Here is some of my backstory - when I was in Uni, I worked at a yoghurt factory. Hey, it paid the bill. It was extremely dull work and also so much work. You'd have dozens of people making sure the pots of yoghurt were, say, aligned properly on the conveyor line. Or deal with the spillage that the machine almost always produced. Some would put the plastic lids on top of the filled pots. Others would take the finished pots and put them in stacks. Etc.
@Toph That's broaching a deep topic in AI. But I'll side-step it a bit - what if there is no other way to make an AI? I'm simplifying AI research a bit but essentially some believe a true AI will be essentially human brain but simulated in a machine. So, the AI will be very human-like. While others claim true AI can emerge from completely different roots. So it may be completely alien to how human brain operates.
So, with all this said, perhaps the challenge for the dream mage(s) is to identify the type of failure and find an appropriate vessel. The more closely tailored to the type of failure, the more of it you can store. So, a candle might "soak up" fire-related failures but a burnt doll might be much more appropriate for somebody who started a fire as a child and it got out of control. A burnt branch will, however, match somebody who accidentally started a fire in the forest.
She might not be dealt with legally at all -- I imagine plenty of powerful men would want her captured or killed first, and the legalities of that figured out later if ever. But let's say she turns herself in publicly and insists that the law be followed. In the US she'd find herself in juvenile court, but would probably be tried as an adult given the seriousness of her crimes. Murder, property destruction, terrorism perhaps, etc.
@Dmyt Like fruiting plants, they need their seeds to be spread far away and will trick animals into helping them with this. Fruits have a tasty sugary flesh to entice animals into eating them, the seeds pass through the animal's digestive system undigested and are hopefully deposited far away; as a bonus, they'll be planted in a dung heap rich in nitrates and phosphorus.
@Dmyt IMO, there is no way to "balance" that. The scare quotes are because the very idea precludes attempts at balance. Essentially, you want to break reality and there is no real way to reach equilibrium then. Because not all reality bending is the same. A container can have more volume than it should - that, by itself, doesn't define the magnitude of the error. If the container has, say, gold it'd be quite a lot more useful than if it was, say, milk.
We can try to assign value but only as it pertains to humans and their economy - gold might be quite useless to garden snails and the like. But they might actually like having a lot of milk. How do you "balance" it? You can't. That's not to dissuade you from using the system. I just don't think there is a rational universal way to counterbalance an Error.
What I would suggest is take an inspiration from Paradox in Mage the Ascension/Awakening. I'll not delve in the metaphysics there but essentially magic exists and it allows for bending reality in such a way that something extraordinary can happen. Levitate, throw fireballs, teleport, etc. Magic twists reality to make the impossible possible. The counter to this is Paradox. It is reality snapping back and twisting magic or mages themselves.
@Dmyt The most obvious answer: "Hello, people in this bank, all of you die instantly if you fail to give me all your money in the next five minutes and/or do anything I don't like"
Croupier in a bent casino (selectively averts players from winning more than the house deems right), bookmaker (in the betting sense, fixes fights), spiritual guru (again, perverse), snake-oil salesman. The principle with much of the above being selectively switching the ability on and off again in a scripted way to engineer outcomes. @Dmyt
Firearm salesman, diplomat (yeah, sounds perverse I know), adventure holiday guide, therapist specializing in severe phobias. @Dmyt Professional boxer or cage-fighter.
Custody officer, feral youth training officer, debt collector, neighborhood dispute resolution consultant, circus performer (dangerous animals), village protector in areas where there are elephants that rampage in musth, psychopath reconditioning technician, sergeant major, protection racket enforcer. Politician (dictator). I.e. vote for me or else XYZ (inconvenient, truthful) apocalypses will happen. @Dmyt
It's funny reading articles about the artificial ones - I've seen some people claim they were cheated when they found out their diamond ring was actually artificial diamond. Chemically, it's just carbon. Mining the thing takes more effort, sure, but there is an abundant supply of "real" diamond, as well. It doesn't cost THAT much. (Granted, shaping it into jewellery adds cost but it's also overblown)
And the tactic is not mind-blowing but still. Basically, consider having three portions of the army - left, right, middle that start off in a line: - - -. Hannibal withdrew the middle - _ - and got the enemy to pursue it. Then closed the other two flags around the enemy. \ _ / -> /_\ trapping the enemy and more or less slaughtering them (except the ones that fleed).
@Mary Heh, I was going to suggest "meteorology". Which is the study of weather. But composed of meteor (=meteor - a big rock falling through the sky) and -logy (from the ancient Greek "logos" for "knowledge" as suffix denoting the study of what it's attached to). So, it's the study of meteors.
@Toph Look at scientific nomenclature. A lot of old theories live on in their names. Hydrogen is called "water maker" but it's oxygen that's called "acid maker"
@Dmyt Maybe first of all, what are they actually better at? Shooting? Or warfare in general? Let's talk history: Rome is known as a military powerhouse. They were certainly "war machines" when they started expanding and forming what would later be the empire. Then Hannibal showed up and thoroughly beat the Romans. He didn't swing a sword better. He didn't even have an army that was much better. He was, however, a brilliant strategist.
I can probably see a mix of both, to be honest. Maybe some are just getting their documents and dealing with everything themselves. Others might request a supervisor. I can see a visiting professor who'd spend their whole stay in an university probably doesn't need a supervisor. But maybe somebody who does more travel will get into more situations they need to prove they are adults, where a supervisor might be of more use.
Other options might be assigning the children a supervisor for the stay. Presumably, there won't be thousands of visitors at the same time. So, having somebody who travels with them and can assure others the child should be treated as an adult is probably OK. It might be a bit demeaning as it's essentially tacking an adult onto them. But this might even be what the child geniuses prefer - it should be much smoother to operate like this.
@Dmyt Assuming they are willing, then probably they would produce some sort of document that the what-looks-like-a-child can use to verify they should be treated as adults. This would obviously be tightly regulated but it's the very same concept as IDs, passports, and other documents. You can use them to prove you're of legal age. Just for that particular country, the legal age is different.
@Dmyt TBH, I think the very vast majority will have some mix of 1. Determined to stay just because they've "always" lived there (this might be a single generation or multiple). 2. "It won't happen to me".
Bounties on the killers. A fair number of the inhabitants are out to collect the head of a killer and get a handsome reward for it. The rest of the population honor those heroes and feel all the safer for their presence. A bounty hunter never has to pay a bar-bill in that city.
2. With enough control over light they can simply not be seen ever. Sight is us absorbing light in our eye. This can be aided by, say, a telescope. But if they can just make the light not go somewhere, then wherever somewhere is, the mage won't be seen. Make the light go elsewhere, rather than straight. Curve the light beam or tie it iinto a pretzel.
However, authorities may want to detain or monitor such a person. Considering they might be a risk (e.g., if they commit a robbery, they won't be found). A lax approach might be to force them into regular meetings (e.g., weekly) similar to a parole. Just to keep tabs on how they looked and what they've done. But stricter approach might be to put them in a facility - jail or a research facility.
@Dmyt If the soldiers are produced, and presumably that takes less than <insert age of human in the army>, it follows that they don't really have a full life's education and understanding of the world. A theorist might very well suspect they only know about war or if not "just war", they have enough skills to survive but probably don't know, say, names of animals (what children learn early on).
@Dmyt Frame challenge - since I know football fans, and basketball fans, they are all encyclopedias for sports facts. Like, they'd know who won a match and who scored in the match for a game that might even be from before they were born. They'd be able to list a famous player's goals per club he was in. So, adopt that in your nation.
There's another thing, more fundamental to the writing. If a thing (strategy) suits the story, but the description you imagine or hear to yourself when you think of it doesn't appeal, you can always rename it, re-frame the description so as to fit your flow. (Perhaps my favorite writing tip - as I tend to think of the ideas first then realize they don't have quite the aesthetic I'm after. It's not necessarily the idea's fault, nor need it be thrown out because of that, just re-worded)
Another issue may be the access, there's a lot of countries for just the refugees to cross out of the charity of those countries, the free-transport would be asked for them in exchange for taking them in. - Therefore start with the premise that advertising the invitation to the refugees - even before trouble reached a crisis would precipitate migration across the intervening land- China and Russia. Then make the offer to them of taking the unwanted ones and criminals etc.. @Dmyt
There's plenty of countries that would take advantage of such an arrangement in my view, not just migrants, but - prisons are expensive. Persuade the world to send them criminals - it'd be a part of plea-bargaining in the US legal system, and other countries may follow suite. Any civil unrest stirred-up in those countries would be of benefit to the system. What I'm wondering about is the area issue. N-Korea is tiny compared to most countries, about similar to Nicaragua or Pennsylvania.
Maybe some could meddle sufficiently in world politics to make the rest of the place inhospitable thus enhancing the attraction of home. Wars create migrants, economic pressure creates migrants, maybe you can figure out a plan of disease that does the same (possibly a Q for the main site). @Dmyt
Then there's the appearance on the battlefield, the soldiers all seem to be the exact same height, weight and have similar reactions and behaviour when stressed beyond their training - indicating the grunts were cloned from limited stock (the "ideal soldier").
To that end, I'd add such things as water-runoff from the rivers to the sea showing overwhelming lack of female hormones. Hi-res satellite imagery showing the citizens in infra-red - these would indicate the male pattern of heat radiance from the visible citizens not the female. Any intercepted radio or comms. traffic would notably lack female appearances, except those which suspiciously seem to be AI generated.
They'd have a great deal of trouble if they expected to be taken seriously when they first arise - my suggestion is that they'd need to work very hard at PR. But then they're super intelligent, they can work it out.
I should think they'd take the piss out of the jumped up tots. Super intelligent but lacking in human experience and pre-pubescent - those things wouldn't command much respect, but would command a certain amount of worship.
@Dmyt Since it's biopunk, start with some kind of ironwood, and make it tougher. Or possibly grow the trains, and they have to be watered and sunned to stay alive, so most trains run by night. And, of course, they don't have wheels. They run along the tracks, though they do need the tracks for some handwavium.
If you prefer to keep trains more or less as they are, then how about changing the fuel or the engine? Then, structurally, the train will still be a train. But it'd be powered differently.
based on vibes... This is like plastic surgery, or Botox. Botox treatments I think have to be repeated two or three times per year. Facelifts last about ten years. So somewhere in that range.
Although, now that I think about it - the biopunk nation might build facilities in the politician's country. Thus reducing the problem with logistics, the politician can just go by much more discretely. There is some risk of the biopunk nation that their facility will be seized, and they'll lose the advantage. But if the machine (or whatever) they have is sufficiently hard to operate for everybody else, then the risk is minimised.
However, the ghouls and vampires are very low profile. It's the whole "Masquerade" in the title - hiding from the rest of the world. So, this is a 1 month period when basically nobody knows about the ghouls. Politicians are quite different as public figures. Given their visibility, maybe they need a larger period. Say, about six months. Just so, their trips don't raise too much of a suspicion.
The regular soldiers would be supernaturally perfect cogs in the war machine. All good at giving orders, all good at following orders, all individual cells in the hive mind. You might be able to kill one of them, but there'll be another identical one along in a moment.
However, if we're just talking about shooting, then an exceptional soldier would probably be more like John Wick or the <whatever their name was> from Equilibrium. In both cases, the shooter still shoots, but also supplements this with excellent battlefield control and discipline. IIRC, John Wick just does it because he's awesome.
In Equilibrium, they have special training that apparently allows people to dodge bullets and also guess where enemies would be. Supposedly based on analysing tactical data from many encounters. I mean, the explanation is mostly bullshit but you can find a grain of truth in it - by knowing how the enemy commonly reacts, you can anticipate and counter them. It's not quite going to be this but you get more John Wick, I suppose.
And, again, the Romans weren't bad at warfare. They got much better at it after Hannibal literally taught them a lesson. But Rome at the time had discipline and preparation on its side. The other enemies they fought were local tribes who were used to "wars" being basically a big brawl. Then the Romans show up. The tribesmen would kill a soldier and the rest of the soldiers would just keep coming for them.
That was extremely unusual for the tribesman, since they expect taking down one person sends the other in panic. But the Roman military discipline was ironclad and they weren't allowed to flee. At the time, it must have looked like a Terminator coming for you - unflinching faces advancing regardless of what you do to them. This is just to put some context.
Still, it's an example of where Hannibal manipulated the enemy. There are lots of other examples, that wasn't his only trick. In other cases, he'd position his armies such that the sun is behind him, giving his enemies a severe disadvantage. Or would get his troops early at around 4a.m, have them eat, then attack the enemy camp before they even had time to prepare or eat. So, his army fights on a full stomach, the enemy troops don't.
The battle of Cannae was Romes biggest defeat in all its history where they lost basically its entire army. And they had ~50% more troops than Hannibal did. To this day military strategists still try to use the same tactic.
