@Mary They're building industrial bases.

@JiminyCricket. How about "importing" breast milk? The nation can create a market by asking women for their breast milk in exchange for money and stuff. I wonder if this is feasible

Could breast milk survive the usual conditions of international shipping long enough to still be usable?

Shipping is really slow (estimated 19 to 25 days Uruguay to Florida), way too long for fresh milk. A country with a contiguous border might work, by train or truck (with built-in cooling), then there's distribution that needs to be done quick - you could make it work I guess. Still leaves you with antibodies to non-local bugs which may not help with deaths-by-disease.

@JiminyCricket. How about 'hiring' adult women directly? I wonder if there's any historical precedence here...

I have another corner that I've painted myself into that I'm hoping that someone can help me with.

In my story, the queen has discovered by magic that she can't reveal that one of her favourite nobles is planning to secretly murder his wife, because he can't afford to divorce her due to a prenuptial agreement. The queen doesn't care about the wife, but doesn't want her murdered and her husband compromised.

What sort of above board things could a queen do to get rid of a troublesome wife of one of her nobles so that he doesn't feel that he has to commit murder.

We're talking a standard-ish feudal monarch, right? The queen could just exile the wife or imprison her. It'd be very easy to just drum up some charges. Perhaps for a crime that will annul the contract.

One possibility, although might need more setup, is to declare the wife an illegitimate child. Then one could very well claim that the noble married not to who he thought it was - not the daughter of another noble family. Then the prenup could be declared void. I mean, it also needs buy-in from the wife's family. But if the family is not there already, then it'd be easy to fabricate evidence with nobody who can attest to it being false (well, servants don't really matter).

Also, an easier solution is for the queen to just execute the wife. Again, could be on false charges.

I know it's not exactly "above board" but it is what royalty is like.

Less defamatory - the queen could search for a way to void the contract without fabricating evidence. Could be a clause there that the queen would use. Or even try to force a clause to be effective. A sample clause might be that the wife has to bear children within some time. The queen could try and force this to not happen - send the noble away as ambassador, or send the wife away. Make sure they are apart so babies can't happen. Prolong for whatever time is necessary to fulfil the clause.

It's not exactly "above board" I'd class it as "underhanded" but still - not unlike royalty.

Another option on about the same level: prove the wife's infidelity. Perhaps even engineer the infidelity - send somebody to seduce her. Infidelity was common but usually hidden and usually had a greater negative impact on women. From the point of view that if the man was unfaithful - the noble line still continues. But if the woman was unfaithful then a bastard would be born not of the noble line. It's...not great nut it is what it is.

In many places infidelity by the wife would be grounds for divorce. Mostly because women didn't have much rights, so a woman trying to divorce her husband would be quite rarely possible.

Yes, a pretty standard feudal monarch... but the queen is not comfortable with unjust solutions. However, the wife hasn't had any kids in years of marriage (mainly because the wife is unattractive to her husband, though they have 'tried' on occasion), and the husband is important enough that his childlessness is an issue.

Would a royal command to 'divorce your barren wife and marry a fertile woman' be considered to be divorce for a reason that's the wife's fault?

@MontyWild Definitely. How about secretly informing the wife about her husband's killing intent while openly inviting the wife to work as her servant because of her infertility? Accept the grace of the queen!

Maybe the queen presents her 'findings' as a educated guess to not tip anyone off about the magic. Let the wife think about it before accepting it.

Possibly... except that the wife is not good servant material. She's too used to indulging in her privileged lifestyle.

@MontyWild I'd say yes. Moreover, I'd say it'd be whatever the monarch deems it to be anyway. But also, just to be clear, "barrenness" has been faulted on women regardless of the cause.

@MontyWild If not a servant, perhaps an 'advisor'?

Maybe she'll work to give advice to the queen

In a particularly religious society, it might even be taken as a sign that the god (or gods) are not happy with the marriage. The same argument can also be levied by less pious but more unscrupulous people.

Well... the husband has illegitimate kids since they were married, and the wife hasn't had any in the 5 years since their wedding.

@MontyWild Make the wife do non-taxing stuff like running this village, checking their tax records, etc. Ease the wife into it as the queen introduces more and more difficult tasks. Eventually, the wife should possibly become a servant in all but name

Perhaps send her in a few nunneries or luxury-depriving equivalent for a few days or weeks then the queen takes the wife back to further 'persuade' her.

Basically, the pre-nup says that he can't divorce her without cause without paying a whole lot of money from his estate, most of which she has frittered away due to her irresponsibility, but he can divorce her with cause and not have to pay her out.

@MontyWild Cause? The wife deliberately makes herself unfertile?

The wife's siphoning off her husband's estate wealth. Corruption scandal.

It's a renaissance-ish setting. She's expected to bear him his heirs, and hasn't to the point that the Queen has noticed.

Why does the queen not want the husband to kill the wife?

Probably not corruption... conspicuous consumption. It used to be a thing for nobles to live a 'certain lifestyle'.

Perhaps let the husband try to kill the wife, the queen secretly intervenes, and uses this as case for them to divorce

Make an appeal that this is to preserve the 'order'

@Dmyt Basically because if he does, the queen would feel that she had to look into it, since she knows that he was contemplating it. If she finds evidence, she'd have to have him brought up on charges.

@MontyWild Is the husband important to the queen in some way? Is he a supporter of her?

And the husband is the holder of the most important title in the kingdom below the monarch, and is one of her advisors.

If she overlooked a murder, the husband could be compromised by people who would have blackmail dirt on him.

@MontyWild What's stopping the queen from talking it out secretly with the both of them?

It doesn't solve anything. The wife doesn't want a divorce, because she's enjoying her lifestyle, and the husband does want one, because he hates his wife who he was forced to marry by his now-deceased father. He doesn't think that he has a 'her fault' reason to divorce her.

It's got to the point where the husband wants her dead.

@MontyWild Can the queen and the husband share the burden of paying the wife the divorce money? Use the pretext of infertility and endure the consequence

The queen can justify this as helping her loyal advisor. Extra cred

Maybe she can bring up the wife's other excesses as an excuse

Can't kill the wife so might as well grit their teeth

The husband would be able to say, 'I didn't want this divorce, it's a royal command to us both.' The wife's lack of offspring thet the Queen noticed could be considered to be her fault, especially if the queen could point to the husband's illegitimate kids.

It would be a 'wife's fault' divorce.

@MontyWild Or make the wife fall in love with someone, enough to override her indulgence. She willingly divorces to be with her true love?

Far easier said than done. The wife loves only herself and her husband's money.

@MontyWild The more that I think about it, why does the husband hate the wife so much to the point of murder? Is the wife that annoying or something? That kind of emotion seems too extreme without much context

She's a nag, has poor judgement, is profligate, and he thinks that she's ugly. They were set up by her family basically to be rid of her... not that her family would admit that.

@MontyWild ...That's it? As expected of a noble but still... How about convincing her to marry someone else of equal wealth? Preferably an 'enemy' of the queen. If the wife just loves money, she wouldn't mind jumping ships.

Especially when the ship she's on wants her dead

Now that I've thought about it, the fact that in five years of a marriage that has been consummated, the wife hasn't become pregnant, and the husband has fathered illegitimate kids is a good enough reason for the queen to command a divorce for the good of the nation. The guy's a duke, after all. No legitimate heir makes his succession uncertain.

@MontyWild I'm assuming you've found your answer?

Yes, thanks.

I also have another problem with another setting. Consider modern-day earth bumps into another universe where humans were transplanted due to other bumps long ago, but things in the other universe have gone differently. In the other universe (as in worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/260557/75), life sciences are more advanced, and the other universe has physics-based magic.

also as in worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/249243/75

I'm trying to think of dramatic things that could happen as a result of this collision of universes that is now effectively permanent, that could be resolved at least in part by a couple of people who meet by chance (because they live on opposite sides of a wormhole) and fall in love despite not speaking the same language or the same culture.

Also worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/248964/75 for the 'magic'.

@MontyWild Perhaps a parent stumbles upon a child from beyond the wormholes and takes it upon themselves to care for the child until the true parents are found. Make the kid a chosen one or something

Or scientists capture some Pandemonium folks like the horned ones for experimentation.

Well... I have an aircraft that has crashed through a high-altitude wormhole and has lost a wing, but it's not a 'chosen one' sort of story... more sci-fi than fantasy. The magic is physics-based energy manipulation and wormholes, not applied narrativium.

Perhaps the aircraft accidentally kills some people after crashing. People are afraid of what they view as an alien invasion so when the time comes for the universes to interact, it goes very badly.

People all around Earth goes into the wormholes willingly or not. Some of them hold media recorders. Maybe some of them are livestreaming and the government is simultaneously trying to retrieve them and letting them do as they wish as probes to an unfamiliar universe

@Dmyt That could happen either way... and probably will. However, I'm looking for something that an 'ordinary' cross-universal couple who start out not even speaking the same language could influence. The one from here is s a computer programmer and martial artist, and the one from Pandemonium is a librarian, and not really genetically modified for anything much except radio and good health.

@MontyWild nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/… The Earthling creates a universal language for them to communicate with

While the librarian attunes themselves to Earth's countless radio signals and tries identifying basic patterns

Actually, can radio waves pass through the wormholes? If light can, I assume the same for EM

I rather expect that the first days will be chaos. People and machinery crossing over inadvertently all over the world. People from here getting scared of the 'demons', and people from there worried about the 'cave people' (non-gmo humans)

Yes, radio can pass through.

@MontyWild How abrupt is this universe bump? Is this completely by chance or were there people deliberately working from either side of the universe to make this happen?

Pandemonians radio with their horns, and are pre-TV. On the other hand, we have digital radio comms, which are just so much static to the pandemonians. AM and FM radio are intelligible... except for the languages.

@MontyWild Could our Earth's many radio signals be so deafening for the Pandemonians that it could motivate some of them to attack Earthlings just to make the noises stop?

@Dmyt The previous bump was in the middle ages, and it spawned legends of demons. The universes have been bumping since the Cambrian era, which was caused by the first bump.

@Dmyt No. You can't have people radioing each-other all over the place without making a lot of your own radio noise. They learn to filter it out.

@MontyWild Or maybe you can take this the opposite direction and both sides quickly adapt to each other's existence. The real conflicts begin when they try understanding each other?

The thing is, you can't really have borders between the two universes like we do on the surface of earth. There are wormholes every few kilometres, and how can you stop people just wandering through them? Borders are no longer linear but are two or even three dimensional. Sure, people will get used to each-other, but governments...?

@MontyWild This is pretty much an alien invasion scenario. Governments will act cautiously so no overt aggression in case the Pandemonians could wipe them out. How strong are the Pandemonians compared to humanity in terms of military?

In their own universe, they're more powerful. On our side, we are more powerful.

Pandemonians have battle 'magicians'... but their magic relies on artificial biomechanical minds in their own universe, and the magic works only in their own universe.

@MontyWild Maybe Earth or Pandemonium has some mysterious cult or organization aware of the universe bumps and have been preparing for this day. So when the time comes, they quickly jump into action and cause much chaos along the way

Maybe a few 'lunatics' of our world have their words validated and the world fixates on them to extract any info they can

Possibly... I'm going with Pandemonium as the source of legends of Hell in our world.

Even though Pandemonium isn't hell, just different.

Lots of genetically engineered people in Pandemonium, from people who are mostly just artificially attractive and healthy, to people who are bioengineered to be good soldiers.

@MontyWild Maybe our Earth has a mysterious cult who believed life arose because of the bumps. With this, they quickly swell up in size. Perhaps our own religions see the similarities of Pandemonium and our Earth's hells and they get fired up apocalyptically. The end times have come

Perhaps your Pandemonium characters have encounters with these zealots, leading to some drama you can use

It's more likely that the various IRL organised churches will flip their collective lids

Or potentially some zealot will ignore the collective calls for calm and try to rouse the rabble.

@MontyWild Very likely, religions and cults in this world are going to reach a level of power never seen before in the face of this universe bumping. Existential uncertainty is the ultimate breeding ground for beliefs. You can make this a conflict between pragmatic governments trying to assess the new power blocks, religions trying to attack the demons, and other people like your characters being forcefully dragged into the mix

@MontyWild Does Pandemonium have 'monsters'? Big beasts and stuff. Maybe some pop into our world. Maybe your programmer pulls out some sick martial arts and beats it with the help of some past, fragmented knowledge by their Pandemonium companion. Some government officials notice this and keep an eye on them. Cultists try kidnapping them because the character must clearly know something

He's not going to pull any sick martial arts... he's just sorta fit and can fight a little. He's not even a black belt, and is probably sensible enough to run away if necessary.

As for monsters, there are some very GMO people who are no longer human who might be called monsters here.

@MontyWild How about he finds a GMO person-turned-monster and befriends it? His interaction with the librarian softens him up to it and he tries to communicate, leading to this relationship

Normal people's instincts would be to open fire but he does the opposite

This attracts attention and others try mimicking him.

Maybe as a side story

Americans might be tempted to blast the demons, but this isn't set in America, it's Australia, and guns are rare.

At least it's Australia to start with.

Does this happen globally in an instant everywhere? Or is this localized and spreads out eventually?

It's at least galaxy-wide in an instant.

Due to gravitational linkage, matter is organised pretty much the same on both sides.

@MontyWild So no mismatched wormholes? Like some Australian with a portal in his home leading to a black hole while the wormhole next door leads to some Pandemonian's home?

No. It's a 1:1 correspondence with the geography on the other side.

If you're lucky (or unlucky), you find that you have a wormhole in your bathroom leading to some pandemonian's balcony.

Pandemonians have left their earth. Because their universe has physics-based ways of creating and manipulating wormholes within that universe, they can just push a wormhole out through space and then pop an explorer through it. They don't need rockets, they can just send an airtight can, perhaps with the equipment to manipulate physics in it.

@MontyWild What's the timeline for your story? You mention problems that need solving so how long do you want them to last?

Years maybe? As long as it takes for a good story, so it could be anything, really.

What's your story's theme and intended message? I forgot to ask this first.

The religion thing might be interesting, but I don't know how my characters could help with that, other than being able to talk with both sides.

@Dmyt It's sort of sci-fi magic. As for a message, I came up with the idea and I'm trying to work that out.

A clash of cultures thing.

A bit of conlang exploration.

Do you have a question you want your story to answer? Perhaps: How much does language contribute to culture clash?

I've invented the world, and right now I'm trying to think of what to do with it, and how my characters could play into that.

If you're up to it, you can tell me more about the Pandemonium cultures you want interacting with ours. A few sentences would suffice

I'll see what I can do with it

I've also invented the language, but there's only so much that can be done with that. It's a detail, not a plot element.

Since you mentioned your characters from Earth and Pandemonium falling in love despite not understanding each other, perhaps you can extrapolate from that?

Basically the pandemonians are almost a monoculture. They've been able to make wormholes within their universe for years, and people can move around far more cheaply than here.

They have some pockets of 'cave men' who haven't bought into the cultural GMO fetish yet, and some splinter groups that have GMed themselves right out of being human at all.

They effectively have a single language because global communication has been far easier for longer than it has been here.

Some themes I thought about: 1. Words are not needed for different people to understand and care for each other. 2. Cultural diversity vs Monoculture

3. Should one strive to be the caveman or the transhuman?

You can pick whatever you like or make your own. We'll brainstorm

@Dmyt It's a cultural quirk that after a pandemonian has a break-up, when they're ready to move on, they sort of 'sweat' their ex out of their system and prepare for a new relationship... from our POV by impaling themselves on a roasting spit and sweating over a bed of hot coals for an hour or two. Since they're GM people, it's perfectly safe... but the guy from our side thinks that the woman he sees is being cooked alive.

Because he 'rescues her', she has the assumption that he could be her next partner.

In a way, the story is going to be an exploration of the language... why make a conlang and not use it.

@MontyWild Well, I believe you have an answer to that: You. You can make yourself the core message of the story.

I don't have any opinion on being GM or non-GM... though the pandemonians would feel that despite being engineered, they're nothing special. The pandemonian woman is very pretty... just like every other GM woman.

the 'cave man' is considered to be special because cave people have to put effort into looking good. Non-GM humans are slobs unless they take care of themselves.

@MontyWild How about your consideration of the conlang? You can make a story about that. You can make your character as someone creating something that will never be used like a program that only he knows. You can make the bumping a challenge of this assumption. Somehow, this program only he knows become very important in the story later on

I can't see how that might work.

If not that, perhaps you can make this about your characters' relationship as they try communicating?

If sci-fi romance is your thing

So far, that's what I have, but it has to go somewhere further.

Or they make a language unique to only them. Lovebirds they are.

Perhaps their language comes into play when they come into conflict with others.

Trouble is, I'd have to turn around and make a pandemonian-english pidgin, and that's more work than I want to do.

Perhaps your story can be about people attempting to stop their relationship

Making just one conlang for the first time is hard enough.

@Dmyt That might work... the aforementioned religious nuts...

You don't have to make a language, just the impression of one. Perhaps hand gestures

A thumbs up indicates something is wrong

Like they use this when they're in a subtly dangerous situation.

He grabbed the ice cream and gave a thumbs up to her. She nodded

Stuff like that

I have a lot of the language already... a polysynthetic language with OSV word order and base-12 mathematics.

Different gestures.

Anyway, I have to go... getting late here. I'll be back later.

@MontyWild Good night.

In my past question, my Hivemind detonated Sagittarius A in its fight against a quasi-Kardashev Scale 3 humanity. This is to destabilize their galactic infrastructure. My question is: What would this humanity build around Sagittarius A? It has to be related to infrastructure and it should be important enough that it could heavily damage the operations of an entire galactic empire