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Post by HorizonsDream on Sept 9, 2006 19:41:30 GMT -8
Well, I figured by answering what I would do, that would go along with what Jinnil should do, considering it is my opinion on what should be done.
As for what Psyche would do, she would at first try to reason with the priest by saying something to the fact that they just don't have enough information yet to really act against the vampire. In a sense, she would try to stop him before more innocent lives were killed. If that didn't work, then she would end up fighting along the vampire to try and knock the priest out (as she wouldn't want to kill him) and then, just as a safety measure, take the baby away from the evil vampire until she learned more information. Psyche would know that a vampire could not be trusted. Plus, the baby is in danger even if it stays with the vampire, due to the fact it even states that the vampire is having a hard time not acting against the family. Killing the vampire while it is holding the baby is a bad idea due to the fact she could very easily hurt the baby, so it is all a matter of reasoning on Psyche's behalf.
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Post by Daos on Sept 9, 2006 19:46:20 GMT -8
Are you saying Jinnil and yourself have the same alignment, then?
How do you propose taking the baby away from the vampire?
How will you stop Jupe from just hunting down the baby anyway once he comes to?
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Post by HorizonsDream on Sept 9, 2006 19:59:47 GMT -8
Well, I know I'm not lawful good. I have always said that I'm more neutral good if one was to give me an alignment. Either way, that is what I think Jinnil would do, even though he is Chaotic Good. I mean, this priest just murdered an innocent life is trying to do so again to another innocent life. I think a good person, chaotic or not, would realize that and help the vampire save the baby rather than killing the vampire then killing the baby.
It is a matter of reasoning. If Psyche helped the vampire, it is quite possible that the vampire would be a little more willing to trust her, especially if he cares about the child (which is hard to image for a vampire). Psyche could easily reason that the child would be safer with her due to the fact that the vampire has even stated that it is getting hard for him to protect the family. Plus, she could probably assure him that she wouldn't hurt the child.
It isn't that hard to tie him up to something to keep him away from the baby. Just keep him in a place where Psyche can keep an eye on him and then remove his weapons from him.
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Post by Daos on Sept 9, 2006 20:02:57 GMT -8
The vampire doesn't likely care for the baby. It is CE, after all. It's only protecting her out of self-preservation. It's possible the story that he needs the family to stay alive was just created to prevent him from attacking his kin. Or it may be true. Either way, the vampire believes it, and that is why he protects the family.
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Post by Daos on Sept 13, 2006 16:16:19 GMT -8
I guess nobody else is interested in this one. Ah, well. Oddly enough, this one had a follow-up, if you want to read it.
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Jinnil immediately blackjacked Jupe across the back of the skull, then again, knocking the Cleric out cold. Instantly, Maximilian turned and ran.
"Stop!" Jinnil cried out, running after. "Give me back the baby!"
Maximilian did stop -- and turned, rapier lashing out. He caught Jinnil a crippling strike across the leg, dropping him. For a moment, halfling and vampire gazed into each other's eyes, Maximilian hesitantly licking his lips.
Finally, the vampire lowered his head and whispered: "I'm sorry. Thank you, but I can't trust anyone else with her." Red tears trickled down his face as he cuddled a cooing baby Clara against his chest. "She's all I have left, now," Maximilian whispered -- and turned into a giant bat, holding the giggling baby in its claws.
With a screech, Maximilian flew off into the night, ignoring Jinnil's cries to bring Clara back. After a few minutes, Jinnil bound his own leg and staggered back into the mansion, where he retrieved Ravina's body and loaded her into the cart he and Jupe originally used to travel here. He left Jupe where he lay.
A few days later, Jinnil managed to get Ravina raised at a nearby temple of Pelor (the Greyhawk god of Light and Healing). Despite his best efforts, she went off alone to find her child and Maximilian. She was more than a little unhinged by what had happened.
Jinnil continued adventuring. From time to time, he'd hear about the great father Jupe, slayer of monsters ... and shake his head. Of Ravina, Maximilian and Clara, he never heard again to his certain knowledge. Although there was a story about a fetching young Sorceress rumored to have a vampire bodyguard a few years later. ... Apparently, she'd recently had a baby and was giving a big party. Few people were really sanguine (pun duly intended) about attending, for some reason.
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Post by Daos on Sept 19, 2006 14:04:19 GMT -8
In the year 10,000 AD, Bjorn Mbutu-Yan is an officer of the Alien Intelligence Monitoring Fleet. Charged with traveling to locations where Earth has detected alien civilizations, and monitoring their activities, the AIMF is quite new – having been formed after three separate discoveries of alien life. In all three cases, the beings were found to be intelligent… but pre-spacefaring and, in the eyes of Human ethicists, not yet ready for first contact. Since then, the AIMF has sent its science ships on several dozen missions to promising locations, discovering two more worlds bearing multi-cellular life, and a third with a species that appears to be still in the midsts of primitive, pre-civilization development. Bjorn climbs aboard his spaceship, meets his crew of 15, and zips off on assignment. His ship is capable of faster-than-light drive, by virtue of the Singularity Drive. Traveling via conventional ion-drive propulsion to a spot well outside of the mass-sink of the Solar System (using slingshot maneuvers around Jupiter and Neptune, Bjorn accomplishes this in less than five months), Bjorn can safely activate the drive. It warps space around him by creating a ‘virtual singularity’, shoving him into an alternate state of being called (somewhat affectionately, by the layman population of Earth, who has ceased to take itself so seriously) as Mumbo-Jumbo Space. In this new state, Bjorn’s ship and all its contents are able to move in a manner orthogonal to space-time, arriving at distant stars in a matter of just a few months (and avoiding nasty time compression affects in the process). The principle that allows the Mumbo-Jumbo drive was first conceived-of over two hundred years ago… and, as humanity came to realize the potential it truly represented, it finally managed to unite as a global civilization, ending the incessant warfare and violence that had so plagued it in centuries past. While in Mumbo-Jumbo space, Bjorn is completely out of communication with the rest of the universe. His time and place of arrival is pre-destined when he programs the ship prior to jump. Further, a means of FTL communication (beyond actually traveling in a ship, or sending an un-piloted ship, with essentially the equivalent of mail) has yet to be discovered. While in Mumbo-Jumbo space, the universe outside of the ship does not truly exist – its shell is surrounded by a nimbus of hazy white light, through which the crew cannot see (and indeed, through which there is literally nothing to see). Arrival back in normal space-time is much like a ball, fired from below the surface of the ocean… it travels a pre-determined trajectory, and eventually splashes back into the water at a location which was set at the moment the ball was fired. Bjorn and his small crew arrive near the stellar system detected around Cetus 1429, an unremarkable star approximately 2,000 light years away from Earth. Gradually they navigate inward, passing several uninhabitable gas giants, before taking up orbit near the M-class planet, around which life-signs were detected using advanced sensors just a few decades ago. Bjorn’s ship is a science vessel. It has stealth capabilities, because Earth’s current philosophy is not to interfere in any way with developing life discovered on distant planets, unless that life is capable of communication. His ship is festooned with all manner of ultra-sensitive radio receivers, telescopes, sniff-o-meters, and so forth, all designed to assist in the task of discovering, investigating, and monitoring alien life forms from a discreet distance. Everything is passive – only the ship’s radio, used while in Sol system, could alert aliens of their presence – and strict radio silence is to be maintained, unless, after returning to Earth and reporting the presence of aliens, it is decided by the global government to initiate contact. The only exception is that, if detected, Bjorn may respond to direct communication attempts initiated by the aliens. Importantly, Bjorn’s ship is incapable of atmospheric entry. It is a space-only vessel, designed to dock with space station facilities. It is also completely unarmed, for a good reason – despite its stealth technologies, Earth fears an alien civilization that detected the ship, and identified it as having weaponry, might interpret its very presence as an act of aggression, a grievous insult, or in any other unpredictable way. Upon gaining a high-level orbit, Bjorn’s crew is excited and surprised to find a thriving alien civilization on the planet below. Although there are several satellites in orbit, there do not seem to be any space stations or other signs that the inhabitants have ever left the surface of their planet in-person. Over the ensuing months, Bjorn and his crew discover the following:
* The Aliens seem to be a single-minded, driven race, having a complex hierarchical social strata and no apparent desire or motivation to deviate from societal norms. In other respects they seem quite human-like, having families, raising children, enjoying leisure activities, engaging in unique and fascinating arts, and so forth. * they have sent robotic craft to other bodies in their solar system, and have quite advanced technology * they do not appear to have invented interstellar drive of any kind * they do not appear to show any interest in traveling outside of their own atmosphere in person * They have enormous radio detection equipment. They do not use radio terrestrially – in fact they seem to have gone out of their way to avoid producing any sort of errant radio-frequency communications or noise. Electronics are carefully shielded; communications with satellites are accomplished using directional, modulated laser-light communications… Despite an advanced monoculture possessing technology nearly equal to that of Earth, the aliens are virtually ‘noiseless’ and undetectable from beyond their own system. The only reason Earth even sent Bjorn and his crew, was the tell-tale signatures of an M-class planet – spectra indicating breathable atmosphere, liquid water, stable orbit and stable, Sol-like sun. * They are building something. A vast proportion of their efforts seem to be focused on the construction of a single, enormous and incredibly complicated Thing. Whatever it is, it will consume truly staggering amounts of power, but it does not seem to be designed to output that power to anything in particular. Power goes in, to a big complicated device, but there is no sign of what – if anything – is designed to come out.
Eventually, Bjorn’s crew makes a startling discovery. The planet below is covered in radio detection and listening equipment, and a number of the satellites are also apparently designed to listen to radio communications. The jaw-drop moment, though, is when it is determined that all of these are pointing directly towards Earth’s Solar System. As the planet below swings around in orbit about its own star, the radio detection equipment slowly turns, tracking where the Earth would be in the sky. Over the next months, Bjorn’s crew manages to intercept ground-based communications, and eventually translate the strange alien tongue. Bjorn’s crew soon pieces together the following events. Around 8,000 years ago, radio broadcasts radiating from Earth began to arrive in this system. Some time after that (who knows when, exactly) the broadcasts were detected. The aliens must not have yet developed radio technology much, for along with the reception of Earth’s broadcasts came a species-wide decision not to respond… and indeed, to avoid responding at all. This meant avoiding or mitigating all technologies which produced electromagnetic radiation that might conceivably penetrate the planet’s own magnetosphere and become detectable from beyond their own star system. Over the ensuing centuries, the aliens had grown to view Humans as a dire threat. When they began receiving news of the Human development of interstellar travel (within the last few decades), they began to develop the device now being constructed below. Finally, frightened, Bjorn directs his crew to discover the true purpose of the device they are building. It is ultimately revealed that the device being built is designed for one purpose and one purpose only – to destroy Earth. It is a weapon of some kind. The crew cannot determine how it operates (or even be 100% sure that it will work). They only know that, when activated, it will use a principle similar to the Singularity Drive to project an enormous gravitational well into the Earth’s Sun, causing it to suddenly collapse at its core. The resulting shock wave will force the sun into an artificial supernova-like state, shedding its outer shells of hydrogen in a violent event that will engulf the entire Solar system in a brief but cataclysmic explosion. Everything within the orbit of Pluto will be utterly destroyed. Bjorn’s science crew, lacking much of the details, is forced to conclude that the principles on which the device supposedly work are plausible, although a great deal more work (years’ more work) would be needed to be sure. Worse, the device is finally complete. The aliens announce to themselves that it will be activated in just a few days. Desperate, Bjorn commands his crew to give him options. Here is what they come up with.
* The unarmed ship could reveal itself, and, using their radio, plead with the aliens to halt their plans. As soon as the ship is revealed, it will be vulnerable – the aliens possess the technology necessary to quickly destroy the ship, including rockets capable of accelerating faster than the ship and chasing it anywhere it might try to flee within the local system. The only hope would be to convince the aliens that, in the last two hundred years – the time-gap between the latest radio receptions they’ve had from Earth (which reveal Humans as a warlike and violent species) and now, Humanity has finally moved beyond violence and is no longer a threat. On board is a linguist who can manage the alien language (with computerized assistance), and another member is specifically trained in theories of first-contact protocols. But there is no real experience, and it’s impossible to tell exactly how truly alien aliens would react to anything. * One crew member suggests flying to a nearby large asteroid, and pushing it so that it will impact on the surface right at the giant alien weapon, destroying it. However, calculations quickly show that, given the power of the ship’s engines, such a plan would take months to achieve, the aliens would surely notice, and they might well be able to prevent the impact in any case. Launching smaller rocks would be feasible, but unlikely to significantly damage the device, and would still betray their presence and position. * Warning Earth is out of the question. Radio signals would take 200 years to arrive, and traveling home using the ship’s drive would take months. In fact, just traveling to the nearest known human – a monitoring ship much like Bjorn’s, located only 50 light years away at another star, would still take more than five weeks, and would probably accomplish nothing.
Bjorn is about to command his crew to take the only option that seems available – attempt to communicate and dissuade the aliens – when his ship’s engineer quietly informs him that there is one more, drastic and suicidal option. Bjorn could steer the ship right to the edge of the atmosphere, and then, overriding numerous safety features, activate its Singularity Drive. Doing so that close to a planetary body would be disastrous… it would rip a continent-sized chunk out of the side of the planet, and violently destroy both the ship and thousands of square kilometers of planetary mass. The result would be similar to a peta-ton nuclear explosion, and a volcanic rupture the size of a continent… the seas would boil, the continents would rupture and heave, the atmosphere would burn, and everything on the planet would die, including without any doubt the entire species of the aliens below, as well as every multi-cellular life form on the planet, and probably most of the single-celled organisms too. So here you see the dilemma: Bjorn could attempt communication, but in doing so, take a serious risk of failure – and if he fails, Earth will die (if the device works, and the aliens proceed to activate it). Or, he can do nothing. Earth will die (again, assuming the device works and they activate it as publicly declared). Or, he can destroy the planet below, committing an act of mass genocide dwarfing anything done by humanity before. He can perhaps radio a message back home, moments before destroying the people below, to tell Earth of his action, but it will take over 200 years to arrive.
Or… can you think of anything else?
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Shannon
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Post by Shannon on Sept 19, 2006 16:01:53 GMT -8
The only other thing I can think of would be a combination of the first and third actions. Get into position to strike, then attempt to contact the aliens. Of course, they might see it as a threat, yada, yada, yada, but, between Us and Them, I'd prefer Us to win.
Considering that they made up their minds, 8,000 years ago to destroy Earth and that nothing was going to stop them, I'd say that the probability of option 1 working out is slim to none.
If I were the Bjorn, I'd probably jump straight to option 3, but, you asked for options, not opinions.
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Post by Daos on Sept 19, 2006 16:34:47 GMT -8
What if they blow you out of the sky before you get their response? I mean, if you decloak and send out a communication, and they just out and lock on to you, it's possible you may not have enough time to activate the drive.
There's also the ethical questions of destroying an entire planet on the chance the weapon might actually work. There's no guarantee in that area, either. Also remember, the only reason they decided to blow up Earth is they believe the Earthlings are a violent, war-like race (which we were 8000 years ago) that just recently went into space. They believe we will find them and blow them up, so this is a pre-emptive strike.
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Shannon
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Post by Shannon on Sept 19, 2006 17:49:01 GMT -8
It's possible, and only mentioned as another possibility.
To me, the third option is the clearest. Who are they to decide that we're the warlike ones. If they're all that smart, wouldn't they also realize that things can drastically change in 8,000 years? What if Earth isn't their only target? Since they have shown inclination to play God with one planet, what's to stop them from passing judgement on another? They have no qualms about committing genocide without stopping to make sure that their judgement is correct, so, why should Bjorn?
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Post by Daos on Sept 19, 2006 17:58:16 GMT -8
I think the answer to that question, which is also the cause of the moral dilemma, is because we are better than that. Humanity is no longer a savage, barbarian race that kills its own. We are now peaceful, enlightened explorers--like on Star Trek, I suppose.
There's something else to consider. These two possibilities laid before us (either earth is destroyed or the alien planet is destroyed) are not mirror images. Consider: If Earth is destroyed, it is a huge blow to the human race. It is not, however, the end of humanity. There are many colonized worlds and space stations out there beyond our solar system.
However, as the scenario explains, these people have never left their world, nor shown any interest to. So to destroy their world is to wipe out an entire intelligent species (not to mention the countless other lesser species living there). Does this change things at all?
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Shannon
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Post by Shannon on Sept 19, 2006 18:39:49 GMT -8
So to destroy their world is to wipe out an entire intelligent species (not to mention the countless other lesser species living there). Does this change things at all? First, please allow me to digress and say that I believe that there is more than than one intelligent species on Earth. Now, back on topic, not really. What would stop history from repeating itself? What would stop them from unwittingly stumbling upon another race, only to declare them too war-like, and decide to exterminate them? I'm so silly. I forgot one other option, and that would be the kamakazie (sic) option. Send a message to Earth, then bring the ship to the fastest, quickest speed, while in stealth mode and plot a course for the Thing. Presumably, their smaller defense rockets aren't that fast. Leave a radio beacon to broadcast an explanation to Earth moments after impact. We may be "better" than them, but, what good do the honored dead do when no one can acurately interperate their sacrifice?
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Shannon
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Post by Shannon on Sept 19, 2006 18:43:08 GMT -8
Okay, never mind, reread the explanation of the Singularity Drive.
In a simular vein, though, there is the possibility of creating a home brewed bomb and doing the same thing.
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Post by Daos on Sept 19, 2006 19:01:21 GMT -8
Do you realize that if they did send a broadcast back to Earth, it would not be received for centuries?
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Shannon
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Post by Shannon on Sept 20, 2006 6:19:45 GMT -8
Oh, yes. Two of them, to be exact. But, my point is that it took them 8,000 years to make this thing, that, if targeted correctly, 200 probably wouldn't be long enough for them to fix any damage from a less lethal bomb. It's more of a stall tactic than anything else. Leave the radio beacon behind to explain what they did and why they did it. There is also the chance that the aliens would overhear the delayed radio beacon and change their minds about humans, if worded properly.
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Post by HorizonsDream on Sept 20, 2006 13:00:42 GMT -8
Are there any planets that are close enough that have some humans living on it? If so, why not send a radio beacon to them explaining the situation. That way you don't have to wait 200 years for earth to receive this beacon when it could possibly be too late.
I'm not for the whole violence then thing, but that is just me. I don't like the idea that we should flex our muscles and show them who is boss. We do that enough on Earth as it is. That endless cycle should really end as it is pointless and it only makes things worse in the end.
So after sending the radio beacon to someone closer than earth, try to communicate with the aliens. If we can prove that we aren't out to kill them, maybe they will stop what they plan on doing. I'm not sure that this race will just outright target the ship and try to blow them out of the sky, as they seem to be a more or less peaceful race, other than the fact they are trying to destroy a planet light years away from them. I think the communication is worth the risk instead of murdering a bunch of innocent people.
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