ooc Salem University OOC (Open)

[Buck Testa 5,505]

@Duality @Denim&Venom @dragon4111

From my understanding, magic is still quite rare in this setting. If you look at the opening post, only 1 in 1,000,000 on average gain any kind of magical ability, and cases of extremely powerful mages would be even more rare. 

That would mean there are at most six or seven thousand mages on the planet (assuming the population is about the same). What's more there is no reason to assume they would all spring up on one continent or one city

 

That is why a completely mundane Mafia can still function and why Dru is such an anomaly to them. Chances are a person could go their whole lives and never meet a magic user in person. 

Rogue magic users would be notable then, but they would be quite rare. It's all but been explicitly stated that most magic people arent even that powerful, and that Salem is a training ground for the exceptions rather than the average joe ( though they are welcome none the less). 

With them being so rare, and large swaths of the world likely never running into one, much less one that is a problem, it would not be outlandish to say government programs to handle this element are underdeveloped.

Edited August 30, 2018 by Buck Testa

[dragon4111 914]

@Buck Testa@Duality@Denim&Venom

Alright alright.

[Duality 10,740]

18 hours ago, Buck Testa said:

It's all but been explicitly stated that most magic people arent even that powerful, and that Salem is a training ground for the exceptions rather than the average joe ( though they are welcome none the less). 

I support all but this bit. Most magic people aren't as powerful as Druantia, perhaps, but the vast majority of them are still of significant ability nonetheless. Since magic ability is something of a continuum, I would deem someone with only parlour-trick-level magic to fall below the conventional in-universe cutoff point for classification as a 'mage', in fact, and thus be excluded from the one-in-a-million statistic.

16 minutes ago, dragon4111 said:

@Buck Testa@Duality@Denim&Venom

Alright alright.

It's still up to you, though. I won't deny Ghalan a magical task force past if it contributes good backstory. 

[Buck Testa 5,505]

1 hour ago, Duality said:

I support all but this bit. Most magic people aren't as powerful as Druantia, perhaps, but the vast majority of them are still of significant ability nonetheless. Since magic ability is something of a continuum, I would deem someone with only parlour-trick-level magic to fall below the conventional in-universe cutoff point for classification as a 'mage', in fact, and thus be excluded from the one-in-a-million statistic.

It's still up to you, though. I won't deny Ghalan a magical task force past if it contributes good backstory. 

That's why I said "from my understanding." 

Also since Dru is going to go down to one percent of her power thanks to Dualitys restrictions, the playing field will be leveled out a bit. That is not to say she is going to be a slouch. Part of those flashbacks goal is to indicate even when she was younger and weaker she was still a forced to be reckoned with, just in different ways. Her knack for deadlines with her plants should not be underestimated regardless what percentage shes using. Lol

[dragon4111 914]

@Duality

wouldn't the arena have a purification rune in it's array?

[Passion 3,484]

Pretty sure whatever runes and barriers were present at the arena are currently... well, not present.

[dragon4111 914]

@Passion

Well you can just turn them on...Unless they didn't read the staff handbooks?

[Duality 10,740]

12 minutes ago, dragon4111 said:

@Passion

Well you can just turn them on...Unless they didn't read the staff handbooks?

What Passion means is that the arena is no longer there, let alone the runes it had. The place is a smoking crater. 

[dragon4111 914]

@Duality

I see Hmm.

[dragon4111 914]

@Duality

Oh dear a thought just caused me to chuckle slightly. what if Ghalan has a vacuum machine that uses blackholes?

[dragon4111 914]

@Duality

Oh dear a thought just caused me to chuckle slightly. what if Ghalan has a vacuum machine that uses blackholes?

[Denim&Venöm 19,104]

8 hours ago, dragon4111 said:

@Duality

wouldn't the arena have a purification rune in it's array?

 

7 hours ago, Duality said:

What Passion means is that the arena is no longer there, let alone the runes it had. The place is a smoking crater. 

 

7 hours ago, Passion said:

Pretty sure whatever runes and barriers were present at the arena are currently... well, not present.

Actually reminds me of an idea I had that dueling arenas would have special types of runes to stop the fighting. Like a chrono-rune that could stop time and freeze the fighters in place should a duel get ugly or even rewind it should it have gotten fatal. 

 

[Duality 10,740]

26 minutes ago, Denim&Venom said:

Actually reminds me of an idea I had that dueling arenas would have special types of runes to stop the fighting. Like a chrono-rune that could stop time and freeze the fighters in place should a duel get ugly or even rewind it should it have gotten fatal. 

I would peg time freezes and 'rewind' runes as incredibly complex and high-energy-demand magic; time spells are too OP for any usage beyond a one-off deus ex machina world-saving event, and they violate far too many conventional laws of physics to use anything less than vast amounts of reality warping to achieve.

That, and if the duelling hall had runes like that, there wouldn't need to be an impartial panel of teachers on hand to make sure fights don't go too far.

[Buck Testa 5,505]

13 hours ago, Duality said:

I would peg time freezes and 'rewind' runes as incredibly complex and high-energy-demand magic; time spells are too OP for any usage beyond a one-off deus ex machina world-saving event, and they violate far too many conventional laws of physics to use anything less than vast amounts of reality warping to achieve.

That, and if the duelling hall had runes like that, there wouldn't need to be an impartial panel of teachers on hand to make sure fights don't go too far.

Time travel isn't actually a concept that violates how the universe works (as far as we understand it.) However you are correct in the idea that it would take an obscene amount of power to do so. Far more than any one magic user would have. There are also different kinds of time travel that would be a lot more feasible but they would probably violate godmodding rules for rps lol.

 

 

[Duality 10,740]

1 hour ago, Buck Testa said:

Time travel isn't actually a concept that violates how the universe works (as far as we understand it.) However you are correct in the idea that it would take an obscene amount of power to do so. Far more than any one magic user would have. There are also different kinds of time travel that would be a lot more feasible but they would probably violate godmodding rules for rps lol.

'Conventional laws of physics' includes the principle of causation, which time travel has a famed tendency to violate. 

Quite besides that, time travel in the sense of 'disappearing' from one point in time and 'appearing' at another would require at least the same amount of reality warping as instantaneous teleportation (due to the spacetime violation similarly inherent in both), stabilising and utilising a wormhole for time travel as apparently permitted by Einstein's field equations would require both an exceptionally resilient transportation vehicle and large regions of space possessing negative energy density (not currently known to physics outside the Casimir effect), and the second law of thermodynamics arguably throws a spanner in the works every now and then to boot.

The icing on the cake is that nobody has the foggiest clue why we perceive time as 'flowing' in the first place, let alone why it seems to 'flow' only one direction - the laws of physics do not dictate a 'flow', nor is there any physical reason that the forwards direction should be the only one possible to perceive. It may be that the only way to truly travel through time is to violate our own baseline perception of it, but that's not a task that physics can achieve.

 

But, yes, 'tis definitely out of reach of all but perhaps the most ludicrously powerful of spells. Time travel is never not OP. 

[Buck Testa 5,505]

5 minutes ago, Duality said:

'Conventional laws of physics' includes the principle of causation, which time travel has a famed tendency to violate. 

Quite besides that, time travel in the sense of 'disappearing' from one point in time and 'appearing' at another would require at least the same amount of reality warping as instantaneous teleportation (due to the spacetime violation similarly inherent in both), stabilising and utilising a wormhole for time travel as apparently permitted by Einstein's field equations would require both an exceptionally resilient transportation vehicle and large regions of space possessing negative energy density (not currently known to physics outside the Casimir effect), and the second law of thermodynamics arguably throws a spanner in the works every now and then to boot.

The icing on the cake is that nobody has the foggiest clue why we perceive time as 'flowing' in the first place, let alone why it seems to 'flow' only one direction - the laws of physics do not dictate a 'flow', nor is there any physical reason that the forwards direction should be the only one possible to perceive. It may be that the only way to truly travel through time is to violate our own baseline perception of it, but that's not a task that physics can achieve.

 

But, yes, 'tis definitely out of reach of all but perhaps the most ludicrously powerful of spells. Time travel is never not OP. 

Days of future Past(that X men movie), groundhog day, and Madoka Magica use my favorite variety of time travel. Sending your mind back in time to a past version of yourself instead of sending a physical thing (Madoka is a smidge different but I digress). I would argue that would take comparatively a lot less energy than full on sending physical things back in time. It would still be Godmodding without prior approval from everybody and you would need a big reason to do it, but it's more feasible than other varieties (by magic anyway lol)

 

[dragon4111 914]

@Duality@Buck Testa

So are blackholes op then?

[Duality 10,740]

Just now, dragon4111 said:

@Duality@Buck Testa

So are blackholes op then?

It should be fine as long as Ghalan doesn't create massive ones that can spaghettify people from a distance, create many at once while controlling them all independently, or have them be utterly unstoppable and demolish everything in their path if used projectile-style.

[dragon4111 914]

@Duality

Yep and if he leaves one out for too long it would end the earth.

[Duality 10,740]

4 minutes ago, dragon4111 said:

@Duality

Yep and if he leaves one out for too long it would end the earth.

If they're small enough they'll actually evaporate via Hawking radiation if they're not constantly fed with large amounts of focussed energy, so as far as I know of the subject only the nigh-OP-size ones would be self-sustaining. Rather fortunate, that, as otherwise even a single microscopic black hole left undissipated and forgotten about by Ghalan could prove world-ending. 

[dragon4111 914]

@Duality

got it see somewhere  I've seen maybe in a documentary they put a blackhole into the earth and well.

[Buck Testa 5,505]

Is Dru in the infirmary yet? That's not really clear.

[reader8363 1,281]

@Buck Testa
I think she's been there for a while, but I'm not 100 percent sure

[dragon4111 914]

@Buck Testa

I think she is in the infirmary.

[Duality 10,740]

7 hours ago, Buck Testa said:

Is Dru in the infirmary yet? That's not really clear.

This is the post you're looking for, methinks; primarily the first half of the last paragraph.