TFT snippet #8

Bluesqueak wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:
Merlin had.

Right... So let me get this straight:

Nynian is entitled to be called Lady Nynian by birth.
She's the Mother Superior of a secret sisterhood whose headquarters is by three lakes.
She's now married to Merlin ....
...and may retire to a virtual existence in a cave.

RFC, you evil punster, you.

IIRC Didn't Merlin get trapped in said cave in the original legends by the said lady?

isaac_newton wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:
Merlin had.

Bluesqueak wrote:Right... So let me get this straight:

Nynian is entitled to be called Lady Nynian by birth.
She's the Mother Superior of a secret sisterhood whose headquarters is by three lakes.
She's now married to Merlin ....
...and may retire to a virtual existence in a cave.

RFC, you evil punster, you.

IIRC Didn't Merlin get trapped in said cave in the original legends by the said lady?

Was all just a big misunderstanding! Besides, the story was garbled in transmission.

runsforcelery wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:
IIRC Didn't Merlin get trapped in said cave in the original legends by the said lady?

Was all just a big misunderstanding! Besides, the story was garbled in transmission.

Yeah, those semaphores can really mix up a message, especially on a day with poor visibility. Like the days when mist rises up off the lakes, and a woman emerges, arms clad in shimmering samite...

Joat42 wrote:If Safehold was written by a Chinese author Merlin would soon be dead since it's quite common for the male love interest to die heroically while protecting the girl.

Nah, half the time the female love interest dies despite whatever sacrifice the hero makes. Even worse, sometimes she'll kill herself making that sacrifice really pointless and they are both dead. If Titanic was a Chinese movie Rose would have jumped off the back end of the ship that rescued her, not 50 years later at the end of her long life.

I have always described Chinese romance novels/movies by using a line from the movie Heavy Metal: "you die; she dies; everybody dies".

Give me a Hollywood happy ending every time...sappy as it may be I don't end up being pissed over the complete futility of the story.

With the next Safehold book due soonish, I decided to reread the series, and I discovered something.

I never finished At the Sign of the Triumph.
I have no idea why. I started it, but stopped part way through.

Why is everyone assuming that Nynian has to die after 90 years or so? The last time I checked, Merlin had full access to TF life extending technology, but he couldn't use it on certain people, since everyone would get a bit suspicious if Cayleb, for example, never seemed to age and lived for a couple of centuries.

But Nynian is a spymaster/mother superior, and she can pass the mother superior role onto someone else whenever she feels she's groomed her to be ready for the job. She can move whenever the identity she's using grows a bit long in the tooth, and change her name and apparent occupation. It isn't like she hasn't done it before! She can keep on being a spymaster forever, since very few in her organization even know who they answer to, so she wouldn't have to change how she operates.

So our lady of the lake is likely to outlive everyone in this snippet who isn't a PICA, both as a human, and possibly as a VP in Nimue's cave after death.

That would tie in nicely with the discussion we had several novels ago about the possibility of OWL setting up a VP of Merlin in the cave. I insisted at the time that any VP would most likely be named Nimue, since RFC had cleverly misled us to the point that we thought the possibility of another PICA was off the table. I suggested that to avoid confusion, the VP ought to be named Guenevere, which RFC said he found interesting. I appear to have merely guessed the wrong name from the Arthurian legends if Nynian becomes a VP so she can keep Merlin company forever. Isn't that sweet? (Sniffles)

Of course if she becomes a VP, there's no reason she can't put herself into a PICA so they can live together physically forever as well. (Go ahead, have a good cry, I'll wait!)

I STILL think it was a cheap shot to trick us into discarding the idea of a 2nd PICA. I'd always assumed there was a backup of Nimue in storage so that Proctor could restore Merlin's memories if he goofed up while hacking the 10 day limit. (The need for that was pretty obvious.) I thought all the talk of making a copy of Merlin's brain was to INCLUDE the experiences he'd had in the years since he woke up in Nimue's cave so any VP wouldn't have to catch up, but instead they went with the pristine copy of Nimue, specifically because she didn't have all his mileage.

So just because I didn't SAY anything about my assumption that there was a backup of Nimue, I missed out on what would have been my biggest coup in guessing where the series was headed. Sigh...

Why did Nynian take Merlin's last name? Is it safe to let the world know she's married to a seijin? (Ok, she's probably a lot safer if everyone knows, since nobody wants to piss Merlin off!)

Still, I wonder at everybody being named after Merlin. I guess I'm so immersed in him being a PICA that I don't consider that the rest of the planet sees him as merely the deadliest bodyguard in existence, and to whom both the emperor and empress owe their lives. So in retrospect, they and their extended family naming their kids after him isn't that surprising.

It's just that Merlin has so many secrets that having his name plastered on a bunch of royal kids makes me wince. I'll get over it.

Is it just me, or did a bunch of us expect Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk to gradually regain the use of his injured arm through the subtle use of TF tech? I'm really surprised that he's still injured when he doesn't need to be - although it's too late now unless some Pasqualite "experiments" with new therapies and/or operations and "discovers" that they will fix his arm.

Just sayin'...

McGuiness wrote:Is it just me, or did a bunch of us expect Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk to gradually regain the use of his injured arm through the subtle use of TF tech?

TL;DR version: Not really.

Long version: At the beginning of the summer, I suffered a proximal humerus fracture -- medical talk for "you know that knob at the top of the upper arm bone that goes in the shoulder joint? Snapped. Clean. Off." Barely missed trashing my rotator cuff in the process. I finished in-clinic physical therapy last month, but I've got months (minimum) of at-home exercises before I get full function back.

Most of the PT I'm doing is stuff some Pasqualate could easily have prescribed for Hektor. Arm stretches with a pulley or cane supporting the arm? The most reactionary Inquisitor on the planet wouldn't look twice at that. However, the reasons I could start PT less than two weeks post-op are because 1) the ortho surgeon could put a plate in my arm to hold everything together, and 2) the surgeon could take regular x-rays to monitor how the bone was healing. I'd be surprised if pre-Merlin metalworkers had access to titanium, and I know for a fact there isn't a Pasqualate on the planet with an x-ray machine.

If we assume the Book of Pasquale contains some analogue of the Hippocratic Oath, then if I'd had this break on Safehold whichever Pasqualate was treating me would have needed to immobilize the arm until the bone had healed before we could even think about starting range-of-motion exercises. Under current medicine, that's too late. A friend of mine suffered a "sprained shoulder" several years back, before the US Army started putting MRIs in overseas base hospitals. The medic immobilized his arm for the standard time, he went back on duty, but noticed that he couldn't move the arm as much. By the time he finally got back stateside and could get an MRI, the rotator cuff injury that "sprain" actually was had healed but was so badly scarred up that there was no point in even trying to fix matters.

Granted, TF medicine is way more advanced than modern-day. However, we know from Nimue's second awakening in the Cave in LMA that mil-spec nannies couldn't prevent wounds from scarring as they healed (Merlin's facial scars aren't seen as unusual). That should hold true for internal scarring as well. Popping Hektor in the Cave's med unit should be able to rebuild his shoulder as good as new, but fails the "subtle use" test. They've already raised enough eyebrows with Hektor's survival, having him running around like he'd never been hurt in the first place is too much.

(Now, once we get to open Federation tech on Safehold, I fully expect Hektor to have an appointment with the med unit.)

Julia Minor wrote:

McGuiness wrote:Is it just me, or did a bunch of us expect Hektor Aplyn-Ahrmahk to gradually regain the use of his injured arm through the subtle use of TF tech?

TL;DR version: Not really.

Long version: At the beginning of the summer, I suffered a proximal humerus fracture -- medical talk for "you know that knob at the top of the upper arm bone that goes in the shoulder joint? Snapped. Clean. Off." Barely missed trashing my rotator cuff in the process. I finished in-clinic physical therapy last month, but I've got months (minimum) of at-home exercises before I get full function back.

Most of the PT I'm doing is stuff some Pasqualate could easily have prescribed for Hektor. Arm stretches with a pulley or cane supporting the arm? The most reactionary Inquisitor on the planet wouldn't look twice at that. However, the reasons I could start PT less than two weeks post-op are because 1) the ortho surgeon could put a plate in my arm to hold everything together, and 2) the surgeon could take regular x-rays to monitor how the bone was healing. I'd be surprised if pre-Merlin metalworkers had access to titanium, and I know for a fact there isn't a Pasqualate on the planet with an x-ray machine.

If we assume the Book of Pasquale contains some analogue of the Hippocratic Oath, then if I'd had this break on Safehold whichever Pasqualate was treating me would have needed to immobilize the arm until the bone had healed before we could even think about starting range-of-motion exercises. Under current medicine, that's too late. A friend of mine suffered a "sprained shoulder" several years back, before the US Army started putting MRIs in overseas base hospitals. The medic immobilized his arm for the standard time, he went back on duty, but noticed that he couldn't move the arm as much. By the time he finally got back stateside and could get an MRI, the rotator cuff injury that "sprain" actually was had healed but was so badly scarred up that there was no point in even trying to fix matters.

Granted, TF medicine is way more advanced than modern-day. However, we know from Nimue's second awakening in the Cave in LMA that mil-spec nannies couldn't prevent wounds from scarring as they healed (Merlin's facial scars aren't seen as unusual). That should hold true for internal scarring as well. Popping Hektor in the Cave's med unit should be able to rebuild his shoulder as good as new, but fails the "subtle use" test. They've already raised enough eyebrows with Hektor's survival, having him running around like he'd never been hurt in the first place is too much.

(Now, once we get to open Federation tech on Safehold, I fully expect Hektor to have an appointment with the med unit.)

It is simple, slow improvements over time would be ignored/explained away. That is just human nature.

Isilith wrote:It is simple, slow improvements over time would be ignored/explained away. That is just human nature.

Safehold also believes in divine intervention. If the healing could actually be done in slow stages there wouldn't be a problem, and you wouldn't have to actually say anything out loud beyond, "I seem to be able to use it better these days." Doing a full heal then trying to fake a slow recovery would be much more difficult. Two healing miracles for him is maybe a bit much.