LAST EDITED ON Mar-23-15 AT 12:21 PM (EDT)
 
Sorry this one's so late. Real life punched us in the head.

Audio will probably get done tomorrow sometime.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Real life's been known to do that from time to time. =)

Take whatever time you feel you need. If it was quantity fanfic we wanted, we'd be elsewhere.

We come here because we believe in quality.

--------

this world created by the
hands of the gods
everything is false
everything is a LIE
the final days have come
now
let everything be destroyed

--mu

Episode's under way, though I've had a busy day and can't finish it tonight. Here, however, is a little something I thought of a while back, and doodled today during the downtimes of an all-day conference class.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

---

Jacqueline-Yvette Cousteau
Lieutenant de Vaisseau, Forces Navales Galliaises Libres
Lieutenant, Free Gallian Naval Forces

Nationality: Gallian
Date of birth: June 11, 1930
Familiar: Mediterranean flying fish (Cheilopogon heterurus)
Striker model: Cherbourg Arsenal Minerve-class Sea Striker
Weapon of choice: Type 47 Jet Harpoon Rifle

Notes: While the flying witches get most of the press and the tank witches have their devotees, few outside of the world's seaports are aware that there are undersea Neuroi as well - and that there is a small corps of magic-wielding young women tasked with hunting and destroying them. These women, the sea witches, tend (unsurprisingly) to come from nations with long-established maritime heritages, many of them islands. Britannia and Fusō have produced many distinguished sea witches, as have Liberion and (mostly northern) Karlsland. Baltlandic sea witches, though rare, are renowned for their ferocity and their navigational skill.

But among the witches of the waters themselves, few names are more highly regarded than that of Jacqueline Cousteau. Sometimes described as "the Professor Miyafuji of the sea," she is renowned among her peers for having developed the first truly practical undersea Striker Unit. She would be the first to admit that she didn't invent most of the technologies incorporated in it herself - Sea Strikers are, for instance, based on the Miyafuji Magic Engine - but she was the first to bring them together and apply them to the problem of underwater counter-Neuroi operations. Before 1942, witches fought undersea Neuroi either by bombing them from the air, or simply by swimming to the attack. The latter technique was highly specialized, very dangerous, and not known for its overwhelming effectiveness.

The Sea Striker changed all that, enabling underwater-specialist witches to fight on terms similar to those enjoyed by their aerial cousins. Coupled with the development of effective undersea weapons such as the Type 47 Jet Harpoon Rifle, it made direct one-on-one engagement of aquatic Neuroi a practical reality. Sea witches are still uncommon, and rarely seen in action, but no military fleet goes anywhere without at least one somewhere in the vicinity. They take their obscurity as a point of pride. "If we're doing our job right," Cousteau has been quoted as saying, "you'll never notice us."

What fewer people realize is that the inventor of the Sea Striker had more in mind for her creation than combat against the Neuroi. From the start, Cousteau's mind was on the device's usefulness in a world without the Neuroi; her heart is that of an explorer, not a warrior. She dreams of a day when she can use her Striker to delve into the ocean depths she loves and share their majesty with the world, rather than fight desperate battles against alien aggressors.

Cousteau's magical specialty is called limited flight; through concentration, she can propel her Sea Striker out of the water and perform short-range aerial maneuvers. This makes her a more flexible combatant than most, but is a very demanding technique and can leave her vulnerable to counterattack.

LAST EDITED ON Mar-22-15 AT 09:39 AM (EDT)
 
Hell if I don't mind delays, Gryph; I think most of us here know that Stuff Happens (tm) and always will.

I always love it when Eyrie Productions can come up with interesting new twists on existing characters (fictional or non); the witch version of the renowned M. Cousteau was a nice treat to find this morning.

A question: back in New Tricks, Mio spent a month or so I think with UF-Gryphon on Ishiyama, but it was only the NEXT DAY when she returned to her own universe/timeline... if that's the case will UF-Gryphon been gone a long time or a short time in the UF-verse? NORMAL time conversions stump me as it is, never mind those brought on by dimensional travel.

> that's the case will
>UF-Gryphon been gone a long time or a short time in the UF-verse?
>NORMAL time conversions stump me as it is, never mind those brought on
>by dimensional travel.

When he talked to his Not-Really-Love-Slave-Vampire a few chapters back, he mentioned he couldn't go back to before she left the main UF universe, so I suspect there's some control over it. Or at the very least, he can sort of aim and there will be a Goddess or a TARDIS on the other side to intercept him.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Matrix I think, hit it on the head. Gryph also mentioned in another thread that Time Travel is very rarely linear. I also think UF-G alludes to that when Mio shows up; he mentions in inner monologue how incredible it is that Mio traversed a universe veil and some 400 years time difference, as -well- as half the galactic radius, to land a reasonably short distance from Sakura's cabin.

>
>A question: back in New Tricks, Mio spent a month or so I think
>with UF-Gryphon on Ishiyama, but it was only the NEXT DAY when she
>returned to her own universe/timeline... if that's the case will
>UF-Gryphon been gone a long time or a short time in the UF-verse?
>NORMAL time conversions stump me as it is, never mind those brought on
>by dimensional travel.

My guess: Mio was using Minna's tie as a guide, so it was drawing Mio back to a time as close as possible to when she took it. The fight against the Neuroi required Minna to make heavy use of magical energy, which made her an easier target to locate, thus the dramatic arrival time.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

>A question: back in New Tricks, Mio spent a month or so I think
>with UF-Gryphon on Ishiyama, but it was only the NEXT DAY when she
>returned to her own universe/timeline... if that's the case will
>UF-Gryphon been gone a long time or a short time in the UF-verse?

It was actually more like four or five months - she arrived in summer and left the day after the first snowfall of the year - but it wasn't a straight crosstime jump; she traveled forward (and then back) in time as well. Therefore, the relative speeds of both timelines aren't necessarily important. To use an inaccurate but serviceable metaphor, she didn't just cross the road, she went several houses down as well.

What this means is that Gryphon doesn't need to keep track of how long he's spent in 1946 to calculate his return trip when the time comes - he just has to know how long his absence from 2411 has been Established Fact, in order to avoid causing awkward adjustments (or indavertently spawning a new parallel timeline through paradox resolution) when he goes back. Hence his query to Marceline about when she'd left from. Technically speaking, he could go back to before she left - or indeed before he left, if he was careful not to meet himself - but it's safer and less fiddly to aim for a day or two later, just to give himself a margin to work with.

In practice, since he has no idea how to make a time jump from 1946 (it's not as if the technology yet exists to build even a primitive flux capacitor, let alone anything more sophisticated, and he's not too sanguine about his chances of pulling off the metasorcerous technique Mio used), inasmuch as he's thought about it at all, he probably assumes that someone will have to come and get him, in which case it's technically their problem. :)

(Plan B is to just wait around until the mid-1980s, when he expects he will be able to build a flux capacitor. Assuming the Neuroi don't destroy humanity, that wouldn't be a particularly problematic outcome.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

So here's a related question: can he communicate with people in his home timeline and era using the Lens? If something came up requiring him to leave in a hurry, that would be a valuable thing to be able to do. (I'm guessing Marceline doesn't have a Lens, but Don does, right?)

>So here's a related question: can he communicate with people in his
>home timeline and era using the Lens?

No, the Lens network doesn't span across time. (That's why Skuld had to build a relay for Dìqiú; it's not the same kind of parallel universe, but for purposes of ætheric communication, the principles are the same.) At present, the only Lensman G can make contact with is Wolfgang.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Mar-23-15 AT 11:00 PM (EDT)
 
First guess is that he can't — in the Dìqiú Suite Skuld had to physically travel to Dìqiú with a beacon in her luggage to enable the Lens network to cross the Veil. I don't think we've seen any other way to use a Lens from one dimension to another.

(Whups, took too long remembering how to type "Dìqiú"...)

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

>Jacqueline-Yvette Cousteau
>Lieutenant de Vaisseau, Forces Navales Galliaises Libres
>Lieutenant, Free Gallian Naval Forces
>
<snip>
>
>Cousteau's magical specialty is called limited flight; through
>concentration, she can propel her Sea Striker out of the water and
>perform short-range aerial maneuvers. This makes her a more flexible
>combatant than most, but is a very demanding technique and can leave
>her vulnerable to counterattack.

*spittake* Very well done, G. *applause*

I'm sorry... did you just use the word advanced in connection with a Belv? Is there a doctor in the house? :)

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

>I'm sorry... did you just use the word advanced in connection with a
>Belv?

It's all about the context! There'll be more about this in the annotations.

Besides, he's just as surprised as you are. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>Besides, he's just as surprised as you are. :)

I don't think "surprised" is a strong enough word to use in the context of this particular wonder of modern technology. Took me a few minutes to remember where I'd heard the name before... and a few more to stop laughing.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

So, moving on from jokes about strangely horrible yet wonderful cars, and the rather nice 'friends just messing about in a garage' scene that came with it, I quite liked the introduction to Wilma. Nice kid, and yet another one screwed over by the odd rules of Magic on this world, and the attitudes of the brass towards such things. And yet another character who, upon realizing she might have a way to do something about it, proceeds to get to work on it. I like her.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

LAST EDITED ON Mar-24-15 AT 05:53 PM (EDT)
 

"I've been thinking about that for most of the day, in the back of my head, while
I've been doing other stuff," he said. "I wondered myself about everything you've
just said... but I think I have a plan. I don't know if it'll work, any more than
I knew what you and I did would work when we started out... but I think it's
worth a shot."

so my first thought? Gun Kata...and wondering if Geoff (or one of the tetragrammaton) will make an appearance.

I have no idea the actual likelihood of this being the answer -- I've long since learned that my brain doesn't work like other people's :)

... but it's the thought that crossed my mind.

* edit: missed a close paren...what is this, Scheme?

> What is this, Scheme?

Well, it's certainly not COBOL!

I'll buy that. I was thinking long range shooting as a sort of zen exercise. Empty your mind to get in touch with your true self kind of thing.

"Know the Force. Feel its ebb and flow. Drink deep from the well. Dive in. Fire."

A single, sharp crack.

"What do your feelings tell you?"

"There are none."

"... What, exactly, are you feeling right now."

"Recoil."

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

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