It was that kind of day...

--G.
the oddest part was that Bell and Skuld seemed to be expecting her
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Eh, they're Fates. That doesn't seem odd at all.

Polychrome

It did to Korra. She didn't know that.

--G.
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I wouldn't think there'd be any reason to classify that, at least not any higher than the existence of the Avatar State and past selves. My initial guess was that Korra lost her Lens and the classification was a face-saving measure, but that doesn't quite fit either.

Brian

She's still working on her Ph.D. from there. It's just taken a bit longer than she planned.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Seriously, a galactic survey of spiritual techniques across different species and cultures takes more legwork than you might think."

>that on the day of the most dangerous cosmological conjunction in
>existence, your girlfriend was going to strap you into a tin can,
>stand it on top of a truly enormous amount of high explosives, and
>shoot you to the moon. Heeeeee.

Actually, there weren't a lot of explosives involved in the Phoenix Flight. That's WHY they did it on Comet Day.

--G.
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... okay, wow, that's on me then.

For years, and I mean years (going on a decade now, I think) I've been convinced, probably as a gross misinterpretation of the above incident, that the Test of Light functions in much the same way that Sakura's Sacred Spirit Blade does: that is, it weighs your soul, and if it finds you wanting, it decides to do a little spiritual recycling.

I'm gonna have to go re-read CSI: New Avalon now, I think. Puts an entirely different complexion on a number of scenes in that series for me. Conrad Ecklie (or his double) looks massively less un-self-aware and potentially suicidal for lobbying hard to take his Test, for example.

>Actually, there weren't a lot of explosives involved in the Phoenix
>Flight. That's WHY they did it on Comet Day.

I figured, but even with her Avatar Propellant System on tap, Asami seems like the kind of gal who would build Diqiu's Saturn V equivalent -anyway-. Also, even -some- explosive would make Tenzin... nervous, one feels. Because of all the OTHER times Korra has nearly ended up exploded. :)

Now that I really think about it, I suppose what they did was use Korra to achieve escape velocity and probably for the trans-lunar injection (the energy-intensive bits), but utilized more traditional methods for landing on, lifting off from, and returning from Yue.

-Merc
Keep Rat

"The moon's weird, though, right? It's there, and there, and then, suddenly, it's not! And it seems to be pretty far up! Is it watching us? If not, what is it watching instead?! Is there something more interesting than us? Hey! Watch us, moon!! We may not always be the best show in the universe, but we try!"

If it makes you feel better, I also had the false impression that the ToL was fatal. Chalk it up to the "Luke, I am your father" syndrome -- Everybody knows that line, or thinks they do, but it's not what is actually said in the movie, but it's what is lodged in our collective consciousness. Similarly, it's pretty easy to go from "the Lens kills the unworthy, and we only Test those who we think will pass" to "the Test kills the unworthy."

"It is a pink slip, hence why it is pink."

Until Gryphon explained it all upthread, I went with how I read Skuld's explanation in Another Christmas Rose - it's a 2 part Test in which (Part 1) Skuld does the judging (a character test) and (Part 2) the Lens does the final acceptance. If you don't pass Part 1, the Test is over. If you do pass, Skuld makes you a Lens and you move on to Part 2. If she misjudged you and you're not the right kind of person, the Lens will kill you.

This is all based on a bit in Another Christmas Rose (S2M3), where Skuld gives Wakaba the Test of Light during the Christmas party. Afterward she gives Wakaba the "orientation" (touch someone else's Lens, it'll hurt, touch it for more than a couple seconds, it'll kill you, etc). There's a bit of a joke about Wakaba waiting for some sort of oath to be administered, then Skuld says:

        Skuld smiled.  "No, no oath necessary.  Assuming I misjudged
you before I made the Lens for you in the first place, if you were the
kind of person who would misuse the power of the Lens - or your -own-
power, come to that - it wouldn't have accepted you as its wearer.
You'd be lying there dead on the rug.  That's why the integrity of
Lensmen is so readily accepted around the universe; because anybody
with an education knows that a Lensman wouldn't be a Lensman if he
weren't worthy of his Lens."
        Wakaba blinked.  "Gosh," she said wryly, "thanks for
mentioning -that- up front.  Has that ever happened?"
        "Only once," Skuld replied with a touch of sadness in her
eyes.

Kind of puts another spin on the title "Chooser of the Slain"

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Never give up, never surrender!"

That was how it worked in practice, until the time somebody actually died, but it was never the original design intent of the process, and after it happened, Skuld patched it so "phase one" was more comprehensive.

(The short version is that the person who died was a very carefully prepared infiltration agent.)

--G.
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1) You grows your killer doll in the ISO standard vat/old-rain-barrel-full-of-clone-juice.

2) You mentally programs your killer doll to be the kind of spunky, heroic, two-fisted action girl who Gryphon so enjoys collectin'.

3) You embeds a kablooey code deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep down in yer killer doll.

4) You waits until the killer doll has wormed her way into the Chief's life to the point where Skuld gives her the Test Of Life. This is the clever bit; because she believes herself to be X McWhatever, Saviour of Day(s), as opposed to a killer doll, she should pass the test just fine.

5) You waits until your killer doll's in the Chief's office, because a Lensman is about the most trusted person in Gryphon's life who isn't immediate family/previous flame/personal friend, and then you demonstrate just how kablooey the kablooey code is.

How kablooey?

VERY kablooey.

Of course, I freely admit to making this up on the fly at half-past three in the morning, so the plan's probably got all the watertight attributes of a colander in a Texan firing range. Still, if an idiot can think it up, then a smart villain might be able to put a bit of polish on it.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

This is what happened the time you mentioned someone dying, isn't it...

... aaaaaand there's the bit of code Skuld patched.

--G.
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Neat.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

Next time: why Corwin is secretly one of the Lizard-People.

Sort of. That's more-or-less what happened (with a less involved setup phase), but their masking protocol wasn't good enough. Good enough to fool Skuld, yes; not good enough to fool the Lens. The individual him- or herself not knowing his or her own intent isn't enough for that.

Another approach that might hypothetically have a chance is something along the X-23 model, an individual so weirdly constructed psychologically that she, while aware of her intentions, is not aware that they are evil. The problem with a setup like that, as Laura's creators discovered with her, is that it isn't stable. Any organism capable of learning and growing is going to evolve past it, sooner rather than later if in an environment like that which tends to surround the Chief. In the best-case scenario, the programming would simply break down and the weapon would become a Good Person (as we saw with Laura). In the worst, the conflict eventually causes a complete breakdown. In neither case does it actually work.

None of which actually has anything to do with Korra, whose Test(s) w{as|ere} complicated by factors having nothing to do with her character or moral standing.

--G.
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Hence why she had to take it multiple times; the first time, they tried to Test every Avatar that's ever lived, but the second time, the only person being Tested was Korra herself.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

I have a certain amount of respect for whoever tried this, because they demonstrated a fundamental understanding that many seemingly intelligent guys who looked at the WDF/IPO and thought "Hey! I can fit THAT in my mouth" have not: namely, if you're really opposed to Gryphon (for whatever reason) to the extent you feel you need to take him down, your best, and really only, option is to come at him sideways.

Taking a direct shot at Gryphon and his generation of cosmic heroes has a really, really shitty track record. Gryphon punched the devil in the face and lived to brag about it. Whereas sliding up next to them and planting the knife at least has gotten a little traction for the people who tried it. Largo is the most obvious example, of course, but even complete two-bit operators like Carson D. Carson (anyone remember that slimeball?) managed to slip into blind spots and do real damage.

It was probably a trick worth trying. It's just not going to work, because you're a mortal agency going up against Skuld in one of her areas of expertise. It's like how Skuld will always be better at the super-science game than Washuu is, not because Washuu isn't potentially smarter than Skuld at least in some ways, but because Skuld can write a rootkit and Washuu just can't.

If it were me, and I really truly felt I had to get an intelligence officer inside of the highest ranks of the IPO, I would try two things:

1) Find someone who marks off all the appropriate checkboxes for being genuinely, truly, heroic, but believes, without any non-consensual persuasion on your part, that they really need to get into the IPO and spy on it because it's the right, or at least the patriotic, thing to do. See if the Test will detect THAT. You run a very high risk of them going native but it could be worth the attempt.

2) Demons or other Godlike entities. Assuming you know this one is an option, if Skuld is doing to deploy her divine "no, fuck YOU guys" toys in Midgard the obvious counterweight is to see if anyone in the Pit with programming expertise would like to see if they can code a way to fool a Lens. Risky move, but the alternative is to just let the IPO run around completely unchecked, and people like, say, the Tal Shiar are going to regard that as not being an option.

I do feel bad (maybe) for the person who had to die to prove that you can't slip into the Lensmen as a stowaway, tho. Assuming we're talking about some kind of bioroid as opposed to a Talia Winters style personality overlay, and that they had a sufficient Spengler flux to qualify as fully sentient (which they'd almost have had to; Skuld could probably be blind drunk and passing out Lenses like Mardi Gras beads and not miss THAT) it has to be a shitty way to die: you think you're about to become the next awesome galactic policeman and then you wake up blinking in your afterlife, possibly being told that you had an evil other personality in your head that also woke up in it's afterlife.

... Frey, assuming he runs Asgard's intelligence service under his aegis of being Security Guy, must lead a very interesting life when he puts on his 'Spy vs. Spy' hat. Almost as interesting as that of the guys up in the NOC.

-Merc
Keep Rat

"Does the carpet match the drapes? No. It doesn�t. You�re the worst interior decorator. Please leave my home."

Eh... don't.

>... Frey, assuming he runs Asgard's intelligence service under his
>aegis of being Security Guy, must lead a very interesting life when he
>puts on his 'Spy vs. Spy' hat.

Oh, goodness, no. As we have seen, Frey is shiiiit at subterfuge. That crap is Heimdall's job. (Vigilance, you know.)

--G.
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"I can understand the police detective, the starship captain, and even the Destroid pilot, but why in the Allfather's name do you have the ID for an alcoholic French monk?"

"I saw the need."

(Think about it...)

"You'd be surprised what you can get away with in the Earth Alliance if your ID is sufficiently official-looking. People look. But they don't see."

-Merc
Keep Rat

"The crate is in your kitchen, where you left it, and you get down on your knees to embrace it more fully. It has grown warmer � even hot. It still is not ticking."

Oh, she did - they were going to need to be able to get to orbit, if not to Yue, without it being that one day every hundred years, after all - but the prototype they used for the Phoenix Flight wasn't anything like fully equipped.

>Now that I really think about it, I suppose what they did was use
>Korra to achieve escape velocity and probably for the trans-lunar
>injection (the energy-intensive bits), but utilized more traditional
>methods for landing on, lifting off from, and returning from Yue.

It wasn't just Korra; the Phoenix Flight had a crew of seven, and she wasn't the only firebender (or, as Asami winkingly described them in the official documentation, propulsion system specialist) among them.

Korra basically had three jobs on the Phoenix Flight mission:

- Double up for all the other bending crew members, in case any one of them was incapacitated and someone had to take over his or her job (which is why her crew title in the official transcripts is "systems specialist", without a leading specialty designator);
- Provide the necessary symbolic international appeal to get everyone on board with the project; and
- Serve as the mission's liaison to the Moon Spirit once they actually arrived, given that they were about to show up uninvited.

I've toyed with the idea of writing the whole mission up as a BPGD file, but we hold out the hope that we might stumble across the spare spoon we need to do it as a proper story sometime.

--G.
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As a reader, I just gotta say that I am loving this idea; in my head it's kind of a "Wings of Honneamise meets Legend of Korra with a tiny pinch of Apollo 13, but in a much more upbeat fashion" thing. I can hear Janet Varney saying "Republic City, Yue base here. The Phoenix has landed."

(I also have this kind of weird mental image of Korra being tapped on the shoulder by one of her very frightened fellow specialists, reporting that he just looked out the porthole and there's what looks like a teenaged girl sitting up on the crater rim in hard vacuum with a complete formal tea set in front of her. Waiting. She waved at me, Avatar. Am I going to die?)

Ahem.

Anyway, might I humbly suggest that if you do end up going the "Featured Document" route rather than "told as a story" route, you might consider making it, say, the Future Industries white paper on the subject, or Korra's formal after-mission report, rather than a BPGD file.

-Merc
Keep Rat

"You have a new job now. Every day except Sunday you drive out into the Sand Wastes, and there you find two trucks. You move wooden crates from one truck to another while a man in a suit silently watches. It is a different man each time. Sometimes the crates tick. Mostly, they do not."

Also, it just occurred to me that from Tenzin's point of view, the whole thing was an even crazier idea than you think. Hee hee.

--G.
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Somehow, I imagine by that point in their relationship as teacher/mentor and student/massive headache, anytime Korra came to him excited about something, an overpowering feeling of dread fell over him.

Korra: "Hey Tenzin, guess what...!?"

Tenzin: "Korra, whatever it is, the answer is no."

Korra: "But I haven't even told you what it is yet!"

Tenzin: "I know, that's what scares me."

--------------------------
CdrMike, Columbia pilgrim

Well, by the time Comet Day rolled around, Tenzin was in his 80s and Korra in her 40s, so one doubts they had that precise dynamic any longer; on the other hand, she's perpetually youthful in both body and spirit, and I suspect Tenzin is one of those guys who were middle-aged in high school*, so maybe. :)

--G.
* Yes, Merc, I know he almost certainly didn't go to high school, get off my balls. :)
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You mean all those fanfics I've read where Tenzin and Lin attended Republic City High... aren't canon-compliant?

Gym Coach Toph never caught Lin pressuring Tenzin into smoking behind the bleachers?

They didn't defeat that Noatak kid in the Talent Show, which was both preceded, and followed by, a musical number?

Mind. Blown.

I need to go think about this. Lies. All of them LIES.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I could have written five paragraphs with speculation about the structure of primary and secondary education in the Republic, with analogies to both pre and post-war American systems of public education and using Mako and Bolin as proof of lack of truancy laws.

Could have.

Chose not to.

They're still getting to grips with the Standard alphabet over there.

--G.
BAM
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Blame Wikipedia, that's where I got that part from. (and the ATLA creators use "Hung Gar", so if it's good enough for Sifu Kisu, it's good enough for me.)

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here"

for the record, there were only a dozen women at RPI at the time ;) and nobody calls it Rensselaer Polytechnic... those that were there at the time call it RPI, and the new president who's trying to turn it into a Respectable University is trying to get people to call it Rensselaer :)

-Z

---
Remember kids: guns make you stupid, duct tape makes you smart.

If there was one, Prof would've had decent odds of finding her. :) (Also, that's about five more than were at WPI.)

>and nobody calls it Rensselaer Polytechnic...

... unless, like me, they're talking to a group of people not all of whom are likely to know what RPI stands for.

--G.
sheesh.
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which is half the reason i didn't go there

>>and nobody calls it Rensselaer Polytechnic...
>
>... unless, like me, they're talking to a group of people not all of
>whom are likely to know what RPI stands for.
>

an excellent point

-Z RPI.... is that in Rhode Island?

---
Remember kids: guns make you stupid, duct tape makes you smart.

If all I had to go on was "RPI," my first thought would have been, "But Rapid Prototyping didn't exist back then, did it?"

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

The pre-eminent healers on Diqiu are waterbenders, and the most prominent part of the symbol for the water tribes is that crescent-moon-and-wave thing they have going. If you handwave a little bit you can get to the same place we got here, where they take the symbol associated with healing and invert the colors from blue to red to demonstrate that it isn't a water tribe thing, it's an international healing thing, boom. You could even argue that the idea slipped in via Zipang, which I'm sure has it's own chapter of the IFRC; "The cross thing is weird, but oh hey, yeah! We already have people used to seeing the best doctors and nurses wearing crescent moon symbols. We can work with that."

The Red Crescent isn't particularly asiatic, of course, but hell, ATLA dropped in random meso-americans whose objects of veneration are chinese-style dragons, so...

>Second place goes to "Korra Tonraqsdottir", which she selected off
>the top of her head when visiting Bear City on Ice Planet Halloran
>V, having discovered that the online tourist visa application
>wouldn't go to the second page without something in the Surname: blank.)

ARRGH.

I deal with ticketing systems regularly, and have had at least three yelling matches in the past five years about this kind of design fuckup. There are people who only have one name, and your clever little first-year programming trick where you won't allow the form to complete unless all appropriate fields are filled out -doesn't account for that-, you -idiot-.

Oh, and then there was the one system that we eventually figured out was using the name string as the only form of identification for any of the "Person" objects it instantiated, instead of assigning each one a separate, unique identifier. That was real fun; the search-by-name function was designed to return one and -only- one record, which meant it would pick a person at random if there were more than one of them. If you wanted something on the five or six John Smith's we had, you had to back into them using only their objects rather than the object itself.

This was commercially-deployed software people had paid quite a lot of money for, mind you.

-Merc
Keep Rat

"Today's program has been sponsored by the physical act of gulping."

No?

okay.

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

---
"Yeah, I'm definitely going to hell/But I'll have all the best stories to tell" -- Frank Turner, The Ballad of Me and My Friends

In another universe, she's better known as Triplicate Girl/Triad (among other codenames) of the LSH.