Arc 6 Notes - The Ledger

Arc Six: The Ledger

Chapters 161 - 230

This arc, although it's titled The Ledger, actually revolves around themes of Family, Fortune, and Fame. It's all about taking stock of what's important, and fighting for it. Here the Ravens come together as a team and as a family, all while they each grow even further themselves.

And dealing with whatever tragedies come along, too.

This arc also sees the return of the Prophets of Gaea, murderous synthetic lifeforms headed up by the megalomaniac who titles himself 'Father'. They too share the same themes, but more twisted versions - Patriarchy, Wealth, and Infamy.

You've probably noticed that I've started to extend the 1st and 2nd acts within each arc more and more. And that's because I want to do a lot more character building, among other things. I also kept them specifically short in the beginning, just to imbue this sense of time ever advancing.

Not that the arcs will keep expanding, and in fact it'll eventually start shortening again at some point. Maybe around the 9th or 10th arc? I hope to have the last arc have the same amount of chapters as the first one.

We'll see how things go.

One big reason why I wanted to flesh out characters is simply because I want them to be real. They need to have real things bogging them down and hindering them.

I'm tired of reading & watching isekai where the OP MC is one-dimensional. And too powerful. If that's your thing, cool. But to me, it's kinda like gooning. There's no real merit to those characters. Fun to read and watch once or twice, but not to absorb and think about further down the line.

I sure do like candy, but I prefer a bowl of pho much more. There's just so much more to chew on.

I'm a big fan of John le Carre, actual British spy turned spy novelist, and his 1st and 2nd acts are *chef's kiss*. His characters are simply phenomenal, and he builds them with absolute perfection. When the tragedy unfolds in the final acts, you feel serious pain for what his characters go through.

What he does is break your heart, then he fills it with this roaring flame against the injustices of the world.

If you want to check out what I mean, read 'Absolute Friends' or 'The Constant Gardener' or 'A Perfect Spy'. Any book he's written, really. But those three hit harder than most.

I would be happy if I could gain even half his talent at storytelling.

Oh! I wanna talk about technology in the book a bit. I want to sort of break the news that a Type 2 humanity would be beyond our imaginations. We wouldn't even look like we do now, and anyone who 'wakes up' in a society like that would be like… if neanderthals suddenly showed up today.

Not only would Freya and co be seen as inferior, but they actually would be, too. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Fundamentally, they would have zero chance at surviving in a Type 2 society without having to evolve into a "normal" human, whatever it is at that point.

Which of course, they would be able to.

This would be a society that literally has merged with machinery, or made biological computers. They would have the capability to edit their own genome to fit their mood for the day. You know, like how we choose outfits today.

Imagine having atmospheric control over your specific region of land. For example, if you want it to rain on a few acres, you could possibly schedule it. Like, if you had a huge farm or something. And it was outdoors for whatever reason. (Because by that point, food creation facilities would all be indoors and fully automated.)

You would be able to schedule it like you would anything else in your life.

Food scarcity probably wouldn't be a thing, nor would currency. No diseases, or doctors. Because imagine if you break a leg, you can simply have your body repair itself. No-one would need anything, because getting what they wanted or needed is simply a matter of asking for it.

Thank you, nanite swarm!

Imagine you have a 3d printer by your side, except it isn't a big boxy machine. Instead it's your swarm of personal nanites. You can't see them because they're tiny. And when you command them to create something, they can. They'll simply use whatever molecules they have on hand, and reform them into the molecules you want.

Like a cupcake out of thin air.

And they'll be powered through the orbital station that's surrounding the sun. So, they're there forever.

The actual thing that's brightly lit in the sky? Specialized machines (probably more nanites) that simulate the sun. And the clouds. And the wind. Everything.

When one has unlimited free energy from the sun, the populace gains the ability to do anything they want. It would be magical. People would be able to live exactly how they wanted to. Did they want to turn into a four-legged animal and go prancing in the digital woods?

Yeah, that's called Tuesdays. Naughty stuff after dark.

Life would be that easy.

But a magical place like that doesn't offer too many conflicts, does it? If every galactic species have everything they want, then what's all the fighting about? And we can't have an impactful drama without serious conflict.

So, things like tech had to be scaled back a bit (a lot). Even though I would have loved to write about skin-morphing people and evolutionary ninjas, keeping things more grounded is more important.

That being said, the most unrealistic technology I have in the book thus far is ship teleportation. I've been thinking about how this could work, not with any real-world explanation, but with some sort of fictional pseudo-science.

(And of course I figured it out. You probably won't like the reasons why.)

But as to the mechanics of how teleportation works, it's like this:

Each fleet has a flagship with a teleportation module connected to a navigational intelligence circuit. NavInt provides coordinates, communicates with the endpoint (always a teleport beacon), gets approval, then OK's the module.

Any ships have to be latched onto the flagship's teleportation module through their own NavInt, otherwise they get left behind. And although accompanying small ships like fighters don't have to sit still, the larger ones do.

Because they're the anchor, they can't be moving around.

There can be multiple ships that provide the flagship navigational assistance, and together they create a kind of energy lattice that strengthens the teleport maneuver itself. Of course, they can't be moving, either.

The flagships can be the largest battleships, or they can be simple corvettes. Almost no small ships and mecha have teleportation modules - they're too large to fit in their chassis.

Anyway, once the module gets the OK, it fires off. Puts the ship in the exact spot that the teleport beacon told them they could be in. When they show up, it's kind of a huge 3d grid of squares, with the teleport beacon right in the middle. It assigns sections of those grids to oncoming ships.

Combined with the ships not moving, it means less collisions all round.

Which leads to the question - can the teleport beacons be faked/hacked/boarded/destroyed? The answer is, of course, yes to all of them.

Okay, I seem to be rambling now, so I'm just gonna end things here. I need to go work, anyway.