New answers tagged magic
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The second way of resurrection involves resurrecting someone back into their original body.
You didn't use this explicit wording, but I assume you mean this form of resurrection places to original soul back into that original body. And in that case, the other answers here offer some interesting ideas.
But what if we tweak it slightly: The original body is ...
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I chellange your premises, that a second heart will help if the first heart is stabbed.
You will lose many liters of blood thru that open wound gushing high pressure blood. In a minute you will faint, in five you will be dead.
And your second heart make things worse by giving the enemy another place to stab and drain you dry.
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The Afterlife Bureaucracy tries to reclaim unauthorized departures
When you bind a soul to a golem, the specially made container is not just a vessel for the soul, but a contract with the Afterlife to borrow the soul for a specific task until a specific event or set of events happen. This contract combined with the explicit permission of the soul before ...
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You could always make it so that only the Revenants are the only ones actually resurrected, and the Golems souls are captured at the moment leading up to death, and extracted into the container. So they never experience the afterlife or what it feels like being dragged back to the world of the living.
So the Golems contract is decided before death, and on ...
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The law is not broken, only refined.
This is just like the common discussion about Newtonian mechanics, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics says that things don't work the way Newtonian mechanics say they do, that it's very different. But scientists don't say Quantum mechanics invalidates Newtonian mechanics, rather that it is a ...
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Typically, the term Revenant tends to refer specifically to people brought back to life to seek revenge. If you keep with this trope, the need for revenge may be a prerequisite to this form of resurrection; so, the problem is not that you bring back evil forms of good people, but that good people capable of forgiveness and accepting their own fate are just ...
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As stated, the soul bound to their own body is a revenant, in other words, a hungry ghost that seeks revenge. The original purpose of the ritual was to bring back a soul to fulfil their, or their summoner's, desire for revenge. Good or positive traits require a full resurrection, which is far more expensive, and quite unnecessary for a being whose sole ...
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Life is pain
Literally. Being alive in a body made of flesh is painful. People who have been alive for all their lives in their bodies just don't notice it. But once a soul passes on and it returns, it's suddenly aware of all this pain. It drives them insane. It makes them want to hurt others for what was done to them.
Golems, being non-living bodies, don'...
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Revenant Ritual brings back the same soul person had during life. During death and earlier parts of afterlife, or during resurrection, person suffers traumatic experience, and becomes broken, having symptoms similar to
https://www.helpguide.org/articles/ptsd-trauma/ptsd-symptoms-self-help-treatment.htm
After some time in afterlife, soul begins to loose ...
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resurrecting a person back to their original bodies changes them, making the individual evil and removes their positive traits, highlighting only the negative ones.
After an entire life of getting up early, going to work, yield my boss' nagging, going back home and yield to my wife's/husband's nagging, sleep and repeat, pay taxes and consume (well, add the ...
answered 13 hours ago
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Our entire idea of the afterlife is wrong.
Instead of an entire soul going to a good place or a bad place, The soul is sundered and the good and bad portions are split to their prospective realms. This ritual unknowingly only calls back the evil soul.
The reason that we only call back evil souls is because it is actually a voluntary thing and the good ...
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A golem only brings back part of a person's soul. A revenant brings back the entire soul, complete with extra baggage from the realm of the dead. Whatever it saw on the other side was enough to make it evil.
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Because thermals
Raising the islands into the air changed the air patterns over the islands and the coastline. Now emphasised by the expansion from villages, the heat from the cities causes thermals over the islands that the dragons take advantage of to gain extra height as they fly past.
Consider them simply as large flying creatures and a free thermal, ...
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NASA recently discovered a very interesting resonant pair in two moons of Neptune, Naiad and Thalassa. Their orbits (nearly <2000km) intersect and have periods of 7 and 7.5hrs respectively. Even though they are quite close at nearest pass (<4000km) they never actually collide because of this ”unprecedented” 69:73 resonance.
This resonance was ...
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Everyone is familiar with the old saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. However there's a less well known but for your purposes equally important version.
Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.
So what does this mean for your purposes?
The reason this applies is that your experimenters have ...
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The real answer is "why not." There simply was not a situation where it occurred until the magic was discovered.
If I may offer a real life example, consider the law of the conservation of energy. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Everyone learns this in physics. When you get to relativity, you have to modify it slightly to say that mass-energy is ...
answered 20 hours ago
Cort Ammon - Reinstate Monica
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Your magic is creating an (as yet) unknown enthalpy channel. In effect it is linking another unit to the observed system.
Consider the following gedankenspell:
You create a portal, that doesn't permit molecules to pass, but does allow their bumps and jostles to pass. Think of it as a stretchy membrane between two fluids. But one side of the portal is ...
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Usually when you have something created or supported by magic that causes a logical problem like this, it is easiest to just say "because magic".
If the Islands are levitated by a magic force, then perhaps the dragons (being magical creatures) are affected by that force. If they tried to fly below the island the would be pushed up by the force and ...
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It isn't
In theory, this ritual (just requiring contact between various common molecules such as water and cheese crystals of quartz. It should have happened loads of times during the formation of the planets, even leading to the formation of various new forms of astronomical objects, like heat sources that aren't stars or gas giants).
This doesn't look ...
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We do this all the time (locally)...
Ever wondered why wearing a beanie in the snow keeps you warm? The head is such a small amount of our surface area, yet wearing a beanie in very cold environments is practically essential. Why would covering such a small surface area make so much of a difference to our capacity to retain our internal heat?
It comes down ...
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Simple, De-Isolate the System
Laws like the second law of Thermodynamics rest on isolated systems, something many other areas of science might call a "closed" system. Which is to say, as long as nothing is coming in to add heat, entropy is constant. But the second you no longer have this isolated system, the second law no longer applies.
So what is this ...
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Because there is magic and once there is magic you can do things like "also requires intent/participation of an sapient creature".
The second law is largely still valid, it just needs to be amended with "..as long as no magic happens". Or "For any system without sapience ..".
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The problem there, as others have said, is that this will still be pumping blood around, past whatever hole was made to damage the original heart, and if that heart stopped beating because of blood loss, then it won't help at all. The only time it'd actually really be helpful is if the heart stopped beating... in which case the fix would want to be a second, ...
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You should have a look at Janus and Epimetheus. They are two moons of Saturn that exchange orbits every once in a while. This setup is probably not stable for more than a few billion years but it might do for what you want.
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Oh, maybe that is what the magic is about.
Under normal circumstances, you can't have perfect synchronous orbits. Suppose the orbits are, to pick numbers, 1000 hours and 10,000 hours. That's about 40 days and about 400 days.
So whatever is supposed to happen at the first coincidence might be off by some tiny amount. This tiny discrepancy grows for 400 ...
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Ok, so you say 'Harmonic Orbits', but actual Space-Talking-Dudes call that 'orbital resonance', and it's the solution to your problem.
We've got an example of something ALMOST exactly like what you're talking about right here in our own solar system with Pluto and Neptune. As puppetsock rightly points out, their orbits don't actually intersect because of ...
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Immediately behind the genitals.
If you get maimed there you're not gonna want to live anyway.
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The most "realistic" thing that I could imagine would be for the redundant heart to really be a kind of "heart seed", maybe the size of a hazelnut or walnut which would be located for example on the aortic arc, or somewhere nearby. There's enough fatty tissue in the mediastinum so you could place it there.
Not only is being stabbed in the heart actually ...
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How do things work?
They work very, very simply: it is the world where you live in now.
Any weapon that we have is based on one or more of the 4 fundamental forces or its usage.
What you call spell is just the sequence of steps one need to execute to produce and fire the weapon. Some are more long, complex and powerful (aka thermonuclear bombs), some ...
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The real problem is discrete parts.
What you need is the ability for specialized cells to quickly change specialty. So that any cell in your body could more or less instantly become any other kind of cell based on need. Maybe even redundant, distributed memory storage throughout the body so that the brain's contents could be rebuilt.
Then it's really ...
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In a "Bag of Holding"
Since we're using magic anyway, let the redundant heart, as well as some sort of reservoir of extra blood, an extra lung or two, with a large supply of oxygen to supply them, and while we're at it a supply of glucose that can be quickly added to supply immediate energy needs; all be inside a magical container that is larger on its ...
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Two redundant hearts, one under each foot.
This placement capitalizes on energy that would otherwise be wasted, by using the fall of the body onto the foot to compress the heart and drive blood effectively back up from the lowest part of the body. The accessory hearts would pressurize the venous system and facilitate blood return, improving blood supply ...
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There's quite a lot of plumbing to make the blood flow through the lungs and then through the body. If you put the 'standby' heart anywhere other than the chest cavity you end up running major high pressure blood vessels from the 'standby' to your chest. There's the veinous return from the body of oxygen depleted blood, a semi high pressure feed to the lungs,...
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They've learned to live with it by the time they get around to being able to exterminate them?
Outside of the western world there's plenty of dangerous animals that roam around. Just take a trip to Africa and see how friendly the local wildlife is. Even the hippo's that people find adorable are some of the most murderous creatures on that part of the ...
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Part One of Two:
Actually most people in a viking-age world would die as children.
In pre modern societies more than half of all the persons born died in the first few days, months, or years of their lives.
In a modern society, people can die at any age, but most die during what is considered old age.
In a pre modern society, people can die at any age, ...
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Not all the land is valuable. If the cost-benefit of organizing an army to eradicate monsters from a desert, or a swamp, or some glacial islands is negative, nobody would do it.
The only reason why an eradication of monsters from a far and worthless land would make sense would be to protect the nearby lands from attacks from rampaging monsters... but if the ...
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The lower abdomen / pelvic region.
In order for the secondary heart to be effective there has to be damage which causes cardiac arrest without major haemorrhaging. This would include blunt trauma to heart or questionably minor puncture wounds which would manage to stop the heart. In this cause the use of a secondary heart could be beneficial if it appeared ...
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In the event the first heart goes down, (suppose someone stabs you clean through it, for instance) the second heart kicks in and keeps the blood pumping through your body.
So what you mean is, instead of dying in ten seconds or so as the blood pressure in your brain drops to zero, instead your magic super soldier get to live for a minute or so going "augh! ...
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It's a dormant organ, that upon the demise of the first heart, sprout and injects itself...
In this case, it isn't really a redundant heart, right? It is a replacement heart. It would make sense to keep it near the old one. That way, it can sprout into place and you won't have a gaping hole in your chest. As the other answer notes, the main problem isn't ...
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The diaphragm.
There is already some space there to allow the muscles of the diaphragm to expand and contract with your breath. The presence of another heart in this area would mean the abdomen would not contract as fully on an exhale; perhaps magic users can be spotted by a bit of a protruding belly on an otherwise slender frame. Plus the aorta already ...
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I'm going to issue a framing challenge here, because I think you're asking the wrong question.
If you're trying to make it more likely for someone to survive battlefield injuries, a redundant heart isn't really what you need. Damage to the heart isn't what causes most people to die on the battlefield. What kills them is exsanguination. It doesn't matter if ...
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More interesting might be the firing mechanism rather than the bullets.
For the bullets you "simply" want hard materials for armor penetration. For non-armor purposes you can use less hard materials like the already mentioned types of glass, plastics or other compounds. Certain sillicon oxydes would fit the bill for example. Their shape would largely be the ...
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Metals are fine. From my understanding of the problem, the bullet itself being magical is not important, only that the bullet exits the weapon with sufficient lethality.
If the magic field does not affect the motion of metal objects, I would use a sabot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot_(firearms)) of whatever magic-susceptible material you choose, ...
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Material choice for your bullet seems likely to devolve to glass, stone of some kind, wood, or various minerals -- most of which are compounds of metals, but the question says compounds aren't a problem, only the pure(ish) metallic material itself.
However, most of these material choices aren't likely to take rifling, and it's obvious the barrel can't be ...
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Several answers here have provided apt suggestions, here are a few ones I could think of :
Wax/Clay : this may sound surprising, but soft wax/clay bullets, while obviously non-lethal, could provide a range of possibilities. Most of all, they could be filled with poison ; as the gun works with seemingly progressive acceleration, the bullet would not break ...
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Magical Conservation
Having your human's tech be equivalent to the 60s is actually a really interesting setup. At that point humanity had enough knowledge about the natural sciences to understand things like biodiversity and ecology, so your society should have the same kind of understandings. It was also a prime time for the development of new medicines ...
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The creatures are simply too powerful, and don't like visitors
Perhaps the deeper you go into magical territory, the stronger the creatures are. Even with planes, tanks, etc., humans have learned that whatever aggression they provoke the (normally peaceful) creatures with, they get a retaliation proportional to the original attack.
They dare not use ...
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Glass, Concrete, and Explosives
Ammunition could look any number of ways depending on the rules of your magic and universe. Sticking with more of a "replacement" for our world's ammo to be used in your magic universe, ammo could be roughly the same and shape, or simple spheres. These could be manufactured as glass, as concrete, or some type of container ...
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There are several studies on how often an average adult lies per day. The range seems to go from 1.65 to 25 lies per adult and day. Maybe that depends on how seriously the lies are counted.
(For example: The origin of the phrase "good morning" is something like "I wish you a good morning". So everytime you say "good morning" to a person while actually not ...
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I have something that prevents me from lying. Basically I cant read social cue's as naturally and have to learn them from memory and previous interactions. This caused me to have little feedback to how well I performed a lie (or someone else lying to me) and means that I never learned to lie properly.
And its such a liability that I'm actually learning how ...
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