SSSS Fic ideas [general repository]

[lwise]

Speaking of quarantine, it seems to me impractical to have a two-week quarantine for everybody every time they travel anywhere where there might be non-immunes.  I think villages would have a policy where if someone has been tested and found immune several times, and has gone through quarantine several times, that person would be recognized and waved past quarantine, as being certainly immune.  Of course, such a person would be checked over by cats every time; being immune doesn't mean you couldn't have a mouse-beast hiding in your gear.  (Not that that would have worked with Hilja, sadly.)  Such people could even be allowed to vouch for others, so even non-immunes, properly escorted, could be allowed to bypass quarantine as long as they underwent inspection and wore masks at all time.

[dmeck7755]

And in the flashback the wording is “send for containment ships”. How do they send? Homing pigeons? Might work for one way alarm. Radio? Courier who has a special one person quarantine facility to allow emergency message delivery?

I would like to think each town may have had something to communicate outside.  Especially for Saimaa, where the residents were distributed all over the tiny islands.  Also if most of the populace were not-immune, there would need to be radios of some-sort in case of incidents like the flashback provided. 

The other option would have been mage-space communication, but with the Kade taking over the minds of the mages, a radio would be the way they had to go.

[dmeck7755]

Waaaay back, during the Iron Age / Viking times there were chains of bonfires used to alert many settlements when raiders were coming.

The "lord of the Rings" movies used that premise.  I have to admit it is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

Though they could use that premise to call for the ships.  (Tossing salt, borax or something to make the fires a different color. ) One color for invasion, one color for sickness, one color for send quarantine ships (or the sickness one would do also)

Though the same question would come to mind.  Some of the places the bonfires burned were pretty inhospitable.
Maybe a military post?

[lwise]

The "lord of the Rings" movies used that premise.  I have to admit it is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

Though they could use that premise to call for the ships.  (Tossing salt, borax or something to make the fires a different color. ) One color for invasion, one color for sickness, one color for send quarantine ships (or the sickness one would do also)

Though the same question would come to mind.  Some of the places the bonfires burned were pretty inhospitable.
Maybe a military post?

Maybe they have flare guns with different colored flares.  If the little islands are fairly close to each other, they'd see something like that.

[tehta]

Hey, I posted about mage-based communication already, and I wasn't joking even if I called it mage-o-gram! The kade is clearly dangerous to the Hotakainens specifically, especially to the less skilled Lalli, but maybe it wouldn't be as big a problem for an unrelated and specially-trained mage? Also carrier pigeons (or similar, even Harry Potter-style owls) are not far-fetched in a world where a seagull mage exists.

[JoB]

(even funnier, it was forbiden inside towns to "make fire" (be it with a lighter or matches) on open air, for example to light a cigarrete. The law phrasing referred that those devices had to be used "under roof tile". Therefore some people carried a small piece of tile with them and covered their lighter/match with it to avoid penalties. And yes, that's true, I'm not making it up   )

The truly hard-to-believe part actually is that they apparently never followed that up with a tax on roofs.

[Jitter]

Tehta, you are right about the mage-familiar birds! Finnish mages can’t walk on the Dream Sea like Reynir can, but apparently the ones whose luonto is a bird can fly. Lalli just yelled for help and Onni was able to show up, when the sea serpent was about to drown Lalli.

They definitely need to have a reliable system for letting the capital know if there is an outbreak. It could also be a pre-enchanted item that has the one function of alerting the capital. Sort of like Väinö’s Filing Cabinet. If each item was specific for each village, at least the message that things are going to hell could be delivered. Of course the new tax-avoiding frontier villages would have none of these.

[lwise]

They definitely need to have a reliable system for letting the capital know if there is an outbreak. It could also be a pre-enchanted item that has the one function of alerting the capital. Sort of like Väinö’s Filing Cabinet. If each item was specific for each village, at least the message that things are going to hell could be delivered. Of course the new tax-avoiding frontier villages would have none of these.

That's a cool idea.

Re: taxes.  I'd guess that most taxation is local, and varies in structure and formality from village to village.

[thegreyarea]

Tehta, you are right about the mage-familiar birds! Finnish mages can’t walk on the Dream Sea like Reynir can, but apparently the ones whose luonto is a bird can fly. Lalli just yelled for help and Onni was able to show up, when the sea serpent was about to drown Lalli.

They definitely need to have a reliable system for letting the capital know if there is an outbreak. It could also be a pre-enchanted item that has the one function of alerting the capital. Sort of like Väinö’s Filing Cabinet. If each item was specific for each village, at least the message that things are going to hell could be delivered. Of course the new tax-avoiding frontier villages would have none of these.

The idea of a "Warning Cabinet" is very interesting. I must admit that I only thought about radio when Lalli's village had to request support...

Using mages that can fly over the dark ocean in the dreamworld seems a great idea (and Tehta's mage-o-gram is a great name)!
Of course it has it's limitations: You need a capable mage with a flying luonto and that mage must go to sleep, which might not be that easy on a stressful circunstance...
Also in the dreamworld we don't have the physical limitations that prevent rash creatures to fly, therefore it would be possible to have flying enemies for those mages.

And with that comes to mind another idea for a story:
What if we had a non-immune mage that spends most time on the dreamworld, to the point others have to care about his physical body, made weak by immobility. This mage could act as a guardian / guide to those that venture on the dreamworld, but sometimes (obviously the worst ones - Murphy's law) would be drawn away by the real world needs. One could bounce the story from Real to Dream and back...

[tehta]

In my stories, I've been pretty much assuming that mages are trained to fall asleep under any circumstances. (I also assume that Lalli was great at those lessons.)

But yeah, your idea about the dreamworld guardian mage has many possibilities!

[Róisín]

Dunno how it is in the Minnaverse, but most of the our-world mage traditions familiar to me have some training in, if not falling asleep, intentionally leaving the physical body. About the only one that I can think of that doesn’t do so is European formal magic, and even that has some meditative practices aimed at the same end. Ways of doing it can vary from pure mental discipline through a whole spectrum of incenses, anointing oils, drugs, meditations, and practices such as dancing, chanting, breathing exercises, fasting, concentration on a point source of light or a repetitive sound and such like.

[Jitter]

I agree that they learn to do it, even non-immune Reynir was able to fall asleep despite being stuck in a pantry surrounded by trolls. Which probably isn’t the most peaceful nap he’s ever had And he’d still have only a little training.

Icelandic/Norse mages can walk in the Dream Sea, but that is definitely dangerous. But in his first scenes Reynir had a spirit boat, maybe that is also an option? Not that it would be fully safe either, but it might be helpful.

I love the dream guardian mage! There are somewhat similar characters in Elfquest where a certain person had ordered a stoneshaper to always sit at a certain spot and open and close the side of the mountain. In that case it was more or less slavery, she called him just Door and it wasn’t really voluntary on his side. But I remember being touched by his situation as a kid when I first read it.

[wavewright62]

And with that comes to mind another idea for a story:
What if we had a non-immune mage that spends most time on the dreamworld, to the point others have to care about his physical body, made weak by immobility. This mage could act as a guardian / guide to those that venture on the dreamworld, but sometimes (obviously the worst ones - Murphy's law) would be drawn away by the real world needs. One could bounce the story from Real to Dream and back...

An Icelandic mage can do that.  We concentrated a lot in other threads on the abilities of the staves and runes they draw, but supposedly their primary ability is 'seeing' while they're asleep. 
We don't know the range of physical proximity, but it could be comparable to the example given olf Onni flying to Lalli's aid.  Lalli's first glimpse of Reynir came long before the tuna boat diverted to Denmark, after all.

So here's the story idea: Finland allows some of the seithkona to integrate into their protection strategy, and the goddess Freya (from whom the gift is bestowed) razzes Vellamo and Ukko (and/or other Finnish deities?) about it. 

[lwise]

I've been thinking a lot about immunity and trollification.  Given that the Dagrenning Project can guarantee that a child will be immune, knowing the mother and father, I assume that immunity is conferred by a single autosomal recessive gene.  I further assume that the prevalence of immunity in the Y0 population was 1%, as that would mean that Iceland had raised its prevalence by 7x in three generations: plausible if the non-immune population was growing slowly and the immune population was growing twice as fast due to social pressure.

But after 90 years, the populations of Sweden and Finland are 1/500 or less of the Y0 population and that of Norway is 1/365.  (Denmark is a special case.)  That means that at least 9/10 of the Y0 immunes must have perished.  Some would have died due to starvation, other disease, accident, or suicide, but trolls must have accounted for a lot.  But why?  Most trolls really aren't a threat to an armed and alert immune.

Consider: what was the trollification rate in Y0 population?

It can't have been anywhere close to 100%, since the original 11 patients were described as going comatose and then dying, but it had to be high enough that trolls could overwhelm immunes almost everywhere.  I assume the trollification rate was about 10%, so immunes were outnumbered 10 to 1.

This led me to an interesting conclusion.  If 1% of the population was homozygous for immunity, then 18% were carriers; that is, they carried one copy of the immunity gene and one copy of the non-immunity gene.  Suppose that heterozygosity offers some resistance to the Rash.  Homozygous non-immunes go comatose and quickly succumb; carriers survive long enough to undergo trollification, though the changes are so intense and so random that about half of them die before fully transforming.  I.e., all trolls were originally carriers of the immunity gene.

Since the average immune would be the child of two carriers, or one carrier and an immune, the average immune's parents and perhaps some siblings would be carriers and thus have a 50/50 chance of trollifying.  Immunes in Y0 would be in the horrifying position of having to deal with their own immediate family as trolls, accounting for their high death rate in Y0.  There may be a fic idea in that.

By Y90, due to deliberate efforts to raise the immunity rate, most of the population in Finland, Sweden, and Norway must be either immune or carriers.  I roughly calculate 49% immune, 42% carriers, 9% homozygous non-immune.  This means that by Y90, nearly every non-immune who gets infected will trollify.  It strikes me that, once they figure that out, some smaller communities might forbid non-immunes from reproducing at all: enforced eugenics.  Again, maybe a fic idea in that.

[thegreyarea]

I've been thinking a lot about immunity and trollification... 

Interesting thoughts. 1% of immunity seems a good estimate.

However, the reasons for the death of so many immune population can also take in account a) Violence between humans, as society collapsed and people began fighting for what's left, and b) Beasts, because there's a very huge number of mammals out there, so it's not only 70 million trolls (aprox. 1% of the World's human population) but many more beasts. Just the number of cows is estimated on 1,5 billion, so it would be 15 million (large) cow-beasts to fight... Now add sheep, pigs, dogs, rabbits, horses and so many wild animals...

On my side, for some reason that I can't recall (had I read it on some comment?) I always assumed a 3% trollification rate.

Anyway I always assumed, as you said, that trolls are "half-immune" people. They didn't die from the infection because they had some resistance, but it was just enough to allow the mutations to take hold, not to overcome the virus (assuming it's a virus).

That would mean your idea of immune people having to fight their close relatives applies, whichever trollification rate existed. And yes, that's one good starting point for a story!

That it raises the trollifying probability of non-immunes is one quite interesting conclusion of that line of thought. Another fine idea for a story, and one that fits with what happened to Tuuri.

The eugenics part raises two questions:
First, we saw no evidence of that on the source material. But Minna may have not give much thought to the topic, or maybe we just didn't see enough to notice.
Second, there's the disadvantage of reducing the reproduction rate and the gene pool, which is worrying when you have a very reduced population. (not to mention the societal stress connected to the implementation of that ban...)
So any sufficiently protected community would, I believe, allow the reproduction of non-immunes, considering they should be kept behind fences and any outbreak immediately dealt. That, again, matches with the Hotakainens story.
But maybe some places see it on a different way? The non-immune couple that is banned from having kids and decides to move away to the wild, or to search for another community, so they can realize their dream looks like a good starting point for a story...