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Re: No, stupid calculator!

Posted By: SiliconDream (anton-mates.hip.berkeley.edu)
Date: 11/12/1999 at 7:15 a.m.

In Response To: No, stupid calculator! (duckyjo)

For one thing, the Summoner may not normally resurrect Myrkridia as fast as he did against you. Perhaps it's harder for the Summoner to control larger groups of Myrkridia; as a rule, he may only resurrect a few at a time to make sure he can keep them from turning on him before he transports them from the Tain. He was able to resurrect them more rapidly when you attacked him because he could be sure that your forces would draw their aggression.

Also, I don't think time is as drastically accelerated inside the broken shards of the Tain as it was inside the intact artifact. What reasons do I have to believe this? Well, as you said, a ridiculously large quantity of Myrkridia would be resurrected; the Summoner would have to be many thousands of years old, and so would the fetch and Myrkridia who guard him, for that matter; ownership of the shard is still being contested by the cave spiders (after fighting for thirty thousand years, wouldn't the cave spiders either have been exterminated or learned to leave the Myrkridia alone?) and there isn't nearly the amount of debris on the ground you'd expect from vicious spider-Myrkridia fights like the ones you witnessed. Also, some evidence can be found in the narratives. Note that the "Relic" level, the "Summoner" level and the "Murder of Crows" level all start on consecutive days--Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Now, the "Murder of Crows" apparently takes place in the early morning (because "Limbs, Heads and Smoking Craters" is a daylight level but occurs on the same date), and the narrator says it's been about nine hours since they left the Tain shard. Since "Relic" started on Sunday sometime during the day, this means that at least 22 hours of external time (probably more like 30) elapsed between the start of "Relic" and your forces' exit from the shard. Although the "real" army probably took longer to complete "Relic" than your army does in the game, since they had to bind up their wounds, go to the bathroom, and so on, it still doesn't seem to me that they would have taken 22 hours. So several hours must have gone by in the outside world while the "Summoner" mission was being completed. Which means time was hardly (or not at all) accelerated inside the shard. Oh, and one more bit of evidence; the narrator speaks of the Summoner as "slowly resurrecting the entire race" of the Myrkridia. If he really was resurrecting millions a day, then a) he wouldn't be doing it "slowly" and b) the entire race would already be resurrected, and the Summoner would just be restoring those who died again. Hardly conclusive evidence, but worth mentioning.

If my suggestion is correct, Forrest can dust off his old theory about all of The Head's actions indirectly helping the Light. If The Head hadn't gotten Murgen and Cu Roi trapped in the Tain, they wouldn't have destroyed it; if the Tain had remained intact, then the Summoner *could* have resurrected millions of Myrkridia a day thanks to its accelerated timefield.

An interesting thing I noticed about the Summoner: the narrator seems to feel the need to justify his execution.

"The Deceiver has brought us here to kill The Summoner. The ruin he will bring about if allowed to remain alive is unconscionable. This alone dictates that he must die."

He treats the assassination of Baron Kildaer a little more casually, saying something brief along the lines of "we're to kill him so his zombies will die." Is it just that he needs to get his courage and resolve up in order to face hordes of Myrkridia in an alien world? Or is there a reason he doesn't want to kill the Summoner? Perhaps the Summoner was a respected and well-liked man before the forces of Fate possessed him.

Also, is there a reason undead don't do well in the Tain? In TFL you fought undead inside, but only (I think) because theyy were transported in with you. In Myth II, when you fight creatures that were inside for months, they're all living--spiders and fetch and Myrkridia. This is especially strange because you'd think undead would be perfect for long-term Tain missions: they don't get bored standing in the same cave day after day; the cramped spaces limit enemy mobility, increasing the effectiveness of slow-moving undead hordes; and the cold, dry air should help keep them from rotting. So why no undead? Will they not work inside the Tain if the being who animated them remains outside?

--SiliconDream

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