Yay! It’s always a good Friday with a new Bata Neart…(I hope :D)
Ahh, teleport spell. I could have gone cheeky here and had a had a mis-firing spell that teleports the clothes to somewhere else, but I might save that joke for when Ashling tries to learn this spell 😀
Ah nuts…some of those PE students have just seen Áine appear. How will this play out?
Nothing to see here, move along. Show’s over, folks, move along. Nothing to see here, moving right along, please. HAVE YOU NO HOMES TO GO TO! 😛
” but I might save that joke for when Ashling tries to learn this spell 😀”
Aoife: I approve 😀
A webcomic I read had that precise teleportation malfunction. The warrior guard took it in stride, but the sorceress who cast the spell was noticeably upset…..
What I’m wondering is that since they’ve seen Ashling packing that weird staff around, and Aine using a staff to do amazing things, how long it’s going to be for the penny to drop. 🙂
@Azreal: Damn right! Keep moving along folks there’s nothing here, there’s nothing (turns around)…hey! Look! I weird glowing girl! Hey come-on everyone! Gather around, don’t be shy!
@Delta: I’ve been kind of wondering how far I could push the idea of people not actually noticing the magic and rationalising it away as something normal. Something will probably have to give eventually…but the question as you said is; when?
@Henry: *Gasp* How did you know I would approve?! ‘Cause I do 😀
I hope it happens while I’m around 😉
Having her arrive without her clothes really would be very harem anime-ish.
As for rationalizing away the magic as something normal, no, something really doesn’t have to give. Well, at least not until You get to the point of multiple instances of major bodily harm and significant property damage. People have a really amazing ability to rationalize away almost anything that doesn’t literally pick them up by the shoulders and shake them. That sort of thing happens all the time in real life.
A really good real life example is a UFO sighting that happened in 1980 at a major NATO airbase in southern England called the Rendlesham Forest Incident. There was actually a series of events that occurred over a couple of nights witnessed by a variety of people, and as usual with this sort of thing there are a bunch of stories that have grown up around it over the years that are, shall we say, of dubious provenance. However, there are some aspects that are very well documented. On the second night of the incident, Lt Col Charles Halt USAF, the deputy commander of the base, went out into the woods to investigate with several servicemen. While they were out there they saw a red light through the trees that appeared to move about and pulse. Halt described it as having the appearance of a blinking eye – it was oval shaped and the central portion would periodically darken. He also said that it threw off glowing particles of some kind that looked like drops of molten metal. They followed it through the forest for a short distance until it broke apart into four or five separate white objects that flew off and disappeared. This is documented both in an official memorandum that Halt filed two weeks later and in an audio recording that Halt made that night in the woods.
The “skeptical” explanation is that Halt and his men were looking at the Orford Ness Lighthouse. The light appeared to be moving because they were walking. The blinking eye effect was due to looking at the lighthouse through an early generation night vision device called a starscope: when the lighthouse’s beam was pointed directly at them it overloaded the scope’s sensors making the middle appear dark. The glowing particles were some sort of atmospheric effect, and the red color was a misperception on Halt’s part.
Now I find most of that argument at least provisionally plausible. It does make several assumptions that I don’t know if they’re accurate or not, such as that Halt and his companions never stopped to observe the light while standing still, and that the blinking eye effect was only seen through the starscope. It also sort of handwaves the glowing particles – just what kind of atmospheric condition could produce that sort of effect? Is that even possible given the known weather conditions that night? So it’s a plausible hypothesis, but it needs to be investigated – which, as far as I know, it hasn’t.
But the real problem is that lighthouses don’t split into multiple lights and fly off. The only half hearted attempt at explaining that is, “Halt’s description of these lights is too vague for us to be sure what they might have been.” Which doesn’t stop the “skeptics” from declaring that nothing out of the ordinary happened at all. I don’t know what happened and I’m certainly not ready to declare that it was aliens, but it was nothing out of the ordinary? It was just a lighthouse? Really?
If you’re curious you can find the full skeptical analysis here: http://www.ianridpath.com/ufo/rendlesham.htm
@Kessy: I’m going to try to hold off on the ‘nudifier’ joke until I can make it funny enough. I’ve been heavily infected by harem manga (Damn you Love Hina!!)…but I think there might be still some hope for me 😉
Oooo…I’m a sucker for unsolved mysteries (Bet you can guess the name of a show in the 90s that I enjoyed 😀 ). Not everything can be explained away, which makes the world a little more interesting. I’m not a religious type what-so-ever, but I’m fairly certain that we not clever enough as a species to full grasp everything that’s going on (at least not yet). This thing at Rendlesham Forest really could have been anything. It could have been something normal that was mistaken as something fantastic, or something fantastic that we have no understanding of. The latter sends my imagination flying, which is why I like these stories.
LOL So I guess I picked the right characters for Aoife and Ashling to cosplay as then? ^_^ I love mysterious stories. A lot of people seem to feel the need to definitely classify things as fact or fiction, but I’m perfectly happy saying that I have no idea if a story is simply made up, wildly embellished, or completely factual. I think of our collective knowledge as being like a campfire – a lot of people seemed convinced that we’re in a room and the walls are just at the edge of the firelight. I think that’s silly and love probing the edge of the darkness – you never know what’s out there.
Anyway, I was using part of the Rendlesham Forest incident to illustrate the lengths some people will go to to explain away weird stuff. In the case of this page, someone with that mindset would probably say that the girls just didn’t notice Aine walking up to them, or maybe she was actually sneaking up on them, and the glowing bit was just a trick of the light.
But there is a good bit more to the Rendlesham story, including that one of the security guys from the base says he got close enough to a small landed craft in the woods to have actually touched it. There are a couple of reasons I find his story more dubious than Halt’s account, and I didn’t want to make the post too long.
Teleportation, eh? That would have come in handy earlier several times, not the least of which was being stuck outside half-clothed with an ex-popsicle. Better late than never, though.