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razieltwelve · 6 years ago

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The Day Breaks (RWBY AU Snippet)

Note: This is set in the same AU as Night and Day, Emissary, I Am Become Death, Thunder and Paperwork, Ice and Fire, Apocalypse, and Origin.

X X X

Glory.

That was the word that echoed through Blake’s soul as the Goddess of the Day descended from the sky. It radiated from every fibre of her being, a wondrous, celestial glory that captured Blake’s gaze even as it made her want to avert her eyes.

Unworthy, the thought bubbled up from deep within her. She was unworthy of even looking upon the goddess. Blake had always thought that Yang was beautiful, but this goddess was beyond mere beauty. Light blazed from her, a conflagration of radiance so brilliant it should have blinded them and so hot it should have reduced the world to ash. Yet Blake was not blinded, and her flesh did not burn. Instead, she stared, utterly captivated at the divine version of Yang.

Blake had once wondered how anything could be described��‘inhumanly beautiful’, but now she knew. Every single one of the goddess’s features was impossibly perfect to the point that looking at her was equal parts enthralling and painful, and every single one of her movements was filled with power and majesty.

The goddess’s hair was wrought of golden flame, a waterfall of solar fire that shifted endlessly in the maelstrom of her own power. Her eyes were lilac inferno’s with swirling currents of crimson within them. Even her skin shone, radiating a brilliance that both soothed and electrified.

Armour of molten gold flowed over the goddess’s body, wreathed in a mantle of flames and punctuated by runes and sigils of platinum and other precious metals. The goddess’s eyes swept over the group, and a memory that was not hers filled Blake’s mind.

Blake saw the goddess in the throes of passion, eyes almost entirely crimson with desire, that golden hair falling over her like a curtain of silken fire. In the memory Blake saw another Blake, this one a goddess, and their passion was a storm of shadow and light filled with such raw, unfulfilled hunger that Blake found herself struggling to even breathe as the memory faded.

How could the goddess stand it? Blake reeled. How could anyone want someone else so much and stand not being with them? She would have fallen if not for Yang’s steadying hand, and she gave the blonde a grateful look as the goddess’s gaze grew heavier, as though she sought to peel back every layer of Blake’s being to glimpse the soul beneath.

“You’d better back off right now,” Yang warned, stepping in front of Blake. “I don’t care who you are.”

The light and heat increased until they were almost painful, and Blake had a feeling that Yang would have found herself on the receiving end of some divine punishment if not for Death.

“You really should turn that down,” Death drawled. “Unveiling so much of your presence is a little excessive, don’t you think?”

The goddess, Day, turned to Death. Her eyes bled crimson. “You…”

“Uh…” Ruby nudged Death. “She looks kind of mad at you.”

“Hmmm…” Death continued to meet Day’s glare. “Well, given the way she was looking at Blakey over there, I’m going to guess that the Blake in her world was someone she loved very much but could not have.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like how you and Weiss end up meeting in just about every world. It’s the same with Yang and Blake. But who couldn’t the Goddess of the Day have? Well, how about the Goddess of the Night?”

“That’s awful,” Ruby whispered. “But why would she glare at you?”

“Because, Ruby, think about it. Day and Night can never meet, save for dawn and dusk, but if they do try to break the natural order, who do you think would be sent to stop them? Death, Ruby, that’s whom the other gods would send. And in so many worlds, a version of us is Death.”

“Oh.” Ruby stared. “So this could get ugly?”

“I have a feeling it will.”

“You…” Day stomped toward Death, and the ground at her feet ignited. In an instant, she was walking atop a lake of molten rock. With an almost casual flick of her wrist, Death moved the others away to safer ground. “Even here…”

BOOM.

Goddess Nora grunted with exertion as she struggled to hold Day’s fist back with her hammer. The other goddess had moved with incredible speed, and the resulting impact had shattered the landscape and sent waves of molten rock spilling outward in all directions. Goddess Nora had barely managed to get between Day and Death in time.

“You know,” Goddess Nora growled. “I really don’t like it when people try to punch my friends. How about you calm down?”

“You dare?” Day growled. “Little goddess, little storm, you have no idea who you’re dealing with. My light is the light of Creation, the fire of the first sun, of all suns. I am every star in the sky, every light that has ever been. I am the one who shines upon the Many Worlds, and there is no mortal in existence who does not know my name. I am the Day.”

Goddess Nora smiled toothily and shoved Day back before drawing her hammer back and bring it around in a thunderous blow that sent Day hurtling into the sky. “That’s great because I am Nora.”

X X X

“Are they going to be okay?” Ruby asked.

Death sighed. The sky above them was awash in flame and lightning. Day and Goddess Nora were all but invisible to the mortals, moving far too fast for any of them to see. All they could glimpse were the aftermaths of each collision, shockwaves of power and devastation that would have utterly destroyed Remnant if Death had not cast her power around the area to contain the damage.

“I hope so. Whatever is going on, it can’t be a coincidence that so many gods were brought here.” Death’s eyes narrowed as gauntlets appeared on Day’s arms. When Goddess Nora next swung her hammer, Day actually caught it in one hand. “Oh… that’s not good.”

“What isn’t?”

“Nora’s hammer has a name. In your language, it translates roughly to ‘The All-Smasher’. It shouldn’t be possible to simply catch it.”

“So… she’s hot stuff, huh?” Yang asked.

Death raised one eyebrow. “You know, I always though the Yang in my world made the lamest puns.” She sighed dramatically at Ruby. “But now I stand corrected. You have my sympathies, Ruby.”

“Hey!”

In the sky, Day used Goddess Nora’s surprise to land a blow to her chin that knocked her up beyond the clouds. A second later, Goddess Nora went crashing back toward the ground as Day appeared above her and struck her with a punch that hit so hard that the mortals could hear the thunder of its impact and feel the shockwave it created. Goddess Nora hit the ground with a sound like a meteor crashing to earth, and Death took a deep breath.

“I should probably step in. If Day is anything like the Yang from my world, she’ll keep fighting until someone stops her, and it looks like my friend might have bitten off more than she can chew.”

A massive sphere of light and heat appeared in the sky, and Day pointed with one hand.

“Did she just… summon a miniature sun to throw at the divine version of me?” Nora asked.

Death shrugged. “I suppose you could say that although it’s hard to call a sphere of heat hotter than the core of star that’s a mile wide miniature.”

In response, Goddess Nora gave a deep, booming laugh and raised her hammer. The entire sky ignited, and bolts of lightning crackled down to strike the weapon. The weapon shivered as though it could barely contain so much power, and still the lightning came, bolt after bolt after bolt, until the roar of the thunder was a single, sustained howl that tore the clouds and shook the ground.

“Come on!” Goddess Nora screamed. “Let’s see what you can do!”

“On second thoughts,” Death murmured as she moved the mortals even further away and reinforced the barrier she’d put around the area. “I really should do something.”

Day glared and hurled the miniature star at Goddess Nora. The red-haired goddess grinned from ear to ear and threw her hammer.

BOOM.

X X X

Goddess Nora laughed and turned her head to spit out some blood. How long had it been since she’d bled? Too long. This was what she’d been hoping for! A fight - a real fight - where she wasn’t sure if she would win. People were always saying she needed to hold back and show restraint, but here, at last, was an opponent she could throw everything at. Above her, Day was surrounded by a corona of blinding light and heat. Around them, the entire landscape was a blasted, ashen ruin. There were even ripples in space and time, tears in the very fabric of reality that had been created by the clash of their powers.

“Do you really think you can beat me?” Day growled. “Look at you. You can barely stand.”

“You think this hurts?” Nora leaned on her hammer. “I could do this all day.” She pointed. “Besides, I’m not the only one bleeding.”

Sure enough, there was a small rent in the armour along Day’s shoulder. Through it, barely visible amidst the light that spilled off her, was a small cut.

Day’s lips twitched into what could almost have been a smile. She raised one hand to touch the wound. “All that for a drop of blood?”

“It’s a start.” Nora raised her hammer again. “So… are you going to stand there looking pretty, or are we going to fight?”

Day didn’t bother to reply with words. Instead, she streaked forward like a comet. What followed was two minutes - an eternity given the speed with which gods moved - of the most intense close-quarters combat Nora had ever experienced. Day was incredible. She fought with unbelievable strength and aggression, every punch or kick capable of pulverising a world. She was utterly relentless too, never slowing or tiring even as the force behind her blows only seemed to grow.

She really does live up to her name, Goddess Nora thought parrying a blow with her hammer and blocking another with her arm. After all, there was no stopping the day, was there? Night always gave way to day. Always. And Day had no intention of easing up.

A blow clattered into Goddess Nora’s shoulder, and her arm shattered. She ignored the pain that flared through her being and brought her hammer around to strike at Day’s side. The other goddess caught the hammer again - honestly, she had to be cheating because that wasn’t supposed to be possible - and somehow wrenched it out of Goddess Nora’s grasp. The weapon hurtled away, and when Goddess Nora tried to call it back, Day blasted it away before continuing her onslaught.

“You can’t beat me,” Day growled. “I am the Day.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time.” Goddess Nora drove her forehead into Day’s, but the blonde goddess barely seemed to feel it. “Because I don't care. I am Nora!”

“And I am Death.” Day leapt back as Death appeared, her scythe held at the ready. “And you two really need to stop this.” Death’s silver gaze pinned both of them in place. “Because if you’re not careful, you’ll destroy this world, even with the barrier I’ve put up to contain the damage.”

Goddess Nora grimaced as she realised that Death was right. She’d been having so much fun that she hadn’t really thought about the mortals and their world. Day, however, went right back to glaring at Death. It gave Goddess Nora the creeps. Their Yang was much more cheerful than this grumpy guts.

“You dare…”

“Are you going to give me the same speech as before?” Death asked. “Because you really shouldn’t bother. You might be the Day, but I am Death. You’re not going to beat me. We both know it.” Death allowed a hint of her displeasure to show. “Besides, we have greater concerns than any issue you might have with your version of me.”

“The Death of my world - my own sister - keeps me from my beloved!”

“And that’s awful,” Death replied. “But doesn’t it bother you that we’re all stuck in this world. That can’t be a coincidence.” She was about to continue speaking when she stopped, and her eyes glazed.

“What is it?” Goddess Nora asked.

Death scowled. “I had this world’s version of Salem imprisoned with my power.”

“They have a Salem here?” Day bared her teeth. “Is she a monster too?”

“Yes, but I stripped her of her power.” Death’s scowl deepened. “And now… something has stripped her of her soul.”

“Someone got to her despite your power?” Day asked. “Unless you are a good deal weaker than my sister, that should not be possible.”

“Yes. Someone did get to her despite her being in a prison I created. Worse, I can vaguely recognise the power responsible although it is… twisted and warped.” Death’s hands clenched around her scythe. “It belongs to someone who should be dead. Or rather, it belongs to someone I killed. Personally.”

“That does not sound good,” Goddess Nora said.

“No, it does not.” Death looked at Day. “Which is why we need to work together. You love Night, do you not?” Day nodded. “Then we need to work together. Otherwise, we might all be stuck here, and you’ll never get back to her.”

“A truce then,” Day offered. “Until the truth of this situation is known.”

“Oh.” Goddess Nora grinned. “And a rematch too, you know, when we know what’s going on.”

Day looked at her for a long moment. “Very well.”

X X X

Author’s Notes

Divine combat is always fun to write because the divine versions of the characters can do some absolutely obnoxious things power-wise. That said, things are beginning to come to a head. The only one of the four we’re missing now is the goddess version of Blake, and she’ll be appearing in the next snippet.

Naturally, the big confrontation is also coming closer, and if you think things are bad with Fred (the heroic dinosaur and bureaucrat), then you’d better brace yourself. Remnant is going to come under siege too, and Team RWBY and the other teams are going to have to show their stuff.

Why? Because the gods are going to be busy with an enemy of their own.

You can find me on fanfiction.net, AO3, and Amazon.

#rwby #fanfiction #ruby rose #nora valkyrie #yang xiao long #blake belladonna

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omarpritt · 4 years ago

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laurenh-art · 8 years ago

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The Shape(ing) of Life

Perhaps I’m a little late to this party, but apparently the flat earth theory is making a comeback in contemporary times. Even sports stars, celebrities, and people who are famous for having pleasant looking human bodies are jumping on the flat earth boat (I hope they don’t sail too far though or they might fall off!).

Could the theory that the planet we inhabit is a giant sphere spinning around a fiery sphere be the biggest lie we have been taught as humans? I’m not convinced (yet) that is it, however what really draws me to the flat earth theory, and the following this theory is getting, is the idea of illusion. What really defines our reality? What is an illusion? Well, everything really.

“Consider the opposite scenario...Imagine that our pulse, instead of speeding up, were to beat a thousand times slower than its normal rate. If we assume the same amount of sensory experience per beat, then the life time of such a person would reach a ‘ripe old age’ at approximately 80,000 years. A year would seem like 8.75 hours. We would lose our ability to watch ice melt, to feel earthquakes...We would see mountain ranges rise and fall but overlook the lives of ladybugs.

Flowers would be lost on us; only trees would make an impression. The sun might leave a tail in the sky like that of a comet or a cannonball. Now multiply this life a thousand more times, to produce a man living 80 millions year but having just 31.5 heartbeats and 189 perceptions in one Earth year. The sun would cease to appear as a discrete circle and would instead appear as a glowing solar elliptic, dimmer in winter. For ten pulse beats of the year Earth would be green, then white for ten more; snow would melt in a heartbeat and a half.” - Alan Burdick, Why Times Flies

All information comes to us through a filter. The filter, is our beliefs. Our beliefs influence the way we perceive the world, and how we perceive the world is our reality.

“And then, in this wearisome nowhere, all of a sudden,

the ineffable spot where the pure too little

incomprehensibly changes, veering

into that empty too-much ?

Where the many-digited sum

solves into zero ?” - Rainer Maria Rilke

The first time I read this passage in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Fifth Elegy, I was blown away. These few words quickly dissolved many perceptions I had about reality. A reality that I thought, at the time, did not solve into zero. Solve into zero? What does that even mean? Everything solves into nothing? But zero isn’t nothing, it’s still zero. Below zero are negative numbers, and above it, positive numbers. So, does the many-digited sum of life solve then, into the zero of both positive and negative? Of light and dark? Of love and fear, combined into one, balanced equally, in the ineffable spot of eternity?

Letting go of blame and ego, taking control of ones life by realizing that you know enough to know that you know nothing, is the beginning to dissolving the veils of illusion.

…………………………………

Now that it seems the flat earth theory has found a revival, it’s no wonder there is so much turmoil and unrest here on earth. We can even decided as a whole what shape we live on. However, whether earth is a flat disc, or a sphere shouldn’t really be the concern, as either way, it’s the only place for life that we have. Thinking in terms of a more cohesive disc or sphere, where all life is connected, all actions have a reaction, and that this reality is an illusion. The point of this life is to remember what the truth really is. Even if that truth is, an equation that solves into zero.

In the mean time, a small update on my herb garden, which thankfully in the time scale I live, I am able to perceive the growth of these time plants.

…………………………………

Reading - The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Listening - Death Song by The Black Angeles

Watching - Cosmos: A Timespace Odyssey

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theconservativebrief · 7 years ago

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Once, when I was 9, my mother and I were scouring the summer night sky for stars, meteors, and planets.

Suddenly, an object with a light that pulsed steadily from bright to dim caught my eye. It didn’t have the usual red blinkers of an aircraft and was going far too slowly to be a shooting star.

Obviously, it was aliens.

My excitement was short-lived as my mother explained it was a satellite catching the sun as it tumbled along its orbit. I went to bed disappointed: The X-files was on TV twice a week back then, and I very much wanted to believe.

Today that hope is still alive and well, in Hollywood films, the public imagination, and even among scientists. Scientists first began searching for alien signals shortly after the advent of radio technology around the turn of the 20th century, and teams of astronomers across the globe have been taking part in the formal Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) since the 1980s.

Yet the universe continues to appear devoid of life.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford brings a new perspective to this conundrum. In early June, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, and Toby Ord of the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) released a paper that may solve the Fermi paradox — the discrepancy between our expected existence of alien signals and the universe’s apparent lack of them — once and for all.

Using fresh statistical methods, the paper re-asks the question “Are we alone?” and draws some groundbreaking conclusions: We Earthlings are not only likely to be the sole intelligence in the Milky Way, but there is about a 50 percent chance we are alone in the entire observable universe.

While the findings are helpful for thinking about the likelihood of aliens, they may be even more important for reframing our approach to the risk of extinction that life on Earth may face in the near future.

In 1950, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, physicist Enrico Fermi famously exclaimed to his colleagues over lunch: “Where is everybody?”

He had been pondering the surprising lack of evidence of other life outside of our planet. In a universe that had been around for some 14 billion years, and in that time developed more than a billion trillion stars, Fermi reasoned there simply must be other intelligent civilizations out there. So where are they?

We still don’t know, and the Fermi paradox has only strengthened with time. Since the 1950s, humans have walked on the moon, sent a probe beyond our solar system, and even sent an electric sports car into orbit around the sun for fun. If we can go from rudimentary wooden tools to these feats of engineering in under a million years, surely there would have been ample opportunity in our 13.8 billion-year-old universe for other civilizations to have progressed to a similar level — and far beyond — already?

And then, surely there would be some lingering radio signals or visual clues of their expansion reaching our telescopes.

Space is a large place, and the task of accurately estimating the likelihood of little green men isn’t exactly easy.

In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake proposed a formula that multiplied seven “parameters” together to estimate N, the number of detectable civilizations we should expect within our galaxy at a given moment in time:

Ming Hsu

The Drake equation was only intended as a rough tool to stimulate scientific discussion around the probability of extraterrestrial life. However, in the absence of any reasonable alternatives, it has remained astronomers’ only method of calculating the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is problematic because while some parameters, such as R* — the rate of new star formation per year — are relatively well-known, others remain hugely uncertain.

Take L, the average lifespan of a detectable civilization. If we look at the average length of the past civilizations here on Earth, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume a low value. If the Romans, Incas, or Egyptians are anything to go by, it seems hard to make it past a few hundred years. On the flip-side, you could argue that once a civilization becomes technologically advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel, it could conceivably last many billions of years.

This enormous uncertainty leaves the Drake equation ultimately vulnerable to the optimism or pessimism of whoever wields it. And this is reflected in previous scientific papers whose results give values of N ranging anywhere from 10 to many billions.

As astronomer and SETI co-founder Jill Tarter eloquently put it in an interview with National Geographic in 2000: “The Drake Equation is a wonderful way to organize our ignorance.”

Sincere attempts to overcome this vulnerability have previously been made via selecting a handful of conservative, medium, and bullish best estimates for each parameter value and then taking an average across them.

In their new paper, titled “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox,” the FHI researchers dispute this method by demonstrating how this technique typically produces a value of N far higher than it should, creating the illusion of a paradox.

This is because simply selecting a few point estimates and plugging them into the Drake Equation misrepresents the state of our knowledge. As an example, imagine three scientists who have differing opinions on the value of L:

If you take a normal, linear average of all the possible integer values from one to 1000, you would implicitly factor scientist C’s opinion 90 times more than scientist A’s because their range of belief is 90 times larger. If you use a logarithmic scale to represent the above so that each scientist’s range corresponds to one order of magnitude, all three opinions will be represented more equally.

Therefore, the researchers represented the full range of possible values on a logarithmic scale and ran millions of simulations to obtain more statistically reliable estimates for N. They then applied a technique known as a Bayesian update to those results. That means mathematically incorporating the information that we have not discovered extraterrestrial intelligence yet (because the absence of evidence of aliens is evidence itself!).

This two-stage process produced striking results: Based upon the current state of astrobiological knowledge, there’s a 53 to 99.6 percent chance we are the only civilization in this galaxy and a 39 to 85 percent chance we are the only one in the observable universe.

This implies that life as we know it is incomprehensibly rare, and if other intelligences exist, they are probably far beyond the cosmological horizon and therefore forever invisible to us.

To be clear, the paper’s authors do not appear to be making any definitive claim about whether or not aliens exist; simply, our current knowledge across the seven parameters suggests a high likelihood of us being alone. As new information becomes available, they would update that likelihood accordingly. For example, if we discover a second instance of abiogenesis — the process of rudimentary life emerging from non-living matter — on a comet or another planet, then this would narrow the uncertainty on the fl parameter significantly.

Nonetheless, their results have certainly caused a stir, especially after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted them:

This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets https://t.co/UDDP8I1zsS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2018

Many reacted to the paper’s findings by calling it anthropocentric and narrow-minded, arguing that any conclusion suggesting we Earthlings are somehow special is simply human arrogance.

This is somewhat understandable because the idea that intelligent life is extremely rare in the universe feels completely counterintuitive. We exist, along with other intelligent life like dolphins and octopi, so we assume what we see must be extrapolatable beyond Earth.

But this alone is not proof that intelligent civilizations are therefore ubiquitous. Whether the true likelihood is as high as one in two, or as inconceivable as one in a trillion trillion trillion, the mere ability to consciously ask ourselves that question depends on the fact that life has already successfully originated.

This phenomenon is known as an observer selection effect — a bias that can occur when thinking about the likelihood of an event because an observer has to be there to observe the event in the first place. As we only have one data point (us), we have no reliable way to predict the true likelihood of intelligent life. The only conclusion we can confidently draw is that it can exist.

Regardless of which side you take, the idea that we might be alone in the universe raises serious scientific and philosophical questions. Is our rareness something to celebrate or be disappointed by? What would it mean for humans to be the only conscious entities in the universe?

This last question matters hugely. Not only are we depleting our environmental resources at an unsustainable pace, but for the first time in the history of mankind, we’ve reached the technological stage where we hold the entire future of our species in our own hands. Within a few years we built enough nuclear weapons to exterminate every human on earth many times over and made these weapons available to our leaders on a hair-trigger. Each decade has brought us novel technologies with ever-increasing potential for both immense good and immense destruction.

As we rang in the new year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to the closest it has ever been to midnight. Meanwhile, estimates from various specialists in existential risk suggest somewhere between a 5 to 19 percent chance of complete human extinction by the end of this century — an unacceptably large probability considering the stakes.

Not only does this dark gamble affect the 7 billion of us alive today; if you factor in the moral weight of the billion billions of future people who would also never get to live out their existences, it becomes clear that we urgently need to get our collective act together.

As Carl Sagan famously said in his 1990 Pale Blue Dot speech: “In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. … the Earth is where we make our stand.”

He’s not wrong, especially in light of this paper’s findings. If humanity really is the only civilization that may ever exist in this universe, then we shoulder a responsibility on a truly astronomical scale.

Liv Boeree is a science communicator and TV host specializing in astrophysics, rationality, and poker.

Original Source -> Why haven’t we found aliens yet?

via The Conservative Brief

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