The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Surlethe]

"... black as Yahweh's heart." I like that. Also, glad to hear Obama made it in - I suppose the election would have been a lot closer with the Salvation War distracting people from the economic fuckup. The point about the people dying at the Message only reducing Republican majorities in red states is well-taken, although I wonder that there wasn't a significant backlash against the GOP for representing the religious right for so long.

[Darth Wong]

It's almost impossible to estimate what effect the complete disintegration of religion would have on politics in the US. For that reason, the simplest thing is indeed to have the story's election mirror the outcome of the real-life election. Keep in mind that even "moderates" who are not hard-line fundies often have a world-view which has been fundamentally shaped by religion. For many of these people, the entire way they look at the world will have been changed. Who knows what effect that would have on their politics?

Anyway, I wonder if Abigor can provide some intel about the weather conditions in Heaven. If Yahweh is using portals, it would be nice to know what his limiting factors are: is it the frequency with which he can open portals? Is it the appearance of suitable weather conditions in Heaven? Is it both? Or is this not a portal-related attack at all? Is it something else?

Hurricane Katrina was in late August 2005. Hurricane Ike was in September 2008: three years later. But then the storms come rapid-fire: another one in October 2008 and again in November 2008. So the last three strikes have been once per month. If this is the rate at which Yahweh can use his Weather Machine, humanity needs to come up with a countermeasure, and fast.

[Mr Bean]

The one obvious thing humanity needs right now is information, something we should see from the next chapter since Surlethe is on the scene.

Speaking of which, congratulations on your promotion Surlethe. Play your cards right and you might end up SecDef the way things are going.

Speaking of which considering the end of the first book, where's My Lee? I was wondering if he was going to become a new character or that was just a one off.

[erik_t]

It's almost impossible to estimate what effect the complete disintegration of religion would have on politics in the US. For that reason, the simplest thing is indeed to have the story's election mirror the outcome of the real-life election. Keep in mind that even "moderates" who are not hard-line fundies often have a world-view which has been fundamentally shaped by religion. For many of these people, the entire way they look at the world will have been changed. Who knows what effect that would have on their politics?

I'd have to assume that a large number of them would follow the RCC's view: "We were following a God for a while, and he's not it".

It'll be interesting when we meet up with Jesus.

[tim31]

Hurricane Katrina was in late August 2005. Hurricane Ike was in September 2008: three years later. But then the storms come rapid-fire: another one in October 2008 and again in November 2008. So the last three strikes have been once per month. If this is the rate at which Yahweh can use his Weather Machine, humanity needs to come up with a countermeasure, and fast.

Katrina, if you recall from Chapter 78, was merely Yahweh pissed off about 'something or other', as narrated by Michael. I too look forward to more exposition on the weather attacks.

[iborg]

Yeah ! The epic's back !

[Peptuck]

Keep up the awesome, Stuart! Is there going to be any more information on those changes in crime and suicide figures? I'd imagine both would go up a lot.

One quibble I had was Surlethe's comments on the election. Not the outcome, as that actually made a lot of sense, but the exposition there was odd, as Surlethe basically just busted out a long-winded explanation regarding changes in politics as a result of the Message. Perhaps that would be better if it was seperated into exposition instead of lengthy speech by a character. It would make the dialogue and the scene flow better, because as it stands Surlethe just holds up the conversation.

This is actually something I've noticed happens a lot in your writing, where characters break into long, exposition-heavy paragraphs. It might flow better and seem more natural if you break up the exposition a little by showing the other character's reactions, or by having the other character ask a question or something, which prompts the next part of the explanation.

This is by no means a criticism, as your work thus far has been really, really well thought out, and the exposition itself has been fascinating. I think that this might just help you break up those big text blocks into something that flows more naturally.

[Pelranius]

I'm surprised that all of Yahweh's actions seem to be focused at America (or the areas around the US at the moment).

Is he thinking of attacking the strongest link in the chain? It would be somewhat reasonable for him to do so, though I personally think that attacking more vulnerable developing countries would be more effective.

[Edward Yee]

Does Yahweh personally even realize how much of a difference it would be to go after the most vulnerable link compared to going after the strongest? I don't know if he understands (or cares enough to make use of such intel) this, considering how he was treating humanity as one single entity only a few months ago in-universe.

If he's aimed for the "strongest," I wouldn't be surprised if America was ID'd as such based on the visibility (if you don't think it was the 'actual' importance) of its role in the downfall of Satan's regime: from spearheading the undead resistance and augmenting it with living American SOF and resupply, to providing much of the air power (at al Badiyah al Janubiyah and the Phlegethon River)... or even U.S. Marines leading liberation efforts in Hell and being at Palelabor's surrender. (This last one might be relying on whatever Belial's told.)

[Count Chocula]

Keep up the awesome, Stuart! Is there going to be any more information on those changes in crime and suicide figures? I'd imagine both would go up a lot.

My speculation is that both crime and suicide rates would go wayyy down. Especially for violent crime...if you murder someone while committing a crime, you now know that you will see them again after you die, and they're quite likely to hold a grudge. An Earth-Hell conduit would also cause Earth-side murder apprehensions to skyrocket, since the murder victims would be able to identify their murderers. A life sentence would suck, too.

As for suicide, there's also concrete evidence here that suicide is not a viable way to escape from your problems. And all this is before lawyers get in the picture! At the very least, a person standing on a cable on (for example) the Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa, on a beautiful spring day, would know they're going to wake up again in a reddish, dusty, arid Hell...and be stuck there. Any minimal sense of aesthetics would argue against suicide as a valid option.

I'd imagine that within a generation the only Earth humans committing murder or suicide would be the sociopaths and psychotics...and Hell would have a LOT of spare land to quarantine their kind from the rest of the species.

I can't add any more to the praise for Stuart's stories, so I'll just say "excellent work. More crack please!"

[Setesh]

Now if we could just find Nikola Tesla, he could clue us in on how Yahweh's doing this. He's bound to be in hell somewhere. I'm so happy to see this at long last, though. Can't wait for the next part.

[rhoenix]

Stuart, you captured my attention with the first, and this current storyline of yours is something I've awaited patiently. As before, excellent work thus far, and I look forward to more.

To echo Peptuck though about character expositions, though it does certainly help flesh out current events through conversation, it would flow a bit better to have it flowing between both people in the conversation.

[Pelranius]

Does Yahweh personally even realize how much of a difference it would be to go after the most vulnerable link compared to going after the strongest? I don't know if he understands (or cares enough to make use of such intel) this, considering how he was treating humanity as one single entity only a few months ago in-universe.

If he's aimed for the "strongest," I wouldn't be surprised if America was ID'd as such based on the visibility (if you don't think it was the 'actual' importance) of its role in the downfall of Satan's regime: from spearheading the undead resistance and augmenting it with living American SOF and resupply, to providing much of the air power (at al Badiyah al Janubiyah and the Phlegethon River)... or even U.S. Marines leading liberation efforts in Hell and being at Palelabor's surrender. (This last one might be relying on whatever Belial's told.)

I was just thinking of Sun Tzu's advise to go for the weakest parts in your enemy's formation first. But Yahweh is no Sun Tzu. The Archangels might have their heads screwed on a bit tighter, though.

[Shadow6]

As for suicide, there's also concrete evidence here that suicide is not a viable way to escape from your problems. And all this is before lawyers get in the picture! At the very least, a person standing on a cable on (for example) the Sunshine Skyway bridge in Tampa, on a beautiful spring day, would know they're going to wake up again in a reddish, dusty, arid Hell...and be stuck there. Any minimal sense of aesthetics would argue against suicide as a valid option.

Surely, if you were really determined, you could just 'kill' yourself again once you turned up in Hell. Being dead doesn't make you invulnerable, just highly resilient. I'm thinking of these two examples, although there are probably more:

The Plateau was silent except for the thudding noise of the gunships as they circled overhead, looking for any sign of resistance (by which the pilots and gunners meant any sign of life). At the cliff face, the pile of human bodies arriving through the gate was rising steadily, well, the second wave of the assault would handle that. It was already arriving, nine UH-60 Blackhawks loaded with Israeli commandos, their command section and one very special, absolutely indispensable passenger. The Blackhawks touched down, the commandos spreading rapidly across the plateau, quickly ensuring that the dead demons strewing the rocky surface were indeed dead. There were some dead humans in there as well, those unfortunate enough to have arrived just as the assault was starting. They had died with their demon captors although the unconscious humans had never been aware of by how little they had missed salvation.

The leader of the group stepped forward and to his horror, Simplicus realized he hadn’t seen the tripwire leading to the booby trap. There was only one thing to do and Simplicus did it without thinking. “Look out!” He yelled the words as he dived forward, pushing the human leader backwards, out of the way of the rocks. In doing so, he hit the tripwire himself and the last thing he registered was the battering of the rocks as they hit him.

Of course, it's questionable whether this would really be the end, as speculated by some of the characters, there could be a "super-hell" that the "dead-dead" and/or baldricks pass into.

[Darth Wong]

I'm not entirely convinced that suicides would decline in this scenario, primarily because I don't really believe that suicidal people actually desire oblivion. Instead, I think they just want to escape the lives they have here, and in real life, many of them no doubt believe they will be granted another life beyond the grave. In this scenario, they know for certain that this is true, and I don't see how this will discourage them.

Even if there is great uncertainty about how good their new lives will be, I think the average suicidal person will be willing to take that risk.

[Eulogy]

You know how Belial used portals to dump lava? What if humanity could use portals to redirect the brunt of the storms to an uninhabited part of Hell, like Detroit only in reverse?

[Peptuck]

You know how Belial used portals to dump lava? What if humanity could use portals to redirect the brunt of the storms to an uninhabited part of Hell, like Detroit only in reverse?

I'd imagine it would have to be a really big portal to actually have any effect on the storm. It would probably be easier to open fromt he Hell side to Earth, rather than the other way around, knowing what we know about how they work.

[bobnik]

And if opened from the hell side, such portals would be big enough to be permanent and/or really hard to close. It would probably lead to a lot of cross contamination if done en mass.

That brings up a point. If Yahweh is using portals to affect the weather, they'd need to be really numerous, really big or Yahweh (or his targeteers) are really good at being a butterfly. Or some combination thereof.

If it's the "really big" category, that raises some questions about the energy gradient between Heaven and Earth, as well as Yahweh's "portal gun". I'll wait for more story before I speculate more though.

Heh, portal gun. I'd love it if Stuart would name the study of planar relationships and portals "aperture science", but I suspect Valve might object when it came time to publish.

[Ilya Muromets]

Damn. I stay away from the fanfiction thread and most of TVTropes for a few weeks and missed the announcement that Pantheocide has started.

Anyway, I'd just like to echo everyone's "Yay, the crack is back!" comments. I came into Armageddon about two chapters to the end as a lurker, and archive binged like hell. The Salvation War's partly the reason I chose to un-luker-ize myself, and I'm glad to see the second installment has begun. And it begun with Yahweh on the offensive, I see. I'm eagerly awaiting to see how humanity responds to Heaven's opening salvos.

As for Obama's election in this universe, maybe Obama went in from an "I support science wholeheartedly" angle. IIRC, a some of his campaign stuff briefly touched upon the fact that Obama had some geeky interests. Maybe that got played up here, considering how in the TSW-verse a lot of the people supporting anti-science just up and died?

Oh, yeah, and kudos to Peptuck for purging The Salvation War's JBM page on TVTropes. Even though I started said page to clear up some of the natter from the main trope page--and I certainly enjoyed Stuart's smack down on the guy who was whining about what he didn't like in Armageddon--it had shifted away from legit fridge logic JBM complaints and become a huge eye-hurting collection of text that needed clean up.

[Stuart Mackey]

I am delighted to have this back. I wonder who will be angling for the job of leader of the Commonwealth peoples? Pitt, Walpole, Churchill or the first two Cecils, Burghly and Salisbury, or maybe NZ's own wee empire builder, Richard "King Dick" Seddon?, perhaps Ghandi or one of the Monarchs? . Lord knows the Commonwealth will have to stick together because their numbers are so few compared to other 'nations', bar India. Mind you, and lets face it, the Indians are not all going to have Raj tinted glasses about the Commonwealth.

I also look forward to the Tudor family reunion.

[iborg]

Oh, I just checked the frigates' deployments. Nivose is based at Noumea (New Caledonia) which is a long way from the Bermudas. The author might want to replace the name with the Ventôse, which is the one based at Martinique island.

[AniThyng]

Oh, I just checked the frigates' deployments. Nivose is based at Noumea (New Caledonia) which is a long way from the Bermudas. The author might want to replace the name with the Ventôse, which is the one based at Martinique island.

Given that there's been a massive war just over, I doubt IRL deployments of small naval vessels like these are still going to be the same. I mean, nitpicking about a major unit like an aircraft carrier's berth is one thing, but a frigate?

[Stuart]

Oh, I just checked the frigates' deployments. Nivose is based at Noumea (New Caledonia) which is a long way from the Bermudas. The author might want to replace the name with the Ventôse, which is the one based at Martinique island.

Ship deployments at this point in the Salvation War will have no similarity to those presently in our world; there's a whole, huge new area that is still contested and virtually everything that's available is being shifted there. The smaller navies (like the French and British) have shifted virtually everything they've got into Hell and Hellgate Bravo is the primary naval access point as well as being the way major supply convoys get routed into Hell. So, its pretty much taken for granted that all the Floreals are in this general area one side of the Hellgate or the other. A goodly proportion of the U.S. carrier fleet is in the Hell oceans as well. By the way, Nivose is actually off the coast of Somalia at the moment.

On the exposition thing, that's a good point and its one that had never occurred to me. Perhaps because in the work environment I come from, we have a tendancy to give detailed answers when asked questions for clarity and to eliminate ambiguity (either that or we brush the questioner off completely).

There's no way a storm system could be portalled out, they're huge things, tens or hundreds of miles across.

Whether one picks off the weakest parts of an enemy formation first, leaving the strongest part isolated or kicks the strongest part out and then clear up the weak sections later has always been a great strategic debate. Given the way modern nation-states are constructed, a war can only really be ended by engaging and destroying the center of mass of the enemy's force. World War One and World War Two are both good examples of that, in both cases the center of mass being the German Army. In World War One, the defeat of weaker allies on either side (Russia, Serbia on the allies, Austria-Hungary etc for the Germans) had no effect on the primary powers until the center of mass was engaged and destroyed. That made the Western Front the critical battlefield. In World War Two, the same applied, defeating German minor allies had no real effect on Germany as a whole until after the Russians engaged and destroyed the German Army. To achieve the mirror image situation, the center of mass of the allies was the United States (and to a lesser extent the U.K.); defeating minor allies would have no real effect unless the United States could be defeated, since that was beyond Germany's power, Germany could not win. Sun Tzu has a lot of this, his (? it's debateable if Sun Tzu really was one person) writings contain a lot of maxims that really only apply to Chinese internecine warfare and their utility outside that environment is questionable. This particular line is a good example of that.

[Setzer]

I thought Sun Tzu was talking about exploiting enemy weaknesses, instead of picking off the weak ones first.

[Darth Wong]

Stuart, is that necessarily what the "attack the weak points" strategy means? I was under the impression that the entire modern military strategy of preferentially destroying logistical and production facilities (as opposed to throwing all of your assets directly at enemy fighting forces) is an example of attacking weak points in order to hobble the enemy.