Best posts made by Olo

C036 by Cariwebo

@littlest-lily Then you best pick your virtual reality roleplaying partners with great care. Or you can just order the vanilla Giant Gentleman NPC with Extra Affection.

@kisupure 9th-years. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Should be some snappy jargon to refer to “graduates.”

Regarding Gray and her “hatred” of the Corps, it’s perfectly reasonable for her to resent the Corps as its regulations impinge more and more upon her interest in the sentinel. It’ll be totally subconscious, tho.

@giant-gripper

Sometimes when I’m reading science fiction I come across technological ideas that can, in the “right” hands, have sizey applications. As we know, the Square-Cube Law pretty much eliminates any realistic possibility of true giants or tiny people, at least those who might interact with “normal” people. I suppose one could imagine aliens from a different evolutionary environment or gravitational field that could be considered giant or tiny intelligent life, but to me such a size encounter wouldn’t be much different than interacting with blue whales or field mice; there’s awe and wonder, but it’s just not the same as meeting another person who is impossibly larger or smaller than you. For that you need either magic or some hand-waving away of known physical laws.

Even in “hard” science-fiction, however, one can find a number of ways to interface with the human mind in order to experience a virtual or artificial environment, sometimes just for communication but also, tantalizingly, for recreation. Of course, I am hyper-alert for any such scenario that includes characters who intentionally seek out simulations featuring otherwise-impossible size differential.

One example of a science-fiction universe that has multiple avenues for such size experiences is Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. Humans living in The Culture are in a post-scarcity utopia, including dramatic life-extension and digital backups of one’s consciousness that can be restored to a new body if one is killed. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and robotics are sufficiently far advanced as to seem like magic to us here trapped on a melting planet ruled by plutocrats.

It would be trivial for The Culture to manufacture androids of a desired size that a human could remotely pilot, just like in the Avatar movies (or in the series The Peripheral). They would have all the appearances and sensations of a normal human, just extremely large or small. They could talk, hear, feel, and have every other human experience as they encountered normal people. Presumably, the paternalistic Culture wouldn’t permit giant androids to menace human habitats, but there could easily be preserves set aside for such recreation.

More sophisticated would be engineered organic bodies into which a human consciousness could be transferred. Such bodies could be super-resilient or just as vulnerable as a normal human. With the “backup” capability, a human mind in a, say, tiny engineered body could experience the world from a reduced perspective and if they were killed (as occasionally happens to imaginary tinies), their consciousness could be retrieved, including (if so desired) the fatal experience. In the Culture series, there is a particularly cruel species that has engineered food animals that resemble miniature versions of themselves for the sheer sport of hunting them.

Of course, the simplest option is virtual reality, which The Culture has perfected to a high art. One could interact with other people, each at the size of their choosing, and AI-generated NPCs could provide the desired social environment for whatever size scenario one is in the mood for that day. Virtual scenario authors and artists would create endless narrative options, genres, and worlds to play in, and if you still couldn’t find something to your taste, give your preferences to an AI who can probably quickly generate something that scratches your itch.

I long ago gave up on the hope of ever directly experiencing true size-differential, but I still cling to the idea that technology might give us the next best thing. What would you do with these possibilities?

@kisupure Nice misdirect with the opening Manual excerpt. I was partially expecting Gray to be promoted.

Also surprised that Gray reported the sentinel’s calling off the pursuit. It doesn’t incriminate her in any way, but it does put a spotlight on his loyalties.

Did . . . Gray rub one out after her stroll and before her nap?

First Day on the Job by Cariwebo

@Mrgoblinging7 Depressingly, in “One Little Ship” the writers decided that normal-sized oxygen molecules would be too big for the miniature crewmembers’ lungs to absorb, so they were restricted to the environment inside the shuttle.

@kisupure said in Petrichor - a novel in "open beta" - [M/f, minigiant, post-apocalyptic dystopia, slavery, military setting]:

The enlisted/officer divide is a staple of military fiction, but what was once rooted in static social classes became more permeable with the rise of “professional” soldiers and recruitment. With the Disruption sending us back to serfdom, however, a battlefield commission is less a promotion than an ennobling.

Corpsmen are still enslaved, as Finch’s lack of good choices demonstrates. Captains leading armed bondsmen aren’t quite overseers or feudal lords, but the 'Naks and harsh environment seem to provide the rest of the discipline necessary to keep the corpsmen loyal. Until now, that is.

Still, Gray suddenly didn’t like how [Wesson] was taking up space.

Not as much space as some do…

animal impiety

Nice.

As far as I can tell, you haven’t disturbed the conventional wisdom that there are no female Anakim, but you have allowed that it might not be possible to engineer an humanoid effectively for combat without giving it a libido. I don’t suppose I have to remind you how non-neutered adult human males have historically behaved in prolonged single-sex environments.

What does fear pheromone smell like to other 'Naks? Pleasant? Noxious? Undetectable? Is suppression against orders?

Grabbing Two at a Time by Cariwebo

@tiny-ivy I hope you encounter someone with the appropriate imagination and appetite.

@kisupure said in Petrichor - a novel in "open beta" - [M/f, minigiant, post-apocalyptic dystopia, slavery, military setting]:

What was he doing? His words were plain, but they were slippery, muddy, hiding things. Is this how he talked to Finch for a whole week? He made this seem so strangely urgent, like she was running out of time.

Like the pheromone, she can detect the foreboding but she cannot see the cause.

by Tony Kovik

@littlest-lily I’m afraid it varies depending on several factors, primarily our respective personae.

To address the specific size issue: little ladies taller than four inches are literally more than a handful, and it’s very important to me that I can enclose her entirely in my hand, so four inches is usually my upper limit.

The greatest catastrophe would be if I were to drop her, so my chief concern is a secure grip. One-inchers get pinched between the pads of my index finger and my thumb, 2-4 inchers are wrapped up by my fingers and pressed against my palm. Under a half-inch-tall is too small to really grip, so if I wanted a micro lady in my palm I’d probably have to sweep her into it. A bottle of compressed air would come in handy here.

An important factor is whether a given tiny woman has ever been handled by anyone at all or by me in particular. If it is an occasion where I need or want to establish trust, I might invite her to place herself into my palm. If I am feeling particularly dominant or if I sense that she’s feeling particularly submissive, I will simply grab her without warning or permission.

Regular readers will recall that I enjoy bathing tiny ladies, so when it’s time to dry off I’ll scoop her up out of the water. If she’s in the bathtub with me, I probably won’t be able to resist surfacing some part of my body beneath her.

There is no greater first impression than the first physical contact, and it can also be an occasion for demonstration and instruction. Dangling her upside down by her leg looks absurd, and as such it is best reserved for when there’s an audience, either other tinies who need to be trained or other biggos who would be entertained by her plight.

Last but not least, I do enjoy picking her up with my lips and teeth by bringing my mouth down over her T-Rex-style. I’ll do this with even the most cherished and respected tinies as a bit of playful teasing.

@littlenichole

What a fucking bastard.

I really like how you hint at the (pre-shrinking) history between Andrew and Nia without giving us more than we need to know. Similarly, we get to imagine for ourselves the range of tortures and humiliations he inflicted upon her, which of course makes them worse.

“Before you always looked down on everyone…so we made it so you could never do it again…"

That “we” is highly intriguing…

On a technical note, I wonder if the narrative might flow better if all the action was in the past tense rather than the present. This could easily be just a matter of taste, but to me it would feel more organic and less like, say, the transcript of a roleplaying session. YMMV.

Also, “you’re” instead of “your.”

But yeah, he really played her desperation like a fiddle, and it was delicious.