DE: It's a kind of magic

[bjornwilde]

From electro_kinetic :
So, Milliways is a pretty technologically advanced place if you don't go for the magic explanation. How does your pup try to explain the wonders of The Bar to people who're pre-Industrial Revolution? Conversely, if your pup *is* pre-Industrial Revolution, how do they accept Milliways' 'magic by another name'?

Comments

[camwyn]

Hektor of Troy was about eight years old the first time I brought him into the Bar. One of the first people to encounter him was Kara Zor-El, who explained to him that the Bar was the dwelling place of a goddess who presided over the ending of things, and who brought people to Her precincts from time to time for reasons of her own. This made perfect sense to Hektor and he pretty much attributed everything else of technological wonderment to the goddess' power. (There was a lot of this. As a denizen of the Bronze Age, Hektor was from a time before glass was used in windows. He never entirely understood doorknobs. Toilets he sort of understood, because there had been Cretans at the Trojan court and the Cretans had running water inside the house to carry the night soil away, but he never did get the hang of what was going on that enabled the taps on the sink to work. Things like that.) A lot of other stuff was more or less chalked up to foreigners having strange ways- the sheer prevalence of trousers, for example. I don't think it ever really sank in for him just how many people could, and did, read and write- or how much writing there was out there.

The Silver Corporal wasn't pre-Industrial Revolution, but he was from between 1904 and 1920 (he was a member of the Royal North-West Mounted Police; the 'Royal' part was added to the NWMP name in 1904, and in 1920 they merged with the Dominion Police to become the RCMP). He was also from rural background, being from Wyoming cattle country and working in Canada's far northwest, so his interaction with technology was somewhat on the limited side. He tended to attribute a lot of Milliways' more advanced tech to those clever fellers back East who were always tinkering. I think what impressed him the most about tech was how incredibly consistent things were. He'd seen manufactured goods, after all, but nothing with the level of refinement and quality control you got in Milliways stuff from after his time. (I kind of miss playing him, but he really doesn't work that well outside of his environment.)