Chapter 22 p13 – Dangerous dabbling
It’s your artist’s birthday today! If you want to celebrate, I’m always delighted to get fanart of my characters, and links and recs of my comics.
It’s also Hillary Clinton’s birthday. It couldn’t hurt to send a few dollars her way.
Cohen: I’m serious — this is a dangerous area to dabble in.
Miranda: So we’ll wear our gloves and safety goggles.
Sparrow: Is this sigil likely to delete us from the flow of spacetime? No? Then that’s good enough for me.
Cohen: Haven’t you read any stories where someone goes too far and learns things Man Was Not Meant To Know? You know why those all turn out badly?
Miranda+Sparrow: Narrative contrivance.
Cohen: That’s right, human hubr–
–wait, what?
Miranda: In a story, knowledge that comes too easily makes it boring, so it has to backfire somehow. But in real life? Some things can’t be too easy.
Sparrow: Hello, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children? Do you have a pen? Because I’ve got a bunch of names and locations here, and you’re gonna want to start writing them down.
THANK you! Finally, someone else points out what I’ve been thinking for years!.
I’m not sure what analogy Sparrow is acting out. Also, it seems odd to have ‘can’t be too easy’ said then. Their argument skips a bunch of steps, or they’re making different arguments altogether.
Sparrow is using “the locations of missing/exploited children” as an example of knowledge that wouldn’t backfire if you got it too easily.
Actually, locations of exploited children CAN backfire if you are not careful where you phone from and police come to ask how did you knew that.
That’s why you get a ‘burner’ phone, or several. Though if one person buys too many of them and/or doesn’t pay cash, then there WILL be red flags. Luckily they know several shape shifters…
Of Course, this is a story, so something will go wrong.
But what if it doesn’t, and Miranda is proven right?
It depends how you wanna view it – when Cohen did it, it was way too early in the story (backstory, even!), but at this point in time it’s fair game. Are we far enough in the story that answers are a good thing that are needed to push things along? Or does the narrative think that it would be better to make them work for it?
Again, why doesn’t he just say “well that may be true, but I tried the ‘learn everything’ circle, and I could barely breath afterwords, it could be very dangerous.” Why must he keep this a secret? He’s clearly willing to admit some mistakes, so why not this one? This information is important dammit, as far as he knows, she could end up in a coma or something if she tries this.
Thank you, Mandy and Sparrow. (Though, of course, they’re unaware that they’re in a story themselves, so something Will Go Wrong)