You know, it would be highly amusing for Elspeth to, for some plot-convenient reason, have to try to convince a fundamentalist, say, that evolution is true. (Insert similar setup here; it doesn’t have to be evolution, that’s just the first thing that came to mind.) Does she work equally well trying to convince someone of a position in debate that she honestly believes is true? If so, she could be the ultimate espionage tool, albeit a necessarily oblivious one.
Her power does vary in effectiveness depending on how closely she has verified the thing she says (e.g. if at age four she said “My daddy is dead”, this would ring true, but not as true as “I’m four”, because she believes the first thing secondhand and knows the second thing firsthand). And it’s not actually impossible to doubt her even at her maximum truthiness. She conveys that she isn’t lying (and isn’t a hallucination or otherwise basically untrustworthy), but she doesn’t come off as an Omega-creature who is absolutely beyond the possibility of being mistaken.
It probably ought not be evolution, unless Elspeth is actually in a position to give an account of human evolution that is consistent with what she knows about vampirism, lycanthropy, or witchcraft. In which case I would totally love to hear it, because I can’t think of one.
You know, it would be highly amusing for Elspeth to, for some plot-convenient reason, have to try to convince a fundamentalist, say, that evolution is true. (Insert similar setup here; it doesn’t have to be evolution, that’s just the first thing that came to mind.) Does she work equally well trying to convince someone of a position in debate that she honestly believes is true? If so, she could be the ultimate espionage tool, albeit a necessarily oblivious one.
Her power does vary in effectiveness depending on how closely she has verified the thing she says (e.g. if at age four she said “My daddy is dead”, this would ring true, but not as true as “I’m four”, because she believes the first thing secondhand and knows the second thing firsthand). And it’s not actually impossible to doubt her even at her maximum truthiness. She conveys that she isn’t lying (and isn’t a hallucination or otherwise basically untrustworthy), but she doesn’t come off as an Omega-creature who is absolutely beyond the possibility of being mistaken.
We just saw this demonstrated, actually, in Chapter 11. Jasper is able to guess that Elspeth took the wrong meaning from Cody’s story.
It probably ought not be evolution, unless Elspeth is actually in a position to give an account of human evolution that is consistent with what she knows about vampirism, lycanthropy, or witchcraft. In which case I would totally love to hear it, because I can’t think of one.
Witchcraft, yes. Lycanthropy, at a stretch. Vampirism… not unless it involves cooevolution on Krypton! :P
Really? Now I’m curious. Let’s hear it.