Question Cardiac, Ebon Flow, and son.

From Jade 5.

I was thinking about Cardiac and her family. It's a bit early for her son to be attending Whateley unfortunately, but I wonder what happened to them.

Ebon Flow is presumably still a statue. But the bomb has probably gone off by now. They thought he was slowed down by a factor of 10 million, but the bomb only had a few seconds left. 10^7 magnification gives you about 115 days per second. So how did they deal with the bomb?

And I'm a bit curious about their son. Obviously, he isn't affected by Cardiac's aura. Is that because he's immune like Jade? Does the aura exclude him because it considers him part of his mother? Is he just inured to the effects from experiencing them constantly? I like the last option the best, because it has the most potential for an interesting character. It reminds me a bit of Loup from Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey's "post-punk desert urban fantasy about girl’s love and boxing." (that's a quote from Carey). Loup was genetically engineered to not feel fear, which also means that she doesn't feel embarrassment, and also has difficulty knowing when to be cautious. It would be interesting to see someone similar in the WU.

The whole point of speeding up the time was to find the bomb and disarm it, and he succeeded. The problem was, his skill had a sting in the tail, and because he went so fast, now he's been slowed down so much by his skill he's practicly a statue in front of the building for a very long time.

And for Cardiac, the baby had to survive 9 months in the womb. At a practicly level, any baby conceived that wasn't immune to her would basically not survived to birth, but instead miscarried. So the fact the baby was born means it can survive in Cardiac's aura.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: The whole point of speeding up the time was to find the bomb and disarm it, and he succeeded. The problem was, his skill had a sting in the tail, and because he went so fast, now he's been slowed down so much by his skill he's practically a statue in front of the building for a very long time.

Yes, I understood that part. The question that I was trying to ask is what you think has been done to his not-quite-a-statue form by other people since then?

And for Cardiac, the baby had to survive 9 months in the womb. At a practically level, any baby conceived that wasn't immune to her would basically not survived to birth, but instead miscarried. So the fact the baby was born means it can survive in Cardiac's aura.

My question here was about the mechanics of the baby's immunity. Is the baby being excluded by the aura, or is the baby immune to the aura, and if that immunity is neurological rather than psychic, what effect did that immunity have on the baby?

Obviously, we can't know any of this with the information we have, but I thought that they'd be interesting to speculate on.

My thinking goes like this:
- Fear is a function of the nervous system.
- The nervous system develops gradually
- Brains can learn to adapt to different stimuli (look up that classic experiment on making someone wear glasses that invert the images constantly...)
- Baby's brain adapted to the fear aura *before* it was developed enough for "fear" to be enough of a concept to have physiological consequences.

So... the baby might feel the aura, but does not process it as "fear." He might even consider it comforting, since the presence of the aura essentially means "Mommy is here".