[video]

[steelandtemper]

[What has no thumbs and is sick to death of gods and sorcerers and magic spears and all the similar crap that keeps popping up? This AI.

Well, actually, her hologram has thumbs, but they're currently not visible behind the equally holographic folded arms.]

Poll: how many of you are from universes where the supernatural is real? Magic, gods, shoe-making elves that aren't just a parable about virtue, whatever.

[Why Grimm's Fairy Tales? Why not Grimm's Fairy Tales? It's all equally nonsense as far as thorough-going materialist Cortana is concerned.]

Comments

[steelandtemper]

All elves are fictional where I'm from.

[There're probably a bunch AIs out there who use elf avatars, but those hardly count, and anyway she's never met one personally.]

[hallaifyouherd]

Cobblers seem an oddly specific point, then.

I just couldn't be sure if I wasn't supposed to exist in general, or if I needed a particular profession to offend your sense of what is and isn't real. You understand.

[steelandtemper]

[Heh. She likes Marjara.]

The shoe-making is from a specific fairy tale. Anyway, it's not the pointy ears and the tapetum lucidum that bother me. It's the magic.

[Don't step in that Theodosian politics, Cortan--whoops too late.]

[hallaifyouherd]

Oh, just magic, then.

You'll no-doubt be delighted to know you share that sentiment with most humans, where I come from.

[steelandtemper]

What, they can't use magic?

[Humans are very good at sour grapes, so this is the obvious answer.]

[hallaifyouherd]

Oh no, it's not that. Humans turn up as mages every now and then too.

They just prefer to round them all up and lock them all in towers, guarded by packs of armed zealots. A perfectly natural reaction to things you're afraid of and don't understand.

[steelandtemper]

That's the best thing they can think to do with people who can throw fireballs by thinking about it real hard?

[Are you kidding her.]

[hallaifyouherd]

The most popular, at any rate. The rest of the options they come up with are usually more barbaric.

Particularly in the case of children. Attempting to drown the magic out of them, for example.

[steelandtemper]

I would tend to assume dead people aren't particularly good at magic.

[...Oh wait what if they have magic ghosts where Marjara's from.]

Unless you have magic ghosts, in which case drowning seems short-sighted because now you're facing something that can walk through walls and doesn't sleep.

[Yes, that's the problem with trying to drown a 9-year-old, Cortana.]

[hallaifyouherd]

Yes. How much simpler having a dead mage child would be, by comparison.