From:	Marc Renouf renouf@********.com
Subject:	fox special: when MetaBeings attack!
Date:	Tue, 16 Feb 1999 16:07:36 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Jordan wrote:

> Look in the novel Night's Pawn.

Word of warning: novels are rarely considered "canon." Authors
have this obnoxious way of ignoring rules to further a story.

> The mage goes Astral during the firefight, and
> when she encounters another mage during the fight, Church sits by and
> watches as her body twitched/thrashed about, grimacing and grunting.
> What causes the reaction? Even if it is a small reaction, the brain
> sends the body info, via electrical pulses and such, saysing, "OK, now
> move that leg back and forth a bunch," or whatever. There *are*
> things to be recorded....the brain is obviously getting info from the
> Astral bod, hence the reaction to the action in astral, so, why
> couldn't it be recorded?

Sure, but all you'd be recording would be the gross muscle
movements (which RAS overrides would take out anyway), the "bleedthrough"
of the signal that gets into the motor-control areas of the mage's brain.
To me, this represents that fact that the mage, in his or her moment of
panic, is losing control of his or her will, and is acting out of an
"instinct" developed in a different envionment (i.e. the real world). If
something jumps out at you, you duck. By the same token, if you're
concentrating really hard on trying to smack a guy in astral space, maybe
you arm twitches as your brain gets momentarily confused about "which" arm
you're moving (the real one or the astral one). But this doesn't change
the fact that the stimuli that caused that arm to twitch don't get
recorded.
So the audience would feel like they were having an epileptic
seizure, not like they were in astral combat. Not what you'd call a
box-office hit.

Marc