Quote:A few hundred travelers? Er, take a second look at the scale of TSAB Headquarters - if that thing has less than a million permanent residents, I'll eat my briefs.
As for earth goverments knowledge of TSAB I'd say the TSAB doesn't really care if they know, but they preffer ignorance. Makes it easier to police everything if there are only a few hundered people that can bounce between dimensions rather than a few million (ep7, they seem to be using a 33 digit hex number identifier or an 8 dimensional coordinate system with most numbers in the 4 digits. Either way even assuming that most coordinates are duds that's still a lot of worlds)
My working model at this point is trying to reconcile a lot of different things, so bear with me. The first WAG I'm taking is that the TSAB's 'dimensions' are not, in fact, seperate pocket universes, but the coordinates in 'real' spacetime - the one Terran astronomers have been staring at for centuries - that one arrives at after feeding certain energy characteristics into an indefinitely small universally adjacent 'other space'... IOW, if a Terran researcher independantly replicated the principles behind their interdimensional planar travel, he'd call it 'hyperspace'.
That Midchildia is the oldest/wealthiest/most active of a number of civilizations with access to 'interdimensional' travel, and that all of these such are known to and actively trading with each other, much as, say, nations did on Earth in the nineteenth century.
Relative to those spaces these people would define as 'civilized', Earth is way off at the ass end of the beyond.
Magical energy, as used for industrial and technological purposes, may be compared to water - some places have a lot of it, others much less, but everybody needs it, at least if they want to build a civilization with anything in common with the TSAB's.
Continuing the metaphor, Earth's oceans were all flash-boiled away, down to dry bedrock, at some point in the distant past. We're talking Arakkis level dry, here, 'kay? An experienced mage can do personal-level effects in that kind of environment, but will never develop without outside interference some time before they hit puberty.
The Gray Men's world is not called Disith. It is, however, in much the same sort of fix. No, it wasn't their fault.
The dimensional traveler characters are just as human as they look.
Nobody from Earth has any clue that the Asura is out there... at this point, anyway.
The Saucer Loonies would indeed latch onto this and never let go.
So, recap: Earth public knows that a bunch of men with wierd powers showed up in a Japanese city and killed everyone they could get their hands on, before being driven off by a cute Japanese girl who could fly and throw pink energy bolts. Earth leadership knows that the TSAB is an Interpol-like organization dedicated to dealing with interdimensional problems and limiting dangers brought about by Lost Logia technology, but has no clue as to the organization's real resources.
Aside from the Mage Brigade and Admirals Graham and Halloran, none of the TSAB's people really realize that Earth's population is larger than the next three worlds they have contact with combined, and none of them have any kind of clue how bad a hornet's nest our politics are about to turn into.
(rationale: knowledge of magic can allow a person to establish what we would consider a 'first world' lifestyle for themselves. Magic books, therefore, will sell like hotcakes. Once the printing press shows up, local standard of living should, therefore, skyrocket, no matter how hard the powers that be at the time try and clamp down on the knowledge.
It is an observed fact that a nation with a high standard of living also has a low birthrate. Therefore, their growth will either slow or almost stop right after, with none of the explosive growth we saw from the spread of modern medicine on Earth.)
ja, -n
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."