Not an idea... but a request.

[Comartemis]

Alright ladies and gents, listen up.

Many of you have probably noticed that I haven't been posting any ideas as of late. The reason for this is simple; I've taken to hanging out on Animesuki's Nanoha boards, and all my ideas are better off being posted there than here (where nobody pays attention to my ideas these days anyways).

Less than half an hour ago, I was challenged on the Original Character thread's IRC channel, #outercadia, by one of the locals. TK3997 challenged my latest idea, a Nanoha/Kingdom Hearts fusion, saying that the importing of the Heartless and the concepts of Light and Darkness was a stupid idea. When I argued with him, he proceeded to call me out and challenged me to prove him wrong.

Which is where you lot come in.

The challenge is thus: to import the Heartless into a foreign universe, namely the Nanohaverse, holding by and large to the rules which exist in that universe. The best lead I have thus far is connecting Light to a concept attributed to the Saint Church, namely making the Sankt Kaiser into an embodiment of that force.

The heartless, for those who are unfamiliar with Kingdom Hearts, are the embodiments of the power of Darkness, a malevolent force which exists in a realm parallel to our own universe. In Nanoha, this might translate into Light being the multiverse as we know it and Darkness being a negative reflection, literally the shadow of the multiverse. Deep within this negative reflection lies either Kingdom Hearts or Al Hazard depending on which series you're paying attention to.

Other ideas include existence vs anti-existence, with the heartless being the results of an experiment with some kind of void magic, and spiritual energy vs lack of spiritual energy.

I'm busy trying to think up ideas of my own and figure out ways to fit them in, but I'd also like to get ideas from the local gang. You lot have been a great help to me in the past, and I hope you'll help me again now, when I've got something to prove.

[Comartemis]

...or you could, you know, just ignore me and my ideas. That seems to be a rather popular option around here these days.

[sarcasm]Thanks so much for all your support guys, I knew I could count on you. [/sarcasm]

[Metroidvania]

Gee Com, I'm sure that'll help your cause nicely.

[/rolleyes]

In all seriousness, though, I'm pretty sure hardly anyone on the boards has both seen Nanoha and played Kingdom hearts. I've only done the latter, so I can't really help to make the Heartless (not to mention the nobodies) fit into Nanoha-verse.

[Neko-]

I am completely unaware of KoH... Hence my complete unability to provide meaningful input.

[KonokoHasano]

*Sweat* Well, I've both seen the Nanoha series and have played Kingdom Hearts I, II, and some of Chains of Memories.

I can't really think of how to fit both of them together in a working way at the moment. If I had some time to think about it, then it's possible to come up with some things.

Edit: Wait... wait... couldn't it very well be possible that a project that Jail Scaglietti worked on before he started Project Fate by experimenting upon in an earlier work combining Magic and genetic engineering?

Or perhaps it could go all the way back to the ancient civilization where they DID experiment with an odd form of both magic and genetics to try and create a perfect soldier. However, something went haywire and brought into creation beings who 'lack a heart' and 'feed upon those with hearts'. This also has a side effect of -- when the heartless prey upon their victims -- turning people with darkness inside of them into Heartless as well.

Before anybody knew it, the problem grew completely out of control. One thing lead to another, and eventually, the creatures were confined to a sub-dimensional zone where they would prove no more threat to anybody else.

However, things like that aren't to last...

Eh, alright, so what I came up with sounds crappy.

[Comartemis]

Gee Com, I'm sure that'll help your cause nicely.

My last six or seven story ideas have also been completely ignored, Mets. Can you blame me if I'm a little snippish?

Or perhaps it could go all the way back to the ancient civilization where they DID experiment with an odd form of both magic and genetics to try and create a perfect soldier. However, something went haywire and brought into creation beings who 'lack a heart' and 'feed upon those with hearts'. This also has a side effect of -- when the heartless prey upon their victims -- turning people with darkness inside of them into Heartless as well.

Before anybody knew it, the problem grew completely out of control. One thing lead to another, and eventually, the creatures were confined to a sub-dimensional zone where they would prove no more threat to anybody else.

However, things like that aren't to last...

Eh, alright, so what I came up with sounds crappy.

No no, there's a few things in there I could possibly salvage.

Let's see....

I'm trying to avoid references to "hearts" and keyblades and such so as to keep the eye-rolling factor down (the AS Nanoha locals are largely a bunch of military nuts, and I'm not too hot on trying to bring something as sappy as the heart motif into Nanoha), so instead of "heartless" we move the emphasis to the "spirit".

In this sense, the heartless are akin to bio-magical weapons manufactured by what passed for the military in Al Hazard.

If we use the analogy of the multiverse being the realm of light and the multiverse's reflection being the realm of darkness, then the artificial removal of the spirit creates an opening for the darkness to bubble up into, taking command of the spirit-less body and mutating it into a completely unrecognizable form. From here, the darkness is able to spread by consuming the spirits of other humans. In essence, you now have something akin to a zombie plague waiting to happen, and that's exactly what happened to bring about the downfall of Al Hazard.

At the height of the Belkan Empire, the heartless (spiritless?) somehow manage to break out of Al Hazard and go rampaging around the multiverse. They are halted by the Belkan military, and the Sankt Kaiser seals the majority of the heartless back into the Realm of Darkness.

Then of course, you have Precia and Alicia's corpse, who enter the realm of Darkness at the end of S1 and are promptly consumed by darkness. Alicia is reanimated by an especially large and nasty "spiritless" (need to find a better name than that, though), and Alicia's magic is used to wear down the barrier from the inside, eventually breaking out about a year after StrikerS.

Well... that was surprisingly easy. Thanks, KH. I'll see if I can get this working.

[KonokoHasano]

Well... that was surprisingly easy. Thanks, KH. I'll see if I can get this working.

Glad I could help spark your imagination. ^_^

[P.H. Wise]

ITT: BAAAAAAAAAAAW

Seriously, dude. Drama is nobody's friend.

As for your idea, do you need to connect Light and Dark to anything within the Nanoha-verse at all? Don't get so bogged down in the metaphysics of the event that it gets in the way of your narrative. Don't tell the reader more than you do the characters, and this sort of thing is much less problematic.

You could even have scenes in which specific characters are trying to figure out what the Heartless are and where they come from, and have them be told by other characters something to the effect of, "We can figure that out when they're not in the process of attempting to eat us!"

Anti-existence is a bit problematic, of course, and obviously so: what is the opposite of existence? Absolutely nothing. That is, nonexistence.
In what way can non-existence be said to have a will? A mind? Objectives? Are not all of these the properties of things which exist? There is no noun there for a verb to operate upon. Hell, there is no noun there for adjectives to operate upon.

Really, you've got all that you need as far as the cosmology of the situation goes in the explanation you gave earlier: "The Heartless are the embodiments of 'Darkness', a malevolent force which exists in a realm parallel to our own universe."

You can expand upon that definition as the characters learn more details, if you wish to do so.

[Munchkin]

Anti-existence is a bit problematic, of course, and obviously so: what is the opposite of existence? Absolutely nothing. That is, nonexistence.

I'm afraid I don't know either of the afore-mentioned works, so I can't help on that front.

However, as a slight aside here on the above quote, incase it helps with any working out of combining Darkness and Heartless, the opposite of existence is not absolutely nothing.

Strictly speaking, nothing is the lack of existence - the opposite of something added to something should always result in nothing; existence + nothing = existence. Therefore nothing is not the opposite of existence. You need to balance the equation as "existence + something = nothing", and since the only thing that can remove existence would be a theoretical 'anti-existence', then that is the opposite.

Of course, we have no current parallel to anti-existence, since we've never discovered it, and in all probability does not exist in reality, since energy cannot be destroyed, only converted. Entropy would be the closest thing in our universe, and that is the degeneration of structures, which in an entirely entropic universe would (if I'm correct - i'm a little hazy on this) give a uniform distribution of heat energy across the universe.

The only other parallel that we currently have is anti-matter - matter that has an equal and opposite charge to normal matter, and the reaction of such with matter removes all structure from the matter, turning both parties into their equivalent energy (and with e=mc^2, that's a lot).

Going back to entropy, I guess you could say that anti-existence would be any existence (energy, matter, spirit etc...) with some theoretical inverted property (like spin or charge) such that when interacting with normal existence removes all structure from both, reverting them both into fully-entropic forms - that is, a large burst of unstructured energy.

Since we know that anti-matter behaves in similar ways to normal matter, extrapolating this to anti-existence would indicate that any such entity would also behave like existence and would be able to form similar propertied systems to normal existence - like matter, energy, spirit, mind and will.

That still leaves the problem of anti-existence not being able to enter our universe though, since it would instantly and catastrophically revert itself and the existence of the space/time continuum that it interacted with into a large burst of entropy. Fun.

But of course, we aren't working in the real world with either of these story universes, so i'm sure that this could be worked around in much the same way as George Lucas got away with it in Star Wars. Namely "It's my universe. I can do whatever I damn well want with it" .

Right, i'll shut up now .

[bissek]

Antimatter is stored by keeping it in a state of magnetic spin inside a vacuum. Since there is no air in the container, and the antimatter goes around in circles inside the container without ever touching the container itself, there is no matter-antimatter collision, so no explosion. Anti-existence could be stored in a similar manner.

[Sunshine Temple]

Comartemis if you want people to help you on an idea of yours...
It's not wise to start off by insulting the forum you're asking for help on, and saying how much better another forum is. If you get more traction on your ideas on Animesuki's Nanoha boards then ask them.

" My last six or seven story ideas have also been completely ignored, Mets. Can you blame me if I'm a little snippish?"

While it's understandable to be irked by a lack of response.
Is being snippish really the way to encourage people to respond with help?

I'll note that you have gotten some serious comments. Which is good.
Next time however, try to be less snipish and have less drama

As Metroidvania and Neko mentioned some peopled just may not know about the ideas your asking about.

Also I'm not being sarcastic about Animesuki. If this forum isn't giving the idea help you want, while another is, then it makes perfect sense to use that one.

[Dumbledork]

It's not that I don't want to help, but generally if a fic doesn't have any Ranma in it I'm just not interested. And I've never watched Nanoha or played Kingdom Hearts, so I can't help at all on that front.

[Sky]

Sorry for taking so long on this.

I'm not sure this helps and I haven't had any coffee yet, but...

If we go with the explanation of anti-existence given, then Precia's and Alicia's bodies would cause a matter/anti-matter like explosion when entering the other side in the absence of some kind of container.

The "mirror" or barrier sounds interesting. What if it wasn't really a mirror, but was transparent and an effective separator? In this case, the other universe is not really a reflection of sorts. Transparent glass lets light through, so it may be possible for some elemental component of the multiverse to pass through this without destroying everything. If you could manipulate whatever the barrier is porous to, the manipulation could allow anti-stuff to interact with universes of regular stuff or even in the barrier itself.

Similarly, if such a barrier exists, then it is made of stuff that is safe to both universes, and can be used on both sides if it can be reliably converted or manufactured.

You could also say "it's my multiverse, my rules."

[Munchkin]

I did forget to mention one little detail about matter/anti-matter, but it's possibly quite important if you're using it as a basis for existence/anti-existence. And that is, they only mutually annihilate equal and opposite entities - an electron will destroy a positron, but not an anti-proton.

Therefore if you take further abstracts, anti-mind only annihilates mind and not body, being a different 'type' of existential object. Perhaps you could have astral travel, whereby you could project yourself into the other universe, but not actually step through physically? Of course, you'd have to be careful not to touch other spirit forms, but it's a possibility.

I've still no idea how that would fit in to either story though, so i'm probably going off on a complete tangent .

[P.H. Wise]

I did forget to mention one little detail about matter/anti-matter, but it's possibly quite important if you're using it as a basis for existence/anti-existence. And that is, they only mutually annihilate equal and opposite entities - an electron will destroy a positron, but not an anti-proton.

Therefore if you take further abstracts, anti-mind only annihilates mind and not body, being a different 'type' of existential object. Perhaps you could have astral travel, whereby you could project yourself into the other universe, but not actually step through physically? Of course, you'd have to be careful not to touch other spirit forms, but it's a possibility.

I've still no idea how that would fit in to either story though, so i'm probably going off on a complete tangent .

Yeah, see, the problem with this take on anti-existence is that it's hard to use it in a story short of as a plot device. As in, "I have created a weapon capable of destroying ALL EXISTENCE! WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE!?!?"
Not to mention it's somewhat nonsensical.

I stand by my earlier statement. If you strip away everything that has the quality of 'existing' from existence (defining 'existence' as 'to be'), you are left with absolute nothingness. The uncreated void. This is not a thing which can take action, but a thing which can only be acted upon by a Creator.