synthozoic

Disappointed that CoH is not on the list of course. But were some choices there that I did agree with, The original Fallout and Bioshock for example. There were some choices that I would have put on the list, like Planescape: Torment for example.

But I'm sure there are a lot of people out there disappointed that their personal faves aren't on this grand list.

Coolness! Let it happen that way.

Into the Garden of Forking Paths, Continued

As Found Spider rode into Kings Row he expected things to be quiet--nothing that the Paragon Police and less experienced heroes couldn't handle. On his arrival, as he walked down the ramp from the monorail station, he heard chatter on his police radio that there was battle going on between heroes and a giant crab--a giant crab?! It sounded interesting but he elected to listen to police updates about it as he made his way to PPD Headquarters. He wouldn't get involved unless it sounded like it was getting out of hand.

On his walk over to PPD headquarters he easily dealt with a small crowd of Skull ruffians bullying innocent passersby. He knew their tactics from the few times he dealt with them in the Isles. It was hardly a match.

At Police Headquarters, there was a small crowd of outlandishly dressed heroes down in front of the building, chatting, drinking coffee, asking questions and sharing old stories. The Mathematician's plan was that Found Spider would start his recruiting here. He walked over to a clutch of heroes standing by Blue Steel. Being a newly legal super in chrome body armor of Arachnos design--he's spent months buffing all the insignia off--he felt self-conscious.

"Ummm, Hello? I'm Found Spider and I'm new to the City's ranks of heroes but I was hoping for some help with police scanner work. Any takers or questions?" he asked in a baritone voice with a very mild Spanish accent. The police scanner continued to chatter in his ear giving him updates on the crab fight.

((Is this a little better? My plan is to give Found Spider his own mission to bring others on but if one of you think's it's better to say that the Mathematician's plan requires that he join one of your plots in progress, PM me and we can do that too.))

Okey-dokey. I'll continue as such and it's simple matter for me to rewrite my last move to end in King's Row. Consider it done.

Chapter One: Into the Garden of Forking Paths, Continued

Chapter One: Into the Garden of Forking Paths, Continued

Okay so I posted my opening shot in the Crossing thread. It may sound like I'm just reviving the Chateau Rogue thread but I'm not and won't remain there for long as things develop. It's more appropriate for me to be in this thread I think.

Chapter One: Into the Garden of Forking Paths

"People, even people who should know better, misuse the word 'dimension' all the time," said the mathematician, talking to himself, "They think they know what a universe is. But then I hear them say, 'plane of existence' or 'realm of the gods' they betray their naivety, their lack of training and rigor."

He was alone, which was unremarkable, but where he was alone was interesting. He was in a small stone room barely more than 3 meters square. The room had a doorless exit out onto stone corridor and there was a narrow hole in the opposite wall that could be called a window if it actually had a pane of glass in it, which it didn't. The window was narrow but big enough that someone could squeeze their way through it with some effort. There was even, white light shining from the window, like the light from a rainy day. The man sat in the room on a stone bench and opposite him the stone wall was covered with formulas, equations and diagrams. He scrawled those there a few hours ago with pieces of chalk that he always kept with him. It was easier than keeping track of paper and notebooks which were hard to obtain anyway given his current, voluntary thralldom.

A mild claustrophobia swept over his thoughts and he chuckled a bit when he considered where he actually was. He stuck his head out the window anyway for some air and reassurance.

What he saw was both ordinary and physically impossible. His head was hanging out over vast plane or wall of stone. It was so vast that the horizon in all directions took up half his view and there was no clear edge to the horizon as there would be in ordinary circumstances. The horizon just blended into the sky with no clear transition. That meant that the wall he was looking on was very large or perhaps even infinite in size. He didn't really know. He saw that the wall was equally spaced with windows just like his that repeated endlessly in all directions. He knew that these were other windows because he had wandered a bit in the corridors and found other rooms just like this one and some larger. He slept in one of the larger rooms further down the corridor.

It was a bit like being in a cosmically huge castle or skyscraper--perhaps even infinitely big. Considering his master, he was pretty sure it might be infinite.

He looked directly away from wall, out from the wall, to look at the sky. It was blue sky with widely scattered clouds but there was never any sun or other objects in the sky aside from clouds. Night never fell. Due to the orientation of the clouds, they bumped into the wall all the time, just as low clouds and mist bang into skyscrapers in big cities. This made the wall constantly slick with moisture but there never seemed to be any rain or storms, just the constant misting.

Now vertigo settled over him and he pulled his head in.

"I should bring a telescope here," he mumbled pulling out a notebook to write a reminder to himself, "If I'm lucky enough to find one in our next trip."

He heard footsteps and knew at once who it was. And sure enough, a familiar, black suited figure, covered with yellow radiation hazard trefoils, walked into his room. The figure was wearing a bulky, thick hazmat suit with no breathing or air filtration apparatus. Over its eyes was a thick brass plate with cruciform holes. A flicker of green light sparked within those dark holes and green laser light played over the man and the entire room. The figure drew paper index cards from its tool belt and started burning text into them with yellowish green laser light. The cards smoldered briefly and then extinguished as the figure passed the cards to the man to read.

The mathematician was long experienced with this method of communication and understood the cards well enough. His long abandoned family, friends and associates would have said that his understanding had in fact rendered the poor mathematician insane, but, by his current thinking, they were less than nothing now. They weren't special, they weren't even unique.

"So, you've got it all tidied up? Time to go?" The mathematician asked only to chuckle at the utter absurdity of the question.

The figure didn't answer, or rather it answered by sweeping both of them into the mouth of a small wormhole which lead into a small hypersphere of space-time sitting a five dimensional realm. In less than a yoctosecend the hypersphere was swept into hyper-hypersphere of five-space, which in turn, a yoctosecond later, was swept into a hyper-hyper-hypersphere of six-space and then this was swept into yet higher dimensional chunk and so on, millions of times, like some kind of dimensional matryoshka doll.

After multiple nestings, having finally arrived at a continuum with suitable physics for traveling at brain insulting speeds, the dimensional matryoshka then moved over distances that would make humans weep in utter shame at their presumption of trying to ken them.

Arriving at the right position in the right universe was not something to be taken trivially. As most scientists at the the governmental consortium of the Portal Corporation would say, the number of universes is not actually finite. News in the popular media, to be accessible to a general audience, presented a description of the multiverse that was much simpler than the truth. The truth was that the numbers of universes was infinite and eternal. This meant that an obscure aspect of thermodynamics called "Poincaré's Recurrence" and quantum mechanical restrictions on analog variation would ensure that all phase spaces for any finite number of particles would repeat--repeat infinitely many times for all eternity. Not only did many variations of Statesman exist, Statesman himself and all that he knew was repeated infinitely, forever.

This was something the mathematician knew as the dimensional matryoshka unnested itself in less than a nanosecond, in the right place, spitting the mathematician and the black suited figure onto the Rue Gimbal in St. Martial. They were at the street address of the Chateau Rouge in the Rogue Island archipelago.

Or, to be more precise, they were at one Chateau Rouge out of an infinitude.

It was about 15 o'clock local time as the pair walked into the Chateau's lobby and up to the receptionist, Valley Witch, who was blissfully unaware of her utter commonness and eternal ubiquity in the grand scheme.

Valley Witch goggled, pointing at the black suited one, "Oh Em Gee! Hey, like, I know you! You're, you're that freaky zombie chick, right? What's it, ummmm, the Protonic Vampyre! No! That's not it! Quark Zombie! Quark Zombie? Right? Who's your friend?"

Quark Zombie, for that's who it was, dumped a small stack of papers and a bound stack of money onto reception desk.

"I'm the one who will explain things," said the mathematician pulling out a notepad to refresh his memory, "we're here to hire people. This might seem like a repetition of your recent past but I can emphatically state, it most assuredly isn't, not this time."

((Setting this all up might take a few chapters. but people can join in if they want to at this point.))

((So after reading this thread yesterday after work I had, for me at any rate, a clever moment where a plot snapped together in my mind. It involves one of my villains that I introduced way back in the Chateau Rouge thread. On the face of it, it's rather simple: a game of keep away involving something a lot like the Ultimate Nullifier.

If it's cool, I'd like to stir this into the mix here. But I don't want to mess up everything that's cooking here. Where should I hash this out with everyone to make sure my plot doesn't mess up anyone else's?))

I would love to see well-researched African legends and mythology brought into the game.

But barring that, the stories and myths of India, Southeast Asia and Mayan stuff would be cool too.

Hmm, maybe I should design a few story arcs in AE? Hmm, hmm, hmm.

I'm not tired of Praetoria. If anything I now see the whole rest of the game through the lens of Praetorian Earth. Maybe that's because I wasn't there for the launch of CoH and CoV but I was there for the launch of Praetoria.

But, to be far, I'm a biased casual who hasn't played all the task forces, raids and missions in the game umpteen times over yet. There is still a lot of material I really haven't mined out of the background yet.

Ornithopter: for a sort of winged iron man knock off.
Effulgence: for a peacebringer.

Remember kids, the thesaurus is your friend!

Oh yeah, I read about that slightly over a month ago. Is this planet amazing or what?!