I was doing some thinking...

[M Fnord]

Round three of the megachart is up, mostly shifting the layout a bit, although Bob no longer being coy allowed me to add another fic nexus to the graph.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Bob Schroeck]

Actually, my "coy" node is still marked that way...
And you know, you could rotate the Twisterverse left-for-right and it would look a little cleaner.
Once again, many thanks for all your effort.

-- Bob
---------
The Internet Is For Norns.

[Morganite]

Just need to refresh, it appears...

---

Theoretically, every Sailor Moon fanfic ever.

---

@.@
(That could actually be another link point for my characters, since Confusion and Discord originate from Sailor Moon universes... Mind you, I never actually wrote the fic for that, but I certainly RPed them a lot...)
-Morgan."Mikuru-chan molested me! I'm... so happy!"
-Haruhi, "The Ecchi of Haruhi Suzumiya"
---(Not really)

[Bob Schroeck]

Hey, Fnord? Would you mind if I put a copy of the chart in my FAQ file for DW?
(Edit: Wow, you didn't say it had been updated since the last time you posted that link! Nice!)

-- Bob
---------
One of the primary differences between the Left and the Right is their attitude toward the Future. The Radical wants the Future to have gotten here yesterday. The Reactionary wants the Future quietly shot and the corpse buried where no one can find it.

[M Fnord]

Oh, sure. Go right ahead. I probably would've suggested it if I bothered to remember the silly thing. ---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Bob Schroeck]

Thanks!

-- Bob
---------
One of the primary differences between the Left and the Right is their attitude toward the Future. The Radical wants the Future to have gotten here yesterday. The Reactionary wants the Future quietly shot and the corpse buried where no one can find it.

[M Fnord]

DUDE! When the hell did you put the chart on TV Tropes?!---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Bob Schroeck]

A couple days ago, I think. If it's a problem, I'll nuke it. It just occurred to me that there was a natural link in the text there.

-- Bob
---------
One of the primary differences between the Left and the Right is their attitude toward the Future. The Radical wants the Future to have gotten here yesterday. The Reactionary wants the Future quietly shot and the corpse buried where no one can find it.

[M Fnord]

Nah, if I was that paranoid I wouldn't have put the thing up publicly in the first place.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, good. I was worried I might have upset you there for a while.

-- Bob
---------
One of the primary differences between the Left and the Right is their attitude toward the Future. The Radical wants the Future to have gotten here yesterday. The Reactionary wants the Future quietly shot and the corpse buried where no one can find it.

[kentmagus]

Something occurred to me as I was perusing the chart. If people can get to Fenspace from Drunkard's Walk, people can get to Drunkard's Walk from
Fenspace. Now I want to see the reaction of avatar Bob Schroeck meeting Doug Sangnoir a character he created at a different universe from Fenspace. He could
even observe Doug in his native worldline.

[robkelk]

I suspect Doug's reaction would be along the lines of, "What do you mean, you created me? Quincy said he created me! You can't both be right!"
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Cobalt Greywalker]

ACK!

Technically, both are true. Bob created that version of Quincy, and thus he created you using that version of Quincy. Of course, with the unrestricted frame of
reference Quantum Physics gives us, Bob himself could and probably is an avatar of himself. Bob's a writer, and as such is not above using himself as a
self insert. Yes, this leads to circular reasoning in that a person is both an avatar of themselves and a writer of themselves. Basically, World-As-Myth or
Transfictionality (however you want to call it) is a reciprical process. Quantum Physics says the act of observation affects that which is observed but, as
pointed out by Terry Pratchett, it also affects the observer.

And you thought temporal paradox was hard to deal with. The poor Trekies who deal with this tend to retire and go to the funny-farm.

[Bob Schroeck]

Another interpretation might be that neither Bob (any version of me) nor Quincy created Doug, any more than a radio creates the music it plays. They somehow received information about him across the gulf between universes and interpreted it as the product of their own imaginations.

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Norgarth]

Bob's comparison also helps to explain why Doug didn't/wouldn't quite match with Quincy's/Bob's expectations.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Shay Guy]

I'm still trying to figure out general information about the whatever-you-call-it-verse as a whole. A lot of it, for obvious reasons, is inconsistent. I mean, take the Event. As far as I know, Twister's the only individual known to have interacted with it. And almost every story has its own means for travel between universes. Twister used magic, I believe, with botched demon summonings involved, Douglas Sangnoir has his magegift, the cast of The Number of the Beast used...er, whatever-the-technique-was-called...and I can't think of ANY story that's used the caveat mentioned in Sailor Moon Expanded, involving travelers taking on traits from the universes they go to.
Not to mention that any coherent theory also has to take into account differing laws of physics, the flow of information - what exists as a story where - and, possibly most importantly, the free will of a writer. Along with the stuff 1/0 mentions about the nature of creation and fictionality, particularly toward the end. Plus, it can't be any system that would theoretically allow you or me to leave this universe and enter another one on the map, because there are no nonfictional records of any such thing occurring. This should go without saying, but I think the World-as-Myth novels claimed that such a thing would be possible, and the logical extension of that idea is this.
I'd also like to see a map of INDIVIDUAL universes in the continuum. For instance, as of part III of Twisted Path, I've seen three universes so far. Call them Real-T, Ranma-T, and BGC-T. Drunkard's Walk features a different one in each Step, not counting Doug's home universe. And so forth.
...Wow. I am such a dork.

---

Pronounced "shy guy."

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

That's why we added a caveat to SME: universes are organized in multiversal clusters, each of which can have its own rules on interdimensional travel and
whatnot. Getting from one multicluster to another is exponentially more difficult than "simply" universe-hopping.

--Sam

"MALLET SLAVE!"

[kentmagus]

Obviously there's no nonfictional records of this occurring. Infinity is an infinite resource. Whoever has access to it rules their world.

[Bob Schroeck]

If it helps at all, there's going to be a mention in DW6 of the Evangelion universe that Doug reaches as being one in a "skein" of similar universes that are all "quarantined" by the metagod who plays the role of Kami-sama/Yahweh/whoever in most timelines.

Similarly, in unreleased material from DW10, Legion speculates that Warriors' World is a "skew line" that runs at an angle -- possibly even perpendicular -- to the general flow of most other universes.

ETA: I should add these notes: The folks from Number of the Beast and Legion in Legion's Quest use the same mode of transport: the Burroughs Irrelevancy Drive. Doug's portals are fundamentally the same as Twister's, but have different side effects (Doug's unconsciousness being the most notable). The SME "adaptation" could well be less a universal law than a vulnerability of the folks from the SME timelines (but that one's up for grabs, since from the SME point of view, DW10 is just another Bogosity, and I am not in any way a final authority on the SME cosmology).
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Norgarth]

Or the adaptation may be an aspect of the SME method of interdimensional travel rather than of the inhabitants.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Shay Guy]

Hmm. Was it ever confirmed whether Twister and Bert Van Vliet (the characters) were born in the same universe? Looking at Twisted Path, we've got Real-T, Ranma-T, BGC-T, and BGC-Z, along with possibly a Real-Z if the answer to the previous question is "no," in the Twisterverse Cluster. The others...well, the Warriorsverse cluster has, of course, the fifteen-plus worlds Doug goes to at various points. Plus Fenspace? Already we've got three universes in two clusters (BGC-T, -Z, and -D) that are COMPLETELY identical up to the point an interdimensional traveler enters, and all three get their arrivals around the same time, in the same approximate physical location, including Doug, the one who had no prior knowledge of BGC-D. I rather doubt that this is the only instance of such a phenomenon. Is there an in-story reason for this?

Obviously there's no nonfictional records of this occurring. Infinity is an infinite resource. Whoever has access to it rules their world.

Well, for any serious discussion to occur, one must also accept that such an event CANNOT occur in true real life, where nobody is writing events from another universe. To imagine otherwise would be pure silliness. If such a thing ever happened to me, I'd automatically assume I was starring in a self-insertion fic, or something like it.

from the SME point of view, DW10 is just another Bogosity

So...if Titanite and Doug get to the DW10 world by their usual "mundane" means, does that mean they're in the same multiversal cluster? Okay, now I'm confused.

The folks from Number of the Beast and Legion in Legion's Quest use the same mode of transport: the Burroughs Irrelevancy Drive.

Wait a minute. Is Legion capable of crossing multiverses? The map and common sense seem to suggest that the entirety of Number of the Beast takes place within one multiverse, along with the rest of Heinlein's World-as-Myth stories. If Legion uses the same transport mode, how is he capable of performing the "exponentially more difficult" trans-multiversal travel? What am I missing here?

Another thing. I've only read the first two UF stories or so, so I don't really know whether there's actually more than one universe involved there. Certainly not in the first story, which just has some kind of Captain-Underpants-2-style plot device. (Is there a good starting point for UF that doesn't suffer from all of Core's problems?)

---

Pronounced "shy guy."

[M Fnord]

Wait a minute. Is Legion capable of crossing multiverses? The map and common sense seem to suggest that the entirety of Number of the Beast takes place within one multiverse, along with the rest of Heinlein's World-as-Myth stories. If Legion uses the same transport mode, how is he capable of performing the "exponentially more difficult" trans-multiversal travel? What am I missing here?

I suppose that since I created the map, I ought to chime in here.

The map's organized for readability, not necessarily reflecting "reality" (whatever the fuck *that's* supposed to mean in this context). Legion's Quest was my choice for the transfictional hub because Ed Becerra is a fandom leech ne plus ultra and he started early enough that he's got direct links to all the stories hooked with red lines. Yes, that includes Sailor Moon: American Kitsune too; I didn't make that up out of some twisted impulse. The first pass Bob made had Twisted Path as the hub because he thought that's where all the stories connected.

That's on a simple level. The more complex level is trying to tie together all the different fictional cosmologies. This is a hell of a lot more confusing because frankly none of them are supposed to work together. SME's model of the multiverse is mechanically incompatible with World-As-Myth, which has structural compatibility problems with the Dr. Who-inspired multiversal model used in Undocumented Features and it's derivatives, etc. We're not even getting into problems with major source materials like the DCU/Wildstorm or Marvel multiverses.

In this instance, common sense would seem to dictate saying "fuckit," going out & getting a beer, 'cause you're *never* gonna untangle this mess on a cosmological level.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

Shay Guy wrote:

---

Already we've got three universes in two clusters (BGC-T, -Z, and -D) that are COMPLETELY identical up to the point an interdimensional traveler enters,
and all three get their arrivals around the same time, in the same approximate physical location, including Doug, the one who had no prior knowledge of
BGC-D.

Not completely, only superficially. For example, we have no evidence that the Quincies of other BGC alternates were motivated in the same way (or even, to
the best of my knowledge, had the same first and middle names) as J.D. Quincy. All we know is that the events shown on screen in the OAVs play out in the same
way until dimensional travelers arrive.

I know it's a nitpick, but it's what I do

--Sam

What good is science if no one gets hurt?

[Evil Midnight Lurker]

As an aside, I've always felt that if Doug did wander into SME's Earth Alpha or its surrounding anime universes, his chaos field would completely
insulate him against assimilation. He constantly imposes his own personal physics on his immediate surroundings...

--Sam

WANNABES! All of you, spitpolishing your prosthetic limbs, und whitewashing your liverspots for this wretched back-patting, smarty-party! The true mad
scientist does not make public appearances! He does not wear the 'hello my name is" badge. He STRIKES from below like a viper! Or on high like a
PENNY, dropped from the tallest building aroundt! He has only ze one purpose: do bad things, to good people, MIT SCIENCE!!!!

[Bob Schroeck]

He constantly imposes his own personal physics on his immediate surroundings...

Correct. Which was going to make one of the early drafts of Doug+Legion rather interesting, as Legion can "lock down" his local reality to the rules he wants -- it's not something that shows up a lot, but he does it in one of the early stories. I can't remember which at the moment, though.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.