[OOC][PLOT] Planning for Arc 1 - Arrivals

[Labster]

I suppose there is one continuity that could be merged to cause that:

In the urban fantasy / alternate history novel, California Bones (Tor Books, June 2014), by Greg van Eekhout, Abbot Kinney's Venetian experiment grew to encompass all of Los Angeles, taking the place of what might otherwise have become L.A.'s metropolitan roads, becoming part of a hydraulic empire overseen by an immortal William Mulholland.

LOL.  The author is obviously Dutch, as that sentence is the most Dutch thing I think I have ever read.  But of course L.A.'s topography and lack of fresh water prevents this.  One of the things that was most conspicuously absent in my visit to the Netherlands were hills, as I'm constantly using them to orient myself.  The hills are also conspicuously present in paintings by the Dutch Masters, who liked how they looked in Italian works.  When I was in Amsterdam, one of the locals told me that they had gone through the same process as Venice CA in the 60s and 70s, with people wanting to fill the canals in, and replace them with something useful like parking.  They got decently far, especially in shortening the Rokin.  But then it was stopped by historic preservationists in the 1980s.  Urban preservationists really only got going in L.A. in the late 1990s.

Which begs the question, Why not change everything else to suit the visitors then?

Um, because story needs conflict?

I guess I've never been entirely clear on the idea of the Metacontinuity.  I was thinking of it in terms of having characters drop into a base universe, which just happens to be the one our SIs live in.  I wasn't thinking of it in terms of having a second Japan appearing offshore of the first one (which is a thing that has been done before).  Or letting people arrive with all of the stuff they have in their normal life.  To me you take Washuu and put her in another dimension, and she can juryrig access to her extradimensional lab in 10 minutes.  But for most characters, those without magic or overtechnology on their persons, I felt like they were in on their own in a new world, only given a place to live.  Batman sounds fun, but wouldn't it be interesting to put him in a world without Wayne Industries, and see what he does with it?

I was thinking of Arrivals (I like this word better than visitors) might start changing the world themselves.  Sakura Kinomoto could probably, with The Earthy and The Copy, dig new canals in days, if not hours.  Freaking wizards.  (Or The Big and a giant shovel, but that sounds too embarrassing!)  But our protagonists should change things more like normal citizens.  Protagonists.... hmmmmm.

Hmmmm.

Can I borrow Cinder for a while?