[OOC][PLOT] Planning for Arc 2 - Crisis on Infinite Earths

[Black Aeronaut]

Well, would you be interested in buying some real estate on Mars?  There's so much to choose from.

At the very least, we should have the Sailors' castles.  Always nice to have an orbital HQ.  Also, depending on how long they've been unattended, they might make an interesting dungeon crawl.

Oh, yay - dungeon crawls. I wonder whether Sailor Teleport is capable of taking passengers?

Oh man.  This would just be BEGGING for trouble in the form of Benjamin going completely and totally unhinged from 1) have a whole helluva lotta targets to choose from and 2) Washu gives him a little present...

We outnumber you. We will find you. You are alone, and we are colony.

Have you ever watched a snake kill something? It's awful. It's so awful. I watched a man die of a terciopelo bite once. Out by the northern wall. I still have nightmares about it. Anyway, that's where VEIST comes from. The inspiration, I mean. Weapons with all the power of a venomous creature. Plus an onboard AI with that creature's killer instincts. And now there's the Colony. A grenade launcher packed with fully mobile, AI-controlled insectoid detonators, each one designed with a taste for blood. We've made some pretty messed-up stuff. You've probably seen it. You know. But we've never made anything like the Colony before.

Benjamin is going to be running through these castles, laughing like Babs Bunny with a Chainsaw, while gleefully and utterly annihilating everything creepy and crawly.  And Washu will tell everyone to just let him be for the moment and make sure nothing sneaks up behind him... though with the way he's absolutely terrifying the not-so-native wildlife, that's a slim chance.

I will probably want to bring in Southern Cross Island, because I've been wanting a Star Driver crossover for a while now, so I'll probably just have to do it myself.  There's no real outside contamination if they're still in the conspiracy (because island, not because the characters are competent at keeping a conspiracy). But if the giant robots start appearing outside of zero time, looking all fabulous, people would notice.

I'm not sure if I'd like Gameindustri to appear on the far side of the Bifröst, or just have a few CPU girls drop into the local Basilicom (which I'm sure would be museum in the Getty Castle).  Poor Nep, her share energy would be so weak in our world.

Digression: When I hear "CPU girls", I think "OS-tan"...  

Oh, just rez up Cybertron on one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian Points.  That will give our infomorph friends plenty of real estate to play in, especially if we can get the Decepticons to finally chill the fuck out.  (Although, if Cybertron is too big for that to work, then I guess we can do an Earth-Sun Lagrangian Point instead.)

I'd also like a competent villain.  Big bads that are just nuts annoy me quite a bit.  And honestly, it leaves a pretty short list of who to use: Salem and Naraku come to mind first.  Akio and the Antispiral.  I suppose the leaders of GENOM, too. I'd also be okay with alien intelligences, like Neuroi, Chthugua, or Kaworu.  OK maybe not quite the last one, lol.  Not sure which ones are worth it, but we may want to have several of them.

That's a big reason why I want Academy City. Aleister is a chessmaster, using the others as his pawns. (And we all know what happens when a chess player only has pawns... but he's reasonably competent despite that. And he has access to technology that's demonstrated as being capable of building a working space elevator that isn't situated on the equator.) Members of the Kihara family range from competent-and-deadly to competent-and-crazy; pick the level of menace that your story needs. And then there's the esper/mage enmity.

I'll be fine with competent villains as long as they understand that there are equally competent 'heroes' who have no qualms whatsoever with putting a bullet through their heads and understand that there is never sufficient enough firepower.  

To me, the magical formula that make Sailor Moon work was that 90% of it was slice of life, and 9% of it was goofy monster of the week.  And then there was that 1% of it that put children in mortal peril, because they know they are the only ones standing between ordinary life and ten thousand years of darkness.   All y'all who think that I'm just writing happy comedic stories have another thing coming.  But the villain should be someone worthy of it, worth giving up the peaceful daily life to stop.

@Rob: So we have Sailor Moon from the end of the first anime, after Stars?  I've been meaning to ask for a while.  I'd be okay with it after S too -- they're still enjoyable, but nothing of great value would be lost.

Yes. Quoting from post #16 in the main thread:

As Rob handed her a pen, he realized that Rei and Ami had made sure Usagi got one of the chairs when they came in. Then he remembered that Ami said she had read The Incomplete Enchanter when she was in middle school - past tense - which implied that she had graduated to high school already. Then he realized where in the story the Sailor Senshi had come from. "You're exhausted, aren't you, Tsukino-san? I'm sorry that I asked you to come to this office instead of going to you."

"Why would you think that?" asked Rei, very quickly.

Usagi giggled, surprising everyone else. "He's read about us, Rei. He's seen the anime. We're anime characters here, remember? He probably knows what I did just before we showed up in Ottawa."

"So, what happened?" asked Mikoto.

Ruiko answered first. "I think episode 200 happened." She turned to Usagi. "You fought Galaxia, right?"

Usagi nodded. "Yes. And I won, and I undid what she did, and there was a flash from the Ginzuisho, and we were here."

Rob nodded again. "And what you did to undo what Galaxia did must have taken all of the strength you had left."

You know, it's funny because Takeuchi-sensei originally only intended the manga to be nothing but a parody by combining magical girls with Super Sentai (aka Power Rangers).  She never expected that it would become so wildly popular, and I feel that we should all tip our hats to her for managing to shift gears like that in her writing.

Which of course means that the very end of episode 200, where Usagi and Mamoru were alone together, hasn't happened. Despite SI-Rob's discussion with Mamoru about Canadian laws about "sexual interference", he's expecting that they've already known each other, possibly someplace quiet during the Halloween party.

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I'ma gonna go run off to the Season 1 thread with this.  Ciao, baby!