[OOC][PLOT] The Seventh Thread of Planning for Arc 1 - Arrivals

[robkelk]

I don't think we can make them smaller while keeping this in the realms of deconstruction.  For schools of their size?  Geared towards teaching vocational trades and seamanship?  Yeah, a town of 30,000 - the students, workers, teachers, crew, and their families - sounds about right.  The only way you could get away with is is if you made the student body A LOT smaller.

And reading about the history of these ships?  Shit's pretty absurd.  Apparently this has been a thing since the Roman Empire.  Though that would explain why it's so damn normal for these people - they're used to the idea of floating cities that are practically political entities on the same level as provincial governments.

At any rate, I just see this as a challenge for us, as writers, to rise to: a realistic response to gargantuan ships that have actual, living, breathing towns on them, showing up in bays around the world.

Yeah, Oorai's going to have to show up in (EDIT: if it'll fit) the Gulf of St. Laurence, not the Port of Montreal. Who knows where Pravda's going to show up.

If I may make a suggestion?  Have them be the very first thing that shows up during the events of the Academy City Job.  These ships arriving would be the very first sign that the Maleable Causality System has gone into complete and irrecoverable failure mode after Dr. Doofenshmirtz's Unreal Estate became the straw that broke the camel's back.

For some reason, I thought we had already agreed to that...

Here's how I thought we were continuing and ending Arc 1:

1. Malleable Causality events continue to increase over 2017 - a larger fraction of displacees start showing up in places where nobody is ready to welcome them (e.g. Washington DC) and they have to fall back on their own resources... or get recruited by Cinder, AMALGAM, or some other nasty.
   
2. Displacees groups get larger and more noticeable over 2017, as well, going from a few people to a cabin in the woods with an evil-minion base under it to an entire top-secret government department with its own HQ
   
3. The Malleable Causality system is running at 110% capacity by October 2017, and the Celestials are swamped. ("Anybody who isn't completely inept at miracles is on shift. Even Troubador is manning a console!") Imps and "Relievers" (In Nomine term - essentially angels who haven't earned their wings yet) are dispatched to get the apartment managers involved in covering up displacee appearances. (Flashy-thing not included.)
   
4. From my working notes: "October 9, 2017: The 2017 Panda Game. Real-world final score: double-overtime, Carleton 33, Ottawa 30. Outside of pro hockey, this was the big game in Ottawa in 2017 - they played to a sold-out pro football stadium. Mii and Ami cheering at opposite ends of the field, everybody else preventing Cinder/Unselie/Leonard/Kyubey/etc. from spoiling it for the fans."
   
5. All the Arc 1 ideas for events caused by displacees that we haven't figured out how to flesh out get shown being prevented in a montage. Somebody goofs or doesn't take things seriously and lets an event take place. One can get through, but then a second one happens. And then a third. "What did you do, Ranma/Jayne/Meltdowner/Tomo/Bean/Vita/etc?"
   
6. October 10: Academy City shows up in toto and redlines the Malleable Causality system.
   
7. "Doc Doof" takes advantage of the distraction to launch his architecture-ships and accidentally overdoes it. Meanwhile, the other annoyances (Unseelie, Drosselmeyer, etc) kick in their own disruptions. The Malleable Causality system blows out an oscillation overthruster (or whatever), critically injuring Urd, Skuld, and Sebastian and forcing Belldandy and Hild to take personal charge of Yggdrasil and Niflheim.
   
8. Urd, Skuld, and Sebastian are dumped into the Metacontinuity in their emergency-life-sustaining modes in order to keep them alive.
   
9. While Westwoods and Blossom deal with the immediate threat that Academy City poses, Aria House, Douglass Gardens, and Henrettia Street have to tend to critically-injured Celestials.
   
10. Meanwhile, the "NPC" apartments deal with the fallout from the cities in flight, until somebody - anybody - else has time to take a look at what's happened to them.
    

Insert the school ships showing up at #5 - even if nobody goofs (which IMHO is highly unlikely), there's still something obvious happening.