My Apartment Manager is not a Planning Thread, #14

[Labster]

I'm mostly responsible for the last major retcon we decided to make to the setting.  Which is not the last in terms of work remaining, since the Halloween party still needs to be moved to (checks watch) New Jersey.  Actually, what is changing is the very name of the setting.

From what I noticed, our conception of the universe has changed, both in terms of our planning, and what is actually published in our eponymous introductory story.  No longer is it a weird or auxiliary universe, or anything to do with a backup state on a divine computer.  It's not a side universe, so the name Metacontinuity no longer made sense for us.  Nor is it weird that people would move to another universe, as universes flowing back together is a normal (super)natural process.

Due to a series of improbable events, the normal way in which universes branch and merge back has been greatly disrupted, leading to a storm that cascades across the multiverse.  Our setting is a universe that just happened to be sitting in a low energy state.  And so other people and stories naturally fell into this energy minimum, which has managed to be safe among the gyre of instability that has been halting other timelines, one after another.  This little slice of the multiverse at the eye of the storm has come to be known as the Refuge.

And no, I didn't come up with the name.  My "best" suggestion turned out to be already taken by a cyberpunk porn game.  We've had the Refuge named for the better part of the week, and it feels comfy already, so I thought I'd go ahead and announce it.

Coming very soon is a document that will get much deeper into the setting and how it works together.  It's not a story, but an in-universe "Bacon Book" that I've written, so that we can stick a book in the hands of each displacee rather than explain everything.  It is really kind of a weird thing, since there's a whole chapter of things that everyone reading this already knows, since you live in a reality so similar to the Refuge.  But some in-universe people would really need to know it, so I couldn't leave it out.  A book written for theoretical readers, not actual readers.  I'm insane, I know.