[OOC][PLOT] Galaxy Building (Where we make Magrathea look like small potatoes)

[Rajvik]

Alright, who the hell loaded Windows Vista onto the multidimensional mainframe?

PFFFFTTT!!!!  

Supercomputer, not Mainframe. (Those being two different things is one thing that ReBoot got right.)

Mainframes run consumer-grade operating systems all the time...

I know the difference, I just figured being alliterative would make it funnier

[Norgarth]

A passing though for when you start to expand out past Earth.

I had stuck SG-1 and Co in my (NPC) building partly because I figured they were popular and it would keep them available for use without needing the active Managers to worry about what they're doing at any given time. But this past day it occurred to me, Baal is smart enough to join forces with Salem (and unlike the majority of his fellow Goa'Uld his Ego isn't planet sized)

[Bob Schroeck]

Plus imagine how threatened and panicked the Goa'uld would be by real gods, whose power makes them look like the posers they are.

[Norgarth]

Plus imagine how threatened and panicked the Goa'uld would be by real gods, whose power makes them look like the posers they are.

*nods* admittedly, a lot of them would lash out at the 'imposters' and 'intruders' suddenly claiming chunks of 'their galaxy' resulting in quite a few being defeated/killed, weakened, or simply tied up in a war that wasn't as short as the Goa'uld expected. 

But Baal is smart/sane enough to look before he leaps, check out a potential opponent's strengths and weaknesses, to see if it's worth the effort to crush them, more trouble than it's worth, or a potential ally.

[robkelk]

Now that we have a calendar, does anybody want to work on a map? I spent much of the weekend pulling all the named locations onto one list - all it's missing is the off-Earth locations planned for Arc 2. I think.

I just realized that I put the firebenders "somewhere" in South Korea... but the original post only said "Korea". And they were the not-so-nice empire in Avatar... so should we put them in North Korea instead, and let them work for the government there?

we do need some recurring antagonists, after all.

[Black Aeronaut]

.......  Ozai would take over and, after learning about all the technology available, begin to apply fire bending wherever he can to improve things.

And then go a-conquering.  And no one would see it coming because he would keep it all quiet.  We wouldn't even know that there were firebenders in North Korea, let alone goddamned Fire Lord Ozai.

[robkelk]

Re-reading the thread, and noticed this:

In short, we'd have to see about moving off of Earth VERY prematurely.  This isn't one of those things I take lightly.  This is the point where if I were a DM, I would look over my blind at everyone and ask, "Are you guys sure you REALLY want to do this?"

If that's how we're running this plot thread, then I'd much rather wait until Moonbase Alpha has shown up and an arrangement has been made between Koenig and Usagi - that gives the Blossom residents someplace to run to, instead of simply running from the political mess.

Well, I did say this was deconstruction.  And from what I've seen of the current White House Administration?  Having all of our characters arrested sounds perfectly in-character for them.

The displacees at 7 Henrietta Street, Blossom, Piffle, Club Lofts, Appartements Mont-Royal Sud, and the place in Nova Scotia don't need to worry about being arrested for illegal immigration to the USA. They're in Ireland and Canada. The USA can't touch them for that.

So... the folks in the USA do have places to run to that aren't in orbit. It'll be crowded, though... until we do something like this

[robkelk]

Some of them just manage to continue what they were doing unnoticed, because they were minor enough to have the Metacontinuity just change around them.  The cases I've used or will use so far:

...
* The Dude has found an L.A. bowling alley, and hasn't even noticed changing into another universe
...

Quoting from ATT's page for Principia Discordia: "According to the Principia, Eris first made herself apparent to Malaclypse and Omar in... a long-since-defunct bowling alley in Whittier, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles (and given the years in which it was written, not coincidentally the home town of Richard Nixon)."

Just saying.

I'm tempted to nominate my friend David for an apartment house in Amsterdam, but I'd have to ask him.

Did you think to ask in the last couple of years?

[robkelk]

I'm tempted to nominate my friend David for an apartment house in Amsterdam, but I'd have to ask him.

Did you think to ask in the last couple of years?

Bump.

[robkelk]

Back to the cosmology planning. I suspect this is an Arc 3 thing.

My current notes have the Crystal Millennium staffing three or four embassies by 2027, a decade after the nation on the Moon was formed. All locations were pulled out of Wikipedia's lists of which fictional worlds are orbiting which real life stars, because that seemed to me to be the best way to decide where worlds were dropped into the Metacontinuity.

I don't expect any pushback on the first one, since it's something we agreed to ages ago:
* 40 Eridani A/Vulcan

The second and third are more nebulous, but I think they're do-able (with some logistics issues for the latter one)... unless somebody objects:
* Chi Draconis/Minbar
* Lambda Scorpii/Cybertron

This last one, though... somebody convince me that it's a good idea and I should keep it on the list, or tell me I'm being an idiot for thinking of including them in the Metacontinuity, please:
* 61 Ursae Majoris/Kzin

[Norgarth]

Not every race that gets 'imported' is gonna be nice/peaceful. I think the Kzinti might be a good addition

granted, I don't recall reading any of those stories so I don't really know how bad they are. I mostly know them due to 'the Kzinti lesson'

[Dartz]

There's always the Coalition of Governance.

[robkelk]

Well yeah I speed read a lot.  But what you wrote there isn't relevant to my point, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at.

I feel like by the nature of the story being a Metacontinuity, we're able to break continuity in a lot of ways.  But the initial event that created the Metacontinuity shouldn't be subject to this fuzzyness.  I mean, okay, it can be a unicorn in the garden.  I'm just trying to reconcile these facts:

Define U as the set of universes that appear in the metacontinuity.

1) The event that caused all of this to happen was Washuu hacking into Yggdrasil.
   A) Implication: Washuu can connect to divine power
B) Implication: Washuu didn't fully understand the operation of the System
2) Damage to Yggdrasil caused all of the universes to be moved into a dump file
   C) Implication: Yggdrasil represents the source of truth for U
   D) Implication: Yggdrasil maintains spacetime for U
3) Belldandy and her sisters operate Yggdrasil on behalf of Heaven
   E) Implication: given C or D, the Norns are responsible for maintaining U
   F) Implication: The Norns are lesser powers than Heaven
4) Heaven and Hell bear responsibility for protecting the Metacontinuity
   G) Implication: Also given E, Heaven represents powers which control and maintain U
5) Belldandy was able to place power limiters on Washuu without her knowing it
  H) Implication: Belldandy is more powerful than Washuu.
6) Tenchi Muyo's universe (TMU) is a member of U
  I) Implication: TMU was maintained by Yggdrasil
7) The Choushin created TMU, and existed outside it across the 8th dimension
  J) Implication: Given I, the Choushin were aware of Heaven
8) Washuu and her sisters (the Choushin) were unaware of any powers greater than they prior to meeting Kami-Tenchi
  K) Implication: Given J, Heaven is less powerful than the Choushin
  L) K contradicts H, given F

So either the 'verse is inconsistent, or I've made the wrong implications.  I think there's something to be said about maybe I'm looking at it wrongly for power levels (above 9000, metering doesn't work).  Maybe it's more of a Brahma/Vishnu situation where creation and maintenance are split.  Except Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva feel like yet another incarnation of The Three, and the Norns are already not that under F.

Ugh, no wonder this was hard to explain, now that I've written it out.  I'm not really looking for answers now.  The MST3K mantra is also an acceptable answer, really.

Given that in A Certain Magical Index light-novel canon, a Level 0 (Shiage Hamazura) can defeat a Level 5 (Meltdowner), your assumption H might not necessarily be valid. Belldandy just had a good day against Washuu, is all.

[Norgarth]

possible thought in regards to 5: Washu's greater self did notice Belldandy applying the limiters and approved/allowed it, preventing her Avatar from noticing

[Bob Schroeck]

Good point. Washuu =/= the Choushin incarnated into her, similar to the difference between the True Gods and their expressions in any particular universe in Drunkard's Walk.

[Black Aeronaut]

Erm... Actually, she pretty much is?

No. Seriously. She is the full-blown incarnation of the Choushin. It just doesn't seem that way, though, because her power is all stored in those three gemstones which were on Yosho's Master Key. This was because she did not want any chance at all that her semi-god-like overself hanging around would skew the results of her research. That being, "Do actual Gods exist?"

It's also important to remember that while the Choushin are very powerful indeed, they're still a step or two from being actual gods.

Tenchi-sama, on the other hand....

[Norgarth]

okay, then if she currently has 90%+ of her power packed away unavailable to her, doesn't that in itself enable #5? If Washu has reduced herself to mortal status, it shouldn't be hard for Belldandy to place the limiters.

[Black Aeronaut]

Part of the problem is that the original write-up where I dropped that tidbit about Washu being a goddess and having her power sealed by the Megami was over ten years old.

Besides, the whole thing is moot for the most part now because, in order to have things actually make sense (at least, as much as they could), we kinda retconned it so that what happened was a test for a new piece of software to back up the multiverse....

..... Didn't work as planned.

(Simply put, the UI that showed that "Test Mode" was enabled did not actually flip that particular bit from 0 to 1.  What happened next was the metaphorical equivalent of a backup program trying to write an entire server rack's worth of hard drives into a single partition.  The partition in this case being the Metacontinuity.)

[Labster]

I don’t even remember writing that long thing. Maybe I just stopped worrying and embraced the chaos. Maybe divine stuff doesn’t even make sense to mortals, who are constrained by time, and thus a certain interpretation of cause and effect.