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Old 09-17-2016, 11:31 AM   #1
PTTG
 
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Default Catalog of the Weird Parallels

I considered adding these to the venerable History Seeds thread, but they aren't really historic. Nor are they luciferian nor just general hells.

No. These are the weird ones. They're similar to the Lizardia simply because they don't make any damned sense at all. I'm putting a lot of narrative load onto reality quakes, Q-entities, assortive quantas, and waving my hands. That said, once the weird situation is established, things should remain fairly explicable; people will act like people unless otherwise established.

OK, here we go:

Chandler:
Current year 1998. Best guess is that a psionic shock wave from the collapse of a nearby worldline changed human culture in 1996; people barely even acknowledge the change. In this worldline, cannibalistic dominance challenges are accepted and respected. I.e., one may eat the heart of your superior to obtain his or her social status. Only a formal challenge and duel with short knives is acceptable, however; there is a range of responses to a formal, public challenge, and the duel itself may be delayed by up to a month by the superior, etc., etc.

In all other ways, the societal and geopolitical situation is identical to that of the late 1990s. Many bosses were decent enough that their underlings are quite happy working for them, and no two world leaders have dueled eachother in this way. The sitcoms, however, are surprising.


Duplicate:
Starting in 2001, every human being became sterile. However, people occasionally duplicate asexually during sleep. The effect is unpredictable, but works out to be a 2% chance of duplication per year, resulting in about the same growth rate as before. The resultant clones are totally indistinguishable. The present year of 2021 is mostly adapted, but is still struggling with the long-term consequences.


Invisible:
Human beings are completely invisible, including their attire and equipment. Would make a superb recruitment ground for spies and soldiers, if either side could operate there with any subtlety at all. It seems that the transition occurred in 987 CE, following an unusually intense aurora. Current year is a substantially changed 1450.


Scramble:
The earth's surface is broken into 2km x 2km squares (based on a quadrilateralized spherical cube map) and randomly shuffled in 2016. Most alarming is that this happened the exact same instant the first scouting party arrived! There's no way this could have been caused by our visit, right?

The atmosphere stayed in the same place, and the shuffling seems to have 1: surrounded anyplace on land that was below sea-level with a safe border wall of higher-elevation blocks, and 2: ensured that no two adjacent blocks were more than 200 meters different in altitude. Other than that, the mixing seems totally random.

All networking cables are, naturally, cut, as are all power supplies, etc., etc. Falling tree branches are a somewhat-serious hazard along the borders.

One last thing, no animals were directly harmed; they just ended up on the side of the line they were either mostly on. Vehicles, however, were, hmm... occasionally cut.

Last edited by PTTG; 02-15-2019 at 08:49 PM. Reason: Fixed a URL from three years ago, I guess.
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