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Old 09-03-2017, 07:50 AM   #411
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
He went pure dichotomy, either 100% real or 100% fiction for everyone ever? That's odd to say the least.

But making some people real here fictional in parallels would be interesting. I've only ever seen it the other way around.
What changes? That's the important part. Debates about what is "really real" are usually pointless philosophical ones. Show me the operational differences.

The extreme endpoint after all is "Last Tuesdayism". You can't get much more mythical than absolutely everything older than last week isn't "real" because that's when the universe began, and yet nobody can come up with a way to prove or refute that - it's *defined* to be utterly inconsequential.
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Old 09-03-2017, 11:10 AM   #412
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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So for a brief while in parts of the 19th and early 20th century, there were US presidents, but after that they became mythical again? I like it.
And the co-star of Way of the Dragon changed after the "Chuck Norris facts" myth started.

I think we're looking at a worldline that's subjected to frequent low-power reality quakes.
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Old 09-03-2017, 01:49 PM   #413
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Definitely a dangerous world for anyone with powers or exceptional competence as they could easily be mythologized and fictionalized out of existence.
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Old 09-03-2017, 03:40 PM   #414
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Definitely a dangerous world for anyone with powers or exceptional competence as they could easily be mythologized and fictionalized out of existence.
I don't think reality quakes destroy people. The way I see them they transform and move things. If you were made mythical you'd probably be bounced into some kind of mythical realm of existence or another place that could accomodate you.
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Old 09-03-2017, 05:44 PM   #415
Not another shrubbery
 
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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I don't think reality quakes destroy people. The way I see them they transform and move things. If you were made mythical you'd probably be bounced into some kind of mythical realm of existence or another place that could accomodate you.
They don't have to, although I've always figured them to be unhealthy to be around. Canonically, that's one of the things that Temporal Inertia is supposed to help guard against in the IW setting.
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Old 09-03-2017, 06:47 PM   #416
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

With magical fictional forces, there are no universal "musts".
But it's strange for me to imagine reality itself breaking and changing fundamentally yet cause fewer deaths and injuries than earthquakes or any other natural disaster.
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Old 09-03-2017, 07:08 PM   #417
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

Sometimes what are really just Myth parallels have been listed as "weird" bit it's probably not good terminology.

For example, a world where an undercover policeman named Sonny Crockett is maintaining a persona of a drug dealer known as Sonny Burnett in Miami it's just a Myth parallel.

However, when you find a world where Sonny Burnett is completely real and Sonny Crockett provably never existed that's _weird_.

Named Undercover-1 as several other double fictional persons have been encountered (amid the flying bullets) this is the timeline that added "secure access to large databases of faces" to the check list for early penetration missions. If you start running Homeline actors against them you never know what you'll find.
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Old 09-03-2017, 08:45 PM   #418
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Larson timelines are noted for the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. Surely some were created by banestorms, but a few seem to be stable enough to rule that out, suggesting that a very different evolutionary process occurred.

(I have a feeling the designation as been used elsewhere, but a quick search didn't find anything of note. Seemed appropriate to me.)

Larson-1 is the template worldline of this type, and one of the less-implausible variants. Some dinosaur species survived on the land masses that would become the Americas, but died out in the Africa-Eurasia area, leaving humans to evolve undisturbed. Around 150,000 years ago, the neosaurs began migrating into the rest of the world once more.

Current era is roughly 200 BCE, but the global TL is approximately 1 because of millennia of low human population due to many carnivorous new megafauna. These neosaurs have resplendent feathers and the large ones have exceptionally sophisticated behavior. They may resemble known dinosaur species closely, but they do have notable differences caused by millions of years of evolution.

Larson-2 is rather different. Its exact date cannot be determined, as astronomical data is conflicting. The fauna comes from practically any era of Earth's history... although in some cases mangled by misinterpretation. The dinosaurs here have thick, scaly hides in a wide spectrum of colors. The humans wear crude togas fashioned from animal pelts, and they have a language entirely made of inarticulate grunts. Their technology, however, is a curious TL 0+?, with many specific gadgets replaced by strangely specific domesticated animals, but not effectively any better than TL7 at the best.

Larson-3 is in the late Maastrichtian age of the Cretaceous period. It is approximately 66My before the present, which puts it exceedingly close to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event; however, if that event is 5 years, 500 years, or 500,000 from now is anyone's guess. The worldline is (or rather, was) believed to be a historical echo of homeline, with species matching paleological science as closely as one would expect the original research to be accurate. The humans present in this worldline are all victims of what appears to be a crosstime scheme selling itself as an elaborate amusement park. The amusement park grounds were built here, and portals erected in a dozen or so worlds (a parking-lot shuttle service being the means of assorting visitors back to their proper worldlines). When the portals shut down unexpectedly on a labor day weekend, over 100,000 visitors were trapped in the park.

The population very rapidly started exploring the world outside the park and today, 50 years later, some 150,000 people live on the tropical coast of Western North America. They come from about a dozen different near-echoes from between 1970 and 2020 (no sign of parachronic tech, but otherwise homeline-like). They were apparently told that some "guests" were actually actors pretending to be from different times, in order to "increase immersion of the time-travel experience."

The park was suspiciously well-stocked with supplies (tools and food, mainly), and even more suspiciously a disproportionate number of guests were doctors, engineers, and technicians thanks to an allegedly random sweepstakes. Nobody, not even the workers trapped inside the park, know why this is, but it did allow a less-traumatic transition than might be expected. The settlement is a mixed TL 4 or 5, with a large number of TL 8 tools and gadgets from the park, although these are wearing down by now and they don't yet have a means to replace them. Some are afraid that they'll end up not much better than cavemen themselves, eventually. They did eventually discover that the other guests were from varying times, but that has actually reinforced the idea that this is some kind of time-travel setup, rather than an alternate dimension.

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Old 09-03-2017, 09:55 PM   #419
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The population very rapidly started exploring the world outside the park and today, 50 years later, some 150,000 people live on tropical coast of Western North America. They come from about a dozen different near-echoes from between 1970 and 2020 (no sign of parachronic tech, but otherwise homeline-like). They were apparently told that some "guests" were actually actors pretending to be from different times, in order to "increase immersion in the time-travel experience."
This one is pretty interesting, but I think the chronology may need a little tweaking. People coming from 1970 to 2020 echoes 50 years ago would be from local dates 1920 to 1970. The early end of that is probably too early for theme parks, and all of it is too early for TL *8* stuff at the park to have fit in. Of course you could tell everybody it was stuff from the future and still pretend to be time travelers, but the victims aren't going to be well equipped to use or maintain it.

Note the implications for the secret here aren't just limited to this line and somebody unknown with parachronic technology 50 years ago, but also that there is a band of former echoes out there that were pushed into divergence somewhat before that when the "time travelers" started openly flashing around "future" and "time-travel" technology in California. It's actually quite unlikely they could have carried that off without *any* of the versions of the US intelligence services stealing at least something parachronic from them, and they've had 50 years to reverse engineer it....
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Old 09-03-2017, 10:24 PM   #420
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Default Re: Catalog of the Weird Parallels

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Larson timelines are noted for the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. Surely some were created by banestorms, but a few seem to be stable enough to rule that out, suggesting that a very different evolutionary process occurred.

(I have a feeling the designation as been used elsewhere, but a quick search didn't find anything of note. Seemed appropriate to me.)
Well, the main problem I have is that Burroughs is the designation used for this kind of timeline, I think.
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