Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain

According to Wikipedia, kaku is a measure of volume, not time.

I think this is what is being referred to. This is complicated by the unstable length of the hour, and moves immortality resorts to the poles (because it will never be just before noon/midnight.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Goddess-1

Goddess-1 is a Q3 parallel where every goddess of every religion from Homeline exists (gods do not exist, though goddesses are capable of giving their consorts godly powers). Normally, Infinity would have just erased the coordinates when they discovered the timeline five years ago, but the goddesses captured their agents before they realized that goddesses were real in the timeline. Since then, Infinity has had to deal with bored goddesses appearing across Q3, Q4, and Q5.

Unlike the deities of other timelines, the goddesses of Goddess-1 seem fully functional outside of their native timeline and are not dependent on mana or worship. Infinity has established a Division of Divine Diplomacy to deal with any divine tourists. The standard tactics is to give them gifts and to praise them until they get bored with the adoration and wander back home. Attacking the goddesses have proven to be a bad idea, as they are capable of turning humans into horrid abominations with a thought or, even worse, turn them into adoring worshippers with a frown.

Considering that there is good evidence that the Jewish God had a wife named Asherah, that could get awkward real fast.

Oh, Tiamat of Babylonian mythology views on her D&D counterpart could be a problem.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

I can't get over the vision of a Dark Lord with the powers of Bugs Bunny! The Horror, the Horror, and do you have enough carrots?

Be wery wery quiet...I am trying to hide from the crazy dark lord. ;-)

[maximara]

Reich-D

At first glance Reich-D, in Q3, looked like just another Nazis in the 1930s reality but then it was found it is missing the anti-Semitism normally found with the ideology.

Seems Hitler had a 1918 vision that altered his views on Social Darwinism and Jews. He, and his Nazi party, see each race as being evolved to best suited its original environment with the Jewish people being viewed as a kind of tabula rasa they can shape any way they want.

Note these Nazis are as into eliminating "undesirables" as their anti-Semitic counterparts. People with birth defects or mental issues are either sterilized or killed and all races are "encouraged" to go into certain fields as is the desire to "maintain the strengths of the race" (race mixing is strongly discouraged). Homosexually and Communism are ruthlessly "dealt with".

Homeline has named this Darwinian Nazism and really doesn't know what to make of it. From everything they know it simply shouldn't exist as anti-Semitism and enslavement/purging of the lesser races are supposed to be key cornerstones of the Nazi ideology.

The reality seemed to otherwise following Homeline's history...until Reich-5 showed up local time 1938. The meeting between the two forms of Nazism went as well as could be expected with Reich-5 and Reich-D viewing the other as a total abomination that must be purged from reality.

Reich-D Hitler has used the fear of Reich-5 to encourage any country willing to listen (which has turned out to be a lot) to arm for war either to defend themselves or take out the "cancer" that is Reich-5.

[PTTG]

In Specter worldlines, previously crude and unscientific approaches to communicating with the dead are refined into functional, reliable and widespread methods.

Specter-1 found a way to allow sensitive electromagnetic sensors and powerful computers to pick up ectoplasmic phenomenon in 1988. The Necrotronic revolution had a wide variety of effects. The current year is 2002.

First, a general look at digital necromancy, or as it is also called, "cyber-spectronics." In these worldlines (but not all,) human neural activity leaves a worn image that persists after death. It is a kind of self-perpetuating hologram, and as a result does not have measurable mass, but is capable of interacting with photons and matter in the region where the deceased person spent the most time. The physical death of the person "decouples" the hologram, allowing it to operate independently. This hologram is the functional core of the ghost.

However, these holograms are almost never energized enough to do anything -- even to think. An activated, or "manifested" spirit has several potential energy levels, all the way from the low end wisp (which is invisible, barely conscious, and may produce a faint glow), all the way up to revenants, which are fully physical copies of the spirit's original form projected by the ghost. Notably, it takes a great deal of energy and effort to speak audibly, let alone to manifest coherent images and forces.

"Natural" manifestations were exceedingly brief, and only few humans have been known to produce enduring, long-lasting ghosts; there have been only a few dozen documented cases in recorded history. In nature, most ghosts dissipate over time without interaction.

Perhaps the most complicated consequence of the development was in law enforcement. Laws were not written with Necrotronics in mind, (this being a high-inertia worldline,) so people have had to interpret the laws creatively. For instance, it is illegal to compel someone to provide evidence. Thus, manifesting the spirit of the deceased cannot be reliant on that spirit providing evidence for a crime.

Ghosts are bound to the locations where they lived, but they have no mass. Experiments involving volunteers have set out to bind a ghost to a small workspace that would then be converted into a rocket payload. Ghosts do not age (they are as they perceive themselves,) nor do they need life support. Others are looking for ways to employ ghosts to provide labor, such as performing small tasks in hostile environments, or non-physical work like programming or writing.

Specter-2 saw the revolution emerge with the dawn of Radio.
Specter-3 is several centuries in after discovering ghosts in the Enlightenment (it seems mana-based here).
Specter-4 has yet to uncover the technology, but it has the same phenomenon. 2016.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by johndallman

"Local time" is a slippery concept. Time zone boundaries are a human invention. Does the effect follow them, or does it work by the position of the sun?

Didn't really think about it for that blurb, but I'd say position of the sun, but with strictly defined bands that work out to be roughly comparable to the timezones we use. That is, you can cross from an area where the band sets things at 4:00 into one where it is 5:00 by traveling east, and you aren't considered to have passed through 4:44 at any point in-between.

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

Hmmm ...

A rich dude's medical busness would be large airplanes that circle the Earth in under 24 hours, thus making the sickly and/or elderly passengers practically immortal.

(And fighter-plane rental services all along the flight route for the radical Distributist market.)

Because of the way the barriers between timezones work, you don't even need fast airplanes - find where the divide occurs, and build your clinic in the middle. Starting at 4:00 (on the eastern side), wheel your patients from the western side of the building to the eastern, wait until 6:00 (on the eastern side), then wheel them back over. They'll eventually be so old their bodies will go completely comatose (if their brains aren't already essentially mush), but they'll never actually die unless you fail to send them east soon enough.

Originally Posted by malloyd

And if it's Japanese, why does it use western hours and not traditional koku? Japan didn't adopt hours until the end of the 19th century.

I assumed traditional Japanese time wouldn't quite have the sort of divisions that lead themselves to a time like 4:44, and after reading some about it, I'm glad I went where I did. Seriously, hours lasted longer or shorter depending on the season and if you were measuring daytime or nighttime. And which 4 o'clock would I use - Snake, in the middle of the day, or Pig, in the middle of the night?

[AlexanderHowl]

Eros-1

The Eros timelines refer to any time line where human sexuality produces weird effects. Of all of these though, Eros-1 is considered to be the strangest and the most dangerous for a number of reasons. Despite being a TL1 timeline with a population of only 100 million humans (local year is 2000 BC), Infinity bans travel to and from Eros-1 because of the dangers associated with having sexual relations with the natives.

In Eros-1, consensual sex causes an exchange of one CP of positive traits between partners with every sexual episode while nonconsensual sex causes a transfer of 10 CP from the victimizer to the victim per sexual episode (the victimizer can acquire 10 CP of negative traits, such as -1 ST, in order to give the victim 10 CP and killing the victim does not prevent the tranfer). In addition to exchanging (or transfering) CP, sex generates 10 points of magical energy between consenting partners (with victims of nonconsensual sex receiving 100 points of magical energy). The natives of Eros-1 use the magical energy produced by sex to fuel their form of symbol magic, which does not depend on mana and, much to the worry of Infinity, functions in timelines without mana, as it seems to use sexual energy to bend reality.

Eros-1 would be worrying enough, but the natives of Eros-1 retain the peculiar sexual properties of their home outside of their timeline. When Infinity finds kidnapped natives on Homeline, they usually have to sedate a traumatized superhuman who killed the people who enslaved and violated them. Infinity usually returns them to Eros-1, where they have began to form a group that hunts down outtimer slavers that seek to prey on the natives of Eros-1 (Infinity occasionally finds them on other timelines, as their symbol magic allows them to travel between timelines).

[PTTG]

Why would a slaver want an Eros-1 native? They have a lot of other options...

[AlexanderHowl]

Slavers go wherever they can pick up attractive people. Low TL timelines are probably preferred, as they lack the means to defend themselves. Timelines where Infinity does not maintain a presence are also probably preferred because it reduces the potential of detection. Even if the slavers know the risks associated with Eros-1, they just have to not take sexual advantage of the captured natives to avoid suffering the consequences (the natives would also serve as an exotic form of assassination, as giving a native to someone who would abuse them would probably result in the death of the victimizer).

[Ottriman]

Stabilizer-1

A peculiar kind of superscience was invented by the end to the 19th century, those being stabilizers. This technology allowed interactions between particles to be "made stable" such that change at the particle/atomic/molecular level was halted. This led to the exotic matter revolution of the 20th century, and currently as of 2012 most technologies use it in some way.

This ranges from creating "stable" exotic particles that would decay or annihilate far too quickly in OTL (such as Muons, Antimatter and Tau particles) and using them in exotic compounds or as super fuels. For example they store the excess from their renewable energy grid as stabilized antimatter, which can be stored in normal containers without annihilating.

In order to get the unstable materials to fall apart again, they run the process in reverse. For example instead of nukes they have antimatter missiles with de-stabilizing equipment on-board for when an explosion is needed.

As some general rules of thumb on what it can and cannot do.

1. It can prevent particle decay
2. It can prevent particle-antiparticle annihilation
3. It can prevent radioactive decay
4. It cannot stop chemical reactions
5. It cannot stop nuclear fusion
6. It cannot stop the effects of conventional forces such as heat or kinetic energy from having an effect on the substance