Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by PTTG

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.

If they just duplicate, as being undistinguisable, then there are no kids anymore and the youngest person in the world is about 20 years old.

[Astromancer]

Try a Broken Story world, in The Incredible Umbrella the protagonist travels to a universe based on rough drafts and rejected plotlines and revisions. The stories aren't completed or worked out but the characters still try to live out their busted distorted stories.

[PTTG]

A twisted form of Itertia rules Abiographica. Historical figures live lives largely similar to their pre-ordained Homeline ones, but totally unhooked in time and order. A young Winston Churchill is presently alive, as is Razia Sultana, the President of India. In contrast, Elon Musk was an ancient astronomer and merchant.

Homeline wants some answers, and believes they can learn about the (presumable) intelligence that created this odd world by seeing what it considers important parts of someone's biography, and what parts can change to fit the time the person is born in.

The present year is 2005, and nobody born after that year in Homline history was sent into the past, though new historical figures keep being born.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by PTTG

The present year is 2005, and nobody born before that year was sent into the past, though new historical figures keep being born.

Do you mean "after that year"?

[PTTG]

Bit of a typo there. All the shuffled historical figures were born between ~1000CE and 2005CE.

Of course, for real-world reasons, that's because we don't know who's going to become a historical figure going forward, but to homeline it's just another part of the mystery.

[PTTG]

Necco is strictly speaking designated Simmel-1, but everyone calls it Necco for the bizzare nature of its local economy. The world apparently diverged in 1847, but probably changed some time long before that.

With the invention and distribution of Hub Wafers to Union troops in the civil war, a kind of black market emerged. The coinlike shape and lightness, combined with a lack of other hard-wearing sweets, resulted in soldiers trading the candies for other commodities.

By the war's end, the trend had caught on in the civilian world, and the by-then named Necco Wafers took on a status as an auxiliary currency. In the 1920s, the monetary collapse lead to the more widespread adoption of the edible coinage. The trend inexplicably extended around the world, with countries adopting edible currency for a number of reasons.

Due to the quick degradation of such materials, money does not last very long. Everyone has a story about a child eating a week's wages in one sitting, or a spilled glass of water melting it into a sticky mess. Most people keep their money in an account until it's needed, at which point it's disbursed in confectionary form long enough to last the day, then returned.

Perhaps the currency's global acceptance may have something to do with this enforced, closed-loop banking practice. Yet that doesn't explain why, in the present year of 1959, banking organizations around the world are attempting to manufacture a charge or credit card printed on a chocolate bar. Perhaps, now, people only accept currency in relation to how edible it is?

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Captain Caveman

Astronomy fixes the date at 15,504 BCE (Mesolithic Age, during the Oldest Dryas Stadial). The weather is very very cold, megafauna still wander the world. Cro-Magnon and Homo Sapiens compete, the first wars are being fought with stone and wood.

But there are ... differences.

This "caveman world" is also a world of what are commonly known as "Charles Atlas Superpowers", specifically cinematic martial arts. Spiritual magic also exists.

Tribes and clans are built around venerable masters who teach the secrets of martial arts and ki manipulation to their select champions. The least caveman knows arts equal to Judo and Karate. Tribal and clan champions are leaping over mammoths, shattering boulders with their bare fists, and hurling firey bursts of roaring willpower at each other.

Shamans can see the future and can empower themselves with spirits. They usually use martial arts styles based on animals. Some help their fellow man, others give in to dark temptations and turn on humanity.

Some animals somehow get ki-powers or shamanic empowerment, becoming monsters. These tend to endanger the small human communities. Those with powerful martial artists and shamans are more likely to survive.

The societies that have evolved are dissimilar to the ones that archaeologists have deduced existed on Homeline. Sociologists are curious as to how the societes will evolve with superhuman abilities being a factor in survival. Even whether higher civilizations can evolve is a hotly debated question.

[Tom Mazanec]

How about a parallel where, about the time Van Zandt started his first experiments, tiny reality quakes (about a city block) start occurring several times a day randomly over the surface of the planet. The area is exchanged with the corresponding area of an alternate timeline at the date of the occurrence. So far no "weird" worlds have been dumped into the parallel, just ones that might plausibly have occurred by a butterflied history. The transportees are not coming from the known timelines...even when a history seems to match that of Homeline, Centrum, Shikaku-Mon, etc. there are not missing persons on that timeline.
The PoDs are all over the place...half are historical, half are from prehistory. Different species are being dumped into the parallel, and a few have enough population to reproduce and become invasive.
The first few people to be dumped into this TL were misdiagnosed as fugue amnesia, but they figured out after a year or so what was going on. After a coronavirus pandemic from one transportee the TL began quarantining arrivals. The reality quake is accompanied by a pulse of radio and microwave energy that can be detected by satellite and ground receivers. They have started a major R&D program in parachronics. It is currently 2003.
I imagine Homeline gets scared by this Q5 TL and about them getting the Secret.
Any other considerations? What would be a good nickname?

[Flyndaran]

Doomed? Because if anything like that happened without warning or understanding, the entire world would panic. Death cults and riots, and last hurrah wars would pop up everywhere.
It's not like you can just retreat into bomb shelters if existence itself appears to be unraveling.

Even if it's minor enough to not cause such a disaster, at the very least you could get loads of conspiracists pushing that there is no such thing as the Mandela effect. Everyone with memories that don't agree with consensus are lost travelers.
Home liners could see posters in every major city advertising support groups and therapists to help them find others from their reality.

Edit: As to name, I suppose just Mandela is an over used choice. What is evocative of a collection of reality chaff or random collection of similar items?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Edit: As to name, I suppose just Mandela is an over used choice. What is evocative of a collection of reality chaff or random collection of similar items?

Do you perhaps mean "mandala"? Any connection to the former President of South Africa is eluding me.

As to your random collection that's a hodgepodge or soem word like that.