<Snipped quote by Kierkegaard>
I didn't even know the town of Wilno existed until yesterday.
Next time I take a history course I'll study for the final by making an RP about it.
Next up: Warlord era China
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Next time I take a history course I'll study for the final by making an RP about it.
Next up: Warlord era China
<Snipped quote by Kierkegaard>
I'm always amazed by just how much you can learn thanks to writing.
The amount of stuff I've learned about World War II and physics in the last three days far eclipses what I learned in high school
upon discovery that not only is Klaus Eichmann a real person, he is the son of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and virulently anti-Semitic, it has been decided that Klaus will be renamed Klaus Foerster.
Aaron does not disappoint. Hilarious.
two relevant plot things:
- I think it's cool that not all of, or even the majority of, our characters are opposed to the Nazis to start out with. That'll probably change once the Nazis start shooting at them, but there's a lot of room for character development here and that'll be fun.
- @Obscene Symphony Aaron and Klaus are probably good friends because a) it makes things convenient plotwise and b) they've both been at Humboldt for forever, so it's plausible. thoughts?
two relevant plot things:
- I think it's cool that not all of, or even the majority of, our characters are opposed to the Nazis to start out with. That'll probably change once the Nazis start shooting at them, but there's a lot of room for character development here and that'll be fun.
- @Obscene Symphony Aaron and Klaus are probably good friends because a) it makes things convenient plotwise and b) they've both been at Humboldt for forever, so it's plausible. thoughts?
Loose ideas for an initial arc:
- Sometime in the near future an SS officer will approach Klaus about the offensive applications of the Zauber Project. Klaus, recalling Ros's unease from lunch, will question his role as a bystander/enabler in the Third Reich and be uncooperative.
- Sometime in the near future the SS will launch a raid on the basement laboratory to seize their lab notes and the canister. Klaus and the newly defected Ros will grab shit and run. Aaron and Jozef are welcome to come along/aid in the escape efforts. Up to you.
- Our scientists + SS defector go into hiding with a canister with a mini black hole in it. Inconspicuous. So very inconspicuous.
Insert hilarious training montage a la X-Men First Class where they learn to control their magical powers.
Loose ideas for a second arc:
- Our motley crew form or join a kind of underground resistance movement
- Tangentially relevant: now would be a good time to read up on the White Rose if you've never heard of them because I think they're cool as fuck.
- Jozef kills, or tries to kill, someone. Everyone applauds.
- Sometime in the near future an SS officer will approach Klaus about the offensive applications of the Zauber Project. Klaus, recalling Ros's unease from lunch, will question his role as a bystander/enabler in the Third Reich and be uncooperative.
- Sometime in the near future the SS will launch a raid on the basement laboratory to seize their lab notes and the canister. Klaus and the newly defected Ros will grab shit and run. Aaron and Jozef are welcome to come along/aid in the escape efforts. Up to you.
- Our scientists + SS defector go into hiding with a canister with a mini black hole in it. Inconspicuous. So very inconspicuous.
Insert hilarious training montage a la X-Men First Class where they learn to control their magical powers.
Loose ideas for a second arc:
- Our motley crew form or join a kind of underground resistance movement
- Tangentially relevant: now would be a good time to read up on the White Rose if you've never heard of them because I think they're cool as fuck.
- Jozef kills, or tries to kill, someone. Everyone applauds.
[quote=@Obscene Symphony]
Oh, I'm psyched for the wrongness. It makes for [i]wonderful[/i[ moral dilemmas and great backdrop to develop characters. I can't wait to explore this topic further!
Jeez, how does someone convey excitement over something so wrong without sounding like an absolute crap person? Heh.
[/quote]
i think about the depiction of evil and atrocities in fiction a lot, actually (take that as you will.) There's a good exchange between Roger Ebert and the guys who made the film "Chaos" that has some good reflections on the topic here: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/evil-in-film-to-what-end
ultimately, my thought is that it's important to talk about this stuff, because erasure makes it easier for atrocities to repeat themselves, and it's important to walk through the same moral paradigms and examine why people might have done the things they done. (Plus, better to do it through fiction than in a setting where real lives are affected.) That clearly doesn't mean becoming neo-Nazis or Hitler apologists, but it does mean examining monsters of the pasts as humans and not wholly unfathomable creatures.
might be getting in too deep here. Just my two cents, anyhow.
understatement.
It would be very interesting if he were the next table. That's definitely somewhere he'd want to be, if he wanted to get inside info on the SS agenda. Does he know Ros is spying on Klaus? No reason why we wouldn't, if he's a spy worth his salt.
By the way, just going to mention here- very impressed with the character. Great attention to detail and historical record, and again, the Witold Pilecki thing is just too cool. Cool magical ability, too- it's like magic has made him a wormhole where ordinary rules of time and space don't apply to objects.
One question- how much conscious control does he have over this? Could he, say, summon the canister with the dark hole at some point in the future?
One last thing- this may be obvious but this RP is a little more complex than most, and as such will be more like a collaborative writing project and less like a free-for-all adventure. I propose we discuss loose storylines here in the OOC before writing everything out. I have some ideas that I'll post in a second, but I'm hungry, so you'll have to wait a bit.
(In the meantime, if you have plot ideas, make yourself heard now.)
Oh, I'm psyched for the wrongness. It makes for [i]wonderful[/i[ moral dilemmas and great backdrop to develop characters. I can't wait to explore this topic further!
Jeez, how does someone convey excitement over something so wrong without sounding like an absolute crap person? Heh.
[/quote]
i think about the depiction of evil and atrocities in fiction a lot, actually (take that as you will.) There's a good exchange between Roger Ebert and the guys who made the film "Chaos" that has some good reflections on the topic here: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/evil-in-film-to-what-end
ultimately, my thought is that it's important to talk about this stuff, because erasure makes it easier for atrocities to repeat themselves, and it's important to walk through the same moral paradigms and examine why people might have done the things they done. (Plus, better to do it through fiction than in a setting where real lives are affected.) That clearly doesn't mean becoming neo-Nazis or Hitler apologists, but it does mean examining monsters of the pasts as humans and not wholly unfathomable creatures.
might be getting in too deep here. Just my two cents, anyhow.
It's okay
We're all as sickly excited for some insane character development as you, trust me. You're in good company.
understatement.
Wrongness is a wonderful thing.
<Snipped quote by Kierkegaard>
Yep. His name is explicitly mentioned in the background I just put up. He's a personal hero of mine, which is the main reason I decided to use his brother. I considered using Witold himself, but there's no way I can do that man justice.
By the way, if anyone is interested in talking to the asshat lab assistant, let me know. Because I doubt the asshat lab assistant is going to actively seek anyone out. Being perfectly honest, it would be quite interesting if he happened to be in the next table over from Ros and Klaus. While he probably has the common decency to not interrupt a date by talking about mass murder, there's definitely an opportunity for his magic to be revealed there.
It would be very interesting if he were the next table. That's definitely somewhere he'd want to be, if he wanted to get inside info on the SS agenda. Does he know Ros is spying on Klaus? No reason why we wouldn't, if he's a spy worth his salt.
By the way, just going to mention here- very impressed with the character. Great attention to detail and historical record, and again, the Witold Pilecki thing is just too cool. Cool magical ability, too- it's like magic has made him a wormhole where ordinary rules of time and space don't apply to objects.
One question- how much conscious control does he have over this? Could he, say, summon the canister with the dark hole at some point in the future?
One last thing- this may be obvious but this RP is a little more complex than most, and as such will be more like a collaborative writing project and less like a free-for-all adventure. I propose we discuss loose storylines here in the OOC before writing everything out. I have some ideas that I'll post in a second, but I'm hungry, so you'll have to wait a bit.
(In the meantime, if you have plot ideas, make yourself heard now.)
Just a note I discussed with Kierke, I know Josef Mengele didn't start his human experiments until 1943 but briefly working with him is a major point in Ros' view of everything so we decided there was no harm done in bending time and pretending he started his experiments in 1940
That, and we kind of threw historical accuracy out the window when we decided that, ya know, our characters had magical powers.
Also, Ros's scene with Mengele is horrifying. Well done, liebling.
Oh god, forgive the double post but the absolute casual wrongness in this RP is already getting to me. This is going to be a fantastic setting for what I have planned for my character.
I hope no one minds if I grab Mat for my post? I don't really see another option, haha.
I'm actually pretty excited for the "casual wrongness." WWII was full of moral quandaries and I'm hoping to explore a lot of those themes here- science vs ethics, duty vs conscience, sacrificing innocents to save many, etc etc.
Obviously I don't want to cross the line into justifying the Holocaust, but our characters will be acting in very difficult and hazy moral situations a lot of the time which should make for a really interesting RP.
And yeah, use Mat as you will.
Well would you look at that, we started.
We did indeed.
Looks like we have four or five, I'll keep this open for another day or two but I think we've got a good cast.
January 3, 1941
Berlin
Berlin
Humboldt University was quiet.
It had been quiet for years. Founded in 1810, Humboldt was once home to Germany’s greatest thinkers, doctors, philosophers, and legal scholars. It had once been a sprawling campus filled with undergraduates eager to take classes in arts and the humanities.
There had been no classes for a while.
A huge segment of the university- students, scholars, and anti-Nazi activists- had been ejected in 1933, followed by hundreds of Jewish professors and employees. Enrollment had all but stopped. The professors who remained did not teach. Humboldt could no longer truly be called a university, but rather a research center.
Down in the basement floor of the Peithman Physics Laboratory, Klaus Foerster stood hunched over a mass of papers in his office, tugging absently at his hair as he scrawled equations down.
For Klaus, the absence of students came as something of a relief. He’d never loved lecturing to auditoriums full of undergraduates, wherein students invariably fell asleep while he tried desperately to make theoretical physics seem interesting. Nor was he overly fond of grading exams, holding office hours, or interacting with students, really.
No- he much preferred the quiet of his lab. The entire basement floor the Peithman building had been sectioned off for Klaus and his research team- something that would have met considerably more resistance if half the physics department hadn’t been fired in 1933. Even so, Humboldt’s greatly reduced physics department was still formidable, and it was here that groundbreaking research was being done to aid the war effort.
Klaus scribbled happily away for another twenty minutes, then sat up abruptly. “Mat!” he yelled.
Mathis Auttenberg, research assistant and lab engineer, poked his head into Klaus’s office.
“How’s Adel?”
Mat shrugged. “She’s great. Little temperamental today, but you can give her a poke.”
The pride and joy of the laboratory was the artificial reactor, against which Klaus’s team had been attempting to sustain a slow-neutron chain reaction with uranium and graphite. It was a monster of a machine, occupying a good third of the underground lab. The team had affectionately named it Adelheid.
They’d been hoping to achieve a chain reaction of nuclear fission. They’d been expecting a chain reaction.
On July 31, 1940, they gave it a trial run.
Adelheid displayed the result. The reactor was now a safeguard for a large glass canister, inside was hosted something that appeared like a floating black sphere. Closer examination showed that it was not a sphere at all but some sort of hole, as if a tear had been ripped in the fabric of the room itself. By itself, the black hole didn’t do much, but anything that made it past the glass barrier and came too close was immediately absorbed, disappearing into nothingness.
This they knew well. Mat had lost a finger in February.
They’d learned to be careful. They’d erected barriers, donned protective equipment, and approached the sphere with painstaking caution. For all their efforts, the hole had affected them all- was still affecting them all. Mat had taken to bursting into flames at random intervals. Aaron, who worked in the medical lab next door, had a terrifying tendency to turn transparent. Klaus was involuntarily making things float, which was why every chair and table had been nailed down into the floor. Just last night he’d woken up to find himself floating a good three feet above his bed.
None of them knew what was happening to them; no one had a clue how to explain it. Somehow, it had never occurred to any of them to be afraid. It was just so damn interesting. The entire team, despite their recent baffling transformations, was acting like children who’d been given a new toy. Ironically enough, they’d labeled it magic. The Zauber Project, they called it. It was an inside joke of sorts, an acknowledgement within a circle of men devoted to the scientific method that they’d stumbled upon something that simply could not be explained with science.
They didn’t know what to do with the sphere, so their plan was to try everything. Their latest approach was to introduce a stream of various noble gases into the canister and measure the output.
“Alright, darling,” Klaus muttered as he rolled up his sleeves. Several canisters of gas were lined up on the counter, ready to be opened. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
~
Noon came and went. At half past one, Klaus glanced at the clock, nearly dropped his clipboard in panic, and hastily began putting away his lab equipment. He stopped briefly by the medical laboratory before he left, where Aaron and Mat appeared to be having a heated discussion about safety gloves.
“I’m heading out,” he told them.
“Meeting Ros?” Mat queried.
Klaus nodded.
“Still don’t believe she’s real,” Mat singsonged.
A flask erupted near Mat’s head as Klaus pulled out his coat, eliciting curses from behind the door. Klaus grinned as he climbed up the basement stairs and left the laboratory.
He’d been seeing Ros Wolff from the linguistics department for several months now, and in Klaus’s opinion, their relationship was even more inexplicable than the black hole contained in the basement laboratory. Ros was charming, lovely, the pinnacle of Aryan perfection. They’d first gone out for drinks the day Klaus and his team discovered the black hole, and in Klaus’s mind, the two incidents were equal in sheer improbability.
She was waiting at the Czech diner they were so fond of, mostly for its cheapness and proximity to campus. Klaus slid into the booth, apologizing profusely for his tardiness.
“Caught up in something at the lab- we’re doing something with gases, those are tricky if you don’t measure them carefully- cibulacka, side of bread,” he told the waiter without looking at the menu.
Ros knew next to nothing about what Klaus was actually studying, which was already more than what she was supposed to know, but Klaus was finding it harder and harder to keep the Zauber Project a secret from her. So far he’d managed to discuss his work in vague, inscrutable terms like “energy” and “radiation”, and it helped that Ros didn’t have a degree in science, but the involuntary telekinesis posed a larger problem. Klaus fervently hoped they’d answer the mystery of the black hole before Ros saw him floating in the air.
Klaus leaned back in his chair, tapping his fingers against the table. “You’re looking wan,” he observed suddenly, noticing Ros’s demeanor. “Something the matter?”
@Keyguyperson I'm sure the reference to Witold Pilecki was intentional, and I can't believe this is the first I've heard about this guy. Too cool.
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