Naril

The Sunday Group

Oh, Morgan is absolutely down to drive.

Did Eleanor want the deposit on those cars back?

When the Sky Broke... [OPEN WORLD SUPERHUMAN ROLEPLAY] [IC NOW OPEN, APPLICATIONS STILL OPEN]

Okay so...

Again, thanks for answering.

But here's the thing: you're saying these characters have gone from a society in which they had a lot (TV, cars, roads, showers whenever they wanted, inalienable rights) to a society in which they have virtually none of those things. They might be "making it for themselves," but now the world is one where they're at the level of feudal, lord-and-nation-state society.

The concept of fundamental rights almost cannot exist when there are power disparities like the ones here. For example, everyone needs water. There are no (or almost no) clean, naturally-occurring sources of fresh water, because the water table has been flooded with salt water, is inaccessible due collapsed wells, or whatever. Some person has the water, because they can turn sewage into potable water. Everyone needs the water. If the person with the water decides that the price of the water is...something unpleasant and autonomy-abrogating, you have to do that or you die because you don't have water. You can't get water from the outside world, because they'll kill you for asking. Considering that this world already presupposes violent gangs and a psychotically violent (or at least profoundly xenophobic and violent) entire nation, and that clean water is a valuable trade good, this is a recipe for Mad Max more than anything else. Please don't make me extrapolate out exactly how terrible being certain things are going to be here.

The reason I talk about living a modern life is because that's where these people came from, and they are aware, at every second, that they are being kept from it by threat of horrific death. Los Angeles didn't cease to exist, Gothenburg is a few hundred miles away. There's shitty daytime TV and Pepsi and podcasts and they can't have any of it. They aren't an enclave of equivalency being kept from another equivalent nation to keep both sides safe, they are being oppressed and isolated, affected by a treaty that stripped them of their right to travel, their right to communication, and their right to live without the constant threat of destruction from a force so hostile that their default position is state-sponsored murder.

That has to be part of the default narrative understanding. Writing to be content under that weight is fine, but carries the risk of introducing a profound initial narrative place of passivity. This isn't the gentle slide of one societal state to another, from villages to city-states to monarchs to democracies (or whatever), where change happens gradually and people are born into a societal assumption. This is the abrupt and complete alteration of social norms (especially for anyone living in reasonably-modern-Western-cultures). Contentment with that situation, rather than "ground-down resignation" is something that, to me, suggests "widespread mental alteration," possibly by something added to the drinking water. :P

I'm still working on a character, but she's going to be fairly adversarial to the status quo - at least partly because I, personally, would hate this situation with nearly every fiber of my being and would do if not anything, at least quite a lot to tear it down.

Finally, thanks, but I don't...like, I'm reasonably bright, but I just ask questions. :3

When the Sky Broke... [OPEN WORLD SUPERHUMAN ROLEPLAY] [IC NOW OPEN, APPLICATIONS STILL OPEN]

Heya! Thanks for replying! I, er, have more questions now, though.

- The coastline of Britain is almost 20,000 miles long. That rather makes me wonder how one being can be anything other than a retaliatory action, rather than a line of defense. Is the Chimera responsible for monitoring the coast? What power allows it to do that, or did The Order build some kind of sensing network? What if someone teleports away, or has gills and swims away?

- Regardless of the spectacular ability of the Rifters to alter their environment, there are very basic things that I'm not seeing. Being able to transmute sundered mud into asphalt and buildings is wonderful, of course. However, building a city is extraordinarily hard. Doctor Manhattan thought himself a gorgeous palace of glass on the surface of Mars, but when he brought his girlfriend there she immediately started to choke on the thin Martian atmosphere. While the palace was undoubtably a marvel, for all his vast intelligence, Manhattan had not considered that someone who was not not him would need air to breathe. While that's also for narrative weight (demonstrating that Manhattan was fundamnetally losing connection to humanity) it parallels nicely here - Manhattan's palace also had no chairs, no beds, no toilets. Is having a Fluid-Transmutation Rifter really preferable to a wastewater treatment plant? How long is that person (or people) going to want to be on the rota for making sure people don't get cholera? Having the ability to do extraordinary things is very cool, but harnessing that with plans, knowledge of how much weight a wall can take, how to build a pump, or what the minimum head pressure is to provide enough water for a shower is the absolutely necessary other half of the equation.

Being able to turn mud into steel and granite is wonderful, but without the engineering design to build a skyscraper, the architecture craft to make it beautiful, knowledge of electrical code to keep the lights on (not to mention the intricate understanding of how to build light bulbs), interior design to make sure people want to live there, and the thousand other disciplines that go into that one building but the galaxy of infrastructure to keep it livable, all you have is a bunch of people failing to stack one block of stone on top of another one. And even if there's a Rifter who's managed to keep the sum of all human knowledge in their head and does know how to do all of these things, what happens when they die? Furthermore, since the enclaves are separated, how is that knowledge transferred? Does each enclave have one of these people?

I guess the real question is this: Is the presupposition of this setting one where there are enough Rifters who know how to completely rebuild nations in each of the Rifter Enclaves? Are the Enclaves each supposed to be third-world countries and refugee camps? If you tell me "they're basically cities and it's fine get over it," I can probably manage that.

Right now, though, I admit I'm having a very hard time seeing past a lot of ugliness. "Making the best of things" when you don't have running water, and you did less than a decade ago, and you are being denied the expertise to build out running water (because of The Order's blockade and shoot-to-kill/release the murderous cannibal hunter-killer attitude at the border), is going to make for a situation that starts ugly and becomes uglier. I feel like you're positing a world where there weren't a lot of Rifters in the first place, who were given powers functionally at random and who are now cut off from the outside world. The land they have been "given" is a war-torn wasteland. Virtually all Rifters are going to have PTSD from a year-long war in which many of them seem to have been necessarily involved, and they are now separated into different enclaves, which are in turn under the threat of roving gangs and some of which border a nation-state where you are murdered and dismembered for straying over the border. And all of that is on top of the constant threat of The Order making a unilateral decision that the Rifters aren't worth the trouble and just turning the Chimera loose, nuking the place, or doing whatever their apparently-superior force is capable of. As written this is not a compromise or detente, it is the systematic oppression and isolation of one group by another, under the threat of unilateral, immediate, horrific and lethal action without trial or appeal. People aren't generally well-designed to sit under that kind of Sword of Damocles and be "happy." This is less Harry Potter-style "one world isolated from another" and more "dystopian extension of fundamental social inequality," and if that's the intention I feel like you might have to own that a bit more.

Again, if the fundamental baseline here is that the Rifters have made a basically-modern, basically-functional society because of staggering luck in having the right people (several copies of them really) who weren't killed in the war or left psychologically broken, fine. I personally find that extremely unlikely, but I'll go with it if that's the basic idea here. The reason I'm jumping up and down on this is that timeline as presented is such that these aren't people who were born into the Rifter's enclaves and haven't known anything else. The characters are going to be people who remember having Facebook and iPhones and convenience stores and therapists and gyms and trains and air travel and a nice view over the lake and the chip shop down the lane they liked and the cute barista who they never got up the courage to ask on a date. If these things have all been stripped away, that has a cost. If they have to live in a functional but basically feudal society (which it kind of sounds like - no electricity, no way to make clean water that isn't traders or having a lucky Rifter around, etc.) that also has a toll. If they are being denied the ability to live that modern life because of The Order's blockade (by implicit or explicit withholding of important knowledge or access to information - by refusing to allow an Internet connection and preventing the import of books and technical manuals, for example), that's the kind of thing that creates nothing-to-lose rebellions, and I'd really like to know what the assumption is here.

- What happened to the Rifters who worked with The Order in the war? Were they thrown into the gulag with everyone else, or are they given special dispensation to live among normal people? Are they monitored 24/7 with the threat of The Chimera if they step out of line? Do they have any particular legal protections in case, say, a lynch mob forms and they have to use their powers to prevent themselves from being murdered? Are they specifically restricted from doing so and live under the tacit threat of The Order's citizens taking out their anger for a war that cost millions(?) of lives on their Neighborhood Mutant?

I'll absolutely have more, but I've got to get to work myself.

When the Sky Broke... [OPEN WORLD SUPERHUMAN ROLEPLAY] [IC NOW OPEN, APPLICATIONS STILL OPEN]

@Puffhead - I can wait, sure. :3

When the Sky Broke... [OPEN WORLD SUPERHUMAN ROLEPLAY] [IC NOW OPEN, APPLICATIONS STILL OPEN]

Oooookay. *cracks her knuckles*

This isn't in a particular order, really.

- Can you be more specific about where the Rifts appeared or, at least, how they were named? The Britain rift is affecting a comparatively small landmass, as compared to Russia (a nation that spans so many time zones that it can be 1:00 in the afternoon in one part and midnight in another) or Africa (a continent that has 20% of the total landmass on Earth). Were people disproportionately affected in Kinshasa or St. Petersburg? Were there times the Rift opened over the savannah or taiga and nothing happened? For that matter, I have the same question about Brazil - the nation is vast, and only irregularly densely populated. Did the hypothetical descendents of Percy Fawcett find their way out of the jungle? Are there super-powered tribespeople or Siberian hermits who were never discovered and never heard Daniel Viela's call to arms?

- What is the timeline of the Rift War? Did this happen in weeks? Years? Getting the leaders of technologically advanced nations (not to mention the leadership of the UN and EU) in the same room or on the same conference call is something that could barely be accomplished in a month, even in the face of an existential threat. Moving troops and materiel is likewise a vast and terrible engine that begins slowly.

- As a corrolary, organizing a meaningful fight against individuals who can move trillions of tons of water and topple a nation in less than a fortnight is something that really requires either a period of comparative calm (for example, a period - brief or protracted - where there is a reduced amount of activity outside of Britain's borders) or the immediate and direct threat of nuclear retaliation, and possibly demonstrating that retaliation. The description of these people is "unstoppable." They destroyed a national government in less time than it takes for your ISP to come and install a modem; a nation with a functional and very advanced army, navy, and air force, and access to hydrogen bombs. You've set up a situation where the individuals in question are to one degree or another irrational (flooding a nation is not the action of someone in their right mind, unless mass destruction of one sort or another had already happened) and are basically gods. Sharp words aren't going to cut it.

- As a second corrolary my character's background is going to more or less directly address this, but if you have a timeline in mind I'd like to hear it. :3

- Do you have a plan for how quickly The Order advanced technology in order to fight these new meta-humans, and where that advancement came from? Again, given the powers established within the story, the situation is one where basically there are N people who can functionally render combined arms utterly ineffective. Even with all the armies of the world, if all of these superhumans are in one place, and there's more than one with "move the oceans" level strength, there will virtually by necessity need to be more advanced weapons than planes and ships and tanks. This is something else my character's background goes into, but I'm really writing her as a weird edge case.

- With all of that said, how is the Superhuman Exile in Britain anything but a post-apocalyptic Hellscape? The nation has been flooded, and with salt water, which means virtually all buried infrastructure has been destroyed. The nation saw an intense, year-long armed conflict with superpowers and the entire world's worth of weapons and materiel, which probably means almost all above-ground structures and infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed. Did The Order agree to do nation-building after the conflict? Why would they?

- How does The Order plan to both detect, and execute, someone leaving the British Isles? Are there nuclear weapons on standby at all times? Do they have some handy weapon capable of killing a demigod?

- Furthermore, in the absence of the active existential threat of superpowered individuals, how does The Order survive as an organized body? The European Union can't even agree on what kind of money to use, and the Kremlin and the White House are addicted to spying on one another and fomenting conflict. We can't even keep NASA's priority on a single project for a decade within the United States.

- If the above is true, how would characters within the Exile Zone feel anything other than intense dislike, likely blossoming into hatred, for The Order, and humanity in general? They are treated like caged, dangerous animals, exiled to a blasted hellscape with no running water, electricity, or even sewers, and unless someone has the superpower of "Generate Cake," are likely scraping a life of disease and famine from land blighted by a year's worth of conflict. They are surrounded on all sides by people who will kill them if they attempt to leave. Their kind were captured, tortured, and experimented upon by the people who now hold guns to their heads. Is that still happening? I can hardly see how it couldn't be.

- Rifter society in the Exile won't be an organic and complete society full of people to fill various niches. How many doctors are there? What about people who know how to splice a fiber optic cable? Would the rest of the world even allow an Internet connection into the Exile? How many Rifters know how to restore Rennaissance architecture or recreate 17th century stained glass? Were there any nuclear engineers or city planners? Were there Rifter versions of Joseph Bazalgette and Isambard Kingdom Brunel? What about nurses or garbagemen or bankers or diplomats? Farmers? Pharmacists? Art historians, psychologists, leatherworkers, conservationists, conservators, or musicians? What about mapmakers or pilots or anything else? How does this affect the society of Rifters in the Exile?

I probably will have a few more, but we'll start here.

When the Sky Broke... [OPEN WORLD SUPERHUMAN ROLEPLAY] [IC NOW OPEN, APPLICATIONS STILL OPEN]

Okay, so.

I have so many questions. First off though, do you want sort of...questions about the setting? I don’t want to sound mean but I have a lot.

Second though, I have a character in mind who’s going to push on the setting in a couple of interesting ways, I hope.

The Sunday Group

Oh man, you have no idea. I mean, you have some. But, like, yeah. It hasn’t been great.

The Sunday Group

I’m back at the airport again - off to the east coast for a week. I’ll try to make edits in the departure lounge or maybe Penny’s next post will just smooth things over. Either way, I’ll be out of pocket till Monday evening, most likely. Airplane WiFi sucks and I’ll be doing things that keep me away from network connections tomorrow during the day (maybe).

Also, I had a bike accident and cracked two ribs! That doesn’t affect my ability to write, I just wanted to complain.

The Sunday Group

@POOHEAD189 - I'm going to do my best to hang around more. We'll see how good I get at that.

The Sunday Group

@FantasyChic - I wrote that post before yours showed up, sorry. I'll edit something in tomorrow morning, I've used up about all the brain cells I've got left tonight.

edit: also, blame sunspots. That's a thing people do still, right? Definitely sunspots.