[text]

[hatefuldays]

This is *Hyun-ae again! Sorry I wasn't really able to contribute anything to the Jaunt, but it sounds like things turned out pretty well.

So, I was thinking about how all of us were apparently taken from various worlds or alternate universes, and was wondering: Do we have any sort of compiled list of what worlds we've discovered? Liminal Space and Jaunts are both crazy, but there's a whole extra layer of this experience where we're basically all getting a chance to discover dozens of other worlds and universes through each other! We can't see them directly, but there's still got to be plenty of interesting stuff we can learn just by talking about where we're from and how those places differ or how they're the same.

I was going to follow that up with "so let's assemble a list of all those worlds and what we know about them", but the more I think about it, the harder it seems like it's going to be to even figure out where to start. Like, for example, I know we've got a lot of people from "Earth" or some variant of it, so how can we tell which ones are parallel Earths and which ones are the same planet? It gets even hairier when you factor in that there's different periods of time represented, so saying "this person and that person are from the same Earth/different Earths" is practically impossible most of the time.

So as a compromise, if any part of this sounds useful, interesting, or cool, tell us a bit about where you're from! It's not like there's too much for us to be doing while we're stuck in Liminal Space, so why not? I don't have a specific format in mind, but maybe some basics like...

* Homeworld name
* Other people you know are from the same world as you (to keep this organized)
* Local year when you left
* Whether or not you know what Disney is (this seems to be some kind of divide, at least for Earths)

I'll go first! I'm from the Mugunghwa, which is a generation ship sent from Earth to another planet where it was going to start a new colony. The trip was on the order of thousands of years long, so in between, the ship was basically its own isolated society. My situation's a little complicated timeline-wise, but it was 4989 AD when I was warped here, which might or might not be why I've never heard of Disney before. Magic and monsters don't exist (as far as I know), but it seems like our tech was pretty advanced compared to most people I've talked to - space travel tech has gotten pretty advanced by the 60th century, and human-comparable AI is a thing.

...If I'm going to talk about the ship for culture exchange purposes, I guess I should probably talk at least a little about what happened in the later years of the ship's society... So, I spent a very long time in cryostasis and accordingly don't have a firsthand account of what happened, but a few millenia after the ship's voyage began, there was a coup and a family managed to instate themselves as a new royal family. They blamed a bunch of things they did on rebels as an excuse to take more power for themselves, and pushed society back to Joseon Dynasty ideals - stability, strength of family lines, male superiority. A couple hundred years down the road, you end up in a world where scientific research is dead in the water and women aren't allowed to learn how to read.

...Eesh, sorry to end that on a dark note. But, well, that's how it was, and why I'm so glad to be here now. There's probably some kind of fancy moral you could come up with to summarize the whole incident, but I'm honestly not far enough away from it to look at it objectively and come up with one, so I guess I'll leave that to you.

[ Private to Malin ]

Status report! It took a while, but I managed to get the hang of making portals! A couple other things, too - I experimented a bit, and I can psychically change outfits and stuff. It's still so wild that this is just something I can do by thinking about it.

Thanks for all your training~

Comments

[haremtrap]

So we've talked about this before a bit, and it took me a while to figure it out but I think I've got a pretty good grip on how my version of Earth differs from most others:

Back like 30 years before I was born my Earth found a giant cave network miles and miles underground that was full of monsters. The monsters have since been burrowing up to the surface. Most of them just attack everything around them, but some attach to random people they find and grant them special powers, which allows us to fight back effectively.

Nowadays, we have special schools like the one I go to to teach hosts of these symbiotic monsters how to use their cool powers to save the world from the more angry monsters.

God it feels weird to just explain your life like the synopsis for an anime. All that was just How Life Is until I started hearing about other worlds and finding out they DIDN'T have all that shit going on.

Otherwise, uh, it's 2018AD, I don't think anyone from my world is here right now, and I do know what Disney is.

[hatefuldays]

Right? Whatever you grow up with, that's just "normal" to you, and you don't realize what parts of it are weird or unusual until you talk to other people about it.

You said you were still a student, right? Have you fought any monsters since you got your training and powers and stuff?

[awitchdidit]

Hm. That story reminds me of a permutation of my own timeline I haven't tried yet. Killing all the men. I think it has some possibilities.

Anyway, I think this whole idea of distinct, parallel timelines may be a bit of an oversimplification, but this is a worthwhile project just for curiosity, anyway. I came here from a sort of localized space-time distortion of my own creation that was bordered on either side by the planet Earth in AD 1986. Also 1998. That part wasn't my fault, though. Battler Ushiromiya and Maria Ushiromiya are from approximately the same frame of reference, and Bernkastel spent an inordinate amount of time visiting. I've got a theory that the worlds Thorne, Melissa, Jules, and Gil are from are related, but it's probably not a 1 to 1 linear correspondence that fits your model.

Finally, I'm familiar with Disney's work, but I'm not sure I'm quite supposed to reference him directly. In any case, it seems like I missed most of the good movies that weren't about rodent detectives just by virtue of when I departed.

[hatefuldays]

[ A LOT of that went over *Hyun-ae's head, but the bit about killing all the men... is correct, as far as she's concerned, to such an extent that she decides to just not comment on it. ]

Geeze, and I already thought this was really complicated... how can two people be only sort of from different dimensions?

[razorblade_empress]

My timeline is basically a do-over of the last one after a couple of... entities... made a bet about humanity's capacity for enlightenment and Team Evil decided to "help" things along. The end result of that was humanity being reduced to the surviving population of a city that got launched into space on a ship while the rest of Earth was destroyed, because rumors had started indiscriminately coming true by that point and one of those rumors just so happened to be a doomsday prophecy.

Philemon more or less reset things after that, but its continued existence relies on a group of kids never remembering that they knew each other in the old timeline - if they all remember, that's it. Nyarlathotep tried to force that for a repeat win, but ended up losing. I'm from just after the end of that mess, which was in... 1999. No idea if my timeline's connected to any others - I know there are other places and times where Persona users are a thing, but it doesn't seem to work the same as it does in my world.

[hatefuldays]

I thought my story was a crazy one, but it's downright normal compared to the things I keep hearing about here...

Sorry, but what's a Persona user?

[leftbehindagain]

There have been, and still are, several of us from the same variation on early 21st-century Japan - mostly similar to other Earth timelines, but every now and then some powerful supernatural entity or other takes an interest in human actions, and it falls to a group of teenagers to clean up the resulting mess. Within that subset, though, we've had a frankly ridiculous amount of alternate timelines.

I know of two major incidents in this subset of worlds, one in Iwatodai in 2009 and one in Inaba in 2011 - that's where I'm from. Minako-san and her friend are from Iwatodai, apparently the same one, and there's been at least one other person here from a timeline where Minako-san's role was filled by some really quiet guy with blue hair.

Inaba's where the timeline complications really start to kick in. Myself, Kanji and Chie are all from one timeline. Souji-san, Rise and Naoto are, as far as we know, all from the same timeline as each other - Souji-san led their group's investigation into the incident, Kanji and Chie were part of the team, and I was on the sidelines. Hanamura's timeline started out very similar to Souji-san's, but took a sharp turn afterward.

As for people who are gone, Yua, Seta-san and Adachi-san all led their respective investigation groups. Seta-san was mostly identical to Souji-san but a lot more closed-off, so I suspect the investigation didn't end well for him, but I never got a chance to ask. Yua is the only female team leader from Inaba I've met - I think things went pretty well for her group, but she was really burnt out by Traveling. Adachi-san... was a weird case, since in most other timelines he was the culprit we were all pursuing, but in his he was leading the investigation. There was also another Hanamura for a while. And Dojima-san, who as far as I know overlapped with Souji-san up to the point where he got more actively involved.

We're not entirely sure how the Inaba and Iwatodai timelines intersect. Naoto uncovered repressed information about a time anomaly that brought the two groups together, and that Iwatodai group had the blue-haired guy. Otherwise, we're not sure if their timeline is the same as Ken-kun's - she didn't find that information until long after he was gone - or to what extent Minako-san's might overlap with ours.

[awitchdidit]

Wait. So the Culprit was a detective, but then there was another timeline where he was the Detective but not the Culprit? That's...I honestly don't know if it's the most brilliant thing I've ever heard or the dumbest.

[pretentiouself]

You come from a timeline more advanced than I do, then. But I think it must have been a parallel timeline if there's no magic. In the earth I come from magic reawoke about seventy years ago, and people started giving birth to dwarves and elves, and some people turned into trolls and orcs. So there's magic, but also our technology is more advanced than most people seem to know. I'm used to there being augmented reality everywhere, and being able to physically connect into the internet. Oh, and I guess the power structure is different as well. A couple of big companies hold most of the power, and countries aren't as powerful as they were back in the day. But they have the money so of course they have the power.

I've seen old Disney videos around on the internet, though, so I guess that was a thing that existed back in the day. I'm not sure why they're such a big deal to people, though, they just look like old animations to me.

[hatefuldays]

It's all about what you grew up with, right? Even if it's just old animations to you, for someone else it's probably an important part of their childhood, so they remember it totally differently.

[thornsofmalkav]

I'm trying to think up some snappy name we can call the particular world cluster that me, Melissa, Malin, Laughs, Jules, and Gil are all from. Something spoopy like 'the Dark Worlds?' Only they're not actually physically dark. They're just filled with, like, a lot of spoopy shit. 'The Worlds of Spoopiness?'

Anyway. So the six of us are not all from the exact same world, but the worlds we do come from are hella similar. We all have vampire clans, werewolf packs, mage cabals, fairy bullshit, and the hunters that go after supernatural creatures. And the ways that our supernatural creatures operate are pretty similar too. Especially with vampires. But, like, there are differences too. Like, I don't think some of our political structures are the same and there's only five major vampire clans where Melissa comes from, while there are, like, thirteen in my world and Malin's.

I have some theories about what might have lead our worlds to diverge, mostly centered around the biblical flood and different people eating each other while our vampire forebearers were trapped under the water, but, like, that would take too long to get into.

But anyway, yeah, we're from closely related worlds that have a lot of supernatural bullshit going on and in the case of mine in particular, a vampire apocalypse that was on the way.

Oh. Right! And it was 2014 when I left, although I'm not sure about what year it was for any of the others.

[breakaleginhalf]

Jules and I worked out we're, like, legitimately actually both from the same world, but it was 2017 when I got sucked in here.

I'm not entirely sure what Kitty's jam is though, she's definitely a Changeling too but she's a whole heap of other shit as well.

[rustyhonesty]

I don't really know what our world is called, other than Titan Hell. It doesn't seem to be a variant of Earth, at least. Though the year was 850, so even if would be a variant of Earth, it'd be quite far in the past.

There are three others here from the same world. [He refuses to say Mikasa's gone forever so there.] There's me, Eren, Mikasa and Armin.

And no, we don't know what Disney is...

[leftbehindagain]

Not necessarily - it depends on what date the calendar begins from. The main calendar in use in Nova Venezia had the year as 13-something, but it was only about a century before my time.

It could be a far-future Earth variant.

[photonicfighter]

[Cryostasis? Generation ships? How very interesting. But she'll hold off on asking more until later.]

I'm not from Earth at all. At least, not directly... I have no solid confirmation that the planet "Coral" that the colony ship I was activated on was launched from was a version of Earth, but that star system did share some of the same planets that Earth has. But I'm digressing...

I come from the Gurhal System. It has three habitable planets, Parum, Neudaiz, and Moatoob. There are also several colony satellites. The technology level is advanced enough that interplanetary travel is common. Honestly, most of the versions of Earth that I've seen seem like something right out of history books, to me... but I'm digressing, again! Excuse me. The system is inhabited by humans, newmans, beasts, and CASTs. I'm a CAST, which is a kind of artificial lifeform.

I was living on the GUARDIANS Colony, orbiting Parum, when I was brought here. It was a little over a year from the SEED-fall incident at the Alliance Centennial Ceremony. That probably doesn't mean anything to anyone... I'm the only one from the Gurhal system that I know of. But maybe in the future, someone else will come, and they'll find this on the network, and feel some relief.

Er, and it goes without saying that I don't really know what this "Disney" thing is.

[hatefuldays]

Whoa, you're from a colony! Your world did what mine was trying to do, but actually succeeded! That's fantastic!

[loyalrebel]

There is a section in the library on all the worlds we have visited on Jaunts or Walkabouts. I cannot personally vouch for the completeness or accuracy of anything prior to The Grid, however.

I believe there is also similar information on the internets that Claudia has woven.

[Malik is still catching up on things in some aspects.]

As for myself... Nothing so interesting to most.

I am from an Earth, and while most of the people I know who were from the same one have left Altair and Maria Thorpe are from there. There may be others but I have not spoken with them.

I am from well before the invention of electricity, specifically the year 1195 by the Christian calendar. If you need an approximate event in time, I fought in what is called the Third Crusade. If anyone wants to know about the Levantine area of that time I am something of an expert.

I do not know what sort of communicable disease Disney is but it seems unpleasant.

[rustyhonesty]

I've almost written a summary of Nova Venezia from the memories I had as my overlay. I'll add that to the library when I finish, if that's alright.

[otomechapilot]

I'm from an Earth that... well, lost a war with aliens seven years ago. They can't talk to us well enough to enslave us and I'm not sure if they know we can think; they're living dreams, kind of like the Arcana before the Arcana realized we existed. But they took out all but one of our adults with a weird disease or poison we call the Bliss, and my Resistance only just got weapons to fight back a couple of years ago.

That's what my suit of armor is. The ANIMa.

[claudiometer]

Me and Helena are the only people here definitely from the same world, but I wouldn't be surprised if we overlap with one of the other low-magic-type Earths. [Claudia has ruled out Malik and Altair's world, on the grounds that one Super-Secretville would know a thing or two about the other, but that's getting into things that aren't hers to divulge.]

Our world has... not exactly magic, but you might as well call it that as anything. Get the right person, object and emotional circumstance in the same place and the object becomes what we call an Artifact. The vast majority of 'em are associated with famous people in some way, and generally fall under the pattern of 'has a neat mystic effect, but will most likely kill you horribly for invoking said effect.' Most people don't know this is a thing until they run afoul of one - my brother used one to teleport himself into an interdimensional space when I was ten.

The other way you find out Artifacts are a thing is when you get recruited to the Warehouse, which was founded by Alexander the Great, moves to whatever country can best defend it, and is so super-secret as to be the only thing fuck-off-nowhere South Dakota has going for it. My immediate supervisor is no doubt having an aneurysm back home because of how freely Helena and I talk about it, but around here people have seen or done weirder, so I figure it evens out.

In any case, that's a large part of why I spearheaded the amulet heist back during the jaunt - it was acting waaaaay too much like an Artifact for me to leave it alone. We retrieve dangerous objects, so they hopefully won't hurt anyone else.

Helena actually started working for the Warehouse in its previous incarnation, in 19th-century London - the 'put it in fuck-off-nowhere' move in America was, I think, because Americans are nosy fucks. Maybe also so anyone aware of the previous pattern would assume it was the Smithsonian. Anyway. As she herself said the other day, Yensid was not her first stint as a statue, which is how she's working with me and not long dead.

Ordinarily I'd say a good litmus test for world overlap is 'was HG Wells a woman,' but we didn't even know that until after she was debronzed, so. There really... isn't one, since Artifacts are so hush-hush.

We have Walt Disney's paintbrush in the stacks. Pete used it to cartoonify his shoes when he was Artifact-drunk once. Not sure if he ever found 'em.

[hatefuldays]

[ There's a massive amount of cultural stuff in there that *Hyun-ae has no idea what to do with (Alexander the Great? HG Wells?? South Dakota???), so she latches onto the small details that actually DO mean something. ]

Oh, great job with the amulet thing! It sounds like that turned out to be really important, so I'm glad you were around to do something about it.

[starshaper]

... why did he say that he leaves this explaining thing to me when i was going to let him explain everything with his much better explaining skills ... (´・×・｀)

Homeworld name? Does this mean my original home or my current one?? Okay well, you get both! I'm originally from the Moon where we watched over the Earth in our own kingdom, Silver Millennium. My name was Serenity back then, but we got into a war with the Earth and me along with many others were sent to reincarnate on that beautiful planet. It's why my name in my new life is Tsukino Usagi (Rabbit of the Moon) though I didn't know those reasons for 14 years! /(•ㅅ•)\ ... Or well, my parents don't know about my previous life at all, so you could call it a coincidence too but mostly I call it fate!♥

I guess it's not a completely normal Earth with that Moon kingdom in there ... plus me and my closest friends can become magical girls, who protect the Earth and the people there from aliens and others that attack there. I never talk about it to anyone else back home because we keep it as a secret from normal humans there -- but I'm totally open about me being Sailor Moon here! Since keeping that secret seemed like a bad idea and some of you knew about it even before I said anything.(*≧∀≦*)

My fiance ♡´･ᴗ･`♡ Mamoru Chiba （♥￫ｏ￩♥）is here with me too!✿♥‿♥✿

We're from Tokyo, Japan, the year back home is 1997.

Ohhh, I absolutely LOVE everything from Disney as much as I love shoujo anime and manga!(♥ω♥*)

[reincarnatedprince]

Because my explanations are plain and boring.

[scarsolderthanyou]

[Stone can't work out how to put text on the psychic network, so you get audio. Sorry, kid.]

I can't even work out how I'm reading all this. It's not in Raksuran or any other language I know. Hmph.

I'm from the Three Worlds. I'd never heard of this Earth place, or humans, until I was kidnapped here. There are groundlings, sealings, and skylings, and scores of variations of each one. Most of the gadgets and machines in that last Jaunt we were on were more advanced than the most advanced groundling empire that I know. We have magic, instead, or sometimes meld them both together. It doesn't seem much like any of these other worlds you people come from.

[dino_zarf]

It's the most basic level of psychic communication. It apparently used to be the only thing on the network. Basically transferring the whole idea over. Jaunt before last it wound up being the only way anything came across. Rosie couldn't follow it and she can't read anything.

Didn't like it though.

[professorwolf]

Well, this is exciting to read about! This is Randolph Lyall, I'll add my two cents to this. I'm from Earth, like many of us-- but I come from two different versions of it, unlike most of us. There are three of us from my most recent version of Earth, from Locke City, in the 2000s. There used to be four of us, but one, ah, went out of ambit.

As best as we can work it out, a number of us in Locke City were all reincarnated from previous lives in alternate versions of Earth, or even other worlds entirely. There were aliens and giant pink guardian beasts and it was a bit strange, I'll admit. It was rather like Traveling, except we didn't go anywhere, we just slowly got back pieces of our previous lives. Mine was Victorian England, also on Earth, but an alternate Earth where there are various types of supernatural creatures, and clockwork and steam were rather more prominent than in typical Earth history.

[morethanashadow]

It's all very confusing.

[Yeah guess who is pointedly not talking about his pre-reincarnated world?]

Also as of when I left the majority of West Coast had been destroyed by aliens and people in Locke really don't like us anymore.

Elua's World 101

[youandyoualone]

There are three people currently in Liminal Space that come from the same world that I do: my pupil, Alcuin, and Imriel, who is the son of an old friend of mine. However, there have been other people from our world here before: my other pupil, Phedre, and her companion, Joscelin. I am also told that Imriel's mother, Melisande, was here for some time when I was not.

Our world seems to be the same celestial body that most people here are from, but from my research and my conversations with other Travelers, I can only conclude that it has had a very different history, especially when it comes to religion. I am to understand that in many worlds, a single religion called 'Christianity' became dominant over much of the earth. It is not so in my world. Most lands hold to their ancient religions, with the Skaldi worshipping their All-Father and the Aragonians Mithras and so on and so forth. And while the shape of our world is the same as many other worlds, the names and shapes of our countries and kingdoms are different.

I come from the land of Terre d'Ange, which I am told is called 'France' in many worlds. Our own, much younger, religion is centered upon the Blessed Elua and his angelic Companions, from whom we are all at least in part descended.

Our dating system is likewise different from the standard, but as far as we have been able to determine with the help of other Travelers, we are all from the equivalent of either the thirteenth or fourteenth century of what is called the 'Common Era.' Alcuin and I were brought from the same year--the same day, in fact--although we began Traveling at different points during the Arcana's game. Imriel is from at least twelve years in our future, given his age and that he was not yet born when the Arcana brought us here.

It has suggested to me that if we need a name for our world, 'Elua's World' may be appropriate, given that the Blessed Elua seems not to exist in other worlds, or at least not in the historical record.

Re: Elua's World 101

[theflyingone]

[ He'd heard some from Alcuin of course, but it's always fascinating to talk about. ]

If most lands still hold to their pre-Christian religions, then Elua does not own the world, and it cannot be called 'Elua's World', can it?

[wholeheaded]

I'm from...well, I guess most of you would know it as Oz. With the wizard and yellow brick route and good and wicked witches and all that stuff. Dorothy arrived a few centuries before I was born, and by my time our world is called the Outer Zone, or O.Z.

I've read a few books by that Baum guy and while it's a sort of fanciful account they have a good chunk of historical accuracy - for me, at least. Elphaba...was from a different version of Oz than me.

Uh...timeline, okay. DG said it was 2007 in Kansas when she slipped over - we call folks from Earth who come to the O.Z. Slippers, they usually show up via tornado or ship wreck - and then another three annuals after I got my brain back so I guess I'm sorta from 2010? But I've been Travelling a long time too. Dunno if any of that helps.

Oh, and DG told me about Disney and showed me a few movies. I like the one with the mermaid.

[hatefuldays]

Most people seem to have sort of clustered around the 21st century... As far as I can tell so far, I'm the furthest outlier.

You said most of us would know it as Oz - what do you mean by that? Is Oz in contact with Earth or something?

[pearlyspirit]

Oh, this is all so interesting...!

Um, but I'm afraid I'm probably not going to be very helpful... I haven't seen a lot of my world. And it's just called Earth, so it might be a lot like what other people have said? B-but I grew up in the Kurain Village and practiced spirit channelling, and Mr. Nick is a lawyer in the city, and, um... I can't really think of anything else...

[hatefuldays]

That's already some important information! If spirit channeling is real, that means it's a world where supernatural powers exist, right?

[goestoextremes]

Name? Uh, we can call it Bending World or World of the Avatar or Avatar world or whatever, world of four nations works too I guess... Dooooesn't matter, much, but anyway it's a little similar to what I know about the Earth but it's not really Earth.

We have four nations: Fire Nation, Air Nomads, Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe -- that's sort of divided into two because we're located in the South Pole and North Pole but these days I kind of see it as we're like one tribe despite the distance. Then there's Republic City where everyone from all those nations and everyone else can gather together in peace. And Spirit World is what it literally sounds like but at least mostly it's a really pretty place instead of what it might sound like...

We have "magical elements" that aren't really magic at all, since magic would make things out of nothing and we don't --- um, i mean some of the people there are born as what we call benders; waterbender, firebender, airbender, earthbender but most people are non-benders, so it's not that usual. And bending is the ability to manipulate and control those elements and they all come with side skills too (waterbenders can become healers, eartbenders can learn to bend metal or lava, firebenders can redirect lightning -- though all of them don't learn those...)

Then there's one person in every generation, who can learn to bend all those elements, energy and all other things. He or she gets the title Avatar, everyone knows them and they share their body with the light spirit Raava. I'm the girl from my generation with that skill, bridge between the mortal and Spirit World, supposed to bring peace into the world and so on. When my eyes suddenly go completely bright white, that's when Raava's in control of my body but I let her take control much less these days than I let before. I'm from the Southern Water Tribe, my dad is our chief and I had to stay there until I was 17 because they didn't want me to get into danger ... But then I kind of ran away from home, been staying in Republic City most of the time except my three year recovery from extremely serious mercury poisoning.

We've had trouble from benders and angry spirits, and some other things but things were really quiet and peaceful when I suddenly found myself here. It was the year 174 though it's almost year 175.

No one else from there is here except me and hasn't been in all my time here.

If I knew what Disney was, that's because I've been to modern worlds here where I may have heard it before. Sure's not a thing in my home world.

Oh, and one other thing that I haven't heard happening in any other worlds? Most of the animals back home are a combination of two species. Polar bear dog, polar leopard, badgermoles, cat owl, deer dog, tiger shark, tiger seal, turtle seal, dragonbird, dolphin piranha, koala otter, platypus bear, sand shark, otter penguin... You know what, if I just say that everytime when something is just one species of an animal, that's confusing or at least surprising there but sometimes that happens too. But that's definitely one of the most confusing things for me while I've been here, that that's normal everywhere else while I'm sure that that list is not normal for anyone else here.

also Varrick is at least like 25% Walt Disney.

[senpaidol]

Trust me, we've been on at least one Jaunt with a really real Spirit World, plus whatever the heck's going on at any given time in my world.

Also, I so want to live in a world with turtle seals. Hopefully we can visit when all of this is over...

[crouching_sin]

Hmm... how to explain this...

I come from a version of Earth in the year 2009. I lived in Tokyo, Japan. There's a lot of technology around, and I tended to be involved in a lot of those sorts of things, because I am a computer programmer by trade. The nature of my work, however...

Magic is something that exists, though much of it comes from the use of demonic power. You see, my world is connected to a world of demons, though it's usually separated by a mystical barrier. Demons are... creatures of folklore, or anything that gets enough of a mythology built around it. They are also gods of other religions, cast down by the one that several religions now call 'God' - Yehowah.

You see, a very long time ago, there were many gods of many pantheons, sustained by rituals and emotional energy. The greatest of these demons was called Bel, who was ruling around what humans in my world would count as 2500 BCE. Yehowah defeated this demon in around 600 BCE in a war, and Bel shattered into many different demons. These and the other gods were cast down to become demons, and the world they were in was sealed off.

However recently those demons have begun to fight each other, searching for the other shards of Bel. The one who defeats the others and absorbs their power will become the King of Bel - the ruler of all demons. The battleground for these demons has become an area in Tokyo which has been sealed off by the government, trapping everyone inside. There have been some electronic devices distributed to some people to allow them to summon and command demons, but it's only a small group that has managed to make progress against the demons fighting each other.

... One of them has the ability to absorb the Bel demons, becoming the only human qualified to become King of Bel. Unfortunately he has allied himself with Yehowah, who intends to make this human the Messiah. And Yehowah will use him to enforce His will - and should humanity not live up to His extreme standards, their free will is going to be taken away.

So in short, it's not exactly a good place to be right now.

[ninjayeehaw]

I might just go ahead an' call me an' Yakumo's world 'Sentai World'. An' anyone else what identifies as part 'f a sentai team's free t'do the same. Our worlds are similar enough that Right an' his team could do a bit a' dimension hoppin' t'come help us out one time, can't none a' them be too far apart. We're in the same world as a few other Sentai teams too - Kakuranger an' Hurricanger, at the very least - alongside the World Ninja Jiraiya. The Riders all seem t'be at least a might bit related t'ours, since Yakumo an' the team went an' got sucked into Kamen Rider Drive's world 'fore I met 'em.

But fer our world specifically - a bit over four hundred years ago, a feudal warlord called Kibaoni Gengetsu wanted t'try an' unite the world through fear durin' the Sengoku era. He got defeated an' swore t'revive himself as a demon four hundred an' forty four years later - there was a slight hitch when he came back early, but the Last Ninja, Igasaki Yoshitaka, defeated him then an' sealed him away.

Turns out the real year he was s'posed t'be released was 2015, but he weren't powerful enough t'do it all at once. So he an' his generals started sendin' out Youkai into the world t'gather the power a' Fear an' help resurrect him. Yakumo an' his team were beatin' them back in Japan while I was huntin' 'em in America, then I met the Last Ninja fer myself an' hopped over t'Japan t'start fightin' Youkai there with Yakumo's team, the Shuriken Sentai Ninninger! An' the six 'f us beat him back an' defeated Gengatsu properly t'protect our world from bein' destroyed by him!

[That is... horribly glossing over a fucking huge amount of detail there Kinji]

The ToQger came before us, I think, seems like a new team pops up every year or so. An' I was talkin' with Marvellous when he first came in, seems he's a fair while before either 'f us. Seems like a runnin' theme fer us all is 'monster shows up, team forms outta family or friends or complete strangers who all learn how t'henshin, kick the monsters' behinds into next week', an' the cycle sorta repeats.

[sumofallreds]

Try over 40 years of this shit happening. I'm surprised Earth is still in one piece after how you humans deal with stuff.

[dino_zarf]

I'm from one of the Core colonies, we left Earth behind a few centuries ago because there weren't resources to sustain the population. It was 2518. I'm the only one left who's from our world. Zoe and River were here for a while... Rose was conceived there, but she's never seen it herself.

I'm not familiar with Disney, but there's been a lot of things from Earth that Was that we've lost track of.

[hatefuldays]

Oh, those dates line up close enough that we could almost be from the same timeline! The Mugunghwa departed in 2395, so that gives them another 120 years for the first successful colonies to get going...

Unless "Earth that Was" means that the planet was wiped out, or something. I'm pretty sure it's still there in my timeline, so that would throw that out. Otherwise, I had been in cryostasis for just under a hundred years by 2518.

[helborn]

I'm from Earth! Or a version of it. It's 2005 when I'm from... technology's pretty good? We have the internet and hot water and antibiotics and all that stuff.

Specifics, though... uh. You're going to have to suspend disbelief a little bit, because this part is hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. It's a world where all - or most, at least - myths are true. There's multiple pantheons, most of which aren't nearly as strong as they used to be. All of them have their own sacred domains that exist simultaneously - there's multiple underworlds, multiple home domains of the gods, all that stuff. There's also some other planes of existence where other creatures live. These places are all extremely hard to get to for normal people.

Many of the gods have also had children with human beings, making scions. That's what I am - my mother's Hel, the Norse goddess of death. Scions start out as heroes, and then grow strong enough to be considered demigods, and then minor gods themselves.

But uh... gods aren't the only things that are real. A long time ago, the gods sealed off the titans - monstrous forces of primordial nature. They hate the gods and their children and want to destroy or enslave all life on Earth and any connecting realms. They're getting stronger, and some of their spawn cause trouble for people, especially children of the gods. We're working to fight back and destroy them and find a way to seal the titans back up more tightly.

There's also other creatures around that are... non-human and supernatural. Vampires exist, for one. I know mages are a thing, but I don't really know much about them other than 'they can live a long time' because the only mage I know is an asshole.

And Disney is totally a thing.

... I can try to answer any other questions people have, though?

[hatefuldays]

I'm pretty sure that I burned through the rest of my disbelief within a week of showing up in Liminal Space. Compared to some of the things I've already seen, gods and titans and vampires don't seem that much more outlandish.

[tookashirototheknee]

My world's pretty boring. ... if you're just on Earth.

If you're not, well, there's been an intergalactic war going on for upwards of ten thousand years.

But, really, it's just... fancy space tech and Darth Zarkon running the show.

[Oh, Matthew, you don't know how right you are.]

[breakaleginhalf]

Gonna expand a little on what Thorne said about our shared world-cluster-thing.

Jules and me - and also Kitty, sort of? - are from a version of modern Earth. 21st century, most people here'd fit right in, y'know? Except for the three of us, we got kidnapped by the Fair Folk.

Anyone here familiar with stories about them? Not like Disney Tinkerbell bullshit, actual old like-- Irish stories about how you'd fall into their world, eat their food and then when you get out a hundred years have passed and when the protag realises this he just sort of crumbles into dust?

...might have mixed a few stories together there but basically that. That's us, that's a Changeling here. Except during our time being caught in Faerie, by Faeries, we got tortured to the shithouse and managed to escape again. And now we just sort of pretend we're normal when we're all weird as shit and semi-insane.

[thezerothlaw]

My name R. Daneel Olivaw. The R stands for "robot." To my knowledge, there is no one else here from the same reality as I am.

I am familiar with Earth. I am not properly from Earth, but I was first activated there, some twenty decades ago, just outside of New York City. My creators were men of Aurora, the first of fifty worlds to be settled in the first wave of colonization, over a thousand years ago. In the time I know, Earth is overpopulated growing worse, and humanity as a whole has moved into underground Cities. Spacer worlds such as Aurora tend to be sparsely populated and heavily reliant on robot labour. Both Earth and the Spacer worlds are, I believe, ultimately doomed and unsustainable societies.

It was 3740 when I came here, though I have been a Traveller for several years now. The second wave of colonization has begun, and I have high hopes for humanity taking that path.

[hatefuldays]

Oh, that's the closest date I've heard to mine! I didn't mention it but I'm actually also a robot, sort of. That's three I know about now, counting myself.

Still, it sounds like your timeline's first attempts at colonization didn't go much better than mine... I hope the Earth I was headed back towards was in better shape, but I guess I don't really know.