[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

[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.

[runs]

I'm from 2016 and I'm from 2078. And 2074.

[Helpful.]

[breakaleginhalf]

And no doubt other places that we didn't end up visiting in your dungeon, too.

[runs]

No.

I'm exactly three people.

I know that now. And how much of each.

[hatefuldays]

Oh, I didn't know that you knew Malin! She taught me how to use psychic abilities, she's really cool.

[thornsofmalkav]

I do! Not previously, but I met her here. She's a cool person, yeah.

Oh and Casper is probably from our world-cluster too, but I'm not sure which one or if he's got his own as well.

[hatefuldays]

Maybe I'll have to revise my notes here to split it by same planet, then same 'cluster', then same timeline...

[thornsofmalkav]

Might not be a bad idea.

[crouching_sin]

... What's this about the biblical flood?

[thornsofmalkav]

Uh, basically while that was going on, the vampires of the world--who were mostly living the the Levant--spent the entire forty days and forty nights underwater. And since the only thing there was to eat down there was each other... you can kind of guess what happened.

[crouching_sin]

... All of them were in the Levant?

[thornsofmalkav]

I mean, that's where vampires are originally from? See, Caine was the first vampire. He got kicked out to the land of Nod and learned a bunch of crazy shit out there and added the 'e' to the end of his name because everyone knows extra 'e's on the end of your name totally double its coolness quotient [hence why SHE has an 'e' at the end of her chosen name] and then some time later the archangels went after him to yell him and get him to come home and apologizes and every time he said 'no, fuck you' they all levied another curse upon him and between those curses and his crazy new powers he ended up becoming the first vampire.

[crouching_sin]

[There's no verbal response for that, just a lot of laughter. The first vampire? Him? Or another version of him? That's absolutely fucking hilarious.]

[thornsofmalkav]

... um, dude? Naoya? Are you okay?

[crouching_sin]

Hah... haha... of course you don't realize. I suppose it doesn't matter in a place like this. Not with all of this strangeness around... heh.

That's only solidified how different our worlds are. Because... well. At least in my world, I am Cain.

[stopinthenameofawe]

Absolutely not.

[She's referring to the name if it's not obvious.]

Title drop

[thornsofmalkav]

[Aw, Melissa.] Worlds of Darkness? Is that better?

[finalizes]

That makes no sense. Most of us can walk around in the daylight perfectly fine.

[Stupid first gameline.]

[thornsofmalkav]

Metaphorically dark, my dude. Metaphorically dark.

[finalizes]

[Ew. Metaphors. They are like glyphs that aren't self-evident, which is a stupid way of doing it, in his opinion.]

Just call it "world where things are bad".

[thornsofmalkav]

That describes a lot of worlds, though.

[stopinthenameofawe]

It just sounds like you're trying to be edgy.

[thornsofmalkav]

[... you caught her there, Melissa.]

Seriously, though, if you've got a better suggestion, I'm totes willing to listen.

[stopinthenameofawe]

[She does not, in fact, have a better suggestion, so... she will suspiciously not reply.]