hatefuldays: (What are our options)
*Hyun-ae ([personal profile] hatefuldays) wrote in [community profile] synopsychic2017-11-20 12:59 pm

[text]

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~
haremtrap: (Press X to doubt)

[personal profile] haremtrap 2017-11-20 07:36 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
haremtrap: (Sh-shut up!)

[personal profile] haremtrap 2017-11-20 07:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Nope.

No, actually that's not true I fought a monster in a jaunt once. I didn't kill it, but I chopped one of its arms off so...could've gone worse?
awitchdidit: (been around for a long long year)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 07:45 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
awitchdidit: (but what's puzzlin' you is the)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 08:03 pm (UTC)(link)
My view of reality is something like an ocean of possibilities, all the different Fragments of what could have been and might be all swirling together chaotically. Any given human consciousness usually traces out a single line through the Fragments, based on their choices and circumstances, like a locomotive traveling down a track with an infinite number of switches.

However, it's possible, through the miraculous or the magical, to go back, move in circles, travel parallel to the flow of time as humans perceive it, to explore possibilities that "you" may have never had the opportunity to realize. I made something of a hobby out of it before coming here, and Bernkastel practically made it a career. If she decides to respond to this, she might deign to give more details. As it was, I kept to my own small lagoon in this Sea of Fragments, so I speak mostly in conjecture and hindsight.
Edited 2017-11-20 20:03 (UTC)
awitchdidit: (allow me to introduce myself)

Mostly Harmless was 1992 but she was in 21st century Britain with access to bookstores

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 08:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Essentially. People have a habit of treating that like a tree growing out from the ground and you start at a personal "root" and eventually end up on one particular branch or another. In my experience, it's really more like a whole sort of...general mishmash. If you wanted an arbitrary reference from someone who isn't Disney.
awitchdidit: (but what's puzzlin' you is the)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 08:26 pm (UTC)(link)
As far as I know, no. I believe based on what I've learned on Jaunts that the computing of my day was in its "infancy", and that it was about another ten years before the first time a computer defeated a world chess champion.

[Naturally, that's her benchmark for artificial intelligence being relevant.]

Magic can, of course, give consciousness to previously inanimate objects, but I believe that's fundamentally different from what mundane humans would call "AI".
awitchdidit: (allow me to introduce myself)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 08:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Such a being is certainly alive, although their intelligence and will can vary from animal-like to obedient servants to full-on contrarian human-likeness.

The hierarchy of power in the magical world usually means they serve some form of magician in some capacity, though some people of course treat them as friends. For my part, I specialized in casting demons into physical vessels, so a formal or informal work contract was expected.
awitchdidit: (been around for a long long year)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 08:48 pm (UTC)(link)
"This type of being is bad" is rather a gross oversimplification of anything that can think, isn't it? Demons are another form of life with a different perspective. I wouldn't go out of my way to piss one off, but lumping any kind of person into "good" or "evil" is counterproductive, in my experience.

If your experience is "demons are meant to tempt human beings to sin" or something like that, though, then I personally think humans find sin just fine without any interference from others.
awitchdidit: (allow me to introduce myself)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 08:53 pm (UTC)(link)
People have a bad habit of forcing a moral reading onto stories that don't really have one, especially in hindsight. This can be useful for moral instruction, but it turns the story into a terribly uninformative source for things like demonology.
awitchdidit: (i'm a (wo)man of wealth and taste)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 09:03 pm (UTC)(link)
Hence my disillusion for moral tales in general. I much prefer stories that teach the reader how to think, rather than what to believe.
razorblade_empress: (At rest)

[personal profile] razorblade_empress 2017-11-20 09:28 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
leftbehindagain: (you thought about exploring the TV world)

[personal profile] leftbehindagain 2017-11-20 09:41 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2017-11-20 21:55 (UTC)
pretentiouself: (Neutral)

[personal profile] pretentiouself 2017-11-20 09:44 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
awitchdidit: (allow me to introduce myself)

[personal profile] awitchdidit 2017-11-20 09:56 pm (UTC)(link)
"Better" is even subjective there. A great deal of people honestly prefer comfortable ignorance, and I'm not about to argue with all of them.

A smart girl like you, though, I think is better off keeping her mind alive.

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