[art] Boundry control?

[Anders48]

I'm too tired to give an explanation of what's going on here rn (There is one, I swear!). I'll probably replace this description with something more coherent tomorrow. Basically it's some ideas I loosely had for a DMFA au (more specifically) like seven months ago that I decided to retool into a sort of bizzaro version of the Ahri Empire. I alluded to

A government driven policy to boost economic growth by 'adapting' technologies from other universes, existential angst, [and] someone higher up on the multiversal food chain told them to.

as three possible [if presumably odd] reasons a society might engage in the multiverse. For this society these three factors* are the core reasons they venture out at all. I also have a fic in the works that involves them [Prophet and the Loss is currently stalled because it started coming off as way too real with how the state of the world is].
EDIT: Why isn't the image here.
EDIT2: Nvm the image is here
*Plus 'furthering infighting between different factions' as a equally strong fourth.

[Anders48]

Since I still want to at least prepare the way for people who want to riff of my ideas just like I'm riffing off of everyone else's, here's a basic outline of what's going on.

The General Situation

I fear there's more to it than that. We're not unique, comrade; we've been here before. And we all died.
-Missile Gap

The 'Boundry Control' universe (hey, I have to name it something) is essentially a bizzaro counterpart to both the Project Future universe and the Ahri empire. They're cold war paranoiacs and cosmic middle managers; they know more about the multiverse than you do; what they know tends to be more disturbing than useful (the Anri Empire will just have to console itself with the fact that it retains a higher nominal GDP, a higher per capita GDP, greater worker productivity, greater economic resilience, greater political independence, lower Gini coefficient, lower crime rates, and generally rosier outlook on life.)

Metaphysically speaking, it isn't technically an alternate timeline of say, Project Future or the main DMFA continuity. It's the canonical future of the version of Earth that I'd be depicting in Prophet and the Loss, which happens to include getting a version of Furrae superimposed on top of it. By the time things have somewhat stabilized the world population sits at about 600,000,000 and the majority of that isn't human, but compared with what humanity† would have been destined for otherwise this was probably the better outcome. The factions which had the most influence over this process have been marked with a ߇; unsurprisingly they did their best to skew things towards their own interests. At least, two of them did. The interests of the True Fae are somewhat unknowable.
† Not to be confused with the original humans of LaGaRa, or of Furrae, or really most universes that operate on remotely sane principals and don't have a history of suddenly veering into cosmic-horror-tinged surrealism. I could give these humans a fancy name like 'the Nephilim' to make it super-extra-clear how different they are, but in spite of everything they're still the society that's culturally closest to IRL earth.
‡
which presumably stands for something like the german Weißglut and certainly not any other event this one off occurrence, which cannot be repeated, may or may not bare a completely coincidental resemblance too, and which the world's intelligence agencies certainly aren't suppressing knowledge of out of fear that some band of organized maniacs might figure out how to turn it into a trilogy.

[Anders48]

Moving on, I have one chief story idea here, which basically revolves around...well, let me show you.







Nope, this isn't just me being weird again. Actually, none of these images are things that I created, or even really art in the traditional sense. They're diagrams from Stephen Marshall's 2004 book Streets and Patterns. Because this time around I'm going to write about someone trying to solve LaRaGa's problems through urban design and modernist architecture. Somehow. Granted, none of the main conflicts in LaRaGa are things the urban design profession has a tradition of solving, and granted, she's only here because of some kind of black budget project her home society is backing in order to accomplish god-knows-what. And granted, she's also somehow being stalked across time and across universes by seven cities from the Book of Revelations*. And granted, her plans are consistently opposed by the intelligence services of a nonexistent, fictional country that somehow has designs on LaRaGa anyway. But if we let little stuff like that get in the way of progress, how could we ever get anything done?
*Or possibly just seven American cities that just happened to be named after cities from the Book of Revelations (as Americans do), and acquired malevolent reality warping properties for unrelated reasons. You never know! 

[Anders48]

Here's an example of a 'diagram' that would show up in the story (made by me this time). I orginally made it as an SVG, with the poorly-scanned-in-picture-from-somewhere effects added in on GIMP