[ART/Story Notes] The Prophet and The Loss

[Anders48]

Created with GIMP 2 and inkscape from a base image located here. Copyright for base image © 1899 by Baptiste-Paul Grimaud.

Remember that annoying thread I started checks notes two months ago? Welcome to the end result! and by end result I mean half-way result, because at this rate it's probably going to be another two months before I have anything complete to put out there.

Meet Clan Inanna.* They're the clan that didn't so much 'go off the rails' as 'go off the rails and ram into a sheer cliff face at 250 mph'. They made some questionable and frankly baffling decisions during the Dragon-Cubi war; when the consequences of those decisions finally caught up to them, not everyone was sorry to see the clan go.

But as it turned out the clan really did 'go'. Unbeknownst to their fellows, unbeknownst to the dragons, and even unbeknownst to the Phoenix Oracles (at least as far as anyone can tell), some visionaries among them made their way to a world still ruled by humans**. And now, their descendants are coming back.

*Emotions: Joy, Guilt. They were considered something of a 'black sheep' offshoot of the Matrons of Light, back in the days when there were multiple Matrons of Light and the Cubi had the time and energy to care about such things.

**And it's not a backwater universe either, even if the local civilization isn't actually any more advanced than Furrae's. On a good day, it is (was? will be?) as far from that as you can get while still being comprehensible to Furraean natives, or even to the local humans. On a bad day it's much, much farther. Naturally, the people returning to Furrae have lived through more than their fair share of bad days.

[Anders48]

On a less IC note, I'm planning on using this thread for both releasing images that I'll eventually use for the fic (For instance, I'm also working on a map of The League of the Nine Jurisdictions, a country that's as close as you can get to a 'human nation' in a world without humans.) I'll also be posting from my backlog of partial outlines, in universe documents from various sources, notes-to-myself about themes, &c as I try to work out what parts to keep and what parts to drop. Since several aspects of the story are in a state of flux right now, feedback is welcome and highly encouraged.

[Anders48]

To summarize what I have planned in terms of what's going on 'under the hood':

-the central idea I'm loosely going for is interaction between Furrae and 'Earth', which as you might have guessed from the first post ends up being a weird inversion of how otherworld fiction generally goes. Of the two it's ultimately Furrae that comes off as relatively stable and comprehensible in spite of its many faults, while Earth is this place where the relatively rational (if unfair) rules that govern Furrae seem to break down completely, resulting in constant bizarre shifts in the nature of time, history, and even geography. Or possibly that's mainly a side effect of whatever methods are being used to access earth. Or even just the fact that most of the people who go to earth have ample reason to completly distort the truth in order to paint themselves in a better light, while almost everyone who arrives from there ends up being heavily traumatized to the point it threatens their grasp on reality in general.

-building on that, the other loose theme I had was recovery: Whatever it is that happened them, most of Clan Inanna has already hit rock bottom hard by the time they arrive in Furrae (and become properly accessible to the narrative). As a result, in the narrative proper they don't really have anywhere to go but up. It's a long, deeply imperfect process and there's a lot to recover from, but almost all of the clan proper leaves the events of the fic in a better place than they started. Even if that isn't necessarily saying much.

[Merlin]

I like!!

[Anders48]

I like!!

Thank you!

In terms of overall plot, what I'm going for is a kinda rashomon-on-steroids thing where different sources have vastly different takes on what the deal with Earth is, or if it even exists at all. The main throughline is a shared sense of something that's gone very wrong, with a split as to whether that's something specific to Earth and thus alien to Furrae, something relating to the nature of the multiverse itself, or just a reflection of darker events in Furrae's own history. Right now I'm planning on a story split into three parts, which each focus on different people within the clan.

For instance, part one (the main part I've thought about in detail so far) would have stuff from the perspective of a medical team desperately trying to prevent clan member Billy Pierpoint Jr. from becoming the first incubus to die while under Fa'lina's care after he somehow shows up at SAIA while infected with something they could only describe as a 'spiritual parasitoid'. However, it also has subsequent interviews with Billy Pierpoint Jr. himself once he's stablized to the point of being mostly coherent and lucid.

Billy Pierpoint Jr. basically claims that his childhood was destroyed by the fallout of his mother's involvement in a secret war between the Hanseatic League and 'demons from the sky' that had spontaneously generated out of flaws in the crystal spheres that hold up the planets the same way maggots spontaneously generate out of decomposing food. This is in spite of the fact that he grew up in 1930s-40s New York, though obviously from the standpoint of the people interviewing him having a parent who's lived the better part of a millennium is basically the one thing about any of this that makes sense.

My idea was that after that part one would rap up with a report from a joint Taun/Daryl 'fact finding expedition' that was meant to independently investigate Pierpoint's home universe. Or more specifically separate reports from the surviving expedition members, who are all mainly concerned about absolving themselves of whatever it was that happened over there. 

[Anders48]

Oops, it looks like I forgot to post the rest of the outline.
Anyway, part two would kick off with what was supposed to a followup to the expedition in part one, nominally because of the importance of making contact with what's left of clan Inanna but also because Taun is at this point more than a little miffed about earth in general and wanted to express her feelings personally (I. E., via avatar).

 It would have returned to roughly the same location (metropolitan New York, basically) a few years later in that universe's timeline (roughly the mid 1950s; the first expedition is in 1949-50ish for both universes) to avoid having to deal with the immediate fallout of what happened the first time.

Instead it basically finds itself in the middle of the 'cold war era humanity gets wiped out in the most confusing/existentially disturbing way possible' backstory I came up with back when I planned on only writing about a single Earth transplant. That is to say, they end up on a 'planet' (actually an alderson disk) that definitely isn't the earth, orbiting a 'star' that definitely isn't the earth's sun, where astronomical data suggests a time period much later in the universe's evolution and human civilisation seems to have been wiped out years ago... except that records salvaged what's left of the local settlements point to a date in the early 1980s and identify the locations as central Pennsylvania. Also civilization getting wiped out may have been somehow tied to the discovery of a 100,000 year old copy of the country's 200 year old capital?

The expedition eventually manages to track down two 'surviving' clan members in all this mess using a mixture of Peirpoint's clan connection and more esoteric methods only really known to Taun herself, only to discover that they have been forcibly incorporated into....something. This isn't an insurmountable difficulty when you have the personal backing of a clan leader, but the process of dealing with it ends up awakening more somethings and the expedition has to flee back to where it came from.

At this point the narrative would switch to the debriefing of Inanna's newest members, who make everything even more confusing by claiming that being born with backwings was a 'new mutation' caused by the aftermath of atmospheric nuclear testing and/or the Cuban-American War (You know, the one which went nuclear and lead to the Soviet Union invading and occupying all of continental Europe?). Also they were apperently made aware of an alien conspiracy to wipe out humanity by listing to an 'underground radio'.

(I'll probably do more updates when I'm done with finals.)