The RP Message Board Continued!

[Zaleramancer]

In case there's any confusion, my character is not the skinny green-eyed guy you guys hang out with all the time.

That guy is my character's mouthpiece.

There's a bunch more, too.

So you are going to have the chance to watch me talk to myself. That should be fun.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

 Ooh...

[Zaleramancer]

Just because you guys like to keep yourselves in one place doesn't mean I have to.

[Zaleramancer]

Of course, my character expends somewhere around 40 percent of their energy budget just keeping up with you guys.

But powerful friends is worth a heavy investment.

[Philote]

Complete opposite of my character

Glad I upgraded to V4.0 recently

[Celadon's Penultimate]

 Um...I'm flattered?

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

So Myself plops down a factory that produces Kystians on New Atlantis by way of apology, and Neo thanks him for this. He doesn't seem to realize that, because of Myself's special virus, every Kystian is really just a werewolf waiting to be added to Myself's growing legion of mindslaves.

Greenday discovers a group of supers who have set up in a pocket dimension in a moving castle, staffed by over 500 supers that have formed a government, schools, and military training centers. Myself Heads in there to visit them. Now HE says that he teleports out because he was imminently attacked, but we've already seen what Myself considered a "Visit", so in all likelyhood he killed a few dozen people before being shown the door. Also he used a power called Safety Net to get out before he was killed, because I guess he's not confident in his sevenfold immortality. Myself heads off to make battle armor for his next run at them.

I must stress that these people have done nothing actually villainous. Myself s specifically planning to destroy their new country to "show them their place on the totem poll." Oh, and he wants to enslave their minds with a virus that lets him use their powers.

Meanwhile Mik has finished construction of his pyramid out of the wreckage from Wulf and Boomqueefas fight, and it turns out to be the base for an anomaly core. It brings mythical species to the planet, gives spirits physical form, and will grant a wish to the first person who makes it past Mik to get it. Like most of Miks events this will be completely ignored by everyone for the rest of the thread, except Greenday who gathers up an army and marches toward the pyramid. I don't think this ever get's resolved, however.

OOC Note: At this point, a dude named the knight of neverending dark shows up, but all of his posts have been deleted. From what I gather, he thinks Mik is Threads bad guy, which is hilarious to anyone who's been paying attention.

We have first confirmation the Myself controls the world media as well as the government, where he apparently spams non-stop propaganda encouraging people to say his powers.

Mik has also set up a little kingdom around his pyramid, building housing for his citizens, when his enemy Rhiolo makes a grand entrance somewhere across the country. This, like the pyramid, is ignored by everyone.

Oh, by the way, Myself made another Phylactery. Earth. He then gives all the citizens who were not under his direct control Conditional Ability Bestowal, turning them into his slaves. For those of you bothering to keep score: all those people now have 3 superpower, minimum.

OOC Note: Mik brings up that everyone is basically gods, which is rejected by everyone immediately. Of course they aren't gods, that would be silly, they're just really powerful. Years later we would have Lords of Creation, where we would proceed to do most of this same stuff that happened in NB but with limits that the guys in NB don't have.

At this point, the thread sort of peters off on a argument between Mik an Wulf that I'm going to get into in my next post. Nothing is resolved, and the whole this sort of ends on a whimper. Just really disappointing.

[Zaleramancer]

We were still kind of obsessed with the You Have The Powers From The List thing then.

It changed later.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

 Indeed. It took a good little while for some of us to get used to lending our powers for heroics.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

Oh, gosh, I can't finish my NB posting right now. Started too late. I'll try, first thing tomorrow.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Now, as the reader, I have the unfortunate job of sorting all I've just read into a narrative whole. First, lets look at the state of the world at the end of thread one.

There's a new continent just sitting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by an impenetrable cloud of poison gas. Large parts of Western Europe and Africa are just gone. Australia, China,and most of Europe are under Myself's dictatorship, the citizens of which are constantly chanting the names of his power under mind control. There's an open portal to the afterlife just sitting somewhere, basically the Farplain from FFX. Because of Mik's reality altering pyramid, every mythological creature and spirit now exists, and some mountains and forests are alive. There are numerous personal plains littering the surface of the planet that I'm sure Myself never uses. Every person on the planet has at least 3 powers on average. There is not a single non-sick person in the entirety of continental North or South America. Wait, what!?

You remember when I said to keep in mind that Wulf was just traveling around with his personal sicko slave army letting then spread their sick all over everything, and it would play into something ludicrous later on? Well this is it. At one point, yet again in a snit with Mik, Wulf mentions in regards to mindslaves that he already has "a few billions." Now, since he hasn't mentioned mindslaving any Celadonians and since the plague he unleashed somehow give him control of the sickos they're obviously who he's referring to.

A few Billions. Multiple Billions. In fact, for the first time ever in this retrospective, I'm going to be generous to the Holy Trinity. I'm going to assume it's the minimum number of billions to qualify as a few: 3.

The population of the United States in 2012 is 313,914,040. Taking into account the nearly universal rioting, we can actually cut that number down a bit. Even adding in Mexico and Canada, it's not nearly enough. Adding all of South America might be. But, like I said, I'm being generous here. I'll assume the plague works on the spirit things Mik summoned up and the kystians Myself infected with his human/wearwolf virus to top off that number. There we go, a few billion sickos. I'll confess, I read ahead, and Wulf apparently puts them all in a pocket plain sometime after the end of thread one. Now we take into account the 2.4 billion people Mik locked up in marbles.

5.4 Billion human beings. More than half the worlds population is gone. One whole half of the planet is completely void of sentient life, and most of the rest are mindslaves to Myself. Those that aren't are likely still fighting and killing one another or simply hiding and trying to wait out this insanity. This is the world after Dark Friday.

Congratulations, I've seen people try and not come up with something half this grimdark. No wonder Bug can't seem to find anyone.

Let me make it a little darker.

The impression I get, as a reader, is that getting power from this list or any derivative of the list, in the vast majority of cases, also comes with varying degrees of mental damage. It's like Crossed, If every crossed had a super power and some of them became god king demi-urges. Those of you that have unfortunately been exposed to Crossed just felt a mixture of fear and disgust in the pit of your stomachs. Neo's altruistic action only spread the lists influence to everyone. This interpretation is the only way I can reconcile everyone with superpowers becoming either a kill crazy psychopath or a complete sociopath. Most of the ones that don't go crazy even have explanations for it. Zale locks all that up in Shadow (note: kill crazy psychopath), Mik (as I've already discussed) didn't actually get his powers from the list, Dryad was created with her powers after Myself broke and remade the world. The others, like Wish and Bug, represent a small minority who didn't go crazy.

Lastly, I'm going to talk about Wulfs situation. The one I said I found stranger than Miks.

This is Wulfs first post in New Beginning:

Wulf wrote

I wake up, in the bed of my immense palace (due to Author Power Mimicry, I has MythPower: Ode to the Oneiroi, and combined with Power of Imagination, I seem to have dreamed my planet into existence; here I am referred to as Penultimate).

Terryffinda: Good morning, Master Penultimate...

Penultimate: Hello, there...where's Brutus?

Terryffinda: He's off to his afternoon chores...

Penultimate: Don't you mean morning chores?

Terryffinda: It's 3:45pm sir...

Penultimate: Are you questioning me??? I know what time it is! Y'know, my Chronopathy? Ugh. Anyways, it's time for breakfast.

I head downstairs, where my breakfast is waiting for me (my servant Nikolai is intuitive like that), and after my breakfast of  various fruits, vegetables, and exotic never-heard-of before meats, drinks and pastries, MythPower: Philote's Affection allows me to sense that my allies may be paying me a visit in a short while (or a long while if they have yet to learn how to control their abilities)...

Pay specific attention to the bit in parenthesis, clearly implying that Wulfs powers come from the list and he created the planet Celedon in his dreams while sleeping. But later on, at the end of the thread, Wulf seems confused. In an argument with Mik, he says than he didn't create any of his villains and that "When I say that I created ANY of Celadon, I am speaking out of character." Except that clearly contradicts what he wrote about creating Celadon in his sleep. How then can this contradiction be reconciled. There is in fact a way, and it goes back to Wish.

This is Wish's first post in New Beginning:

Wish wrote

 own hands.

I created a green duplicate of me with the ring.

Then I switch into my ironman costume to go outside and stop the two rampaging mecha.

I'm joined by......Superman

I almost coughed....Superman was my math teacher.

Why was he my math teacher?

Then I realized.....this is fictional world interblending.

Everyone was being affected and were becoming their favorite characters---they were even starting to think that they are the characters.

Suddenly I had the urge to resist.

What am I thinking? I'm being drawn into my own power.

I'm saving the city because my characters would be saving the city not because I wanted too.

It is with this that I sealed myself in a protective ball to isolate myself from the mind controlling effects of my own power.

Suddenly a mysterious man shows up in my protective ball.

"Hello, boy"

It was the devil himself.

What have I done?

Wulf joins right after Wish does, AFTER Wish is already using Fictional World Interblending. As I've said before, Wish clearly intends for this power to mirror the Stand Bohemian Rhapsody from Jojo's Bizarre adventure.

Read about it here.

Now, Bohemian Rhapsody was beaten by a one of the protagonists simply drawing up a character from their imaginations that had the power to put all the other fictional characters back. So characters you just think up are covered under Bohemian Rhapsody.

Wish wrote

Everyone was being affected and were becoming their favorite characters---they were even starting to think that they are the characters.

I posit: The Penultimates life, as he remembers it, is complete fiction. He is in fact the poster Shadowulf1 under the effects of Fictional World Interblending, and used Power of Imagination unconsciously to build everything in his whole mythology. Wulf is in fact dead, completely subsumed into The Penultimates personality.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

 I like that posit.

It's wrong--if I'm reading your suggestion correctly--and can easily be explained otherwise, but interesting nonetheless.

I rather appreciate your consideration of the context and implications of the various threads. I doubt you'll find the other threads so satisfying, where reading between the lines is concerned, but by all means, do continue.

Speaking of which, how far along have you come in that there first thread?

[Marvelous Miscreant]

I'm trying to recall...In NB someone had a weapon that was named something utterly ridiculous and cutesy sounding, but it was actually incredibly powerful...What weapon was that and who had it?

[Celadon's Penultimate]

Zaleramancer had Bunnyhugger and I had The Gilded Ninnyhammer.

[Zaleramancer]

Bunnyhugger could cause an apocalypse by being shaken vigorously.

[Marvelous Miscreant]

Has either ever been described physically in the course of NB?

[Celadon's Penultimate]

I think I just said that The Gilded Ninnyhammer was a large, golden warhammer. It has a Celadonian rune on the actual part that hits stuff.

[Zaleramancer]

Imagine a spear brought to you by Barbie via the imagination of a nine year old girl.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

 That sounds amazing.

[Philote]

@Marv: The NB story arc ended. I don't remember if someone already told you.

Did someone already call doing the next NB story arc? I don't suspect that we will be starting it quickly, but I was curious.

@Vault: Did you ever read NB Brawl? Would like to see you do one of your reviews on that whole thing