What the flying ####: AKA: New Beginning a Retrospective by Gentlman Vaultboy.

[Marvelous Miscreant]

Myself wrote

When I started reading this minutes ago, I began to laugh harder than I have in quite a while.

I think I may make a YouTube video of me narrating New Beginning, perhaps with help. What does everyone think?

I think its a great idea. Let me know if you go through with it and I'll help anyway I can.

[Myself]

I would probably need some additional voice actors and and editor or two anyway.

I may upload it here before uploading to YouTube.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

I currently have no way to help out, but when my other computer gets back up and running, then sure.

[Mik_Hael]

How about help with the one that's already in progress Myself.

I know that no one pays attention to anything I do for more than five seconds unless it pisses them off but we're already trying to create a series of youtube voice overs played over a changing picture background in the comic thread.

If you volunteered to be the voice of GV for the Video I think it would be great if Vault didn't want to do it himself. Even then I'd be gracious for some help converting New beginning retrospective into a script with vocal cues and whatnot.

But please why don't we all just work on the same project please, I don' mind if it's yours even although I would feel slightly pissed after spending the last few days working on the other one only for it to be usurped.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

GV, do you have a way to do voice-over for the narration?

[Myself]

Why did you have to phrase it like that? Now I feel like a horrible person.

I am more than happy to offer my assistance with voicing.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

No, nothing like that.

Anyway remember all those Mercers that are tearing up New Atlantis? The dudes that didn't run off to find Chuck and have a fight that may or may not have happened? Well, because Greanday and Neo don't seem to be handling the situation at all Miks buddy/alternate self The Monster King decides to step in decides to step in and take care of things. He turns all of the Mercers into pure light before they can do any further damage.

Wulf then points out that, if he's there already, why is he sparing the Kystians that are flying around. Mik then decides, screw it, I'll kill Kyst. The whole dimension. Now I know I bag on Wulf and Myself a lot for their desire to destroy every last Kystian in existence, but this is actually a fair point. These things, from reading their descriptions on the list, are dangerous as hell and New Atlantis has already let a group of them loose on the planet so obviously Greenday and Neo can't be trusted with them.

On the other hand, Wulf only wants them dead because they're creepy.

This sort of spawns a little argument of people telling Mik "no, you can't just kill Kyst. It'd put up to much of a fight" And Mik going "man no I can totally take him he's just cocky" and people replying "how can a dimension be cocky" to which Mik replies "brb killin kyst."

He's back in three seconds carrying a skull and a flag like a baller. The flay lets anyone who possesses it control Kystians, and he plants that sucker right in front of Neo's house on New Atlantis. The skull he gives to Wulf, because Kyst is actually in there. Wulf fluctuates on whether or not he wants to keep the thing for a bit, but then decides, yes, being able to kick this thing around is worth having to touch it.

No there wasn't a description of the battle, why would there be?

Then the two of them decide on what to do with all the creatures they released into the world from the substitute battle arena. The Chikraken gets shipped off to a celedon zoo, the Dragon is shrunk down into a marble and the squirrel is just plain shrunk down, and no one does a thing about the army of super robots because screw it, that's Myself's problem.

During this conversation, Mik reveals that his empire spans across "most of" the northern hemisphere. That's a lot, no matter how you slice it. Myself also shows of his holdings, which consist of:

1. Australia
2. A bunch of self replication space colonies.
3. Wulfs attic, which I'm pretty sure is an act of territorial expansion considering he only had a single room before.
4. All those personal realm he left dotting the surface of the world. You know, the ones for the redundant immortalities?

Neo, not to outdone, unveils his Arks of War! He goes really in depth with these gleaming gold and silver spaceships, but all you need to know is that they are totally 100% impervious to all attack. He has used Ability Imbuing to trick these things out to be the most badass space ships ever made, and he churns out over a half a million gold ones (big, bulky, and shooty) and a straight million slivers ones (smaller, sleeker, less shooty). Keep in mind, when I say smaller that means the silver ones 300 feet long. The gold ones are over three miles.

Myself, not to be outshone by this, revels his society. Gee, I wonder what sort of society it is...

...

.....

........

...I need scotch.

Okay, I'm back. I got scotch. Lets get into it, because it's bad.

You want to know what life is like in Australia under Myself? First of all, there's this caste system. There the ruling class on the very top. There's only one member of the ruling class, and that's Myself. He says that once he dies or resigns there will be a new ruler but he's made sure, over and over and over again, that that's not going to happen, so he's going to be ruler until he doesn't feel like it anymore. Even if someone does manage to kill him, then his reincarnation is put on the throne. Only people with superpowers are allowed to marry into this class (too bad you filthy muggle ladies, Myself isn't interested in your kind).

Now you may be thinking to yourself "Vault, that rule doesn't make any sense because Neo gave everyone superpowers." You'd be right, but keep reading.

The second step down, the Powered Class, is literally the 1%. They make up one percent of the total population and a given a genetic trait by the god king Myself that allows them to pick a power from the list. But in woman it's recessive, so really it's only the men of this class that can pick their superpower. He also stipulates that any other person with superpowers from the list is automatically uplifted into this class, so we're all in here underneath Myself.

Now you may be thinking to yourself "Vault, that rule also doesn't make any sense because Neo gave everyone superpowers from the list." You'd be right, but keep reading.

Number three on the totem poll are the High Worker Class. Making up 9% of the population, these all innately have Vector Control, immunity to mental powers (never thought he'd give someone immunity to mind control), and much longer lifespans. This doesn't seem so bad, does it? Well, it is when you see their interaction with the lower class.

Number 4,the lowest class, is comprised of normal people with no powers. If you think about that for just a second you'll see the problem, but it get's worse. Their official job is to be broodsows for the High Worker Class. So whenever they need more workers, they just go and get freaky with those under them to pop some out.

Then there's that pesky recessive trait. You know what it causes if you're born with it? Death. You have a 90% chance of just straight dying. You have a 9% of turning into some mystical creature and being moved to Celedon. There is only a 1% chance of making it into the second class. Which doesn't make any sense at all, because everyone has powers.

Neo praises him for this society because, like I said before, he loves the boot.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Lets's move on from the.....unfortunate fate of anyone Myself has power over and instead keep laughing at Neo trusting him. Myself says he as some way to make the the ships better, so Neo just hands over one hundred and ten thousand of them. Neo then starts work on even more WMDs, including a cannon that just shoots out into space and things designed to blow up stars and black holes.

Mik decides during the lull to destroy the planet Niberu before it conquers the Earth. No I don't know where this came from, just that he borrows 3 of Neo's ships to go fight it. He comes back with 4 of them, having conquered a planet that doesn't exist and installed a friend of his as puppet ruler. No he doesn't describe at all how he did this, just that if you encounter 13 black cats glowing green and floating through space you should run away.

So now Mik owns a planet, one that, according to him, has 3 times as much mass but half as many beaches. So that's out there somewhere.

Neo then unveils the 4 guardians of New Atlantis: Minate is a robotic Asian girl capable of replicating herself using nanomachines who is super strong and super fast. Harai is a being of living psychic energy who has every psychic power ever. Todo is a small talking puppy a smart as a man and capable of creating and throwing dimensions around as weapons. Arathan is a living mass of sentient atoms which is so weird, because I am also a living mass of sentient atoms. Funny how that works out.

There some talk of getting that puppy to fight Myself, and that somehow leads to a explanation of Rihlo's backstory. You know, that dude the teamed up with Boomqueefa and then proceeded to do nothing? Anyway, he was one of three Jesters created by god at the very beginning of time, but he's somehow an infant compared to his brothers. As the Jester of anger, he has complete control of the time space continuum, but don't worry because Mik keeps assuring us that he's the stronger of the two. Now, Jesters can appear as anything, but Rhiholo chooses the form of a teenager. Why, I have no idea. Oh, and his hair is super spiky because it represents a jesters cap and number of hair spikes represents power level for them just like Dragon Ball Z. The three I'm talking about have three. Mik has 4. Anyway these three jesters, him, Rhian, and Rhea, made a huge anomaly core and he jumped in and got all demonic so he had to get beaten down. He's a super strong reality warper and has "limited omnipresence" which means he can be anywhere.

You know what there's no such thing as? Limited Omnipresence, it's a nonsense concept.

I spent some time on him because I had to write about something.  See, the next couple of pages are taken up by people arguing about powers and how their little fake dudes could kill the other guys little fake dudes.

On page 39 something finally happens again, even if it's only someone trying to strangle Myself and Myself killing him. Still, it's something happening and, god help, at this point I'll take anything.

Oh during the big stretch of nothing happen Zale came back, and he points out to Wulf that the whole viral army thing is something a supervillain would do. Wulf rejects this and continues to insist that infecting billions of people with a horrible virus of mind control/living death is a perfectly heroic thing to do, and that he'll let them all go once he's judged them to be good people. Well, not the good good people, he'll spirit them off the Celedon to live with him.

Zale's retort boils down to "So, you're kidnapping people?" And according to the law, yeah, that's exactly what he's doing. But Wulf doesn't care, and WHD back him up on this. They're powerful, they don't have to answer to anyone. Wulf continues to do some truly impressive mental gymnastics to dance around the fact that this is something a literal cartoon supervillain would say.

Eventually it takes Zale and Mik talking to him to get him to go along with releasing them. Those D&D nerds? He takes them to Celedon. Baddies, according to Wulf, get thrown into his prison torture dimension. Goodies, again according to Wulf, get released back onto earth with a way to contact him, which I can only imagine is immediately crumpled and discarded in disgust.

He ends it with a "there...happy" Again, it's the smiley that gets me. He still doesn't think he's done anything untoward.

Myself makes a bunch of cheat codes for real life that anyone can use, but doesn't tell anybody what they are. Of course they can't be used ob the shining golden gods that look down upon the Earth and freely judge the rest of petty humanity, why would they? Mik's the only one that points out that inputting to many cheats could cause the game to crash, and laments that this whole thing is going to end with god smacking them all down and undoing everything. At this point I can only hope.

You may have noticed that Dryad is missing. That's because she''s on Celedon, interacting with "real" Dryads. Wulf sent her there.

After this we get a nice long religion derail spawned by people not not getting a simple Futurama joke about the God of Atheism.

Myself, thankfully, is there to drag the thread out of the muck again. He discovers that the people a Celedon are being strickin with a plague. He sets to work, building a hospital one Celedon and sending out jackbooted thugs through the teleportation network to grab anyone who's sick. The disease is immutable, it affects anyone regardless of powers, can worm itself through any immune system, and a dead come back as zombies. He fashions a vaccine for it withing his next post.

Normally I'd blame Myself for this, as a false flag operation to get more Celedonian land, but no. It's far more likely that the virus Wulf put in the nerds mutated once it got out onto Celedon and started killing his own people. Myself even says that it's clearly something created by superhuman hands. They don't realize this simple explanation, however, and set out looking for the "culprit" that created this clearly disease. They blame a man named Everblade who got blocked from the site and decide to bring him in and splatter him. An act that Zale points out is super mature and in no way petty power-tripping. To be fair, it's about as mature here as when Dante Alighieri did it.

Now forget all that stuff about the disease, because everybody else does. Myself weaves dimensional space into his clothing, improves his armor (why?), then uses Technopathy to wreak havoc on "his foes." WHAT FOES? You can'r just say you're fighting people and not say who those people are. I'm going to assume Australian freedom fighters. He then starts handing out fitht dimensional notebooks to everyone allied with Wulf and adds a shield around his house. Then he gives himself MORE redundant protections.

Then he uses conditional ability bestowal on "the army" (his army?) and "those hunting superhumans" to mind control both groups and hunt down any "illegitimate" superhuman he wants. He also sets up a business to sell superpowers, with a big old side helping of mind control. Oh I get it, "illegitimate" means you have superpowers, but don't have Myself in your head.

The rest of the Holy Trinity fully support this development.

That is effective where Thread 2 ends.

[Gentleman Vaultboy]

Bonus, Myself during all of this:

[Philote]

The moment I've been waiting for

I believe I get to make my appearance in your next post and Marv shows up 25ish pages later.

Don't forget to chronicle the New Beginning Brawl thread into this story, it occurs within the time frame of NB 3 I think.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

In my defense, a lot of this is just really immature reality bender showboating, which is implicitly undone in place of actually logical improvements, just like any damage that occurs during a New Beginning party. Most damage done by us, that isn't a fixed point in time, is implicitly retconned from reality.

[Zaleramancer]

Are you telling me I was the voice of reason?

I wonder when I mess up.

[Zaleramancer]

I also consider the GREAT POWER COMES GREAT INSANITY to be cannon.

Since we live in a multiple-choice past, anything can be.

Also because I remember times when my character breaks out into violent psychopathy and also once when my shadow became more sane as I became less.

I like the idea of having a reservoir for an overflow of crazy.  

[Celadon's Penultimate]

It recently became headcanon that you silently and diligently reality-unbent whatever craziness we set in motion, whenever we went too far. I mean, it totally makes sense. Not only does it suit your personality, it fills in the plotholes, as to how many people were left on Earth unaffected by us. When it seems like we keep doing things to millions and billions of people, and GV wonders how anybody is left over for us to do anything else to, it's only because you've come in our wake, undoing damage and erasing memories, until the next time we came around to cause chaos.

You let us have our fun, trying to talk us down to sensibility, until we finally snapped into actual hero mode. And unfortunately for Earth, it takes us over 10 New Beginning threads' worth of havoc to do it.

[Zaleramancer]

'ey boss, they've done broke free will again.

BY THE SWEATY ARMPITS OF ZEUS! FINE! I'LL GET THE DUCT TAPE.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

 Something like that.

[Mik_Hael]

I look at most of my stuff concerning powers from back the and think "teenage bullshit from a damaged person."

and niberu was one of the several 2012 or 2013 apocalypse scenarios involving a planet that was suppose to colide with earth so I thought what the hell and put it in, by that point I was just tired of nobody paying attention and decided to just get things out of the way myself....which in all honesty means that if it wasn't Zale cleaning up after everyone it might have been me doing it at that point, or the both of us.


What I thought might have caused the inconsistencies and badguys popping up everywhere was the power conflicts I kept harping about back then. Everyone said they had complete control over their abilities due to some power coupling or insta training power and what not, but did they really. I could see it as entirely being possible if at one time in the back of someone's mind they thought "wouldn't it be cool if '"blank" started killing "blank" with a flaming "blank" composed of screaming "blank"" and that thing just popped into existence because they were that powerful, then they just forgot about it and then subconsciously created a villain retroactively.

[Celadon's Penultimate]

It all really was quite immature. The in-character play, the out-of-character sniping, it was madness. And not the good kind.

As for the theory of that last paragraph, sure, I could get on board with that. Makes sense to me.

And, personally, if you ask me, some of those earlier plots puttered out way too soon. They could definitely work out, now that we've all gotten a feel for one another and don't have to worry too much about stepping on each other's toes. And with our current band of merry misfits? Magic. In fact...hm...hehehe...methinks some more machinations should be in order...

[Myself]

That made my laugh rather hard. Apparently, in NB I am FABULOUS!

[Myself]

Well, the workers on those ships are actually paid workers (whether I actually mentioned that or not). They also have fantastic benefits to the job. They are not slaves.