aberrantangels | Entries tagged with aberrant

Further down the spiral.

August 3
[Aberrant] An article notes that Project Utopia's approval ratings within the US, Australia and parts of Europe have continued to drop since the Slider murder last year.

We aren't given a source for the article, nor does it give actual numbers, but it has a bar graph that shows Utopia's US approval ratings as over the S and A of "Strongly Approve" in January (of 2008, I'm guessing), between the R and O of "Approve" in June, and just left of the A by December. It also quotes a Utopian press release that's "confident Project Utopia will weather this storm.... Project Utopia rests on its record of humanitarianism and hard work for the benefit of the people of the world." (Okay, that link was me being sarcastic and ruining your life.)

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Jewel, "Angel Standing By"

Nothing much to add.

July 31
[Aberrant] A memorial is held for Donald Zeleckis. He receives posthumous honors for heroism. Both Syrian and Israeli governments agree to a cease-fire for this day to honor Zeleckis' sacrifice.

Let's hope it lasts a while, even though I already know it won't last forever.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Jewel, "Adrian"

One day, his deeds will be erased, but for now, he is a hero.

July 28
[Aberrant] Donald Zeleckis, a Jewish-American tourist and nova, dies while stopping a nuclear missile which has been launched at Syria. Israeli officials deny authorizing the escalation to nuclear weapons. Syrian officials don't believe Israel is responsible and will not respond in kind.

If Israel hasn't destroyed its nuclear stockpile yet, it's probably in large part because (like their OTL counterpart) that would require them to admit having one. (The Aberrant Storyteller's Companion says they're similarly coy about whether they have any novas of their own.)

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: A Flock of Seagulls, "I Ran"

...if you're on the frequency, yeah.

July 16
[Aberrant] Jacob Ashton writes a private journal entry bemoaning his non-nova status. He believes it's his birthright to be a nova, and has tried transcendental meditation, skydiving, even murder with his bare hands in hopes of joining their number

He complains of how eruption "sits just beyond my reach, taunting me.... I fear that I may kill myself before I stumble upon the right alchemy that will trigger my node.... How is it that I can have so much and yet be relegated to the hordes of common men — only to look in awe and envy upon the quantum gods who walk among us?"

Right below his plaint is an implied example of the sort of thing he's tried, in the form of a newspaper article headlined Industrialist Nearly Killed in Tragic Airline Crash. Thirty-nine people died when the pilots of British Airways Flight 317 lost control and the plane did a Brodie into the Atlantic; luckily, the HMS Inevitable was there to retrieve the survivors.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Madness, "Our House"

It helps you out knowing I'm left out, locked in a box with a light that won't shine.

May 11
[Aberrant] An unmarked communiqué is sent to "Jonathan." It says that the enclosed script for an N! documentary about Slider is set to air, but is unkind to the Project, so it should get edited or killed before it airs, and whoever's responsible should be fired.

Whether Jonathan actually knows about Proteus or just works for them, deponent knoweth not.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Vertical Horizon, "You Say"

Remember these? Yeah, me neither.

April 7
[Aberrant] Matt Dawson (mdawson@opcom.sydney.au), Tom Miller (novamanic@opsource.bos.us) and The Lightkeeper (lightkeeper@opcom.melbourne.au) talk about nova group Australis on the NovaWatch OpSite discussion boards.

This is the money quote from Miller's post, which went up at 20:05:56 GMT:

I don't get the problem Australians on this site seem to have with their own novas. I mean, c'mon, Australis is a good team, and they've done a lot for your country, even if they aren't Team Tomorrow. I think the idea that every country should have its own Team Tomorrow is ridiculous, why can't you be happy with the novas you have?

At 22:44:37, Dawson explained that it's because Australis are wankers whose job is to "look good and pose for photo ops". He explains that Australia has "a fine, long-standing tradition" of hating its celebrities: "The higher you climb, the harder we'll try to pull you down." (Can any of my Australian readers tell me whether this is accurate to OTL Australia?)

That's why any Australian nova with an ounce of brains gets out of the country as soon as possible. Why the hell would you want to stay here and become the "hero" of the godforsaken Outback when you can join up with Team Tomorrow and become a media darling or sign on with DeVries and make scads of money? [...] I'd rather scan old newsvids of Team Tomorrow than watch a live feed of anything Australis is doing, unless it involves Michelle Medford getting naked.

At 23:17:40, The Lightkeeper quotes the sentence about any Australian nova with an ounce of brains as a lead-in to eir reply:

That may be true, but isn't that why Australis exists in the first place? To keep all our local novas from just flying (or teleporting or whatever) off to Europe, Africa and the rest of the world? [...] If there's a disaster in Sydney or Melbourne, you can bet it'll be Australis and not Team Tomorrow that shows up first and does whatever it can to help out.

E ends by wondering why T2M A/P is located in Indonesia rather than Australia.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Garbage, "Push It"

Pretty much the last TitTU post of 2008.

December 15
[Aberrant] The Electoral College votes.

By canonical default, confirming Randel Portman as the 45th President of the United States.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Berlin, "Sex (I'm a...)"

I wonder if Hugh was as psyched about the results as I am about ours. (I'm certainly glad I'm not posting an eight-thousand-word cluster F-bomb like the guy in my userpic.)

November 4
[Aberrant] The US Presidential election.

Canonically, Randel Portman wrests a narrow victory from Mark Green, ultimately decided in the Electoral College. (In other words, like the OTL 2000 election, only with a happy ending.) How it went in your chronicle may be quite different, of course.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Garbage, "Push It"

Well, the next update would be the election, and that's tomorrow, so I guess I'd better get off these things I've been sitting on.

October 8
[Aberrant] Mark Anthony Green writes in his journal: "It seems cruel that the Lord told us of Heaven. [Earth] is a satisfying world in many ways...but God dangles Heaven above us like a man teasing his dog." He opines that to attain great power — to erupt as a nova, for instance, or to be elected President — is to become like God, and vows that "If I become like God, I will not tease the people with stories of Heaven. I will teach them to love the world they have."

That's a vague relief, even if it's not clear he'd expected them to act on that love, and even though he considers power the defining attribute of a Godness.

October 9
[Aberrant] Soguk Birlesme, a baseline post-doctoral assisting Dr. Dmitri Kasheyev in his fusion research, writes home to his parents in Thailand about a recent accident at work in whose resolution he got to see Dr. Kasheyev's powers in action.

The previous week, Dr. Kasheyev had returned to the DAIKOKU facility from the inertial containment lab, after "some sort of quarrel" whose nature was a mystery to Soguk. Without Kasheyev's ability to sense subatomic structures, and his ability to solve the relevant equations even more precisely than DAIKOKU's computers, the research had stalled.

On the 8th, Dr. Nakazawa decided to show Kasheyev a test-run of a "plasma configuration we'd had some luck with." Kasheyev didn't think this was wise necessarily, and it turned out he was right: "the plasma tied itself in knots and burned a hole in the containment tube!" The plasma jet wouldn't have hurt Soguk (200,000,000° sounds like a lot, "but the plasma is so thin and dissipates so quickly that it doesn't have time to burn"), but Kasheyev threw himself in its path anyway, and "his whole body glowed" when it struck him.

Neither of them was hurt, but they went to see the doctor anyway. The doctor recommended Soguk take the day off, and he was so light-headed he agreed. The next day, the DAIKOKU staff discussed the accident only in terms of preventing a repeat. Only time will tell what effects the whole thing had.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Garbage, "Milk"

Downright anticlimactic, this.

September 18
[Aberrant] Nova manipulation of the polls is uncovered.

Took 'em long enough. The specifics of the uncovering, and where it goes from here, are supposed to be up to your PCs anyway.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Murray Head, "One Night in Bangkok"

Okay, I've blown this off long enough.

September
[Aberrant] Jane Mason, a plant for Marietta Jackson, joins the Portman campaign.

(Or the Green campaign, if that's whom the PCs are working with and the ST wants to keep them involved.)

First, Bard Crosby of the Dominoes convinced another campaign (probably President Pendleton's, which previously had no novas working with it) to hire the Dominoes, giving them an excuse to follow the characters from political event to event. Then he contacted Mason, an associate from either his allegiance or academia, and spent a week or so rewiring her personality until she believed herself to be an ally of the Dominoes who "became a bit complicit in some illegal stuff" and wants out.

She will approach the PCs and give them information about upcoming Domino schemes. Once she's proven herself, the Dominoes will use her to lead the PCs to schemes that weren't actually going to happen... schemes whereof, in the authorities' eyes, the characters themselves will appear guilty.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Madness, "Our House"

Sorry I'm late.

September 5
[Aberrant] Mark Anthony Green attempts to arrange a sex scandal involving Randel Portman and nova Raphaela Moore.

Moore lives in San Francisco; Portman was in town to give a speech. A hacker on Green's payroll spoofed the hotel switchboard, then called Moore (with a Fireman-themed voice-masker) inviting her to "his" (Portman's) hotel room. Whether it worked or not is up to the players and the Storyteller.

Either way, Raphaela Moore's interest in the political process has been piqued. She later modifies her appearance and attaches herself to Bernard Morrison's campaign.

This could lead to excellence or serious injury, given that Moore is a Mega-Social maniac who has to make an effort to interact with people in a genuine way, rather than through her "social jujitsu" abilities.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: The Escape Club, "Wild Wild West"

Stuff in general.

September 2
[Aberrant] Geyser, a novice Tomorrowite, writes home about her first days on the job with T2M-Americas.

They flew her and Christoph Yannik to Mexico City on a private jet, where Skew himself met them at the airport. "And god, is he handsome! I thought I was going to melt!"

After getting showered and changed into their official Team Tomorrow eufiber ~~onesies~~ unitards, they proceeded to a pig roast ("three whole hogs roasting on spits") attended by a lot of reporters, "at least a hundred other [ordinary] people" and the entire rest of T2M-Am "except Ana Graça Texeira, who had something else to do, I guess". (You guess right.)

Things got a little tense for awhile, when one of the reporters started asking questions about Slider, but Mr. Montoya-Bernal was so cool about how he answered the questions and then moved on so that the reporter couldn't bring everybody down. It was a party, after all and nobody wanted to talk about sad things.

She breaks off there, as she's about to head off on a mission and will be too busy to talk (even if she were allowed to, which she suspects she won't) for a couple of days.

Marietta Jackson, a developed sphinx, turns the Dominoes, a group of novas under her direction, against Randel Portman.

Marietta's body, animated by a subconscious mind that does a completely convincing imitation of normal human consciousness, tends a bar in Garza Bay, Costa Rica. "Her conscious mind wandered off long ago into abstract realms of number theory and linguistics, and it's not planning to return until it can drag its body into those realms with it." Her subconscious considers that Portman poses a threat to her just by the two of them existing, and is enacting countermeasures.

The Dominoes ~~are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction~~ have an allegiance "generally opposed to the [player] characters', ideally one with an interest in protecting America." Silvia "Anne Steiner" Calendri is a former NSA crypto expert who became a chaos generator after a virus wiped her hard drive. Bard Crosby is a body-hopper and social monster. "Mary Mary" Martinez is almost entirely focused outward, which means she doesn't pay enough attention to herself to stay the same shape from moment to moment. Reginald Daniels, the optional big gun, is an old-school angel, praising his God but with one wing dipped in blood.

Current Mood: geeky

There's a second part to this, but I arbitrarily decided it needs to come after tomorrow's post.

September
[Aberrant] In a Baltimore police station, Captain Goss gives a presentation to his men (and women) on nonlethal weapons purchased in the wake of a wrongful-death lawsuit the previous year.

Three different varieties of soft projectiles (all identical in terms of game mechanics), netguns, foamthrowers, a shotgun that fires a spray of tranquilizer darts, and an elephant gun that fires enough sedative to (hopefully) incapacitate a nova. The whole thing ate up the squad-car replacement budget through 2010.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Marshall Crenshaw, "Someday, Someway"

I've been genuinely demotivated to work on this.

August 28
[Aberrant] Randel Portman finds out about Mark Green's meeting with the Senate Committee on Nova Affairs.

St. Rebecca of Whitherby lists a number of dirty tricks Green can play on the PCs, many of the "let's you and him fight" variety.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Erasure, "Who Needs Love Like That?"

"If you ever do this to me again, I swear I'll wrap your feet around your head and use you as a racquetball."

August 19
[Aberrant] Bartolomew, one of Mark Anthony Green's Secret Service detail, sends an encrypted communique to his supervisor Steve, complaining about the difficulties in working for Green. "First, he has more privacy issues than ViaSoft.... Second, honest as Saint Pete is tall, he's nuts."

"Not irrational for a minute, mind. But he's a sick bastard." The mask slipped for a moment the other day in New York, when they were driving him to a fundraising dinner and saw a little girl lying in the gutter. Green's wife Lois called out "Oh my God! Stop!"

Bartolomew had to think about the candidate's safety. But the candidate... for a moment, seemed to be fighting the impulse to say "No &mdash: I don't want to be late".

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: The Smiths, "Girlfriend in a Coma"

How I got the impression this happened today, I couldn't explain under {fast-penta,Veritaserum}.

August 17
[Aberrant] On PBS' "Speak Out", media and culture critic Paul Nielman of Columbia University criticizes the isolation caused by popular VR systems like Vir-Gogs.

His point is underlined by the ad on the opposite page for Vir-Gogs Junior, with Cyber-Trance Junior. It takes the "electronic babysitter" to a whole new horrendous level.

He also points out that "Most of what's available so for for Vir-Gogs are adaptations of existing movies and TV shows", done by computer. "It's colorization all over again." And it meddles with the original creators' visions. "If George Lucas decides that he wants to digitize and dimensionalize the Star Wars series for another special edition, that's fine with me. No one else, though, has any right to touch those films or change them in any way."

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Frank Zappa f/Moon Unit Zappa, "Valley Girl"

Go on and psychoanalyze that.

August 15
[Aberrant] Corby Carter, nominally a Utopian nova but privately a "smart egg" (Portman's term for an undeveloped Sphinx), begins moving against Portman (who suspects Corb of Sphinx status).

We aren't told what, specifically, Corb plans to do to the Fireman, but we're given examples of the things he'll do to PCs who come to his attention: causing police to show up to take them into psychiatric custody, police primed to "watch for the known personal habits and mannerisms of the character as signs of the alleged condition," then come in as a special consultant and goad them into acting out (in the words of Bryan Lambert to the Malkinistas, "That's your A-game?"*); incriminating messages and other threatening actions; associating the Clytemnestra blog with the characters' allegiance to a degree that they can't attack him without attacking their own side; turning one of his followers into a PC's ideal mate, such that the Corbite will be heartbroken if the beloved turns against Corb...

August 16
[Aberrant] The "World's Opinion" segment on N!terview asks "Is the world ready for a nova President?"

A Moscow house painter replies "Why not? Russia has one." Ivy Latimer, a graphic artist in Bedworth, is "quite convinced that nothing is too crazy for America." Jenina Goudreau, a geneticist on Boston, considers that "A one-in-a-million curiosity of nature doesn't represent anyone." Kirsten Kinney, an elite of no fixed address, says "The wolves'll tear him apart." Josette Nicholson, a retired programmer in San Jose, believes it'll "keep[] the number of threats down. Plus, The Fireman has demonstrated his integrity in the face of power."

* Don't getta me wrongo; the prospect freaks me out, to the point where trying to write about it was one of the chief reasons I didn't get this posted yesterday. And I've never actually been through it, whereas it's quite possible that Ryan Sean Borgstrom/Rebecca S. Borgstrom/Jenna K. Moran have seen the quirks of one of them used against the entire Hollyhock God(dess) system and the body it inhabits. But it strikes me as spectacularly petty on Corb's part, not to mention hard to ST a way out of.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Jewel, "Daddy"

[Insert witty comment here.]

August 11-14
[Aberrant] The Democratic National Convention, which ends with a nova candidate, Randel Portman, with Congresswoman Carol Migden as his running mate.

At least, that's the default assumption. The supplement notes that the PCs may end up supporting some other candidate for the nomination, possibly even one of their own.

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Jewel, "I'm Sensitive"

Most of the other entries under this tag come from this item, actually.

August 7
[Aberrant] An INTERPOL report on Greenwar makes note of recent actions believed to be the work of the eco-terrorist group: the psychic attacks on Susan Durant, Anthony Farrell and Sato Tanaka and the deaths of Janos Van De Meer and Ricardo Mendez.

The memo ends up by noting the main thing Greenwar have that most other eco-terrorist organizations don't: novas.

Current Mood: geeky

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Today in the Trinity Universe: the Repairer of Reputations
Today in the Trinity Universe: and the air was so still, and his eyes, they did not blink
Today in the Trinity Universe: there goes my hero, watch him as he goes...
Today in the Trinity Universe: privilege, you have the right...
Today in the Trinity Universe: too much listening, not enough living
Today in the Trinity Universe: this is the noise that keeps me awake
Today in the Trinity Universe: the moment of truth
(no subject)
Early last month in the Trinity Universe: heaven and hellfire
Today in the Trinity Universe: watching the game, controlling it
Sometime this month in the Trinity Universe: there's always something happening and it's usually qui
Yesterday in the Trinity Universe: she's so mean but I don't care
Today in the Trinity Universe: your little mystery
This month in the Trinity Universe: breakdown, takedown, you're busted
Today in the Trinity Universe: and now it's all gone wrong, the words are kind of hard
Today in the Trinity Universe: but you know I would hate anything to happen to her
[DEL: Today :DEL] Yesterday in the Trinity Universe: a whole bunch'a nothin' in there
Yesterday and today in the Trinity Universe: I'm gonna use your tongue as a stamp...
Starting today in the Trinity Universe
Today in the Trinity Universe: fur and fangs

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Entries tagged with aberrant

Today in the Trinity Universe: the Repairer of Reputations

Today in the Trinity Universe: and the air was so still, and his eyes, they did not blink

Today in the Trinity Universe: there goes my hero, watch him as he goes...

Today in the Trinity Universe: privilege, you have the right...

Today in the Trinity Universe: too much listening, not enough living

Today in the Trinity Universe: this is the noise that keeps me awake

Today in the Trinity Universe: the moment of truth

(no subject)

Early last month in the Trinity Universe: heaven and hellfire

Today in the Trinity Universe: watching the game, controlling it

Sometime this month in the Trinity Universe: there's always something happening and it's usually qui

Yesterday in the Trinity Universe: she's so mean but I don't care

Today in the Trinity Universe: your little mystery

This month in the Trinity Universe: breakdown, takedown, you're busted

Today in the Trinity Universe: and now it's all gone wrong, the words are kind of hard

Today in the Trinity Universe: but you know I would hate anything to happen to her

[DEL: Today :DEL] Yesterday in the Trinity Universe: a whole bunch'a nothin' in there

Yesterday and today in the Trinity Universe: I'm gonna use your tongue as a stamp...

Starting today in the Trinity Universe

Today in the Trinity Universe: fur and fangs