This day in Trinity Universe History: Mal is a forethought

[aberrantangels]

Thanks, etherlad, for the reassurance that TDiTUH still serves a useful purpose. The plan I'd almost forgotten I had is working just the way I meant it to. ("That's just the way I planned it!" — Wolfgang Amadeus von Fahrvergnugen)

There's a link between the two items for today, but I'm not going to spell it out explicitly. I will say that f you've been reading my posts, at least this calendar year, you can put the pieces together for yourself.

1923
[Adventure!] Several academics who had been investigating the Inquiry on behalf of Michael Donighal are framed for stock market fraud and arrested.

Truth to tell, I dropped the ball (screwed the pooch, goofed the floof) on this one. It was actually on Whitley Styles' behalf, not Donighal's, that those "scholarly associates" were looking into the matter. In the second place, given some of the references in Whit's journal entry on the matter, I'm not so sure 1923 was when it happened. He says it started in the summer of 1922 and had its next major development three months later — but he also says that his friend David Aramissian summed it up "for Mercer, Primoris and myself." In the fall of 1922, Whit had no idea of Max Mercer's whereabouts and had yet to meet Dr. Primoris as Primoris (though he knew Donighal, or at least knew of him). This is a number of occasions when the Trinity Universe could have benefited from a copy editor with the eye for detail that Asperger's inflicts bestows on a body. (I'll have occasion to cover another within the month.)

Briefly, Aramissian, a mathematician doing doctoral work at the University of Chicago, had been comparing the distribution of income changes among college graduates over the last decade and noticed something he wasn't expecting: "The careers of the graduates who got involved with postwar diplomacy and reconstruction were, on the whole, significantly stunted." He mentioned it to Whit, Whit passed it along to some ivory-tower types he probably knew through Mercer, and they thought no more of it.

In the fall, Aramissian contacted Styles again: "Whit, there's something going on here that isn't just accidental." People who took part in war efforts, both during and after, were suffering a succession of minor misfortunes. Interestingly enough, the worst of it was not happening to the people at the top of the chains of command, but of the people a few rungs down who made the real decisions.

Primoris conducted his own investigation, which uncovered the Inquiry — named for the group of advisors who suggested Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and similar projects for a just and lasting peace in the aftermath of the Great War. When it became clear that the winning Great Powers were more interested in punishing Germany, a few of the Inquirers decided to take a more proactive role.

Both investigations ultimately failed to make real contact. Donighal hoped to present himself to the Inquiry as a fellow peacemonger, though he wasn't actually opposed to war qua war. They evidently weren't fooled, though; he spent three weeks dodging assassination attempts while the people he was observing as possibly Inquiry members muddied their trails.

I've already spoken of what happened to the academic investigation. In the spring after his initial presentation, David Aramissian contacted Whit Styles again, mailing him a copy of the New York Post article "Professorial Scam Uncovered: Scandal in Ivy League", on the arrests. Someone had been mailing him a copy of that article once a week for a month. "I don't know why they didn't include me. But I got the message. I'm through."

(Sounds like the Council on Foreign Relations if it had even more power than most conspiranoids attribute to it. Then again, the Trinity Universe is in many ways a conspiranoid ficton anyway.)

1999
[Aberrant] Dr. Phylicia Cassant speculates on the real story behind the Galatea explosion. "Is it possible that one of the men and women aboard was the first aberrant, and that he or she somehow engineered the explosion to create others like himself or herself?"

Well, I don't know if he was on board, and I gather he didn't actually engineer the explosion, but the Adventure! rulebook indicates that the first aberrant nova manipulated the after-effects of the blast to suit his purposes. I hate to keep teasing like this, but I'll cover that in more detail on March 23.