We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

The article in the Aberrant corebook is undated; I think I got the date from the relevant supplement.

November 12
[Aberrant] Graham Herron, current holder of the Houston Tornado "franchise" (urban defender license), is found shot, stabbed and beaten to death near Dime Box, TX. His corpse is reportedly marked with symbols associated with the Church of Michael Archangel, a fundamentalist Christian sect which holds that "aberrants" are literal demons from hell.

Sheriff Tom Boddard, who found the body, says "[t]here must have been a lot of the Michaelites to take one of these boys down," but says he wasn't aware of a Michaelite compound in the area; he speculates they came from Austin or Nacogdoches, which presumably both host Michaelite presences. "Powder burns marked the weapons as having been discharged at close range."

A spokesman for Micah Piper, Grand Deacon of the Austin (TX) Michaelite compound, while not actually admitting any role in Herron's death, says that the Tornado "obviously met his match in God's Chosen." Online Michaelites echoed the sentiment; Suzanne Haslett of Virginia asks "Why should we weep for the passing of the Devil's own?" Lucy Corgan, age seven, boasts: "My papa has a gun that will drop an aberrant dead in his tracks, and so do all his friends."

Linda Raphael (evidently done with Operation Upgrade) and fellow Devries Elite™ Elijah Crane head for Houston to "rally some novas interested in justice." Piper counters with a warning: "The righteous God is with us, you spawn of Satan. We've got enough guns and faith to lay you out just like what happened to your friend." Sounds to me like they have more faith in their guns than in their faith, but money and gunpowder do talk, don't they?

It's been a crazy time for us, of pushing all our limits.

October 12
[Aberrant] Proteus agent Talpa informs Director Thetis that he's "uncovered quite a bit", but has "no direct access to the Babel Dossier yet." Apparently, Æon keeps its secret files on a private network, separate from the OpNet and from everything else he could detect. He mentions that his orders to avoid Margaret Mercer make it awkward, as he needs either her approval or a unanimous vote of the Æon Council to get Dossier access; he asks her if, to that end, she could please pull whatever strings (he thought) she has with the Council.

What comes of this, one way or t'other, I don't specifically know.

Not yet. I think the dumbass was about to cut the shithead.

September 18
[Aberrant] Devon Works <sliderfetish@unca.edu> replies dismissively to an anonymized poster's all-lowercase claims about the scientific suppression carried out by Utopia's S&T department.

It's a sign of how much the 'net has changed since 1999 that this exchange was supposed to happen in the alt.fan.utopia Usenet group. These days, "2Wikkd@im.not.going.to.let.them.trace.me.com" would be an anonymous poster on a Utopia fanblog, maybe even Dev's own.

In addition to posting without use of the shift key (well, except to generate punctuation [mostly exclamation points] and one piece of all-caps), 2Wikkd is terrifyingly nonspecific "about all the things [project utopia] don't let us see or have", saying only that

my
brother is a scientist, and he was working on something relly
important that would have made all our live alot easier but
they came in and took all his files and now he drinks alot and
can't get a raise cause he just wasted all his time working on
something that utopia wont let us have! you utopia slaves suck!
by the way this story is TRUE but i'm not going to say who my
brother he works for because they (utopia) might find out and
he'd get fired or arrested or something.

My reaction to a post like that would have been something along the lines of "Well, *I'm* convinced." If I were on his side, I'd have elaborated to the effect of "Well, *that's* a compelling evidentiary trail that would be sure to persuade anyone not already inclined to doubt S&T's enveloping benevolence. Please quit being on our side, dude; you're making our side look stupid."

That's not how our boy Dev rolls, though:

Look, hobgoblin, the UN granted Project Utopia the power of scientific regulation for a reason. Did you hear about the guy who was working on a virtual OpNet interface that would be wired right into the user's pleasure centers?... As far as I'm concerned, Project Utopia (something properly spelled with the "shift" key, loser) has every right to their environmental and scientific regulatory powers. Might as well go to somebody with the staff smart enough to use them wisely.

(Well, now we know another reason for jachilli's writer credit on the Aberrant core rules, besides the Duke Rollo material.) Again, I'd be tempted to reply asking for a citation, but I'm like that.

Tonight on It's the Mind...

August 9
[Aberrant] Yukiko Takemitsu files a report on telepathic scans of Ma Yuo, a presumed Heaven Thunder Triad member.

She gets feedback from the pain it causes him when she works to get through his mental defenses, defenses that get stronger when she probes directly into HTT-related matters, and those probes only get her vague images. He doesn't seem to be involved with the triad's heroin dealing, but "images of fan-tan cards and paigow dominoes" confirm Investigations' report of his rank in the gambling side.

Deeper probes raise up deeper images:

the repeated chant of oaths of loyalty, many oaths of loyalty. In all, a gruesome fate is promised if he reveals the secrets. The chanting is accompanied by shadowy images — demons with the smiles of sharks, a man on fire, a gout of green smoke with the lips of a woman. At this point, the pain becomes too great, and I am forced to withdraw.

Yukiko concludes that those final shadowy images represent the Triad's nova enforcers. She says she's willing to probe deeper tomorrow, but warns that there's a very real possibility that Ma will simply die of fright.

Something a little more to the purpose.

July 13
[Aberrant] A Gumi Nova Tragic OAV is released. In an excerpt, Ryu, the nova protagonist, admits his role to his lover Ichiko — the hundred men he has killed on his oyabun's orders, the blacktech dealings he's been involved in — and confesses that she is right to hate him. Ichiko insists that Ryu had a choice in all that he did, but he replies "I was given no choice to be born, and no choice to live. Now I have no choice how to live."

Ryu's primary power is hyperspeed; the Nakato-gumi's main actual nova (at this point in time) doesn't have anything nearly that flashy.

Safe in my own skin so nobody wins.

April 23
[Aberrant] Utopian telepath Leland Cornwall interrogates Sluice, who sees right through the deception of pseudo-telepath "Psi-Dancer" and tells Cornwall "I can wait, and you'll come around. Then we can talk about this like reasonable novas, without all these monkeys screeching at us."

Sluice just ignored Psi-Dancer, which boggled Cornwall: "even Pax can't tell her M-R emissions are faked when I don't want him to" (this may mean that Psi-Dancer is just an illusion projected by Cornwall, albeit a highly convincing one). "Just how I like to begin my days: A telepathic probe right after breakfast."

He anticipated that the inside of Sluice's head would contain "some sort of monstrous asylum dream sequence"; instead, "[i]t was like some drawing-room play." The Terat was a perfect gentleman, "walking me through the mansion of his cortex and kindly opening doors". But, to Cornwall's chagrin, the doors Sluice didn't want Cornwall to open, wouldn't open for him: "something to do with 'meditative exercises' and 'funneling potential'."

He confirmed for Utopia's board of Directors that the Teragen has no chain of command, no superiors except the Beacon Mal (who earned a "flash of authority-respect"). Cornwall likens them to "graduated college friends who keep in touch and help each other out".

In the journal entry from which all this is taken, Cornwall notes that the Directors weren't happy, but Sluice didn't seem at all worried. The quote above, about eventually discussing the matter as brothers in the One Race, is what he said as he was being led back to his cell.

I didn't like his tone one little bit. Particularly because it seemed so genuine. What does he expect, that I'm going to have some epiphany and spring him, then we can go waltz off to Mal together and make the world a happy place for novas? Where do the people fit in this arrangement?

Whatever Pax may have to say about it, Cornwall feels he's going to have to go out and get laid tonight, "sensory sharing and all... With at least three women."

Correcting an error, among other things.

March 16
[Aberrant] Nimal Dharmasena writes in his journal about the latest in a series of progressively-unsettling meetings with Antaeus.

Yes, his journal. He mentions a wife and kids, which makes my earlier identification of him as a "her" obviously wrong.

Dharmasena talks about being obliged to go "very, very deep in[to] Sector 3" to report to Balmer, about having to wander around and literally sweat for a whole hour before before sitting down to rest, at which point Antaeus came "heaving... out of the ground, geocarapace and all." (Dharmasena wonders if Spencer Balmer's body has replaced human flesh with soil and vegetation, or if he even has a permanent body.)

( How is it that he can be so impossibly brilliant in the field of ecoscience, so erudite as 'Dr. Balmer,' and yet, as 'Antaeus,' practically autistic when dealing with people? )

Insert witty comment here, please; it's too early for me.

February
[Aberrant] Andrew Parker erupts with an electromagnetic pulse that blacks out much of Miami. Government and Utopia personnel comb the area for the next two months trying to find the culprit.

I was holding off for a blackout in Miami at whose "real" cause I could hint, but we're almost out of month and I don't see that happening.

Happy birthday, md_donighal! (Bet you wondered if I'd forgotten.)

January 1
[Aberrant] Nova astronaut Janos Karagian walks across the lunar surface without artificial life support gear. Plans are made to send nova astronauts to Mars.

At least one sourcebook gives Karagian's first name as Janis. (Yet another reminder that, at White Wolf, proofreading was something that happened to other game-lines.)

Continued from Sunday.

2006
[November 30] WXLM News reports that, four days after Herbert Wa's death, his head has still not been recovered, and no eyewitnesses have yet cooperated with the police.

"[O]ne source at the coroner's office admitted that 'it was [as] if his head was bitten off and swallowed.'"