We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

Macho bullshit. Let's go.

April 17
[Aberrant] In an N!terview, DeVries Elite™ Lance "Stone Badass" Stryker denounces the rumor of his scheduled participation in next month's XWF "Hong Kong Karnage" pay-per-view, or indeed in any other XWF event. "If Core wants to take off his little makeup and come out from inside his little arena and bring his little Core Meltdown to [any] place where real men do real fightin' for a livin', then the Stone Badass will be happy to shove the sole of my boot straight up his ass...and that's a damn fact!"

This is the second time I've mentioned Lance Stryker (if you don't count the days when my comments links came with a reference to his trademarked catchphrase "and that's a damn fact"). I should've mentioned him last spring, when he was unmasked by rival elite Borealis, but the Aberrant core rules didn't state the date any more precisely than "the spring of 2007". (There's another item about him from last year that I missed then, but it's got a precise date, so I'll get to it next month.)

"Do I look like a damn cartoon to you, son?" he asks the N! reporter right before calling out the reigning champion of posthuman sports entertainment. "Do I look like Core or [Maxx] Mauler or one of them other mite-injectin', pumped-up, fake-ass faggots that goes out there and rolls around in his damn underwear so that a bunch of fat OpNet turds can sit around and jack off?" The irony here is that he's a fairly obvious Captain Ersatz of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin ("And that's the bottom line").

An even more tenuous common thread.

January 20
[Aberrant] The German Ministry of Transport, Construction and Housing announces plans to link the nation's major cities with high-speed maglev trains.

In OTL, they're talking about one maglev service, from Munich to Franz Josef Strauss International. (Maybe in the TU, they'll reactivate the Hamburg and Berlin maglines.)

[Aberrant] Anna DeVries sends a letter to Linda "Lotus Infinite" Raphael attempting to persuade her in favor of accepting a full-time DeVries contract, offering as an inducement the care of DeVries' paraphysician if Raphael's current aberrations worsen.

Lotus' most obvious current aberration is that her hair constantly swirls as if in a gentle imaginary wind; she's taken to shaving her head to hide that.

I realize I forgot to write about "Teragen Liberation Movement", so here they are now.

December
[Aberrant] Nova Vigilance's last major strike of 2007 demonstrates what Geryon means by "commitment" with the rescue of the [captured] TLM from the grasp of the NYPD and T2MAm.

TLM (actually, no definite article) are a bunch of Terat-wannabees (weeabats?) who spent much of the year making fools of themselves trying to impress the actual movement. Over the last six months, they've been acting like "cheesy OpNet super-crooks" in attempts to one-up major NV actions.

It started when Geryon, with help from Boom-Boom Harmon of the Pandaimonion, trashed the Chicago Rashoud facility, which led TLM to attack a Houston society ball. As Leviathan will tell it later, "The feebs didn't think that those rich folk would mix gala soirees and nova bodyguards like Texans mix pickup trucks and shotguns." Result: eight dead baselines, two seriously wounded novas, and one deeply-peeved party guest by the name of Raoul Cristobal Orzaiz.

NV, in an attempt to show TLM what the game was about, rescued a captive taint-buttered monster from the Utopian cargo plane taking it to Bahrain for study. TLM continued to interpret this as a pissing contest and assaulted the New York office of the DeVries Agency. "They get their ass kicked by nova bodyguards in Houston, and so, they attack the people who represent most of the novas-for-hire on the planet," Leviathan snarks in retrospect. The Agency's on-site Elite™ security, Aggro, mopped the floor with them, and TLM's leader, André "Battle-Cry" Courtmanche, got blowed up real good, "like a Chihuahua in a microwave."

And so the rescue. For T2M: Skew, Ana Graça Texeira, Ricardo Montoya Bernal, Delaney "Firefly" Croft-Martin (a debutante who erupted at a charity benefit) and Slider. For NV: Geryon, Epoch, The Confederate, and Binh "Gauze" Nyugen. It was Gauze who turned the tables for the Terats, "slic[ing] through the support structures of a nearby building." The Tomorrowites, hampered by their foolish concern for baseline lives</sarcasm>, evacuated the humans from the building and set about repairing it "while NV rescued the prisoners", who "ended up making pretty good Terats once they learned a little discipline."

The movement, on the other hand, could use a little message discipline:

In the span of three weeks in December, 2007, Boom-Boom's on the Montebello Show acting like a KISS reject, The Apostle's talking to reporters about the divinity of Mal, and N!'s interviewing Orzaiz about a nova homeland. Every statement or interview made contradicted what some other Terat said. And when a reporter was smart enough to point out the inconsistencies, members like Boom-Boom could only respond: "Yeah man, but Orzaiz blows. I'm Mal'icious." How the hell were we supposed to get any respect when we were acting like a frat party.

The big lizard blames this centrifugal bumble-puppying, at least in part, on Mal's absence.

Remember, if they're not with DeVries, they're not really an Elite™.

October 5
[Aberrant] DeVries Agency Elite™ Linda "Lotus Infinite" Raphael enters into a contract with TransEurope Expediting, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, for "Operation: Upgrade" — the location and retrieval of 13 OpNet servers, to begin October 11 and conclude by October 18.

There's a page and a half of legalese discussing Lotus' fee, required confidentiality, civil limitations (endanger no infinite lives, use neither the Infinite Wind Technique nor the Infinity Justifier), an agreement not to re-recover or otherwise tamper with the servers absent direct written permission from TransEurope... fairly standard IP-industry legal blap, I'd say.

And once again, I almost run out of month.

1922
[Adventure!] Whitley Styles records in his journal that Michael Donighal has called, asking if Whit has had any better luck finding Max Mercer (whom neither of them has seen since the Hammersmith Incident). Whit resolves to catch the next boat to London: "Mrs. Austin will be disappointed, but her jewels can wait."

I've already spoiled the ending of this movie.

1923
[Adventure!] Whitley Styles records in his journal that Max Mercer has returned from Macao, conveniently at a time when the other six Æon founders were in Chicago, and almost the first words out of his mouth were "We're not the police, but we've got to do something with the people we stop." Jake Stefokowski wondered why these Inspired malefactors can't just be turned over to the police; Whit pointed out that most jurisdictions don't actually have laws against building "death rays". Professor Dixon suggested setting up a psychiatric facility; Jack Tallon offered some of his secluded African/Arabian holdings to the purpose. In the end, Mercer agreed to the project: "it's not enough to understand the wonders of our world; we must understand the people who experience them." Max has also suggested that the Æon core membership spend Christmas together.

It may be that this decision led directly to Bahrain. At the very least, it provided precedent.

2001
[Aberrant] The DeVries Agency announces the formation of a new arm, DeVries National Tactical Solutions. While the Agency does not apologize for its role in the Equatorial Wars, it transfers the management of its combat Elites™ to DVNTS.

I'm afraid I don't have much to add to that.

2002
[Aberrant] In the wake of Utopia's being granted oversight of Kashmir, Covert Action News reports on "Utopia's Real Agenda Revisited". The monitoring facilities in Kashmir would allow Utopia to watch India and China — the two largest armies, and largest official nova military forces, on the planet — and the southern parts of the RusCon. The article's author even speculates that Utopia may have manipulated China into taking an interest in Kashmir (which they never had before).

The original article on "Utopia's Real Agenda" appeared in April, but I don't seem to have written an entry about it at the time. *^^* It was to do with the negotiations that led to the London Peace Accord.

Playing catch-up again. (I sometimes think I should've just backdated the whole journal to 1998.) This is the last event until March that isn't part of future tension.

( Generals gathered in their masses... )