And the PPC sort of is a nerd paradise except for the terrible hours and risk of total mental breakdown, so why not? {= D

Can I grant conditional Permission for you and Grundleplith and anyone else who's interested to write good ideas like this into existence? Is that a power I have? (Would you guys do it if I did?)

~Neshomeh

I'm sure she could work in a pocket-sized zoo full of small not-that-dangerous critters. ^_^

hS

The thing is, being a good agent—by which I mean one that carefully observes and considers a fic as opposed to one that takes it for granted that Intel's given them a Sue, kills, and scrams—requires a fair bit of knowledge across a range of fields. Being an active reader/viewer/game-player with a grasp of logic and the craft of writing is the minimum. It also helps if you have a good grip of math, biology, physics, psychology and sociology, history and social studies of the culture(s) producing most of the big canons and most of the fanfic, and so forth. At least a high school level, which I suppose is also the minimum we expect the average fic writer to understand, too.

If you want to tackle the really tricky fics, though (the ones where the mechanics are passable but the rest is dubious), you gotta go further. Serious literary criticism, world history, philosophy and religion, the history of your preferred genre, feminist and queer theory very useful, not to mention advanced anatomy especially if you're in Bad Slash, and so on, and so forth.

Jay and Acacia were in college when they started, I think. Architeuthis and Lambda, too, I believe. Possibly Nenya and Rosie? That's just to name a few off the top of my head.

So, while you certainly CAN go straight from secondary education to being an agent full time, but that doesn't mean you should. Not if you want to be famous. {= P

Possibly the—Collège de Nouvelle-Calédonie? (ColCal?) Université de Nouvelle-Calédonie? (Nu U?) Something else with a better nickname?—offers more online/correspondence courses than classroom-based ones, more on an ad hoc continuing education basis than a two-to-four-year one...

The OFUs might cover some of the same things, though. I mean, I can see HFA going for something like Remedial Maths: Just Because It's Not Taught At Hogwarts Doesn't Mean YOU Don't Need To Know It; or OFUM, Special Seminar: Fortnights and Furlongs: If You Don't Add Them Correctly, There Will Be Dungeons and Dragons In Your Near Future.

~Neshomeh, musing.

I wonder if the mountains are actually much good for farming, considering nobody really lives up there; almost all the real cities are along the coast with just a couple in the interior. Still, there's clearly plenty of vegetation up there, and no shortage of moisture on the west side in the hot/wet season, so maybe it just takes a little tweaking to get the soil to support food crops. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, just guessing.

North residential area = American Quarter, south residential area = French Quarter?

Re. sci-fi skyscrapers: I really really don't like the idea anything taller than four storeys in this place. ^_^; However—what if they built down, not up? There's plenty of room under the mountain, it's less conspicuous, and upside-down buildings are cool. Plus, they could use or sell whatever resources they pulled out of the earth in the process of carving the space. (There was a recent thread that discussed a function of the Finance Department being to disguise the PPC's hand in trade deals, IIRC. They DO need accountants with special skills!)

So, you get to keep your Complex, I get to keep my more rustic aesthetic? Notwithstanding a terribly sci-fi clock, an actual fricking spaceship port that looks like a modern-art sculpture garden, and very exotic building/decorative materials here and there throughout, of course!

~Neshomeh

Here's the link again, just so it's obvious:

PPC City, New Caledonia in My Google Maps form.

~Neshomeh

Your map is looking excellent, by the way, even though I have just cluttered it up with camera icons...

Did you know that there is actually a named peak in the city area? Pic Poya is on the border of the south residential zone, and has an official marker on top of it. Presumably, hikers occasionally come up to look at it, which leads to the PPCers scrambling to cover up their presence. (There are a few other markers in the area; I'm working on them now.)

I've also found two sets of photos of the area. One dates from 1967, and shows the old mines; the Hunger Games Arena is featured a few times. The other set, from about 2011, is from someone named Lillian who walked right through the middle of the city. She's provided several shots of the area itself, which she characterises as a sinkhole. She's also given some some utterly gorgeous views of the surronding area, of which this is by far the best:


Quite how the Flowers managed to hide the entire city from her as she walked through, I have no idea. Possibly they pilfered some tech from Wakanda.

I've also stuck pins in a few of the local mountains. Of note is Mont Boulinda (not the same as the much larger Boulinda to its north), which is 1137 meters tall. I mean... I'm pretty sure some Star Wars agent has added a 1m cairn to that by now.

hS

(As discovered by searching my GoogleDrive for 'Caledonia')

-Buds & Sprouts establishes that Nyx, Dassie, and their kids have a 'small house' in the city.

-OH! Oh, flip! I knew I'd done this, but I couldn't find it - because I was looking for an image, not a spreadsheet:

My 2014 map of the city

It's a rendering of this image of the MyMiniCity, which on comparing to your current version has changed a bit, but is still basically the same.

The weird silo things are tagged as TARDIS stores, where the many TARDISes procured during the Macrovirus event were mothballed. I've also got the police station pegged as the local DIA branch, and it looks like the factories are entered as DoSAT branches (not that there's any evidence they exist...).

I don't think this map was ever published, so please don't feel bound by it. I would consider it a nice gesture if you kept Club Aujourd'hui at the corner of Fait-de-Choses and Bart Ronson, if they still intersect at all, and it would be nice to see any new street names I created retained (though moving them is fine). But please, please don't walk your work back for this. (For one thing, the hospital is way off where Tawaki put it - because I marked the location of a hospitaesque building in the MMC.)

-And ohhhhhh double-flip. I also wrote a Brief Guide to New Caledonia at the same time, which explains exactly what I was thinking, and introduces a bunch of new places. And it's a Published doc, which means I did put all this on the Board.

Yes, I did: here's the thread, which also includes the claim that the DOOCH have been importing hobbits into the farmlands. Which of course can't be true... right?

So I'll make a deal with you: you refrain from scrapping everything in favour of my half-hearted, haphazard, ramshackle work from five years ago, and I'll rewrite the Brief Guide to reflect your map once it's done. Shake on it? ^^

-<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/u/2/d/1xFF8he9DI24dk5CAYUVGdAWQJFBvIRzMQzJ8aErGek/pub">Help from the Past establishes that the Mini-Balrog Adoption Centre, run by Cass (who may or may not be Agent Cassie Young), is in New Cal.

So, um, as a general note... oops?

hS

I'm assuming 'du Nord' is measured from the baseline, so Rue des Fleurs. At ~50 meters along a block, should something at 104 be only halfway up the very first block? Assuming a 5m front for each address, and addresses in some way occupying both sides of the road (I'd assume alternating), I get 250m north, or around block 5.

I'm guessing you're basing it off Tawaki's first interlude in the city, but there's a definite scene break between Tour Prend Pion and Rue des Fleurs.

... also Tawaki's route in that story makes very little sense. He (presumptively) leaves the pawn shop at FleursxFait, heading for DafyddxImbolc and walking down Fleurs, but somehow reaches FleursxImbolc and heads for FleursxJay by turning left. The only thing this tells us for sure is that Fleurs and Jay didn't, originally, cross.

I suspect what happened is that I took the names he'd mentioned and slapped them willy-nilly on the map, because otherwise the geography makes even less sense than usual. So... sorry?

(But the map is amazing if you ignore me messing up way back. ^_^)

hS

Is this something that's been established in Who canon, or is it just something presumed to exist, or something made up entirely for New Cal?

How big is this one, anyway, considering that a) it saw fairly heavy use in 2008-2009, but b) people seem to have parked wherever it was convenient?

~Neshomeh

Well, the pizza place can't be reached by walking straight from the exit from HQ--there's at least one turn. The ice cream place (actually also mentioned in the pizza interlude)...no clue, but it's a comfortable walk from the pizza place (comfortable enough to make for a tradition of eating pizza and then getting ice cream for dessert). I think once or twice in an RP I've had both pizza place and ice cream shop fairly close to La Trattoria (which has great cheesecake and ravioli, by the way), albeit probably not close enough to be seen from there. Just a street or a block or two away. So if we know where La Trattoria is, they could just be placed in the vicinity? Unless Ix has a vastly different headcanon for where the ice cream shop is?

Hmm, Scottish pub. Yeah, New Cal could probably use a pub! Maybe a sports bar (or regular bar) too? Ooh, and a vegan and/or vegetarian place could be good and make sense. That could be more recent, particularly the vegan one--they've been popping up all over the place lately, but used to be rarer. And there are definitely at least a few agents who'd eat there.

~Z

PS: werewolf!Ix is Irish, by the by. Not sure who Sanguine is, though, besides aptly named?

Canon representation:
Since the PPC defends canon, canon should be represented in the city. One possibility for expressing this would be different "quarters" of the city being inhabited by canon ex-residents (retired agents?), having canon-themed restaurants and parks that have plants taken from that canon. Kind of like ethnic neighborhoods in Real Life. So Harry Potter Neighborhood (Rowling Quarter?) would have wizards, wand shops, and restaurants that serve Butterbeer, and parks containing trees alive with Bowtruckles and sometimes visited by centaurs or even unicorns, with Acromantulae lurking if you wander too deep.
I have no idea how much of that is possible since I'm still somewhat new, but it's an idea.
Secretiveness of Headquarters: Depending on how fantastical the city is, it could have misleading woods that always pop the traveler back where they started from- or, the city would simply have to pretend to be normal and bereft of any non World One influences, hiding away wands, stuffing elven ears under enormous hats, and trying to explain to Pokemon partners why they can't go out and say hi. I can imagine the Flowers standing still in a garden, trying not to mind-yell at visitors who comment on their leaves being overly plump or otherwise give away their sentience. If, that is, the Flowers visit New Caledonia. Though I've heard it's a nice place, so why not?
Leakage of unusual canonical elements into the island of New Caledonia could be the reason why New Caledonian crows are unusually intelligent- and they might just be more intelligent than they let on... *dramatic music*