Subject: What's going to happen to the Foxglove now?
Author:
Posted on: 2013-05-05 21:19:00 UTC
Obviously, she can't become Head of a Department that doesn't exist, but what would she have to do in the prime multiverse now that it doesn't? Or does she even exist in this iteration?
It seems like the timestreams are we working with "it was the same until it split" principles here, but they might not be.
First up, The Official Fanfiction University of Discworld has just hit its tenth chapter, Chapter 9. You can read it either on Fanfiction.net, or on The OFUDisc Files, where you will also find such things as the Mini-Luggage Adoption Centre.
Secondly, following a point made by MAXinsanity - that the appearance of the Department of Efficiency and the subsequent restructuring of the PPC is actually barely ten years away now, which is pretty darn soon - End of the Beginning: Trousers of Time has/will happen. It takes place in 2025, and the net effect is to AU-ify several other stories in End of the Beginning.
Or at least, that's the assumed effect. Whether it works or not is up to whoever's still here when 2025 rolls round. Which, going on the past ten years, will probably be about five of us.
hS
(I consider this a test to see how many people actually scroll this far down...)
Sacrifice: A Story of the Sundering
Just because it's AU doesn't mean I can't write it...
hS
I must say, I find the AU future writings very interesting. Poor Rhodes, though. I appreciated the Blackout reference, too.
By the way, is the Exonet from any particular continuum, or is it something you invented?
More or less on the fly as the RP went on. It's just your basic intelligent, reproducing wearable mind-interface computer...
hS
I remember it being mentioned in the ask-an-agent questions the Other Board had a while ago, but when I looked back at the RP where it was first mentioned, the only mentions I found of what it was and did said that it regenerated itself, it was brought from the future, and it attached to skin and augmented it somehow.
What is it for? Or was that not decided upon yet?
The Famous Last Stand of the Rhododendron. It finally exists. And it was awesome. The first time we see the Rhododendron, and he defines himself, kicks off a confrontation, and has the best last words ever. I'd make a pun about "going out with a bang", but I'm terrible with those.
So the Cherry Tree and the Crocus are dead, then. (scribbles out something on story plan, makes a note in the margins) Wait, actually... I might have an even better idea now! Heh heh. (goes off to feed plot bunnies)
I really enjoyed the use of the unnamed narrator for this piece. It really helped convey the emotional impact of the story.
So now we know how the House of Rhodes came to be. Very interesting... I'm currently thinking out a series of stories that will take place during the Sundering. The Second Battle of the Cafeteria is giving me plotbunnies...
(A Test! Oh, oh, did I pass? Did I?)
Well, I guess that answers my question of if anything has been written actually set in the Sundering itself :)
I think this is a great story, and the anonymous narrator was a nice choice. It makes it seem like the events themselves are so much more important than whoever happens to be telling them.
The actual sacrifice scene was very well done, that calm countdown seems vaguely reminiscent of... something, but I can't place it. Very good though, and some awesome Last Words. And the last line, with the narrator deciding against the name of the House of What Was in favour of honouring the Rhododendron's sacrifice, was fantastic.
One (very minor) thing that I noticed - the speech mark at the end of the 'We can repair this...' line looks like it's the wrong one (opening rather than closing) - that's something I've noticed Word has a tendency to do with dashes, the Smart Marks don't seem to treat them as text/punctuation.
This one caught me out, I'm afraid.
I haven't yet decided whether to write more Sundering stories. There's tales that could be told - the Fall of Legal, for one - but I don't know that I have a hook to tell them with.
This story has been bouncing around my head since the Blackout fics. Before that, I didn't know what Rhodes did - or how HQ ended up shattered. The shields coming down during the Blackout was the key to writing this.
(Which is why the evacuation plan is codenamed 'Meatloaf', of course...)
hS
Oh, is that why it was codenamed 'Meatloaf'? And there I was thinking that it was a perfect reference to the song 'Bat out of Hell' (as in, get out quick before it all goes to hell) :P
I've wondered for some time, what the Rhododendron's Sacrifice was. It was mentioned in at least one of the other stories. Well, now I know.
I have to say, this is probably one of the most emotionally impactful stories that I've read in a very long while. I teared up when the countdown started. I don't even know who the narrator is, but their pain and loss resonated with me. I was crying by the time I got to the inevitable House of Rhodes.
Very well done, hS.
-Phobos
Well, you already know my opinion on OFUDisc, although it's probably worth repeating - I'm really enjoying the story, and looking forward to reading the rest of it and finding out where some of those plotlines are going.
As for the Trousers of Time, I thought it was a pretty cool piece, and I especially liked how excited the unnamed Floaters agent was at the thought that there would be news from the future of how great they were, only to be cut off by the Sunflower Official like that. I really like your portrayal of the SO here - he seems to have a touch of menace to him, as if he'd be willing to go to any lengths to stop the Department of Efficiency from coming about.
However, that timeline chart you produced is far too simple for my tastes :P
I'm tempted to write something up involving my agents getting caught up in a pre-Trousers Sundering - after all, it's a pretty common theme in stuff involving time travel/prophecies for the very actions taken to avoid some event actually setting them up.
Sadly, I haven't had a chance to read the OFUDisc story, yet, so I can't comment on that.
However, I did get to read End of the Beginning. Though short, it is quite interesting and kind of a refreshing take on the whole time-travel/future information thing. It is nice to see characters who, rather than being secretive with the information and trying to enact the necessary changes subtly, are upfront about what they are doing and why they are doing it. "We have information that X is going to happen if we do nothing. We are taking Y action to prevent it. End of story. Go about your business." The usual cloak and dagger approach just ends with no one being able to learn from the other timelines' mistakes because they don't know that mistakes were made.
So, yeah, I liked the story. Well done.
Also, I've been working on a future-AU for a little while now. So that chart you posted further down the thread is going to be outdated soon. Sorry about that.
-Phobos
I'm toying with the idea of making an interactive chart that could in theory link to every PPC story ever... I don't know if there's software that could do that, though, and I don't think I'm capable of writing it myself. Not quite.
(Mostly because I'm no good at GUIs)
hS
I've opened it in a new tab, but what's the whole story behind it?
Okay, looking back at what I wrote, there are big spoilers in here, probably. Not much of this is said beyond exposition in the End of the Beginning itself, but it's worth noting since the vague question means that I can go on at length about continuity, which I love.
I'm not entirely certain how it started, but it's essentially a continuation of the histories of the Protectors that Huinesoron and some older, now-inactive writers made back around 2006 or so. The End of the Beginning builds off of the Ten Years Hence idea that writers of early and/or influential spin-offs liked to do to show their agents in new periods of time as older and occasionally wiser versions of themselves for character purposes. Huinesoron uses the format to create a theoretical future that would map out the families of the characters from his old DOGA spin-off. I'm not entirely sure how the idea for the Department of Efficiency came about, but it provided a founding reason to change up the possible future in a big way so that it wasn't just a story about brief moments in the lives of characters we've rarely if ever seen before.
Now, DE history and potential spoilers follow: a group of Floaters headed by an obscure Flower known as the Foxglove(not to be confused with the Foxglove Official of the All-Purpose Department in the same way that the Marquis de Sod is not to be confused with the Daisy) decided to create a way to increase the productivity of the PPC; it was a fine idea at first, but the DE began to abuse its power, imposing mandatory and occasionally arbitrary rules on most of the organization in the name of efficiency, but in effect using their semi-monopolistic power as a handhold to seize control of the Protectors.
Eventually, the Department of Efficiency allied with a resurrected version of the Department of Author Correspondence, one of the dead Departments from the early spin-offs, which quickly became the corrupt and sadistic Department of Author Correction, headed by the Cherry Tree(who had/has not been seen before or since, by the way), and Something Bad Happened. It's not been shown what it was, but it involved the capture and torture of people from World One on the order of the Cherry Tree and supported by the DE.
The Crocus, Head of the old-spin-off-era Department of Author Correspondence(which had basically been DMS-light, for reference) now Head of Operations, teamed up with the Sub Rosa, the Last of the Firstborn, and started a war against the DE-sympathizing Flowers. The DAC was driven out, and the DE was almost completely purged, but since the latter had ingrained itself in just about every aspect of PPC workings by the time of the war, its destruction caused several Departments to split into factions, while the Protectors developed extensive rivalries with other groups, leading the grounds for the factions and Departments going separate ways.
The Sub Rosa resigned, and she, her surviving sympathizers(no word on whether the Crocus survived as well), and an unknown number of followers retreated elsewhere in the multiverse, leading to all but a select group of the fragmented PPC to abandon HQ. As to what the Sundering is, it could be either the Flower-versus-Flower civil war, the fragmentation of the Department cohesiveness, or the abandonment of HQ; I'm not sure which.
The last story, the Seventy Years on period, deals with the Paladins, an alliance of former factions of DMS, DBS, and DOGA, and the Rangers, the remnants of Intel. They had decided during the unrecorded time span to team up and kill Sues like their ancestors did, and this led to the Time Will Decide For Us story, which isn't finished, and the Door To The Future RP, which pollinated the Twisted Skein Alternate Multiverse(actually, since the Twisted Skein hosts two alternate multiverses, I'll just call it the Sundering alternate multiverse after this post) with the undesignated "prime" multiverse, giving the former some of the lost technology of the latter and, as of Trousers of Time, preventing the latter from effectively becoming the former.
Actually I'm excited about the new development and the full-on confirmation that the Sundering took place in an alternate multiverse. Now that the world that underwent the Sundering is no longer "the real future", it's not going to be the bare-bones world it made itself to keep from stepping on the toes of future writers. That means we can write in the Seventy Years on time period now! Again, I'm excited. I've got some good ideas on some other factions and such, and there's a plot thread that hasn't been touched since 2008(real time, not AU time) that I've been dying to pick up ever since I found out about it.
The future has not been written, yet. It will be written when it becomes the present.
What I mean is, it doesn't matter what anyone writes about the future of the PPC, it is only ever a possible future. hS's stories, while interesting, are just one (well, two, I suppose) possibility for what the future holds. The same goes for the Ten Years Hence series. The same goes for the story I am writing now, or for any story you want to write in any future you choose to explore. None of it is binding. We don't have to take any of that into account as we write our own stories.
So go write your stories. Explore your own possible timelines (as hS has done), or add some depth to the ones that already exist (in the tradition of Ten Years Hence).
The future is your bivalve mollusk.
-Phobos, Time Philosopher and Bivalve Mollusk Enthusiast
I was hoping I hadn't accidentally missed the secret shadow-puppet vote that turned us from a writing collective to an oligarchy of timeline-control with an absolute monarch.
(I plan on dealing with the Blackout by having my team portal in some time after it ends, look around the chaotic and partially-destroyed Cafeteria, and be very, very confused.)
As Absolute Monarch Presumptive, I of course had complete control over the voting process. In fact, I didn't even allow other people to be involved - the voters were literal shadow puppets, held by me.
Imagine my surprise when they still voted against me... man, you'd think setting up a totalitarian timeline dictatorship was a bad idea or something...
hS
That would be me. Or rather, the Reader.
See, she finally got hold of a sonic, and then I sent her back in time to sonic the shadow puppets, just in case. She, uh, might have given them the slightest bit of sentience--just enough to know what they were voting about, you understand--and, well, that tipped the scales. I guess they just don't like dictators.
~DF
Guys, do we need to have the "hS Is Not God" talk again? (Were any of you even around for the last one?) I mean, even if hS were God, I'm pretty sure he'd believe in free will and stuff, so you wouldn't need to fall on your knees and despair before His Incontrovertible Word even then.
~Neshomeh, also not God.
P.S. Prime!Jenni would just like to say "I told you so" to everyone from the Door to the Future RP. {; P
I'm hoping we don't have to, of course. If we can stop the process here, before it progresses to outright blaming you for other people's bad decisions, that would be ideal.
~Neshomeh
I don't remember the specifics, to be honest (this was about four years ago), and may be oversimplifying, but there was indeed a rash of people going on about how hS was the high and mighty new owner of the PPC due to how much he was writing at the time and how much everybody got behind it all. The logic somehow switched from "hS writes something -> everybody likes it -> it's a thing" to "hS writes something -> it is law; we must obey." So, when people started making uber-powerful, super-serious agents and writing ever-darker, grimmer, squickier missions, supposedly inspired by hS's stuff, some of them rather objected to being told that's not what we're actually about, and then the finger-pointing and insults started.
This was around the same time we started making the various FAQs and Guides to the PPC.
So yeah, people assuming they have to do things just because hS writes stuff leads to the Dark Side of the Board. Learn from history and don't start that again, and I won't have to deliver another lecture. {= )
~Neshomeh
Doesn't this have the same application as everyone's missions working a little differently? I mean, if I see someone have the a/ns be edible, I can use that, but I can also have them nearly take my agents' heads off. It's my choice. The main framework is that the agents need to gather charges, witness the major ones, and kill the Sue at the end (if we're talking about the DMS). And their RC can be very plain and only one room, or it can be a suite; the consistent part is that there has to be a console that alerts them when they get new missions or messages. Within that, I can make up whatever I like, as long as it works and doesn't go against the general PPC canon. And, following from that, if hS writes something I happen to like, I can reference it, or have my agents be around during the same events; but I can also forget it happened, or assume it happened in a different dimensional part of HQ, or even just assume it's an AU. In fact, I might not even know about it, and my writing may reflect that! No one's stories bind anyone else to following their exact rules. We even write variations on TOS--in fact, that's exactly what we're about! We take the general idea and a lot of the concepts from Jay and Acacia, and adapt it and tweak it to suit what we want to tell. And as long as we don't, for instance, make the SO ridiculously OOC and make HQ easy to navigate even if you *do* notice (I totally want to write a conspiracy theory story where the SO is a collective hallucination, or something now...), we're fine; we're still writing PPC stories. Just because my agents use a Crash Dummy when Jay and Acacia didn't doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to do that! Ok, time to wind down the rant.
I guess I just don't quite understand why people would have this viewpoint--ok, I understand *why*, but it doesn't fit with the rest of the PPC. I think it's even in the How-to for mission-writing that you can adapt as you wish (you know, within limits). It just...doesn't really work.
Ok. Rant over now.
I'm glad you made the FAQs and Guides. They're very helpful, and pretty clear.
(Dark Side of the Board. XD )
~DF
I want to read that one now.
Applause for your speech, by the way!
Ok, technically it was edible punctuation--oh, I think it was Mittens and the RMC! And possibly some other people. I think it was really edible punctuation and scene dividers, although it may also have been the a/ns? Not sure. I kind of want to write that now, though.
Thanks! *bows* Thank you, thank you.
(You like speeches? Here, have another one. Seriously, that's just about the most inappropriate joke I've ever seen. Who the Flaming Denethor thinks that it's okay to say that? And, even worse, who the Flaming Denethor thinks it's funny enough to reblog? People these days...)
Also, hurrah! I've managed to memorize the link insertion code!
~DF
... but the idea of edible punctuation has come up on the Board before, so I wouldn't be surprised if it has been used in Missions - I just don't think I've read any.
It's a fun idea though, and I have thought about using it myself.
It is a fun idea, isn't it? I really kind of want an agent to be so addled by the badfic that he or she just stumbles up to the a/n and breaks off a piece to eat while his/her partner stares.
Maybe it's edible if you believe it's edible? Of course, that rather depends on it being a 3D a/n...hm.
Oh, hey, that post looks useful! I think it ought to be a wiki page, if it isn't one already.
~DF
I have some questions and comments about your link, but I don't really want to drag all of that onto the Board, at the moment. Can I get your email? Or you could email me, if you like. My email is Baridthetroll(at)gmail(dot)com.
-Phobos
Unfortunately, no-one else seems to believe it.
hS
I can understand people latching on to an origin story. After all, it is in the past. It already happened, right? But, what I can't understand is people choosing to believe that the future of the organization is set in stone because someone wrote a story about it. Why would you want to limit yourself like that?
I mean, I like your Paladin idea. I might want to explore that future a bit someday. But I really think the future of the PPC is in a squadron of giant robots fighting mutated badfic constructs that are rampaging through Tokyo.
It could happen.
-Phobos
But tell me, would the giant robots be able to combine into one super-mecha? Because if so, I could totally get behind that idea.
The largest robot would be staffed by a crew of thousands of titanic robots. Each of the titanic robots would be crewed by another set of robots that are merely colossal, all of which are in turn operated by huge robots that are piloted by large robots.
I just realized that the big robot that all of those other robots of variant degrees of giant-ness are working together to drive would be approximately as large as a mid-sized continent, if I'm adjusting for scale properly. I like my idea even better now.
I was going to have my Agents abscond from the PPC before the Sundering happened, probably because they'd probably get punished somewhat by the DoE for (once again) the Kill and Scram thing they tend to do. The SO can threaten them with Cafeteria bin-cleaning duty all it likes, but the DoE would probably do something much worse.
And then their descendant would've found her into the Paladins from wherever my Agents had absconded to. But now it's all alternate universe, so that's going to be interesting to play with...
Oh, and also: DawnFire wanted to bring in the Teselecta to the PPC. I immediately thought it would've been pretty good tech for the Department of Author Correction, but since that's alternate universe now...
There are two main ones, the "all worlds are almost identical until something major happens" model, and the "the universes were never very similar, but they may have looked that way from a certain point of view" model.
In the former, famously used in Michael Crichton's book Timeline, any action in a universe that parallels another universe will cause a similar and/or equal action in
its parallels. In that model, the Agent DawnFire has bring in the Teselecta would coincide with another Agent in the Sundering Alternate Multiverse bringing in a Teselecta. Since there hadn't been a big enough split to distance the two universes from each other, both would allow the same event to occur from the same cause, though admittedly some of the details would be different because of quantum singularity and probabilistic matters.
In the latter, everything is genuinely different in each timestream. Chaos in decisions, motions, and chances has made it so that no event can be duplicated, and while similar events can occur, nothing can ever be exactly the same, with the same reason, and creating the same reaction, in two separate timestreams. In some streams, not much may appear to be different on the surface from another similar stream, because raw chance has caused an alignment of moments in a way that allows all of the important players to retain the same positions. Still, anything can change at any time. Universes following this model often have notoriously mutable timelines, since the appearance of a person in the past can have far-reaching ripple effects rather than having that person's time travel become part of a predestination cycle as the more rigid Timeline-style multiverse system would do.
Likewise, if the descendant of your two Assassins had found the Paladins, she would have found it in either universe, regardless of whether or not it was an AU, but the number of instances of that descendant that found the Paladins and the number of instances of Paladins that would exist to be found would vary depending on the type of simultaneity that's used.
... I like to talk about this sort of thing. Time travel, alternate universes, dimensional models... I can go on and on sometimes. A little late for the heads-up but... yeah.
I'm actually planning on writing a story set in the Mirror Multiverse, and the hinges of the plot are going to depend on which one of those is used for the PPC's multiverse format. I can make it work either way, but if it could be either, it would be a mess trying to make it fit both ways.
Basically, as I understand/envision it, the PPC uses a 'splitting' model. It's not that the universes were almost identical - they were the same world until 'something major happens'. That's not quite the Timeline model, which as you say explicitly drops everything into a parallel universe.
On the chart, the space between 2012 (Door to the Future) and 2025 (Trousers of Time) is technically incorrect. The universes split in 2012, as soon as the Door opened. However, the effects of that split were limited to the Sub Rosa writing a report, and a handful of agents playing with an Exonet, until 2025. Hence my drawing it the way I did.
As to how time and universe travel intersects with all this... there are three colours of arrow on there. Blue arrows represent intersections between versions of the PPC. They don't appear to cause AUs, at least most of the time.
Secondly, the red arrows. These are the time travel used by the Illian family and their friends. The Sheaf of Worlds was very careful to come up with something that wouldn't create AUs. So every red arrow simply creates a closed loop - when Jasmine went back to join the Black Cats, she did so because she had already done so.
The single green arrow is portal-based time travel. (Yes, it's marked as coming from an AU - that's because the prime universe really should stay in the centre, despite being technically a derived universe now). When something went wrong in the future and dropped a handful of Paladins and Technomancers into 2012, that created an AU. That's something that didn't happen in the universe of the Paladins - only in ours.
As to the effect other forms of time travel would have - I'd say that's up to whoever writes it first.
hS
With parallel lines and different colored arrows and everything!
Okay, this has a lot here. Merging timelines, branch worlds, alternate segments... yeah, this is fun. (copies graph for easy storage)
Why does the Arthurverse terminate at 2010? Is that just because there are no stories that go past that point in the timeline, or was there something that dissolved the timeline itself?
What was the Sheaf of Worlds, by the way? I don't remember that being mentioned anywhere. I don't remember Protectors of the Plot Discontinuum either, but it looks as though that might be an AU of the Mirror Multiverse, and I've not gotten into a lot of Mirror Multiverse history yet.
And turned them into badfic. Obviously, they're a direct parody of the PPC.
Considering that a portion of IAHF2's last arc deals with the Mirror Multiverse and all I should probably be used to confusing, but yeah.
I think the IAHF stuff falls under the 'every change to the past creates an alternate timeline' school of thinking when it comes to alternate timelines, so the main characters managed to create an Alternate Venice when they went back in time, and eventually with enough travel the alternate timelines would just kinda bleed over into a Mirror Multiverse setting where the very foundation of the universe is set in reverse.
Not sure how I'd plotted to resolve the damn thing, though; this was done about a year ago. Years, really.
I've not seen any Mirror Multiverse stories, aside from Tawaki's "Oh bother, I guess we're in another multiverse, guys." one, and it was, in case you couldn't tell from how I described it, pretty underwhelming. Plus, I read the thing twice and I'm still not sure how Tawaki's characters actually got there. The closest thing to an explanation I could put together was that alt-Makes-Things decided to switch their minds with those of their Mirror Multiverse counterparts using a machine to create sleeper agents for an invasion, but he for some reason didn't tell the agents whose minds would control the intended sleepers beforehand.
That makes no sense.
So, in short, I'd like to see a story taking place in the Mirror Multiverse that can actually tell me something new about the Mirror Multiverse. It would help if I knew some precedent before writing events there.
This is sorta one of the character's idea of what the multiverses may look like, based on the research I had at the time with the PPC wiki.
Skip to chapter 49, and I've got characters in a Void Between the Verses, which is probably like the Void in Doctor Who (though at the time I wasn't watching DW).
And in chapter 53 we have PPC Agents who have physically strayed into the Mirror Multiverse IAHF because somehow their RAs took them into the Void, and they managed to physically overcome some sort of barrier into the Mirror Multiverse (one of the agents likens it to the Girdle of Melian). I can only assume they were let in because of some purpose that I'd plotted down a year or so ago and forgotten ever since.
But, since I said a lot already, I'm not going to go into that unless I'm asked. I already made a giant block of text retelling information from End of the Beginning exposition, Wikia pages, and Huinesoron's old posts, so I'll hold off on that for now.
So this makes, let's see... three alternate timestreams now. Arthurverse, Twisted Skein, and the Shipverse world that Luxury came from.
Of course, there's also the AU PPCs like the Transcanonical Defence Authority based on steampunk and the version simply called called The Organization that was based on Magical Girl anime, but there are a lot of those and they have varying levels of connection to the prime multiverse, so they aren't as major. I may need to make some sort of chart for this.
What was MAXinsanity's point that made you write Trousers of Time? I'm curious.
When the main PPC universe split from the Twisted Skein multiverse, does it retain the ability to interact with it, or can the alternate multiverses only fully connect to other versions that share similar pasts to theirs?
Wait, if the latter is true, then perhaps the reason the Mirror Multiverse is difficult, but not impossible, to contact is because it shares a past with the PPC that is now utterly divorced from its own present and future. Hmmm. Plotbunnies breeding.
Oh, and I liked the new OFUDisc chapter, too! Well, chapters, because I hadn't read any new ones for a while for whatever reason.
I'm not entirely sure why the leader of a transdimensional organization would disguise herself as an fangirl to enter the University if she thought it was an elf-harming society, though. Maybe it's foreshadowing something.
For a short while in Chapter 9, I thought there would be the first sign of an invading force of some sort, but nope, just the one ship with a talking platypus. I might want to read the ISPACE story to get some context on that, but then again, it's funnier without any.
If you're still operating the Mini-Luggage Adoption Centre, would I be able to adopt Hexxx?
And it's interesting to see that you've adopted the Many Multiverses theory. Myself, I've always been a proponent of the Two Multiverse theory, which would place the Paladins (and the TCDA, for that matter) as AUs to the PPC, but not multiverses in their own right.
hS
...Some people wouldn't agree too well to the changes to the setting that The Sundering would cause, considering how much it changes... Well, everything.
But I guess that's what happens when I show my concern for the future of the community as a whole.
I said that your mention that it was coming pretty soon, coupled with the reminder of the Door from the Future RP, inspired me to write it. It was fun, too.
hS
Obviously, she can't become Head of a Department that doesn't exist, but what would she have to do in the prime multiverse now that it doesn't? Or does she even exist in this iteration?
It seems like the timestreams are we working with "it was the same until it split" principles here, but they might not be.
Therefore, the Foxglove exists (although technically it might not exist yet, since we don't know its age), but will not head the DoE. Same goes for the Cherry Tree and the DAC. I guess they're spending their time like all of HQ's other surplus Flowers - as division heads, administrative assistants, or just wandering around being floral.
hS
Great to see new stuff coming out as always, though something seems missing in this sentence: "All the other members of the Board of Department Heads, for that matter – looked over at the empty ninth space in their circle."
Sorry for the nitpick, I /could/ just be tired, but it feels off somehow. Great work though!
(PS: Sorry again for disappearing off the face of the Earth. Hopefully I'll have good progress on certain things soon.)
I'd moved that line from a few spaces above. It originally ran "She [ie the QAL] - and all the other" etc. Nice catch!
hS
Yeah, something seemed weird with that. Glad to know I hadn't just gone crazy! And hey, at least I'm back now to be catching these things. :P
A. Though I don't follow Diskworld (or even know what it is for that matter) the FF university was interesting. If a little confusing, but I'm pretty sure that might be fixed by actually knowing the fandom, though. /smiles and looks embarrassed)
B. Interesting point. /Has no idea what's going on, though she read the story/
The End of the Beginning is my history of the future (and part of the past, now) of the PPC. As it stood, er, yesterday, this involved a Civil War in 2038, leading to an event known as the Sundering, and the changing of the PPC as we know it.
As it stands now, four of the stories towards the end of EotB are technically (probably) an AU: Trousers of Time shunts them off onto a different timeline altogether.
(And as a nice cross-reference: The Trousers of Time are a concept made popular by the Discworld books. It's the idea that when the timeline splits, you either go down one leg or the other...)
hS