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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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