The Mini Adoption Center has been mentioned in missions before, but it is kind of a place that you dump off minis that no one on the Board wants and that don't have their own OFU's of Adoption Centers to go to.

It may be a sort of generic type place that only exists in a few missions.

If I can find the name, I'll post it.

1. A real world location that also exists in the fictional universe you're dealing with would indeed make a mini. So "Gurmany" in an IJ badfic would make--whatever you're going to make the mini be, since they don't exist yet. I reckon the same would be true for real world figures who appear as characters in the fiction, like Hitlur. (Did I just Godwin's Law a mini question?)
   
   I guess the same would be true for real world locations that didn't originally appear in the canon? Like, Jones never went to Hawaii (that I know of, haven't seen all the Young Indiana Jones movies), but there's no reason to assume Hawaii magically doesn't exist in the IJ-verse. (If it doesn't, I blame either aliens or some ancient magic. Or magical ancient aliens.)
   
   But again, I'm not sure on that point. Anyone else want to chime in?
   
   2. HQ has several mini adoption agencies. Most of them are for individual varieties of mini, like Miah and Cali's mini-LEO AA, Skeet and Amelia's mini-Mogget AA, and the mini-razor adoptions run through the Creepy Bloodstained Victorians Protection Society. These are basically instances where someone wrote a mission to a smallish fandom, found minis there, and realized there was no OFU author to manage mini distribution. They then took it upon themselves to handle mini adoptions.
   
   I'm sure there is also a capitalized Mini Adoption Agency, although it's typically described somewhat vaguely (that I've read). This was for instances where the mission author, upon finding said minis, did not want to manage adoptions, and wrote a generic place to drop them off at, which other people started to use when they wanted to adopt minis with no caretaker. Since it's been kind of haphazardly used, it probably never got a wiki page created. That's something you could work on, if you feel like it!
   
   (There's also Mini Care, a daycare-style service to keep minis safe and out of trouble while their adopted agents are on missions. As far as I know, it only appeared in Tawaki's spin-off. That could warrant a wiki page, as well.)

1) The Indiana Jones continuum has a lot of overlap with the Real World, so in this case I'd say yes, you'd get an Indiana Jones mini out of it.

2) Maybe? There are definitely several specific mini adoption centers run from response centers in HQ, and there have been occasional references to a generic one, but it's ambiguous. No one has yet buckled down and officially established a generic mini adoption center as far as I know; probably because it would be a lot of work to actually run such a thing.

~Neshomeh

in the continuum they come from. They spawn with the misspelling of a character's name in that continuum.

Also, NMs & NMs! -noms-

What a great idea! I really hope the rebooted OPFU goes smoothly!

They got added to the wiki's mini list waaaaaay back on August 8, 2008, by an anonymous IP address. For context, the mission "Luke" wasn't published until July 30, 2011. The mission you linked, where mini-Rayquazas are mentioned in passing was published a few months later, on September 23.

SOURCES
http://ppc.wikia.com/wiki/Mini?oldid=7856
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?disc=199610;article=214547;title=PPC%20Posting%20Board

I don't think this was a regular, unsigned-in PPCer (their only other contributions were to expand the "Robecca" page) and adding it after a Board discussion, as the first mention of this mini on the Board is by me (hurr duur durp) on February 19, 2010. (Although it is possible that much of the Board's past discussions have vanished off the internet, but I don't want to think about that.)

SOURCES
http://disc.yourwebapps.com/discussion.cgi?id=199610;article=193238;search_term=rayquaza

So basically, it got thrown up on the wiki by an unknown someone (who was obviously unaware of the mini-Deoxys at the OFU of Kanto), and no one questioned it until now (well, until the Warrior of Many Faces changed it for his OFU).

This makes me even more inclined to support Many Faces' mini-Missingo as the Pokémini. Especially since minis originally came from the OFU multiverse, anyway, and OFUs have traditionally trumped the PPC on the topic of minis.

Another companion for me, hyuuman? Truly, your typography is the work of a maaaaster. Though I do not blame you. It is natural to wish the world consumed by the work of the Great Error.

Dang it, Missingo! I thought I was done with you!

I am not here to give you misery, hyuuman. I have merely come to reclaim one of my own. Come, Missigno. Together, we shall make this world ours.

Stupid spelling errors. I should never trust spell-check when dealing with the names of glitches. That's twice now this has happened. It almost seems like they've been org□□□□□□□ □ □□□□ □□ □□□□□□□□□.

Hahahahahahaha.

Partly because it gives a nice, clean explanation.

It also matches up with their characterization at the Pokémon Fanfiction Academy, where they sometimes took the appearance of their less famous images, which Outhra mentioned.

When a Missingno takes on a non-pixellated form, it nabs one of the sprites not assigned to anything else. In-game, it can appear as the unidentified ghost from Lavender Tower, a few types of skeleton, or a number of ambiguous partially-loaded entities, but it can't take the form of another Pokémon, and it can't change its shape once it selects one.

What are minis, anyway? This isn't the only case of them changing over time - Star Trek has had both mini-Tribbles and mini-Gorn, for instance, and reading the current OFU doesn't suggest an official explanation for that. I'm pretty sure we've had people show 'formless' minis on occasion, too.

So why do minis form? We know they're misspellings, which suggests a connection to the literalness of the Word Worlds: since, for instance, there is no Pokemon called Kangascan, the World decides there must be something else there. And since it's a spelling error, the thing that appears must be a monster - since spelling errors are bad, after all. But, being a manifestation of the Word World's sense of humour, it will also, generally, be friendly to the Canon Protection Initiative.

Perhaps the form of the mini depends on the expectation of any canon-friendly operatives in the area. So when Triumvir Cam- wait, sorry, wrong mythology, Miss Cam of OFUM first met the first mini, she saw what she expected - a miniature (since it's not real) manifestation of one of the worst monsters of Middle-earth - the Balrog.

As to how the other minis took their form, once people knew they existed, I propose three methods at various times:

-Their form grew out of their behaviour. Mini-Aragogs act like acrowhatsits, so even before seeing them, Meir Brin may have developed an idea of what they looked like - which projected onto them.

-Discussion among those who knew about them. If a debate (on the Board, say - or, in fiction, in HQ) leads to a general conclusion that, uh, Pokemon minis must be mini-Missingnos - and in this case, evidence to the contrary can be countered by Phobos' argument - then people will be primed to see them in that way.

-Declarations from an OFU. If the Administrator of OFUDisc announces that Discworld minis are mini-Luggages, that's evidence enough for everyone, I think.

We have to assume here that PPC Agents do their homework - that they know what to expect in a new canon. I'm not sure that's a reasonable assumption, though... maybe we should postulate some sort of cumulative effect? Like, if enough people believe something about a canon, then (when and only when the canon is already weakened by a badfic) it will tend to come true regardless of the current agents' lack of belief? There might be a 'when not directly contradicted by the canon' clause in there, too.

---

Oh, and to add - I think mini-Missingnos are the best (and funniest) solution, and that Phobos' argument is a good way to get round any discrepancies.

hS