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Assuming that events in this book series (what is it? is it a secret?) take place on a linear timeline—that is, each new book takes place after the ones before it—then you could just have your character be from the latest time you remember and have them not be aware of anything that happens later in the series. It would be like having a character from an earlier era in Earth's history. If they're from, say, the Renaissance, they could be forgiven for not knowing much about what's happened since and holding some beliefs about the world that have now been outmoded. Same goes for a character from an earlier point in their canon, I'd think.

That said, I'd be leery of doing it myself without at least brushing up on major events/changes in the canon. Does it have a wiki? Just about everything does.

~Neshomeh

Feel free to fire that Railgun at your brother, he's had worst.

Hefts his own, normal sized Railgun

Much worse.

(Just make sure you don't sit on fellow boarders in the Discord chat and you should be fine.)

Okay, so, how to phrase this? I have an idea for an agent that I really, really want to use (she's one of my very old characters). However, I dropped her home continuum book series a long time ago because I could see that it was becoming waaaay too long-winded and was by now a clear cash grab (it's still going, btw). I still remember the majority of rules and canon characters, though. And I do want to use this character in some way and in doing so fulfill a personal goal of mine. So seeing as how I'm not up-to-date on the character's home continuum, would it be a bad idea to make an agent from there?

I'm gonna assume Skarm's already told you all about us, so just have this plate of welcome SPaGhetti!

Hello and welcome to our little corner of the internet, have a Mini-Railgun for your troubles.

Seeing as how epl pointed you to the OS, I'll take care of the second part: If you mind telling, what are your fandoms?

Glad you decided to stop by! I assume your fandoms are mostly the same as Skarmory's? Here's a pack of sticky notes and some popcorn to eat while you read the Original Series (hopefully the link works again). Enjoy! :> (It's supposed to be a bird)

About the lack of description; I get the sense that a) we were trying to avoid bogging down the story with scenery and/or b) the particular way we played GDoc tag didn't allow for a lot of description. You're right that we could use more, though. (Skarmory also says he figured Beach City was pretty well-defined in the audience's heads.)

And, yeah, in retrospect it does read a lot more like an MST than it probably should. But on the other hand, we got two great gags out of the format--Lapis turning into a graph and Violet's spittake. Again, you raise some good points about why it didn't quite work, and I'll make a special effort to summarize/paraphrase more in my next mission. Thanks for the constructive criticism, and I'm glad you enjoyed the story otherwise! :)

Skarmory's brother here, just trying this out

Is that mammoths are taking the place of horses in the setting. Because it's awesome, that's why. =]

With how it's set up, I am the only one who can renew it, and I'm more than willing to do so.

That said, money is a bit on the tight side at the moment and I can't immediately afford swinging the $48 it costs for the 6 month subscribe.

TY to Des for pinging me to this.

-July

Considering it says it expired, does it mean that Mojang is waiting the [insert whatever timeplan they have here] payment here?

I wouldn't mind renewing the server contract myself, but I don't know how, so... Anyone can explain me how, or ways to page July about it?

The Cascadian Protectorate has historical precedent; it turns out that Cascadia is kind of good at conquering the world. We're currently doing it with assorted corporate empires - UPS, Costco, Weyerhaeuser, Paccar, Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, Starbucks... the list goes on. It wouldn't be terribly nice to turn that ability (and technology base) to warfare - but it also wouldn't be terribly hard. And, depending on how the United States breaks up, we could easily be the only nuclear-armed western successor state.

("Like, you know, an army or something"? That sounds like something Californians would say.)

Ooor, if you want a completely different spin on future history, have Cascadia be another piece of Vikingar! We have so much in common - rugged glacial terrain, terrible weather, chronic vitamin D deficiencies... Seattle traditionally was a very Nordic town, and we're currently very politically compatible. (An independent Cascadia today would rapidly become a very liberal social democracy, in Nordic style.)

Cascadia welcomes our northern neighbors, of course - I've seen maps that propose cascadifiying the entire inside passage up to Mount Fairweather and Glacier Bay in Alaska. We would also be entirely willing to help the good people of upper British Columbia, either as part of Cascadia proper or a protectorate to be shared with our neighbors of the First Nations.

But California? California? That is a bridge too far, my good friend. California can keep itself and continue choking on its own ego. Bloody loud extroverts. Except the redwood country, we'll take that.

(Also, if you want to make certain historians very happy, you should definitely put the liberated Kootenai Nation in the rocky mountains of northern Idaho, northern Montana, and southern BC.)

I suspect there will be two nations on the lovely west coast - Cascadia in the north, stretching along the coast from southern Alaska down through Oregon's Willamette valley (and into Redwood country beyond), and expanding inland to fill the Columbia River basin of eastern Washington. To the south, The Bear Republic of former California fills the central valley and southwards almost to LA - the LA basin and southlands in general, of course, are a blasted wasteland extension of the mojave desert. (But seriously, the good people of Deseret are not going to continue pouring the heartblood of the Colorado river in to California, and that's going to cause Problems for LA.)

Cascadia tucks really nicely into the corner of Deseret, by your map - there's a diverse economy, too, from the techno-industrial heartland of the Salish Sea ports to the rolling wheat fields of the Palouse. The nation's power sources are sustainable, massive hydro-electric facilities on the Columbia river and wind turbines dotting the coast and highlands. I'm not entirely sure what your future chronology looks like, but they're probably still very upset with Washington DC for not cleaning up the Hanford site, trying to declare themselves the "State of Washington", and probably beating them out in the final Superbowl before the United States fractured.

The city-state of Newer York will probably exist for as long as there is a global economy - they're probably going to take reasonable chunks of Connecticut and New Jersey with them.

Are you Welsh, by any chance, or do you just happen to know that little tidbit about the language?

I hadn't read the interlude, and I'm sure that does make a difference. Even still, it comes off a little as "Oh look, Lapis has yet another ongoing quarrel with someone."

Splitting the party does make sense in a narrative way, as well as to some extent in-universe. And having them report back to each other also makes sense. It just seems a little awkward to switch from one team encountering Malachite to the other. Maybe if it was shown that they were still in contact (which could include warning the other about Malachite) it'd seem less risky.

I'm aware that the regenerative thing is canon; as a resolution to Lapis's behavior problems, however, it still feels a little abrupt. That said, I'm sure that future missions will show that it isn't quite as over as it seems to be here.

...you get a copy of it for free! No strings attached, and it's on me. ;)

The reason for Lapis and Aiko starting off as enemies in this mission is best explained by the co-written interlude "Child's Play", which I should've provided as a primer: Aiko was jealous that Lapis got to become an agent before her, and Lapis retaliated but took it too personally. I guess we could've made that clearer if we'd intended for this mission to stand out on its own, though.

Splitting the party was a decision that we all agreed upon while writing the fic, and as noted in the dialogue, the in-universe justification was that Lapis and Aiko were fighting so much at the time that they had to be separated until things calmed down. We were well-aware of the risk of continuity not being covered as effectively, so we assumed that each of the teams would relay charges that they covered to the other team offscreen every once in a while. It's why Lapis, Ami, and Aiko were all able to recite the charge list in full without having to cut each other off to fill in what they missed.

This mission takes place after "Witches Get Stitches", which occurred in December 2015 (and Cupid's first date happened in early 2016, and this mission takes place at the same time as said date). Looking back, one of the failings in this case was that we'd already had "Girls' Night Out" technically finished and in the process of beta reading by the time "Witches Get Stitches" was even conceived in my head. I guess I should've expected this insertion of a mission into an already pre-planned series of events to cause a bit of a continuity snarl, and modified Lapis' language use and personality for both missions to make the flow a bit more consistent.

The magical regeneration changing Lapis' personality and the waterbending abilities are both derived from the Steven Universe continuum and Lapis' gemsona. Armenus is stated to be a variant of Canon!Lapis Lazuli's gem "species", if you can call it that; it's been established that Lapis has incredibly powerful hydrokinetic abilities, and lapis armenus (the mineral) is closely related enough to lapis lazuli that it made sense for Armenus to be a Lapis variant. It's also worth remembering that regeneration both allowing a complete recovery and changing the gem's personality is something that happens in canon as well. If there was one thing I did wrong it was probably having Lapis transition into her Taking the Bullet for Aiko more suddenly than readers would've liked, especially given that the entire MO of this mission was to resolve the conflict between the two of them and put them on the road to repairing whatever relationship there could've been between these two. I can say with confidence however that Lapis' story is far from over, and that her next appearance will hopefully smooth out her development as well as deconstruct the resurgence of her abilities - her waterbending is, after all, still rudimentary.

I'm glad there are things to like about this mission, and I agree that Seung-Li and Violet were awesome to work with. If anything, Lapis' character arc does have potential now for further growth and ironing out the kinks in said growth the next time she shows up. Unfortunately, it'll be a while before she does, since I've decided to shift my focus away from my DIC team now that this leg of her character arc is complete. With luck and a fair wind, my next few published missions won't have so much exposition or sideline arguments - especially because they definitely won't be sixty pages long!

It may seem off, but wooly mammoths for either dragons or Balrogs. There are in fact Algonquin stories about this massive greedy animal, whose description perfectly matches the mammoth, who takes up so much water and food that nothing else (game, especially) can live in its territory, followed by the way a clever hero managed to destroy it by weakening and sharpening the trunks of the trees it used to rub against.

So, giant, greedy, dangerous, and destroyed by valiant and clever hero… sounds a lot like a Balrog to me!

Thanks for the more stuff to look at instead of doing homework.

I needed that.
More stuff to look at, instead of doing homework.

I will admit that those alternatives did not come to mind. It's just that IIRC, threads more than halfway down the front page don't usually get read, even if updated. I'll try to use other means of getting people's attention in the future.