Episode 15: The Opiate of a Brave New World

"I choked on what felt like liquid light. My skin tingled, but the sensation was like when a truly great piece of fiction or music causes goosebumps& multiplied by a thousand. I lost my balance because for a split second there was no ground. I stumbled and fell face first, staring at the asphalt. It was green.

Not spray-painted green, but actual green asphalt, green tar holding together shiny green pebbles.

"Angelica, DUCK!" Hobie yelled.

The first thing that I thought was that my name was not Angelica but Antoinette, the Toygirl. I was the Toygirl; an odd realization.

I ducked anyway.

A rush of wind and a pressing sensation on my back, as if from magnetic repulsion flattened me to the ground.

Getting up on my elbows, I looked up at the scene in front of me. Angelica would have fainted, but The Toygirl just stared. Never mind the blue-skinned alien leaning out the window of his flying green cab and cursing at me in a bizarre language I understood for no reason, the city around me was fascinating. All of the buildings were green glass and stood taller than I could see. A green sunlight reflected from their surfaces along with a viridian sky. I would have thought I had just lost the ability to perceive other colors were it not for the billboards advertising everything from tanning lotion to magical talismans. That and the hundreds of multicolored floating cars buzzing back and forth, interspersed only by strange flying creatures and even a floating carriage pulled by giant birds. The storefront nearest to me beckoned with new and tantalizing dishes, the smell of unearthly meats and spices mixing with the incense of the street vendor across the street. Tall, beautiful, men and women of generally mixed ethnic origin walked the streets with robots and aliens and demons and angels. On the corner, a waifish girl that looked like the very picture of mercy chatted with a chitinous insect. Closer by a cowboy and some sort of Nordic goddess haggled with the street vendor, a bearded, wise-eyed old Rastafarian. It was f antastic. It was beautiful. It was home. It was most assuredly NOT Washington D.C.

As I got out of the street, a heavy-set robot centaur with the head of a horse trotted up next to me and spoke with a digital version of Hobie’s voice.

"Welcome to Eden, Angelica. This is M City- The Emerald City of OZ as visited in dreams and immortalized on Earth by Frank L. Baum in the last century. ‘Course he took a few liberties to make it a bit more kid-friendly. What do you think?" he asked.

I was speechless. I realized that I was standing a good six inches taller than I’m used to. Only then did I look down at my body.

"These are not my boobs." I said."

-From the Journals of The Toygirl: Angelica Carpezio, Karmic of the Order

EDEN: TERMINAL CITY: DAY

"A pair of sleek Aethership Fighters skim past emitting their strange buzzing whine. The city is a beautiful array of architecture, massive spires that are a collision of the Vatican and Frank Lloyd Wright. Still, taller than all of the other spires and dwarfing them for size is the Tower District- an island created on the ruins of what was once the Tower of Babel, the largest structure in Heaven- seven miles around at the base and over twenty miles tall. It has since toppled into the clouds and provided an new foundation for hundreds of other buildings that jut from the superstructure like spines. Chief among these is the Capitol Monument, the last standing piece of the former tower which serves as the base for a new city. Airships overhead and Telebillboards below blare holographic neon advertisements: Kraid-Bleeker Prayer Brokerage, Chum-Chums, Christ Chex Communion Chips, CokaPop, The Church of Saint McDonalds, and the Temple of Chaise-Brinkley. The city is massive beyond human comprehension. For that matter, human eyes have never even seen it."

This had got me thinking.

I write these little opening cutscenes every week for my big Sunday night Last Exodus game. I make it a point to run the game as often as possible; I remember the shock I felt when I asked another designer how often he ran his game and he explained that he had run "a few demos once, but that was it."

Not so this hard-drinkin’ stripper-lovin’ big-nosed game geek. I love my game and I run it every chance I get. And sometimes I treat my players to a two-to-five-page screenplay-style script detailing how their actions are affecting the world around them. It helps to maintain a cinematic atmosphere and give everyone a chance to ham it up by reading a villain role or something. Best of all for me, I get to write a couple of descriptive paragraphs about the Tower District, Avalon, or the flight deck of E.R.S. (Eternal Reich Ship) Reckoner.

Now what caught me aback in particular about this little insight into Terminal City was the Advertisements. In order to come alive, in order to thrive, a place needs details. The knobs on a moisture vaporator on Tattooine or the horns of a gargoyle in Greyhawk all serve to really bring the place to life. Creating a world is basically a study in changing our own- you need to start with what people can relate to. Suddenly it became clear that I needed some of this in Eden.

If you remember my first diatribe on Eden then you will see that I had figured out what the world looked like and how the physics and metaphysics of it all fit together. It had become incumbent upon me to decide what it was that the souls of Eden did with their time. And it looked to me like they were some furious capitalists.

Starting from the top, the Kraid-Bleeker Prayer Brokerage. I really zinged that one onto the page because it sounded good. But in retrospect it had given me a fantastic idea. I figured that souls in heaven collected and traded stock in various Earth religions like Brokers on Wall Street, with certain bigwig souls maintaining entire Religious Stock portfolios. These guys would constantly be checking their sacred market report to see how their investments were doing- "Catholicism’s down, Islam is up. Judaism seems poised for a decline whereas now is a good time to invest in Hinduism&and don’t count out the Subgenius market share. "

But what are they trading and buying? Prayers? Seems complicated and risky. What could a Heavenly economy be based off of? Every idea comes back to the most obvious choice: souls. The sale of the soul is a time honored tradition&however, if everyone’s carting around trails of slave-souls to pay for toilet paper and t-shirts, it sorta' detracts from the "holy" feel of the thing. But perhaps the value of an individual soul could be quantified somehow? What do they all have in common?

Imagine the Tower Square Cornucopian, a sort of divine Seven-Eleven wherein one can buy snacks like Chum-Chums or a "Big grab" of Christ Chex (the name is taken from a stand-up comedian, Dane Cook, I believe- I wish I could claim it as my own, but I gotta give him credit) for about one Halo Fragment, or 1H for short. All souls’ Halos indicate, essentially their relative wealth in Eden. The Halo is part of a soul, and so when one sells his soul, he’s just helping the Edenic economy by using the standard currency. Nice.

These last really are the ones I want to talk about here, though: The Church of Saint McDonalds, and the Temple of Chaise-Brinkley. See, Earth is a world as much created by our collective dreams and memories of Edenic society as anything else, so why wouldn’t we bastardize the symbols and images we remember from Eden into our pop culture? We envision those thing which have the biggest control over our lives as being the most spiritually weak in our escapist fantasy.

Consider for a minute who you think has more "power"- the district manager of the local fast-food chain or an Innuit shaman? Really? Which one, O civilized gamer, has a bigger effect on your day-to-day life?

McDonalds is a massive corporation, yes, but spiritually and morally corrupt, whereas the Kalahari bushmen are in tune with the earth and universally enlightened. It’s easy to get caught in this mindset and forget that both McDonalds and the Kalahari are both just organizations made up of people like you and me, and there are individuals within who are both pious and skeptical, loud and quiet, good and evil. These people are all individuals and they all share the same dreams.

Dreams that I have indicated long ago all came from the same place- Eden.

So where am I going with all of this? I envision Eden- at least the Cities (the big ones in particular, like Terminal City (New York), Shangri-La (Los Angeles) Irem Zat- El-Emad (Bhagdad) Tuat (Mogadishu) or Jotunheim (Berlin) as being both in the Heavenly and the Infernal regions, PLASTERED with advertising. Maybe it’s that I’m spoiled by New York, but it’s really advertising that makes a city feel like a city to me. When every available surface is competing for my attention, I feel that I am really in a true city. (Hence my adoration for Las Vegas) Although, I see this as being more important in Eden than a simple race for the almighty buck.

Let’s rewind two thousand years. Jesus Christ, AKA The Nazarene, has just made his prophesy of the Millennium Religion’s coming in two thousand years. He has already returned to the Earth to rise from the dead as promised before returning to Eden here he founded the Heavenly Government (Called the Host), along with Moses, Gabriel/Mohammed, Siva, Visnu, Kali, Siddhatha Gautama/ Bhudda, Mithras, and a host (get it?) of other important souls. Still, He claimed that these twelve heralds of the Saviors from Earth (your characters) will be a pretty diverse group, as previously stated: A mercenary, a priest, A DJ, a child, a Gangsta, an artist , an addict, a rapist, a psychopath, a tycoon, a scientist and a cop.

Now the souls had two thousand years to wonder and hypothesize about this. That’s a long time. And as we know full well, here on Earth, that people can get some pretty weird ideas, especially if left with a vague prophesy from an important guy, like Jesus, Zoroaster, Nostradamus, Elvis, or Babe Ruth. So perhaps our cadre of Millennium Apostles appear in Eden, not to twelve strictly organized religions but instead to millions of squabbling sects? Dexter Tenchi/Kintaro v3.3, The techie-artist DJ, for example, learns that some of his worshippers think they can best venerate him by running a divine internet. Other think the best way is through study and mastery of the scratch table. Others believe that only Dexter himself should be allowed to use technology and live as neo-Luddites. Others might run a computer software business. Still others believe that they should kill him so that he may rise on the 3.3rd day! It’s not easy being a prophesized savior.

Somewhere in the midst of all of these thousands of religions in Eden some of these images may have filtered down into human dreams and ideals& Coca-Cola, The Medicine Wheel, McDonald's, The Cross, MTV, the Sacred Heart Etc. All have power over mankind in some way or another. And it’s up to the Players and their Millennium religions to unite these cults under a common banner- or take a branch sect and make it their own? After all, if the amount of Edenic splinter Religions are infinite, it’s only a matter of time before you find one that worships your characters as the true divine savior from Earth.

It’s just an idea I was kicking around. Is that too confusing, or do you think it could be fun? Let me know!