From the article archive
World A Week?
I'm going to write a World a Week sub-category in my World as Story articles. This is based on the Multiverser game as fan fiction, and I've cleared this concept with M.J., I believe, so here goes.
In Multiverser you visit a great variety of worlds, and I am going to provide you plenty.
It began when I bought a PC, my first brand-new one since the 386, my brother and I had bought at Sears. My brand-new 2002 PC proudly said on the outside, "Scriff-enabled", and it claimed sssssspeed! Well it sped me somewhere, when it blew up in my face. Only, I'm not in an afterlife, but first in a world of Avian humanoids locked in a Stone Age and using psionics to defend themselves versus meteor fall. My psi abilities, send me elsewhere when a pyro trick botches, and I have to execute a madman by the name of Bethleham, and try to restart the greatest nation that ever was in 2015. A cold winter horseride sends me further to 2007 Chicago, and Vampires. Here my memory gets foggy.
You see, I have just been in a world where I stood with a madwoman, a godling against an unnumbered horde of evil. She made me as her, and I stood, on a desolate moon, hundreds of miles tall, and challenged this army we had lured to this uninhabited solar system.
When they found my mire-encrusted body in a cell of my own making under the lunar crust, I repeated my threat.
"Leave now, or I will turn this star into a black hole." I gasped through parched lips as inhumanity slipped into my cell. I would have believed me, depite the grandstanding, and the unprepossesing appearance of my frail body. They didn't, and so I, we, no let's be honest, I killed them all. No question in my mind, they deserved it, but still ...
William of Orange, that mad godling, who had faced them for over a decade under the weight of madness that had cracked me in less than a week,gave me a final gift. She turned the black hole back inside out, and thus kept them from slowly dying as they slipped over the event horizon. She paid her life for that kindness, and I truly think she was happy to do so.
So, I moved on, numb and broken. I'd had power beyond the dreams of kings, but it had only reveled the holes in my soul, and then when we did that final bit, it had stripped the power, and much of my memory and who I was from me. I keep coming back to the number twenty, was that the number of worlds I traversed thaat I have forgot about, or the years that my young body saw, never-aging? I can't rember, and right now, I only want to lay down, and cry.
So they found me, laying in a field. My distress had reached them, and the humans came from their small town on foot, and on horseback to bring kindness to me. They were bound in a form of what I would most normally consider a slavery, but I was terribly grateful for their unstinting kindness.
They were socialists, and they saw my need, and gave me what I needed to pull myself back together. It took a long time.
In that time, I saw how it worked. They were bound in a low level empathic union that made each others joys and sorrows as their own with some diminished intensity. It extended the circle of empathy from family and friends to the whole small town.
1)They were limited to city-states because the Unions could not hold more than that much. But war was infrequent, and most attempts were stopped by passing High Union pacifists, a super-psi working for the central government.
2)It was easy to let go of your very self in the bath of the Union field.
3) Self-knowledge and mental health were greatly enhanced.
4) Emotion and general good feeling were considered vastly more important than a lone discovery.
5) The community was well-designed for all. Toddlers wandered the streets in perfect safety.
6) The pace of life was downright leisurely. Fify hour work weeks bred resentment, and that caused problems for others.
7) Benevolence practised becomes benevolence in truth; these were very nice people.
8)On the downside, Mood swings could and did affect the whole community. I saw a lynch mob form in under a minute, and had to TK toss the perpetrator into a very tall tree to keep him in one piece. Also, a late night urge for Rocky Road ice cream by my next door neighbour's wife had some fifty guys showing up in the middle of the night for the last twenty gallons in the store. We got out our jackknives, and divided it up peacefully.
So, I healed, and eventually went forth to face a Null who was immune to the sweet airs, and just wanted to grab what he could get. He sounded like a typical businessman at first, and I was struck by how crude he seemed. Then things got downright crude as he jumped me.
My reflexes were way off from the soft living, but I believe I got him before I versed onward to the next world.
Tech Bias: 1950's Earth
Mag Bias: Flatlined
Body Bias: 13@2(Earth normal)
Psi Bias: Enough to sustain a 20,000 person Union Field.
Tadeusz(Eric R. Ashley)
In Multiverser you visit a great variety of worlds, and I am going to provide you plenty.
It began when I bought a PC, my first brand-new one since the 386, my brother and I had bought at Sears. My brand-new 2002 PC proudly said on the outside, "Scriff-enabled", and it claimed sssssspeed! Well it sped me somewhere, when it blew up in my face. Only, I'm not in an afterlife, but first in a world of Avian humanoids locked in a Stone Age and using psionics to defend themselves versus meteor fall. My psi abilities, send me elsewhere when a pyro trick botches, and I have to execute a madman by the name of Bethleham, and try to restart the greatest nation that ever was in 2015. A cold winter horseride sends me further to 2007 Chicago, and Vampires. Here my memory gets foggy.
You see, I have just been in a world where I stood with a madwoman, a godling against an unnumbered horde of evil. She made me as her, and I stood, on a desolate moon, hundreds of miles tall, and challenged this army we had lured to this uninhabited solar system.
When they found my mire-encrusted body in a cell of my own making under the lunar crust, I repeated my threat.
"Leave now, or I will turn this star into a black hole." I gasped through parched lips as inhumanity slipped into my cell. I would have believed me, depite the grandstanding, and the unprepossesing appearance of my frail body. They didn't, and so I, we, no let's be honest, I killed them all. No question in my mind, they deserved it, but still ...
William of Orange, that mad godling, who had faced them for over a decade under the weight of madness that had cracked me in less than a week,gave me a final gift. She turned the black hole back inside out, and thus kept them from slowly dying as they slipped over the event horizon. She paid her life for that kindness, and I truly think she was happy to do so.
So, I moved on, numb and broken. I'd had power beyond the dreams of kings, but it had only reveled the holes in my soul, and then when we did that final bit, it had stripped the power, and much of my memory and who I was from me. I keep coming back to the number twenty, was that the number of worlds I traversed thaat I have forgot about, or the years that my young body saw, never-aging? I can't rember, and right now, I only want to lay down, and cry.
So they found me, laying in a field. My distress had reached them, and the humans came from their small town on foot, and on horseback to bring kindness to me. They were bound in a form of what I would most normally consider a slavery, but I was terribly grateful for their unstinting kindness.
They were socialists, and they saw my need, and gave me what I needed to pull myself back together. It took a long time.
In that time, I saw how it worked. They were bound in a low level empathic union that made each others joys and sorrows as their own with some diminished intensity. It extended the circle of empathy from family and friends to the whole small town.
1)They were limited to city-states because the Unions could not hold more than that much. But war was infrequent, and most attempts were stopped by passing High Union pacifists, a super-psi working for the central government.
2)It was easy to let go of your very self in the bath of the Union field.
3) Self-knowledge and mental health were greatly enhanced.
4) Emotion and general good feeling were considered vastly more important than a lone discovery.
5) The community was well-designed for all. Toddlers wandered the streets in perfect safety.
6) The pace of life was downright leisurely. Fify hour work weeks bred resentment, and that caused problems for others.
7) Benevolence practised becomes benevolence in truth; these were very nice people.
8)On the downside, Mood swings could and did affect the whole community. I saw a lynch mob form in under a minute, and had to TK toss the perpetrator into a very tall tree to keep him in one piece. Also, a late night urge for Rocky Road ice cream by my next door neighbour's wife had some fifty guys showing up in the middle of the night for the last twenty gallons in the store. We got out our jackknives, and divided it up peacefully.
So, I healed, and eventually went forth to face a Null who was immune to the sweet airs, and just wanted to grab what he could get. He sounded like a typical businessman at first, and I was struck by how crude he seemed. Then things got downright crude as he jumped me.
My reflexes were way off from the soft living, but I believe I got him before I versed onward to the next world.
Tech Bias: 1950's Earth
Mag Bias: Flatlined
Body Bias: 13@2(Earth normal)
Psi Bias: Enough to sustain a 20,000 person Union Field.
Tadeusz(Eric R. Ashley)
Recovered from the Gaming Outpost database backup. Original wording is preserved; damaged punctuation and presentation markup have been repaired. Historical links without a local match point to the Internet Archive.