Meta/Ocean

Starting with the ideas sprouted at [the tekalalmuck LJ community], but feel free to add stuff at will. (Add, but not delete.)

Idea: An ocean environment linking each of the Warps and possibly other places in the Mess. Apart from beaches, aquatic-minded* souls can take to the sea (arr!) or go under it (underwater cities, general oceanic living...).

• (Originally "aquatic-minced", which made me think of anthropomorphic fish-sticks, which probably wasn't intentional. This note is here on the off-chance that it was, and if there are aquatic-minced souls around, the cat in me doesn't want to miss out on them)
  • Auuugh. No, that was a typo. Though an interesting one, to be sure. -- Grey

Warp Beaches

UpSea and UpBeach

DownSea and DownBeach

TopSea and TopBeach

BottomSea and BottomBeach

CharmSea and CharmBeach

StrangeSea and StrangeBeach

The Ocean Proper

• Islands natural and artificial (or even a whole fleet or a giant bigger-than-aircraft-carrier ship)
  • Perhaps a Chitin Queen floating island, built on the backs of giant drone-waterskaters, guided by great sails of spidersilk. Drones and workers remain perpetually in the aquatic larval stages, working beneath the island; harem-members and sexual servants are kept in the nymph stage, in decadent sea-breeze-swept seraglios; while the upper castes in glorious adult form (dragonfly-like, perhaps) live in mannered luxury on the top -- living a life not unlike that of the Victorian first-class sailing elite.

• What if that same said ocean spanned the entire Mess?
  • And, like the rest of the Mess, the ocean regards most laws of physics being optional? The water's surface might follow Mobius curves, so in some places the surface is not UP at all, but rather downwards or to the side; and in some places you can live beneath the sea without getting wet at all, because you live BENEATH it in the sense that it's hanging way up in the sky?

The Ocean's Center

• Might have to do some explanation as to how the warps manage not to pollute each other (toxins from Down, biohazards from Strange, pink goo from Charm...) Currents? Maxwell barriers a mile offshore? Upwarp would probably have some engineering solution. Charm probably emits a field of Nice that keeps that stuff away. Top could have fields of engineered plankton and seaweed that are part of a marine immune system...
  • This isn't necessarily a solution to that question... but maybe there should be a huge whirlpool in the center of that ocean where the essences of all six warps mix in some bizarre way, almost some kind of antipode to the Cube Tree.
    • And those unfortunate to be sucked down into the whirlpool?
      • ...re-emerge from inside a Cube Tree leaf?

• More thinking: the Waterwomb, where the currents impregnated with effluvia and potential from the six Warpseas, runoff from the Warps, mingle, vortex in shuddering subaquatic climax. The water boils with newborn creatures, potential life, semi-substantial shades of what-may-be, beautiful and terrible, becoming and coming undone between heartbeat and heartbeat.

• I'm very badly tempted to put a sort of combination lighthouse/Tower Of Babel right in the middle of the ocean. Prob'ly with [these] forming the base.
  • Been done.

Factions

• Math PiRats (Innersea pirats)
  • Rodents whose lives revolve around the number Pi
    • Perhaps they are a Fraction Faction?

• Terrorist spin-offs, the Al Gebra
  • If they went on a math crusade, they'd call it the Al Jihad
    • ("Al" just means "the," you know, it's not that much of a pun after all)
    • Converting the unbelievers to metric
      • Holo pop-ups to pester their victims into submission ("Convert now!" "Easier, faster, more useful!" "It's GigaGreat!")
        • Well, an Al Jihad would consist of many things. I'd imagine a radical militant religious sect of the Kabalarians: not only finding orderly number patterns in everything, but enforcing them. Or one very secretive group that actually has found the hidden connection between the universe and numbers, and exploits it by using different computations of the True Name of God as reality-bending manipulative weapons. Having the 216 digit number from Pi, for instance.
          • Though that's more numerology than mathematics. So....convert to metric, ye Intregals! Lo, a Sine from Elheaven! There is but one Log, and Quadratic is His Function.
            • Numerology, yes... we DO need a highly Pythagorean faction if we haven't got one already, that raves on about sacred geometry; I've already thought up a few characters who'd fit into it fine, but I haven't done the required research yet.
              • I can imagine a few of these at home in Up... perhaps they work as mathematicians, or for the Department of Time Stabilization, and keep their more mystic side under wraps. With such arcane fascinations they might also cross over into Strange, or perhaps Down...

Attractions