Timeline 5.2

In Azeroth, Sally is merrily picking flowers when she feels one of her Exalted is in an odd Place. She can't find him, not being well-endowed with the powers of clairvoyance, so instead, she and Ginnie try a brief experiment; to see whether Ginnie can use Sally as a bridge-point from which to view the multiverse.

This doesn't quite work as expected. Instead of allowing Ginnie to find someone in the multiverse, it instead opens up a viewing portal to where Sally's Exalted is; a strange realm with trees, and snow, and squiggly symbols on the tree trunks. After poking it a bit gingerly, Sally and Ginnie figure they can't actually close it. So they end up going through; at which point it's discovered that the trees with runes on are anchors for routes to other worlds. And that this place is basically Sally's Demesne.

Some experimentation later demonstrates that, as Sally is a Goddess of Always Going Forwards Because She Can't Find Reverse, it's impossible to go through a portal to her Demesne and then straight back to the same world; but otherwise, anyone can open portals once she's given explicit permission to them. Which is nice.

This makes it surprisingly easier to sort out the next steps of Mattmatt's plan - popping to Skyrim, where it takes Mattmatt all of half an hour to realise they have a magic school; Sally and Ginnie have a week off as everyone else studies either magic or blacksmithing; then forcibly lever Mattmatt out of the place to move on to the next steps. Then there's the D&D-verse; where Sally takes a temple to Pern, then to Waterworld (whereupon it sinks, to everyone's slight distress) and then finally to talk to Mystra. She tells us to go knock on a door while bearing a pie; whereupon the world's most wanderlust-driven magician comes out and, after some conversation, agrees to give Matt and Mattmatt more magical tuition and some other stuff in return for being dropped off somewhere in the multiverse. He ends up being dumped into Rising Stars-verse, and seems pleased by the idea.

Now all Mattmatt needs to do is talk to the Traveller and work out more about pocket universes and how to control reality within them, and then get Destiny to put it in the Book. How can it go wrong from there?

It turns out things go wrong from there by the fact that it's actually not possible to stay in Grand Sally Central for more than 24 hours. This, it turns out, results in being thrown into the multiverse _somewhere_. Matt and Andy were hanging out in Azeroth while we others were in GSC; so only Mattmatt, Sal and Ginnie were thrown around the place. Ginnie ended up in Wild Cards-verse New York, and promptly pottered over to Jokertown and asked Dr Tachyon for a line on a lift to Stoke, which went via Popinjay. Mattmatt ended up in Scion-verse, and got a lift via his dad back to Anglesey. Sally found her way to Fionavar, and after some faffing, found someone to point her towards where Ginnie is. She got there three months later; and then popped back with Ginnie to GSC to see what had happened.

The boys, having met up beforehand, prepped GSC with fake cobwebs and a tea-stained note of 'We gave up waiting for you'. Sally noticed this, and had an exciting screaming fit; but since she brought along the Big Bad's second in command, that was kind of okay. Then said BB's2IC had an Alpha-off against Bryn. It was... very manly. And a little bit scary.

Then we paused for breath.

Then Mattmatt had a Plan. He went to Dresden-verse (via Once Upon A Time Neverland and somehow collecting Abi) and decided to call the Wild Hunt down on Harry Dresden. This has so far involved: Abi getting accidentally infected with the shadow of Thorned Namshiel, Michael Carpenter being deliberately shot in the head and his children randomly whacked, the Carpenters being Suck'n'Dumped back to life with the energy of an Angel powering their resurrection, Abi getting accidentally infected with the Wild Cards virus, half of northern Europe being deliberately made Very Unlucky as Abi is made Very Lucky by the power of Luck'n'Dump, Abi manifesting as an Ace similar to Jack Hawksmoor from the Authority, Abi getting deliberately psychic assaulted to destroy the Denarian shadow, and Mattmatt having to be very careful because anything he says will come true. No Wild Hunt yet, but hey, it's not even been 48 hours.

The Angelic bit of Molly Carpenter got dragged out by the power of Sally, and we rapidly thereafter departed, after Mattmatt wandered off and muttered embarrassedly. His response to any questioning on this thereafter has been 'The world still exists, doesn't it?' and we're all too scared to look and see what it was he's actually caused. Then we headed forth to Star Trek. Via, er, a wide variety of places, most of which are noted on the Portals list, as GSC connects to yet more places. Our latest and greatest was actually getting to Star Trek (after Sally came over all funny when trying to get to the place and time the Traveller and a newly Ascended Wesley Crusher were), then heading over to the world by the power of Horizon; and then Ginnie (in a move that shocked the nation) somehow redirecting Horizon through hyperspace into the Bleed. Mattmatt promptly shifted the ship and contents to a world; which turned out to be Chaos Victorious 30K. Sally took what was _intended_ to be everyone back out, and accidentally wandered off with the spaceship and no one else. On the bright side, she's the only person who can't survive in space. On the down side, turns out that Mattmatt's propulsion's a bit dodgy where it comes to direction, so we, er, holed an Alpha Legion ship. Then we asked them nicely if we could, you know, just leave, and I think they were so surprised they said yes, as we pushed off the side of the ship. I say 'we' in this; I mean a concussed Mattmatt, Andy and Ginnie. Matt was at that point in his space-manouevrable and -capable armour, stealthed up and trying not to giggle, about a quarter of an orbit away. After some juggling, we all got to the same place at the same time. That place turned out to be the ex-flagship of Ferrus Manus, a Good Primarch. So Matt harvested gene-seed, Andy looted and Ginnie lugged Mattmatt around after them, and then Matt portalled everyone home. It was surprisingly painless.

Now all we have to do is go to Star Trek. You know, that phrase sounds _really familiar_...

It was decided, after Sally found that she can't 'port to the Traveller (like poles repelling? Some kind of diversion-shielding? Who knows, but it's a Thing), to wait for Horizon to come home and use him to fly to the right place. This would be a lot easier had Horizon not got the freedom of Grand Sally Central and a fundamental wanderlust - he was last heard of Somewhere In Space, going 'Whee! I don't know where I am! This is _awesome_!'. Er, metaphorically.

So we decided to hang out for a bit, do some chores. Sally went home, and has had a nice quiet couple of weeks with Bryn, Matt has been invested in sorting out his piles of equipment, Ginnie has been hanging out in Wild Cards and learning how to make people do what she tells themfrom Dr Tachyon, and Andy has been keeping an eye on Mattmatt's experiments. These haven't led to disaster this time, but have left Mattmatt very frustrated with the way the universe seems to fundamentally hate him, sometimes...

In the meantime, though, Ginnie popped into Aberrant to sort out the murder charge (you may remember this from some months back; but yeah, some neo-Nazi politician was killed in Germany, and our brave adventurers were suspects no. 1. No one's really sure why.) due to information received from the D'Orlay group. They stated that there's a good chance the hit was commissioned by an organisation associated with the British government, who have a Red Bishop (?) as an officer. They were surprised that the tech train showed that they might have had something to do with it, though...

Raoul Orsaiz dealt with the murder charges, but not with anything else; and then invited us to tea. So we went over, and met up with him, Geryon, Jeremiah Scripture and Narcosis for tapas. Everyone being warned about Narcosis, she seemed to be largely lurking in a corner and sulking becaue no one wanted to touch her. Geryon and Scripture, though, talked about Teragen philosophy and long-term plans - the which involve finding a planet with a suitable amount of energy to support the Nova physiology and a means of getting there with, potentially, enough people and materiel to set up a civilisation. They didn't know what Sal can do, but were looking very hopefully at Mattmatt and his forcefields, the which, Scripture says, may well be able to encapsulate a city and take it into space in ten years or so; which fits their deadlines.

There were some oddities in their conversation - some of these are: - Calling Divis Mal 'Michael Donighal' repeatedly. This was explained as 'this way you're not meeting with Mal, you're meeting Michael, and you can avoid the impact and political statement of the former'; but it's still _really_ odd. - Calling the assembled and a variety of other Terats by their birth names rather than by their chosen monikers; this is surprisingly contra basic philosophy. - Mentioning that humanity is breeding/creating (?) their own weapons against Novas. If this is JamesGame, then there are no psiads yet; so what is it that they're creating? - Mentioning the Chromatids as an alien race that's done things that affect the Mathematician's figures, when in Canon 'verse, it's the Qin who give humanity the Prometheus Chambers; and then, not for another 150 years or so... - Mentioning the upcoming fight between Mal and Caestus Pax as if it'll level cities. IIRC, this in Canon 'verse was over a mountain range; and while it blew up a chunk of that range, it wasn't a people-killer, as Mal just turned Pax' powers off and walked away.

There may be some other quirks of conversation I've not picked up, but these all lead me to believe that either something significant is affecting this reality that we don't know about, or we're being played and fed information to make us sympathise more with the Teragen movement and enable them to use our capacities. We are very keen to show off... Matt (who wasn't present) analysed the situation as 'I'd move all my civilian personnel off-planet before an upcoming conflict. I'd be able to do what I wanted to the planet then, without worrying about casualties...'

But now, we're just hanging out, waiting for Horizon and thinking about extra-solar exploration.

The conversation continued briefly thereafter with Narcosis' bragging that of course she was happy to help get everyone offworld - when Mal left, she'd be happy here. Ginnie decided to do some digging, and proptly found the reason for Narcosis' gloating - she was capable of making her addiction viral, and hadn't only because of Mal. Andy promptly executed her; we apologised to the rest of the Teragen, and paid De Vries off to clean up and spin it as a perfectly understandable political debate.

We left to chat over the possibilities afterwards; and ended up taking Horizon (after he came home) out to - well, we totally _intended_ to reach Trek 'verse. This didn't go as well as we'd thought - we ended up in SLA, for some reason, and then promptly fled. As you do in SLA. Sadly, we were followed out of the hole into the Bleed by the foldship Yung, which is apparently a legend in its own lifetime in SLA.

We agreed to try to take them to a place where they could go colonise and be safe; and then realised that this probably wasn't really something Sal could do yet. So Matt tinkered with Horizon's engines and hooked him up with a couple of ZPMs, and managed to get a hole into the Bleed that the Yung could follow. Sadly, after a minor mis-calculation, this led us straight into Trinity space. Hanging in near-Earth orbit, with what we originally thought was a routine patrol nearby.

Turns out that the clairsentients employed on Earth defence had twigged something was coming beforehand, and the 'routine patrol' was General Solveig Larssen, the telekinetic Proxy - one of the eight hardest psions in the 'verse. We basically stalled for long enough for the Yung's captain to recharge, then bolted out of the place.

We weren't very good on the targetting again; but on the bright side, we didn't end up in more space combat. We did, however, end up in what appeared to be a lost world, with a jumpgate hanging in space on a distant solar orbit. The planet itself had a few densely green clumps of what appeared to be psychic plant life, and a few hive cities heavily defended and wiped clean of all green. So... symbiots, then. A quick scan ledus to point at a couple habitable planets for the Yung to stop off at, and they agreed that one of them looked kind of okay for a stop-over - and since it didn't have SLA Industries there, it was approximately eleventy billion times better than where they were. They said they'd be fine popping there themselves, so we left them to it and headed on out.

Horizon needed time to rest, recuperate and heal his battered engines, so he sloped off to Ussura, where there's no defensive batteries and a ship can float at his leisure. We figured out the list of things we had to do that we could do without a spaceship, and dropped into DS9 for a brief op - Ginnie had briefly infested Sal's lungs with nanotech, so Dr Bashir grew her new lungs and transplanted them tidily. Then we decided to try Plan: Supernatural for how to get Jez out of Hela's realm.

This basically involved Matt popping to F&M's for pie, and then Sal dropping Matt, her and Ginnie off to SPN-verse while Andy and Mattmatt hung out in Exalted and tried to learn Charms. In SPN-verse, Matt bribed Dean Winchester with pie to lend us a magic syringe, and we dropped by an abandoned warehouse and summoned us a wandering angel. We, er, rather neglected to check which one; but in our very faint defence, we left the body alive and wrapped up in a cosy blanket with all his stuff intact apart from the angelic blade he carried after we'd unceremoniously stunned him in three different ways and extracted all the Grace before he'd been there for three seconds.

Then we dropped by Hela's realm, asked for a half hour with Jez (for which we'll pay the standard cost; another three vampires at Hela's request as and when she wants them ganked) and then gave him the choice of whether to take on the mantle of an angelic being. He agreed - possibly more through confusion than conviction, but it was good enough for us. And then we walked out of Hela's realm with a newly-reborn Archangel of Fire. Er, oops. On the other hand, we're all in Grand Central Sally now, and Jez is bathing in the hot springs with a Coke.

We spent the next few days... well, technically we aimed to acclimate Jez, but instead we kitted him out as a WoW Hunter, and let him run around Northrend. With, in our defence, a suitable escort. Andy and Ginnie trawled the Timeless Isle for loot, Ginnie dinged to 90, everyone else hit at least 85, and Sally earnt a penguin to give to Jez. He looked very confused. That is all that happened for like four days, and it was remarkably soothing for some of us; though whether it was soothing for Jez, who knows? The only blemish in the glory that is the relaxation available in Azeroth is the ongoing issue over whether to take Jez to the Poppy Fields or not; the which Sal is very reluctant to do. But since no one else can work out how to stabilise Jez so he doesn't potentially assimilate, we're a bit stuck, otherwise...

So after some further discussion, Sally agreed to take Jez to the Poppy Fields, on the understanding that there would be further discussion on the matter once he got there. Then, obviously, we were all (separately) whirled across the multiverse, landing in a variety of different places. Saly then found Ginnie, and then collected, er, Gabriel Montoya. Oops. Shortly thereafter (with the application of Majesty), Sally agreed to take Montoya to the Tower; and since it was right there, Ginnie pointed out the correct Jez and Sal hoiked him in. Then, two versions of Jez being there, they tried to eat each other, and Jez ended up sort-of diablerising Montoya, and being a bit of a fanger. Sally then basically shoved him into the Tower in the hope that the vampire cooties would vanish. He couldn't walk up, as Montoya had started to go down, so he completed that walk and felt a little wobbly afterwards. Then he and Ginnie started walking up, because why not. (Geb, while all this was going on, was in Pandora, meditating on the glory of Pandora-Gaia. Andy was in Azeroth, and Mattmatt was... well, no one's too sure, but we're fairly sure we'll spot the kablooie at some point.)

The team that actually walked up the tower were Jez and Ginnie; Sally threw chunks of her power at Ginnie to keep her on the path, and Matt hung out on the landings after a brief incident with a version of Capricorn tying their fates together.

Matt, on the other hand, went down; stalwartly maintaining his Garou nature and his focus on the rules of Gaia throughout, with only one slight glitch in success rate on the 'Cunning' circle. Apparently 'attempting to kill them all' doesn't count as Cunning. Bright side, he did face whatever was at the bottom of the Tower, and successfully completed the Logrus.

The list of Things to Do provoked by the Tower's landings are: - A minute of time is given to us to overlap our own timelines on Sally's wedding day - this could be used, f'rinstance, to follow the SFS portals and do great deeds. - The trial of Endurance gave us the ability to monkey around in our past; we saved the lives of about ten Garou on the day Simon and his infernal minions attacked Anglesey, and killed Simon a year early - at the cost of Davey, Soph and Celyn. - Lucifer suggested that the only way we could bring healing magics back into the world is by creating the concept for it outside of the multiverse; in chaos-space. - Dresden-verse is a horrible, horrible place now, basically full of Reavers and monsters as the Outer Gates have opened and the Courts of the Fae defending them have been massively disrupted.

So we all got together and decided what to do next; which was to develop the plan for healing magics to possibly use the Logrus to create the concept in Chaos and then try to use the Pattern to fix it into the multiverse. Then we went to have a chat with Necromancy Rich because he had a lot of experience with Chaos. He has suggested that while Geb can survive in there, Andy and Mattmatt can't without going more insane than they already are.

Then, since the portal into Rich's verse is currently around about California-ish and he's living on a beach a long way away from the portal, Sal tried to reset the portal to be by his beach.

This has, er, been somewhat problematic. We appear to have been unglued in time, possibly, and are currently wandering around what looks like Stargate Egypt. Maybe. But healing magics work here. And we can't quite work out how to get to the right when....

After some experimenting (or 'uncontrolled lurching around the multiverse', as it's also known), it's basically been clarified that we were, er, on a fragment of chaos, unconnected to any Tower. Which could be useful, if we can only work out how to tie it into the Tower without the 'no healing magics in reality' overriding it. Especially as one of the things that we ended up doing through the chaos was heading into the deep past, before the spell was cast; and the results implied that the Pattern itself had been rewritten to take out healing magic from it. So now we kinda need to go chat with some dudes who know about the Pattern. And, hopefully, who aren't barkingly insane, Dworkin.

We decide that the better part of going to Amber is having two people who have actually, you know, walked the Pattern; and spend a bit of time getting Ginnie to the state where she's prepared to try this. This is basically all about letting her have a nice holiday, finding an uninhabited world in Star Trek, Sally doing a drawing of the Pattern for Ginnie to walk, and then chivvying her down it. She wobbles a bit, lurches dramatically sideways a few times, and steps off the far end by the skin of her teeth, thanks to a wishing sword bought for that very purpose. Matt, meanwhile, has taken to being a long way away from any Amberites, as Chaos does not tend to do well when faced with the actual Pattern.

Andy then tidies up the evidence (read: creates a supervolcano) and we all go home for tea.