lockestheway: (peter: being locke.)
lockestheway ([personal profile] lockestheway) wrote in [community profile] fandomhigh_ooc2011-09-18 06:55 pm
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Your BDE For This Semester!

Hello and welcome back to another semester of the zany chaos we call Fandom, where timelines intermix and wrap around each other, where doppelgangers room together and occasionally date, where you can meet three versions of your father before you graduate...

Strangely enough, there are beings in the multiverse who aren’t so enamored with the chaos, and those beings are known as the Auditors of Reality. The Auditors are supernatural celestial bureaucrats: they make sure the laws of gravity are obeyed, file the right paperwork for chemical reactions, and so on. They hate life because life is messy and unpredictable and makes them fall behind on their paperwork. They really hate humans and other sentient beings because they are much messier and more unpredictable than other living things, and have attempted more than once to remove this issue.

Fortunately for humanity and every other living thing, the Auditors can't simply wipe out life, because that's against the Rules; the Auditors can't break the Rules because, in a certain sense, they are the Rules. There are, however, loopholes.

The loophole they will exploit in Fandom? Nothing.

Or rather, The Nothing. Simply put, the Nothing feeds on things that are forgotten--hopes and dreams are its favorites--and leaves nothing behind. If it destroys a lake, there wouldn’t be a dry lake bed left behind: that would be something. Nothing is the blackness that you see when you close your eyes before you sleep. The Nothing doesn’t just make things disappear--it makes it so they never existed at all.

Okay, that’s nice and creepy. How will it work here?
Slowly at first. The BDE will unfold in four phases across the semester (which is why we’re telling you now!)

Phase One (September 20-October 20)
The Auditors will release the Nothing and it will beginning nibbling around the edges of Fandom, going after long-dropped characters who have been forgotten by the people currently on the island and erasing their existence. As we get closer to Homecoming, the Nothing will expand into universes our current, alumni, and expat characters come from.

What does this mean for us?
That means that, starting September 20th, we’ll be putting up weekly posts in which your long-dropped characters can post one last hurrah before the Nothing removes them from existence. NOTE that there will be an option later on in the semester for past dropped characters to leave messages before they vanish; this option is only for those who never quite manage to contact Fandom before they fade (or have been gone so long they don’t know anyone on the island any more). So snag your ancient former character journals and have fun with it!

Beginning October 10th, little-known NPCs from your home universes can also start fading. Participation in this is up to you, of course. Fandom characters might still remember these people - vaguely, as we’re talking about That Janitor They Spoke To That One Time In Season 1, not the brother they phone up every week - but chances are when asked, people at home will respond with a simple “Who?”

Alumni can also notice these disappearances, but the more time they’ve been spending away from Fandom, the more trouble they’ll have to notice anything amiss when an NPC goes missing.

Phase Two (October 23-November 20th)
The transportation of all the alumni back to the island for Homecoming will snap the poor little Nothing’s...well, what passes for its brain, anyway, as beings from all kinds of timelines and universes arrive in one place. (He’s from the past! She’s from the future! He’s from spaaaaaaace! Poor little Nothing.) It will start attacking the home dimensions more visibly, but again, only visible to people who have left and returned. Alumni coming back from the dance will have the option of returning home to discover some people they know have disappeared, as have buildings, lakes, small villages...whatever you’d like. News can get around, and people on the island can also go home to check and see if things are missing. They don’t have to be: you can choose to leave your character’s universe unaffected by the Nothing. It’s gone insane, after all, and there are a lot of universes. It can’t have gotten everywhere.

On November 14th, Portalocity will admit that the portal system is becoming unbalanced with all of the chunks of universes the Nothing has taken and will begin limiting transportation into and out of affected dimensions, leaving your characters with the terrible decision of leaving their dimensions to disappear without them or staying to disappear with it. This is also the time to call in favors to fight the Nothing if you choose, but you will not be able to defeat it. Mwahaha. Portalocity will shut down all portals for non-Fandom, non-alumni characters on November 20th.

Phase Three (November 21st until December 3rd)
The Nothing starts inching toward Fandom itself. Dropped characters (and their universes) start disappearing in droves and will be given the chance to leave one last message to people they knew on the island before fizzling into the Nothing. From this point on, alumni and expats will be allowed back onto the island for the duration of the event if they choose not to go out in a blaze of glory at home. On December 3rd Portalocity will shut down all portal service to and from Fandom entirely, so even those alumni staying behind in Nothing-safe dimensions won’t be able to jump universes or talk to their friends on-island.

Phase Four (December 4th-December 10th
The traditional BDE showdown! We’ll be providing more details as we get closer to December, but the Nothing will attack Fandom itself, the shielding the island has will begin to fail, and the Auditors will show up to see What Went Wrong just to add to the chaos. NPCs on the island will disappear (Tino! Noooooo!), then characters themselves can blip out of existence, and we’ll be down to nothing but the school building proper by the end of the week.

What we need from you!

- As you’ll see in the convenient OCD below, we’ve got all kinds of sign-up options!
We need the names of dropped characters that you’ve played who have lost all contact with Fandom but weren’t killed off permanently in-game (for example: Barbossa) for unnoticed disappearances in early/mid October. This is just a headcount, so we’ll know how many folks we can expect!

- We need to know which alumni/expats/island minions will be going home and noticing chunks disappearing in October and November. Please note (if you’ve decided) if they will be returning to Fandom in late November or going down with the ship. Er, universe. Something. We need those names by October 21.

- We need the names of dropped characters that you’ve played who will be leaving one last message before disappearing forever (or until we fix the multiverse!) in late November. We need those names by November 20.


None of this is mandatory. You’re free to participate in any stage of the BDE lead-up that you’d like, participate in one but not another, or forgo them entirely - whether it be to keep your character sane, your plot running, or even create a safe haven in terms of a place the Nothing hasn’t touched yet. Just keep in mind that by the BDE week in December, the island will be completely cut off from the multiverse, and Portalocity will no longer be functioning.

There! Comments, questions, icons of pretty people making out?