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Trystia's Suggestions

Crater Lake Complex (needs a better name)

In the immediate aftermath of the rapture, a number of geology students from Southern Oregon University and Oregon Institute of Technology banded together to take over the ruined remains of the lodge located at Crater Lake in Oregon. The caldera of the long-dormant Mt. Mazama is a highly defensible location, complete with exceptionally pure drinking water, which the students have stocked with fish. Having first rebuilt the lodge using timber from the surrounding area and remains of the original lodge, they have since spent the last 19 years building their own secret volcano lair on Wizard Island and use the lodge as a university, allowing them to claim the entire mountain as sovereign territory.

The primary interests of the former students, most of whom are now professors or researchers, is volcanism and seismology in the post-Rapture environment of Earth, and they have attracted a number of the few remaining experts in these fields because of the protection offered by the well-defended location and its excellent sustainability, making this the leading institute in these fields in North America and possibly the world. Everything from how to use narrative causality to affect or even cause earthquakes to study of the apocalyptic earthquakes that can sometimes be observed to occur in red zones is studied, in an attempt to learn enough to prevent the Earth itself from breaking apart before Humanity can escape.

Legacy Content

The Pietro Monti Memorial Boarding School is an accredited institution that takes pupils age fourteen to twenty and provides them with a six-year program at the end of which they receive a bachelor's degree on any one of twelve specializations, from Conundrums of Philosophy to Dimensional Engineering. It also contains an accredited Montessori primary school, although boarding for children under 14 is restricted to Ragnarok victims.

Like all Montessori institutions, PMMBS tries to put reincarnates in classroom groups appropriate to their emotional rather than intellectual maturity. Follow the ceiling signs to determine what is acceptable behavior.

Like all CATS-founded institutions, PMMBS puts budget surpluses into the Rapture Readiness CERN search-and-rescue fund and offers a Combat Theology minor, despite having no ROTC program and no CT major.

By agreement with the Commonwealth, PMMBS has been grandfathered in with other CATS bases and is still considered extraterritorial. The customs unit at the end of the peninsula covers Commonwealth, Union, Confederation and ZLI consular services. Internships are usually available.

Once a month, flux permitting, grid trips are available to students and faculty who passed their grid entry exam to visit Ground Minus One. Psychological counseling is mandatory after the trip if the Theological Containment facility was visited.

Athletic facilities include a three multipurpose fields (football - handegg - baseball - cricket), eight multipurpose courts (basketball - tennis - jai alai - streetball - curling), four pools (salt water - fresh water - perfluorocarbon - nonnewtonian), two deprivation chamber pods for psionic training, and a marathon-length track around the grounds with appropriate equestrian enhancements.

Academic facilities include a physics lab, biology lab, metaphysics lab, machine shop, tannery, automated fabrication facility (manual certification required), rubber spinning pools, and an analog electronics shop graded B for electrician certification for high-chaos areas. Our library is fully warded and receives publications from all eight national conglomerates, four alternate continuums, and a Class 4 metafictional extrapolator.

Teacher-student ratio is guaranteed to be in the single digits.

Internet access is currently limited to nonsentient hosts; IT services are student-provided as much as possible, occasionally including hardware.

Our faculty comes from all walks of life, including prominent secular, religious and thaumaturgical universities; paragovernmental organizations; CATS affiliates; and professional fields from archeology to xenotheology.

Scholarships are available for students over the age of majority (in any reincarnation) who sign up for our infrastucture program, with a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 25 hours a week.

It's from my version of the salvation war. So, the Rapture happened, and all the stupid shit from the Left Behind novels started happening. However since all the religious idiots were gone and there's only so much and brainwashing divine magic can do, when TurboJesus showed up intending to judge mankind, he got nuked. This has put the universe in what in electronics parlance is known as an undetermined state. Fortunately, narrative causality is holding things together quite well. God has been trying to put things "back on track" ever since, but it keeps not working. Reincarnation sometimes happens, usually after people die of physics snarfles. CATS is the group that caused the world to be stuck in the Ragnarok state, rather than ending. Rapture readiness is just civil defense stuff, only against angels and demons. Combat theology is... well, you get the picture. Basically, this is me trying to give a story to "So, in Ragnarok Online private servers, why is the storyline stuck?"

kay, now i get it. Ground Minus One is where TurboJesus got nuked, then?

[10:43:51 PM] M K B: yup

[10:45:14 PM] M K B: CATS is basically xcom, the aerial hussars, the men in black, the Turinese guys from Foucault's Pendulum, the ghostbusters, and/or the doom guy.

[10:45:35 PM] M K B: how's it look?

[3/21/2015 11:32:25 PM] M K B: if you die by metaphysical means, most of the time you come back but may have to go through puberty again.

[10:54:47 PM] Kite Winters: and, are humans human barring manual reconstruction, or is Weird Stuff happening spontaneously in that regard?

[10:56:11 PM] M K B: I'm thinking weird stuff. except, not much in the way of genetic incompatibility

[11:01:59 PM] Kite Winters: weird stuff heritable or spontaneous? reincarnation keeps subspecies intact or chance of change?

[11:04:38 PM] M K B: Weird stuff heritable due to kid's mind defaulting to, mostly mom's body type. People with body dysphoria are sent to a surgical clinic if they can afford the money or to an affirmational meditation clinic if they can afford spending a couple months as something likely to not being very mobile.

[11:05:28 PM] Kite Winters: Affirmational meditation clinic?

[11:07:21 PM] M K B: Learn to look at self in the mirror, see what you want to see, and politely inform reality that it's wrong and it needs to catch up.

[11:09:05 PM] Kite Winters: and then enough meditation, if successful, causes some form of crystallization and body remapping?

[11:09:29 PM] M K B: ya

[11:10:01 PM] M K B: (Careful: High chance of getting what you actually want, rather than what you think you want)

[3/21/2015 11:32:34 PM] M K B: "The universe went to shit? HEY! We fixed it better."

INTRO

It is the year 2005. This has been the case for a while now.

The Rapture happened in 1997, and the cosmic clock is stuck. The Earth is locked in a state of perpetual apocalypse.

The scars left by Armageddon are still being healed; the Earth once again has mountains and valleys, as it should, but large areas remain inaccessible due to nuclear radiation, cosmic anisotropy, or both.

The twenty million people or so left on Earth found themselves free of the dictates of God, and have been making their own way in the universe ever since.

Love can conquer death. Monsters roam the earth. Making small changes to the fabric of reality is just a couple of university classes away. Things from other universes lurk in the shadows, because they get shoveled in the face if they peek out too much.

All considered, it's a good time to be alive.

GROUND MINUS ONE

The Ground Minus One complex is a carefully manicured blue zone, surrounded by thaumaturgically unstable terrain, in what used to be Jerusalem; it is only accessible by high-altitude drop and by grid travel through the thin safe ring surrounding the complex.

The only remaining CATS installation is here. The containment chamber offers guided tours, and it is possible to see Jesus pass his divine judgement on all he surveys through an array of TV screens that was installed for his perusals; it was felt fair that since he will not leave his airless prison until He surrenders or the Earth is destroyed, He should know why He is in precautionary custody.

It is possible to talk with Him, although He has never deigned Himself to respond; anyone is welcome to try, via text terminal of course. Lip readers monitor His sayings 24/7 and a full transcript of the last 36 hours is available in the main conference room.

The conference room itself was built to house a trial, but given that the accused refused to acknowledge His counsel and the Planetary Committee on Reconcilation beyond impotently cursing their flesh to melt from their bones, the trial has been postponed indefinitely.

Jesus' body remains incorrupted despite the lack of nutrition, and so do His garments; what little information remote analysis provides shows that He is either not in pain, or even capable of feeling pain, which tends to disappoint most visitors.

CATS is currently researching methods to safely deliver Jesus to outer space in a solar orbit for long-term containment (Earth's space launching capabilities have not yet recovered), or alternatively inventing a divinity-proof ball gag so that He may be eventually released.

Most of the research on soul liberation performed by CATS is available to the public, and briefings are given if a sufficiently large tour group asks for it; the actual work is done elsewhere.

Christian Remnants are allowed to come in by grid travel, and worship their Lord and Savior directly, and are in fact encouraged to try to talk to Him; the chances of a breakout are mitigated by the nature of grid travel and the fact that Ground Minus One is one of the few places left in the world that has 24/7 security.

HOMO IMAGO DEI

A hypothetical pre-Rapture visitor would be hard pressed to find a human being who is not affiliated with the Christian Remnant. While everyone has an opinion about whether Jesus was telling the factual truth (as opposed to the Divine Truth, which He was by definition) about cosmology and evolution, pretty much everyone who survived agreed that

Taxonomy has been symbolically amended to remove the genus Homo and fold it it back into Pan, with Homo Sapiens renamed "Pan Narrans".

Given that God Almighty considers humanity to be in His image, and given how easy it has become to change one's phenotype -- narrative causality is easiest to work on oneself, after all, which has had the side effect of making medical care much easier -- most non-Remnant humans have changed their shape at least symbolically to answer Divine concern about it. Given time, mythological influences, and the occasional bit of oneupmanship, this has caused a number of phenotypes to emerge. While most everyone is limited to shapes that make physical sense, at least if they want to be able to visit blue and most green zones, it's not unusual to meet folks as short as two feet or as tall as eight, people with tails, and even centauroids, although departure from the general vertebrate shape is rare. Being NC dependent, a human's imago is rarely fixed, and may change according to community, profession, passion, and so on. Imago seems to mostly transmit through the same-gender parent.

Oddly, this has caused what was left of the furry subculture to decline and disappear fairly quickly.