Many Worlds
”…Trapped in the eye of time, they await a blink…”
Which came first? It’s hard to remember. There were always space age stories. And there was always a city. Alterstar is closer to Idzhexing in terms of timeline, but closer to the Klon Era in terms of its origins. Who knows which is the better pairing…who cares?
Alterstar is a place. Where did it get its name from? No one remembers any more. But perhaps it’s got something to do with the way the night sky looks…and the way the night sky looks in Alterstar has something to do with the way Alterstar was blown out of its world by something very, very bad that happened seven hundred years ago. Once upon a time, Alterstar was called Idzhexing…
The Klon Era is a time of space travel. Who was Klon? A sex pervert of an engineer who invented the soul drive, which the Lillitha renamed the Klon Drive after him because if people knew what really went into powering the interplanetary and interstellar transport they use every day, they would go insane. What happened to Klon? Mirrereo Maedele-Kerrind killed him. He should have been honoured. He was the first living non-Lillitha in half a millenium to realize that Maedele-Kerrind still existed.
IDZHEXING & THE MAGNAPOL FOUNDATION
Idzhexing is the past of Alterstar; the Magnapol Foundation is its future. Who created Idzhexing? That mystery may never be solved. How did the Magnapol Foundation come about? It grew, like a seed fallen into radioactive ground. There must have been people at the bottom of either one. But who, and where did they come from, and how did they live, and where did they go? Perhaps only the House of the Dead knows.
The Magnapol Foundation is very like Idzhexing in its technological advances. Fitting that history came full circle in the end.
There are always dragons. Fantasy is the root of all fiction, and however much distaste I have for fantastic convention, however tired I am of elves and dragons, there has to be a place for them. Doesn’t there?
Solipsism: the theory that only the self can be proved to exist, also known as a form of extreme egoism. The people of Solipsis call their planet Earth, just like us, but of course Solipsis isn’t Earth…and there is horror at the root of their legends, the same horror that broke their history in half and flung the early millenia into bluuwespace together with lost Idzhexing. Can they be blamed for not believing that the stars are attainable?
Solipsis is the world that Idzhexing was torn out of, and the ordinary world that went on for six centuries parallel to Alterstar, neither really knowing or believing that the other was out there.
Dragons, in deed.
So much fantasy has been written about Lilith, the first woman; and in fiction about shapeshifters, demons and other monsters, there will usually be a reference to such beings as children of Lilith. It all agrees on one thing, though; she was evil, and her offspring are inhuman. Ah, the irresistible morbidity in the tragedy of those offspring; like Echidna’s children, they are doomed.
But in modern times, the doom that befalls monsters is not to be slain by heroes. Instead it is the doom of being outcast; being hunted by the army; experimented on for scientific research; unable to live normally in any way at all; and unlike the famous X-Men, they never have a chance to become heroes themselves.
Although, in the Klon Era, their time will come; when the Lillitha become an interstellar law enforcement agency, a secret service within a secret service, handling all the things that are, like themselves, too enormous for the average human (however enhanced that human may be by futuristic science).
Setting: the here and now, because strange happenings under your nose hold so much more horror than strange happenings in a place long ago and far away. Also because the backstory of reality is infinitely deeper, richer and more clearly recognizable than the backstories of worlds that only exist in orbit around my head.
No one ever said that stories set in the real world had to be about real things, though.
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