Finite Infinity - Two Universes
The next chapter starts off with them trying to find there way into destiNATION following Bob Gorilla, utilizing the Kilroy virus that was build to bridge the interface. They discover the downloader app used to send stuff into the Matrix does not function properly in destiNATION, so have to come up with a diffrent way of sending items there for support. They meet up with one of the tour guides in Otherland by the name of Lain, who shows them around.
This one I really didn't have any structure to, just a few things I wanted to throw in. The main concept here follows a mysterious controversy, a series of murders that had started since they had come into destiNATION, but were not by Bob Gorilla. The groups split up into different configurations exploring the place trying to find Bob, and at one point The Anaconda and Aura go into the .hack copy MMO that exists there, and helps out a player named Exelia to fight Skeith. The Anaconda then goes back later and learns from the actor playing Skeith that Exelia was running a friend of hers through the Skeith mission, when suddenly the muderer showed up and killed Exelia. The murderer was Kite.
In the mean time Aura goes to a world based off the OS-tan concept, where she is attacked by someone with Agent access that had leeched onto Vista-tan. She discovers this person was a program originally built to manage the bandwidth issues, but was scrapped in favor of The World. After draining that person, she meets up with a man filling the role of Windows Update in this world, who is one of the main designers of destiNATION and was using that zone as his own private hideout. After getting back with The Anaconda, trying to figure out about this Kite that was clearly from the .hack//GU E3 trailer, the man reveals he has Harvester data of CyberConnect 2 at the end of that iteration of the Matrix, which he was storing away to eventually process and get that full series. They set up a zone to run it at high speed.
Eventually they find Bob Gorilla, and drag him back to the Matrix. They hold him in The World in a new Root Town that was under construction, Kappa Server, which was to be an arena root town built in a dormant volcano crater. On their way out The Anaconda gets information from the CC2 zone about another trailer, which called this zombie Kite "Tri-Edge", but getting little more info. He speaks with Morganna when he gets back, who says she had seen that one sneaking around for a while, and the player Kite had quit the game some time ago. She suspects the Kite was built by the Architect. Joe Monkey ends up having a final battle with Bob Gorilla, and finally defeats him for good.
Tags: ties_to_infinity
Finite Infinity - destiNATION
I had a number of supplemental topics building up to the next chapter, which focuses on destiNATION, so I'll cover this concept before detailing the next chapter of the story. I had built destiNATION as an alternative network to the Matrix. One underlying thing that was going on through this story is what ends up escalating to a Machine Civil War, with several of the programs not happy with the policies of the Matrix administration. They ended up creating an alternate network as a haven for those that would not become part of the Process, a network which, while designed to be interactive between the two, caused the Matrix administrators to constantly rotate login policies so people couldn't go from destiNATION to the Matrix or vice versa.
This other network works a lot like the way The World works, with a gate system in a central hub leading to other, smaller areas. It is a distributed network, much as the way I have structured the Matrix, but whereas the Matrix is seamless between servers, each server or cluster in destiNATION is isolated and operates independently. The actual root hub I made for it is based on a misinterpretation of the Otherland novels, by a program called Harvester. There's other locations as well in destiNATION built with this utility.
Harvester is a program I intended on referencing numerous times, I might have already referenced it already in the story but I don't recall. The Harvester program was written as a tool to assist in building the Matrix, by processing all the human's information from the internet before the Second Reniassance and process it into a usable, world-building format. The program was used for the initial building of the Matrix, for minor things since then, then again in a major use for processing all the .hack media to build The World section of the Matrix. The destiNATION founders have a pirate copy of Harvester, as the program is tightly controlled by the Matrix administration.
Tags: novels ties_to_infinity
Finite Infinity - Last-Minute Additions
I had a title for each of the chapters that would be in this story, but I can't remember the one for the next one at this point. It wasn't even originally going to be it's own chapter, except that there ended up being too much to do between this chapter and the next one after that that it would have made one way too massive chapter.
After Morganna made off in Reone's body, The Anaconda was going to then get everyone together to reveal what his new memories had contained, certain key memories that he had lost after being defeated at the end of chapter 1. This information revealed that he had originally lived before the Second Reniassance, and for some reason was put into cryogenic stasis and copied into a Persocom. He didn't have any of the memories as to why this was, however. He also revealed informationt that The World as they know it was an expansion to the Matrix due to space problems, based on the actual .hack series which had existed in the previous iteration in the form that we know it, including brief flashes of .hack//GU, as the previous iteration had reset just 3 days after the E3 where the initial trailer aired. They decide at this point the best plan would be to use the data gathered by the black box program to form a body for Morganna as well, since she is formless currently.
In the mean time, Fidchell had joined up with Morganna, who was going around and causing mostly mischief while loosely cooperating with Bob Gorilla. At this point all of the Phases have had the Drain Lock upgrade applied to them, which has had the additional effect of giving them all human forms. 5 of the forms have taken on their GU look, Skeith (who dresses like a Wavemaster rather than Haseo's Adept Rogue looks), Innis (who also can turn herself into other forms), Magus, Fidhell (who dresses more like Wiseman then Yata when he's not dressed as Organization XIII), and Corbenik. The remaining three got other forms, Gorre's modeled after the twins, Macha (being still Mia at this point) transformed into much more human, but having an outfit similar to Endrance's, and Tarvos being Jum Bansyoya.
The rest of this I pretty much left open. Aura realizes early on, from the spirit weapon The Anaconda is now using, that she in fact never had met Orion and it was The Anaconda that she thought was Orion, so now the trail trying to find Orion had gone cold. They go to find Albiero, who had left the Matrix with Hokuto, trying to find the location of the black box, while in the mean time Corbenik, since there were no details in the E3 video as to what was actually inside the locked compartment on Ovan's arm, Corbeniks is instead a giant MaGun, which he uses to summon The One Sin in the middle of the city. Corbenik is acting on someone elses accord, not on Bob Gorilla's side. The Anaconda gets his Oni Form at one point in the story, and they work at gathering unique cores and breaking the Drain Lock encryption. After they do that, with the assistance of the Agents, they trap Morganna and drain her out of Reone, then force her into her new body. She finds that satisfactory and gives up, while in the mean time Bob Gorilla forces open the barrier and escapes into destiNATION.
Tags: ties_to_infinity
XML Aversion
I don't really like XML. But not because of any dislike of the formatting itself or the purpose or anything, it's at a different level, just a general unnerve with the the language. I don't know if I can really explain it, I just am so accustom to the rigid setting of HTML, where everything has an exact purpose and meaning, that the openness of XML is just rather disconcerting. It's like sitting down and speaking, but you can't be sure that the words you use will mean the same thing to someone else. I could say duck, and someone would think it was soap, and someone else would think I meant lightbulb.
Plus it's freaking hard to parse.
Tags: programming
Finite Infinity - Triad Rule
Apparently font kerning and leading differences exist between WordPerfect and OpenOffice, because I remember these documents having more pages in the past. I noticed the same thing with Skewed as well when I switched over to OpenOffice, I suddenly had a lot less pages then I did before.
Anyway, setting that aside. In the process of planning out where I wanted to go with Ties to Infinity, I wrote various story fragments to plan out certain things. This was all written in prose, rather then the script format the topic follows, because it allowed me to keep track of descriptions easier. I had two documents, one for the present time of the story itself, and a second for the past. As I was going to introduce at the beginning of the next chapter, as The Anaconda began recovering his memories, he remembered a lot more that was hidden from him before. These older memories were from the past, before the Second Renaissance, where he had originally come from. This second document makes up that, a bridging storyline between the ending of the Chobits series and the war of the Second Reniassance, where the Matrix picked up. I also have some other documents sitting around, one containing a summary of an event that happens in the last chapter, and another one with details on a console interface I invented to be used in the story called TMI (standing for "The Matrix Interface"), based on a random conversation Joe Monkey and I had over MSN Messenger one time.
I've noticed, as I've planned out this story and another work of fanfiction that I planned out in StoryLines but will probably never get around to writing, that my thought process doesn't really start moving until I have three elements. In the case of this story, the three key elements are the Matrix series, the Chobits storyline, and the .hack games. In the topic, most everything happening was more or less random until .hack was introduced into it, and elements quickly built up to an end for the first chapter and a true beginning of the storyline. In the case of this other storyline, the three elements I worked with are the Bleach series, the Haibane Renmei storyline, and the Rozen Maiden series, managing to tie the three together rather well, which started as two separate empty-ended thought processes, one exploring the puzzle of the city of Grie in Haibane Renmei, and the other exploring more into the Meiryouken zanpakuto I had made for Skewed. Once I introduced the Rozen Maiden into the thought process, and tied the three together additionally with Pink Floyd's The Wall album, which just fit naturally, I ended up with a story with a total of 50 cards in StoryLines. A far cry from Skewed, which currently sits at 102, with probably a lot more cards which would exist for the story up to when I started it, and currently 15 unplaced cards with a lot more storyline still to lay out, but that "short" story does cover a lot of complex story.
Three things coming together, or making up the whole. This Triad Rule, as I will call it, applies to my other works as well. It plays prominently in the Spiral Island Trilogy, with, not to mention the fact that there are three games in the series, the 3 iterations of the game I had originally, as I have detailed on here before. Also, as the story will unfold, there will be other things revealed that will fit into it. It also figures into another game which has figured prominently into my planning of another storyline, listed on the AnacondaSoftware website as "13th Light". In fact it even applies to my ability to think, after I had brought on Joe Monkey as an Administrator to AnacondaSoftware, so it was me, The Fish King, and Joe Monkey, I had a flood of ideas just roll in, where as before I just had the Spiral Island Trilogy, and Shadows of a Faded Past. As of right now I have 18 game titles listed in my development wiki, spanning four storylines, several more I don't have entered in yet, and a fifth storyline I am working on in my head but don't have any games planned for it currently.
Tags: anecdote spiral_island ties_to_infinity writing