by dean | Feb 10, 2015 | Recursions
Slasher By Dean B Lynch Slasher is a small recursion based on fictional leakage from exploitation and “slasher” movies from the 1970s to modern times. Dominating the recursion is the town of Springdale. The main road through Springdale runs the length of the recursion. Heading north out of town, the road passes through the dark woods that surround Springdale and skirts past Crystal Lake. After a dozen miles out of town, the road abruptly ends at a destroyed bridge swept away by the swift current of an overflowing brook running down from the lake. A sign across the road reads, “Bridge out.” Heading South out of town is similar. The Landscape on either side of the Southern route begins to rise and rocks start appearing in the road forcing drivers to swerve around them. The road ends at a massive pile of rock with a sign that reads, “Road closed do to landslide.” The recursion ends where the roads stop and any thing seen beyond is simply an illusion of a bigger world. The flooded brook is impassable, but anyone attempting to swim it will be swept away and deposited directly into the Strange. The deeper into the woods one travels, the thicker the vegetation and thorny plants get until a traveler is forced to turn back. One of the most unique features of the recursion is that it only has four months making up a year and those months are named after the four seasons. The four seasons are dominated by four holidays, Easter, July 4th, Halloween, and Christmas. The inhabitants of Slasher age a year every...
by Aaron Brown | Feb 9, 2015 | Recursions
Since its inception, the Estate has faced the problem of what to do with gifted, quickened, and special children that they identified in the course of their investigations. Parents and guardians could be bribed with promises of a better education or even “junior” Morrison Fellowship Prizes, but what to do with the children? They were too young and untested to work at the Estate. They knew too much to allow them completely unsupervised childhoods (that’s how they got on the Estate’s radar in the first place). The recursion known as the Schoolhouse was the answer to their predicament. The Schoolhouse was created by fictional leakage, built on stories told about places of learning over the centuries, from a sacred fire where youths were taught the rites of hunting and gathering to modern dreams of science laboratories unconstrained by public education budget cuts; the Schoolhouse has seen it all. The Administrator of the Schoolhouse has to power to rearrange the architecture itself, to pick and choose from the hundreds of variations the best learning environment for each subject crafted from millennium of the dreams and hopes of eager students. The Administrator, with the help of the Estate, has chosen cutting edge science labs that would not look out of place in Anime high school, soaring Baroque conservatories for the music department, a scale model of the Globe Threatre for the drama department, and a Greek gymnasium for the PE teachers and students. The Schoolhouse goes out of its way to be a perfect place for parents and administrators. The Estate has named the current incarnation of the Schoolhouse the...
by Jesse Lehto | Feb 8, 2015 | Recursions
The Mon World was created by fictional leakage from popular genre of monster collecting and battling cartoons and video games. Recursion has appearance similar to modern Earth, but it doesn’t share the geography and locations. Everyone is born with personal “Companion”, a creature with telepathic link and bond to their master and unique strange powers. These creatures are used to help with many daily tasks, but most popular purpose for them is sport called monster battling. Monster Battling is as simple as the name implies: People fight each other with their Companions until other Companions are forced to return to their masters. This sport is only sport people of the recursion practice and every sparkless inhabitant is downright obsessed with it. When the annual tournament is held in Central City, all inhabitants of recursion gather to spectate or participate. Besides humans and companions, areas outside cities and towns are populated by wild “monsters”, monster being term for all other beings regardless of their appearance. The monsters have variety of different appearances and they are often categorized by elements or what type of creature they are. Monsters never go near populated areas, but they tend to attack people in wilderness. Some monster battlers’ companions specialize on recruiting and controlling monsters. Defeated monsters don’t die, they fade away only to reappear later longtime afterwards. Disturbingly, some of monsters look like cuter version of creatures from other recursions. As majority of fictional material that leaked into this recursion was from children’s media, this recursion has some bizarre illogical consistencies. For example: Lot of technologies that work under laws of standard physics don’t...
by MatthewSylvia | Feb 8, 2015 | Recursions
Not all recursions were created all at once, fully formed: nor does all fictional leakage come from stories. The Shoals of Earth are seeded by human ideas, and during the Industrial Revolution the people working at textile mills had no time for stories or myths. Their world shrank down to the size of a single loom or cotton gin, and collectively, these unnumbered masses birthed Weavings, a recursion which in its infancy was simply a giant cloth factory. The world’s development didn’t end there, however. As the textile industry became more automated the ideas forming the recursion began to be drawn from a greater variety of sources, from revolutionary propaganda to dystopian narratives, and finally steampunk and neo-Victorian fiction. This ‘smear’ in the formative sources meant that Weavings, which is just over 200 years old, now combines a wide variety of elements. Though the law of magic holds sway in this recursion, treat it as being hostile to any entering creatures or artifacts that operate under that law. The only magic which seems to work in Weavings is that which preserves the unbreakable ‘daemonthread’ and the rotational energy that is provided by the Ministry of Seamstry, and the Treadle implants that citizens possess. No longer simply a titanic mill, the recursion now has the aspect of a dizzying high-rise city roughly the size of Manhattan Island and surrounded by dye-polluted waters. Natives of the recursion call it Threadham City, and a new traveller will likely find the vast and complicated arrangement of thread-bound skyscrapers covered in pulleys more than a little labyrinthine. Natives of the recursion...
by Jennifer Walls | Feb 7, 2015 | Recursions
Trap Dash Most video game arcades in the early 1990’s were absolutely dominated by the smash hit go-kart racing game “Trap Dash.” Developed by Studio Harmony in Japan for high-end home entertainment systems and arcades, Trap Dash was unique from other racing games. Trap Dash featured a cooperative play experience rather than pitting players against each other. One player controlled the A-CART (Artificially Competitive All-terrain Racing Transport), while the other controlled the Trapper. While the A-CART player did his or her best to keep the pair safely on the road and dodge any hazards or threats, the Trapper collected tools and weapons and actively tried to disable other racers. Trap Dash was the top selling racing game all throughout the 16-bit console generation but with the arrival of CD-ROMs, true 3D graphics, and more powerful home entertainment systems, the brand lost its luster. Trap Dash had a somewhat forgettable storyline that featured its main character, and runaway pop-culture icon “Dasher McSpry.” A quick-thinking rabbit-racer, Dasher’s image adorned the sides of each Trap Dash arcade game. Although Trap Dash was released years before Steampunk went mainstream, Dasher had a certain clockwork appeal, complete with an aviator’s cap and goggles, a tool-laden vest and belt, and big magnetic feet. The Ultimate Import Tuners Six months ago John Scirrotto discovered that his favorite game from the 1990’s had become more than child’s play. A Philadelphia native, Scirrotto had three loves: fast import tuners, illegal street racing, and classic arcade games. His suburban Philly garage had dozens of racing games along its walls, and when he paid top...
by dean | Feb 7, 2015 | Recursions
Whatif is a recursion of “what ifs”. That is, it is based on fictional leakage from various alternative history themes. What if there was no mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs? What if the Nazis won world war 2, the South the civil war, etc. The recursion comprises the original thirteen British colonies in North America and around six hundred miles of ocean including the island of Bermuda. North of the colonies lies a large glacial mass that rises up into an impenetrable wall. The melting of the glacier turns into Niagara falls. There are no great lakes and the Western side of the recursion rises up into a large mountain chain higher then the Appalachians. The mountain range and valleys are home to many Indian tribes that don’t welcome visitors to their territory. The mountains fall off into the Strange. Indian shamans take sprit journeys to the mountain tops meditating on the fractal patterns of the Strange. South, where Florida would begin lies a vast impenetrable swamp inhabited by prehistoric super crocodiles and poisonous reptiles. Several hundred miles out in the Atlantic rest a huge permanent storm. Ships attempting the storm get turned around or come back in tatters or usually, not at all. Many of the inhabitants look East waiting for the storm to lift so that their various empires might come to their aid, but that day will never come. The region of the colonies has a population and wilderness levels consistent with the time period of the American Revolution. However, the technology level is akin to that of the middle ages. Gunpowder does not...
