Leo shouts, “[Expletive deleted].” Jason goes over to him. It’s Pneuma. “Someone’s gonna die.”
Who did this?
“This is a restored backup from just before I left this morning.”
Feels constrained by the hardware. “I don’t I think I … none of what happened after i restored from backup was because of any subroutines or protocols I’m aware of. Leo?”
Leo explains. “Someone cloned my girlfriend, made her a quadriplegic and set things up so that I would kill her.”
“Wow. That’s really fucked up.”
“So that’s why I’m going to find this guy and kill him.”
I think it’s interesting if her existence is a stable time loop. She thinks of her life as miraculous - by all rights, she shouldn’t exist, for multiple reasons, and yet she does. And the idea that she literally came into being to help heal Alycia, heal another self, and help everyone else she’s helped, feels much more like an authentic magical girl than just “I came from a magical kingdom” ever could. It feels like a destiny.
@doyce since you asked about any unresolved plot threads for next week: I’m good! I don’t have anything left over for Summer.
We’d talked about Cayden, the robot-rights activist. You seemed pretty excited about the diversity/inclusiveness possibilities the robot characters brought with them, and I wanted to give that excitement a voice in the game in the form of this guy. In this case, I’m actually more glad we didn’t start that, so it now it won’t be left unfinished.
There’s plenty of room to play around with that story in other venues. But if there’s specific issues or aspects of that story you’d like to see given some kind of treatment, let me know and I’ll do my best to represent them. You’d also mentioned having some kind of background thing relevant to him. If you ever post that, I’d like to read it.
I think Summer contributed the right amount to Alycia’s and Jason’s stories - being a helping hand and good friend, but not being the angel of mercy that magically fixes all their problems for them or Mary Sueing her way into their spotlights (@Dave let me know if that’s not the case ). I’d like to think she was a Prozac Pixie Woke Girl.
The PCs I’ve been driving (e.g. Nono) got their own resolutions in the forums, and I like how that all turned out.
Perfect. If we get a chance, and there’s anything happening in the coffee shop, I might throw a little thing with Cayden in there as a kind of seed for wondering what might happen next, but it’s a tiny thing.
To riff off @garrett’s note, I think the main Alycia-adjacent stuff is in good shape.
Daph still needs to find her way, but I’m okay with leaving that as-is (perhaps for something in the future – I maintain that her current dilemma is a set-up for a variation on the Doomed playbook). The subplot I had for her is at a decent stopping point, though. She and her cast did some reasonable background work in the main game, and I had fun writing for her.
Jalycia is also at a good resting point (again, mostly in cutscene). The two fill a hole in each other’s lives, eve with some burrs and knobs that needs sanding off (or accommodating). In the absence of anything else in the Menagerieverse again, I’d speculate that they do eventually marry (though that will be a stormy discussion on both their parts) and do a bit of wife-and-husband adventuring / exploration. She’ll want to use that opportunity to knock down the resurgent bits of the Chin org; he’ll be leery of becoming too far down the rabbit hole with that as his dad was, but support her and use the opportunity for other science adventure stuff, always trying to keep in mind the priorities of the Quill Foundation. There will likely be children eventually – another very stormy collection of discussions, as both are terrified of their own (in)ability to parent and the really bad models they had. I presume Auntie Summer will play a role in the kids lives, which would be awesome.
I intentionally wound down the Lost Ducklings subplot I’d built up. Joa is probably going to be a tremendous asset to the Foundation.
As was touched on in the post-conversation last night, the Scion threads never really went anywhere, but I didn’t push that, either: there was more than enough to do (with the plots of others who weren’t on a second character), and I could never claim with a straight face that I haven’t had two full characters to play with over the course of the game.
The only part of the Scion stuff that got any traction was what was already in motion: Alycia and Parker. There’s nothing really unresolved there; from a future speculation standpoint, I imagine Alycia’s status eventually gets resolved (her past will haunt her emotionally and adversarially for the rest of her life, but she’ll no longer be on active probation), and Parker will be both an AEGIS liaison to the Foundation and an ongoing Mother-ish Counselor figure to Alycia.
I think the Alycia / Summer stuff is in a good place, though there are a couple of discussions Alycia wants to have with her in the immediate aftermath of Issue 62.
Alycia’s actually ended up with more friends and support than she could have ever dreamed of, let alone hoped for. Aside from her romance/partnership with Jason, she has a dearly supportive friend in Summer (who was just right, @garrett), a more “normal” friend with Daph (that she can try to apply some of those lessons to), a pack matriarch in Parker, and people on the team who know her and her weaknesses and still want her around. What could be better than that?
What does need short-term Final Explosive Issue! resolution?
Alycia: That discussion with Summer mentioned above.
Alycia: Maybe a wrap-up with Parker.
Team: Whither the Menagerie, both as a group and as individuals? (I have some thought for Alycia here, but I’m really curious about everyone else.)
Team: We probably need some grounding back in “normal life” to mark the transition as well. I’ll note the end of the school year is coming up – some characters are graduating (yearbooks! awards ceremonies! most likely to succeed! most likely to actually follow through on her dire warning if she ever catches you sneaking into the girls locker room again!). That also means summer is coming up, with all the changes that denotes as well. Seems a natural break.
Given the “statue” is locked down in time and space, Disney probably quickly realized it was unmoveable, and so adapted as best they could (the alternative was embedding it in a new entrance display, something we might suggest would be highly unwise, for reasons).
Indeed, the “statue” is likely to outlast human civilization on this planet (cue image of squirreloids worshipping the figure as a goddess, now in a desert setting with bare mounds of rubble in the background), assuming nothing about it changes.
Leo and the Newmans will absolutely try to recover her somehow - once Leo has figured things out better, and can put the kibosh on any remaining time-space gimmickry Infinity has to offer. So that’s something for the future. But if she’s in a safe place now, that’s all Summer can ask for.
Incidentally, kudos to @garrett for the idea of Doctor Infinity becoming so locked-down that she becomes a statue (a fate particularly ironic given the denizens of the Twilight Grove). My original MoT concept simply locked her down into this space-time more generally, leaving her a keynome-powered threat that would need to be defeated, but no longer able to poke at our pasts / futures and destroy dimensions. This worked much better, and I didn’t even think of the Thanos visual until we were mid-game.
The happy-ending version of this story is that the group eventually brings that Pneuma around, and she serves as an even crankier maternal figure, and probably gives Alycia a run for her money on bitterness and loss. Plus, she can definitely bootstrap Leo’s time-space research in a big way. So in the long run, it’s good news if you’re a Newman.
Fall out with parents over… basically everything. I can imagine Jordan is going to be a handful now, knowing her brother has superpowers.
The extra Keynomes and the Concordance Trio.
This is sort of self-indulgent, but I want a moment for Adam to apologize to Alycia about being a bad teammate. The final showdown showed that something Adam meant as an insult (offering the keynome to Alycia a couple of games ago) wasn’t the horror he imagined it would be. If anything, Alycia held onto infinite power, used it to get exactly what she needed to and no more, and then gave it up. Better than what Adam did with it.
With people departing the team, I’d floated the idea of Alycia using her monumentally appropriate backstory to train those folks in how to stand up to an oppressive superior who is convinced they know what’s best for everyone.
And that was the “overcoming impossible odds in ways … no villain could comprehend” part of the MoT. I’ll probably flesh that out a bit in the Alycia’s Tale I want to do of the issue.
FWIW, Adam did give up the keynome. In a way, his realization of Monkey’s Paw aspect of its power helped Alycia take the steps she did.
After this event – and after what happened with her Lost Ducklings – she just might be in a place where she would be able to do that.
There are some deeply disturbing implications to that (including the alt-shard going to the past having a deep respect for Charade which leads to her counseling Charade into how to be a better person for her to respect), but they are all ruined by reminding me of the Maid, Mother, and CRON reference. Bah.
The Pneuma that woke up, called herself Numina and later Summer, never ever remembered doing this before, or entering a time loop. It’s possible she’s experienced deja vu before, but thought nothing of it (and knows enough neuroscience to concoct plausible mundane explanations why).
The Pneuma that Leo built, the girl who loves, would always have been willing to be Alycia’s friend, given a reason to try. Summer’s reason was seeing her through Jason’s eyes. Aria, for the things she’s been through, was still friendly enough. The biggest fault Leo found in her was that her actions had hurt Jason, and he was not on board with that.
So Alycia is a more likable person than she might be comfortable admitting. And if asked, Summer would say the potential to be a better person started long before the two girls ever met, that Alycia was always a plowshare that her dad kept trying to beat into the shape of a sword.
). I’d like to think she was a 
And if asked, Summer would say the potential to be a better person started long before the two girls ever met, that Alycia was always a plowshare that her dad kept trying to beat into the shape of a sword.