Favourite Original 'Verse

[yvannairie]

questionoftheday asks: Do you have any original fictional worlds that you are fond of, be it tabletop gaming or just fiction writing? This is your chance to gush about it.

My answer: Fusionverse

So, I have... five-ish, fairly well-developed original stories, and I like them all, but Fusionverse is the one that struck me and keeps striking as a setting, free from the plot-character stuff that goes on in it.

The set-up is that there's a pocket dimension, that runs parallel to our dimension, that is accessed through a special gear that mirrors its users consciousness into it, in which force of will can be used to "alter" the environment and the perceived bodies of the people accessing the mirrorverse. As a result, the people accessing it will appear as the most literal version of themselves, and an extensive synchronisation process (as well as good self-knowledge) is necessary to even appear in a cohesive enough shape to exert influence on the mirrorverse.

Another quirk of the mirrorverse is that two people hooked up on parallel mirror gear systems can have their synchronisation processes interleaved, and essentially fuse into a single existence inside the mirrorverse. This exponentially increases the influence they wield, but it's a difficult, mentally taxing process that ever properly works for people whose self-images and images of each other are suitably similar.

The alteration effects usually remain within the mirrorverse, and are usually achievable only within the visual range of the operator, and become exponentially more tiring to achieve the further away and the larger the scale. However, sufficiently strong-willed people can extend the alteration out into the real world on a minute scale -- unlocking doors by messing with the mechanism, disrupting electronics or constricting the arteries inside someone's brain to give them a stroke being popular criminal applications -- so there's an ongoing effort to police the usage and ownership of mirroring gear.

The whole aesthetic of Fusionverse is very... trippy. Character avatars range from angelic to living body horror, the dimensions of mirrorverse are regularly fucked with (rapid movement is done by folding the space up, and then moving across it, which means near-light speed movement is a thing that happens) because while it's possible to simply will things into existence, it's less tiring and promotes better synchronisation to warp the things that are already there. Another thing characters often do is sprout weapons out of their bodies, because body alterations are the easiest to start with and maintain.

I also like it for the thematic potential. You are your "self" in the mirrorverse, which lends itself into themes of identity and how it affects your environment and relationships. 3/5ths of the cast are not cis, and a couple of them are disabled, which has drastic effects on how they appear and how they fight, and synchronisation is a very blunt metaphor for relationships. (Suck it, Steven Universe, I did it first.)

Fusionverse is also the story with the most behind-the-scenes scheming, secrecy and conspiracy stuff and while I'm more lukewarm on Big Government Conspiracy stuff now, it's my go-to original 'verse with an enforced Masquerade. Sneaky activities are fun to write about, what can I say.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

This is fascinating, and I'm glad and grateful you told us about it!

[yvannairie]

Thank you! :D