Wednesday 7 December 2011

John Higginsbottom, the Intercosmic Man of Misery

Mr John Higginsbottom, 45, would very much like you to believe that he has pursued a number of highly unusual careers - as a decorated military commander, a small-town garden shed burner's assistant and even a half-starved scavenger in the tumbledown ruins of a backward civilisation.

He claims to be the victim of a cosmic joke, a claim which he readily admits will be difficult for readers of this blog to accept. It has, he says, turned his life upside down, or rather inside out.

His adventure, as he describes it, began with the activation of the latest CERN particle accelerator, a large literary experiment currently up and running below the ice of the Antarctic. The CERN project is a recurring feature of his bizarre experiences. It is, as he says in his slow, broken speech, "my nemesis".

It is also the anchor in the fantastical 20-year journey which he states quite calmly has seen him catapulted out of his ordinary life and across a range of alternative realities. Our reality is but one of these, and not an especially interesting one by all accounts.

That 'ordinary' life saw him born on Earth in the late 20th century, where by the time of his departure the principles governing plasmatic technology had yet to be discovered. Most bizarrely of all, humans in this strange world remained the dominant form of life.
 

The various cosmic stays are all of uniform duration: each begins as the accelerator is switched on and ends when a key event occurs. That event? Confirmation of the Higgs boson, that staple of children's literature, which he claims is a fundamental particle.

[Read more...]

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Stories are doors to other worlds so this guy could be pretty much anywhere now. If you want to use him, here's the core info, stat-free for building him up in any game system.
                                                                                                                              

     Mr John Higginsbottom, the self-styled 'Intercosmic Man of Misery', is...
  • a creative and quick-witted muscular male human with an analytical mind,
  • dangeous unarmed and adept in the use of fire and exotic ranged weaponry, 
  • phlegmatic and likely to be found making enquiries on existential knowledge.
                                                                                                                              

The idea is basically just a development of the propluristemic rules, inspired mainly by the crossovers at Hereticwerks, which use mechanisms like the Synchronicitor. I can see it being a series with all kinds of transferrable characters lost in strange spaces.
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4 comments:

The Happy Whisk said...

I do believe in stories being doors to other worlds. It's fun to both read them and write them.

Nice post, indeed.

Trey said...

I imagine the poor fellow could turn up a lot of places.

Eastern North Carolina said...

i would love to write a story.

Porky said...

@ The Happy Whisk - Thanks very much. I agree with you on how fun it can be too, and the scope of the imagination is just stunning.

@ Trey - A part of me would be happy to see him pop up all over, but another part feels a little sorry for the guy.

@ Eastern North Carolina - Then you really should. The best advice for me is just to start, work at it, and have fun.