Observer Effect page one – an executive summary of Among The Chosen. It’s a Giant Wall Of Text, it’s Damned Near All The Really Important Backstory, and it’s the first time in nearly ten years and over five hundred pages that a few of the points that Greymalkin makes have been stated clearly. If at all.

The fact that he makes these points with crayons speaks to his personality, and his opinion of the WGP.

Observer Effect is intended as a ten page introduction to the work as a whole, starting with important conceptual and character histories that are not meaningfully addressed in Dead City Radio or The Dualist – concepts that ATC is built on, and events that are referenced or inferred in the books. As intended, OE should decompress into a lead-in to Dead City Radio, which is why it uses DCR production codes. OE shouldn’t screw with story continuity at all – you don’t need OE to read the story… but if I’m doing this right, it should ultimately give you a really good idea of what you’re getting into. Right now it kinda smacks you upside the head like a Plot Tuna. That’s intentional, and I promise you that the smell will wash off in the shower.

Observer Effect – this page in particular – was inspired in part by Sam and Fuzzy‘s new reader page. The rest of the inspiration came from the fact that according to analytics data, the About page is one of the more frequently clicked links on the site. I’ve never been totally happy with that section, and I’m hoping that “New Reader?” takes its place in terms of traffic. After years of working on this thing out of sequence, the story is now firm enough that I can throw down an appropriate (and appropriately brief) starting point without the fear that I’ll be revising it again in five or six years. More importantly, I can do it as a comic. Which moves this firmly away from “support material” and into the oncoming headlights of “narrative.”

The script for this page hit me like a ton of bricks while I was out for a walk a couple of weeks ago – I wrote it down as soon as I got home and while what I intend to do with the rest of OE is still in a bit of flux, most of the script for this page is straight out of my notebook. Though I’ll admit, Greymalkin looked a bit more manic in the thumbnails – a bit like a character in one of Jolly Jack‘s How To Play strips.

Pages created from 2010 onwards are typically accompanied by a combination build log and ramble/rant, capped off by a script page and some comments that may or may not be relevant to the page. The utility and value of this metadata is questionable – as such, I intend to do something a bit different with Observer Effect and, when color work resumes, hopefully with chapter two of Transitional Voices. Namely, I’ll be making an attempt to keep the metadata relevant to the contents of the page, as opposed to the production of the page.

Welcome to ATC!

Cast

  • A former United States Army Ranger, Tantek has been with Thule Garrison since the Waking God Protocols field trials of the mid 1990s. He works well with Raven Lockheart, typically functioning as muscle though...

  • A former Soviet military officer, Greymalkin disappeared in southeast Asia in the spring of 1968. He surfaced in late 1969 as an adviser and fixer for Michael West, succeeding West as head of Thule...

  • A South Jersey punk with a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a Templar-forged Master’s degree for field work, Raven posed as a high school guidance councillor during the early stages of the Waking God...

  • Extra-terrestrial megafauna that spread humanity to the stars approximately 20,000 years ago. Presumed extinct. A highly advanced organism capable of mass abstraction and biomagnetic transfer through Am, it is unknown if the Overseers evolved...

Glossary Articles

  • Aeon

    Known to modern humans as Morgan Bay Observatory Unknown Object 1 (MBO-1), the Aeon is an autonomous starship, tens of thousands of years old and apparently of human origin. The ship was briefly boarded...

  • Bethlehem Medical Centre

    Bethlehem Medical Centre (BMC) is a hospital and detention facility located in the first parallel universe attached to Earth (aka “Earth 2.0”). Were it in this universe, the building would be a short drive...

  • MBO-2

    An object removed from MBO-1 by Aleph Stevens in the early 1960s, MBO-2 is initially assumed to be some sort of flight data recorder. According to Brandon James the enclosure is opaque to conventional...

  • The Waking God Protocols

    The Waking God Protocols (full title The Waking God Protocols : Human History & What You Can Do About It) is a Templar operations manual written by Judas Lang. A loosely structured collection of...

6 thoughts on “Observer Effect -1-

  1. Avatarmspreij, :

    Plot! I understood this! \o/ Maybe I asked earlier (aaages ago if so), is the candy section coming back?

  2. dmhdmh, :

    Mmmm. Plot.

    I may reconstitute “Candy” at some point, either as a blog category or by attaching the art assets in question to the relevant Cast entries. The fact that none of the material has aged very well has kept the subject from active consideration.

  3. Avatarthreberg, :

    Well… THAT explains a lot. Think I had most of that from DCR, but still, a nice summary. I’ve been reading since… ’05? ’06? Can’t remember. At any rate, keep up the awesome work!

  4. dmhdmh, :

    Mission accomplished! Thanks for sticking with it! <3

  5. Avatarwr4ith0, :

    while the making of segments were informative (I am on the ever so slow road to building up a [much softer] SF webcomics myself) I really read them for the plot tidbits. Plot tidbits are awesome.

  6. dmhdmh, :

    In that respect the rest of Observer Effect should be pretty satisfying. :)