Electric Jesus

I’m a sucker for lame daytime talk-shows, especially like Dr Phil and Steve Wilkos. Also police interrogation tapes. I think I’m just fascinated by the psychology of liars. There’s a youtube channel called Jim Can’t Swim, all about breaking down police interrogations and stuff. His Patreon also contains the more graphic stories that youtube removed. Very binge-worthy.

HE COMETH

*laughs in russian*

Come to think of it, you’re right, the ancient art depicting the story of Nan Sapwe does appear to show him deliberately “removing” his head and giving it to these people as a gift. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that he committed suicide in order to give humanity an inanimate weapon. One possibility is that it’s something along the lines of like, the Floo network from Harry Potter. For those who don’t know, in Harry potter, you can travel / communicate with other wizards by basically opening a portal in your fireplace and jumping through, popping out in someone else’s. It’s explained that every fireplace in the wizard world is connected to one another, kinda analogous to land-line phones. Anyway, if you don’t feel like fully travelling through the network to someone else’s place but just want to deliver a message, you can just get on your hands and knees and stick your head in the fire, and then just your head will appear floating in their fireplace on the other end, and you can talk to them and whatnot. Anyway, Nan Sapwe might be on his knees in some dimension with just his head protruding thru into our realm, so he can look out for us with his stanky breath. (Maybe not literally on his knees, but you get the idea.) Like how we’ve never ever seen the body / legs of the cerberus / hellhounds from Mob of the dead, because we’re only privy to like, a cross-section of the head sticking thru the portal. might be the same deal with Nan Sapwe but just less visually obvious. Also, in Harry potter they describe that when you’re like mid-teleportation from one fireplace to another, you’re like zooming through this realm that’s a network of brick tunnels. That’s certainly kinda wormhole - aether - interstellar - y, but with more of a fantasy kinda aesthetic.

Let’s also not forget the spooky Cthulhu-esque skulls in Nero’s room in Shadows of Evil. We can assume those are the skulls of humanoid apothicons, like the shadowman’s squiddy form. So here’s my theory regarding the origin of the keepers. Monty explicitly says on revelations, in reference to the keepers: “...while the rest of mankind was squabbling around in the dirt, drinking their own piss, the keepers...” This makes it seem like the keepers are a subset of “mankind.” But that seems to come in conflict with the Timeline, which opens with the line “In the beginning, there was only the Aether and the Keepers.” Not to mention, there are some, uh, differences between human and keeper physiology. So, I’ve kinda had this thought in the back of my mind that the Keepers were originally normal humans, confined to whatever their original timeline was, but once they figured out how to ascend into keeperhood, they managed to literally “escape” their timeline into hyperspace. So like, each timeline / universe is its own film reel, with souls stuck on them like flies on fly paper, and the Keepers are just the ones who managed to detach themselves and learn to move freely in 4D hyperspace. So, the keepers were there “in the beginning” in the sense that they exist outside of time, with all the timelines laid out before them, where they can just re-insert themselves to any film reel at a time and location of their choosing. Like, a fly stuck on fly paper can only walk forward in one direction, but a free fly can zoom in 3d loop-de-loops around the paper itself. The same way that currently we can only move “forward” through time, the concept of “moving sideways through time” doesnt even make sense to a human, because we ourselves are the flies stuck on the fly paper. A keeper, however, has free movement through 4+ dimensions in space time. Mkay, so let’s roll with that for the time being; there was originally a group of humans that called themselves the Order of the Keepers. They messed with 115, or the Aether, to the extent that they were able to free themselves from the confines of their original timeline, transforming physically due to their exposure to the aether. Effectively, I think the keepers were “the first humans to discover / perfect teleportation.” And they did so at Shangri-La. The temple of Shangri-la is, quite literally, a giant teleporter / time machine. Like the entirety of the temple is a beta-version of Richtofen’s MTD. In the same way that the computers of today were once the size of a room before we improved upon the technology. We hear brock and gary talking about how the temple must contain “the gateway to agartha.” But I think they’re just under the false impression that agartha is a physical location at the center of the earth. The same way that people often conceptualize “hell” as being at the center of the earth. Shang is “the gateway to agartha” in that it is where the knowledge of how to access the aether was first acquired. So Shangri-la is like the ground-zero of humanity’s contact with the aether. Now specifically I’ve gotta mention Indiana Jones at this point, since it’s mingled with the history of Call of Duty. Most notably, Nuketown was explicitly inspired by Vonderhaar’s viewing of Indiana Jones 4. Anyway, in that movie (which also heavily inspired shangri-la,) they do call attention to the artificially elongated skulls that the natives possess, in contrast to the even more bizarre-looking “crystal skulls.” The explanation for this in the film is that the crystal skulls were left behind by “interdimensional beings” that frequently get mistaken for “spacemen.” And subsequently, some of the natives bound their own skulls to imitate the “gods” that they witnessed. Now that’s pretty similar to the mythos of Nan Sapwe. But since we’re talking about Shang, and I’m contending that the keepers were originally human, I think it’s entirely possible we’re looking at the sort of gradual evolution from human to keeper over time, like the spectrum of skulls from homo erectus to homo sapiens, for instance. We’re seeing the elongation of the skull as humans got rapidly more intelligent, and as they gained psychic powers the eyes were phased out, etc. One important point is made at the end of indiana jones 4. They go in expecting to find a physical temple of gold, but instead find that the real “treasure” was the near limitless knowledge the crystal skull beings had. “Knowledge was their treasure.” In the same way that brock and gary might have expected to find a physical “gateway” to agartha, really shang is where the information on how to teleport / interact with the aether was first acquired by man. So basically, my overall “thesis” of how I think things went down is this: Somewhere in the Andes, the first ever humans figured out how to interact with the aether by just arranging astronomical temples in various ways around 115 deposits. They continued experimenting with time and space in really rudimentary ways, til they mastered interdimensional travel, mutating as they did so. So now they are effectively unshackled by time, and can sort of chill outside of time in hyperspace looking down on all the various timelines. Like, lemme ask you a question for the road. Just conceptually. Imagine you’re samantha, trying to kill Ultimis at Der Riese by sending all of the zombies after them. They then hop into a teleporter and go forward in time to 1960s kino. So, from sam’s perspective back in 1945, they just.... vanish. Enter a teleporter, and don’t come out anywhere else on earth. So she waits. And waits. And waits 20 years, until they re-emerge, the same age, in kino. So like, during that whole 20 years, from sam’s perspective, where were ultimis “located?” The answer is, literally, nowhere in her universe. Hyperspace. The Aether.

feelin cute might blow up earth l8r. ’bout 90% done here folks. Dont mind my poorly hidden long hair.

That little revive tag is just a piece of cardboard I cut out and hand-painted, with precision the likes of which has never before been seen on this earth. Just a ruler and eye-balling proportions. i’m kinda proud of that. I’ll post the full get-up when i’m off work. The final piece should be arriving in the mail by the time i’m home. It’s the leather pouch that hangs on Ultimis Doc’s Belt.

Prepare

Kino all the way. My honorable mention, aka the actual best map, is Der Eisendrache. Will elaborate further.

I kinda feel like arguing a case for Kino. Der Riese gave us PaP, and with that it gave us the first PaP quest. So, in most zombies maps, accessing Pack a Punch done in one of two ways. Either you perform a series of steps that permanently unlock a new Pack area (ascension, shadows, origins) or you have to perform the same mini-ritual to re-access pack for a limited time each use (kino, moon, five). Der Riese represents the former, as you open up the whole map and teleport, then PaP is open for good. On kino though, teleporting is free, but you can only access Pack for 30 seconds at a time. So, you can definitely prefer one of these over the other, and I can see the arguments for both. The polar extremes would probably be Shadows on one end, where you’ve got to endure a lot of scavenging and rituals to get to Pack but then it’s left open permanently, and on the other end maybe Buried, where you have to perform the same small-ish ritual each time you wanna pack. (Running through ghost-house.) as a general matter, the style where it remains open permanently is probably way more convenient, particularly for high-round players, because in a long long game, that relatively lengthy PaP ritual isn’t as large of a percentage of your time spent playing. Alternately, if a new player hops on shadows, grinds out PaP rituals, and then only survives to round 15, they spent a larger total percentage of their playtime “getting set up,” So they might have a more sour opinion of the map overall. I think I prefer this style of PaP way more than the temporary-access way as a general rule though. HOWEVER, I gotta say, the teleporter / projection room on kino is one of the most iconic experiences. No other map has such a distinct “heart of the map” to me. So so so many rounds were started off with the entire squad stacked in the teleporter getting ready to go. It sorta invariably forced teamwork and coordination. Throwing grenades from the projector room is awesome. In effect, it’s the only map I can think of where Pack a Punching your gun is literally fun every time you do it. I think Kino has the perfect Pack mechanics, keeping you engaged and not taking PaP for granted, but still with easy / “peaceful” access when you need it. Also Kino has the Thundergun.

Moon. Kino > Der Riese; Change my Mind.

Good ideas. I’ll post a pic of the full get-up around 5pm est, so uh, 8 hours from the time of this post. Edit: OOF i still have some fake blood mixed up, i should get a teddy bear.