Behind the scenes of The Immortal Game: story and event

Started by Arcana, December 04, 2012, 02:21:26 AM

Starsman

I'm curious: I saw you reply to Venture in the Skyfall thread asking him to review your story. Did he ever review the story?
For the sake of the community: please stop the cultural "research" in your attempt to put blame on the game's cancelation.

It's sickening to see the community sink that low. It's worse to see the community does not get it.

I'm signing off and taking a break, blindly hope things change.

Arcana

Quote from: Starsman on December 05, 2012, 08:57:03 PM
I'm curious: I saw you reply to Venture in the Skyfall thread asking him to review your story. Did he ever review the story?

As far as I know, not yet.  And for the record, if he does, I specifically asked for a review if he had the time to provide one, and I'm well aware of Venture's general directness and point of view when it comes to reviews.  If he chooses to post that review publicly, I would ask that no one slam him for any negative element of the review he may express.  I believe if you ask for a review, you should accept the fact the reviewer may not like or approve of every single thing you've done.  You can respectfully disagree, but you should not fault a reviewer for having a different opinion.

Starsman

Quote from: Arcana on December 05, 2012, 09:13:04 PMI believe if you ask for a review, you should accept the fact the reviewer may not like or approve of every single thing you've done.  You can respectfully disagree, but you should not fault a reviewer for having a different opinion.

Oh I agree, also I always respected Venture's reviews... then again I may be biased... he gave 4 stars to my only AE arc  :roll:  (that I just found in Google's cache... should back it up before it fades forever!)
For the sake of the community: please stop the cultural "research" in your attempt to put blame on the game's cancelation.

It's sickening to see the community sink that low. It's worse to see the community does not get it.

I'm signing off and taking a break, blindly hope things change.

Arcana

Behind the scenes fun fact #2:

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=farm9.staticflickr.com%2F8486%2F8230617803_da17b33573_z.jpg

I say in the Immortal Game that Primal Hamidon is actually more powerful than Praetorian Hamidon.  But do I have any in-game basis for making that assertion?

In fact, I do.  I wanted to know which one was more powerful: the Avatar of the Hamidon or the Primal Hamidon.  So I spawned a Hamidon and an Avatar and let them slug it out.  The result: in about fifteen to twenty minutes Primal Hamidon slowly whittled down the Avatar and killed it.  The Avatar never seriously threatened Primal Hamidon.  And that's without any defensive mitos.  In fact, Primal Hamidon was able to defeat three Avatars simultaneously attacking from three different directions, although that one was close.

Nobody beats Primal Earth.  Even our Hamidon beats everyone else's Hamidon.

Arcana

Rejected event idea #1:

Hamidon invasion.  In this idea, the Praetorian Hamidon decides after the events of the Magisterium trial to invade Primal Earth.  It takes over the Primal Hamidon and creates a merged entity that declares all-out war on Primal Earth.

One idea I had was to spawn large numbers of DE giant monsters as the shock troops while I flew around as the Seed of the Hamidon, dropping player-piloted Avatars onto the players.  Trying to control your movement while you are the Seed of the Hamidon is like trying to drive an 18-wheeler with your knees while blindfolded.

One thing I tried to do was figure out if it was possible to either revoke the immobilize on Hamidon Mitos or buff them with enough flight magnitude to allow them to move.  If I could have figured out how to do this, you might have seen yellow mitos piloted by players flying around shooting at people.  Turns out this isn't really practical.

I also thought about making plant/nature controllers piloted by players that spawned DE using dev tools, and turning the RWZ into a giant Eden trial.

What eventually killed the idea for me was the combination of the technical challenges and the fact I couldn't figure out how to make this work as an end-of-game event.  How does an invasion of Hamidon cause the world to "end" with server shutdown, whether we win or lose?

Arcana

Rejected event idea #2:

Battalion invasion version one.  In this version, the Battalion were more of an alien military than a cosmic threat.  It was really just an excuse to spawn tons of mechanized attackers from Zeus Titans to Warwalkers to Kronos titans.  Player-pilots would run ultra-buffed robotics masterminds with the ability to spawn additional robot soldiers.

Pros: I get to break the record for most missles fired on a single map at the same time.

Cons: Otherwise boring, story-wise.

It was the combination of wanting a truly cosmic-grade important backstory and not just a shooting-fest, as exemplified by this idea, that prompted me to write "The Immortal Game."  And it was the thought process of the Hamidon invasion from the previous idea that led me to ask and then answer the question: how do we win the war and lose the servers?

Thus these two bad ideas directly lead to my good idea for an end of game story connected to an end of game event that isn't just a thin excuse for a simplified shoot-fest.  All I needed was the right idea and the right event.  The right idea didn't come until almost a week later, and the event concept didn't come together until I was 65% done with the story, when the story seemed to lead directly to an obvious reason for an in-game event.

Interestingly, my thought process started by thinking about what kind of event I wanted, and led me to conclude I should step away from the idea of an event and concentrate on a story first, and let the event take care of itself.  It was only when the story was solid that the notion of what the event should be seemed obvious.

Next time I'll talk a bit about where the title "The Immortal Game" comes from, and its influence on the story.

Arcana

As I've mentioned before, I tend to write by blitzing ideas onto paper and then slowly editing it into something that actually makes sense and isn't completely boring.  I brainstorm as I write, and The Immortal Game evolved rapidly from revision to revision.  One of the landmark things that happened during the process was the selection of the title.  Fans of Chess history (and incessant Google-maniacs) likely know the significance of the title, but perhaps not anyone else.  Its not an arbitrary title.  The story invoked the title, and the title guided the story.

At one point, I had the first two parts written, two more rough drafted, and the outline for the ending done.  I still had no title yet, but I began to get an idea for the themes the story was traversing.  I could see that it was shifting from a group of actors against the Battalion to this hand-off from the Dream Doctor to Silos, and it was Silos that would become the true architect for the story.  I wanted to explore each character that was in the story, and that exploration would, for Silos, inevitably focus on him being the ultimate planner.  I began to see him as this focused chessmaster seeing everything as a game against some foe, where the goal was not to crush his enemy but to mate him: to put his enemy into a position where defeat was inevitable, and then walk away.  In Chess, the object of the game is not to capture the opponent's King.  That actually never happens.  The goal is actually to reach a point where that capture is inevitable.  When it is, your opponent is "checkmated."  He cannot escape being checked - having his King under attack - which means hypothetically the next move would lead to his or her King's capture.  Its just that capture doesn't really occur under the rules of Chess.  Its an interesting property of the game of Chess that the winning move is not the one that defeats your opponent, but rather the move that makes defeat inevitable.  That's the end of the game.

It was at this point that I began to think about The Immortal Game.  The Immortal Game is the name for possibly the most famous game in all of published Chess.  The game was actually an informal game between Adolf Anderssen - the man considered by many to be the best chessplayer of his day - and Lionel Kieseritzky, considered one of the strongest players of the time as well.  They met in 1851 to play the first International Chess Tournament, a tournament Anderssen eventually won.  During a break, Anderssen and Kieseritzky decided to play a game.  Anderssen went first and played black - back then the convention of White always going first did not exist - and Kieseritzky went second and played White.

The modern game of Chess has evolved over the last two hundred years or so, much like many other games and sports.  In the same way that American football evolved from run-dominant leather-helmeted play to the West Coast offense and beyond, Chess has had eras of different stlyes of play.  In the 19th century, Chess was played in a very aggressive offensive/counter-offensive style designed around "development" (moves that deploy pieces in a way that allow them to attack large amounts of the board) that you don't see today in the strongest players, who today are more likely to be strategic position players.  And Anderssen proceeded to play the game most consider to be the pinnacle of 19th century developmental offensive.

To me, the similarities between The Immortal Game and my story line were, if not perfectly aligned, spookily parallel.  The story revolves around sacrifices and a strategy of attack that doesn't reveal its true nature to its opponent until its too late.  And so I decided to explore the idea to see if there were any other explicit parallels to the game that either already existed or could easily be incorporated.

The game begins with a sequence known as the King's Gambit.  In Chess, the King's Gambit is an early move designed to offer your opponent a free piece which, if he or she takes it, as the potential to weaken their position as they move to take it.  In my story, the first move is to deal with Cole, and offer him ultimate power knowing he can only use it to assist in Silos' plan.  And from his perspective, it asks him to sacrifice himself for the greater good.  This could become my King's Gambit.

Later in the game there's another move which sacrifices a rook but seals the fate of the opponent.  Rooks are also called "castles" and this seemed to parallel Prometheus going to the Shadow Shard to talk to Rularuu.  Originally I had Prometheus talk to Ruladak, but that decided I could change that to Faathim and make the location the Chantry.  I.e. a castle within the shard.

Above all, what makes The Immortal Game one of the most amazing games in Chess history is that Anderssen sacrifices his bishop, then a rook, then another rook, and then finally a knight, and still checkmates his opponent who still has all of his major pieces.  Anderssen gives up piece after piece because each sacrifice pushes his opponent into a smaller and smaller corner and scatters his pieces too far away to be useful, and then mates him with a remarkable combination of weaker pieces.

That theme of sacrifice to win the game seemed very apropos, and I decided that I would call this story The Immortal Game after that chess game.  People familiar with Chess would get it, people not familiar would assume the title referred to the three main characters at the beginning of the story: a game among immortals.

The selection of the title wasn't just a gimmick, though.  It refocused my writing in a way that allowed me to do something I knew I wanted to do, but wasn't precisely certain how to do yet.  This story is about cosmic fireworks.  Its easy to get caught up in cosmic fireworks, but ultimately I wanted to tell a story about people.  Powerful, inscrutable people perhaps, but people the reader could relate to.  I needed to make Prometheus the asshat relatable.  I had to make Silos the Nemesis plotter relatable.  I really wanted to make Cole the badly-written relatable.  I even wanted Rularuu to be relatable.  I wanted readers to have a sense that these characters had a past that explained their present.  And with the theme of sacrifice for the end game inspired by the Immortal Game, I knew what to focus on.  Sacrifice.

Prometheus the asshat became Prometheus the exile, Prometheus the cheater, who cheated on our behalf and suffered for it, and when given a second chance cheats again for us.  Rularuu the plot device became Rularuu the shattered.  Rularuu the all powerful who didn't realize that with infinite power he would not become god, every piece of him would become a separate god who did not want to share.  Rularuu sacrificed his very identity for power.  Silos the maybe hero became Silos, the seeker of redemption who decides that he can't deny who he is, but can choose to make the ultimate sacrifice for humanity.  And Emperor Cole, former ruler of Earth, gains ultimate power and becomes Marcus Cole, servant of humanity, and sacrifices not only his life, but his belief that he and he alone can guide humanity to its proper future.

Ultimately, the title gave me a chance to step back and look at the story, and what started off as a plot, a scheme, a magic trick to save humanity gained a subtext: a morality story.  Who are these people that would save humanity, and why.  What I needed to do to make every character interesting was simply to ask this question: what did this character sacrifice to bring them to this point, or what would they sacrifice to make the future happen?  Everyone understands sacrifice, and if I could make that sacrifice make sense, the character would then make sense. I think I did a decent job there.

I don't recommend gimmicks like this.  I think novice fiction writers get caught up in gimmicks.  It would have been easy for me to twist my story into a pretzel to make it an echo of the actual Immortal Game as it was played, to overplay the metaphor and the analogy to the game.  I've seen it happen many times.  In my case, I was fortunate enough that the parallels did not need to be forced, and I was willing to let the metaphor go before they became forced.  And I got something in return: (I believe) a stronger, somewhat more human story than originally intended.

The title works on  many levels, something I like in a title.  The theme of humanity (aka the players) achieving Immortality through dreams.  The theme of a game played by immensely powerful beings on the largest possible stage.  The chess-related theme of using sacrifice to defeat your opponent.  Things just seemed to come together to make that work.  I think I just got lucky there.

Pep Rally

All I want to know is why wasn't I invited to "Daveland"?  It sounds like a utopia. I've been a Dave my whole life, gorramit!  You'd think my bros would have told me, but noooooooo. Selfish bastards, them Daves.

Arcana

Quote from: Pep Rally on December 07, 2012, 07:42:48 AM
All I want to know is why wasn't I invited to "Daveland"?  It sounds like a utopia. I've been a Dave my whole life, gorramit!  You'd think my bros would have told me, but noooooooo. Selfish bastards, them Daves.

Anyone with admin access zoning into Daveland during November would have seen something less utopia, and more lunatic asylum, while I was using it as an dumping ground for experiments.

Pep Rally

Quote from: Arcana on December 07, 2012, 08:21:44 AM
Anyone with admin access zoning into Daveland during November would have seen something less utopia, and more lunatic asylum, while I was using it as an dumping ground for experiments.

Now THAT sounds more like my actual life.

Starsman

Quote from: Arcana on December 07, 2012, 08:21:44 AM
Anyone with admin access zoning into Daveland during November would have seen something less utopia, and more lunatic asylum, while I was using it as an dumping ground for experiments.

Do you have screenshots of this Daveland? Preferably in it's chaotic state?
For the sake of the community: please stop the cultural "research" in your attempt to put blame on the game's cancelation.

It's sickening to see the community sink that low. It's worse to see the community does not get it.

I'm signing off and taking a break, blindly hope things change.

Arcana

Quote from: Starsman on December 07, 2012, 06:26:38 PM
Do you have screenshots of this Daveland? Preferably in it's chaotic state?

Yes and no:

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=farm9.staticflickr.com%2F8068%2F8253310486_b16d857db6_z.jpg

Daveland is not an interesting place in and of itself.  Its actually a non-place.  It has no terrain.  In fact, upon teleporting into Daveland the first thing that happens is you fall to the maximum depth of the map, because there's no ground.

Its an empty place with only sky, which I assume was used to test various things without extraneous geometry, scripts, or other things like that.  In actual fact, all of the zones are incredibly busy places with invisible markers for spawns and paths and doors and other things of that nature (actually, I should have taken screencaps of that, but didn't think about it).  Daveland is empty except for what you spawn into it.

Codewalker

Developer comments in the SaveCoH channel the night of the shutdown led me to believe that there *are* maps for Daveland, Vinceland, etc., however neither beta nor live servers contained them.

When you did /whereami you'd get something like /maps/_dyoon/Dave_Land.txt. My theory is that directories in their development tree starting with an underscore get excluded during the process in which the maps are compiled into .bin format and deployed to actual servers. So the result is just like what happens when you edit a demo file and misspell the map name -- you get an empty void with the default sky.

That Dave is a riot.

Arcana

Quote from: Codewalker on December 07, 2012, 07:44:08 PM
Developer comments in the SaveCoH channel the night of the shutdown led me to believe that there *are* maps for Daveland, Vinceland, etc., however neither beta nor live servers contained them.

When you did /whereami you'd get something like /maps/_dyoon/Dave_Land.txt. My theory is that directories in their development tree starting with an underscore get excluded during the process in which the maps are compiled into .bin format and deployed to actual servers. So the result is just like what happens when you edit a demo file and misspell the map name -- you get an empty void with the default sky.

That Dave is a riot.

My suspicion is that places like Daveland are placeholders for developmental work that only the developer sees, because only they have the requisite files to properly mapserve them.  One common implementation rule for the game seems to be that the game code cannot create something from nothing, but it can replace something with something else.  The hooks have to be there for something to exist, but what it actually is can theoretically be mutable either at runtime or at least at load time.

This ability to replace something with something else made the game far more hackable than an MMO really ought to be.  Given that the probability of the game coming back is near zero, but not exactly zero, I'm still not sure how much I should say about what I figured out how to do. 

Starsman

Quote from: Arcana on December 07, 2012, 08:34:52 PM
My suspicion is that places like Daveland are placeholders for developmental work that only the developer sees, because only they have the requisite files to properly mapserve them.  One common implementation rule for the game seems to be that the game code cannot create something from nothing, but it can replace something with something else.  The hooks have to be there for something to exist, but what it actually is can theoretically be mutable either at runtime or at least at load time.

This ability to replace something with something else made the game far more hackable than an MMO really ought to be.  Given that the probability of the game coming back is near zero, but not exactly zero, I'm still not sure how much I should say about what I figured out how to do.

I don't know you but I have now a sudden urge to replace Hammiddon's model with a Fire Imp one.  :o
For the sake of the community: please stop the cultural "research" in your attempt to put blame on the game's cancelation.

It's sickening to see the community sink that low. It's worse to see the community does not get it.

I'm signing off and taking a break, blindly hope things change.

Arcana

Quote from: Starsman on December 07, 2012, 09:17:24 PM
I don't know you but I have now a sudden urge to replace Hammiddon's model with a Fire Imp one.  :o

There is not a single tentacle visible in that screencap.

Starsman

Quote from: Arcana on December 07, 2012, 10:08:57 PM
There is not a single tentacle visible in that screencap.

You lost me...

My tought about the fire imp was to hack the game so a regular Hami raid was just a bunch of players attempting to kill the strongest Fire Imp In The Universe!

Interesting thing I noticed during the event, when you turned me into one of the Rularus... (never got their names right, perhaps because never did those raids) and I started to execute Staff animations is that the game engine will do its best (without crashing) to stick animations into rigs that don't even have all the necessary limbs. He did an odd jump too, like every frame he was trying to do something that did not work (bend his legs?) out so he started falling only to be overcome again with the jump force.
For the sake of the community: please stop the cultural "research" in your attempt to put blame on the game's cancelation.

It's sickening to see the community sink that low. It's worse to see the community does not get it.

I'm signing off and taking a break, blindly hope things change.

slickriptide

Quote from: Arcana on December 05, 2012, 07:51:50 PM
<snip>
Because they were linked by the same Well, Primal Earth and Praetorian Earth are now both parallel dimensions within the Incarnate Earth bubble.  Someone attempting to travel to another dimension from Incarnate Earth could reach Praetoria, but not disconnected dimensions.

Good job on the story and it sounds like the event was a success. Kudos for pulling both things off and thanks for the behind the scenes look at it all.

So, if I understand the implications of this situation properly, Praetoria and Salamanca have both been "cleansed".

There may or may not be Devouring Earth creatures living in Praetoria and Primal Earth,but any that exist are the last of their kind. Short of there being a cache of the Hamidon bacteria stowed in a dark corner of a cave someplace, Praetorian Earth is either suitable for colonization or it can be made suitable by destroying the Devouring Earth.

As for Salamanca, it has been freed of the invasion of Croatoa, albeit that parts of it may have possibly been so far absorbed into Croatoa as to have been left behind when the new copy of Earth was created. The red caps would all be left behind. The Tuatha and Fir Bolg might or might not remain; the question of their connection to the Well is an open one. The Coven would be taken along with the rest of Earth.

This assumes that your Well, is your Well, is your Well, and that being born in another dimension doesn't change that. If I recall correctly, there are members of all three factions who were born on Primal Earth and never died (time being relative or simply meaningless in relation to Croatoa) but there are certainly members of the Coven and presumably the others that were born in Croatoa. It might be that all three would split along the lines of which were born where. I have no clue about Jack-in-Irons and Eochai but I presume that they are native to Croatoa and so "cleansed" along with the rest of Croatoa.

I think that the full horror of the Dream Doctor's solution isn't really expressed here for people who have not read the design docs about the Shadow Shard. It maybe would be helpful to emphasize that the Dream Doctor chooses the word "transformation" carefully, because he isn't really literally saving the world. It's more like he's making a carbon copy and destroying the original; essentially like putting humanity through a Star Trek transporter. What have you really saved, in that case? Is there a qualitative difference? The principals of _The Immortal Game_ can't afford to be bothered by philosophical distinctions but the man in the street might well have a different perspective...

But this isn't a story about the man in the street, in the end; so I only mention it as something for a reader without the lore background to realize what's really being proposed by the titular "Immortals".

Do we presume that the Sun, moon and stars still exist and that Earth is not now doomed to die of heat death for lack of a sun? ;-)

I'm sorry I missed the event. I never realized there was a game event planned (however it was made possible). Then again, through serendipity my main spent his last half-hour sharing silent vigil with Troy Hickman at Cyrus Thompson's statue and that was a pretty appropriate way for The Artiste to go out.

Arcana

Quote from: slickriptide on December 14, 2012, 12:04:13 AM
Good job on the story and it sounds like the event was a success. Kudos for pulling both things off and thanks for the behind the scenes look at it all.

So, if I understand the implications of this situation properly, Praetoria and Salamanca have both been "cleansed".

There may or may not be Devouring Earth creatures living in Praetoria and Primal Earth,but any that exist are the last of their kind. Short of there being a cache of the Hamidon bacteria stowed in a dark corner of a cave someplace, Praetorian Earth is either suitable for colonization or it can be made suitable by destroying the Devouring Earth.

I would say that since the Will of the Earth is now an Ascended being, all DE are now facets of the Will of the Earth.  All of them were left on Hamidon Earth.  There is no DE in Incarnate Earth.


QuoteAs for Salamanca, it has been freed of the invasion of Croatoa, albeit that parts of it may have possibly been so far absorbed into Croatoa as to have been left behind when the new copy of Earth was created. The red caps would all be left behind. The Tuatha and Fir Bolg might or might not remain; the question of their connection to the Well is an open one. The Coven would be taken along with the rest of Earth.

That's an iffy question.  Since Magic is a power that is part of the human potential of the Well of the Furies, the "dimension" of Incarnate Earth could still have connections to things we might call "other dimensions" but are really magical "suburbs" of Incarnate Earth.  But the precise details of that is something I did not work out explicitly in all respects.


QuoteThis assumes that your Well, is your Well, is your Well, and that being born in another dimension doesn't change that.

Taking a cue from the Loregasm, my conception of the Well of the Furies is that its a cosmic potential energy nexus.  Its like a whirlpool that forms in a stream as water flows by.  Its possible to have two different such whirlpools form separated by a distance, but if they approach each other they can merge to form a larger one.

So long as Praetoria and Primal Earth had no connection to each other, each had its own Well.  But as soon as dimensional travel started to occur between them, and the two humanities really became one humanity, the two Wells merged into a single one that contained the total potential of the combined species.

To me, this was a way to explain how "our" Well could choose Praetorian Marcus Cole as its champion.  We had to have the same Well.  But that would mean there was one Well for two dimensions, which seems to cause other problems.  If there is just one Well for all dimensions, why wouldn't a race like the Battalion simply go to a vastly weaker dimension and capture the Well there, rather than go to one that had powerful Incarnate defenders?  The answer that made the most sense to me is that every separate, isolated group of beings with Incarnate potential creates their own Well, but that Well can merge with other Wells if that isolated group of beings is no longer isolated from others of similar nature.

The Well is like our shadow.  We had a shadow, Praetorians had a shadow.  But as soon as we started standing in one big crowd, we began to cast one single larger shadow.


QuoteI think that the full horror of the Dream Doctor's solution isn't really expressed here for people who have not read the design docs about the Shadow Shard. It maybe would be helpful to emphasize that the Dream Doctor chooses the word "transformation" carefully, because he isn't really literally saving the world. It's more like he's making a carbon copy and destroying the original; essentially like putting humanity through a Star Trek transporter. What have you really saved, in that case? Is there a qualitative difference? The principals of _The Immortal Game_ can't afford to be bothered by philosophical distinctions but the man in the street might well have a different perspective...

Actually, I would say the reverse.  Cosmic beings might care about the distinction you mention, because they have the perception and power to actually be theoretically capable of detecting any difference.  But to the average person on the street, nothing at all would change from the moment before the Incarnate bubble split to the moment after.

But having said that, you're thinking what the story intends you to think: there are no easy answers, and I tried to connect the dots in ways that would leave interesting questions behind.  For example, what are Shadow Shard reflections, precisely?  Do they have any relationship to City of Heroes humans now ensconced in the dream world?  Maybe, maybe not, but its interesting to consider the coincidences surrounding those entities.

QuoteDo we presume that the Sun, moon and stars still exist and that Earth is not now doomed to die of heat death for lack of a sun? ;-)

That's a safe assumption.  Calling the new dimension Incarnate Earth is a slight misnomer, as that dimension is a copy of the entire (normal, physical) cosmos as humans understood it to be.  It contains every star, galaxy, and world that the original universe contained *except* for any part of it that was controlled by higher forces: another Well, or another even higher power.

Its like Incarnate Earth is a drag and drop copy of C:\Users\Incarnates\Universe except for all the parts for which WellOfTheFuries does not have administrative access.


QuoteI'm sorry I missed the event. I never realized there was a game event planned (however it was made possible). Then again, through serendipity my main spent his last half-hour sharing silent vigil with Troy Hickman at Cyrus Thompson's statue and that was a pretty appropriate way for The Artiste to go out.

Cool.

Felderburg

Quote from: Arcana on December 14, 2012, 04:57:59 AMThat's a safe assumption.  Calling the new dimension Incarnate Earth is a slight misnomer, as that dimension is a copy of the entire (normal, physical) cosmos as humans understood it to be.  It contains every star, galaxy, and world that the original universe contained *except* for any part of it that was controlled by higher forces: another Well, or another even higher power.

Wow. So does that include all alien lifeforms as well? Or did they get left behind, making humanity alone in the new universe?
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