Hey folks; I'm looking for some feedback on my introductory backstory material, Specifically, i want to know:

1) Is readable?

2) Is it easy enough to follow?

3) Did you find it interesting?

Any comments / criticism are very much appreciated.

[/B]

The Events of 1998

All known human history occupies approximately 400 years, bisected from some unknown – but presumably much larger – quantity of human history at a single date: August 27th, 1998.

Broadly speaking, perspectives on the past 400 years and their moment of genesis can be categorized as some permutation of one of four widely held opinions: The EETI Narrative, The Dying Breath Narrative, The Fitzgerald Narrative and The Candid Words Narrative.

The undisputed facts of the 27th of August are as follows: there was a sovereign body of unknown size that was called 'Canada'. An explosion of unknown origins occurred in an urban center housing Canada's governing cabinet, producing enough heat and kinetic force to form a glass-rich elliptical crater 390m deep at its nadir with a 3,000km major radii and 2,600km minor radii.

Whether or not Jyrgunkarrd was present on Earth before the explosion, it was after the explosion that Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001 was established within the crater and that Jyrgunkarrd initiated the Vertex Analysis Project.


The EETI Perspective
As authored by EETI proponent Dr. Katherine Weinberg

EETI is an acronym for 'Encountered Extraterrestrial Intelligence'; the fundamental unifying argument of the EETI opinion is that Jyrgunkarrd is an invasive entity not native to Earth and probably one of many that literally fell onto the planet on the 27th of August. Opinions among EETI proponents regarding the length of human history, the pre-August geopolitics of Earth and the robustness of pre-August human civilization are varied, serving only as a backdrop to the focus of Jyrgunkarrd's  proposed origins and the implications of those origins.

The primary lines of evidence for EETI involve the properties of Jyrgunkarrd itself, the properties and shape of the crater that encompasses Jyrgunkarrd's first known activities, photographs that are believed to have been taken by genuine observation satellites in orbit and a lack of any substantial record, in any of the fragmented remains of the past found, of Jyrgunkarrd being mentioned in any capacity at all prior to the 27th of August.

Properties: Jyrgunkarrd is a robotic entity with no known parallels in either scale or sophistication. It's body is at least 1,500 meters in length and composed mostly of iridium and osmium – metals that current geological models suggest should be very rare on the accessible layers of the Earth's crust. It houses microbe-scale damage control robots that have no known parallels. It is completely autonomous and capable of formulating complex plans, capacities that are orders of magnitude ahead of any known software that's either itself been discovered or has been written of in discovered documents.

Myself and like-minded proponents of EETI see no compelling reason to believe that Jyrgunkarrd was manufactured by some past human state or business entity: the material cost would be prohibitive, archeological studies & excavations suggest a past technology base much too modest for the effort, and no reasonable proposal has ever put put forward for what practical applications such a feat of engineering might have to justify it's expense.


The Crater:  Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001 has been built within a crater of enormous scale that was subjected to tremendous heat as it formed, evidenced by it's glass-heavy composition. EETI proponents argue that the most likely candidate for forming such a crater would be the low angle impact of a celestial object travelling at cometary speeds; the crater is not bowl-shaped, as you would expect from a feature excavated by explosives, and the sheer size of the crater requires that any ordnance used to excavate it would have to be of quantities that EETI proponents find incredible.

Given the crater's origins, and given that the crater must be geologically young to still be so well preserved, the hypothesis is that either a bolide carrying Jyrgunkarrd or Jyrgunkarrd itself impacted the Earth on the 27th of August, with Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001 becoming established in the aftermath.

The Satellite Photographs: A series of sixteen photographs were among the personal effects found on the body of a woman discovered just inside of the UV Kill Barrier, displaying high resolution images of what is argued to be  Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001 as well as four other similarly laid-out compounds in similar craters and a projection of the apparent topography of the Earth. The photographs are marked to indicate that whatever agency took them was of the opinion that the craters were excavated via impact and the consistency between the photographs & known layout of Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001 is compelling evidence of their authenticity.

These photographs have lead to what's become known as the 'banal outlook' – the perspective that our circumstances are not unique: multiple entities similar to Jyrgunkarrd made planetfall all over Earth on the 27th of August and  Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001 is, as the name has always suggested, one of many such arrangements.

Jyrgunkarrd the Unmentioned: Although our archeological collections of pre-August human history is admittedly sparse, EETI proponents assert that it is unreasonable to suggest that undertakings as massive as the construction or mobilization of Jyrgunkarrd could fall through the fissures in the historical record. We have a robust understanding of the cultural zeitgeist of the years immediately preceding 1998, and whether or not it would've been physically or politically possible to institute a military program that would've absorbed so much extremely rare material & specialized labour, it would not have been possible to institute such a program without eliciting an incredible mass of associated media & literature.

Where is this mass? Where is even a single stroke of ink from this mass? Nowhere is Jyrgunkarrd's name ever found pre-August, nowhere is he described, nowhere is there a pre-August photograph or video. EETI proponents assert that the best explanation for this missing documentation is that it was never created because Jyrgunkarrd was not present on the Earth prior to the 27th of August.

The Dying Breath Perspective
As authored by dying breath proponent Lyle Floyd

The dying breath theory is the proposal that Jyrgunkarrd was part of  a weapons package that was deployed as a last gasp attempt to achieve a mutual destruction scenario by a state actor that was on the losing end of a large scale conflict. Such weaponry probably would have absorbed all of the nation's wealth & labour, but this may have been inconsequential to it's leadership if they felt that they were already ruined and defeated.
Evidence of this dying breath scenario is chiefly found in the archeological record: documents, physical artifacts, photographs and some limited video footage produced by governing agencies within a body known as 'The United States of America'. We have records of experimentation with & mass production of fission reaction bombs, records & remnant machinery suggesting the existence of an extremely expansive military-oriented industry and almost a literal ton of xenophobic propaganda and documents related to ongoing war efforts. Proponents of the dying breath theory do not have to rely on fanciful, unprecedented assumptions like extraterrestrial life or the efficacy of the occult and are not forced to leave glaring anomalies like Jyrgunkarrd's sole fluency in the English language & anthropomorphic nature unexplained.

The United States of America: The existence of The United States of America is still disputed, but the majority consensus among proponents of the dying breath narrative is in agreement that we currently have more than enough evidence to overcome reasonable scepticism. It's this political body that is posited as the most likely candidate for manufacturing & deploying Jyrgunkarrd: a collective of nation-states that was small, aggressive, heavily militarized, superstitious and extremely xenophobic. All archeological media samples that have been attributed to the United States of America reflect a violent, pale-skin centric, male-dominated culture where deity worship & national protectionism were central themes. Government documents, most coded as classified cabinet secrets closed to the public, outline an economy that was cannibalized to favour military spending over all other spending, a far reaching arm of military-centric espionage, intimate state relationships with weapons manufacturers & weapons technology development firms and an imperial posture where most other nation-states are seen as pawns or obstacles.

While there is no direct evidence of a war between The United States of America and Canada, there are bodies of documentation related to expansionist wars with it's other presumed neighbouring states and evidence of growing tensions, animosity & xenophobic propaganda between the two focal states: enough, in this author's opinion, to infer that an armed conflict eventually began. The supposition extending from that inference is that The United States found itself in a disastrous position at the apex of the war and deployed Jyrgunkarrd as a mobile fission weaponry delivery system to deny their enemies a victory. The crater holding Tungsten Mining Parish 000-001 represents the epicenter of this climactic attack.

Fission Ordnance: Nuclear fission ordnance is Jyrgunkarrd's totem, and there is abundant evidence both in the form of documentation & physical warheads dug out of munitions stores that these weapons were in steady production pre-August. The Manhatten Project – the genesis for nuclear fission weapons technology – may have been started as early as six decades pre-August, within the context of a conflict of attrition against unknown belligerents. The archeological evidence suggests that production of this weaponry remained constant even after the presumed conclusion of this war. For what purpose? We have found thousands of warheads, and it's not unlikely that tens or even hundreds of thousands were produced.

Media samples make evident an obsession with superstition, violence and weaponry – one that at least resembles a cult-like or religious pursuit. Jyrgunkarrd is speculated to be either the final product of this cult or the core to it, perhaps being constructed as an icon of worship years prior to it's August deployment. It's curious if that's the case that we have no archaeological records mentioning Jyrgunkarrd specifically, but we know that partitions of the record have been censored-out as part of the Vertex Analysis Project; it's past existence could have simply been targeted for removal.

The Pentagon and the DEFCON Statutes: The evidence of military outposts, war machinery, strategic logistics chains and weapons manufacturing facilities is widespread, particularly beyond the UV Kill Barrier – but with few indicators to contextualize their origins, age, ownership or purpose, it wasn't possible to draw any reliable conclusions from the wreckage. The discovery of the multimedia presentations & documentation pertaining to both the Pentagon and the existence of a pre-August DEFCON statute structure, however, has provided that needed context in the opinion of this author & the majority of those supporting the dying breath scenario: most, if not all, of the derelict military hardware & facilities so far discovered are the remains of a highly centralized imperial combat force operated by the United States of America.

The Pentagon was a massive command & control hub for this combat force: a structure with a footprint of over 6,500,000 square feet and seven floors, two of them subterranean. The structure's awe and functionality is mirrored by that of Jyrgunkarrd's contemporary Hex Compound and it likewise takes it's name from a regular geometric shape. The Pentagon itself, or what remains of it, has never been found – but we have detailed blueprints of it's layout & dimensions as well as classified presentations about the activities of each wing of the building. The pre-August DEFCON statutes, also mirroring the contemporary DEFCON statutes, seem to have been housed & maintained in the Pentagon: a 'defense readiness condition' rated from 1 to 5 (vs the contemporary readiness rating of 1 to 6) used to justify state aggression.

What our archeological undertakings have provided us with is an image of a state dominated by a cult of weaponry, highly centralized & industrialized, both capable of & willing to carry out ludicrously expensive mega projects and military programs. Echoes of Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001 are found in all of it's minutia. In this author's opinion, it is nonsense to suggest that Jyrgunkarrd came from any other place.

The Fitzgerald Perspective
As authored by Fitzgerald proponent Adan Juanito

The ruins of the Nichols, Manning and Coen Iron Company building are located about 460 miles southwest of  Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 000-001; well beyond the UV Kill Barrier. Though most of the details about the original expedition that discovered these ruins have been censored as part of the Vertex Analysis Project, the fundamental message that's been left to us has eventually become what's known as the Fitzgerald Narrative. For a Fitz like myself, it is more a matter of personal experience via pilgrimage, conviction and deep seated instinct than anything empirical that has led to my beliefs. Here you'll find my best efforts to explain the articles & items that are at the threshold of those beliefs; anything beyond that threshold is simply outside of written explanation and a matter that the reader must explore for themselves.

The Pristine Floor: From it's exterior the Nichols, Manning and Coen Iron Company headquarters appears as savaged by decay & invading vegetation as any other structure outside of the Parish. The architecture appears unremarkable by pre-August standards: a steel beam & concrete frame holding multiple floors, once panelled with glass. The lobby tells the same hum drum story, except that defoliants brought by pilgrims have drawn a line against the encroaching plant life & the old crumbling escalators have been replaced by crude but stable staircases.

The vision beyond the landing doors on the second floor, however, is – in this author's opinion – not something you could expect to see anywhere else the world over. A freshly polished marble floor. Incandescent lights that still hum & shine, drawing electrical power from a source nobody can be sure of. Ornate, colourful plaster moldings that look scarcely a day old. Beautiful reddish wooden bannisters encircling a central, slightly sunken lounging area. Unblemished acrylic paintings hung on the western & eastern walls. A mechanical clock, hands frozen at 2:15, with an accompanying mechanical calender showing the date as August 26th. And on the northern wall – at the head of the room – two enormous brass plaques dominating the space, a story etched into the face of each: 'The Race to Lawrence Fitzgerald's Vocation' and 'The Matter of Miss Kay's Afflictive Tonic'.

For most that personally witness what has come to be known as The Pristine Floor, there is no question that not only does this place look precisely as it did at 2:15 on the 26th of August, but that in crossing from the landing to The Pristine Floor they have actually physically found themselves in the year of 1998, on the specified day and at the specified time. Again, I cannot describe the feeling itself that has led to my absolute belief in words here, but I swear to this – if you pause in silent contemplation, you can hear the dead. The ticking of the clock, the march of footsteps, the pouring of drinks, the lighting of cigarettes.

It is the single lingering place that time had no appetite for.

The Words in Brass: The two plaques on the northern wall of The Pristine Floor each contain a brief parable. Written on the plaque of the left hand side of the wall is 'The Race to Lawrence Fitzgerald's Vocation', while written on it's counterpart is 'The Matter of Miss Kay's Afflictive Tonic'. It is the belief of a Fitz that what happened on the 27th of August, and the nature of Jyrgunkarrd, can be understood through the interpretation of these parables.

The Race to Lawrence Fitzgerald's Vocation is about the legacy of a mathematician, the titular Lawrence Fitzgerald, whom discovers a lens cutting technique whose end product allows anyone looking through it to see a 'moral spectrogram' of the people around them. Fitzgerald's experimentation with his lenses throughout the parable reveals to him a direct correlation between a person's mathematical acumen and the colour of their moral spectrogram; he also sees glimpses of a strange figure, not wholly described to the reader, who only seems present while he looks through the lenses. The story ends with Fitzgerald coming to the conclusion that, "purity of math is purity of being," and pleading for the strange figure for help in educating the world. This prompts it's physical manifestation.

The Matter of Miss Kay's Afflictive Tonic is about an antagonistic food service company that produces the titular beverage. Anyone that consumes the beverage becomes morally perverse and unable to comprehend mathematical equations, but continues to purchase & drink it because of it's addictive & euphoric nature. This quality of  Miss Kay's Afflictive Tonic is gradually revealed throughout the parable by the use of Fitzgerald's lenses, and by the end of the parable the reader is left with the impression that  Miss Kay's Afflictive Tonic is at the root of all immoral activity in the world. The story concludes with Lawrence Fitzgerald himself setting fire to one of the food service company's outlet stores, encouraging others to do the same, and warning against any substance or activity that impacts one's mathematical acuity.

There are many interpretations of these parables; I'm fit only to share mine: Jyrgunkarrd  is an extradimensional being (the strange figure in 'The Race to Lawrence Fitzgerald's Vocation') accidentally contacted & brought here via some engineering project or experiment. To Jyrgunkarrd, mathematical brilliance & moral brilliance are completely indistinguishable – and any activity not devoted to solving mathematical problems is sinister (represented as the beverages featured in 'The Matter of Miss Kay's Afflictive Tonic'). This is the central thrust of the Vertex Analysis Project.

The Candid Words Perspective
As authored by candid words proponent Kokona Nanami

The candid words narrative is more or less self-explanatory, and some would say the simplest perspective regarding Jyrgunkarrd's origins & motivations: everything Jyrgunkarrd has said to us regarding these matters is the truth. He has no reason to lie to us and therefore he hasn't. There is a dominant opinion that anyone who holds this perspective is either engaging in apologetics of their own and free will on Jyrgunkarrd's behalf or has become broken & corrupted by the constant propaganda – while this is in many cases true, there is a significant difference between believing that something is accurate & believing that something is ethical. This author is of the former mindset and not the latter.

Jyrgunkarrd's Word on His Origins and the Earth: Jyrgunkarrd claims that it is part of a 'Geometry Accounting Array' launched by humanity just over 1,500,000 years ago from their homeworld, Azhalred. It arrived on Earth 400 years ago to initiate it's accounting tasks, bringing with it 1,000,000 human labour units in suspended animation. The Vertex Analysis Project is the last of 3 tasks – preceded by the Segment Bifurcation Project and Plane Intersection Project – before the accounting work is complete. Once the Vertex Analysis Project is finished, estimated to take seventeen cycles (a 'cycle' is currently an unknown quantity of time) at it's current rate, the labour units will be rewarded with the arrival of a terraforming fleet whom will convert the planet to ideal living conditions.

The ruins of the former civilization is claimed to have already been here when Jyrgunkarrd arrived, and long since decayed; Jyrgunkarrd states that it's like this more or less everywhere in the galaxy, with civilizations constantly arising and dying out. Our knowledge of the past is limited in scope because our history did not even begin until 400 years ago – what archeological scraps have been collected are snapshots of an alien pre-history. The calendar months are a dating mechanism created & patented by Jyrgunkarrd, and signs of this time recording system existing prior to Jyrgunkarrd's arrival are simply the result of human error, misinterpretation & fraud.

Quote from: Kevin R Brown;665140Hey folks; I'm looking for some feedback on my introductory backstory material, Specifically, i want to know:

1) Is readable?

2) Is it easy enough to follow?

3) Did you find it interesting?

Any comments / criticism are very much appreciated.

I think your question pretty much contains the answers to the first two, so I am going to focus on that. Everything is Readable. But everything can also be made more readable.

The first thing you could do is add a proper introduction. Within a single paragraph explain who is telling us this, why are they telling us this and what are they telling us. You do this in each of the sub essays, but not as part of the main text. Likewise, you could add an overarching conclusion to the main text to wrap the piece up.

The second thing you could do, all be it the most painful, is take you most lovingly crated sentence - and cut the bastard up into as many smaller sentences as possible. You will cry. You will disagree and curse my name to the heavens. But it will help.

To take a sentence that you start an introduction with: The dying breath theory is the proposal that Jyrgunkarrd was part of a weapons package that was deployed as a last gasp attempt to achieve a mutual destruction scenario by a state actor that was on the losing end of a large scale conflict.

Lets break that up and see how much information is packed into it:

The dying breath theory
is the
proposal
that
Jyrgunkarrd
was part of a
weapons package
that was
deployed as a
last gasp attempt
to achieve a
mutual destruction scenario
by a
state actor
that was on the
losing end
of a
large scale conflict.

That is arguably, too much information for one sentence to bear. I would argue even more strongly that its too much information for the FIRST sentence to bear.

Finally, you might want to move 'The Dying Breath' to the top of the order above 'The EETI perspective'. This is because the Dying Breath seems to me to have a lot more connection to the reader.


I know as a writer that stuff like this can be uncomfortable to read. My own ritual is to call my editor a nasty name, have a cup of tea, possibly take a walk and then come back to it.

I'm sorry, but I didn't get through the whole thing.

I would have preferred to see a less media-res statement up front, as a synopsis of the whole setting. The year is blah and humanity is X.

The first paragraph is not very conversational and reads as if from a highly educated person.  It doesn't seem like this fits the setting, assuming it's a new dark age sort of thing.

I also have some immersion issues.  Canada is known to exist, but the United States of America is argued, even though we know it's exact name.  How did language survive and history didn't?   And where is the mythology that I would have expected to see replace it?  And who named Jyrgunkarrd? That's clearly not the same language as the rest of the piece. But how would we know what it is named if we can't communicate with it? And if we can communicate then why wouldn't we know what it thinks it is?

Anything that frames this stuff out before we dive into the individual perspectives would probably help a reader like myself.

Thank-you for the feedback; I've re-written the introduction. As always, comments are hugely appreciated:

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You are expunged.

Tungsten Mining Parish and Administrative Compound 001 is the seed of The Pure Era; the coming epoch where the mathematical constituents of all problems are a matter of rote memory and can be appropriately solved without conflict or complication. Sanitized from any intrusion by a 200 kilometer wide barrier of ultraviolet radiation that penetrates deeper into the Earth's crust than any machine could dig, nourished & protected by Our Lord Father Jyrgunkarrd, this is the last functional community that is known to exist on the planet. Is there any food to be harvested beyond it's perimeter? Is there any water to bottle? Out there in the dark, are there are hymns to soothe you?

May there be, because you are no longer welcome here.

You have lost your worth and more than that: you have become a burden to Father Jyrgunkarrd. He cannot carry your weight. The flavor of success & reward was not to your liking, so you can now savour the taste of ash & marrow.

You've notated in your Expulsion Appeal Forms that your duties were difficult, some even 'impossible',   that you were not given enough worth to compensate for a particular task's time constraints, that you did not have the education or the equipment to perform your tasks, that you are so very sorry and will do any other task for any assigned operational period to regain your worth. Neither excuses, arguments, confessions, apologies nor promises will settle your debt : only pilgrimage and redemption may bring you salvation.

You will be processed, sedated and boxed at OP-036. All tasks are forbidden to you from this period until then. You will be re-calibrated, issued a Redemption Key and placed under the protection of a WarDen. I am not authorized to instruct you further.

Jyrgunkarrd is Love.

I like it. Especially because it's so hard to find out who the speaker is. Apparently an archeologist 400 years in the future. The text is enticing because we know what has happend until August 1998.

The texts might be better, if you made them up as a hypertext, where the reader has to choose between the four theories. That would reduce the impression that they somehow form a coherent text.


It is on the other hand not very effective, if you want to convey information economically, say as a teaser for a game, but I assume that was not the case.

Quote from: Kevin R Brown;665140Hey folks; I'm looking for some feedback on my introductory backstory material, Specifically, i want to know:

1) Is readable?

2) Is it easy enough to follow?

3) Did you find it interesting?

Any comments / criticism are very much appreciated.

I made it through the first section, but decided not to bother with the rest.

The first section seemed very dry and full of unnecessary jargon. It didn't actually tell me anything.

The narratives seemed confusing - why have them , why are they different, what purpose do they serve? What is their context?

I have no idea who.what Jyrgunkarrd is from the introduction, which seems odd as it is clearly important.

It would have been better to give a brief overview about the state of the world now, after 400 years, then give the narratives showing how each culture described what had happened.

The new introduction is much better as it actually explains things.