Caw, caw! Back to school!

[lucetimods]

Hello Lucetians! A few things to announce:

1) Please hover-add searches_forhim or manage_circle add_read searches_forhim here, as our Jane Foster was removed during AC and her appeal was accepted. Woo!

2) We're well past due (for which we all apologize!), so it’s time for a good ol’ fashioned planned (we hope) shift! Welcome, one and all to good ol U of L (that’s University of Luceti to you, bub) and it’s the first week of class. For some, that might mean meeting up with old friends, comparing class schedules, preparing for the fall term slog. For others, it’s the start of a brand new life--who will your roommate in housing be? Where do you even buy toothpaste? And let’s not forget the grad students, eating instant noodles in their subterranean offices and weeping as they read roll sheets for the class sections they have to teach if they don’t want to lose their fellowships (oh god, not that guy, I heard he does all his homework in crayon and it smells funny), or the professors, torn from their happy summers filled with field work to get stuffed behind lecterns once more.

Beyond the frantic activity of preparing for that learning thing, there are big social events afoot at UL this week. It’s rush week, so be prepared for endless frat (don’t worry, all the frats are coed!) parties, as well as the time when all of the student organizations and clubs make their first big membership push and run fun events. Fraternities Upsilon Omega and Eta Beta Pi are battling it out to get the most pledges with costume contests, wild parties where underage students will Totally Not Get Any Alcohol We Promise (wink wink), the legendary Running Of The Squirrels, and more.

But even more important, the date of the Feather Bowl has fallen on this Friday, and Luceti’s own football team will be playing on their home turf against their most bitter rivals--Kin’Corra University! (BOO! HISS!)

The KU team has temporarily taken over the Heart community housing building while they prepare for the big game. The place is like a maximum security prison right now, and the KU players are all major jerks. And just to up the stakes even more, rumor has it that whichever university wins the Feather Bowl will snag a major prize--a technology upgrade for the whole school!

Kick spirit week into overdrive, Luceti. Make sure your football players stay safe from sabotage, guard your mascot well, and do what you can to demoralize your hated foes. Don’t forget to rub the shiny, bald head of the statue of Davis near the fountain for luck. Go, fight, win!



With all these changes, does Luceti look any different?
Not a lot! A handful of the shops surrounding the plaza that would be atypical on a campus will be transformed into classroom buildings, with altered equipment and furniture to match the setting. (Examples would be the smithy and the art gallery. If you're not sure what would or would not be converted, just ask.) Community buildings will be the equivalent of dormitories, and the Battle Dome will be the campus stadium. If you want to form frat/sorority houses in certain buildings, feel free! We'll have a spreadsheet available for relevant changes so people know what's what, and a map can be created to showcase them if needed.

Powers or no powers?
For this event, everyone is human. Yes, non-human characters, that means you are temporarily human, and it’s an AU, so you’ve always been human. In addition, everyone is limited to being a normal human, with no special magical/psychic powers. Learned skills that require no supernatural abilities (eg: fighting, ninja stealth) can be kept so long as there’s an explanation for them in your character’s AU past.

Do characters still have wings in this AU?
Wings are normal for this world, AU or not, so yes, they'll remain as is. Feel free to change your character's wing colour if you feel so inclined, however.

Are actual Kin'Corrans arriving?
Yes and no. The "rivals" are shifted NPCs based on Luceti's perception of their neighbouring enclosure. You can base the NPCs on existing characters that have been created for previous encounters with Kin'Corra, with an AU spin to them, of course. No one knows what exactly caused the rivalry between the schools, but it's old as dirt and no one needs an excuse for this sort of thing, really.

Wait, I live in Heart Building! Am I being evicted?
Yep, sorry. Your character in this AU will have new lodgings for the duration of the event. Go form/join a house! Find new roommates! Branch out and have some fun with it! And shake your fists at those lousy Kin'Corrans for stealing your favourite dorm.

So what kind of roles are available for characters to fill?
There are a lot of options, since this is a fully functioning university town!

• Students! Undergraduates and graduate students both, all majors. (If you want to be on the football team--which is coed, of course!--please sign up on the spreadsheet. Not everyone can be the quarterback. Also, please only realistically athletic characters on the team, all right?)
  
• Faculty (please sign up on the tracking spreadsheet so we don’t end up with twenty sexy physics profs)
  
• Employees of the university (secretaries, janitors, bookstore/coffee shop sales people…)
  
• Your suggestion here--we can’t think of everything.

My character is way too old/young to be in university…
1) You are never too old for university! and 2) This one is slightly trickier, but you have some options. They could be child geniuses, children of the faculty/student body, or part of a group touring the campus. It's also entirely possible for the school to have a tutoring program for prospective (young) students who are temporarily on campus to fast-track their lessons. Sort of like early-September summer camp. (Don't think too hard on the logic of it.)

What kind of events will there be?
The only event that will be for certain happening is the Feather Bowl. Everything else is really open to player plotting. There’s a tab on the spreadsheet for writing down general events to help everyone figure out which party your character might be going to which day. Feel free to add events! (EG, if you and a few others want to be the drama club and have a big lunch, put it on the calendar!) If you really have trouble coming up with ideas, we have a few we can suggest, but we'd like to see what you guys come up with first.

Okay, this is important--what are the school colors and mascots?
It IS important!
KU: Black and gold, mascot is the wolverine. They literally brought a wolverine with them. No, really.
UL: The mascot is the lorikeet, and the school colors are blue, green, and orange.
Also! Please note that UL is one of the first truly co-ed universities ever! So that means any gender can be on all the sports team, in the fraternities, etc.

Applications are open next week, what about the New Feathers?
Newly arriving characters will have three options:

• join the AU - and the school itself - as newly registered freshmen. This way they can experience being lost and thoroughly confused twice in one month! Always fun.
  
• arrive and be unaffected. They might get some funny looks, and they certainly aren't likely to get real answers about where they are and what's going on, but I'm sure someone can wrangle them into getting registered. ...Or arrested by campus security.
  
• wait until after the event to intro. Obviously not preferred and not very fun, but hey, it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Speaking of unaffected, is this optional?
It is! If you decide this isn't your thing, feel free to have your character remember Luceti as it is. Keep in mind with this option that they'll probably look like a bit of a mad person if they wander around raving about abductions and experiments, and they will definitely be relocated if they live in a building affected by the shift.

What happens when it ends?
The night of the big Feather Bowl event is bound to be full of shenanigans. The morning afterwards, however, the AU is gone as per usual; all buildings will return to normal and characters/possessions will reset to however they were prior to the event. Characters will wake up wherever they went to sleep (or passed out or what-have-you) and will have to get themselves back to their usual lodgings.

If you have further questions, use the thread below to ask away. This event will run from September 8 to 12. This is quite a bit into the future for planning/application purposes, so we'll announce it again and let people finalize their plans as needed before it begins.

Comments

MOD QUESTIONS

[lucetimods]

 

[thefinaljedi]

How about R2-D2? Can this guy stick around as an engineering class project, or is that a no-go?

[lucetimods]

He can be an engineering project in the sense of Luke trying to build a robot, but no autonomous AI for the duration for the event.

[eversohungry]

SO MODS. Are we limited to Professor as the highest tier of authority, or can characters go as high as Chair or Dean of a department?

Lizard people run the world.

[lucetimods]

That's totally fine! Just note it on the sheet so we're not having highlander-style duels over who the chair of the English department is.

[eversohungry]

Woot! Thank you! :D

And I just realized that lizard people comment could be misread, she's totally going to be human here. |D I TRY TO BE FUNNY THIS IS WHAT IT GETS ME.

NOTE ON POKEMON AND SIMILAR PETS

[lucetimods]

Since this was asked in the mod plurk, a repeat of the answer here.

All non-human PCs will be human for the duration of the event.

All pets with special abilities will be shifted into ordinary animals with no special powers. Pets can either be shifted into squirrels and tame lorikeets that live on campus, or unpowered and non-autonomous versions of themselves. (EG: pikachu could either be a cute and exotic pet animal with absolutely no powers, a squirrel, or a lorikeet wandering around somewhere on campus.)

[feistytrader]

EG: pikachu could either be a cute and exotic pet animal with absolutely no powers

I'm assuming this doesn't work for the big Pokémon like Snorlax and they'd have to be normal animals or something, but could they be de-evolved? Like big six foot tall Meganium goes down to a lot more manageably sized Chikorita, big Gyarados turns into a floppy little Magikarp, something like that.

The other thing I was considering/wondering is if it would be okay to go with the human route for trainer Pokémon and have them be like background friend npcs or something?

If neither of these are possible it's totally fine but I wanted to test the waters and see what's in the realm of okay or not. Thanks!

[lucetimods]

Yes, please make them normal pet-sized animals. If you want your character to still have them (instead of say the pokemon being temporarily shifted into a squirrel that wanders the university grounds) keep in mind they need to be pets that could conceivably live in student housing. (Or if your character is faculty, you do have a bit more leeway.)

For the sake of simplicity, let's leave them as non-sentient animals rather than human NPCs. Thank you!

[knightofratatosk]

So characters with stuff like side effects from Twila pacts, will those disappear for the duration of this event, or...?

[lucetimods]

I'm going to say that those effects are temporarily shifted out of existence. Magic won't be in use for this event, so it seems fair that the detrimental effects of working with certain spirits should be temporarily suspended as well.

[ledbythewind]

Awesome, thanks for letting me know!

[ignite_the_stars]

Okay, how would Anakin's mechanical arm work in this plot? Would he be right-arm-less for this plot? I see that R2-D2 would be just a robot without AI programming, so I'm wondering if Anakin's arm would be technology too advanced for the plot.

[thefinaljedi]

Actually same question, Luke's also missing an arm. Would it be alright for him to have it back as organic?

[lucetimods]

It's an AU, so you can definitely do that!

[lucetimods]

Try to aim for a tech level in keeping with current technology for the sake of simplicity, or a little more advanced with the handwaved excuse that this is a university, experimental tech, woo! Artificial limbs are getting pretty advanced these days, so I don't think it's actually too far off the appropriate tech level.

[ignite_the_stars]

Actually - the most advanced prosthetic limb today is this http://bebionic.com/the_hand. And it isn't anywhere near the level of tech of Anakin's mechanical hand. The only loss of function he has with his hand is the lack of sense of touch over the surface of all of his arm (and even in some areas, like strength areas, his mechanical arm surpasses the abilities of a human flesh arm.)

The Bebionic arm, while cool and impressive for us, just doesn't have the same mobility and function of a human hand, much less the mechanical arm Anakin has in canon (to use one of the features of the thumb on the Bebionic arm, you have to use your other hand to position the digit first and the thumb only has two positions).

I'm cool with saying something is like the Bebionic arm with a few more bells and whistles (cuz experimental university and all) for the purpose of this plot, though.

Re: MOD QUESTIONS

[notyourutopian]

Can student characters have an npc parent who works for the college?

(sorry if this is answered in all that information i am stuck on my phone on a bad connection.trying to read everything.)

Re: MOD QUESTIONS

[lucetimods]

That sounds fair! I'd say in this case please add the NPC (marked as an NPC) to the appropriate list with a description so other people know that s/he is there!

Re: MOD QUESTIONS

[tearmeanewone]

THE LATEST OF THE LATE BUT--

A few of us had a thought about maybe having some kind of Facebook-like thing that's used by students and faculty to post drunken exploits/procrastinate on studying/post videos of kittens.

If that's cool, where would be best to post it? I'm fine hosting it on Elizabeth's journal, but lucetilogs might be a more central place/neutral ground (but obviously that's not the usual "network spot"). Thoughts? :3

Re: MOD QUESTIONS

[tearmeanewone]

Also, just to clarify: I realize after posting that obviously the network would be the place for this sort of stuff normally, though I think the driving idea behind this particular thing would be short-form status-update type posts. Instead of the long-form network posts we usually do. Thanks mods! :3

[stilldontgotit]

Will unaffected characters still be perceived as students until proven otherwise?

Also, can they use Featherbook? And what about the journals? Are those still a thing?

[lucetimods]

Yes, everyone will assume you're a student. Possibly one who has had a psychotic break if you insist you're not a student.

Yes, you can use featherbook. The journals will for the time being be tablet computers.

[lostinmyway]

Just realized this as I was about to comment to the log with Sophie, but...what's going to be the deal with her wings? Because she's unaffected by shifts and all, but those are rather not your typical human thing.

[wise_maiden]

>> Wings are normal for this world, AU or not, so yes, they'll remain as is. Feel free to change your character's wing colour if you feel so inclined, however.

She'll be fine! :)