Subject: [Sidles back in]
Author:
Posted on: 2019-09-25 11:15:00 UTC

Recently we've been watching Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which (aside from being extraordinarily tongue-in-cheek) plays with the idea that there have been multiple similar teams over time. I've also been reading The Wicked + The Divine, where 'every ninety years, twelve gods return as young people'. It's no exaggeration to say I really like this whole concept, and I'm wondering: can it be applied to the PPC?

(This post will use my timelines and histories; obviously if you choose not to accept those into your own understanding of PPC canon, that's your lookout.)

The Protectors of the Plot Continuum was founded in 1973, at the close of the Civil War on Origin. But... what if there were other organisations with a similar purpose, founded before the Flowers ever Awakened?

-The Plot Protection Agency follows many Noir film tropes. Those films seem to be set in the 1920s-40s; could it be that a detective agency, run by Flowers and with an alarming level of 'coincidentally' similar agents, protected the canon worlds in this timeframe?

-The Transfictional Canonical Defence Authority seems to have been active in the mid-1800s; its characters seem familiar, but that might simply be human pattern-seeking at work. It had its own community of writers, too. (It should be noted that the TCDA has explicitly crossed into the current PPC, which was assumed to be trans-multiverse travel... but could have just been time travel.)

-The Army for Protecting the Stage Worlds existed in the late 1500s, at the time of Shakespeare. Rather than narrative reports, its authors seem to have used spoken word to convey their message.

-Going in the opposite direction: the post-Sundering PPC was once explicitly a part of our PPC's future, but has been relegated to an abandoned timeline. That isn't to say that a remarkably similar organisation might not come into existence sometime in the 2060s.

-The tragically briefly-described Solarpunk PPC makes use of technology and attitudes that seem to be some way ahead of our own: I've always pictured Solarpunk as a whole fitting into a period after massive sea level rises, as a kind of recovery period. Could they spring up in the early 22nd century? It's entirely plausible.

This seems to be settling into a pattern of two 'PPC-esque' organisations appearing every century, with our current PPC semi-breaking the cycle by turning away from becoming the House of Rhodes. This opens up a whole lot of interesting possibilities - how about a Puritan PPC under Cromwell? A 1700s incarnation protecting the likes of Gulliver and Crusoe? - but the biggest one is this:

Where did it come from? All these organisations are too alike for coincidence: lots of them have Flowers, usually with the same or similar names, and there's a whole bunch of obvious-copy agents out there. Is there some ur-PPC that somehow managed to get its very nature imprinted on the Multiverse, and if so, how far back were they?

The Sunflower Official // supernal soul
Looked at the land // of the Lord of Fate
Decreed that domain // too dark, undetermined
And considered his capacity // to create a new World.

--from The Lore of Origin, a myth of the PPC's creation

I'm just saying... ^_~

hS

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