Mirror universes, part 1

[camwyn]

Stolen from moonlup:

So many, if not all, of the characters we play are good men and women at heart. But in another world, where something went wrong, they become nightmares.

What's their story?

Ray Stantz, gone_byebye: When you get completely and thoroughly caught up in science as a young boy, you learn a lot, but you don’t really have time for other things. Ray never developed a conscience. He maintained a childlike sense of wonder and a burning desire to understand the universe around him, but the concept that what happened to other people mattered never really sank in. Columbia University was a bit scared of him, but they were happy to see him off with a Ph.D., especially since he promised he’d make regular donations from his big fat government paycheck. Anyone who asks about which bit of the government the paycheck comes from is told it’s the Bureau of Indian Affairs, now stop asking stupid questions. It is probably best if you don’t exhibit some sign of psychic powers in public in that world. Someone will find you. And then no one will find you.

Belar, alorn_bear: See ‘the life of his brother Torak’. Only with Scanda-Russian types instead of Arabo-Mongol followers.

Gordon Freeman, acts_of_gord: A childhood of competition with his older brother and a largely absent father left Gordon with the very strong impression that you couldn’t count on anyone in this life but yourself (despite his mother’s best efforts to the contrary). He developed a reputation for splitting his days between scientific research and biathlon practice. His goal was to get the hell away from people, and to be able to make them stay away if they tried to find him. The tennis ball cannon he built when he was six got hauled out of mothballs, dusted off, and upgraded into a homemade slugthrower, which got upgraded into … something else. Fortunately he got hired by a Washington firm, TF Industries, and put to work on railgun research before anything could happen to put him on the nightly news. When those idiots at Black Mesa tore reality a new one and the rifts started showing up all over the planet, he grabbed pretty much one of everything in the lab and started laying waste to anything that didn’t have red blood. It was amazingly effective. By the time of the Seven Hours War he’d carved out his own little fiefdom based on the promise of ‘do what I want and I’ll protect you from anything’, but the Combine were a little overwhelming even for him.

For a while, anyway. You can get a lot of weapons research done if you let everyone think you’ve vanished completely. And if you happen to drop a few rumors here and there about your eventual return, well, when you do show up with guns the likes of which God has never seen, is it really such a bad thing to capitalize on the way everyone assumes you’re the Messiah?

Medic, hands_of_blu: Took his papers from medical school and went looking for someone to hire him to let him do the research he was really interested in. No one knows how he got there, but his name and picture’s all over the really nasty research done by Unit 731. And no one knows where he is now…

The others are going to take a bit to work out.

Comments

[sdelmonte]

Why isn't this a DE question? Seems like a natural.

Of course, I have a canon Mirror Universe, so this is easy on one count.

[camwyn]

Probably because I only ran across it on moonlup's journal this morning, and I don't think other people've picked it up much yet? We should propose it, though.

[akawil]

Your mirror!Ray reminds me of Charles Stross's Laundry series. Are you familiar with it? (Imagine taking equal parts James Bond, H. P. Lovecraft, and Dilbert, and shake thoroughly.)

[camwyn]

Unfortunately, no. I've got some familiarity with Stross' work in general, but I've never sat down and read it in any real depth.

[innerbrat]

It was in Brave & Bold the other day!

I'm not sure what the Hell Mirror Dinah was supposed to be; she breathed fire.

[sdelmonte]

Was that the one with the Red Hood?

[batyatoon]

Mirror!Ray scares me. *wibbles*

[kyrielle]

Eep.

*wistful* Been too long since any of them were current to be worth doing. My old Amber characters would be easy (frightfully so), but who would care by now? (Susan would be a lot harder. Heh.)

[innerbrat]

It was! Closely followed by one with Batman vs the other heroes, because they can't tell the difference between him and Owlman.

[camwyn]

The hell of it is I actually played him out a long, long time ago. Back when we had a Danny Phantom at Milliways, Psychicsaphie and I were working on the prospect of Danny getting captured by his universe's Guys In White- probably turning himself in voluntarily after something really horrible happened. The two people who would be in charge of the experiments on him were going to be No-Conscience Ray and Scary Egon, with Exceptionally Sleazy Peter being in charge of their little branch of governmental research; Winston was going to turn out to be a general and Tucker's uncle, and be responsible for Danny slipping the coop. When Ray finally met his counterpart it would turn out that the no-conscience version was actually an honest-to-God evil twin- there was a theory for a while that a percentage of left-handed people were actually identical twins, from pairs that were split-off mirror images of each other, and that singleton births of these left-handers were cases where the right-handed twin was lost very early in the pregnancy. And Ray is left-handed, so the DP universe was going to be the one where the right-handed twin got born instead of the left-handed one, and it was all going to end up with it being the first time in Ray's life that he committed an act of violence against a human who wasn't Walter Peck. We prethreaded a lot of stuff with no-conscience Ray and Scary Egon and Danny, in case we needed it. None of it ever saw the light of day.

But, yeah, creepy right-handed no-conscience Ray scares the bahoogies out of me too.

[innerbrat]

OK, Renee's Mirror version is sort of scary.

[crazyfurries.livejournal.com]

Cam, I know I've said this before. Mirror!Ray makes me want to hide UNDER the bed, with all possible firearms and explosives.

...and smeggit, you've got me pondering Evil!Dot and Evil!Mother now.

[camwyn]

I've been considering Evil!Ellen for a while now. It begins with the GOAT exam slotting her into the Vault Loyalty Inspector career track instead of the chaplaincy, and goes downhill from there.

The Enclave likes her quite a lot, though.

[crazyfurries.livejournal.com]

...I bet. And all the guys at paradise falls just give her stuff in the hopes they won't be next on her 'list'.

...Mother gone evil wouldn't be Narbon!Mother so much as the guy who really doesn't so much mind blowing up a house or starting an intergalactic war so much as he has proof of everything. In Jars.

he'd likely NOT be any sort of friend to the government.

[camwyn]

Pretty much, yeah. Evil!Ellen does tend to mow down any raiders she comes across; they're nasty filthy wastes of resources and they're probably mutated in some way anyway. But she makes a point of rounding up the vilest ones and bringing them in to Paradise Falls alive, because- well. Paradise Falls is the center of slaver activity in the Wasteland, but the only slaves you ever see in the game are runaways. The slaves are being sold off to some very persistent fellows- they're going to the Pitt, which is the toxic, carcinogenic, mutated-beyond-all-reason hell that used to be Pittsburgh. So that would be where she's sending the worst of the raiders; occasionally she leaves a lesser raider alive to spread the word, in the interests of scaring the rest into behaving.

She didn't follow through on President Eden's ultimate plan for the Wasteland, though. She's got her own plan on that front and she's cooperating with other Enclave elements.