Joe's Questions & My Reply
I had a couple random thoughts I wanted to share (figured the rest of the party might be interested in your responses).
What happens if an Unreal goes insane? Has it ever happened before? Are there any repercussions to such a happening that wouldn't be immediately apparent?
There are many mental illnesses that could be described as "insane", psycopathy, schizophrenia, delusions of all sorts. It is very difficult to quantify the difference between standard unreal functioning, especially under an incursion's influence, from "insanity." In the past there was a location on Earth, referred to as "Ascension Island" that was an unreality-free space as the result of an prior incursion (in truth, use of unreality required a code symbol to be invoked that was known only to a few) and it was used as a prison/hospital for those members of the unreal population who could no longer function in society.
Now, some of the reals who experienced the "turning level event", went insane instead of becoming unreals, but that was different. They were insane, but 100% real, and unfortunately the unreality-relatedness of their illness made it incurable. But these tended to not be tracked very closely.
Threads seem to have a sort of excited-puppy attitude when they're just threads on the plane (look at me! PLAY WITH ME!), but this attitude doesn't seem to carry through when they're instantiated as either an autonomous incursion in the real world, or when they're anthropomorphized in pure unreality. Is there some kind of fundamental change in threads, and how they think, act, or perceive the world around them, when they shift between these forms? Or am I just seeing phantoms with this one?
The personality of a thread depends on the general complexity of the thread *and* its own nature. In general before the time of the nothing, it seemed as though most "cultural" threads (those would be threads with some complexity but not an overwhelming amount) were the most interested in the unreals. As it turns out, the really big ideas tended to be inapprocable as a collective, instead appearing mostly as facet threads (ie Pratchett Death or Gaiman Death, or Rain as a facet of the rain itself). A lot has changed since then and the Nothing -- most of the threads that used to be very interested in the unreals are either burn-out, hiding, imprisoned, or just plain gun-shy.
As to WHY they were interested in the unreals that is a question for you to answer -- if you have guesses I would be happy to hear them as you may well be right.
But trying to answer your question at a high level -- threads only approached in the plane tend to be not part of the story yet. Once they are part of the story they now have a role to fill, a part to play, and apart from possibly trying to increase that role, would tend to stick to that. Now historically threads that do get "a foot in the door" can become very, very important very quickly, and to a dangerous degree -- the Buffy thread, for example, once threatened to consume the unreal story entirely and directly resulted in the death of the Four Aces (Bradshaw, Tina, Sarah, Heather). Also the Evanescence thread was introduced in a big way during Eclipse, but has not left the scene and appears to still be having an impact on the flow of things.
So roundabout way of saying, there is a difference, but not quite one of plane vs. instantiated. But similar, close enough to be a rule of thumb I suppose.
Are there absolute rules of governance for unreality? A set of rules the threads MUST obey (that we as unreals are privy to)? I'm looking for both "rules of law" and "unreal physics".
The "unreal theory" is how unreals can work with unreality and what the limitations are. All of these limitations seem to be imposed by the threads -- ie, if the threads consensus changes, the rules change. This has happened in the past most notably with the Jennifer Laws and of course the Nothing's Decree.
Threads... threads seem to have their own laws, but their interactions with them seem iffy at best, sometimes inconsistent. If anything it seems that threads care very more much about things being "justified" by the circumstance and nature of the moment, than any rigid system. And the case for something being "right" or "wrong" is this flexible, malleable construct that ebbs and flows as part of the give and take between threads.
Like I described when you tried to use your mental powers on Agent Gibbs -- the world he comes from has no information specifically dealing with your powers, BUT his character is known to be very tough mentally -- having resisted torture and extreme coercions in his source, his nature implies that he would have a mental resistance of a very strong nature.
Obviously it could go either way -- perhaps your power surpasses that barrier. But it is more harmonious and "unreality-like" for the threads to be able to make the link and connect the two stories in a meaningful way, it is more "interesting" and it allows Agent Gibbs's character nature to have an impact (however small) in the way the story unfolds.
Unreality is very much constantly trying to sort out the many, many, conflicting stories and rules of all of the individual component threads and produce a workable gestalt -- this is ONLY POSSIBLE with a great deal of give and take and extreme latitude -- when players in the past encountered Thanos with an empowered Infinity Gauntlet -- by the rules of Thanos's story alone, he would just win -- game over -- but because his story is not the only voice there had to be a give and take.
In unreality there is no law that says that "Pride and Prejudice" is a weaker story than "Superman" --- obviously in Superman's world a couple of English gentry would not be... a challenge... but in unreality they have to be placed in the same space... and in fact the concept that most people would consider Pride and Prejudice better literature than Superman would have to be taken into account -- meaning it might even have the advantage in the conflict -- but luckily they only have to decide what happens in such an occurance WHEN IT HAPPENS!
This plays out as the endless give and take, scheming and negotiations between threads -- the Nothing has power, but still threads defy him -- but if the Nothing can convince the other threads that the rebellious threads are not "playing nice" within the gestalt, demanding too much and not playing well with the others, why then they will be ostricized.
Can an incursion be forcibly ended by an entity other than the thread and the unreal involved?
An incursion tied to an unreal can be ended by killing the unreal. That's the way it's worked in the past. With unreals not exactly dying anymore, this conventional wisdom is challenged. "Dispelling" or "dismissing" an incursion would work something like this.
Regular Incursion (imagine this as a MUSH or something):
Unreal: I'm a big red scary dragon! Who breathes fire! Fear me!
Thread A: Oh no! I am a townsperson and I am scared! What will I do!
Thread B: Ah -- the flame is scorching! 1500 degrees! The steel is melting!
Unreal: Bwhaahaha!
Thread C: Ah, but Sir George is coming up the hill... he has heard tale of a dragon terrorizing the countryside....
Unreal: Uhm..
Thread D: AND ITS NAME IS TRODGOR!!!!!
Unreal: No! I didn't mean Trogdor! NOOOOOOOO
Thread D: BURNINATING THE COUNTRYSIDE, BURNINATIN--
*AHEM* You get the idea.
Dismissed Incursion
Unreal: I'm a big red scary dragon! Who breathes fire! Fear me!
Thread A: *yawn* Another dragon... what is that? Eight this week?
Thread B: What, did Fourth edition coming out cause this?
Unreal: Uh.. guys... I'm burning down the houses. Killing the peasants.
Thread A: Yeah. I hear they're charging $150 for the box set.
Thread B: Meh. Amazon.
Unreal: I BURN YOUR FACE OFF WITH MY FLAMES!
Thread C: What's he on about? Something going on?
Thread A: Naw. Not really. Just ignore him. Things he's a dragon.
Thread D: But guys! I really worked hard on this... look, hes going to realize he's Trogdor next!
Thread C: Trogdor? Isn't that a little.... 2003?
Thread D: But... but...
Thread A: Come back to us when you've got a fresh angle.
Thread D: Alright.
Unreal: Hey... what's happening... um... where'd .... why am I not a dragon any more?
As you can see here, the incurred thread needs to willingly give up the incursion, but is forced into that position by its peers. This is sort of a microcosm of what all the threads have to go through to get an incursion going and keep it alive.
Is there a thread for the concept of incursions? Is there a thread for the concept of threads?
There are no single threads for the primary elements of unreality BUT there are many, many, many, many sources and threads that comprised windows and views into the way incursions and threads work -- just about since the first time that man started grunting out fiction to each other, the ideas of unreality started forming. This means that there are a whole lot of threads that are SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality, but not quite. But if you arranged them all in a circle they'd circumscribe and point directly to the X that is unreality.
For example:
Plato's ideas of the idealized form is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
Cartesian dualism is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
The Matrix is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
Magic revolving around true names, or sympathetic magic where you use a connection between words or objects is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
Any sort of matching of anthropomorphic characters to concepts (like Angles with words from In Nomine, Patron Saints, Strawberry Shortcake) is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
The song "Limelight" by Rush is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
The 500 Kingdoms series is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
Don Quixote, one of the earliest novels is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
Every Disney movie where emotion trumphs circumstance is SORT-OF-LIKE parts of unreality
In other words, because unreality is the jostling together of all the stories -- all the stories are SORT-OF-LIKE unreality, and in many cases the paradigm will work for whatever you want it to.
I know I had other questions but they're escaping me at the moment. One probably involved time travel =)