#might revisit the possibility when it comes to the writeup

[pochapal]

gonna be honest i hadn't even really thought about a master key until now. that's...hm.

[eliotquillon]

the h.i.v.e timeline

(this is going to end up massive, so sorry in advance to all my none h.i.v.e followers).

obligatory disclaimer that while i’m trying to follow canon fairly closely here, i know i might have missed some details; this is a writeup of a google doc i made immediately after my feb reread and while i have reread books 1 and 2 since then, i haven’t had the time to double check anything from dreadnought onwards. there are also canon elements that i am deliberately ignoring/reordering, and i will make it clear that i am doing so when those details come up.

part one: student ages

currently, we only have two canon ages: raven, who is thirty-one in deadlock (or thereabouts; i’m basing this off her being 16 when she tries to kill nero and that being in the 15 years ago flashback), and otto, who we know turns thirteen just before he is sent to h.i.v.e (the specific age comes from the blurb of book one). we also know that nero taught diabolus and duncan cavendish as students, and that h.i.v.e was founded in the 1960s, which seems vague but actually gives us a lot to work with; cavendish’s records being faked implies that h.i.v.e does provide public examination results for its students, and that h.i.v.e’s entry year was deliberately chosen to parallel the english private school system (which, unlike the state system, is split into pre-prep, prep, and senior), where entry to senior school coincidentally takes place at the same age of entry to h.i.v.e

when it comes to making age estimations for students during the various points of the series, i’m making three assumptions:

1. all students in otto’s year are thirteen when they start h.i.v.e, just like otto.

2. otto turns thirteen in august 2006, making him one of the youngest students in his year, assuming the h.i.v.e school year starts in early september like most british schools. most of the ‘age’ section of this hinges off otto, because he’s the only student who is given an age and is seen celebrating a birthday.

3. the six years spent at h.i.v.e span what would be year 9-13 + the first year of university in the british system. in the american system this is grades 8-12 + the first year of university. therefore, students graduate at the age of nineteen.

h.i.v.e:

every first year alpha is thirteen.

the overlord protocol:

this is still set in first year, but is months after the events of book one. otto is still thirteen, but we can assume that, at this point, some people have turned fourteen. my money would be on wing, shelby, and possibly franz as being the older kids in their year (and therefore fourteen), but the semantics don’t really matter.

escape velocity:

this is the first book with a sizeable time skip - we see otto trying to steal the end-of-year exam for second years. this means everyone is now at least fourteen, and because (in my personal experience) late july/august birthdays aren’t very common, i’d wager that shelby, wing, laura, and franz are all fifteen; i’m excluding nigel here because i think, based off his physical description, he’s probably one of the younger kids in his year, and otto is obviously still fourteen, nearly fifteen. this is supported by raven telling otto that she was almost exactly the same age as the core four when she went on her first mission; we know from deadlock that she was sixteen, which would only be a year (max) older than the alphas at this point in time.

dreadnought:

dreadnought is set at the start of third year; we know this because the 93-percenter is specifically a third year field trip. this means that everyone, including lucy, is fifteen.

rogue:

rogue is where our perfectly constructed timeline slips, because it seemingly ages otto backwards - it is set thirteen years after we see otto being cloned in the tank, which would make otto thirteen even though he ends dreadnought at fifteen. there are multiple potential explanations for this - i favour the idea that otto is registered as older than he is biologically because he’s a clone/genius and was left at the orphanage with no birth certificate - but either way, i’m still going to say that otto is fifteen and that everyone else is a third year and either fifteen or sixteen. side note: otto’s benjamin button trick here is one of my least favourite ‘slips’ of the series and ruins what is otherwise one of my favourite entries.

zero hour:

there is a year between rogue and zero hour, meaning zero hour is set in fourth year and that otto is sixteen (and again, everyone else is either sixteen or seventeen). in my original doc, i made a note saying that apparently everyone is still in third year, but based off a quick search for ‘three’ and ‘third’ in the ebook, there’s no proof for that. lucy dies when she’s sixteen/seventeen.

aftershock:

there’s another short timeskip here, and based off the fact that this is when penny and tom join and that it’s the introduction of new security chief dekker, we can guess that this is the beginning of fifth year (incidentally, the fact that nero and raven are available at the beginning of the book to go meet joseph wright in london does appear to suggest that nero wasn’t needed to teach that day, meaning that there is some form of summer holiday at h.i.v.e). i also think it’s likely that this is fifth year because penny and tom a) had time to gain relative notoriety for their thefts and b) would’ve needed to be at least sixteen to leave school and local authority care (although tom is apparently a year or two older than otto and penny according to book one) and it being fifth year sets everyone at seventeen. seventeen is actually pretty old for the alphas to be taken to the glasshouse (raven went at age eleven), but i think it does make sense that the hunt was targeted, and not the third years on the 93 percenter; tom and penny actually had time to go to lessons pre field trip, and lucy didn’t, meaning that the 93 percenter mostly likely happens in the first few days of the school year and was organised before dekker became a member of staff, which wouldn’t have given the disciples the necessary time to plan and execute a retrieval. also, laura was obviously in fifth year and not third, making the hunt a far more attractive choice for anastasia to target.

deadlock:

deadlock is similar to rogue in that it fluffs an important timeline detail, but it’s not relevant to ages here, so i’ll revisit it later. it’s set several months after aftershock, but seeing as no other students are recruited to pad out the three left in the alpha stream and that aftershock was only set in the first month or so of the school year, i think it’s safe to assume that everyone is still in fifth year at this point, so either seventeen or eighteen. my gut feeling is that shelby, franz, and wing are all eighteen, and that’s because they’re allowed on the mission to break into the glasshouse; obviously we see them get into danger/be involved in plans before this point, but this is the first time we see nero actively sign off on them being allowed into a tactical situation with a known risk to life (and i’ve made a shitpost on this, but raven does say that nero would “have her shot” if she brought thirteen year old otto into a tactical situation back in the overlord protocol, so i think the only way nero would’ve allowed this to happen was if the remaining alpha students were all legal adults). the exception to this is otto, who would still be seventeen, but seeing as he isn’t an enrolled h.i.v.e student at the time of the mission, i don’t think nero’s no-student policy applies to him.

book nine:

obviously none of us know what’s going to happen, but i think it’s safe to say book nine will probably be set in otto’s final year, when he’s eighteen.

part two: adult ages

really, i should just be transparent and call this what it is, which is just blatant nero age speculation. while it’s implied that nero is immortal in book one, this is also literally never mentioned again, and the only physical indicator we know is that he has a streak of grey in his hair. however, i do have a bunch of info that can give some clues at how old nero really is.

1. nero taught diabolus, and is implied to have been headmaster of h.i.v.e at this time. we’re not really sure how old diabolus is, either, but seeing as he has a teenaged son and was old enough to have had a considerable career and be made head of g.l.o.v.e, he can’t be any younger than his late thirties by the time he pops up in escape velocity, and i’m guessing he’s inching towards fifty purely because he isn’t described as being particularly young when we see him in hong kong with nero 15 years before the events of deadlock. (i am, however, aware that this means nothing, because walden sucks at describing people). that means nero’s been teaching some forty years, which lines up with him co-founding h.i.v.e with his father in the 60s, and seeing as h.i.v.e is nero’s great passion project, i don’t think he could’ve been any younger than 25 when h.i.v.e opened in the original icelandic facility. basically, this tells us what we already know: nero is old as shit, and doesn’t look it.

2. the duncan cavendish thing interests me a lot more, because we see that nero actively switched cavendish from polfi to alpha. again, it was already implied that nero was headmaster from the beginning, but this shows that nero was always running the show and wasn’t just initially his father’s apprentice as deadlock almost seems to hint at.

3. nero has a doctorate. “well duh”. but again, if nero had that doctorate when he founded h.i.v.e, he has to be nearing seventy. he could’ve gotten it earlier, sure, because nero is a very intelligent man, but he’s not otto-levels of academic genius. i don’t think he could’ve been any younger than 15/16 when he got his phd.

i did say that this would be an ‘adult ages’ section, so i’ll do a bit of background on raven, the only adult with timestamps. her being thirty one in deadlock makes her twenty seven in book one (if we follow the logic of otto being seventeen in deadlock), and because i personally believe the h.i.v.e timeline starts with book 1’s publication in 2006, this means raven was born around 1979 (which, if you subscribe to the theory that raven is elena and nero’s kid, makes her born after h.i.v.e was founded, which has some interesting implications about the origins of the glasshouse).

i know we’re all in mutual agreement about the soviet training being a bullshit throwaway line that walden wrote in before deciding to make raven a major player, but i’ll do the work of disproving it anyway: if raven was born in ‘79 and she came to the glasshouse at 11, that means she started her training in 1990. the soviet union officially fell in 1991, but the berlin wall fell in 1989, and the cold war was pretty much over by the time raven came to the glasshouse thanks to gorbachev’s new policies and military cuts. there is absolutely no way that the furans were soviet-funded, or that raven was trained by the soviet government. in fact, the only feasible way raven could’ve been trained by the soviet union in, quote from book 1 here, “their cold war prime”, would be for her to have been born almost a full 20 years earlier in the early 1960s, which would’ve made her middle aged in book 1. but, like, you tried walden.

part three: overlord

the overlord incident - the one that led to the destruction of the chinese facility and inadvertantly led to wing’s birth thanks to wu zhang and xiu mei shacking up together - is probably the most crucial part of the h.i.v.e timeline. without it, number one never would’ve been corrupted, otto wouldn’t have been born/manufactured, the seed code for h.i.v.emind wouldn’t have existed, cypher never would’ve launched his assault on h.i.v.e and nero (or felt the need to come into existence at all), and, of course, overlord himself wouldn’t have been the world’s most annoying LED lightshow for five books (because book one hardly counts). but even though raven had nothing to do with the original overlord incident, she’s still strongly linked to it. i’ll explain.

the overlord incident had to have happened before raven met nero. i can’t stress that enough, and this is the conflicting detail that i mentioned in deadlock. the nero’s internal monologue in the fifteen years before flashback appears to indicate that the overlord incident hasn’t happened yet - but that can’t be true, otherwise wing wouldn’t exist.

like i’ve laid out, wing is thirteen in late august 2006, and most likely eighteen (but at least seventeen) in 2010/11, aka deadlock. this gives him an approximate birth year of 1992/3, and all roads lead back to raven, who would’ve been fourteen when wing was born. already, that makes her too young to have met nero pre-overlord incident. but even more importantly, wu zhang and xiu mei only ended up together because of the overlord incident. like i said, if it weren’t for overlord, wing would not exist. we don’t know when wu zhang and xiu mei‘s friendship turned to romance, but if xiu mei got pregnant in 1992 (which fits with either of wing’s birth years - either he’s late ‘92 or early ‘93), i’d wager they got together in 1991 at the latest. raven would’ve been twelve.

i’m putting the overlord incident at a tentative year 1990, which would’ve allowed plenty of time for xiu mei and wu zhang to escape china together and fall in love before wing’s birth, and also gives overlord a handful of years to start corrupting number one to convince him into cloning himself to make otto (who was dropped off at the orphange in august ‘93). raven came to the glasshouse in 1990. there is absolutely no way she could’ve met nero while he was still making arrangements for overlord, unless wing was born after 1995 when raven tried to kill nero, in which case wing wouldn’t have been at h.i.v.e at the same time as shelby and laura (and nor would otto, come to think of it).

anyway, i’ll do a tl;dr with the final timeline below.

TL;DR (final timeline)

1960s: h.i.v.e is founded.

1979: raven is born.

1980s: both duncan cavendish and diabolus darkdoom presumably attend h.i.v.e during this period. the zero hour contingency plan is drawn up.

1990: overlord is created in a lab in northern china, and is destroyed by number one. it then takes up host in his body. there are three named survivors: nero, wu zhang, and xiu mei. raven is sent to the glasshouse.

1991: wu zhang and xiu mei move to japan and rename themselves as the fanchus. they fall in love around this point. this is also the year where raven tries to escape from the glasshouse and claws out pietor’s eye.

1992: overlord/number one starts work on cloning himself. xiu mei falls pregnant, and possibly gives birth.

1993: otto, shelby, wing, nigel, franz, laura and lucy are all born at varying points throughout the year. this is most likely also the year where dimitri is shot by anastasia furan, and raven is forced to murder tolya.

1994: presumably the year when h.i.v.e’s original location is compromised, and plans start being made to relocate from the icelandic facility.

1995: nero meets with the architect/his father to discuss his plans for the new h.i.v.e facility. raven tries to kill him. the first glasshouse burns.

1996-2005: construction on h.i.v.e 2.0 is completed. overlord slowly takes over more and more of number one’s body. survivors of the overlord incident start disappearing. xiu mei dies of unknown causes. nero receives his half of the amulet. lucy’s parents die of natural causes and she is sent to italy. gregori leonov’s son, yuri, attends h.i.v.e and graduates. cypher pops into existence around this time. diabolus darkdooms fakes his death.

2006: otto, wing, laura, shelby, franz, and nigel start attending h.i.v.e (cue the events of book one). duncan cavendish becomes prime minister.

2007: cypher launches his assult on nero after successfully convincing the contessa to join his cause. after cypher is captured and his identity is revealed, nero keeps him alive unbeknownst to number one. by august, everyone is fourteen.

2008: cue the events of escape velocity. number one and the contessa die. diabolus darkdoom is elected leader of g.l.o.v.e. cue the events of interception point. otto turns fifteen. lucy joins h.i.v.e at the beginning of september and the events of dreadnought take place. otto does not return to h.i.v.e.

2009: events of rogue. cypher and pietor furan die. otto turns sixteen at the end of august. laura’s baby brother, douglas, is conceived.

2010: douglas is born. the events of zero hour occur. lucy dies. overlord is destroyed. nero becomes leader of g.l.o.v.e and fires the ruling council. duncan cavendish steps down. construction of the new glasshouse is completed. otto turns seventeen. penny and tom join h.i.v.e. the events of aftershock occur, and otto is expelled.

2011: the events of deadlock occur. raven turns thirty one. tom dies. the new glasshouse is destroyed. the countdown for the disciples’ new batch of clones begins at 99 days. the artemis project discover the existence of h.i.v.e. at the end of year, otto is eighteen.

2012 onwards: otto turns nineteen and hopefully graduates h.i.v.e.

[teratoscope]

Unbounded Lands postmortem

 this takes a kind of circuitous path and gets heavy fast.

The fall before I started Teratoscope, my brother and I were in a car accident.

The morning of, I made a stupid turn that put a headlight out of commission and mangled the fender pretty badly. It was the first time I’d ever really fucked up a vehicle. Every forty-five seconds or so the car would make this brief scraping noise. I had a good three-hour drive ahead of me that would take me through St. Louis and, I would quickly discover, a torrential rainstorm. Stupidly, I pressed on anyway. I had to pay rent that day. I was full of miserable thoughts about how much it was going to cost me to get the headlight replaced and the body work done, about what might happen if I crossed paths with a cop, you get the idea. I had this recurring imp-of-the-perverse notion that if the car got utterly trashed at least I wouldn’t have to worry about getting the damn thing fixed.

Because I was eager to put a long convoy of semis behind me, I spent a lot of time in the left lane and above the speed limit—way too far above for the amount of water on the asphalt and the crap visibility. Eventually, I got to thinking I was clear on the right; anxious to get back to a reasonable speed, I started to change lanes.

There was somebody coming out of my blind spot; I caught them coming and started to course-correct. We were on a pretty dramatic curve in the highway, or coming up on it, on approach to an overpass.  I started hydroplaning. I panicked, not remembering how to stabilize, and the car spun out.

I don’t have a great sensory recollection of what happened next, but this is what the bystanders saw. The car threaded the needle between two semis, tore through a good ten feet of highway railing and a lamppost (just barely clearing the concrete nub it was bolted to), and ground to a halt after slamming into the hill the overpass was built into. It was sitting mostly on its side, with bits of hill stuck in it.

My brother and I were completely unharmed, aside from some unpleasant bruises.

What I remember from the accident is the sudden, overwhelming loss of control, the terrible lurch I felt as everything outside the car blurred together into an unintelligible slurry, and then the smell of gunsmoke and my hands clawing in horror at this vast volume of gray, thinking this is what death is like, then.

It was the airbag.

These are things that snuck up on me in bed and in the shower for many months afterward. I don’t get the flashbacks anymore, but when I’m not distracting myself with work or stories I’m susceptible to this visceral awareness of my presence as a body in time. I can feel myself hurtling through the fourth dimension, and it feels a lot like being in that car.

It forces me to reckon with big questions about death and consciousness and embodiment. Which is what got me thinking very seriously about sizes of infinity and negative spaces—not just in space but in time and possibility.

I don’t think I started Teratoscope as a way of coping with my trauma and the existential challenges it forced me to acknowledge, but looking back on Unbounded Lands it’s hard to ignore that they’re in there. The Unbounded Lands are, to an extent, a vision of the world as riddled through with existential anxieties as I am. It’s a place with negative possibility space bleeding into it, with multiple ambiguous pasts and futures looping back around into the now and forcing it to confront the moral exhaustion of perpetual being.

I don’t think I’ve fully reckoned with this stuff. That DNA’s carried over to Freestar One; if anything it’s only going to get more so in the next series.

On a lighter note, design!

I did a lot of wavering back and forth about damage and lethality; it’s something I’ve struggled with designing monsters before, partly because I’m lethally allergic to “strategic balance.” Challenge Rating as a concept can eat my whole ass. Generally speaking I think of D&D as in large part a horror game, and so I tend to lean towards lethal critters, but as wary as I am of turning into a 4e-style fight clockmaker, I’m equally concerned about the “Killer DM” rep that so much OSR design carries with it. This is definitely still a problem I’m wrestling with—I think the root of it is that, much as I love the mode of tabletop these critters are for, I don’t get to play it much with the regular group I’ve got. We’re more of a storygames crowd in practice.

Something I mostly tried to avoid while writing Unbounded Lands was giving critters “spell-like abilities.” Something I fucking loathe about later editions of D&D is the way it sucks the mystique out of its own design by making the bulk of its game effects modular. Now, there have always been monsters with spell lists in D&D, but I think it’s gotten progressively more egregious with each subsequent edition. A lot of the problem has to do with feature bloat and the need to turn away from the monster stat block to look something up; in my opinion a tabletop game should be designed such that one needs to do as little cross-referencing as humanly possible. On a related note, whoever came up with giving monster writeups long lists of feats should be caned.

That being said, I should note I’ve broken my own rule a couple of times in Unbounded Lands—the Catalyst Sprite and Slinn are both pretty clear examples of this kind of design. I’ll admit they were ideas I liked, but didn’t have elegant mechanics in mind for them at the time. I’ll likely revisit them in one form or another one day, once I’ve built up a sufficient stock of critters that no longer appeal to me as they did when I first conceived of them. Like a “Misfit Monsters Revisited,” but, you know, for a system I find bearable.

Finally, I figure it pays to rattle off a bit of an “appendix N” for Teratoscope—readings and extracurriculars that played an inspirational role in developing the setting:

any of China Mieville’s Bas-Lag novels. Mieville’s a fucking legend when it comes to whipping up critters; Iron Council is the overall best of the three. Also, his essays and lectures on variations upon the uncanny are absolute must-reads for any teratologist.

A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison. The Unbounded Lands are a bottomless time abyss, not dying by degrees like Harrison’s future-Earth, but the ontological crisis/alien invasion that forms the central plot of the second Viriconium novella is a very appropriate sort of horrible thing to happen there. As a side note, I would kill for a game with Soulsborne-inspired gameplay and Viriconium’s genre sensibilities.

Fire on the Velvet Horizon. My most direct inspiration for writing a monster manual, period. My resolution at the start of Teratoscope was that if I could create critters half as fucking baller as Patrick Stuart’s and then bolt some pretty serviceable mechanics to them, I’d have succeeded.

the artwork of Alexander Kostetsky. There’s a lot of art references I could drop in for Unbounded Lands, but Kostetsky marries the ludicrous scale, kaleidoscopic palette, and feverish organic form that I think is integral to the setting to this sense of bleakness, patience, silence, openness. Which is a fucking challenge, and also suits Unbounded Lands quite well. The barren stretches of Manmonumeq and sunken spires of Old Hyrkonia are his.

YT//ST - Yamantaka Sonic Titan. My brother once summarized this album’s sound as “being sung at by a sea witch and her army of clothes dryers with bricks thrown in them.” He’s not wrong. It slaps. Put on Crystal Fortress over the Sea of Trees and go fight the Hecatoncheiropolis.