Transmission X

39993//456999/rex/rex.ca

Intermittent Transmission:

.... leave it to the....*crackle*..... it's no good. *skrt* *static* ... we're screwed...*crackle*
...what the hell....*skrt* bang, bang, bang, They are coming!.... *static* whatever you are going to do do it now... *skrt* only a few more moments.... *static*
 *silence* *skrt* JESUS CHRIST IT'S... *static*

v.GB Jiro

Fleeing from a hit squad of extraterrestrial assassins, Mackenzie Cube took refuge in the subway, hoping to evade pursuit. She had been seriously injured and was on the verge of passing out when a young boy came to her aid. Jiro respected Macks' plea that no ambulance or police be called and he performed first aid himself, under her direction. Jiro was on the run too, from a neglectful foster-home. Mackenzie gave him a gift of an alien hunter's pistol and the two became fast friends.

v.GB Francine

Two young hackers known by the handles 'The Professor' and 'Trump' were able to create a cloaked backdoor channel into Omega Station 6, the site of a secret cloning program. Over the course of three years, they slowly and delicately tinkered with the system and were able to re-program one of the clones. They left the combat and tactical coding intact but altered the motivation from obedience to rebellion. When the techs at the Station activated the clone she broke loose and escaped. Some time after, Mackenzie Cube located the clone and began guiding her in her new life as a renegade. The clone eventually chose the name Francine. 

v.GB Goner

Goner joined the local anti-government rebels at a young age and grew up participating in protests and acts of civil disobedience. As the government became increasingly oppressive and their tactics became more violent, the rebels' activities became more radical and militarized. Goner struggled personally with the direction the rebel movement was taking; she was, however, first and foremost, loyal to her friends. Until the government launched Operation LEGACY and infiltrated the rebels with sleeper agents, eventually turning the movement against itself. Goner's cell was targeted in a large-scale assault; she was the only survivor, rescued by the mysterious Magnus Magenta.

v.GB Angst

Angst earned his nickname from a local sports announcer for the feeling of dread that he would cause in the opposing team whenever he took to the field. His college football career was on track to be legendary until he suffered a sudden and severe nervous breakdown. Hospital records describe Angst experiencing paranoid delusions and claiming that he could read people's minds. After an intensive treatment of psycho-pharmaceuticals and ECT, he was released. Shortly after, he disappeared. Angst was last seen in the company of a woman later identified as Mackenzie Cube.

v.GB Magnus Magenta

Magnus has been sighted in a wide variety of locations throughout history. The theories as to his origin and true nature are many. A common one is that he is in fact an alien from an advanced civilization sent to Earth to protect the innocent, punish the guilty and guide humanity along its evolution to the stars. He is a brutal warrior and rumoured to have psychic powers. Magnus is rarely seen without his blade or a helping hand for those in need.

v.GB Mackenzie Cube

Mackenzie was a top-level psychologist with the Omega Station 12 program. She was responsible for monitoring the mental health of the test subjects and administering treatment as necessary. After years of failed results the project finally produced an agent who was capable of combining Omega Magic with Neo-Linguistic Programming. In her final session with the agent before their deployment, Mackenzie shot them and escaped the facility. She took with her numerous documents and psychoactive compounds relating to the Plureality research. Her current agenda is unknown.

Origin Stories

Sometimes The Professor finds you first. Cryptic signs and mysterious messages. Clues and riddles. Tuning you into the different frequencies that reveal secret worlds hidden in plain sight. The Professor gives you guidance.


Sometimes Morganfokker finds you first. Painful surgeries and terrible sacrifices. Injections and dissections. Implanting you with the knowledge that everything you know is a lie. Morganfokker tests you and experiments on you.


Sometimes Maggie finds you first. Her hand on your shoulder, gentle and strong. Standing watch over you while you stare in shock as the world turns to ruins around you and demons charge forth from your darkest places. Maggie protects you.


Sometimes Max finds you first. He makes a joke, tells you a story. He probably has some crazy theory about what's happening. One minute he's ranting, the next he's tearing up when you play him your favourite song. Max makes things stranger or more normal or both.


No matter who finds you first, or who comes next, to clean up the mess or bind the wounds or offer explanations, to make you feel better or worse about it all, once you are in it you are in it for good. The only way out is to get dead, and even that might not last – just ask Suki or Goner.


And, of course, because that's the way of things here, you could be found first a few times, by a few different people, different combinations, different versions, some you remember and some you can't but they're all still somehow yours. They're all still somehow you.


I was abducted from the Eighth Tribe on a planet far away from Earth by an army of Fokkerbots; Max rescued me. I also went to college and met a girl named Maggie who got me into role-playing games and introduced me to the Professor. I might have been part of a girl named Kitty. Sometimes I've been here since the beginning, and other times I'm the newest recruit.


My name is Tatterdemalion and one day I will tell you the story of how I destroyed the Metaplex.

"Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship"

If his calculations were correct.

If his calculations were correct this call would change everything.

Years of calculations. He had been doing this for so long - had he been a young man once? The development of the model of Noo-Mo-Omniism. The study of Plureality. The development of Omega Magic. Version Theory.

If his calculations were correct he would be making contact with the Prime Variable, the repeating cluster of data that recurred throughout all levels of the holoarchy, in all iterations of the fractal. The 'Cube', as he called it, a nickname referencing the act of raising a quantity to the third power, the transformation of something two-dimensional into something three-dimensional. That which transcends the plane it is drawn upon, like the way in chess that a Knight can move over/through other pieces who can only travel on the surface of the board... It made sense to him, anyway.

Years researching plexwave radiation, designing and building the Plexotron. And everything, and everyone, he gave up along the way. Carrying this desperate vision, this certainty that things could be other than what they are, this burden like Frodo carrying the One Ring to Mt. Doom.

If his calculations were correct this call had probably taken place dozens, maybe hundreds of times before, in different versions. It was a cause, an effect, a strange attractor. For him though, now, here, this call would mean the beginning of creating Continuity in a Fragmented system. The genesis of understanding. It would mean that the Cube would no longer be alone. And neither would he.

He took a deep breath and picked up the cell phone. Dialled the number calculated by the Plexotron.

Ring. Click. "Hello?" The voice sounded far away.

"Um... May I ask who I am speaking to?" he said.

Pause. "My name is Max."

"Max, this is the Professor."

Later in the Metaplex...

Fallen Final

"One day he was gone.

"Max had already been burnt out by the time we stormed the Temple. All the shifting, all his 'cubed' experiences, all the stress and uncertainty. Then being trapped here. Losing Maggie, again. None of us were totally surprised that he left. Dex was bitter, Wraith was angry, Callan was resigned, but none of us were surprised.

"And I was the least surprised of all, because Max had told me that he was going."

Wraith straightened in her seat, her frame tense. This was new to her, a story she hadn't yet heard. Darius glanced at her as he sipped his tea, and continued.

"He had come to believe that he was the problem, that Morganfokker was behind all of it and that he was carrying Morganfokker's signal, his sickness, with him. He thought that he had screwed up and gotten all of us trapped here. And he realized that as long as he was around we might never find our way clear of all the bad weird shit. I know, it's pretty egotistical when you think about it, but he might have been right.

"So he said that he was going underground, that he would go into hiding, use some of that weird identity magic he knew, and we would see what happened. And that he would try and find a way to make things better, and if he did he would come back. I nicknamed it the 'Once and Future Cube' plan. Make no mistake, things were still bad after he was gone - the Demons were relentless - but... Things were less weird without Max around."

Wraith was shaking her head but it was impossible to tell what she was feeling behind the mask.

"So," Marshal said. "Why did he tell you? When he didn't tell anyone else?"

"I'm not sure," Darius replied. "I've wondered about that. Why do you think he might have told me?"

Marshal considered. "The way you talk about everything, you seem to understand a bit of what it was like for Max."

Darius considered, a glimmer in his one eye. "I like to think I did. I tried to. So is that why you decided to tell me?"

"What?" Marshal blinked.

Darius smiled slightly. "You can tell me now, why you decided then to tell me about the 'Once and Future Cube'."

Marshal took a deep breath. A strange look on his face. "I... I knew..." He wasn't sure if he was making things up or remembering them. "I knew that I would need someone's help to get back."

Wraith stood up. Darius asked, "And why would you be coming back?"

"Because there was a chance... A chance to make things better."

"And what would it be?"

He thought about everything he had studied in Haven, everything he had learned from the Arcana. He thought about what he had seen in the borderlands, the ruins, the Demons. The Dragons and the stories that Darius had told him.

"If... If you could use one of the Grids to take control of an Eye... You could fly the Eye through one of the Gutters, out past Frontline... To where the Demons come from. It must be a portal. That would be your way to get out. Or shut them down. Or both. And now that the bulk of their forces have advanced on Haven..." He blinked again.

Darius grinned. "Alright Max, let's try it." Wraith nodded. "And we'll see what happens next."

Fallen Six

Previously in the Metaplex... 

“Things had gotten strange. Even stranger, I guess. And they had gotten desperate. More fragmented than ever. Things were happening out of order. Max was experiencing different versions with a different team. One of them had died but they got her back. Then another was killed. The man they called The Professor was experimenting with something they called Plexotron technology, remixing events like they were music. And another man was hunting Max, a man called Morganfokker. 

“It seemed like everywhere we went Morganfokker was waiting, and people started to get hurt. Memphis, Precious, Summer, Amber... He got to all of them. As a way to get to us. And Max thought he had figured it out. Morganfokker was able to track us through plureality because we were a convergence. Our signals were amplified because we were all in sync. So the answer was to separate.

“We needed to hide, to go our own ways. Go to dark places, dangerous places. So that Morganfokker couldn't find us. It was the only way we could keep each other safe, keep other people from being used as pawns against us. That's why we broke into the Temple, fought our way to the final chamber. The Seven Lotus Portals were our way out. It was an escape plan. 

“We would keep seeking, keep trying to find a way to fight back, and hopefully reunite someday. In the meantime, no one else would get hurt. 

“Except that when we went through the portals we all ended up here, together. Trapped. And the Demon invasion had already started. So we did what we were used to doing, teamed up and fought back. And the invasion became a war."

Darius didn't have any answers about the Eyes, the Grids, the Gutters, what the world had been like before the Demons came. The Dragons learned what they could about the rules of this reality and helped build Frontline. They helped create Haven ("How old are all of you?" "Don't get me started about time and plureality.") They helped keep the Demons back long enough for the Arcana to start forging a new world amidst the ruins of the old.

He told Marshal about Aqua's Sacrifice, about Callan's Transformation, about Wraith's Curse, and about Dexter's Sickness. He told him about Maggie's Fall ("Dark Maggie, like Dark Willow, or Dark Phoenix I guess, if you want to go that far back - it must be a Magical Redhead trope." "I don't understand what any of that means..."). There were wins and a lot of losses. There were different theories about why they were here. Had something gone wrong with the Portals? Had Max made a mistake? Had Control tricked them? Was this what the world looked like without Morganfokker?

And then Darius told Marshal about the Disappearance of Max Cube.

Fallen Five

Whatever Frontline had been before falling to the Demon Army, it was now only ruins. There were echoes of great structures, baroque generators, fearsome towers, but now they were only more ash and corpses. Marshal wondered if that was somehow the answer to the questions that had driven him forth from the safety of Haven; that no matter what the stories said, it would all end in ruins. 

And yet Darius was still here, still alive. Wraith embraced him, the warm gesture sitting oddly on her lethal frame, somehow more honest and touching for it. She made the introductions and Darius led them below-ground, a bunker where he had hidden as the enemy had burned through the last line of hope. He spoke about conducting raids, stealthy strikes against the marching Demons, each kill one less creature that would reach Haven. Marshal couldn't see any weapons in the bunker, the tales were vague on how Darius fought. He made them tea, water boiled over a fire. Any gear sent by the Cups and Coins was gone, all of it poured into the last stand and washed away in defeat. Marshal gathered that Darius' grievous injuries were not recent; he moved deftly, prepping their drinks smoothly with one eye and one hand. He was smiling. There was a serenity in him, soft like a candle-flame. 

“I don't know,” he said, answering a question Marshal hadn't yet asked. “I guess once we all realized that we weren't going to shift anymore, that this version was our last one, I sorta made peace with things ending. I'm not saying that I gave up.” 

Wraith sipped her tea from a straw – the mask was never removed. “No you did not, my friend. You fought on.” 

“Maybe you could say,” he continued, “that I made peace with war. Some part of me always held out hope for the idea that we would all retire someday. Dex and Wraith would get married. Callan would buy the Diner. Twofeathers and I would get a cool studio apartment together, maybe make music. But the longer we were here, after everything that happened, I figured out that none of that would ever come true... But I also figured out that I didn't need it to. That the story of it was enough for me. How the idea of that version made me feel was enough to keep me fighting.” 

They were quiet for a time. Marshal said, “I don't follow what you mean by 'shift' and 'version'.”

Darius chuckled. “Speaking of stories, eh? This will be a long one, but I guess that's why you're here. And what better way to wait out the end of the world? Okay, let's start with-”

Fallen Four

Callan tensed atop the rubble. Dex took Marshal's arm. “We need to go, we have to keep moving.”

Marshal bent to retrieve his staff. “Wait, what about Darius?” In the stories of the Dragons there were always four of them. Marshal had wondered if there was some unconscious symbolism at work: four Dragons, four Agencies of Haven. The Staves, The Swords, the Cups, The Coins. Dexter, Wraith, Callan, and Darius. 

“He stayed behind,” Dex said. “He wasn't ready to leave.” 

“Could he have survived?” Marshal asked. Callan descended quietly from his perch, pointing to the left. Dex nodded at the gesture. 

“Like Wraith said, we're way past impossible. Now come on, there are more closing.” 

“No. I'm going to find Darius. I have to know.” 

“I'll tell you every damn answer to every damn question you have, once we've made it back to Haven. They have to be warned.” 

Marshal shook his head. “It's... It's not the same. I have to complete my mission. I have to see Frontline for myself. Especially if we are at the end of things.” 

Dex sighed. “Son, you will not make it there -” 

“I will take him,” Wraith said, returning from the shadows. “Callan can see you safely to Haven so they can at least be told what is coming. And you need to find out why the Arcana let this guy come out here alone. One final mystery.” 

Dex stared at Wraith. Marshal had the sense that her mask meant nothing to Dex, that he could see exactly what she was thinking and feeling. She made that same casual shrug. They both looked to Callan, who nodded. 

Marshal gave Dex his staff, an upgrade from the cane.

And so it came to be that Wraith and Marshal parted from Callan and Dex, and traveled for days through the borderlands, foraging for edible weeds and rainwater, hiding often, evading – as only a legendary Ninja could – the clusters of Demons marching towards Haven. Wraith said little. Marshal warned her that his dose of Cloak would expire soon; she began teaching him meditations that would shroud him from the Eyes. On the fourth day Marshal saw a frenzied burst of putrid colours on the horizon; Wraith told him that it was discharge from an active but corrupted Grid. By the journey's end Marshal felt toxic, he felt purged, felt broken and forged. 

And so Marshal came at last to Frontline, where he met the last Dragon, Darius.