Episode 84 of the Letters Page - OblivAeon Part 2 (spoiler discussion)

The end has come

http://theletterspage.libsyn.com/episode-84-oblivaeon-part-2

Well, now that everything’s officially out there...

...One of us is gonna have to update the TV Tropes page.

What a fun finale. I have to admit, I slipped into a bit of “pacing around haughtily” because Voss’ ego was so enjoyable. Just makes you wanna move.

I loved the Bloodsworn victory theme at the end, too. Really did feel like a great climactic moment.

Okay I’m dropping the podcast now bye /s

Super epic finale to the OblivAeon story! Some of the scenes were super awesome to imagine, and it felt like I was reading a comic.

I'm still waiting for my copy of OblivAeon, and this makes it even harder to wait for.

Also, nice to see my favorite character, Baron Blade/Luminary have a big part in the finale, and had some epic scenes all to himself.

So I re-listened to the GTG origin story episode last week (like one does). 

C&A recorded this episode in the middle of the night. 

They came up with the idea for the card game while waiting for a plane, in the middle of the night. 

Sentinels of The Multiverse is basically ending like it started (with two sleep deprived guys talking about super heroe stuff).  

I sad we didnt get Promos for oblivaeon shard tempest and Focused/Scholar Guise. They sound suuuuuper awesome.

I definitely had at least 10, if not 15, questions for this episode, which was trimmed down to 4. 

Hopefully some of those will make a reappearance during the OblivAeon Editor's Note...

We did get the Guise transformation as a reward at least.   As for Tempest you could give him the OblivAeon Shard reward to have that impact.  In both cases their OP versions are temporary at best.  

I had questions between this episode and the Scions which I thought they’d hit but did not.  Though I could say that about a lot of episodes where I have multiple questions trimmed off.   All it means is I’m sending a bigger follow up letter that I hope they go through. 

*nods*  I can only imagine how many your questions get cut, Powerhound, if it's proportional to how many actually made it ON the show.

That first question I asked, though, wasn't quite answered the way I expected:  I was hoping to find out if the heroes had Failed to achieve any of the objectives that were Mission Cards in the game, and if there were any repercussions for such.  From context, it sounds like the only one that really wasn't achieved was "Orchestrate the Void", but I don't have the list in front of me...and that's an awfully good success to failure ratio.

I'd also hoped to get a definitive list of "Which Environments are actually destroyed over the course of the OblivAeon event?", but that was only answered obliquely...

Pretty sure they got all of them, Orchestrate the Void included.  Although some of them are described only obliquely, and some don't have the objectives and rewards match up (e.g. Meager Winnings actually happened before The Last Wager).

Orchestrate the Void was succeeded but would have caused the universe to be destroyed if La Commadora hadn’t intervened at the last minute in the other universe.

I must have misheard, then.  I was under the impression that completing Orchestrate the Void would have made the two timelines too close, and that it was abandoned to avoid that very circumstance.

It would have, if La Comodora hadn't gone to that other reality and convinced its Argent Adept to return the virtuoso spirits to the void, so they wouldn't be manifested in both universes at once.

Or rather, Commodora convinced the other-universe Voidforms to go unsummon themselves, if I understood correctly.

But that aside, quick question:  I know the Incap side of Luminary shows the funeral, with a shadowy figure lurking in the trees up on the hillside above the grave site.  But I strongly recall seeing that same scene from the other side, with Baron Blade smiling wickedly as he slips away while the heroes mourn him in the distance.  Where did I see that second piece of art?

The close up of Luminary is the incap of the hero from the version in the box.   The version with the Shadow in the background watching a funeral is from the Hero Foil Pack.  

Cool, that sounds close enough. I haven’t received my copy yet so I haven’t seen any of the content.

Funny enough, that’s also what I remembered, but I went back to check, and no, she convinced that world’s sole living Virtuoso to unsummon them.

This episode biggest surprise: I actually liked seeing Guise and I'm interested in what happens to the character. I'm glad they are toning down the wackiness and doing away with the meta gimmick.

I’m happier with the outcome here than with Mist Storm.   We do have a slight preview of his RPG version on the Sentinels of a Freedom KS here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/underbite/sentinels-of-freedom/posts/2179440

Seems his main difference is more actively being a hero rather than losing much of his other qualities which I’m glad for. 

These two OblivAeon episodes were some of the better podcast episodes! I liked how deeply Christopher and Adam got into storytelling mode, and how they kept things moving dramatically. I sometimes get annoyed when they say, “oh, this thing is like a full-page spread of whatever, IT’S SO COOL” just because those comics and images…don’t…exist…but in these OblivAeon episodes I thought they did a great job verbally describing for the radio audience the drama of what was happening. The whole drama with Voss and Luminary was very well done. Honestly, the thing I found most surprising about Luminary was that he plotted his triple-cross with the heroes the whole time!

They definitely shot themselves in the foot a little with the recording schedule as far as questions go… We didn’t play OblivAeon until shortly before the Scion episode and I submitted a bunch of questions based on our games and what we learned about the Scions, but I think maybe the submissions came too late for the recording of OblivAeon 1 and 2. I’m glad they realize they’re going to have to devote a whole Editor’s Note to OblivAeon questions. Any bets on that episode’s length? Put me down for 2.5 hours!

“You were never ready for me.”

The execution of the triple-cross was just fantastic.  Just perfect, and that one-liner was by far the best of all the great one-liners (including some stiff competition from Voss himself).

Ivan Ramonat is now officially my favorite character.

Oh, okay… I’ll have to go dig out Luminary’s deck at some point here.  I haven’t really looked at it since I filed it away in the Big Black Box.  I guess I thought the Oblivaeon heroes had the same art as the foils.

I just noticed when transcribing for the wiki:

Voss's back side flavor text: "Witness true power! Now begins the subjugation of all the Multiverse!"

First thing he does after claiming OblivAeon's power: Shuts himself off from the rest of the multiverse.

Some of the other flavor text is messed up, too.  Tempest's quote where he flings Empyreon into space is in Scion Strike #1, for instance, but the story C&A told put it way later than that.  And the quote on Faultless's card is from Scion Strike #5, far too late (Dark Mind's flip side's quote is from Scion Strike #3 and Borr's explosion is in #4).

From what I’ve been told on the Letters Page Discord the issues were put on them before they did their room full of stickie notes so there is good possibility some issues don’t line up correctly. 

OK help me out everyone, I listened to these epsidoes over the course of many days and I'm trying to keep track of who took out which scion, here is what I remember:

OblivAeon: Final blow Luminary with Voss' help, though everyone contributed

Voss: I'm not sure who to give credit to... Tachyon, Legacy, AkashFlora?

Voidsoul: Guise, after Voss beats Writhe who absorded Voidsoul

Faultless: Harpy fixes him and then Faultless unmakes himself?

Progeny: ChronoRanger gets the final shot

Aeon Master: Lifeline absorbed him

Nixious: Voss after Fanatic and Stuntman did a bunch of damage to him

Dark Mind: Driven off by Benchmark, Visionary, and Idealist but its becasue Faultless gave her a physical form

Borr: Borr blew himself up, Stuntman and Mainstay were fighting him

Sanction: Parse after Omniton-U created and interface

Empyreon: I can't remember...

Am I remembering correctly, or should credit go to someone else?

Empyreon was destroyed by Captain Cosmic after being dragged into space. 

For Voss I’d say it’s a combination of Guise, Tempest, Sky-Scraper, Young Legacy, Harpy, Luminary, Akash’Flora,  and the Freedom Five

Empyreon was taken out by Captain Cosmic and doing so left Captain Cosmic drained and floating in space. 

As an aside, for the Voss fighting originals, I tried Santa Guise, F6 Tempest, Extremis Sky Scraper and Young Legacy as a team and they were INSANE together. I cannot wait to add Luminary for Flora to it!

I love that Luminary was the one to make the freedom five team costumes.  He is a mad fashion genius! and how did he get their measurements?

Even if he couldn’t have figured them out after all these years, evidently he made them adjustable (by remote control, of course).

"No wonder you have been losing to me all these years. You aren't fashionable enough!"

"Um, actually, we defeated--"

*sound of fabric tightening* "Fashionable!"

So, bumping this thread because I finally caught up with the Oblivaeon stuff.

Man. The story of Oblivaeon is fantastic. And all the stuff that Voss did that they couldn't talk about, which now comes into focus.

I'm really looking forward to actually playing Oblivaeon (yesterday was spent solely with me organizing all the cards into the UCC) so I can beat Nixious's face in. >:C I hate that guy now for what he did to Wraith's dad.

Of course, the only thought I come away from this episode with is oh no more ships and an image of Tarogath and Slamara in like, American Gothic getup, and Tarogath is just not happy about anything, and Aeon Girl's in a sundress and just giddy as can be because she has parents now. What is my life?

Oh yes, and Angry Taxpayer's letter got me thinking...

The scene: Sunny San Alonzo, California. We open on a large shadow looming over the city and people looking up as they realize it is not quite as sunny as it should be.

Cut to a news report: Breaking news! A giant creature has materialized over the city! Reports are coming in as we speak, but so far, it seems only to be observing its surroundings, no reports of damage outside of the warehouse it crushed while touching down on earth.

Cut to the streets: People shouting, "What is that?" running, panicked, calling their loved ones, the authorities, and any heroes they happen to know. The large face of Oblivaeon is visible above the skyline, but he seems to be surveying the countryside.

In the midst of all this chaos, one old man, his bushy eyebrows covering his facial features. He seems calm and implacable as people rush around him. Gazing up at the mighty singular entity, he says the only thing on his mind.

"Get a job, ya bum!"

Cut to Oblivaeon, who side-eyes the old man, a look of enraged offense on his face.

Cut to the report about San Alonzo being wiped off the map. :B

If you don’t love him at his ‘worst’ then you don’t deserve him at his best.

As awesome as the story is, I struggle with visualizing it in places, but sometimes I get a cool mental picture to answer a question that annoyed me. Oysters and pearls, y’know.

So while the battle is raging around the world, people all over the world probably know very little about events outside their immediate area, because nobody really has time to report on events as they unfold. One of the exceptions being the destruction of San Alonso at the start, which would have become known quickly due to footage from surrounding suburbs and rural areas, showing a massive blast like an atom bomb, but one or two that also managed to catch a towering humanoid figure just before that. There would then be plenty of time to witness whatever was left, be it a massive crater, a field of rubble and ashes, a hole in space where reality itself was deleted, etc. For minutes if not hours, that footage would have been scrutinized by relatively safe people all over the world.

Question: how did nobody notice that the Champion Studios lot in the middle of Downtown was preserved inside an energy bubble and was now being used as a command center for Rainek and the other Scions?

Possible answer: if a field of ashes and rubble, there should be no excuse for people not knowing CS was in there, unless the bubble that protected it was not glowing, and was in fact a bubble of concealment as well as a shield, but that seems questionable. So that scenario is probably out; a spacetime anomaly whose interior simply doesn’t exist and can’t be entered from outside works but is kinda boring. So my favorite scenario is the crater, and everybody looking in from outside saw this crater, and what they didn’t see was that Champion Studios had fallen a few hundred feet and was now in a cavern below the surface which the crater carved down into. From above and outside at ground level it just looks like a hole, lost in deep shadows from the crater edge, but sun coming straight down from above actually Illuminates the studios, and so inside them they look normal and unchanged.

Probably not my shiniest pearl ever, but it’ll do for now.

As to the awesome giant explosion of Paradoja and OblivAeon, I agree that’s the biggest and maybe coolest (I can picture it pretty clearly as this fractal explosion that blips back and forth on its own timeline at random, somewhat inspired by the explosion of Kang’s time core in the Ant Man Quantumania movie, but different). But IMO, the prettiest one would have to be the Oblivion Engine that made like an atom bomb sized blast when it was supposed to be planet sized, but Skyscraper shrunk it down to molecule size. It would look like a planet destruction effect from a space opera, and those tend to be more aesthetic looking than detonations in atmosphere, which create more dust and shrapnel and various other ugly side effects.

Perfect name for a variant Eugene, either in the RPG timeline or an alternate universe: The Lurker.

My one true headcanon. This is the biggest one, the one where I am most determined to just ignore canon completely, and do what my feels tell me is right and true. Luminary is actually really dead. The one who shows up later is a clone of late period Baron Blade. The clone isn’t a hero, although he’s not really a full villain anymore; he’s Luminary at the beginning of the Oblivaeon event… but the man who Luminary became at the end, he actually was a hero and he actually did die.

PS, it’s interesting to note that Trevor put OA music into both episodes, but only ever from phase 1, when it’s the slow bombastic doomy theme of his ten thousand HP form. The more upbeat phase 2 theme of 180 HP OblivAeon, there’s no trace of that, I’m 99% sure.