I need answers. TLQ&A

(OOC: Why not? There seem to be plenty....)

I believe that something has happened and I can't explain it.

Today, I awoke in my apartment to find nothing out of place. However, after stepping out in my daily routine, I found everything completely unrecognizable. I appear to be in a small town, even though I fell asleep in a DC apartment.

My LV was also off and with some recalibration, I am recieving basic transmissions. The news... makes no sense whatsoever. It also appears that, in addition to stepping outside of the realm of my reality, I have stepped forward in time. It is June 2010, correct?


My name is Robert Castro Jones, and I woke up in what I thought was August 1994. I need answers about where I am, and I'll answer any questions you have about my reality of origin. I'm a computer hobbyist, although I used to post to an Escavar group not unlike this one.

I tried to go to the Escavar directory to dig and found nothing. It was a pain, I can tell you. Your ray-tay protocol is far distant from that of my own. I eventually found a good directory (Google?) and the right terms lead me here, where there apear to be stories similar to my own. I tried a few mental illness webspots first.... but they just diagnosed me. I don't think I am so ill as to make a world.
 
As opposed to?

Well, I was hoping for some interest in my story, but they just took it as standard crazy. Don't know what else I expected, but being told that my reality didn't exist wasn't it. I expected them to tell me that I was right and that THIS was a hallucination of some sort. But- no luck.
 
(OOC: Why not? There seem to be plenty....)

I believe that something has happened and I can't explain it.

Today, I awoke in my apartment to find nothing out of place. However, after stepping out in my daily routine, I found everything completely unrecognizable. I appear to be in a small town, even though I fell asleep in a DC apartment.

My LV was also off and with some recalibration, I am recieving basic transmissions. The news... makes no sense whatsoever. It also appears that, in addition to stepping outside of the realm of my reality, I have stepped forward in time. It is June 2010, correct?


My name is Robert Castro Jones, and I woke up in what I thought was August 1994. I need answers about where I am, and I'll answer any questions you have about my reality of origin. I'm a computer hobbyist, although I used to post to an Escavar group not unlike this one.

I tried to go to the Escavar directory to dig and found nothing. It was a pain, I can tell you. Your ray-tay protocol is far distant from that of my own. I eventually found a good directory (Google?) and the right terms lead me here, where there apear to be stories similar to my own. I tried a few mental illness webspots first.... but they just diagnosed me. I don't think I am so ill as to make a world.

Welcome to the future, where America invades Iraq (again), handphones can fit in your pocket and cars still can't fly...

So how are things in DC (assuming you are from Washington DC, capital of the USA, and not from some other weirdo place called DC)?
 
Welcome to the future, where America invades Iraq (again), handphones can fit in your pocket and cars still can't fly...

Iraq? What are we doing messing around in the Shariff's backyard? I mean, I know there's some activist support for the Republican Guard but messing around in the ME is really more a limey or jiggy thing.

So how are things in DC (assuming you are from Washington DC, capital of the USA, and not from some other weirdo place called DC)?

Union City DC is the capital of the USA. Washington hasn't been the capital since the 1870s or something. The Committee (or Council, I forget) of Victory and Reconciliation moved the capital there before allowing general elections in 1872.

Assuming you're asking about Washington, it doesn't seem too bad. A bit of urban decay and its obvious its only kept afloat by its low key tourism, but not a terrible city.

If you're asking about where I'm from.... Union City DC is a pretty nice place to be. Its got the hustle and bustle from the political class, some of the shipping along the Ohio River and there's a few computer start-ups making their name here. I prefer it over any other place I've lived. Being nestled right between Illinois and Kentucky gives you plenty to do when you want to head out of town.
 
Iraq? What are we doing messing around in the Shariff's backyard? I mean, I know there's some activist support for the Republican Guard but messing around in the ME is really more a limey or jiggy thing.

That's a very long story- short version is that the previous administration had a score to settle with the rather nasty dictator running Iraq (a rogue state of sorts, having been involved in a brutal war with Iran from 1980-88, attempted to conquer Kuwait in 1990 before being defeated by a multinational coalition led by the US and Britain, and used chemical weapons on the civilian populations of areas of his own country starting to rise in rebellion), Saddam Hussein, and in spring of 2003, after generating spurious evidence linking Iraq to international terrorism by radical Islamic fundamentalists and having weapons of mass destruction in defiance of the conditions of the peace in the First Gulf War (the invasion of Kuwait), a US and British force invaded Iraq. Although the invasion itself went well, smashing through the Iraqi military and deposing Hussein with ease, it quickly turned into a bloody, costly quagmire, as poor planning for the post-war occupation and reconstruction combined with a series of strategic and operational blunders by that administration allowed a serious insurgency to develop from elements of Hussein's military and security forces, the Islamic terrorists, and a 3-cornered civil war (a sectarian conflict between the Sunni and Shiite elements with the Kurdish minority in the north of the country another element.) The Iraqi government installed hasn't been that effective, and is wracked by factionalism and corruption.

So far, the US has spent nearly $800 billion on the war (much of it borrowed outside the normal budget, and 8x the 2003 estimates of the total cost), suffered over 4000 military dead, and over 30000 wounded, and has severely strained the personnel, equipment procurement and maintenance, and training of the armed forces; depending on which estimate you use, between 80000 and over a million Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. The conflict has become politically divisive, it's unclear if any sort of long-term success can be gained from it, and US forces are scheduled to withdraw around 2012. More info on it can be found here- it's an online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which can provide basic overviews of many things, although take everything you read with a grain of salt, as it's fact-checking is rather spotty, and pages are often changed by people trying to turn it into propaganda for their own agenda, or simply the online equivalent of vandalism.

Also, who would be the shariff, and the 'jiggys' (although you want to be careful using that term in this world, as that can be used as a racial slur toward those of African descent- using it in that context or other racial slurs is something that is not done in polite society and is considered extremely offensive - potentially offensive enough to spark a violent reaction if you use a racial slur to insult someone of a particular ethnicity to their face.)

Union City DC is the capital of the USA. Washington hasn't been the capital since the 1870s or something. The Committee (or Council, I forget) of Victory and Reconciliation moved the capital there before allowing general elections in 1872.

Assuming you're asking about Washington, it doesn't seem too bad. A bit of urban decay and its obvious its only kept afloat by its low key tourism, but not a terrible city.

If you're asking about where I'm from.... Union City DC is a pretty nice place to be. Its got the hustle and bustle from the political class, some of the shipping along the Ohio River and there's a few computer start-ups making their name here. I prefer it over any other place I've lived. Being nestled right between Illinois and Kentucky gives you plenty to do when you want to head out of town.

Ok, this can allow us to start figuring out where your TL diverged from ours. Here, there was a Civil War in the US between 1861-65, when several Southern states (Virginia, North & South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas) attempted to secede from the Union and form the Confederacy between November 1860 & April 1861, sparked over issues of attempting to preserve their institution of slavery which formed the basis for their economy, a dispute over the extent of federal versus state power, and a fear of losing power to the industrial states of the Northeast and the growing agricultural and industrial regions of the Midwest, which did not permit slavery and had many elements calling for at least the containment if not outright abolition of slavery. Several border states- Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri had divided loyalties leading to internal fighting between factions supporting the opposing sides.

In April 1861, the crisis turned into open rebellion and war, when South Carolina militia attacked Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor, one of a handful of military installations in the seceding states that the Federal government had been able to keep control of, forcing its surrender. A bloody war raged for the next 5 years, where at first the North, hampered by many poor generals and poorly trained troops suffered many defeats in the first year and a half-2 years (although both Confederate invasions of the north were repulsed) before more effective commanders who had proved themselves rose to the top, and were able to bring the superior population and economic might of the North to bear. Throughout 1864, the Northern armies ground down the Confederates and penetrated deep into the Confederacy, and in April-May 1865, the exhausted remnants Confederate armies were run down and forced to surrender. Some 630000 military deaths occurred between both sides, making it the bloodiest conflict in US history.

After the end of the war, slavery was abolished, and over the next 10 or so years, known as Reconstruction, the Southern states were reintegrated into the US, secession was declared illegal, and the Constitution was amended to strengthen the power of the Federal government. At first, there was an attempt to reform the political structure of the Southern states, but that, along with an attempt to give the former slaves (of African descent) full legal and political equality, but these were abandoned due to a combination of apathy, racism, and backroom political deals, and it would take another century for the descendants of the former slaves to actually get legal equality and their civil rights respected across the nation.

The capital of the US has always been at Washington DC here.

From your statement, it looks like the US was involved in a war of some kind in roughly the same timeframe. Could you tell us more about it- the parties, cause, how it went, and the eventual outcome, as well as why it would cause the capital of the US to be moved? (And which side of the river it's on, and whereabouts it would be on a map?)

Also, you might want to look out the window, or for something such as a newspaper or a phonebook (or possibly some of the signals you're getting) to figure out where you are. Tuning into the local television news broadcasts could also help you with that.
 
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