[crossover A.U. setting] Crazy Noisy Bizarre World refinement thread

[Agrippa]

I've decided to branch this off from the FFVII setting riff thread so I could go into further detail. Now I've renamed it Crazy Noisy Bizarre World largely because it rolls off the tongue a bit better. Here it goes.

Introduction​

Since this is an FFVII crossover setting, not just an A.U. setting, there will be a mix of setting elements. Some elements will be altered, like geography to better fit with other setting elements, especially character backstories. Of course some of the setting elements, don't worry I don't think I'll be cutting very many FFVII setting elements, will be cut just because I don't think I can get them to make sense or because I find them annoying. Ultimately this is a kit-bash setting, so don't expect me to use everything from every component setting.

Geography​

The geography of this world is much closer to our real world than it is to canon FFVII's Gaia, with our continents and political boundaries. You still have cities like Midgar around, but I'll try to figure out where to fit them or this setting's equivalent, though I may need help with that. The non-FFVII locations are easier to place.

Air Supplena Island (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency)​

This foreboding island fortress dedicated to the training of Hamon was built in A.D. 39, in the hopes of preserving knowledge of the Ripple. It's just a 30 minute boat ride North of Venice, Italy.

Gargantua 1 & 2 (The Venture Brothers)​

Gargantua 1: Gargantua 1 was Jonas Venture, Sr.'s space station. It was considered a modern wonder up until the fateful Movie Night Massacre and Jonas Sr.'s disappearance.

Gargantua 2: This is Jonas Venture Jr.'s space station construction project. It's his attempt to honor his late father's legacy by seeking to surpass it.

Midgar (Final Fantasy VII)​

Less of a city and more of an amalgamation of eight smaller cities, and their suburbs, in New York state that have been melded together into one massive cyberpunk metroplex. Midgar proper is divided into eight sectors, one for each city comprising Midgar, and furthermore by strata, the ground level shantytown slums, the lower middle to working class middle plates and the upper plates where Shin-Ra's H.Q. can be found. Its a festering shit-hole of a city, but say that to any mid plate or slum local and they'll comeback with, "Sure, but its our festering shit-hole of a city, not yours!", or "Yes, but its home". Midgar is part company town, part banana republic and part potemkin village.

Local attractions:

• Sector 5 slums
  • Sector 5 church: Formerly either a Catholic or Episcopalian church that was abandoned prior to Midgar's construction. Still functions as hallowed ground.
  • Gainsborough residence: A quaint and spacious two-story chalet with a red-tiled mansard roof and covered roof terrace at the back of a lush garden filled with flowers, fruits and vegetables. The first floor interior is an open floor plan, aside from the laundry room, with unshaped natural stone flooring and furnished entirely with well cared for Gainsborough family heirlooms. Whatever "new" appliances there are come topsiders discarding their appliances for newer models. Upstairs are the house's bedrooms and two bathrooms and the stairwell to the roof. As you can guess this was a family home at one point, and both it and the attached land were in the Gainsborough family's hands long before Emlyra married into the family. This house is currently home to the widow Elmyra Gainsborough, her step daughter Aerith and her foster children Ciri and Kieran.
  • Sector 5 Leaf House: A small underfunded orphanage dedicated to sheltering the orphaned and abandoned children of the Sector 5 slums. They're able to feed the children they house in part due to the fruit and vegetable deliveries from the Gainsborough household.
• The Train Graveyard: It's a junkyard full of derelict trains and haunted by the ghosts of dead children. This place is dark and depressing as shit.
• Wall Market: Don Corneo's Wall Market. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy in all of Midgar. While free of Shinra's direct control, Wall Market has the misfortune of suffering under the vile and perverted mobster Don Corneo. Perhaps one day a golden wind will pass through Wall Market and drive out Corneo's corruption.
  • Chocobo Sam's passenger and delivery service: Owned and operated by Chocobo Sam, local business man, Old West aficionado and Sam Elliot sound-alike. Acting as the primary taxi/delivery service for Midgar's slums, Sam, his stablemen and birds, ferry people and product all over the Undercity. He's a member of the Trio, but doesn't much like Corneo and wouldn't mourn the man's disappearance.
  • The Honey Bee Inn: Wall Market's premier burlesque theater, owned and managed by lead dancer Andrea Rhodea, albeit with Corneo's name plastered on the wall behind its reception desk. This gloriously and magnificently flamboyant man is fiercely loyal to his employees, which may explain how Corneo comvinced him to form part of the degenerate Mafia don's Trio. Only time can tell if Mr. Rhodea can be convinced to turn his back on the Devil to fly the flag of rebellion and sing the traitor's song.
  • Madame M's massage parlor: Workplace and business of the last of the members of Corneo's trio, Madame M. She's a high strung woman with a hair-trigger temper and she can swear like a longshoreman when sufficiently pissed off, see her hair-trigger temper. She can make your hand feel like a million bucks, or torture it, depending on how much you pay her.
• Shinra Tower: This shining skyscraper is the black and twisted heart of Shinra's evil empire.
• Midgar's Eight Mako Reactors: This is how Shinra powers the city of Midgar, by sucking the life's blood of this world like some giant vampire. Oh they could adopt the various clean energy initiatives sponsored by the Speedwagon Foundation, Professor Membrane, Jonas Venture Jr. or a whole host of socially conscious superscientests, but nooo, Shinra just has to do things their own shitty way.

Morioh Cho (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable)​

A small, quiet and peaceful little suburb in the Miygai prefecture, Morioh is just a weird town. It was once a quaint little farming village, but was quickly modernized in the 80's, becoming the town it is today. Home and birthplace of genius mangaka and prickly bastard, Rohan Kishibe, the artist and writer behind Pink Dark Boy. Along with a pointy eared crazy guy who sleeps in hand made crop circles and thinks he's an alien. To be fair, this guy can turn himself into a puddle of water, shapeshift into various inanimate objects, eats paper napkins and collapses into a fetal position as his skin blisters at the sound of sirens. Most of the locals consider him an eccentric.

Local attractions:

• Anjuro Rock: A local attraction created during the Stand fight between high school student Joskue Higashikata and the spree killing serial child rapist Anjuro Katagiri. Joskue used the power of Crazy Diamond to fuse Anjuro and the rock together, leaving the vile man alive and conscious, yet forever one with the rock, unable to move, yet unable to die. The Anjuro Rock is now a spot for young lovers to meet up.
• Boing-Boing Cape: According to local fishermen this cape is a sacred site where the gods saved a young woman from killing herself by turning a sharp rock into super bouncy rubber, launching her back onto the cliff with a "sproing" or "boing" sound. The truth, naturally, is stranger. Yukako Yamagishi developed a strong infatuation for for Koichi Hirose, whom she then kidnapped, intending to brainwash him into loving her and to torture him into academic excellence. This did not go as planed. During the ensuing fight Koichi had his newly evolved Stand, Echoes ACT 2, place a "fwoosh" sound effect on himself that blew Yukako away with a gust of wind. As he approached Yukako, to make sure she's still alive, Koichi had Echoes ACT 2 check her heart rate, and it noticed the ground beneath Yukako was giving way, so Koichi used ACT 2 to add a "boing" sound effect to the sharp rock Yukako was about to be impaled upon. Thanks to ACT 2's power, Yukako was bounced to safety.
• Rohan Kishibe's house: Mangaka Rohan Kishibe's home.
• Ghost Girl's Alley: The Ghost Girl's Alley is a hidden area in Kotodai shopping district where the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead/the Lifestream is at its thinnest.
• The Old Electrical Tower: An old and decommissioned electrical transfer tower bought and lived in by Toyohiro Kanedaichi for 100,000 yen.
• St. Gentleman's: A popular local bakery that was frequented by the late serial killer Yoshikage Kira.
• Morioh Grand Hotel: It's a very high end hotel in Morioh.
• Agricultural Area: This is where Akira Otoishi shot two rats with a Stand Arrow, granting them the Stand Ratt.
• Trattoria Trussardi: A small Italian restaurant owned and operated by chef Antonio "Tonio" Trussardi. It notably lacks a menu, instead Tonio cooks and serves you based upon your current health status as divined through palmistry. The special order food he cooks can cure what ever ails the customer Tonio cooked it for, as his Stand, Pearl Jam, enhances the healing properties of the ingredients in any food he prepares. Warning, treatments from Tonio's food carry a side order of Cronenbergesque body horror.
• Budogaoka fields: This is where self proclaimed alien Mikitaka Hazekura likes to sleep in his handmade crop circles.

Ogre Street (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood)​

Ogre Street was the London rookery (slum) that Jonathan Joestar was scouring to find the source of the poison his adoptive brother Dio Brando was feeding to Jojo's father George. It was also here that he fought and Robert E.O. Speedwagon and his gang, earning their respect and Speedwagon's undying friendship.

San Marcos (Archer)​

A small country in Central America that up until 16 years ago was locked in a brutal multi-generational civil war between C.I.A.-backed government forces, under the Calderons, and the communist backed rebels. This finally concluded with a palace coup by Cyril Figgis against Gustavo Calderon and Calderon's imprisonment in the presidential palace's dungeon. Then Cyril abdicated after the communist-backed rebels, now C.I.A.-backed mercs from Honduras and Guatemala, reached the palace. Calderon was mauled to death by a tiger from one of his private zoos after his new wife, and outlaw country singer Cherlene let the big cat out of its cage while screaming "Outlaw country".

Science City Zero (Planetary)​

This is where they made the monster movies, except for real. Science City Zero was a secretive government and corporate program in the South Western U.S. that ran from 1950 to 1960. The administrators, including a younger Anna Hark, termed it a research facility, but in truth it was a concentration camp. Political dissidents, civil rights activists, homosexuals, the homeless and other "undesirables" were sent here en-mass, to be subject to inhuman treatment and tortured in the name of science. While Hark herself may have once mistakenly believed that the atrocities performed here were regrettable sacrifices for a great good, their true purpose was to sate the twisted curiosity of Dr. Randall Dowling, a man obsessed with metahumans and their abilities. Unfortunately this monster's legacy survives his death to this very day in the form of his protegee, then intern Timothy Hojo.

Spider-Skull Island (The Venture Brothers)​

Formerly the bastion of the independent supervillain team the Fraternity of Torment, it was overrun by Team Venture at the Fraternity's first summit. It's members consisted of their leader Scaramantula, Brainulo, Manotaur and Dr. Fangdragon, really Dr. Jonas Venture disguised as an incredibly racist caricature of a Chinese man, because the late Dr. Venture was an asshole. As the meeting began, and the Fraternity of Torment had lowered their guard, Dr. Jonas Venture sprung his trap on them, calling in his team to overwhelm Scaramantula's henchmen. Thus Team Venture, consisting of Kano, Colonel Gentleman, the Action Man, Otto Aquarius, Swifty, Ook Ook, Humongeloid and Jonas himself, defeated the Fraternity of Torment and claimed Spider-Skull Island. This now public island base serves as a home for Jonas Venture, Jr., Sally Impossible, her son Rocket and her cousin Ned.

The Venture Compound (The Venture Brothers)​

Built in the 50's by legendary superscientest Jonas Venture Sr. the Venture Compound is home not only to "Dr." Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture, his sons Hank and Dean and their bodyguard (currently Sergent Hatred), but also contains the many labs, factories, building wings and wildlife habitats established by Jonas Sr. The place is large enough that Rusty can rent out an entire wing to Dr. Orpheus and his daughter Triana, on the cheap.

Windkinght's Lot (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood)​

The hamlet of Windnight's Lot is a quaint little village just South of London. Originally founded as a knightly training center it later become a coal mining town in the mid 19th to early 20th centuries before becoming the historical vacation site it is today. This is also the town where Dio Brando was planning to begin building his undead army to subjugate mankind.

 

[Agrippa]

As befitting a good chunk of the source materials for this crossover, this setting features a great deal of magical and paranormal elements. From the Lifestream itself to the Stone Masks, this world is a fantastical one. A world of magic and monsters, heroes and horrors. The first portion will be a (hopefully) brief overview of this crossover's magical history. Part two will be about those elements themselves.

A Paranormal History​

The Birth of The Lifestream​

What is the Lifestream, you ask? It, or more properly she, is the lifeblood of this world, its protector and our mother. Yet that's not the whole story. The Lifestream is the extension of a celestial being of great power and nobility. This spirit, known as The Jade Queen, descended upon this world with her consort The Lord of The Night Sky.
with the form of a glowing jade-colored
sent to this world as a divine guardian, along with her beloved consort. and overseer of life on this world, along with one other guardian spirit. Here she tended to the nascent humans, rarely directly teaching them, but mostly fostering their curiosity so they would desire to learn of this world for themselves. For love of this world she coalesced her celestial form into a shape that would let her better serve this world and her people. Thus she became mako and the Lifestream as we know it was born.

The Dawn of The Cetra​

As she was tutoring the early humans the Lifestream realized, much to her distress, that the people she had come to see as her children, at least the humans, could not share in the joy of creating as she could. Even worse, only a handful of them could truly hear her words, then only as a mere whisper. To this end she began enhancing those humans who already possessed some trace of psychic/spiritual sensitivity, or to be more exact, their offspring. It took generations but her work bore fruit. These new humans, from all across the surface of her world, were of a much greater psychic sensitivity than baseline humanity and with time could shape the raw forces of nature with their innate power and intuition. This was the dawn of the Cetra.

For a while at all went as the Lifestream had intended. Cetra had begotten Cetra, as there were and are no hybrids or half-bloods among them. The child of a Cetra will always be a Cetra, no matter what some idiots, *cough* Hojo *cough*, might say. These early Cetra, along side their baseline human allies, built great civilizations together. Further more, these great civilizations and their cities were constructed in ways that caused the land no longterm harm at all, better than what could be said for later societies, including our modern one. Yet it was not to last.

The Sundering and the Rise of the Pillar Men​

As you now know, what we call the Lifestream did not come here alone. No, she brought with her another divine spirit to rule over guard this world with her. He was her mate, her lover, her consort, and at the start, her partner in every sense of the word. Her was the Uranus to her Gaia, and together they had brought numerous godly into being. Yet as time went on he began to forget what their shared purpose on this Earth was, and he grew jealous their children and of the mortals his queen loved so dearly. So the Lord Beyond the Skies lashed out against the Mother of Life and her children, begotten and adopted both. He plagued them all with nightmarish monsters and demons birthed from the Mother of Life's own womb. He then did the unthinkable, he spiritually and physically cut off this world from the rest of the cosmos surrounding not only the Earth but first three planets in a crystaline of his own power. With this wicked act the Lord Beyond the Skies carried out his three main goals, to protect himself from retribution at the hands of their shared maker, to prevent the Mother of Life from calling their siblings and their maker to her aid and to cut the people of this Earth off from the great beyond, in hopes that having to care for them herself would turn the Mother against us. In that regard he failed.

As the Mother/Lifestream was healing her children, as well as herself, her cruel former consort spoke to a great craftsman and sage from one of her first people. "So Kars", he said inquisitively, "I see you've already made your masks. Why not use them already, so you could walk amidst the Sun without fear?"

"It is simple, oh Lord Beyond the Skies," Kars replied. "I fear how the rest of my kind may react to the masks I make, and what I intend to do with them. I do not believe they would accept it. Sadly, the great bulk of my kind are content to skulk beneath the planet's surface, only coming out at night to feed upon the humans, including those accursed Cetra."

Rage and anger boiled up inside the Lord Beyond the Skies at the mere mention of the word "Cetra". These, in his mind, unworthy creatures stole the attention and affection that his wife and queen was meant to have for him. But he calmed himself and asked, "Must all of your kind agree with you? Would not a mere handful be enough to help see your vision through, my good Lord Kars?"

Lord Kars sat back as he pondered this questioned and replied, "Yes, and I know who my first ally shall be!" So Lord Kars and Esidsi transformed themselves with the Stone Masks and waged a war of extermination against all members of their kind who opposed them. The only survivors of Lord Kars' and Esidis' slaughter of their own people were two infants, Wamuu and the one Stroheim would name Santana. Thus began the War of Blood and Shadow.

As powerful as the Pillar Men were even they could not face the combined might of the Cetra and the Ripple Clan alone, not if they were to claim the Red Stone of Aja and become ultimate lifeforms. To this end Lord Kars sculpted thousands upon thousands of Stone Masks and placed them upon the faces of their human captives, creating the first Stone Mask vampires. With their armies of the damned the Pillar Men sowed death and destruction among the Cetra and their Ripple Clan allies. As Wamuu the Battle Genius scoured the land of Cetra and Ripple Clan strongholds with his Divine Sandstorm, Santana entrapped and killed many warriors with his terrifying Rib Blades, the Eccentric Blazing King Esidisi incinerated his foes, both Cetra and Hamon wielder alike with his Erratic Blaze King Mode, using his own veins and arteries to inject his boiling 500° C (932° F) blood into them and their leader, Lord Kars, cut bloody swathes through the armies of the Cetra and Ripple Clan alike with his Brilliant Bone Blades. Things were getting desperate.

The Forging of the Planet's Weapons and the Wondering Soul​

In her desperation the Lifestream was forced to craft new ways to strike back at her tormentor and that of her children, ways that the Lord Beyond the Skies could not detect. These new beings, spirits more properly, had to be disguised, no concealed like daggers to be drawn and then driven into not only the heart of her tormentor but to all who would harm this world and the life upon it. Thus the Mother crafted her Great Weapons, as the Cetra would call them, spirits to be born into mortal form every century, to guide her people, guard the world from danger and free them all. To everyone else these beings are simply called the Century Babies.

Yet this alone was not enough, for Lord Kars, his three lieutenant's and their vampiric horde waged a bloody war against the Cetra and their Ripple Clan allies. Even the mostly uninvolved wolfcats joined in the fray. It looked like humanity was facing destruction, or at least a bloody stalemate. Ultimately the balance needed to be tipped against Kars and his forces. A new tool, a new weapon no, a new soldier was needed. So a young Cetra man from what would now be Southeastern Europe was gifted the power and longevity to take the fight the Pillar Men and their vampires. He was a prince and sage among his tribe, as well as both warrior and priest. Even he wasn't yet strong enough to destroy these monsters, so the Wondering Soul did the best he could to destroy their vampires and liberate humans from the Pillar Men's grasp. This combined with the Wondering Soul's clashes with the Pillar Men severely weakened them, forcing them into a nearly 2 millennia torpor, the youngest of them in South America and the older three under what would become Rome's Coliseum. With the Pillar Man threat over, for now at least, the Wondering Soul decided to take a well deserved vacation. During which he befriended a certain miracle-working Jewish tekton and wrote an epic history of the great war he fought in titled A Chronicle of Blood and Shadow, of which only a heavily mutilated version of the first tenth of it is broadly known today, with a stage musical adaptation to boot.

The Calamity From the Skies​

The Lord Beyond the Skies, now the Lord of the Crystal Sphere, or simply the Crystal Lord, was enraged, furious in fact. Yes, the Pillar Men had greatly diminished the Cetra numbers, along with their Hamon wielding allies, but that wasn't enough. No, his former queen and her people had yet to suffer enough for the Crystal Lord's liking. A meteor containing a horribly mutated senescent thing hurtling through space to his crystal sphere. He could have destroyed it, should have destroyed it. 'But she should have remained loyal to me!' the Crystal Lord thought to himself. So he briefly parted his crystal sphere, knowing that doing so exposed himself to destruction by their maker and other siblings. Not only did he let this blighted rock through, instead of destroying it, he sent it toward this world. Guided by his monstrous will the contaminated meteorite collided into the Earth landing on the Western most land-mass in what is now mainland Alaska. To across the Bering Strait all the way to the North of East Asia into the Eastern most reaches of Northern and Central Europe, and down and to the East into the Northern half of North America.

Naturally the already devastated Cetra leapt to their world's defense, on the same year that saw the defeat of the Pillar Men, no less. Cetra from around the globe joined in the struggle to defeat and ultimately contain the monster some of them called Jenova. They were victorious, but the Cetra were an even more greatly diminished people, to the point where any returning survivors genuinely believed themselves to be the last of their kind. The Cetra, once comprising up to 40% - 45% of mankind were reduced to a mere 5%, all over the course of 3,000 years.

Paranormal Phenomena​

Ghosts​

[ghosts]

Vampires​

[general]

Stone Mask​

[Stone Mask]

Strigoi​

[strigoi]

Ubir/Upir​

[ubir/upir]

Modern Cetra​

[modern cetra]

Magic​

Natural​

[natural]

Theurgy​

[theurgy]

Philosophical/Alchemy​

[philosophical/alchemy]

Materia​

[materia]

Hamon​

[hamon]

Stands​

[stands]

 

[Agrippa]

(Reserved for major factions.)

 

[Agrippa]

(Reserved for characters.)