Monday Mashup #23: Robin Hood

Today we’re gonna mashup Robin Hood. Yeah, there’s a thematic link to last week’s mashup there; it must be the long winter nights getting to me. The core of it all is the old steal from the rich, give to the poor thing — and from there on in it’s all about the variations. Merry Men, Maid Marian, kings away at the wars: what’s not to like?

A tip of the hat to GURPS Robin Hood seems in order as well.

Oh, and a reminder: there’s a mailing list for the weekly announcement of this writing meme and Game WISH. It’s free, and who doesn’t like free? Now, on to the mashup.

The Queen of a Thousand Celestial Pebbles sits in her throne, orbiting a thousand miles above the surface of the Earth. She normally cares little for the unimportant lives below her. On occasion, when she finds the shape of the continents below her particularly unsatisfying, she arranges to shift the coastlines.

Her peers are entities like her: emergent AIs, nanotech swarms, ascended humanity. They trade in baroque concepts beyond the unaugmented human mind. When her wings brush against the world, the world generally suffers. Sometimes, the pollen left in her wake is of unimaginable value. Sometimes, it is merely a mystery.

The secret truth, which is not suspected by those who dwell in her shadow, is that her pollen is not pollen at all. It is eggs, charged with arcane powers and left to develop into children. Or not, as the case may be. She is not a caring mother, but she is a prolific one. If one human being swallows an egg and develops into a transcendecent being in a year, she is satisfied.

Still, when a decade goes between children, she notices. There is something wrong, down there, on the Earth. But the Queen has no ability to deal with the fragile groundlings. Would you attempt to negotiate with the soil in which you plant your seeds?

She has a small security force. They are rarely necessary; they are frozen, preserved, for precisely this purpose. They are her tool for the unlikely moment when she must speak to those who live a century and die. Her records say that she froze them a thousand years ago; very well. How much can humans change?

You are the security force, uncorked to a world a thousand years away from your lifetimes. Or: you are Robin Hood and his Merry Men, who stole the seeds of transcendence and gave them to the rest of what remains of Earth. Either way, you must negotiate the delicate pathways that lie between the words and desires of the gods.