Board Thread:Planning/@comment-1743498-20130905135447

This is a topic that's been discussed for years, but we have yet to completely solidify it. Chaos Crisis Phase III has a lot to do with this, so I figure we should discuss it before we start writing about it.

I do realize that the in-universe characters should not know much about their identity, but the ambiguity can lead to problems in terms of consistency when users have completely different ideas as to what they are supposed to be. What I'm hoping to accomplish is to completely identify the nature of the Harbingers. Since this is a public creation edited by multiple users, it would be appropriate if we discuss it first.

Some of you may know that the Harbingers are the spiritual successors to an earlier type of being on GC known as Titans. While the Titans were far more fantastical in nature, the main reason they were actually removed was because of the following: New users had trouble understanding them, and they could be used to cheaply explain a glaring inconsistency (i.e. A Titan made it that way.)

Goal
The goal of this is to design a society based on what we envision to be the maximum possible technology level. The ultimate, pinnacle of civilization - in their eyes at least.

Pantheon of Qianae
I think it would be best if we combined the Pantheon of Qianae with the Harbingers to make them part of the same civilization. The former could be their government, while the Harbingers would just be citizens. "I" would be considered a historical figure and the founder of the Harbinger civilization - the one who went back in time to create it. Of course, this may not seem to make much sense, but in their eyes, time is nonlinear, and they would not perceive it the same way we do.

Technology
They would access to time travel, but everything is in a stable time loop. Whatever was changed was meant to happen anyway. That way, we can still write as we usually do without worrying about time paradoxes.

They would, of course, have no physical form as being non-corporeal gives them a lot more freedom to move around than a physical body. They would definitely be immortal, though they could be killed if exposed to something as powerful as a Big Bang.

The Harbingers would definitely have access to multiversal travel, but Omni 01 would have been specifically designed by them. They would have rigged several variables of the Drake equation to allow for the number of civilizations there currently are in the universe. They would have their own self-imposed rules about meddling - they would just be watching all the time while giving the occasional nudge (in the form of prompting dreams and visions) to make things interesting.

As for why the Harbingers created the universe, it would have just been for their own curiosity - because they could make a universe. It would be for the exact same reason we humans would build a robot.

Where are they
Whether they inhabit Locubrermour or the fourth/fifth dimensions of Omni 01, I am unsure of myself. What do the rest of you think?

If another civilization nears their technology level
In the past, we said the Harbingers were responsible for making sure that Mary Sue civilizations never came into existence. Since we removed the tech cap though, it may be possible that a civilization, with enough time, could rival the Harbingers. The Demons definitely would have come close to this.

I think we can explore this question more in the multiversal era after Chaos Crisis. I can see parallels between this, and the invention of sapient artificial intelligence.

Other things to consider
For the Battle of the Gehenna Galaxy, we could just make it so that Vernietigen discovered some sort of "glitch" (the black hole Minos-Vaskus) which would be the reason why the Anathema erroneously appear. Vern would be able to figure this out due to this computing abilities, while it is not immediately obvious for anyone else. 