OF POTIONS AND POSSESSIONS

The Frame Story: A 2200 cyborg historian on Mars is writing The 點化史, about Earth as it went through the convulsions of the late 20th century and 21st century. The turmoil started in 1973 and did not cease its reverberations until the Treaty of Brasilia in 2119. One of the documents he discovers is a lesser-known memoir written in the 2020s and left undisturbed in a section of the LOYNO-in-Exile Campus Library in Lafayette, Louisiana called “Alumni, Self-Published”. The document repository of a sect of Heavenly Master Christians known for their scholarship had amazingly survived in an isolated, cypress backwater of the American South. The historian is of course, Chinese. He is trying to write a complete history of the disruptions of those centuries and the establishment of The OverConvergence in 2123, but so much primary documentation both analog and digital was destroyed by The Waves. The focus story is the daily life and mentalitee of The Before.

The Focus Story: John “Hedge” Monaghan goes off to Taiwan and reads all sorts of Chinese literature. After consuming too much of it, he returns to the United States, convinced that he is the Ninth Daoist Immortal returned from over the ocean to…He’s not quite sure, so he starts this ridiculous quest to renovate his Ancestral Family Manse and calls it “Operation Greenghis Khan”. But of course, The Manse is possessed by a Raccoon Sprit. All the hoard stuff, all the Taiwan movies, all of it, are found documentation that the Chinese historian is going through.

Components:

Poetry

The List of Girls, but with Star Wars, beat novel style names.

The FnB Rules and advice on drinking, clubbing, bar hopping, etc.

Taiwan and Chinese literature — A wuxia novel, but with erotica instead of violence. All your Taiwanese Mandarin Vocab.

The Hoard and Catholicism — all the hoard documentation.

It ends with “Trade and Field”, when Monaghan finally sobers up at 44 years old and goes into Computers like he intended to the night before his dad died.