game guide • omniportal

character journals may be considered part of a regular social media network for all first-person communications.
because the details of a character's experience with the shift is completely up to a writer and the range of possibilities is limitless, there is currently no preset miraculous way that cv identities are immediately able to find or otherwise communicate directly with each other, and it shouldn't be assumed that every character whom ours interacts with knows anything about the shift at all.
however, apart from hinting the crap out of the shift's symptoms in-character (at the risk of coming across insane..), there are a few other convenient ways to dive right into the cv side of things:
- pre-plot some sort of accidental 'reveal' scenario with other writers
- get your character involved with game-wide cv events (those things are just like, teeming with shifters!!)
- have your character pay attention to the news. all news-type items posted in @omniversality are considered information in the public domain and accessible to any character, especially if they know what they're looking for. some articles may also contain clues and prompts for more ways to connect with other shifters, dun dun dunnn...

the general population of this game-world is not aware of any form of superhuman existences and activities. reports of such incidents are available only on the down-low, for example via word of mouth, conspiracy theories and other forms of sensationalized media. for the most part, society on this earth does not take seriously even the possibility of metahumans living among them, and anything out of the ordinary is generally considered by non-cv identities to be either dreams, delusions, hysterics, hoaxes, hearsay, and/or other forms of misinformation.
in cases when cv-related happenings are too large-scale to go unnoticed by the general public, o.m.i.t. does have among its resources an electro bio-mechanical neural transmitting zero synapse repositioner (yep, legit from the MIB Universe), which may be used at a writer's discretion in any character-specific or game-wide plots. part of o.m.i.t.'s agenda is to maintain societal stability from foreign irregularities, and they can be assumed to step in when necessary if not explicitly stated.
au identities typically have no vivid or lasting memory of the events of each 'shift week' due to the refractory effects of the human mind readjusting to the shift-inhibitors. further details regarding what a character is able to recall between shifts are left up to a writer.

at midnight in any location's timezone, and for one week beginning on the third sunday of every month, the global transmission of o.m.i.t.'s shift inhibitors are programmatically disabled.
during this week, alter-identities are no long suppressed within their hosts and may manifest accordingly.

all powers, abilities, items and locations that are non-native to the game's earth setting can be made available as and when it best suits a character.
storyline speaking, these supernatural artifacts do not usually manifest at the same time as a cv identity's first shift, since they require a shifter to come into contact with an 'uncreated reality zone', the sole exception so far being the shifter who created those zones in the first place. the circumstances surrounding a character's contact with these zones is up to us, but would ideally be incorporated into the character's story and not randomly spawned as a sort of deus ex machina.
other than those of npc's, unlocked artifacts will not be tracked in any official way, and it's encouraged that we keep tabs on our characters' cool stuff in their directories!

cv identities may be thought of as the 'astral forms' or 'souls' of their canonical counterparts, which are here in the game-world as result of their demises after being abducted by the stranger.
at the current point of the game's timeline, all cv identities have no recollection of their abduction or anything that occurred while in the domain of the stranger; and even recent events prior to the abduction may only be vaguely recalled.

because cv identities have no material form in this world, they can no longer die or be destroyed in the game per se -- a storyline loophole used to our advantage in bridging the technical issue of broken continuities between different writers of a cv. as such, host-alter (au-cv) combinations can be considered mutable, and cv's may potentially be 'rebooted' into new host bodies, essentially letting us wipe and reset any defunct character's backstory.
unless already provided, the exact details/circumstances of any host-hopping will be up to the new writer of the rebooted character (eg. an au's death, or an au rejecting the cv for whatever reason, if the cv is able to recall their previous host, etc.)
a cv identity may also go 'dormant' after hopping hosts, ie. they're still 'there' somewhere on the game-earth, present within an unidentified host but hasn't manifested until that cv is rebooted as a player/non-player character.
no revived shifters are currently present in the game-world, thus neither shifters nor the o.m.i.t. are yet aware of this host-hopping phenomenon. all character disappearances or deaths in-game should for now be considered permanent and irrevocable by surviving characters.