GSR

Looks fine to me.  Given the overall rate of activity here, I'm not exactly going to err on the side of "fewer RPGs".  So knock yourself out; Approved to start whenever.

IC: Soraya [The peak]

She laughed.

She couldn't help it, and it got her a glance of irritation from one of her sudden companions - Leli, wasn't it? - but man, she really couldn't help it.  Across an ocean, snatched out of a bar by a bunch of not-Dashi, through an impossible tunnel and into Rayuke's fountain, up the peak, past some impossible golem and legendary dragon and -

Nothing was happening.

And you know, she'd really been banking on this destiny hogwash to get her out of hot water with Morie.

Maybe she'd take her chances with the dragon instead.

It is among the stars and within the stars.

It has no name, no consciousness, no emotion.  It sleeps in every atom, binds every molecule of the universe it inhabits.  From it come flame, air, sea, light and shadow and soul. 

All living things feel its presence, and blind themselves to it.  Those who make that murmur solid within their mind fear it, for they know that once seen it does not allow its viewer to ever forget it. 

It does these things with no malice. 

It only waits.

On a battlefield, apocalypse beckons.

A world that was meant to provide peace and plenty is on the verge of tearing itself apart, of repeating the same mistakes that shattered it long ago.  Two armies clash; one is led by a being that fancied himself a god, who lit the spark of consciousness in those he and his cohorts created.  One is led by a glimmer of light, who has faced destiny many times before and is beginning to understand that this is his destiny’s end.

Elemental energy sears the air and slices through the screams of soldiers.  Earth and stone sing and slide, lightning and magnetism dance in an instant.  This moment is charged.

Six elements gather together, driven by desperation and fear.  One of them speaks.

“Are you sure?”

One nods in response, her heart heavy. 

They know what it is they call.  Their legends have told them that their unity will chain it, bend it to their will.  Their Kaita have warned them against ever taking this risk.  But in this moment, as all they have fought for threatens to tear itself apart, their minds are set.

Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Stone, Ice.  Six is all that is needed, for this universe is shaped as such.  From six elements all others can be created. 

From six elements, it is called.

Silence falls like a thunderclap.  A pulse passes through every living creature, a call written in the base of all things. 

It cannot be looked at, at first.  The air tears, dark light spilling from a fold in space that cannot exist.  For an instant the world is in agony; water, down to the tiniest atom, has become solid.  Not ice.  Simply solid water.  The instant lasts an eternity and never happened at all.

It stands there, a perversion of form.  It cannot understand what is before it, for it has never had a mind before.  Consciousness itself is an insult.

It reaches for the world around it, to return this horrible order to the elements from which it sprouted, and finds itself chained.  Six elements, rebelling against the countless others, forcing it into solidity and reality. 

It screams, and the heavens split.  Those upon the battlefield are overcome with a dread beyond measure; this scream will echo in the minds of all that lived this day for the rest of their days.  For the first time, it feels an emotion.  Fury.  To be defied by its own components, these vile six, is an affront to existence itself.  Never before has it been defied.  Never before could it have been.

Then make the one who made this possible pay, they reply.

Its gaze falls upon a short, brown thing.  A Matoran.  A Great Being.  A speck of dust that dared to spread the sickness of sapience.  It recognizes him from an instant ago, millennia ago, when his people came closer to bringing it into this wretched plane than any others.

He opens his mouth to say something.

Its hand is atop his head.  There was no movement; in one moment it was not there, and in the next it was.

No sound escapes him.  But slowly, he begins to drift apart.  His elements, freed at last from the abuse of form, tear away from each other and return to the world.  A moment ago, he fancied himself a conqueror; now, he is less than atoms.

Its hand vanishes back into itself.  It feels… satisfaction.  And it understands.  Physicality is an offense, but with it comes the tools to relieve the universe of that very burden.  It finds this appropriate. 

It turns, its body duplicating, and spreads its countless arms.  It faces every being on this battlefield, all of whom are now seized with a fear that no living creature should ever know.  It will start here; it will return this world to the elements that made it.

“Toa!”

Words are meaningless to it, and yet it notices all the same.  Those six elements suddenly flare back to life, reminding it that it is chained and held, and its fury resurges.

The light stands there, reaching up to the maelstrom above.  “Toa Nuva! Please! This is enough!”

Time and space are fragile before a god, and so reality splinters.  Countless universes are born, and in each of them this plea fails.  The six elements succumb to their nature, and the force they serve reaches out and closes a hand around that light, absorbs it deep into itself in an instant.  It scours the stars, one by one, and when its work is done eons later it finally allows itself to dissipate into this pure existence it has created.

But that is the cost of this moment – to birth and burn endless realities, so that one might be saved.

For in this moment, in this universe, the light reaches its comrades.  Their minds and souls fight back, their faith in the world they have built outweighing reality itself. 

It howls as its form is torn apart.  To be summoned – to be chained – to be returned – each of these is an offense more unpardonable than the last.  And yet it is unable to stop it.

The six Toa Nuva lie motionless on the ground.  It will be some days before their eyes open, and when they do the minds that return to them are not the same.  They are no longer the Toa Nuva, plural, but rather the Toa Nuva singular.  There are days when Tahu cannot remember if he is Tahu or Kopaka or Akamai, or perhaps none of them at all; there are months where Gali reaches out to her element and finds that she now commands the air, not the seas.  They spend the rest of their lives together, for they know that even a brief separation of one means madness for all of them.

The moment becomes warning, story, legend. 

It is among the stars, and it cares nothing for all that has transpired.  There is no regret, no anger.  Endless time from now, all will return to it regardless.  From this vantage point, the reordering of reality already has happened.  It needs no form to do so; it needs only wait for the nature of things.

And yet.

Were it ever called again,

It would enjoy finishing its work.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A/N: 'cause why make a Toa Nui a bigger Kaita when it could be an eldritch force instead.

thanks to demi for inspiring some of this

IC: Soraya [The Great Takea]

"Whoa whoa whoa!" Soraya yelled as the latest strange giant in her life picked her up.  "I may be further from home than I've ever been because I wanted to yell at an empress, but I can still-"

She slipped free of Wraith's grip and into gravity.  There was a colorful crash.

"...Walk," she muttered from the floorboards. 

Wraith helped her up again and she shook her head.  "And for the record, you're all the aliens.  But whatever.  This day can't get any weirder."

[OOC: off to Ko-Koro, even if Sor may need a few additional limbs to keep her ambulatory for the first bit of the journey.]

[OOC: Boy, been a while, huh? Krayz poked me to get a few posts in to get the plot rolling again.  I can't commit long-term to the game, but I can at least unblock y'all after folks have spent eight months (or two years depending on how you count) waiting for Sor to turn around and acknowledge the person standing there waiting to talk to her.]

IC: Soraya [The Great Takea]

Soraya turned around and acknowledged the person standing there waiting to talk to her.

At least, she hoped she did.  She absolutely was not drunk; she knew her limits and she had the tolerance of a dozen women.  So she definitely was not hammered from what she had managed to swallow of that giant's explosive-in-a-mug.  She just didn't feel like exposing her eyes to any sort of light at the moment, that was all.

"Don't tell me," she said, momentarily opening one eye to see the Matoran and Toa in front of her and immediately regretting it.  "A creepy Matoran told you to take me on a mystical journey to save your Great Spirit."

Thanks y'all.  It's been a long weird year and I've barely been around BZP, but I still think of the place.  It means a lot to me. 

y'all old

[i'm old]

I think it's more engaging for your readers if you've got entire chapters, honestly - it can be confusing for someone reading to finish a paragraph and see that the rest of the chapter is missing! It also makes it easier for people to understand when the story's been updated, versus having to check if a post was edited.

I won't make a harsh enforcement of it though - just be reasonable (e.g. don't just write a sentence at time or something.)

whoops i'm alive after all

Other than the fact you spelled "prove" as "proove" twice and it's boring into my cold-addled brain like a very determined mole, I don't see any major issues here.  It's definitely a shorter application and setting, but as long as you're willing to put in the work to help players flesh it out I have no objections.

Project Protodermis is good to go.

Due to some formatting/other issues, this is being reposted in the Epics forum.  Locking this one up!

Thanks, everyone! Lord knows I'm not around here much these days, but I really do appreciate the thought.

My apologies for having this languish the past few weeks.  I don't have the time to try and fix the system right this moment, but I do have the time to say Skyrise approved.

You can get started when you feel ready.

Moving to Epics.  Don't forget to make another thread where people can discuss without gumming up the story topic! (Like what's happening right now...)

daybirth

month long plus two days birthdays are the best

Could go either way, and it depends entirely on the success of constraction and Lego's other story-heavy themes in the years to come.

After G2, I can't see them bringing it back unless they're very certain they have a market niche it fills well.  If constraction is all but phased out and Lego's got far more kid pop culture cachet with other themes like Ninjago (or whatever comes after Ninjago) five years from now, there's no reason for them to bring Bionicle out of mothballs again.

Can you post what browser, browser version (generally you can find that under "Help"->"About"), and OS you're using?

N.A.R.G.'s hit the nail on the head for the biggest issue.  Moderating a live chat is quite a bit tougher than a message board for a variety of reasons.  While I'm not wholly opposed to the idea (Discord's pretty popular these days) it's a lot easier said than done.

Wind was definitely the most active tracker of the Tracker, and I concede that much of the staff has slipped behind on keeping an eye on it (myself included.)  Of course for some issues responses from other members would be more valuable than response from staff, too...

I'm still working through my thoughts on G2 as a whole, and more importantly how it connected to BZP and my own creativity, but before that...

I want to reiterate a couple things already said upthread by others.  First (like anything!) it's totally a matter of opinion how you felt about G2.  So I'm not surprised there are folks out there who felt it didn't hold a candle to G1 or wasn't "Bionicle" to them, and you're totally free to express that.  That said, I do ask that folks don't rah-rah "the witch is dead" quite so much and/or dump on the teams that made G2 or people who enjoyed it.  It's disrespectful to the work that the teams put in, and it's disrespectful to other members who did enjoy the line and want to express their sadness that it's done with.

I also want to reiterate that quality or passion does not perfectly correlate with sales or marketability.  G2 had its flaws, but acting as though everyone involved in its creation was just lazy or unskilled and therefore of course it flopped is, again, pretty rude towards the teams at LEGO that put their heart and soul into this work as they were allowed to.  While we don't know - and probably won't at least for a while, if ever - how much creative control the teams had, or what direction the higher-ups at LEGO wanted to take things, that doesn't mean that LEGO never cared about the line at all.

At the risk of trying to yell above a tornado: while this is obviously a heck of a thing and emotions are running high, keep the discussion civil.  Drive-by potshots help nobody.

...Well, then.  The writing was on the wall, but I didn't think sales were quite so terrible to axe after 2016.

I have to imagine the continued success of Ninjago, Nexo Knights, LEGO Movie, etc. is pushing the company strategy towards integrating storytelling with "traditional" Lego, which defeats part of the purpose of Bionicle.

I'm about to head out the door for work, so I guess I'll have to write up more complex thoughts later, but... yikes.

Holy cats! It's, somehow, the 22nd birthday of local Canadian/FA Eyru, and there's not a topic yet.  Let's fix that.

Happy Eyday, Eyru!

Closing at request of topic creator.

Well, you're not wrong.

There's a lot of factors that go into why BZP's been slowing down the past few years (and the past year or so especially.)  

Some of them are bigger-scale issues.  The straight forum-and-news-page fansite style has been on the decline for a while now; increasingly, people are able to make their own communities on social media, comprised of things they specifically want to talk about and people they specifically want to communicate with.  And though that's got its own downsides, it's not necessarily a bad thing! But it does mean that it's harder and harder for your average forum to grow or maintain a userbase, especially for topics focused at a younger audience (like Bionicle.)  Ten (or maybe even five) years ago people still turned to a "forum" as the main hub of discussion for a topic; these days, that's not so true anymore.

So... what's BZP done to respond to that? Honestly, not as much as we should have.  We've got your obligatory Facebook and Twitter accounts, sure, but those can only do so much to help drive interest to the site itself.  Someone who retweets or likes a post isn't necessarily someone who's gonna then come and spend hours on the forum discussing things in detail.  

What a lot of sites do then is they double down on content creation.  Basically, if you want people to stick around your site, you've gotta have things that really put yourself apart from the crowd.  (That's not to say there are no sites that just function as standard discussion forums for the most part, but most of those that do are focused on much larger or more popular topics than Lego-with-a-focus-on-one-particular-line.)  

Unfortunately, it turns out that creating that kind of content at a level of high quality - and a website that can support and promote it - takes a lot of time, energy, and skill in certain areas.  And the blunt, somewhat depressing fact is that pretty much all of the BZP staff lacks some or all of those things these days.  AFAIK, everyone on active staff is either in or has graduated college (long since graduated, in quite a few cases) and many (myself included!) are working full-time, usually in fields that have nothing to do with what you'd want to get a website kicking (video creation, design, etc.)  

I don't want to undersell the effort that the staff has put into this site.  Bossman's dedicated years and years of his life to this place, and Wind (until she stepped down recently) was as good a mod as they come.  I'm proud to have worked among them and many others.  But the hard fact is that dedication isn't necessarily going to be enough to turn things around if you haven't got the right skillsets and mindsets.

Let's take a concrete example.  It's practically a running joke at this point how out-of-date the front page of the site is.  Since being introduced in the early 2000s, it's seen virtually no changes, give or take the addition of a few social feeds and the removal of a few forum features that are no longer supported.  So for years now, there've been attempts at overhauling the thing.  But here's the problem: we just didn't have staff with actual web design expertise.  I wound up taking a pretty significant crack at it last year myself, having basically 0 experience with web design.  What I came up with was a design that was pretty much functional, that interfaced with IPB's forum software and the news feed better, and which ultimately kind of looked like if Fisher-Price ran a forum and was still pretty much just a meat-and-potatoes forum front page.  Maybe it was better than what we have now, but when we showed it to most of the staff, the reaction was pretty much what I had had a gut feeling about all along: it wasn't really what we needed.

In a perfect world I could've taken all that feedback, gone and spent a lot of time learning website design and iterating and making something really up-to-par for 2016 - but it's not a perfect world and I'm not a perfect person.  I'm at a point in my life where I don't have the time or energy to throw myself into a pretty much entirely new field from scratch and get myself to the level of polish that a project like this would've deserved.  So now the front page is, unfortunately, back in limbo until we can get someone who has the experience, skill, and opportunity to do better.

Then there's the member base itself.  Time passes, BZPers get older, and the same issues that hit the staff hit the rest of the members sooner or later too.  For the most part, the older you get the less time you have to spend on whatever you like - or your interests change, or your views change, or what have you.  That's fine and totally natural! But it also translates to a general drag on activity.  And the thing about drags on forum activity is that they echo off each other.  If Alice is posting less, her friend Bob is gonna be less inclined to post, and if neither of them are around Charlie might wander off... you see what I mean.  Many BZP members have moved on.  Now, if we had a strong influx of new members, that wouldn't be so much of an issue.  But refer to the past several paragraphs - these days, "a strong influx of new forum members" is a heck of a lot easier said than done. 

Finally, let's talk about subject matter.  I don't wanna put too much emphasis here, because if there's anything spending darn near 15 years trawling forums and the like has taught me, it's that there can be an internet community for anything.  That said - Bionicle G2 really doesn't feel like it's taken off as much as G1 did.  Some of that is due to the format - whereas G1 snowballed into a very interleaved story/world with who knows how much media to back it up, G2's been comparatively low-key, with only a few novels/graphic novels/episodes.  It's not a terrible amount of content, but it's also just not as much to chew through as in G1.  That makes it harder for discussion to flourish, especially given BZP had a history in G1 of being very story-focused.

So! I realize I just gave you a fire hose when you asked for a glass of water.  But hey, what better way to celebrate the 15th anniversary with a bit of honesty?

I also realize that the response to the above might be "so what do we do?"/"that's depressing."  I don't mean for the above to be taken as "BZP is doomed, it's the end of the world, etc. etc. etc." But I do feel like these are issues with the site that often get papered over more than they really should be, and I hope folks who navigated that wall of text come away with a better understanding of what's going on and what we would need to start driving activity again.