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“Anything can happen, and it already did, you just weren’t looking in the right place.”

–Larry Smithers

INTRODUCTION

Earth 21 started as a series of short stories I wrote for school. They were about strange things that happen to people who lead less-than-normal lives. The continuity between stories was low, and they were not joined into a single universe until I started writing the main character, Larry Tolkein, who’s last name was later changed to Smithers. Larry was first introduced, though not named, in a story where he traveled to the future and met Moah Jelly, who helped him battle a series of monsters that worshiped Bad Acting. I consider this the first because of some of the elements I later used in all Larry stories. First, the story always beginning with him waking up, Second the reference to the Flying Bologna incident, and Third, Moah Jelly, who would later become Mr. Jelly and then just Lord Jelly. Eventually I scrapped Jelly and stuck to just Larry and his sister Meredith, and later Sarah, Larry’s sidekick. I introduced Meredith at the end of “My Tongue is a Scottish Mastermind” and then used her in all subsequent stories. Meredith I modeled after my own sister, just as Larry was to some degree modeled after me. Meredith was an evil mastermind who constantly was trying to rule the world using equipment she stole from her summer job at Villians, Inc. (A running joke was that Villians was always spelled wrong). Larry’s parents only featured in one story, “Revenge of the Zombie Cats III” which was retconned to become an alternate universe Larry story where he is the evil genius. Jill Sandvik, or Jill the Ripper, was an idea that a friend of mine and I created based off of one of our classmates, who bears no resemblance to the character whatsoever. The Sneaky Man was created to be Jill’s antagonist. I had always toyed with the idea of giving Larry a sidekick, and I eventually settled on Sarah Keich, who has the ability to use cuteness as an attack. The idea evolved from there.

FIVER-PLUSES

These are people that can travel in dimensions above the fifth. Most of us can only travel freely in three dimensions, and linearly in a fourth (time). Time travelers are those that can move freely in time as well as the first three dimensions, and “Fivers” can travel in the fifth dimension, allowing them to Jump from Earth to Earth. The only people that can effectively move from Earth to Earth are “Fiver-Pluses”, like Sarah or Larry.

EARTHS

“Some earths, the ones near Earth Prime, are like metal. You have to hammer them to change their shape. Some, like the ones that you and I come from, are like clay, a skilled craftsman can make it into whatever they want. And some, the really chaotic ones, are like water: no matter how hard you try to shape them, they always flow back into the ocean of disorganized matter.”

–Larry Smithers

There are billions of Earths.

Each one is another plane of existence. They are numbered from Prime (1) to ∞.

Earth Prime is where we live. Its inaccessible to F-P’s except when there are small patches of flux in space-time. Earth 2 is almost the same, but a little more accessible.

The further away you get from Earth Prime, the more the Laws of Physics stop applying, and rather what happens is what I like to call “Hollywood Science”, i.e., what people think would happen. The collective will of the people that live in that universe are causing it to function that way.

If you don’t want to read the above, it boils down to this: Earth 21 is the 21st Earth out of an infinite number.