Jasper, good morning!
Jasper wrote:Neat brochure. Are you going to write a story or something around it?
Thanks kindly for posting back, and the interest and question thus. I've always been fascinated by Victor Lazlo's unexplained disappearance (and never would be in the lifetimes of his peers), three or four years or so before the 'starting date' of the campaign world in Beyond The Supernatural, as a bit of an urban legend with limited public record. I know it was revealed many years later IRL, of course, that he was Rifted roughly four hundred years into his world's future from the Indian Snake Mound to Africa in the modern world of the Rifts setting, but it's always been something very tantalizing to explore in my own mind regarding what his work actually meant to the 'modern world' of the alternate present of BTS, and of course, the irony of his finding out that all of his theories, dismissed by most and attacked by many in his own time, had been completely accurate...and the horror what they embodied had done to the world of the future, when everything hit the fan a hundred years after his time.
I always thought of 'Worlds Within Worlds' (the fictional book Dr. Lazlo wrote, regarding the bulk of his theories on ley lines, natural earth energies, amplifications of those during planetary alignments and the different lunar and vernal equinoxes, and sacred 'hub' places where such things whipped up the occasional interdimensional rift, even in his own time), the magnum opus of Victor's career and the explanation and justification for his struggle to do what he knew needed to be done, even though scant few outside of the Lazlo Company had any faith or interest in his life's work and chosen path, was a perfect metaphor for what Victor Lazlo, as a person, an educated man and as a quasi-mystical warrior and explorer, was and chose to craft himself into.
The quotes I wrote in the small sidebar beside the half-portrait I worked up (based on a stock photo I thought would make a good base for Lazlo's appearance), at least the one regarding the Lazlo Company being found guilty in absentia (as in the court reaching the verdict but the defendant intentionally or not abstaining from being present during the trial) of the murder of the 5-year-old boy after a botched (true, in what I'd be writing) exorcism, at the apex of a considerably-difficult paranormal investigation involving multiple possessions of humans, dozens of tectonic and haunting entities, and a full week of lack of direct contact with the investigative team attached to the Company from the outside world, both because of psychic interference with communications equipment and intentional blocking of analog and cellular transmissions by some reasonably powerful supernatural entities: one of which was doing a terribly powerful job of possessing this young boy. Lazlo had come up against this thing before (remember the 'black, inky cloud, shimmering with hate and horror', he and Vish-Taal had encountered during his first astral projection, detailed in the BTS corebook?) and it started taking a considerable interest, per se, in what Lazlo and his Company was trying to do. Like many things that powerful and objecting to being interfered with, it decided to do its own special number on Lazlo and the Lazlo company...and, well, it did indeed.
That's the bulk of what I'm thinking of putting together, not literally Lazlo's 'last will and testament' in a legal sense (there never was one, since he disappeared without a body or an explanation, and the Company more-or-less lost its unifying hub that kept its members together after his disappearance, breaking apart without any resolution to what happened to him and why), but some small explanation- and I thought it might be interesting to be told as a narrative by one of his Nega-Psychic employees, who by nature would question whether or not anything happening to him and the people around him was anything more than overactive imagination. I thought the 'voice' of someone like that would provide a certain lack of bias regarding the supernatural aspects of the whole mess, which would probably be present in any other employee of the Company (save for another Nega-Psychic, perhaps).
That's about it in a nutshell. I'm not counting on Mr. Siembieda being comfortable with my own take on one of his most beloved characters and creations, and this may never get any further than a piece of writing I do for my own interest and practice...but I'm hoping it might become something more than that.
Again, I thank you kindly for your interest thus!
-Boe.
