Subplot Kudzu

So the Disney "Fairy" franchise has decided that a) the murderously psychotic Tinkerbell is the heroine of the Pixie Hollow stories and that b) she's a Tinker fairy who builds new time saving devices and other technology for the Fairy community. Being me, that makes me wonder if Tinkerbell is actually a Technocracy plant, part of their long term plan to subvert the Fair Folk's operating paradigm and ultimately destroy them. 

Personally, I think that would make the whole thing much more palatable. 

Last night the Sons of the Ether/March of the Pennguins crossover occurred in my head, with two penguin parents being informed that their son - traumatized by a walrus attack - will never fly again, and one chortling that it's a perfect time to try his steam powered personal flight contraption to show them all and the other returning to the lab to perfect the cloning procedure.

Maybe I'm meant to be playing GURPS Technomancer.

Just finished Dava Sobel's The Planets and found one more good example of the battle between the Sons of the Ether and the Technocracy - the Martian Canal Man himself. Sure, it seems obvious: he popularizes the idea of a living Mars and takes steps to prove it, only to have 'science' undercut him every step of the way.

More telling is his battle for Pluto: with his Flagstaff observatory finished he finds he can't get serious scientists to work there because of the disdain heaped upon his Martian theories. So he dedicates his time and effort to proving the existence of 'Planet X'. Just as we knew Neptune had to be there because of the effect it was having on Uranus, we knew there was something else out there that was acting on them. Another uncharted planet, filled with wonder! Using math and the diligent effort of Clyde Tombaugh, Lowell found it (well, he was dead at the time, but it was where he said it would be), and low, he was redeemed!

Except that Pluto wasn't as big as they thought. Smaller. No, smaller than that. OK, smaller still. And it couldn't have enough mass to account for a change to the Neptune and Uranus' orbits. Oh, wait, we'd calculated Neptune's mass incorrectly - there isn't any need for an outside force. And by the way, it's not really a planet.

Chip, chip, chip goes the vendetta of the Technocracy, slowly eliminating the legacy of Percival Lowell in the minds of humanity, lest we start thinking that the solar system might be a more exciting place... if we only viewed it through the Ether!

In 1859 Urbain J.J. Leverrier announced that Mercury's orbit was shifting ever so slightly over time - at odds with Newtonian mechanics - and postulated the cause to be another small planet in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. This kicked off a 55 year search for Vulcan, planet of the forge god. The search ended in 1915 when Einstein told the Prussian Academy of Sciences that Newtonian mechanics break down in high gravity areas - the Sun was warping space around it, making Mercury deviate from its predicted orbit. "Can you imagine my joy that the equations of the perihelion movement of Mercury prove correct? I was speechless for several days with excitement," Einstein wrote in a letter to a friend.

And with a stroke, the Void Engineers eliminated the great fortress of the Sons of the Ether, crushing one more piece of High Concept 'Science!' in the name of their precision crusade.

Your job: Get it back. This seems like such a natural for a Mage adventure, or as the kick off point for a campaign focused on Sons of the Ether - one more thing I don't have time to run.