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Gadg8eer
K.i.D Player 10
Hi! This is an idea known either as Metapowers or the Novel Comics Multiverse. The complete list of "primary layer" inspirations are Marvel Comics and the MCU, DC Comics, Sentinel Comics (which is actually a fictional comic book company that doubles as the setting for the Sentinels of the Multiverse TCG and the Sentinel Comics RPG), The Powerpuff Girls, the Big Hero 6 movie, Kid Cosmic and the Sonic Courage, Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, Soon I Will Be Invincible, Narbonic and P.S. 238, but the "secondary layer" inspirations are divided by the time period in the setting's fictional history and the retro-futurism those periods saw in real life.
Like Sentinel Comics, Novel Comics is a fictional (and extradimensional) comic book publisher who records the story of the RP in its comics. In the last 15 years they've rebooted their entire multiverse with the Novel Comics Cinematic Universe, which does have an accompanying comic book shared universe but bases the majority of its revenue on self-contained movies about singular events in the Novel Comics canon.
I spent several days fleshing out the setting to an insane degree, and MisterEightySix has spent another several days editing it. The setting now has an extensive history going back to the 19th century (earlier if you count proto-superheroes, Geniuses, various magic users and mythological entities), but - other than a few token NPC superheroes and supervillains - I've left out actual characters so that you (yes, YOU!) can populate it with characters that have backstories going back as far back as you want. Just keep in mind that this setting's immortality-induced "comic book aging" only goes back to the 1800s unless your character is a demigod or vampire or something. (Information on Ambrose, the substance that causes this phenomenon, can be found in below in the description of the Brass Age, as well as in the profiles of Dr. Eternity and Desmond Bates.)
EDIT: See the "Atlas of the Novel Comics Multiverse" posts below for the whole list of timelines!
Like Sentinel Comics, Novel Comics is a fictional (and extradimensional) comic book publisher who records the story of the RP in its comics. In the last 15 years they've rebooted their entire multiverse with the Novel Comics Cinematic Universe, which does have an accompanying comic book shared universe but bases the majority of its revenue on self-contained movies about singular events in the Novel Comics canon.
I spent several days fleshing out the setting to an insane degree, and MisterEightySix has spent another several days editing it. The setting now has an extensive history going back to the 19th century (earlier if you count proto-superheroes, Geniuses, various magic users and mythological entities), but - other than a few token NPC superheroes and supervillains - I've left out actual characters so that you (yes, YOU!) can populate it with characters that have backstories going back as far back as you want. Just keep in mind that this setting's immortality-induced "comic book aging" only goes back to the 1800s unless your character is a demigod or vampire or something. (Information on Ambrose, the substance that causes this phenomenon, can be found in below in the description of the Brass Age, as well as in the profiles of Dr. Eternity and Desmond Bates.)
EDIT: See the "Atlas of the Novel Comics Multiverse" posts below for the whole list of timelines!
The existence of metapowers throws a real wrench into the gears of organized sports from the beginning. Due to the many, many ways a muggle can end up as a metapower, it is impossible to tell with 100% certainty that a person claiming to be a muggle is not, in fact, just hiding them. It's also not 100% possible to guarantee that someone who appears (or even claims) to be a Genius isn't just extremely intelligent (true Geniuses are capable of getting a right answer to an engineering or computing problem on the first try every time, but a muggle with greater actual intelligence could solve the same set of problems in a shorter time and/or with better results, despite making a few mistakes), and a surprising number of highly intelligent muggles later became Geniuses.
While ancient sports like the Mayan Ball Game or the Greek Olympics decided to simply allow it in order to allow gods and demigods to grace the ceremonies, and such informal sports of the Early Modern period as the Eton Wall Game (started in 1717) didn't and don't bother to worry about it, sports as a real life concept are exclusively played informally, with land occupied by dedicated stadiums, sports fields and hockey rinks instead used as superhero team headquarters, superhero training facilities or hangars for giant mecha.
The only exceptions are...
VR Sports Tournaments, which can grant all players virtual superpowers, see at the very bottom of this section for a description.
Golfing, which is, as in real life, mostly played by rich white guys as "wagers" which decide business deals.
The NAGL Metabowl, basically the Super Bowl. The North American Gridiron League is different in that it discourages (but does not discriminate against or say no to) muggles signing up for the Metabowl. Muggles who do are usually either well-armed with gadgets, a badass normal (potentially with martial arts training), both of the above, or a reckless fool. The Metabowl also does not allow individual players to sign sponsorship deals, though entire teams and the Metabowl committee for the year's tournament can and often do sponsor consumer products or services. It is held at basically the same time as the real life Super Bowl, and has been held on the exact same years.
High School/College Football exists, but started much later due to its inability to determine whether someone is a metapower. Why did it start at all? Well...
In-universe Sports Comics, including Sports Manga, are the Novel Comics Universe's equivalent to the pirate comics in Watchmen. After the release of a widely popular story in an American comic book in the 1930s, the idea of a world where professional gladiator-style sports tournaments held on a national or larger scale could exist thanks to advances in metapower-detection technology (which never came to pass) was born. By the 1950s, when it was clear metapowers would never be universally detectable, the idea came to be that all sports comics took place in "real life but without metapowers". This was part of a continuity reboot for the largest comics publisher at the time, and (as you're probably starting to suspect) somehow perfectly depicted IRL professional sports and athletes, featured in graphic novels such as...
..."The Modern Olympics", whose issues were only released on leap years - later every two years, interspaced for the Leap Year "Summer Olympics" and the new "Winter Olympics".
...The "Super Bowl I" anthology and its annual sequels that have the Roman numeral bumped up by one each year it gets published.
...The deconstructive "Tour de France" bike race comic about how even in a world that has no supertech or powers, people will find ways to cheat with whatever tech they do have.
...The "National Hockey League", a Canadian-made comic about "what if, in sports world, our country's most popular informal sport had its own Super Bowl?"
..."Basketball", a Sports Manga about a sport - created informally by a white P.E. schoolteacher to get his impoverished inner city students to actually do exercise during PhysEd - that went on to become an icon of ghetto life and black culture in-universe as a result. Rather than featuring a tournament, the comic focuses mainly on individual informal players, though it is of course mentioned that the NBA exists to be like similar sports tournaments throughout the "Sports Comic Shared Universe".
..."NASCAR: Stock Car Racing", "Formula One" and its prequel series like "Formula 2000", and "Tales from the Off-Road Rally Races" are basically the Big Three of car racing comics.
..."Tennis" is actually not a comic book at all, but the first VR game (produced in the 1970s). First advertised in sports comic books, "Tennis" was described as taking place in the Sports Comics Shared Universe and was the name of the titular sport invented in the 19th Century. Of course, this being a 1970s VR game, the backstory is only referenced in magazine ads and in the game's paper manual, rather than in-game where the only things that happen are scorekeeping and the movement of the players and the ball.
As you can guess, a lot of facts about sports IRL are just considered genre conventions in the NCCU, though there seems to be a strange fixation with exotic underwear-like clothes (for both genders, but it's oddly more common in sports comics about male sports teams, giving the whole sports comics industry some vaguely homoerotic implications). Steroids are basically "Super Serum that makes you stronger but also less of a man, so to speak". Cheerleader outfits are no more eyepopping to seasoned readers than the average fantasy bard's goofy getup, despite how clearly they emphasize "certain attributes" of women. Skin-tight swimsuits - from early shoulder-strapped suits to bikinis to speedos - and swim goggles, while originally considered slightly risque in the case of the former, became real life swimwear products in the NCCU. Even jock-straps and cups, which are never actually shown in official sports comics (though Japanese knock-off comics managed to define their actual look), are described in a way that portrays them as part of a character's protection gear as much as existing as fanservice to the reader.
Non-fanservice genre conventions include...
...Winning by one point, or even at the last second.
...A player got injured or too old and had to retire because not having super-medicine sucks.
...The old friend of a main character who went to high school with them and was on the school sports team for the comic's chosen sport, but got a career-destroying injury during a game of said sport.
...A Gridiron/American Football player who gets a Football Scholarship.
...The tragic car crash of the previous two ideas, where the Football injury means the Scholarship is nullified and the player can't go to college.
...extensive protective gear, not just those related to protecting "certain attributes" of a soft and sensitive nature, but the entire body - often so that players can crash into each other in brutal and otherwise injury-inducing fashion.
...hockey and football comics having a grim reveal that the aforementioned collisions lead to brain rot, despite all the protective gear, because "Death By A Thousand Bumps" is just as bad for the brain as the "Chunky Salsa Rule".
...baseball being a slow-burn type of game that often bores less-dedicated readers.
...somewhat hilarious thirty car pileups in NASCAR that only result in minor injuries due to the car's design.
...extremely gruesome car crashes followed by the car bursting into flames with the driver trapped inside in F1, used as a means of killing off a character for drama purposes.
...and, of course, the idea that athletes are as famous in the Sports Comics Shared Universe (and of course IRL) as superheroes are in the NCCU.
...inversely, that athletes from Sports Comics are as world-famous in the NCCU as Superman and other fictional superheroes are IRL.
Additionally, there's a single comic which ignores and does not take place in the Sports Comics Shared Universe, an urban fantasy sports comic by in-universe comic book author Kate Jenna Gatling (K.J. Gatling) called "Quidwitch Throughout the Ages". In the urban fantasy setting, superscience and superheroes don't exist, but magic secretly does and is hidden from ordinary people by an ancient, partly benevolent but partly corrupt, wizard conspiracy. That's just an excuse plot, though...
The comic is actually about teenage girls competing in a global tournament of a sport called Quidwitch, which is played by players called "witches". Players of Quidwitch must be female because only women can form bonds with and ride the magic broomsticks that are required for the sports' typical three-dimensional playing field (for some reason). Five players are assigned to each team, often leading to the players forming an acronym for the team based on the first letter of each of their names, and actual games of Quidwitch resemble WWII aerial dogfighting (complete with magical projectiles). Male magic users, or "wizards", with athletic inclinations usually play a completely different sport called Twinball of which little is shown.
Finally, it should be noted that sports video games and eSports are basically the same thing, except the former (called "Sports Virtual Realities") is limited to a VR system's local Cyberspace and can be paused, while the latter (just called eSports) is often played live in a dedicated node. This also means that eSports are like if real sports could only be played in VR, instead of being like IRL action strategy games such as Starcraft or League of Legends. American College Football was the first to hold eSport tournaments in the Metaverse. High School Football, while limited to Texas, also holds eSports tournaments. All equivalents to real life professional sports are held in the Metaverse, mostly inspired by Sports Comics.
While ancient sports like the Mayan Ball Game or the Greek Olympics decided to simply allow it in order to allow gods and demigods to grace the ceremonies, and such informal sports of the Early Modern period as the Eton Wall Game (started in 1717) didn't and don't bother to worry about it, sports as a real life concept are exclusively played informally, with land occupied by dedicated stadiums, sports fields and hockey rinks instead used as superhero team headquarters, superhero training facilities or hangars for giant mecha.
The only exceptions are...
VR Sports Tournaments, which can grant all players virtual superpowers, see at the very bottom of this section for a description.
Golfing, which is, as in real life, mostly played by rich white guys as "wagers" which decide business deals.
The NAGL Metabowl, basically the Super Bowl. The North American Gridiron League is different in that it discourages (but does not discriminate against or say no to) muggles signing up for the Metabowl. Muggles who do are usually either well-armed with gadgets, a badass normal (potentially with martial arts training), both of the above, or a reckless fool. The Metabowl also does not allow individual players to sign sponsorship deals, though entire teams and the Metabowl committee for the year's tournament can and often do sponsor consumer products or services. It is held at basically the same time as the real life Super Bowl, and has been held on the exact same years.
High School/College Football exists, but started much later due to its inability to determine whether someone is a metapower. Why did it start at all? Well...
In-universe Sports Comics, including Sports Manga, are the Novel Comics Universe's equivalent to the pirate comics in Watchmen. After the release of a widely popular story in an American comic book in the 1930s, the idea of a world where professional gladiator-style sports tournaments held on a national or larger scale could exist thanks to advances in metapower-detection technology (which never came to pass) was born. By the 1950s, when it was clear metapowers would never be universally detectable, the idea came to be that all sports comics took place in "real life but without metapowers". This was part of a continuity reboot for the largest comics publisher at the time, and (as you're probably starting to suspect) somehow perfectly depicted IRL professional sports and athletes, featured in graphic novels such as...
..."The Modern Olympics", whose issues were only released on leap years - later every two years, interspaced for the Leap Year "Summer Olympics" and the new "Winter Olympics".
...The "Super Bowl I" anthology and its annual sequels that have the Roman numeral bumped up by one each year it gets published.
...The deconstructive "Tour de France" bike race comic about how even in a world that has no supertech or powers, people will find ways to cheat with whatever tech they do have.
...The "National Hockey League", a Canadian-made comic about "what if, in sports world, our country's most popular informal sport had its own Super Bowl?"
..."Basketball", a Sports Manga about a sport - created informally by a white P.E. schoolteacher to get his impoverished inner city students to actually do exercise during PhysEd - that went on to become an icon of ghetto life and black culture in-universe as a result. Rather than featuring a tournament, the comic focuses mainly on individual informal players, though it is of course mentioned that the NBA exists to be like similar sports tournaments throughout the "Sports Comic Shared Universe".
..."NASCAR: Stock Car Racing", "Formula One" and its prequel series like "Formula 2000", and "Tales from the Off-Road Rally Races" are basically the Big Three of car racing comics.
..."Tennis" is actually not a comic book at all, but the first VR game (produced in the 1970s). First advertised in sports comic books, "Tennis" was described as taking place in the Sports Comics Shared Universe and was the name of the titular sport invented in the 19th Century. Of course, this being a 1970s VR game, the backstory is only referenced in magazine ads and in the game's paper manual, rather than in-game where the only things that happen are scorekeeping and the movement of the players and the ball.
As you can guess, a lot of facts about sports IRL are just considered genre conventions in the NCCU, though there seems to be a strange fixation with exotic underwear-like clothes (for both genders, but it's oddly more common in sports comics about male sports teams, giving the whole sports comics industry some vaguely homoerotic implications). Steroids are basically "Super Serum that makes you stronger but also less of a man, so to speak". Cheerleader outfits are no more eyepopping to seasoned readers than the average fantasy bard's goofy getup, despite how clearly they emphasize "certain attributes" of women. Skin-tight swimsuits - from early shoulder-strapped suits to bikinis to speedos - and swim goggles, while originally considered slightly risque in the case of the former, became real life swimwear products in the NCCU. Even jock-straps and cups, which are never actually shown in official sports comics (though Japanese knock-off comics managed to define their actual look), are described in a way that portrays them as part of a character's protection gear as much as existing as fanservice to the reader.
Non-fanservice genre conventions include...
...Winning by one point, or even at the last second.
...A player got injured or too old and had to retire because not having super-medicine sucks.
...The old friend of a main character who went to high school with them and was on the school sports team for the comic's chosen sport, but got a career-destroying injury during a game of said sport.
...A Gridiron/American Football player who gets a Football Scholarship.
...The tragic car crash of the previous two ideas, where the Football injury means the Scholarship is nullified and the player can't go to college.
...extensive protective gear, not just those related to protecting "certain attributes" of a soft and sensitive nature, but the entire body - often so that players can crash into each other in brutal and otherwise injury-inducing fashion.
...hockey and football comics having a grim reveal that the aforementioned collisions lead to brain rot, despite all the protective gear, because "Death By A Thousand Bumps" is just as bad for the brain as the "Chunky Salsa Rule".
...baseball being a slow-burn type of game that often bores less-dedicated readers.
...somewhat hilarious thirty car pileups in NASCAR that only result in minor injuries due to the car's design.
...extremely gruesome car crashes followed by the car bursting into flames with the driver trapped inside in F1, used as a means of killing off a character for drama purposes.
...and, of course, the idea that athletes are as famous in the Sports Comics Shared Universe (and of course IRL) as superheroes are in the NCCU.
...inversely, that athletes from Sports Comics are as world-famous in the NCCU as Superman and other fictional superheroes are IRL.
Additionally, there's a single comic which ignores and does not take place in the Sports Comics Shared Universe, an urban fantasy sports comic by in-universe comic book author Kate Jenna Gatling (K.J. Gatling) called "Quidwitch Throughout the Ages". In the urban fantasy setting, superscience and superheroes don't exist, but magic secretly does and is hidden from ordinary people by an ancient, partly benevolent but partly corrupt, wizard conspiracy. That's just an excuse plot, though...
The comic is actually about teenage girls competing in a global tournament of a sport called Quidwitch, which is played by players called "witches". Players of Quidwitch must be female because only women can form bonds with and ride the magic broomsticks that are required for the sports' typical three-dimensional playing field (for some reason). Five players are assigned to each team, often leading to the players forming an acronym for the team based on the first letter of each of their names, and actual games of Quidwitch resemble WWII aerial dogfighting (complete with magical projectiles). Male magic users, or "wizards", with athletic inclinations usually play a completely different sport called Twinball of which little is shown.
Apparently, in the canon of Quidwitch, it is possible to drink a potion that swaps your gender over the course of a single minute (though the result is permanent, and the transformation process extremely painful). In fact, the ancient wizard conspiracy requires such potions to have a safety additive that prevents its effects in anyone who hasn't finished puberty (and nullifies the "it's permanent" part for that attempt so that it doesn't cause such a potion to not work later in life), as well as educating teenagers about the difference between "choice of the soul" (Gatling's "no such thing as fate" equivalent to how real gay people are born gay) and peer pressure regarding sexuality.
Wizards and witches consider sex as well as love a "choice of the soul" rather than a simple mental choice. In real life terms, Gatling's heroic characters believe "being gay, trans, asexual or even straight is like choosing your favorite Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fighter or what college degree to take, it defines your preferences and options going forward but there's no wrong answer" rather than "being gay is a choice made by sexual deviants, asexuals don't exist, and only straight people are virtuous". Even the villains of her works, if they care about sexuality at all, believe that people are "fated to be straight, or gay, or transgender; if that makes them miserable, it is through no fault of their own, but nothing can help them as it is and always has been their fate to suffer" - as you can imagine, the primary problems with this are believing you can determine someone's fate, whether that be out of arrogance and hubris or simply believing in pseudomagical/pseudoscientific methods of divination that have been conclusively proven to be as accurate as flipping a coin. Much like with Trolls from Homestuck IRL, fans of Quidwich took this idea of "choice of the soul" and ran with it, sometimes twisting the message that "organizations and groups shouldn't control people's private lives" into "I'm allowed to be a shitty person because there are no wrong choices".
Of course, IRL and even in the NCCU there's plenty of evidence that sexuality is determined by biological factors, not psychological choices, which Gatling is ignoring (whether for storytelling purposes or because she actually believes them). That said, aside from the good anti-authoritarianism, anti-classist/caste, and pro-skepticism-within-reason message, Gatling has a point; Biologically-determined sexuality could, hypothetically, be "cured" - for lack of a better ominously ironic term - by modifying a person's biological makeup. In that sense, being of a given sexuality really is a choice of the soul as much as a biological trait, like preferring chocolate ice cream over strawberry. Those who are currently trying to get everyone to eat strawberry ice cream - by penalty of torture - when buying ice cream, will someday be trying to force everyone to have their taste buds or brain modified to hate every flavor of ice cream except strawberry.
It should be noted that any post-pubescent wizard or witch who knows for certain that they're comfortable with their birth gender will drink a potion meant to transform a member of the opposite gender into their own, making their original gender permanent in an instant. Unlike changing their gender, confirming their original gender is painless due to there being no physical changes - as you can imagine, having almost your entire body from your physical attractiveness to your reproductive organs to the chromosomes in your cells replaced or translated to the opposing gender would probably be incredibly painful to bear for even a single minute.
As you can guess, this is all just to justify K.J. Gatling referencing her own newfound support for the trans community, including the idea that a born-wizard who realizes (s)he is transgender can play Quidwitch after the gender change. While this moral lesson is handled well in and of itself in her comics as described above, Gatling's public relations in the regular world aren't so spotless due to accusations ranging from "former Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist" to "racist anti-racism hypocrite" to "a lesbian who just wanted an excuse to draw girls in short skirts riding phallic objects". Knowing what we know about Gatling, instead of the limited scope afforded to characters in the NCCU, the worst-case scenario is that despite advising everyone to be skeptical enough to do basic factchecking, she could be a hypocrite who dismissed or is ignorant of the evidence pointing towards biologically-determined sexuality and honestly believes that sexuality is purely a choice. That said, that's the worst-case scenario, it doesn't mean K.J. Gatling - a fictional counterpart - is as bad as or worse than J.K. Rowling's actual shortcomings, but the idea of a supervillain who used to be a famous writer/artist threatening the world because she believes something without questioning becomes more appetizing to the plot every time the real thing says something extremist in nature.
Wizards and witches consider sex as well as love a "choice of the soul" rather than a simple mental choice. In real life terms, Gatling's heroic characters believe "being gay, trans, asexual or even straight is like choosing your favorite Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fighter or what college degree to take, it defines your preferences and options going forward but there's no wrong answer" rather than "being gay is a choice made by sexual deviants, asexuals don't exist, and only straight people are virtuous". Even the villains of her works, if they care about sexuality at all, believe that people are "fated to be straight, or gay, or transgender; if that makes them miserable, it is through no fault of their own, but nothing can help them as it is and always has been their fate to suffer" - as you can imagine, the primary problems with this are believing you can determine someone's fate, whether that be out of arrogance and hubris or simply believing in pseudomagical/pseudoscientific methods of divination that have been conclusively proven to be as accurate as flipping a coin. Much like with Trolls from Homestuck IRL, fans of Quidwich took this idea of "choice of the soul" and ran with it, sometimes twisting the message that "organizations and groups shouldn't control people's private lives" into "I'm allowed to be a shitty person because there are no wrong choices".
Of course, IRL and even in the NCCU there's plenty of evidence that sexuality is determined by biological factors, not psychological choices, which Gatling is ignoring (whether for storytelling purposes or because she actually believes them). That said, aside from the good anti-authoritarianism, anti-classist/caste, and pro-skepticism-within-reason message, Gatling has a point; Biologically-determined sexuality could, hypothetically, be "cured" - for lack of a better ominously ironic term - by modifying a person's biological makeup. In that sense, being of a given sexuality really is a choice of the soul as much as a biological trait, like preferring chocolate ice cream over strawberry. Those who are currently trying to get everyone to eat strawberry ice cream - by penalty of torture - when buying ice cream, will someday be trying to force everyone to have their taste buds or brain modified to hate every flavor of ice cream except strawberry.
It should be noted that any post-pubescent wizard or witch who knows for certain that they're comfortable with their birth gender will drink a potion meant to transform a member of the opposite gender into their own, making their original gender permanent in an instant. Unlike changing their gender, confirming their original gender is painless due to there being no physical changes - as you can imagine, having almost your entire body from your physical attractiveness to your reproductive organs to the chromosomes in your cells replaced or translated to the opposing gender would probably be incredibly painful to bear for even a single minute.
As you can guess, this is all just to justify K.J. Gatling referencing her own newfound support for the trans community, including the idea that a born-wizard who realizes (s)he is transgender can play Quidwitch after the gender change. While this moral lesson is handled well in and of itself in her comics as described above, Gatling's public relations in the regular world aren't so spotless due to accusations ranging from "former Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist" to "racist anti-racism hypocrite" to "a lesbian who just wanted an excuse to draw girls in short skirts riding phallic objects". Knowing what we know about Gatling, instead of the limited scope afforded to characters in the NCCU, the worst-case scenario is that despite advising everyone to be skeptical enough to do basic factchecking, she could be a hypocrite who dismissed or is ignorant of the evidence pointing towards biologically-determined sexuality and honestly believes that sexuality is purely a choice. That said, that's the worst-case scenario, it doesn't mean K.J. Gatling - a fictional counterpart - is as bad as or worse than J.K. Rowling's actual shortcomings, but the idea of a supervillain who used to be a famous writer/artist threatening the world because she believes something without questioning becomes more appetizing to the plot every time the real thing says something extremist in nature.
Finally, it should be noted that sports video games and eSports are basically the same thing, except the former (called "Sports Virtual Realities") is limited to a VR system's local Cyberspace and can be paused, while the latter (just called eSports) is often played live in a dedicated node. This also means that eSports are like if real sports could only be played in VR, instead of being like IRL action strategy games such as Starcraft or League of Legends. American College Football was the first to hold eSport tournaments in the Metaverse. High School Football, while limited to Texas, also holds eSports tournaments. All equivalents to real life professional sports are held in the Metaverse, mostly inspired by Sports Comics.
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