LNR Universe
:: YEAR 2025 REVIVAL ::

You are looking at a very old website that I had first built during my childhood, between about the ages of 12 and 15 years old.

"The Land of No Return" was a childhood project of mine: a story and a set of characters that were inspired by all of my favorite things from when I was a kid.

2025 Updates

To revive this website and bring it back online in the year 2025, the following are the very minimal changes I made to the original website:

Added Ruffle.rs to all of the pages that embedded Flash applets, to bring them back online for modern browsers.
Some bug fixes on a couple pages that caused the outer frameset of the website to break. For example, apparently using document.writeln() to paste in a mailto: link would trash the top-level frame context and then all nav bar links would open their page in new windows instead of targeting the correct frame.
A couple of 2025 annotations added to certain pages where appropriate.
On LNR Worlds, I've extracted the stand-alone Flash game to embed directly on the page for ease of access.
A custom "Not Found" page to redirect certain broken links to, such as the (now defunct) hosted web forums.
This page was added to talk about the 2025 updates.
Details can be found on the git history where I have put this website under version control: https://git.kirsle.net/neocities/lnr

Synopsis of the Story

The very original form of the story took the form of two "journals" that tell the same story from the perspective of different characters.

The first journal is that of Synan Creel, a 12-year-old boy who lives in a city named Vatican City. I had heard that name from news programs on TV and thought it sounded cool, but it has no relation to the real life city-state of that name.

The Land of No Return is a floating island that enters the upper atmosphere one day and monsters spill out and invade the surface. When Synan goes into town to investigate, he meets a monster named Ico who teleports him up to the island in the sky. There, he meets his rival, a boy named Syrus, and they decide to split up and each one explores the opposite side of the island where they encounter friends and monsters who they are able to capture and use as allies on their journey.

The journals are written in the form of 20 short chapters, each one reads like a screenplay as if for a cartoon TV series. The first 20 chapters are the journal of Synan, who takes the western route around the island and meets with Zoe (a friend of his from school) and Sarah (who staffs the Book Temple). The next 20 chapters are the journal of Syrus, who took the eastern route around the island.

Later on, the Book of Veronica was written, in the form of a single cohesive mini novel. Veronica is a time traveler from the future. She is the middle child of a future Synan and Zoe, with an older brother named Sage and a younger brother Kail.

The world that Veronica grew up in is post-apocalyptic, after a monster named Jackal had arrived from an alternate dimension and laid waste to the Earth. Her family is on the move and hiding out in the Sahara desert. Veronica develops psychic abilities as a child, and by age 13 she learns how to use her powers to travel through time and she sets out on a quest to save the world from Jackal's terror, by going back in time to prevent the Jackal's arrival in the first place.

In the past, Veronica makes her way to "The World of No Return," otherwise known as "Planet X," a far-away world with purple soil in the furthest reaches of the solar system. It is from here that the floating island is obtained and brought back to Earth's atmosphere. (The island is able to stay afloat thanks to special properties of "hover crystals" that saturate its rocky core).

The story of Veronica's young parents, Synan and Zoe, therefore get intertwined with her own on the floating island. As part of her efforts to fight The Jackal, she brings her older brother Sage from the future, who has the unique ability to resonate with a crystal called the "Deity Stone," transforming himself into a powerful monster that might be able to defeat the Jackal.

About the Authors

I am Noah Petherbridge, and you can find my (modern!) personal home page at Kirsle.net.

On this website, I am often referred to as Cerone Kirsle or sometimes CjKircle. This is a "pen name" that I had developed to use on the early Internet. I had first gotten online when I was about 12 years old, and the parental wisdom of the day was "don't tell anybody your real name online," so I had come up with alternative names to use for myself.

I also couldn't have come up with the entire story of The Land of No Return on my own, and I credit my favorite cousin, Bobby Clingerman, with helping me to flesh out character designs and story elements. This story is just as much a part of his childhood as it is mine.

Original Inspiration (2025 Edition)

As mentioned on the History page, the initial inspiration for The Land of No Return came from a Zoobooks magazine I saw in my 6th grade class room, which featured a lemur with wide eyes on its cover, which I thought was just so funny and decided to run with. The very first monster I created was a monkey-type creature with similarly wide eyes, and the first handful of monsters followed that theme.

The story of The Land of No Return borrows many influences from all of my favorite things as a kid:

Pokemon is the most obvious influence, with the design of some of the monsters themselves and with the idea of capturing, training, and using them for battle.
NiGHTS: Into Dreams, a Sega Saturn game, inspired the appearance and name of the "Ideya capture marbles" that the monsters were absorbed into.

I had my own canonical backstory about how the marbles worked: at their core was a piece of "Warp Stone" which had teleportation powers, and surrounding it was an orbit of crystals that would fully obscure the Warp Stone core and hold it in place. When the marble is thrown and collides against something, the outer shell of crystals would be disrupted and enable the Warp Stone to "capture" or suck inside of it any nearby creature or object. When similarly jostled again, the Warp Stone would release its captured subject once more.

The different colors, similar to Pokeballs, had different strengths or levels of effectiveness to capture larger and stronger objects or creatures. The order went from Red (as the most basic and weakest color), Blue (greater), Spirit (purple), Gold (not sure anymore) and Master (white).

The appearance of the character "Jackal" was also strongly inspired by the character of similar name on NiGHTS.

In The Land of No Return, Jackal is an immortal being who lives in a parallel universe and has ambitions to cross 'the gap between dimensions' and conquer our world.
Dragon Ball Z and their depiction of Super Saiyans inspired the concept of the 'Mega Stone,' a dark purple crystal in my story which gives its bearer the ability to take on a super-powered form complete with a flame-like yellow aura. But, their hair keeps its original coloration.
Myst and Riven had their influence in the form of some "Linking Books" that allowed our protagonists to fast travel around the island itself. Their depiction in The Land of No Return is basically the same, with a "warp panel" inside the book's cover that teleports the user to the location pictured.

One of the landmarks on the island is the Book Temple, and this one was actually inspired by a dream I had as a kid. I dreamt of being in this circular, yellow colored structure with arches along the wall and in each arch was a pedestal containing a book. One of the books fell to the ground and open, and a bat-like creature emerged from it and flew around the space. The Book Temple and its purpose of protecting various magical books (which can summon monsters, or teleport the user to a far-away location) were translated 1:1 into my story.
The Matrix, with its squid-like sentinel machines that patrol the sewers of the real world, inspired the design of the character Snip, who patrols the infinite labyinth of "the gap between dimensions" and hunts for any intruders who try and navigate that space.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's final boss form of Ganon inspired the design of the monster named Deity.