It’s A Wonderful Life Newel Post

Origin
It's a Wonderful Life is considered one of the Christmas classics. The story opens with George Bailey ready to jump off a bridge after a life of dissatisfaction. An angel is sent to save George, whose whole life is explained in flashbacks.

He always wanted to travel and leave the confinement of Bedford Falls, but something always held him back. Family and business chained him to the town because others relied on his generous support from the Bailey loans office. To show George his true importance, Clarence, guardian angel, pulled a sneaky. He transported George to a reality where he never existed to see how much the town and its people suffers from his absence. George finds reasons to live and returns to his problems with glee.

Audience enthusiasm at the time of its release was apathetic. Even though it had several talented actors, an immense studio set and well written script, production stumbled. Director Francis Capra was difficult for crew to work with, constantly rewriting scenes or hiring replacements. The film only becomes something truly memorable three decades later, ruling the December primetime tv slot for years.

Effects
Allows the user to relive memories from another viewpoint, seeing events unfold from the outside. Every interaction is viewed with the same emotional mindset it occurred under – happy moments look brighter, the mundane more tiresome. Noteworthy memories can act as guideposts to navigating the course of one’s life from their earliest thoughts to the present. When active, the knob (finial) will detach from the post and either fall off or get pulled out by the user.

The effects of revisiting memories seem to be reliant on using the current observer as fuel for the journey. Users slowly start to un-exist when they return to their daily lives. People stop recognizing their identity as they begin dissipating from all records. No trace of them can be found written down, and the world starts to change without their mark. Contributions and lives they affected change as if they were never there, often making others’ lives worse.

It appears the direct confrontation of negative experiences i.e. angst, trauma, weariness allows the user to return to full form. Many do not return as the collective mistakes they made overwhelms desires to live. Very few who accept their guilt come back stronger than before, calm and lucid.



Felix’s Notes
“Blaine tells me quantum entanglement is a new field of research in the hi-sci world. It postulates some particles can be connected together and copy each other’s behaviors over vast distances. While many see its potential in teleportation tech, I think this stairway banister may exhibit some variant of QE. It appears every past replay of one’s life requires a physical link to the current self to sustain travel. People after long visits and revisiting only good times have reported an accelerated disappearance compared to random wandering. Further research could help identify unsolved cold cases and maybe measure what energy makes artifacts tick. At the very least, it could speed up this rattrap wi-fi. Gonna ask Pete if he’s willing for another trip down memory lane.