Conflux 2012: The Solitude of Loneliness

Monday, December 6, 2010

The Solitude of Loneliness

Holding his gun out in front of him he slowly moved through the building. Lights off, emergency lights spinning around in a frenzy, Phil always had his gun pointing at what he was looking at. He wasn't scared. He had had too much training to be scared. The server room had no signs of life. He went upstairs to the guard tower. Opening the hatch to the lookout, his view reached out into the misty fog of a Jurassic looking jungle. It was too cold to be outside with a jacket yet the green plants were still there intermixed with the smog and fog of war cleansing the land. He looked around and with each horizon that he saw nothing looked upset or agitated. The trees weren't moving, the bugs all dead from the failing fall season.

"Funny," thought Commander Phil. Such a scene would be entirely unnatural before the shards. The shards! He quickly climbed back inside the makeshift bunker and looked for any trace of shard dust. Shard dust was the unofficial name of a situation that looks like a shard had passed through it. His eyes were fixed on trying to locate any possible torn fabric of space. The sight was all too familiar, a basic part of Genesis military training.

Evidence. It was indeed as if everything had just got up and left like mindless zombies. There was the coffee, there was the phone, the instruments, the recording equipment. How could a shard pass by the battlefield but not having touched me? Normally the shards were miles long. All of his platoon had disappeared. They had all been carried off to some other reality, past, present, future, who knew where. The shards weren't a "science" that anyone had figured out. Most of what was known about shards was only displayed to top secret clearance holders. The general public only were alarmed to not go near the glassy areas of space surrounding them, torn fabrics of space in their broken world. "This never happened in Iraq," thought the Commander.

Phil reached for the phone. The shards acted as transmutation devices. They could transport any human or insect or other animal along with their clothes and immediate necessary supplies to anywhere. Phil was even surprised at the vast amount of stuff that stayed behind when this shard must have passed through. "Commander Phil Genesis 124.5.1 Code 'Fracture.' My entire regiment has disappeared. Unknown confirmed reason but assumed to have been caused by a shard passing by the battlefield." He left a message for the "busy" military lines. He was a part of the 24th regiment in the European 100-199 numbers, 5th platoon, commander.

Was the enemy alive? Northern Europe, or what was left of it? Gosh, what a nightmare.

He reviewed the facts in his head. The squad was gone. The enemy had possibly been carried off by the shard as well. He was alone with limited food and communications array. Sometimes the shards would even disrupt communications carrying the electric signals off just like anything else. It was as if the shards had a mind of their own, inflicting the max damage possible.

Gosh darn it! Shards shards shards! Phil had to keep his mind focused. His options were to stay put or move. He would head west back to friendly soil. There is no telling how big the shard was or who is alive out there. His decision was made quick. What was left behind to hold on to? He went through the camp gathering his necessary supplies. He gathered up two knives, his M1 Garand, two pistols with ammo, and a back pack of food and equipment for the evenings. Who knew how long it would take to get back? With the shards ripping through the fabrics of space who knew how long it would take him to get back to HQ. Making the last of his preparations he moved down into the went into the depths of the tower. Under the server rooms and down the stairs he entered into a secret room. Staring ahead there was a red glow. This was the hardest part. He put on the radiation gloves and reached into the contraption, a casing holding a crystal. He grabbed the blood-moon crystal, the size of a nice engagement ring, and carefully removed it from the encasement. All the lights slowly dimmed and died. Power was gone. He held the ring, staring at the radiating red glowing from it, and put it into the back of hid back pack. His back pack became alive with light, his M1 Garand became weightless. He felt invigorated. So much war over such a small thing...

He walked out of the building and went to the edge of the clearing. He didn't want to think of the dangers ahead, the dangers the shards had produced. Who knew what mystery he would find? The only protection had been the security around the camp, energized by the bloodmoon crystal. Now his only security was the structure of his armor and the great energy he could feel on his back. Shards... he hated shards.

Slowly he pressed the detonator and explosions rose into the sky. The building was destroyed, the security fence disabled and thrown everywhere in the mass of chaos. The one benefit and curse of the shards was the crystals.

Shards! He couldn't keep them out of his mind as he ran off into the cold but thriving jungle of what remained of northern Europe mixed with fog and smog and the coat of war praying that he didn't run into any changelings.

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The Cataclysm

In the year 2012, as predicted by the Mayan Calender, the sun disappeared. The stars ripped across the sky like streaks of fire, and the moon burned red and dripped boiling drops onto the earth. For three days the earth itself groaned and buckled with terrifying storms and earthquakes and tsunamis. Then, for seven long seconds, everything was lost in absolute darkness, silence, stillness. After the silence, people were greeted by a strange new world. A sun shone again in the sky, but it didn't seem the right size, and it took a little longer to make it's journey across the sky. Two moons orbit the earth, a small bright blue one and the older one now stained a dull bronze color. Stars in the sky now waver with watery light. The world itself was fractured, splintered. Strange creatures hunted the forests, and terrifying creatures haunted the edge of perception. In this new, post-apocalyptic world, you should know these things:

CHANGELINGS: At the beginning of the cataclysm three billion people disappeared all across the planet. Now some few millions of them reappear, at different times, and in different places than where they were. Sometimes they have no memory of who they were before. Sometimes they returned Changed in other ways- hair the blue color of the sky, an extra set of arms, cat-slit pupils, pointed ears, and stranger physical anomalies. Some of them seem to come from other time periods of the earths' history, and others don't seem to come from this planet at all.

FRACTURED SPACE: all around the world, strange, invisible cracks mark the place where space doesn't quite match up, like looking through a broken mirror, where the reflections don't fit together exactly right at the edges. A slice of cloud will be missing, or a doorway will lead to somewhere unexpected. Walking through these fractures, called Slicing, allows you to hop from one shard of reality to another. Sometimes a Slice goes only one way, and other times two Slices next to each other can trap you into a never-ending loop. Some Slices can trap you under thousands of feet of water or lead you into a poisonous atmosphere, or leave you thousands of feet above the earth. While these Slices are extremely rare, they still make Slicing extremely hazardous. You can never tell where a slice will actually lead to just by looking, because most fractures mirror the shard of reality that you are currently in. Most fractures stay put, but some drift slowly across the landscape. Others can lead to different places at different times. Each shard of reality is generally a couple of dozen miles, although some few cover hundreds of miles. Some are very small, only the size of a bedroom or closet.

FRACTURED TIME: Dotting the landscape are eddies of time called warps, places where time moves faster or slower than the world around it. They are barely visible, almost like a heat wave. The shards of reality themselves are from different time periods in earth history, although they now all share the same time line. You can have a shard of Victorian England that connects to a shard of world war 2. The latest time of any shard is 2012, and the earliest is the Triassic Period. The earth itself, because of these extra pieces from the past, has three times the surface area than it used to have, although gravity remains largely unchanged (sometimes a slice will lead you into another shard with reversed or omnidirectional gravity).

REMNANTS OF WORLDS: As well as our own world and its past, some rare shards seem to be from places and times completely unknown to earth. Inhabited by strange creatures, some completely alien and some strangely familiar, these other-world shards are unpredictable at best and present rare and unique challenges to explorers. While they largely seem to obey the same laws of physics that our world used to, it sometimes takes some research to find out exactly how some things, such as floating islands and giant flying monstrosities, can actually do the things they do. On the other hand, rare and valuable materials can often be found in these areas.

REMNANTS OF CIVILIZATION: While Nations have been ripped apart, technology seems largely to keep working. New power sources, such as blood-moon crystals, have been tapped. Bloodmoon crystals act like immensely powerful batteries (1000 times more powerful and longer lasting than anything we now have) and can be found several hundred feet below the surface of most shards. Bloodmoon crystals get their name from when the moon wept meteors onto the earth during the Cataclysm. Computer networks keep most of there functionality, although the internet is mostly broken apart by the shards. Modified vehicles can be used, although it is much harder now to get the parts to repair them. Rifles and guns are now limited by the remaining stockpiles of ammunition in each shard, and the ammunition that can be manufactured there. Anything that was manufactured elsewhere (read- almost everything) is now very valuable, and many things are again made by hand. Buildings that once housed business chains have been converted, and it is not uncommon to find a Golden Arches diner, or a thrift store in the remnants of an old JC Penny's.

ETHERA: Like shadows or mirages, ethereal forms wander the world, haunting the edges of reality. They are most visible near a fracture, but can be found anywhere. Some are human ghosts, some animal, and some are other things, things with teeth and claws, or with shining feathered wings, or others with twitching tentacles. These ethereal beings seep through the cracks of reality, possessing the bodies of living creatures and twisting them into strange new forms. If it is a human or animal spirit, or merely a remnant of one of the stranger creatures, the person touched may gain the ability to change form into that animal, or become stronger and faster than a regular human. They may even gain the rare and valued ability to see between the Slices to where the next shard is. These abilities come at a cost, for all beings of Ethera are bound by strange laws, called geise. One geise may prohibit the person from eating anything besides raw meat. Another may bind them to serve whoever knows their name, depending on the type of Ethera they are host to. If it is a stronger Ethera than the spirit of the living creature, it can take over the body completely, pushing the former occupant out. Once inside a host, the Ethera becomes immensely more powerful and terrifying, capable of directly affecting the world around them. While not all Ethera are monsters, and some could even be termed beneficent, it is wise to deal carefully with any of these strange entities. They are completely alien and many times do not understand human concepts such as kindness or the passage of time. Slicing is the time when these creatures have the most opportunity to capture a living body, although there must generally still be some sort of invitation from the host.

MAGIC: Some people have learned to manipulate this new, broken reality. They channel probability into new shapes, calling lightning from clear skies, enhancing their strength or speed, breaking or mending objects- manipulating reality. Doing so, however, has dangerous consequences, for changing reality too much in this way attracts the attention of the Ethera. Sometimes the backwash of energy is too much for a mortal form, and sometimes they lack the mental discipline necessary and go insane. Any who wish to survive long while using this ability would be wise to keep any changes to reality as small as possible.

Conflux 2012

Monday, December 6, 2010

The Solitude of Loneliness

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