Conflux 2012: Waking Up

Friday, December 3, 2010

Waking Up

Commander Phil always slept peacefully. In his half-dream he smiled and thought about life. He always slept well. Why? Because he was the commander.

Phil was considered entirely strange by his company. He was a mild mannered man that hated authority but thrived in giving it, a hypocrite. As a reason he always demanded his soldiers call him Phil. He got angry quick when soldiers failed to perform their duties but kept a fresh head and point of view when pressure was closing in. Insubordination was a loss of privilege, clear as Luno, the small blue moon. Having served in the Genesis military force for many years he was well acquainted with war and knew that when sleep came it should be taken advantage of. As long as he was loyal to his soldiers they would be loyal back.

No gun fire. It had been a peaceful night. He woke up and slid out of bed. "Horas!" he screamed. Nothing happened. He had expected his 'secretary' to enter in and give a nightly report of all activity. This was war. He put on his cap and buckled his coat over him. He went to his door and opened the latch.

Everything seemed normal. His tent was behind all the lines of fighting, south-east of all the fox holes. Another benefit of being commander. He gazed around in the fog that had covered the battlefield. No shots, no cannons, no smoke, just fog. Phil walked west towards the outpost of operations, looking for Horas. He met no soldiers on the way. Finally he saw the light of the tower, connected to the outpost. Moving toward the entrance he called out, "Rob!" Rob was in charge of the light on top and upon hearing his commander's voice was bound by Genesis rules to check in. The light didn't move.

He opened the door and was stunned. Everything was in order. Lights were busy blinking on all the controls, radio fuzz was audible, and even some food was left on the counter. There was not a soul in the building and no sign of a struggle. He reached for the pistol to his right and aimed it in front of him. The emergency lights weren't even on. It was as if everyone had decided to get up and leave.

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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

Friday, December 3, 2010

Waking Up

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