2.0.0 Alluvian History: Major Events & Milestones
This will be an attempt to detail a few of the more major milestones and events that have taken place on the Alluvius continent. The focus will strictly remain on that continent in order to avoid confusion; while all geographies certainly share the same prehistory, the end of that prehistory was marked by a type of dark ages. From that point on, each area developed somewhat in seclusion from the others; each civilization rising again to prominence on their own.
The Prehistory of Alluvius, the World and not simply the continent, is one that effects the subsequent development of all the other continents and areas of the planet. As was mentioned earlier, Alluvius is at least in part a post apocalyptic world " though it might be more fair to say that its simply in a cycle placing it pre apocalypse, since if it had gone through an actual apocalypse" it should no longer exist in recognizable fashion.
Between the prehistory to the present day, there is a transformation from technologically advanced utopia, to dark ages where almost all of history is lost. With this in mind, I hope to detail at least in part some of the other cultures of Alluvius, after the main Human Tribal document.
2.1.0 Prehistory
Millennia ago, the world existed in a near utopian state ? at least in terms of what could be accomplished in terms of our science. The ultimate transhumanist dream, where technology had become more and more a part of everyday life, and what was once considered magic now become the completely mundane.
As with most scenarios like this, it was short lived. Society placed more focus on what people could do, without stopping to determine if it was something they should do. As a result, several major events happened before the opening of the official Human Tribal histories:
A virus was unleashed which was highly contagious, thought to be spread through saliva of its victims; an almost correction assumption, as it was spread through the exchange of any bodily fluids. The immediate effects of the virus were seemingly non-existent, until it's carrier's children reached the age of puberty: at that stage the adolescent's bodies became pupae - while still maintaining the appearance of normal function. What came forth from those pupae, however, were Wyrms; leathery, scaled, winged creatures of frightening savagery and intellect. A quarter of the population were susceptable to the pathogen, and those were most often the first of the Wyrms victims to die at their own childrens hands. The only place to escape the ravages of the pathogen was Hyperion Machina, a central site of global A.I. which was almost entirely automated.
This was the beginning of the First Dark.
Hyperion Machina became a promised land to the survivors of the Tiama Pathogen; the Wyrms were still a new factor, and no one new their capabilities, and it was quite common knowledge that almost none lived on the entire continent which was Hyperion. No humans, no children; no children, no wyrms.
When the first Wyrms arrived, large quantities of infrastructure systems were lost, among them global communication services. The zealous and the fearful, for the most part, could not wait for communication to be reesablished, experiencing one folly after another in ill fated attempts to reach Hyperion Machina by sea or air. Eventually, communication with Hyperion was reestablished, but the results were not what the erstwhile technicians hoped for; their efforts to communicate using non-standard channels, methodology, et al, were viewed as unauthorized access - as an attack.
Hyperion counter attacked. This was the beginning of the Second Dark.
The continent that was Hyperion Machina was just being reached by some of the aforementioned zealous and fearful, a few of which had in fact completed the journey - though with many losses from their numbers in some cases. Even as conveyances of the sky and sea were still coming to rest upon its shores, it awoke to the inferred threat of humanity. Immediately it powered itself to full, pushing solar energy collecting amplifiers to their fullest capacity, the heat making the continent immediately unlivable within the first few hours - and radiation ensuring that it stayed that way after the fact. A week after the fact, the continent was in fact a shining beacon - but of death, and nothing living could survive upon its surface.
And things weren't finished yet.
Unfinished and poorly written commands sent to Hyperion from the initial survivors who tried to establish contact resulted in further horror when a program was initialized that resulted in the destruction of two continents for the end purpose, it seemed, of creating a third. The reallocation of land mass alone was responsible for countless unnatural natural disasters, which added to the devastation of the now dwindling 'civilization'.
Earthquakes and tsunami's, however, were not the last of the landscape altering changes to occur as a result of....human error. The unnatural, forced, tectonic shift destabilized the rotation of the planet; it righted itself, but no longer spun along the same axis, with the northern pole becoming darker with even shorter terms of sunlight. The southern pole, however, completely melted and became a new sea - with a newly revealed land mass under neath what had been the southern ice cap.
The result of all these things was to usher in a period when the understanding of technology and the sciences of the old world were not simply forgotten but wiped out. Remnants existed, places and objects of great power and knowledge, but even tales of them faded to myth, then to legend, until that was almost gone too.
With the lights of the great cities gone, the world descended in some areas into a stone age, while some others into a more middle aged period.
Then began the period known somewhat appropriately as the Great Dark.
