Origins of the World - Utopia to Dystopia
To begin, a quote from the Setting thread:
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.
That's not an entire explanation, of course, but its a place to start; and this is going to be a little less formal information than that, being more explicitly out of character here.
From Utopia
It started as Earth. I realize that's no utopia, but that's the origin point of the world. The world was originally designed as a table top gaming world, with clear homages to the concept of free form role play - specifically, it was made so that any kind of creature, such as the variety found in a Nexus, could be explained as being there.
If you advance a lot of scientific concepts far enough - and without any regard to the morality behind them - most multiversal 'races' could somehow be technologically explained; there's a law somewhere, I'm certain that states that technology of a sufficiently advanced state is indistinguishable from magic.
Now maybe that's an informal law, or maybe it just means that magic is a matter of perception and perspective. I know I certainly prefer the latter. Apologies for the digression.
It was Earth, or is Earth, some alternate Earth, that is. Because I wanted something that everyone could find a little piece of that was familiar. There are no maps up yet, but there are clear indications it could be Earth, in that aspect alone - just the visual sight of it.
Just as Earth is the principle inspiration for the worlds of Robert Jordan, Michael Moorcock, and Stephen King, it is for Alluvius as well. That's not to comare myself to those authors, except in this one small way: in my frustration to develop my own independent world (to those of you who do, my most sincere admiration, truly) I found myself asking, 'What did they do to flesh out their world"' The answer, ultimately, is that they used one that was already fleshed out and existed in minutae in the minds of their readers.
To Dystopia
'Spoilers' ahead.
Now there's not much strife or conflict in a complete Utopia, so things had to change - if things wanted to go anywhere other than 'and they lived happily ever after.' Since that's a rather boring story in my opinion, everything had to be destroyed - or at least severely twisted. Enough to get us back to the dark ages - again this was a table top based world, and the great majority of table top games that I'd played, and the most influential (D&D and free form at the RDI years and years and years ago) were medieval fantasy, that's where I had to get to. From a futuristic utopia.
I'll jump straight to the spoiler and say....it was Hyperion Machina's fault. With a little help from the right, or wrong, programming of course. But it was Hyperion science that created the Tiama Pathogen; ultimately the basis for the pathogen began as a virus repository, with the idea that to combat more aggressive virii and create vaccines for them, one had to have access to the virii themselves. Of course, the actual virii in this case don't remain miniscule; they use the body of their hosts offspring to gestate in until they burst forth and set about to causing destruction and havoc. Hyperion anticipated this, and before release of the general virus began, it constructed an Omega-form of the virus, something that could cow the lesser virii into submission, or marshall them together as a force if needed.
Amidst all the virii spawned Wyrms (not Dragons, those come later, and are something altogether different), the global cataclysms, and general wide spread death and destruction, civilization came to an abrubt end.
But life continued. Small pockets of humanity were left alive due to the flickering remains of technological marvels from the world past; technology that would not even survive in name for another generation - records could be kept, but finding the means of performing maintenance was a different story. For those small pockets which remained alive, however, it did at least make the descent into barbarism slightly less precipitous; while their civilization had left, it had left their humanity in tact.
~~~
A tentative end to the explanation, for now. Any question you, the reader, have and send to me will only help to further detail what I've set out to detail - my own mind isn't reliable enough a source to ask the questions, since I already know the answers, the -right- questions are not always the most obvious to me. Thanks for reading, and more to come. -K
