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Eol Fefalas
Lord of the Possums
RDI Staff
Karma: 475/28
8841 Posts
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Prometheans: Genesis - Q&A
This is the Q&A thread for the metahuman/superhero game - "Prometheans: Genesis"
The world in which Prometheans takes place is essentially the Earth we have known for much of our own lives with history diverging from our own in May of 2003 as to be described below... Read on!
Armageddon.
The Apocalypse.
Ragnarok.
Doomsday.
From the very beginning of human history, it seems, there have been tales spun, myths and legends woven, and prophecies bolted forth regarding the time and circumstance of “the end of the world.” There were flavorful differences in them all, of course – a battle between the Gods will ravage the earth and leave it a frozen waste… The God will return (after having left us to our own devices for millennia) and, after winning a battle with some great Evil, judge us each for our own sins, casting the wicked into a lake of fire and welcoming the cleansed to Paradise… “The Commies’ll push ‘The Button’”… a meteor will hit the Earth… Global Warming… December 21, 2012 – but, in the end, they all heralded the same thing, didn’t they?... The world as we know it ends and humankind dies out… “The End of Days.”
For as long as there have been tales and legends and prophecies put forth by some and piously adhered to by others, though, there have been still more… from narrow-minded “shouters” to high-brow scientists through the ages… who sought to dismiss or even debunk these predictions in one way or another… And, don’t you know it, dear readers, in almost every single case thus far (save for those few that can, by the very nature of their mythos, neither be confirmed nor denied) and despite the fervent beliefs of the adherents to the various prophecies, the naysayers have managed to prove themselves right by simply waiting out the foretold event. Oft times they’ve even had parties to “celebrate their impending doom.” So it has been throughout time and so it was with the most recent prophesied extinction event in our history, the end date of the Mayan Calendar, December 21, 2012. The thing is, the cynics may just have actually missed the mark on that one. Maybe it was because they failed to realize that the Mayans didn’t predict the end of the world, just the end of an Age. Maybe it was because they were expecting the “world ending event” or, at least, it’s spectacular beginning to occur on that specific date
It didn’t.
Not really.
Well…
…sort of.
You see, it was another supposed doomsday event that was the inception of it all. Another end of the world theory to which many were hungry to espouse and, conversely, found just as many (or more) who seemed fervently sworn to discredit. The Nibiru cataclysm.
The Nibiru cataclysm was a supposed disastrous encounter between the Earth and a large planetary object (either a collision or a near-miss) which certain groups believe would take place in the early 21st century. Believers in this doomsday event usually refer to this object as Planet X or Nibiru. The idea that a planet-sized object could collide with or pass by Earth in the near future was not supported by any scientific evidence and had been rejected as pseudoscience by astronomers and planetary scientists.
The idea was first put forward in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, founder of the website ZetaTalk. Lieder described herself as “a contactee with the ability to receive messages from extra-terrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain”. She stated that she was chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 causing Earth to undergo a pole shift that would destroy most of humanity. The prediction subsequently spread beyond Lieder's website and was embraced by numerous Internet doomsday groups, most of which liked to link the event to the 2012 phenomenon. Of course, aside from those aforementioned groups, most people thought Lieder was a “kook” and that her prediction was just as “kooky” as she was.
Until it came true.
More or less.
On May, 27 2003 “Planet X” did, in fact, pass very close to our solar system. It didn’t quite sweep through as Lieder foretold, nor did it exactly cause a pole-shift on Earth. But the object was of such mass… such size… such gravity that it’s near grazing of Sol’s little family of planets did have some life altering effects on the “Third Rock from the Sun”. From Earth, Nibiru’s passing was first perceived as an exceedingly bright “star,” streaking across the sky in a curious arc and trailing what can only be described as a ribbon of cosmic dust in its wake. The star itself was there and gone in a matter of moments, really, but the ribbon lingered… and grew. What had begun, on that May evening, as a fine, undulating stroke of reddish, cosmic paint across the canvas of the night sky, soon bled out into an amorphous fog-like stain on that celestial backdrop… and the more it grew, more changes came to light.
In the summer of 2003, humans had parties under the rippling ribbon that Nibiru’s passing had scribbled across the heavens, reveling in its beauty. By the winter of that same year “Nibiru’s Ribbon” had bloomed farther across the heavens. It was still a thing of beauty and wonder, of course, but eyes that framed it might have done so, then, with a spark of suspicion… especially when the stars in the constellation Aquila increased several orders of magnitude in brightness and turned red on Christmas Eve. By Groundhog’s Day of 2004, Nibiru’s Ribbon had increased its size fifty-fold if half, and it, along with the stars of Aquila which, now, outshined most others in the sky at night, were visible to the naked, human eye, even in the day.
There was now more than a little suspicion in the gazes cast skyward… and more people… or, should I say “Agencies”… “Organizations,” perhaps... “They” took a greater interest and began giving the phenomena more scrutiny. And then the storms came… Nibiru’s Ribbon was still growing, still roiling closer and closer towards Earth, it seemed, even as the planet’s atmosphere cloaked itself in clouds so thick they obscured it, it wasn’t difficult to imagine what was, by then, certainly a completely red-washed sky, scattered with glittering, dusty particles, residue from the birth of the universe, perpetually lit by eight, tiny, crimson suns beyond the banks of churning, grey-black clouds that enrobed the Earth on the day of the Autumnal Equinox, September 22, 2004.
Again, the weather oddities that occurred during the Storm Season (as the months between the Autumnal Equinox of 2004 to the Vernal Equinox of 2005 would come to be known) were not quite as cataclysmic as might have been expected of a world-ending… or should I say world-changing… event, but they were odd, to say the least, and, in most cases, just a little more than terrifying… and, in the end, I suppose, they did change things… It started with the meteorological phenomenon of the clouds themselves, of course, and was quickly followed by intense concern and scrutiny of the sudden, erratic tides… the rash of savage thunderstorms in seasons and locales where there should be none… the unrelenting hurricanes that had sprung up in the Atlantic… The west coast of North America literally “cracked off” from the rest of the continent on October 13, 2004 when a major quake tore along the San Andreas, and more devastation ensued as the volcanoes of the “Ring of Fire” that skirted the Pacific all seemed to ignite simultaneously. For several months, it was the same world-over. Fault lines cracked open, volcanoes rumbled and belched smoke and ash and lava, the seas rose and fell with no rhyme or reason, and curious (sometimes nigh impossible) weather patterns became the order of the day…
Peculiar.
Terrifying.
Devastating.
World-changing… but, again, not world-ending.
… March 20, 2005 marked both the vernal equinox for that year and, also, the end of the Storm Season. Weather patterns returned to their expected norms almost as quickly as they had toppled into chaos, sea levels stabilized, and, at last, the thick, roiling clouds that had enshrouded the Earth for the past six months dissipated and afforded humanity its first look at the long missed sky. And, when humanity looked, it marveled… not just because an unfettered view of the sky had been sorely missed during the Storm Season but, also, because, since the first time since the rogue planet’s passing in 2003, Nibiru’s Ribbon was nowhere to be found – not as the broad, red swath it had been before the storms came, nor even as the distant, delicately undulating crimson ribbon it had been when it had first appeared. The stars of Aquila still shone more brightly in the sky than they had before Nibiru’s passing (although, the reddish cast they had all taken on before the Storm Season was now gone) but, otherwise, it appeared that the world had returned to the normalcy it had enjoyed prior to the events of May 27, 2003…
But we all know that appearances can be deceiving, don’t we, faithful readers?
… Yes, the end of the Storm Season, saw humankind, once again, emerge from the government provided safe zones and their own, personal hidey-holes. Once they had taken a moment to celebrate their “surviving the apocalypse,” their attentions turned to mending the Earth’s hurts. The physical destruction wrought by the Storm Season was addressed with all due urgency – side-by-side, in fact, with the less visible damage that those six months had wrought on individual and global economies – and, within the year, infrastructure, commerce, communications, and travel were all well on their paths back to what they had been before the Storm Season had begun. Even the west coast of North America was well on it’s way to, once again, being reconnected to the mainland by a series of bridges and tunnels (contrary to popular belief and reports during the Storm Season, California did not fall into the ocean; the portion of it on the western side of the fault line had simply shifted a mile or so farther westward after it had broken free of the continent and, now, is separated from the rest of the states by what came to be called the San Andreas Chasm).
New discoveries were made in the weeks, months, and years following the ending of the Storm Season, as well. New islands had begun to appear in the world’s oceans as a result of the volcanic activity of those months – most notably along the Ring of Fire but that zone didn’t hold the monopoly; the Mediterranean spawned a number of new ‘landmasses,’ as did parts of the Indian Ocean – glaciers had accelerated their retreat from the northern parts of Europe, Asia, and North America but, despite this, it seemed, the Arctic (particularly the polar ice cap) seemed to have become colder and even more foreboding than it had been prior to 2004. These terrestrial changes, as curious and awesome as they might have seemed, paled in comparison to the changes that had taken place outside the atmosphere, though, and it was those changes that had the most bearing on what the future held. In late June, 2005, after the people of the world had begun repairing the damage done by the storms in earnest, it was revealed that, sometime during those months in which the Earth’s eyes were blind to happening outside the atmosphere, Pluto, at its apogee, had stopped orbiting the sun.
Scientific fingers were quick to point at the, now, seemingly dead planetoid where it hung (and had begun to slowly sink) in space, and name it as, at least, one of the catalysts for the Storm Season. Nibiru’s Ribbon, the brilliance and curious color changing of the stars in Aquila, and the inexplicable cessation of Pluto’s orbit simply had to have had something to do with it all, didn’t they? There had to be answers there, somewhere, didn’t there? With the proper funding and study, the scientific community was sure that they could piece those answers together. Unfortunately, the government resources required to fund such research were, at the time, tied up in more urgent, earth-bound concerns and lobbying for funds from the private sector seemed equally as futile. Most organizations who could have bankrolled the research were, like the governments of the world, more interested in leveraging their capital against the repair efforts in search of profit and power in the end, you see?
Most organizations.
But not ”Them”.
No, “They” were just as interested in the happenings at the edge of the solar system and beyond as “They” had been when Nibiru’s Ribbon first appeared… perhaps even moreso. As most governments and private sector agencies focused their attentions on repair and recovery, “They” sought answers to the questions that people were really asking and, even though “They” weren’t sharing any information, it is easy to presume that “Their” quest was far from fruitless… Easy because, shortly after New Year’s Day 2006, Nancy Lieder disappeared… and, over the course of the next few years, numerous engineers, physicists, geneticists, and others of scientific renown, too, simply (for lack of a better term) vanished into thin air. At first, as is usually the way of such things, these disappearances were regarded as little more than news fodder – curious and interesting little snippets used to flesh out nightly broadcasts and fill space on media websites. As years passed, though, and the repair and recovery of the world’s infrastructures and economies fell from the forefront of peoples attentions, these still continuing disappearances kindled to life a string of conspiracy theories that, before long spread like wildfire across the internet and, before long, found their way into the mainstream, inspiring news stories and specials all their own…
Had our governments known something about what was going on this whole time? Had they used the rebuilding that followed the Storm Season as a distraction intended to keep the populace occupied while they huddled in their secret chambers, had their secret meetings, and toured their secret facilities? What did they know that the rest of us didn’t? Who had the real answers? How could those answers be found? What was it that they were hiding? The governments of the world, along with the corporate giants who, in the years following the appearance of Nibiru’s Ribbon, had started to become like governments unto themselves, refuted any conspiracies that had been laid at their doorsteps and denied any involvement in anything beyond the status quo.
…Yes. The world had pretty much returned to exactly the way it had been before the Nibiru Cataclysm. The people of the world were “fat and happy,” again, and their governments, having spent trillions and trillions of dollars to make them so before slipping back into the tedium of global politics, once again became the objects of suspicion and mistrust. And so it was from early 2009 until the next prophesied doomsday event; December 21, 2012.
Again, the foretold “end of times” was a less than spectacular event for most. The day dawned like any other. People went about their lives as if it were any other day and, aside from an almost lighthearted nod to the Mayan End Times in the news, very little transpired here on Mother Earth… unless you count the fact that ISAR (the International Society for Astrological Research) happily announced that Pluto had started orbiting again (now, though, in a pattern in line with the other eight planets of the solar system, save that it travelled around the sun in reverse of the others)… and that the first instances of metahuman activity were reported that day.
December 21, 2012 was not the end of the world, dear readers, any more than was the Nibiru Cataclysm almost ten years earlier, bit it did mark the dawn of a New Age for mankind… An age in which once-ordinary people suddenly found themselves capable of extraordinary things… An age in which the answers to the conspiracy theories that had cropped up since the Storm Season would begin to find some validation as answers were shaken loose from low-hanging branches of leaked information.
This was the dawning of the Age of the Prometheans…
Posted on 2012-06-13 at 22:09:49.
Edited on 2012-06-19 at 16:17:41 by Eol Fefalas
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Shadows of the Empire Q&A
Shadows of the Empire
Neva
