The idea here is a post-apocolyptic Earth...with one VERY big twist. It wasn't what we built for war that brought about the end, it was what, and who, we created; for simple recreation. The worlds of fiction and reality collided, and both were changed forever...
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It's truly a fucked-up world when the phrase "Use your imagination" is considered a curse. No, not "curse" as in profanity; "Curse" as in an invocation of misfortune, calling for fate to bring its wrath upon them...
Ahem...I'll start at the beginning, as it were.
Our world was once a lot like yours, this "Earth Prime" I've heard about. Not an exact copy, of course--just look through a few books and you can pick out differences of all sizes. Where we break off the most, though?
I'll just come out and say it: "OUR reality wasn't that separate from OUR fiction. Yeah, so the fourth wall broke, and its rubble buried us.
It started small--sightings of a certain blue phone booth in Egypt one day; rumors of "strange animals" in Japan the next. The usual "man-bites-dog" stories on the news, or conspiracy-theorist drivel; nothing to concern yourself with. God in Heaven, were we wrong....
Then, it got bigger, stranger: "Vigilantes with unknown weapons" showing up and stopping a shooting or bank robbery; ships vanishing without a trace in perfectly safe waters...usually right after some sighting of a "giant squid" or some-such thing. And behind the scenes the "Contacts" started--artists, authors, fucking cartoonists--anyone who'd created, or helped create, a famous fictional character or world would start getting messages from their characters. A phone call, a letter slipped under the door...or a goddamn green ring, in one poor sap's case. I still don't know if it worked for him or not.
Things kept building up--those weird stories and sightings kept happening more, and getting worse...until the Emergence.
March 18, 2025. That was the day 'imagination' became a curse. Every character, every hero and villain, ever single monster and madman we ever cooked up to entertain ourselves was let loose on the world. Marines fought Stormtroopers in Los Angeles. Sauron and his Uru'Kai overran Berlin and set up shop there, with the rest of Germany torn between the Enclave and HYDRA. I once saw two twentysomething punks with R's on their shirts take down a whole mob with their pet snake and a rocket launcher back in Vegas.
China...is just gone. God, you can still hear the "Exterminate!" echoes in what's left of Bejing...!
So that's the long-and-short of it. Somehow, the barrier between reality and fiction crumbled, leaving both worlds wide open. We--the "Reals", as you'll hear some of us call ourselves--weren't wiped out when the "Fictions" poured in. Some of us fought, others hid,some even worked together with the Fictions to fight off their enemies. Strange bedfellows and whatnot.
Hardly anything left of the old, "Real" world now--cities that haven't been wiped off the map have been rebuilt, nothing like what they were before. Places that we called paradise are now warzones, or just to dead to even fight over. Hell, even some of our old wastelands are now packed to the gills! Just look at the Atacama--if you can get in, of course. I hear these "Foundation" guys will do ANYTHING to keep a secret. When they say "Secure" or "Contain", they mean it. I haven't seen them "Protect" anyone but themselves, though.
Here's hoping you can make some sense of this clusterfuck of a world. We sure couldn't, and still can't.
---Message given to all who Slide into Meta-Earth's reality. Even Blind-Sliders will recieve it eventually in some form, though this is not immediate upon their arrival.
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