“It is a mistranslation of the term 'survival of the fittest' to believe it is about the strong crushing the weak. The story of your evolution is, in fact, one which was propelled by your ability to cooperate and your ability to use your minds, rather than your brute strength, to overcome problems.”
– Firesteel
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Brook –
Listen, I'm breaking international law to get this to you. I won't provide locations and times simply because any attempt to investigate any part of what I'm about to say will result in my immediate disappearance. You know I've been working on the Hawking Memorial Council for Energy Research for a while now. You know we've built four particle accelerators under Siberian soil. The public has been told that they were constructed to follow up study to several others in regards to the birth of the universe and that collisions of particles in these devices might allow us to glimpse particles we have never seen before.
This is not what the machines were designed for. They're trying to open us up.
The UFO flaps that have been going on since the 1940s and even earlier – the airships of the 19th century, the lights in the sky, Ezekiel's chariots – the governments, they've been trying to figure out what they're all for. What they are, who sent them, why people see them.
Nobody could agree on anything, really. They could be from another planet or another time; they could be simple mass hysteria and delusions of people afraid of their own damn back yards. They're not any of these things.
You're aware of multiverse theory. Of course you are, that's your spec. Thing is, they've known about it since the 1970s. The math worked back then; there's no reason math would change, under normal circumstances. The idea is that if you get enough energy concentrated in a tiny enough space, you can open a door. Stir space and time until you stir so much you can see the bottom of the coffee mug.
This was not what we told everyone working the floor. They're doing their particle experiments and trying to solve the proton radius puzzle, good for them. Late at night, during weeks of inactivity, we're doing our own experiments. We're opening doors and looking inside. We'd done it a few times already and were getting some good data. We found a couple universes that seemed to be so similar to ours we didn't even know we had the door open.
Then we had a good day.
We were measuring the data normally up until we started getting pulses that seemed a bit too regular for what we usually get. We started measuring them and one of the interns said that the graphs seemed to him to be lot like breathing. We managed to match it up to something close to an elephant breathing rate, and once we had that, we started throwing new particles at it.
Once we hit synthesized particles, something happened. The breathing rapidly changed pace and then reached a new, higher, steadier peak. Everything in the room started to take on a blue glow. We shut off the machine and left. Everything seemed fine until the next morning.
The head of my department met me out front, saying that he had something to show me. We went inside and he showed off mountains of new data from the civilian side of the project. He said he didn't know we'd been doing such great research so late at night, and to keep it up. Went to my office. There was a message for me saying that the great teacher wanted to meet us all at lunch.
I went about my day, thinking that it'd be some woo woo guru like usual to tell us all how to get together and work as one big family or whatever, so I kept it out of my mind. When lunch did roll around, we all filed into the cafeteria and they lit up the stage and it came out.
I don't know entirely what it looked like. It had limbs everywhere, eyes all over its body, with long gill-like flaps wrapped like a blanket around itself. Everyone was clapping and cheering. One of the other doctors asked if I felt great, that the Teacher was so beautiful it filled her with peace merely to know that she could exist in the same world as it. The thing pointed at me and thanked me for its presence here. That they had been hoping that something like this would happen, that we would finally understand our true purpose in this universe.
I only send you this because soon they will begin appearing everywhere. They've fired up the labs again. The accelerators are about to start working overtime. They have a plan. They're going to come down in columns of blue light, arms outstretched.
They are not what they say they are.
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The one constant about Florida is how flat the state is; they say things about the Great Plains being the broad back of the country, but really Florida is that place where, when rolling out the map, Thunder just said "nope" and left it flat. That's not to say the place is lifeless. In fact, most explorers have, at one point or another, wondered what the Seminoles and their forebears were even thinking trying to settle the muggy, mosquito-riddled, worm-eaten, muddy, swampy, even hateful place. The overwhelming humidity and oppressive heat combined with the proliferation of toxic and low-nutrition flora can lead to dehydration and starvation if a wanderer is too far from the coast. Fifteen minutes of walking will net quicksand, a poisonous animal, a poisonous plant, or muck that looks like two inches of water, but is in reality ten feet of decayed plant and animal matter. It's not the sort of place to insult, though. All someone has to do is imagine the sorts of people that would want to raise a family in Florida to chase out thoughts of ill words directed at the state.
Florida is relatively young, geologically speaking, but it's been around, more or less, in its current form since it was created. It is a densely packed finger of oceanic fossils in the form of limestone and calcium – the state is literally made of the bones of the dead. On top is a rich mix of sand, soil, moss, and decaying plant matter that makes everything grow bigger – Florida exotics introduced into the environment sometimes acquire a size up to 17% larger than their counterparts back in their native homes. They live faster, change their cycles to breed year-round, and voraciously spread themselves like liver spots anywhere they can find purchase. It's a metaphor for the state's stubborn refusal to sink – people in the rest of states like to talk apocalypse, but there is a literal apocalypse once every few years down here. The ocean rises up and takes the biggest bite that it can out of the state. God commands Noah's flood to revisit every season. Lightning strikes and massive forest fires are required for sandhill and scrub to even grow properly. Florida's environment is a prepper. When the apocalypse comes, whether the bombs drop or the seas rise or the sky tears in half, you can be damn well sure that Florida will still be here. The sea rise will bring with it more sand and mud to pile on to the state, fixed by the roots of great oaks and cypress and mangrove. The bombs will set fire to the land and the scrub oaks and the sandhill pines will dare to grow back in mere weeks because that is what they always do. The sky will tear in half and the Gentle One will descend in blue lights and corrupt the meat and the groaning, spitting land will still pump fresh water into its lakes and streams, and the turtles will slide off their logs into its safe, cool, glassy depths.
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“I am Firesteel. I am heat and metal. I am rust and machine. The ancients crafted me to watch after their chariots, to direct them, to build them, to command them should the ancients falter. Though the chariots have stopped, I remain. Know that you share Babylon and the forest with other people. Not just remmy and ublix, though there are those who are not of the Nations among you.
“The ublix may be twisted in form from normal remmy bodies, but though their bodies are changed, their minds and souls are not. They are that from which they come, but stronger and heartier for it. It has empowered their minds and their resolve at a bizarre and unearthly cost. That which does not kill you makes you stranger. Though they may grow many hands, eyes, feet, or other limbs, what remains of them, in their core, is still remmy. They can be found wherever people are found. Though many tribes near you eject them, there are still others that are composed entirely of them. The Kingdom cannot bear their sight, calling them cambions or worse, but to the people, they are as you.
“The 500 are remmies, like you, but instead of great Nations or a single tribe, they are many bands of small numbers. They move from town to town on the back of their rides. They believe the scream of their rides pleases their gods, the Sponsors, from wherever they watch. The roar of the crowd and of the ride drives them ever forward. They move from coast to coast, forever turning left. They ride for the Sponsors. When the Gentle One came and devoured their people, taking them and making their minds against them, they would ride. They could ride fast enough to beat the demons. They could ride fast enough that the Sponsors heard the thunder of their rides and granted them the power of the traded marks. They wear the traded marks to the call of a thousand lives. They are the 500. Theirs is the coast and the wind. Theirs is the pit and the scream of their ride. Look on their sacred garb and see the traded marks of the Sponsors. Each one is a badge, a pennant won for speed and glory.
“The skinnies control the thick forests to the north of the Nations. They do not bow to the yeyahai. They do not bow to anyone. You have seen them around – tall and thin, like ghosts made of sticks, skin like patched black and green moss, they can hide in the forest by standing perfectly still, looking like nothing more than a patch of thicker brambles and sunlight. They are colored by the Earth, honed by its knapping-knives, and girded by its leaves and parasites. Legends say the eyes of the animals are their eyes, and through them, they see all acts of good and evil in the wild. They say that the Blue Star removed its mask at the beginning of the world, revealing to them the secrets of the rainbow warrior. Now, they do not trade in marks, nor word, nor writing or drawing of any kind. Many are the allies of the people, but there are those who devour the flesh of people who trespass among them.
“The clackers control the depths of Babylon. As the skinnies are to the forests, the clackers are to the gray towers of the ancients. A legend says of the clackers that they would do a dance on the flower growing from the last remmy corpse. The clackers do dance, but it is not on remmy corpses. Through the metal skeletons of the world of the ancients, the chaos and peace before the world was created, they crawl. They are dark, with a lustrous copper sheen, standing upright on four legs, with wings wrapped about their bodies like a cloak. On their neck is a great shield, and their bodies are covered in a hard exoskeleton. They have great big eyes, and a face made of fingers. Their homes are in the dark and foreboding places you often fear, and they are the keepers of the path to the Land of Dreams in the far south. If you wish to do magic, you must someday deal with them.”
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The Rifts brought more than dinosaurs and swamp water. Florida is still at least as diverse in its biomes as it was before the events - there's swamp, marsh, hammock, subtropical forest, scrub, subtropical grassland, temperate and tropical evergreen forest, and that's not starting with the underwater meadows and coral reefs. That's also not counting any alien biomes that arrived through an event, or that the state is much bigger thanks to the dramatic shifting of water levels and the change in the amount of dirt and sand anchored in place by the new flora. The ancient ice age forests of massive cypress trees have returned, and the waterways are almost back to their pre-human state. The northern section of the peninsula is partially cut off from the rest of the continent by the continually shifting backdrop of the time holes running from Louisiana across northern Georgia, and east to the Atlantic. Boat travel on the Gulf still works, but isn't really desirable at all, thanks to a combination of monsters, strange weather, and oil leaks. Of course, heading to the Atlantic is even more dangerous.
- The Shimmer makes travel difficult.
That said, there's a lot to visit, explore, and scavenge, from radioactive ruins to the diverse biomes to the newly arrived points west along the Gulf, and of course, defending your small settlements from creatures from the islands to the east - like slavers and worse.