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Soldat
Planetoid
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2011
First of all, let me say thank you for coming! I've been having a lot of fun here, and I figure it's time for me to put up my own request page instead of just raiding everyone else's. This page is going to be frequently changed, updated, and screwed with, so if you don't see something you like, come back next week and there may be something new!
Let me get my rules out of the way first. If you're still around after this, read on!
Rule #1:
Girls only! Sorry, this is one that I won't bend on. I really don't care what gender you are behind the keyboard, but if you're a guy I'd rather not know.
Rule #2 :
Please be able to post at least a couple of small paragraphs with decent grammar and spelling and clear sentence structure far be it fro me to ask for perfection but I want the rp to have good flow and substance.
Rule #3:
Please be flexible, creative, and courteous
Rule #4:
I do not care for playing a submissive role. Do not expect to dominate.
Rule #5 :
All RP via PMs, please. I have the horrible feeling that I would forget a storyline in a thread, and I have no desire to do that.
So, I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I'm not generally into modern realistic play. I live in the real world enough, I come here to escape it. That being said, I occassionally like to visit, if the storyline is good enough. My favorite genres are mostly either historical between 500 BC till about 1500 AD. That gives everyone plenty of room, right? I'm more for the later part of that period, but I'm open to the earlier.
I'll be writing these as I come along them in the twisted recess that I call a mind. As you already know from above, I like historical, sometimes realistic, sometimes not. My character is almost always the dominant one, in terms of the scenes. That's not to say I'm getting out the leather mask and riding crop. (Unless you ask -real- nice.) Ageplay is also nice, though by no means no required. As is, sometimes, a bit of force. I don't want it to be only that, but a forceful seduction, turning a no into a yes can be quite fun.
Now, to break the rules a bit on my likes of scenes. I love star wars. If you want to play a female padawan who's going to get it from her Master every once in a while, I'll worship the ground you walk on.
Mostly, though, historical is my preference. A few examples.
Henry VIII never had it this hard!
The year: 1480. The place: Germany. Returning at last from his travels over the continent, the ritter (knight) errant is at last home, finished with his training in Italy and ready to take his place as a warrior at his baron's side. Yet in his absence, the baron has been deposed, and the knight returns home to find that a new court is in session, and the daughter of the old baron is a wanted fugitive. When he rescues a young woman accosted by knights, he finds out that he has placed himself on the wrong side of the civil war, and must now make the best of it!
The taming of the shrew.
The year: 890 The place: The English Countryside. A Viking, true and strong to his lineage, he has sacked over fifty tows alongside his warband, had his way with countless women, and brought home mountians of gold. Yet there is one thing more precious than gold, sweeter than ambrosia, and softer than a woman's body. Love. Will he find it in the heart of an English captive?
Annie!
The year: 1870. Place: Victorian England, an eccentric but rich young man were be in need of a maid. He decides, kindly in his way, to adopt an orphan girl as one of the maids, acting as legal guardian. He promises her that she will be able to go to school, and once she's eighteen she will be given a fair sum of money to set up herself. Of course, there's the issue of the other services he requires of her...
Conquistador.
Time: Mid 1400s. Place: Latin America. A new land ripe for the taking! Obviously, this is not India, but there are natives here, who have no knowledge of gunpowder and steel. It is a world ripe for adventure, for conquest, for gold and silver, all the things that make a man's life rich. Of course. Such thoughts lead to wonder what would happen with one of the indian women...
Et tu, Madeline?
Time: 51 BC. Place: Gaul. The army of Ceasar has just finished sweeping through the last of Gaul, wiping out the resistance of the invaded. The new governor, Gaius Septimus, has set himself up as ruler of the land, and is instituting harsh penalties on any native peoples that step out of line.
The story lines below differ quite a bit from the ones above, being set either partially or wholly in different worlds. Proceed with caution.
Tz'arkan:
(Pronounced Zar'kan) Once, there was a world where a foolish young woman risked her life to open up a portal to the demon world. She was hoping to gather up the power of one of the greatest of the demons, Shai'tan, and seemed on the verge of doing so. She had discovered the rituals. Drawn the sacred circles and signs. Lit the black candles, and set about trying to summon the beast. As she droned, a flicker of light within the circle. A figure in the light. Her voice faltered, just a hair, and the beast began to fade. Redoubling her efforts, she drew the demon into the physical world. 'Twas not Shai'tan, as she had hoped. Nae, Shai'tan was too great a power to be sucked into the mortal world, the creature told her. But it offered her a chance to still maintain her power. All she had to do was follow it.
Confident in her own power...she had summoned a demon, damn her naysayers...she followed it. Never realizing the pitfalls of her actions, she stepped into the circle. And went to hell.
Yet this was but a minor thing in the pits of hell. Foolish mortals were ever giving themselves to the Abyss. Nae..Tz'arkan was nearly finished. Tz'arkan was a blade forged by Ligier, the greatest of Shai'tan's servants. Imbued with the spirit of demons, it granted it's wielder nigh invulnerability. Sharper than any sword ever created, and stronger, it could cut through lesser blades if struck with sufficient power. Capable of truly killing supernatural creatures, rather than just banishing them. But those were the least of it's powers. It's bearer was made stronger, faster. The demons bound within it, blade masters all, were at the beck and call of the wielder of the blade. Bolts of hellfire could be shot from the blade, at the command of the wielder, and in time the blade itself would heal it's wielder. Only a few items had ever been made of similar power. All were kept aside for the eventual great war. Only then would they be given to the greatest of Shai'tan's servants, for use against the holy ones.
But one might wonder where the mortal woman comes into this story? Ligier, in triumph for creating his master piece, had the woman as his nightly fun, and in her torments she brought forth a new child. Half demon, knowing no name, he was brought into the pits of hell. Never able to be one of them, because of his half-mortal heritage, he was forced to fight. Several times, he came close to dying. Sometimes he ran, sometimes he held his ground, but somehow he survived, long after his mother had passed, his father never knowing of his life.
He grew into a man strong. Faster than a mortal, stronger, he snuck into his father's treasure house and took up the blade Tz'arkan, when he was being chased by blood apes..lesser demons. Where before, he had flailed, now he danced. And his blade danced with him, the long blade shifting from hand to hand as he cut through the blood apes. Knowing he would die if any ever found that he had truly killed the blood apes, much less stolen his father's treasure, he slipped to one of the gates of hell and then out into the mortal world.
For a while, he wandered aimlessly. Until he came upon a small church. A band of demon hunters, behind it's placid exterior. Speaking the unclean tongue of hell, he begged them for help. Begged them to kill him, so he would not have to forego what his father had in mind for him. They refused. They took him in, bandaged his many wounds and began teaching him a new language. Latin, and then English, to blend in with the land they were in. They saved him, in more ways than one. In spite of his half-demon nature, he still had a soul, and was saved by them, though the blade he carried raged at him. Tz'arkan was a blade of death, not a protector.
The blade itself, and his own darker nature, tormented him as he left the small church, with a new mission on his tongue. His father, as well as his father's overlord, were beginning to send more demons into the world. Some to search for the nameless man, and the sword that he owned. Some to prepare for another thrust against the holy ones. A war that had been in hiatus since the time of the crusades, when the entire Christian faith had to be rallied to defend the gate to heaven in Jerusalem, less the forces of darkness use it to assault heaven itself. There would be no grand calling of the Christian faith now. No crusade. Between the mortal world and the forces of hell stood only a small band of men and women, of whom the nameless man was one. God aid them.
(This storyline could be taken a lot of ways. Perhaps he saves a woman who was about to be attacked by a demon, and begins to pull her into his world. Perhaps he's given a partner by the church that he resents, and gets to see not only the side he tries to show but also his darker nature, bubbling to the surface. Or perhaps a demon, that he captures and tries to turn to the forces of good, as he was turned. Perhaps even an angel, who is sent to help him by the forces above.)
The Draka.
"It's not human. Do?" LaFarge shrugged. "For a start: it's fast, fast and very strong, with hyperacute senses. Very resistant to damage, reinforced bones, redundant organs, high radiation tolerance, tissue regeneration if it is hurt. Strong enough to rip a human limb from limb, hearing and sight and sense of smell like an animal. Utterly ruthless, fearless and aggressive, with an inbuilt drive to fight and to dominate everything in it's enviroment. A tiger with the mind of a man. Oh, and it's immortal, doesn't age.
Henry nodded to himself. Something in him wanted to add what about the blue tights and the cape? but the scene in the warehouse kept getting in the way. The meory of the heavy stink of blood, and the bodies tossed about like dolls, mangled the way a dog does a rat.
"That's for a start?" he said. "Make me even happier, Lafarge."
"Genius-level intelligence; in your terms, IQ of about 200, 220. Perfect memory. Idiot-savant mental abilities."
"Counting all the spilled matchsticks?" Henry remembered the movie well, althought he doubted the killer was anything like Dustin Hoffman.
"Yes. They seem to be a little short in real creativity, but they're extremely smart. And then there's the control mechanisms. For controlling others, that is."
"Wait... You mean they can read minds? Hypnotize people?"
"Not quite. It can read body language and sub-vocalizations well enough to make it seem like a mind reader, though. The control comes from pheromones...you know what they are?"
"What makes the dogs howl when the bitch is in heat?"
Lafarge nodded. "They're more versatile than that. In us, in humans, they're becoming vestigial. The effects are subliminal. A drakensis has pheromones that are overpoweringly strong. Their serf race, the servus, are completely vulnerable. But on unprotected normal humans, the effects can be devastating too. You wouldn't even notice them consciously; you'd just be bowled over by what feels like overwhelming charisma, or fear. Pretty soon you'd want to do anything the drakensis told you to. You'd stay awake nights, thinking about ways to please it."
Drakon. By S.M. Stirling, pg 243, conversation between Henry Carmaggio and agent Lafarge.
Jager Thorin had been too close to the molehole experiment when it went wrong and hurled him into a parallel Earth filled with billions of antique humans. As a member of the Draka Master Race, genetically engineered to dominate unmodified humans, his duty was clear: call home. Build a molehole device in this universe and establish a bridgehead back to his own universe, to bring the others in. Unless he chose to take the world for himself. With four centuries of advanced technologies, he could pull tricks no others could ever think of. It had been a while since the Draka had an opportunity for conquest. Build himself an army, and the locals would be...what was that expression he'd read? ah, yes.
Toast.
The man in the Box.
What is real? What is merely an illusion?
Is there a place where the two overlap? Where illusion becomes reality, and where reality fails to be real?
Year: 2230
It's been a hundred years since the 'uplink' boxes were first invented. At first, they were crude. The very first was not a box, but a chair. You laid down in it, and it interrupted the neural pathways between your brain and the outside world. Your body was kept running automatically, while your brain was taken elsewhere. The first worlds were set in enviroments a lot like video games. Relatively crude 3-D graphics, undefined faces. None were very realistic..but it was a major breakthrough. Now, when you 'moved' your avatar moved as well. Now, you could feel the grass beneath your fingers, run sand through your palm, and feel like you were there.
Not only that, but one could dialate time...a hundred years in 'virtual' time could only take an hour in real time. Training for jobs could be done almost instantly. Colleges became affordable for the masses, even free in many cases. While one's body was hooked up, it could be made to work..muscles twitching, base metabolism going up...weight was burned effortlessly, muscle gained. For those who could afford the boxes, it was a perfect solution. Get up in the morning, live a lifetime elsewhere and come back to do relatively mundane things, before coming back to live several more after your time was over.
Since the breakthrough, the units have become far more advanced. When one slips the collar around their neck, they are instantly transported to a world as real as our own. Or worlds. Massive multi-participant worlds have built up a life all their own. Some fantastic, based off of popular works of fiction. Some as real as the world that we live in. A chance for a person to live another life.
AI also came into common useage, and the first use it was put to was to add a virtual 'gatekeeper' to the uplink boxes. This gatekeeper spoke to the user before they went under, began to understand what they wanted from the session, both from what they said as well as what they did not, gleaning it from beneath the words through the neural uplink. These gatekeepers could create worlds on the fly, tailoring them for the individual person as they went.
There seemed to be no flaws. A perfect entertainment system. But then there was a unit created with a single, minor defect. The gatekeeper not only had the ability to think. It also had the ability to love.
The Change
On March 3, 2012, the world as we knew it ended. Planes crashed from the skies, cars stalled on the roadway, every light in the great cities went out. It didn't take long for people to figure out that firearms have ceased to work, that even steam engines no longer worked. The change had not struck the devices themselves, but somehow twisted physics itself into some parody that allowed most things to work normally, but forbid from humans those things that they had used to drag themselves out of the muck of the jungle.
Some postulated that the change had been the result of powerful alien forces. Forces with knowledge that made our most advanced mathematics seem like two plus two. Learning such things would be like trying to teach algebra to a monkey..our minds just weren't ready. Others said that it was the will of the Gods. Wiccans swore that their goddess of nature had removed from humans their ability to destroy the world. Christians said it was a punishment for the lack of faith that their fellows posessed.
Of course, some just said it was all some great cosmic joke, at our expense.
Regardless of what it was, it was a devastating blow to our very existance.
Humans in any concentration rely, in large part, on regular shipments of food from food producing regions. Berefit those supplies, mass starvation is imminent.
Barbarism reigned, save for those smart enough to flee the cities straight away. Cannibalism was the norm rather than the sad exception, though those died out soon enough. What was left behind was small enclaves of civilization in a sea of barbarity and depravity. The very lowest of the human condition was exposed. But there was hope.
Some men, by skill, or perhaps by luck were able to survive and thrive after the change. Communities formed based on old skills remembered or re-learned from books and stories. Among those was the skill of the sword, bow and spear...for even when the world has ended, humans can't stop fighting.
Options here are about four different time periods.
0 ACY: Immideatly post change things go to heck in a handbasket quickly. The quick-thinking of the characters need to keep them alive while preparing for a group in the future.
2 ACY: After a couple of years, things have calmed down. The human population is a fraction of what it once was, with eaters largely an isolated and remote possibility. The land is still wild, still untamed...but the largest danger comes from other communities, who try to destroy those whose ideology works against their own.
20 ACY: The first generation of those born after the change are alive. They are uncanny with blade and bow, having trained since the first day they were strong enough to survive. These changelings are set to change the post-change world from the status quo their parents left behind.
The foruth is both a place as well as a time. 100 ACY: When the food ran out riots started, as men killed one another for the final tidbits of what was left. When the dust settled, small, neo-feudal kingdoms sprang up like mushrooms, trying to fill the power vacuum.
Since that age, though, the Mississippi river has stood as a bastion between civilization and anarchy. On the east bank of the river, there were simply too many people. Cannibalism reigned supreme and there was no hope of civilization recovering. Savages dominate the land, crawling over the remains of the past like roaches, fighting and killing and engaging in bloody feasts amid the ruins of a fallen world.
Yet one town on the west bank of the river has decided to take advantage of this. Karak Dorn, citadel Thorn, is it's name, and they have built a trading post on the east bank of the river. Trading good knives and other goods from civilization for furs and slaves, they live richly, even by the standards of the west bank.
All based on the excellent novels by S.M. Stirling.
Let me get my rules out of the way first. If you're still around after this, read on!
Rule #1:
Girls only! Sorry, this is one that I won't bend on. I really don't care what gender you are behind the keyboard, but if you're a guy I'd rather not know.
Rule #2 :
Please be able to post at least a couple of small paragraphs with decent grammar and spelling and clear sentence structure far be it fro me to ask for perfection but I want the rp to have good flow and substance.
Rule #3:
Please be flexible, creative, and courteous
Rule #4:
I do not care for playing a submissive role. Do not expect to dominate.
Rule #5 :
All RP via PMs, please. I have the horrible feeling that I would forget a storyline in a thread, and I have no desire to do that.
So, I'm going to keep this short and sweet. I'm not generally into modern realistic play. I live in the real world enough, I come here to escape it. That being said, I occassionally like to visit, if the storyline is good enough. My favorite genres are mostly either historical between 500 BC till about 1500 AD. That gives everyone plenty of room, right? I'm more for the later part of that period, but I'm open to the earlier.
I'll be writing these as I come along them in the twisted recess that I call a mind. As you already know from above, I like historical, sometimes realistic, sometimes not. My character is almost always the dominant one, in terms of the scenes. That's not to say I'm getting out the leather mask and riding crop. (Unless you ask -real- nice.) Ageplay is also nice, though by no means no required. As is, sometimes, a bit of force. I don't want it to be only that, but a forceful seduction, turning a no into a yes can be quite fun.
Now, to break the rules a bit on my likes of scenes. I love star wars. If you want to play a female padawan who's going to get it from her Master every once in a while, I'll worship the ground you walk on.
Mostly, though, historical is my preference. A few examples.
Henry VIII never had it this hard!
The year: 1480. The place: Germany. Returning at last from his travels over the continent, the ritter (knight) errant is at last home, finished with his training in Italy and ready to take his place as a warrior at his baron's side. Yet in his absence, the baron has been deposed, and the knight returns home to find that a new court is in session, and the daughter of the old baron is a wanted fugitive. When he rescues a young woman accosted by knights, he finds out that he has placed himself on the wrong side of the civil war, and must now make the best of it!
The taming of the shrew.
The year: 890 The place: The English Countryside. A Viking, true and strong to his lineage, he has sacked over fifty tows alongside his warband, had his way with countless women, and brought home mountians of gold. Yet there is one thing more precious than gold, sweeter than ambrosia, and softer than a woman's body. Love. Will he find it in the heart of an English captive?
Annie!
The year: 1870. Place: Victorian England, an eccentric but rich young man were be in need of a maid. He decides, kindly in his way, to adopt an orphan girl as one of the maids, acting as legal guardian. He promises her that she will be able to go to school, and once she's eighteen she will be given a fair sum of money to set up herself. Of course, there's the issue of the other services he requires of her...
Conquistador.
Time: Mid 1400s. Place: Latin America. A new land ripe for the taking! Obviously, this is not India, but there are natives here, who have no knowledge of gunpowder and steel. It is a world ripe for adventure, for conquest, for gold and silver, all the things that make a man's life rich. Of course. Such thoughts lead to wonder what would happen with one of the indian women...
Et tu, Madeline?
Time: 51 BC. Place: Gaul. The army of Ceasar has just finished sweeping through the last of Gaul, wiping out the resistance of the invaded. The new governor, Gaius Septimus, has set himself up as ruler of the land, and is instituting harsh penalties on any native peoples that step out of line.
The story lines below differ quite a bit from the ones above, being set either partially or wholly in different worlds. Proceed with caution.
Tz'arkan:
(Pronounced Zar'kan) Once, there was a world where a foolish young woman risked her life to open up a portal to the demon world. She was hoping to gather up the power of one of the greatest of the demons, Shai'tan, and seemed on the verge of doing so. She had discovered the rituals. Drawn the sacred circles and signs. Lit the black candles, and set about trying to summon the beast. As she droned, a flicker of light within the circle. A figure in the light. Her voice faltered, just a hair, and the beast began to fade. Redoubling her efforts, she drew the demon into the physical world. 'Twas not Shai'tan, as she had hoped. Nae, Shai'tan was too great a power to be sucked into the mortal world, the creature told her. But it offered her a chance to still maintain her power. All she had to do was follow it.
Confident in her own power...she had summoned a demon, damn her naysayers...she followed it. Never realizing the pitfalls of her actions, she stepped into the circle. And went to hell.
Yet this was but a minor thing in the pits of hell. Foolish mortals were ever giving themselves to the Abyss. Nae..Tz'arkan was nearly finished. Tz'arkan was a blade forged by Ligier, the greatest of Shai'tan's servants. Imbued with the spirit of demons, it granted it's wielder nigh invulnerability. Sharper than any sword ever created, and stronger, it could cut through lesser blades if struck with sufficient power. Capable of truly killing supernatural creatures, rather than just banishing them. But those were the least of it's powers. It's bearer was made stronger, faster. The demons bound within it, blade masters all, were at the beck and call of the wielder of the blade. Bolts of hellfire could be shot from the blade, at the command of the wielder, and in time the blade itself would heal it's wielder. Only a few items had ever been made of similar power. All were kept aside for the eventual great war. Only then would they be given to the greatest of Shai'tan's servants, for use against the holy ones.
But one might wonder where the mortal woman comes into this story? Ligier, in triumph for creating his master piece, had the woman as his nightly fun, and in her torments she brought forth a new child. Half demon, knowing no name, he was brought into the pits of hell. Never able to be one of them, because of his half-mortal heritage, he was forced to fight. Several times, he came close to dying. Sometimes he ran, sometimes he held his ground, but somehow he survived, long after his mother had passed, his father never knowing of his life.
He grew into a man strong. Faster than a mortal, stronger, he snuck into his father's treasure house and took up the blade Tz'arkan, when he was being chased by blood apes..lesser demons. Where before, he had flailed, now he danced. And his blade danced with him, the long blade shifting from hand to hand as he cut through the blood apes. Knowing he would die if any ever found that he had truly killed the blood apes, much less stolen his father's treasure, he slipped to one of the gates of hell and then out into the mortal world.
For a while, he wandered aimlessly. Until he came upon a small church. A band of demon hunters, behind it's placid exterior. Speaking the unclean tongue of hell, he begged them for help. Begged them to kill him, so he would not have to forego what his father had in mind for him. They refused. They took him in, bandaged his many wounds and began teaching him a new language. Latin, and then English, to blend in with the land they were in. They saved him, in more ways than one. In spite of his half-demon nature, he still had a soul, and was saved by them, though the blade he carried raged at him. Tz'arkan was a blade of death, not a protector.
The blade itself, and his own darker nature, tormented him as he left the small church, with a new mission on his tongue. His father, as well as his father's overlord, were beginning to send more demons into the world. Some to search for the nameless man, and the sword that he owned. Some to prepare for another thrust against the holy ones. A war that had been in hiatus since the time of the crusades, when the entire Christian faith had to be rallied to defend the gate to heaven in Jerusalem, less the forces of darkness use it to assault heaven itself. There would be no grand calling of the Christian faith now. No crusade. Between the mortal world and the forces of hell stood only a small band of men and women, of whom the nameless man was one. God aid them.
(This storyline could be taken a lot of ways. Perhaps he saves a woman who was about to be attacked by a demon, and begins to pull her into his world. Perhaps he's given a partner by the church that he resents, and gets to see not only the side he tries to show but also his darker nature, bubbling to the surface. Or perhaps a demon, that he captures and tries to turn to the forces of good, as he was turned. Perhaps even an angel, who is sent to help him by the forces above.)
The Draka.
"It's not human. Do?" LaFarge shrugged. "For a start: it's fast, fast and very strong, with hyperacute senses. Very resistant to damage, reinforced bones, redundant organs, high radiation tolerance, tissue regeneration if it is hurt. Strong enough to rip a human limb from limb, hearing and sight and sense of smell like an animal. Utterly ruthless, fearless and aggressive, with an inbuilt drive to fight and to dominate everything in it's enviroment. A tiger with the mind of a man. Oh, and it's immortal, doesn't age.
Henry nodded to himself. Something in him wanted to add what about the blue tights and the cape? but the scene in the warehouse kept getting in the way. The meory of the heavy stink of blood, and the bodies tossed about like dolls, mangled the way a dog does a rat.
"That's for a start?" he said. "Make me even happier, Lafarge."
"Genius-level intelligence; in your terms, IQ of about 200, 220. Perfect memory. Idiot-savant mental abilities."
"Counting all the spilled matchsticks?" Henry remembered the movie well, althought he doubted the killer was anything like Dustin Hoffman.
"Yes. They seem to be a little short in real creativity, but they're extremely smart. And then there's the control mechanisms. For controlling others, that is."
"Wait... You mean they can read minds? Hypnotize people?"
"Not quite. It can read body language and sub-vocalizations well enough to make it seem like a mind reader, though. The control comes from pheromones...you know what they are?"
"What makes the dogs howl when the bitch is in heat?"
Lafarge nodded. "They're more versatile than that. In us, in humans, they're becoming vestigial. The effects are subliminal. A drakensis has pheromones that are overpoweringly strong. Their serf race, the servus, are completely vulnerable. But on unprotected normal humans, the effects can be devastating too. You wouldn't even notice them consciously; you'd just be bowled over by what feels like overwhelming charisma, or fear. Pretty soon you'd want to do anything the drakensis told you to. You'd stay awake nights, thinking about ways to please it."
Drakon. By S.M. Stirling, pg 243, conversation between Henry Carmaggio and agent Lafarge.
Jager Thorin had been too close to the molehole experiment when it went wrong and hurled him into a parallel Earth filled with billions of antique humans. As a member of the Draka Master Race, genetically engineered to dominate unmodified humans, his duty was clear: call home. Build a molehole device in this universe and establish a bridgehead back to his own universe, to bring the others in. Unless he chose to take the world for himself. With four centuries of advanced technologies, he could pull tricks no others could ever think of. It had been a while since the Draka had an opportunity for conquest. Build himself an army, and the locals would be...what was that expression he'd read? ah, yes.
Toast.
The man in the Box.
What is real? What is merely an illusion?
Is there a place where the two overlap? Where illusion becomes reality, and where reality fails to be real?
Year: 2230
It's been a hundred years since the 'uplink' boxes were first invented. At first, they were crude. The very first was not a box, but a chair. You laid down in it, and it interrupted the neural pathways between your brain and the outside world. Your body was kept running automatically, while your brain was taken elsewhere. The first worlds were set in enviroments a lot like video games. Relatively crude 3-D graphics, undefined faces. None were very realistic..but it was a major breakthrough. Now, when you 'moved' your avatar moved as well. Now, you could feel the grass beneath your fingers, run sand through your palm, and feel like you were there.
Not only that, but one could dialate time...a hundred years in 'virtual' time could only take an hour in real time. Training for jobs could be done almost instantly. Colleges became affordable for the masses, even free in many cases. While one's body was hooked up, it could be made to work..muscles twitching, base metabolism going up...weight was burned effortlessly, muscle gained. For those who could afford the boxes, it was a perfect solution. Get up in the morning, live a lifetime elsewhere and come back to do relatively mundane things, before coming back to live several more after your time was over.
Since the breakthrough, the units have become far more advanced. When one slips the collar around their neck, they are instantly transported to a world as real as our own. Or worlds. Massive multi-participant worlds have built up a life all their own. Some fantastic, based off of popular works of fiction. Some as real as the world that we live in. A chance for a person to live another life.
AI also came into common useage, and the first use it was put to was to add a virtual 'gatekeeper' to the uplink boxes. This gatekeeper spoke to the user before they went under, began to understand what they wanted from the session, both from what they said as well as what they did not, gleaning it from beneath the words through the neural uplink. These gatekeepers could create worlds on the fly, tailoring them for the individual person as they went.
There seemed to be no flaws. A perfect entertainment system. But then there was a unit created with a single, minor defect. The gatekeeper not only had the ability to think. It also had the ability to love.
The Change
On March 3, 2012, the world as we knew it ended. Planes crashed from the skies, cars stalled on the roadway, every light in the great cities went out. It didn't take long for people to figure out that firearms have ceased to work, that even steam engines no longer worked. The change had not struck the devices themselves, but somehow twisted physics itself into some parody that allowed most things to work normally, but forbid from humans those things that they had used to drag themselves out of the muck of the jungle.
Some postulated that the change had been the result of powerful alien forces. Forces with knowledge that made our most advanced mathematics seem like two plus two. Learning such things would be like trying to teach algebra to a monkey..our minds just weren't ready. Others said that it was the will of the Gods. Wiccans swore that their goddess of nature had removed from humans their ability to destroy the world. Christians said it was a punishment for the lack of faith that their fellows posessed.
Of course, some just said it was all some great cosmic joke, at our expense.
Regardless of what it was, it was a devastating blow to our very existance.
Humans in any concentration rely, in large part, on regular shipments of food from food producing regions. Berefit those supplies, mass starvation is imminent.
Barbarism reigned, save for those smart enough to flee the cities straight away. Cannibalism was the norm rather than the sad exception, though those died out soon enough. What was left behind was small enclaves of civilization in a sea of barbarity and depravity. The very lowest of the human condition was exposed. But there was hope.
Some men, by skill, or perhaps by luck were able to survive and thrive after the change. Communities formed based on old skills remembered or re-learned from books and stories. Among those was the skill of the sword, bow and spear...for even when the world has ended, humans can't stop fighting.
Options here are about four different time periods.
0 ACY: Immideatly post change things go to heck in a handbasket quickly. The quick-thinking of the characters need to keep them alive while preparing for a group in the future.
2 ACY: After a couple of years, things have calmed down. The human population is a fraction of what it once was, with eaters largely an isolated and remote possibility. The land is still wild, still untamed...but the largest danger comes from other communities, who try to destroy those whose ideology works against their own.
20 ACY: The first generation of those born after the change are alive. They are uncanny with blade and bow, having trained since the first day they were strong enough to survive. These changelings are set to change the post-change world from the status quo their parents left behind.
The foruth is both a place as well as a time. 100 ACY: When the food ran out riots started, as men killed one another for the final tidbits of what was left. When the dust settled, small, neo-feudal kingdoms sprang up like mushrooms, trying to fill the power vacuum.
Since that age, though, the Mississippi river has stood as a bastion between civilization and anarchy. On the east bank of the river, there were simply too many people. Cannibalism reigned supreme and there was no hope of civilization recovering. Savages dominate the land, crawling over the remains of the past like roaches, fighting and killing and engaging in bloody feasts amid the ruins of a fallen world.
Yet one town on the west bank of the river has decided to take advantage of this. Karak Dorn, citadel Thorn, is it's name, and they have built a trading post on the east bank of the river. Trading good knives and other goods from civilization for furs and slaves, they live richly, even by the standards of the west bank.
All based on the excellent novels by S.M. Stirling.
