Ephemeral Dreams ((Seeking Players)

[Asellus Rosewater]

The Story

The year 2010 was to be a terrible one for Earth. On the night of March 19, the sun set as normal on the entire United States. At approximately 4:00 AM EST the following morning, the Eurasian continent was struck by a mammoth asteroid at a rather precarious angle. The rock skimmed off the planet and back into space, but not before doing serious and irreversible damage.

Almost all life on the continent was eradicated within hours. Those in the more remote western regions, and islands such as Japan and Australia, escaped any direct harm. Their fate would be worse.

The asteroid had left Earth in its natural orbit around the sun, but had shifted and drastically slowed its rotation to one turn every several millennia. Those left alive on one side of the planet were now in eternal sunlight. The Americas and Canada were masked in eternal night.

Within only a few months, most the more sun-dependent plant life on the land masses were dead and attempts were put into effect to try and combat it. Minimal success was managed using a combination of sunlamps and greenhouses. It was a marginal success, as without solar energy and little way to import fuel only a limited number of greenhouses could be put into operation.

Vegetables grown were thusly limited, and mixed with agents to add more filling to the food product when they were shipped out. Fresh produce was a thing of the past, and all vegetables and fruits now came in tightly vacuum-sealed cans, good for single servings as a whole meal, or to split with someone over the still-common animal products being sold.

A further effect of the asteroid was that which its gravity had on the moon. The moon again rotates the Earth with one side always facing and the other always turned, but it was pulled to a certain degree in one direction, such that now instead of rising and setting in the East and West, it now swung around, seeming to orbit irregularly, so that at any given point in the Western Hemisphere it always seems to be moving about the horizon in a lazy circle. Those in the East would never see the moon again.

Five years later, it is 2015, August 10, Midnight. The location is New York, one of the last bastions of high-powered living in the Western Hemisphere with night lights that never shut off. People plagued by the darkness and strange skin diseases brought on by the total absence of sunlight turn more and more to illegal, often lethal, street-made drugs and law enforcement is at a minimum. The only safety is in the fact that low fuels mean low gun and weapon production.

You have managed to find a place to live affordably in a downtown apartment. The place is semi-rundown, half the windows boarded, and graffiti on most the walls. But there is surprisingly-clean running water and basic cable, though with the fuel crisis there is a very limited selection of channels.

It is in an apartment just like this, at the Robbed Cradle Complex, that you begin your story of life in eternal night.