Welcome to Gaia! ::

I thought, remembering the past year and how we where conquered by the alien scum that where the only ones capable of stopping the storm. We where forced to refer to them as "our Benefactors", even though everyone called them "aliens" and "scum" because they stopped the storm, only to conquer our own planet. Luckily, none of the Overwatch ever came and just sent their little minions, the "Tracers" as they called themselves, and started to oppress us by controlling all recourses and limiting fresh and clean water supply. However, they created abominations out of some of us; the Combine. They are called that because of the way they'd combine parts of themselves, such as DNA with brain-washed people. These disgusting things where then very violent and tended to beat people for no apparent reasons. However, we where forced to acknowledge them as the "Trans-Human Army". Psh. More like slaves worse off than the rest of us. We where all forced into cities that where numbered; I was in City 20, a place that used to be Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The reason for such a place is because it survived the ocean levels rising and was the least-damaged city left from the storm. Almost all of those ignorant idiots had been herded into the city like sheep, none putting up a fight. However, knowing that my very own friends where smart people and would keep their heads down until we where all together once again, I knew that they where most likely to be alive. I had been thinking about just that three days into living in this internment camp when I saw what filled me with more hope than anything ever could; spray painted in orange and on the side of a building was a lambda. I knew that they where thinking of how the Combine had taken over Earth in one of our games and that that exact symbol meant help or allies. Less than a year after seeing that symbol, We where all together, except one; his house had simply disappeared, completely vanished without a trace. We prayed for his sake that he was dumped into space and died in the vacuum, instead of going off-world and onto that horrifying rock.

The next morning, we started to figure out how to place the router underneath the vehicle lodged into the first story and secure it in some plastic to keep it from getting full of dust and trailed the cables down to it. With that out of the way and a throw switch to kill the power to it hidden, we started to use the two computers to get in and start poking around and discovering what was going on in the rest of the world. Eventually, we found out that they had covered the whole Earth and had a physical location for each of their units and was able to reproduce the shape of the Earth and placing a point for each cluster of units, as their where countless billions of them. After a week, we where able to figure out their lingo and start talking with them and discovered that America was one of the "Moderate" zones for reported damage. The poor bastards in China and the Middle East had been hit the hardest, as millions of cubic kilometers of soil had vanished or replaced with parts from other planets and a large forest of nasty plant life had sprung up and was devouring everything. Also, most of the Alaska and Russia area had vanished, leaving about two thirds of Russia intact and only the chain of islands close to the main United States was left. Otherwise, a perfect circle had been formed. Our world was perminately altered and could never be changed back. The most interesting thing, though was that something appeared on one of the still existing satellites we got into was showing a single glowing point in the middle of that missing area; in a zoom-in of it, we found it to be a flare of something hot shooting out of a giant round spot, about half a kilometer wide. I had my own theory that it was probably an open spot formed far enough into the magma of the Earth that it found a giant hole to vent out of, but my friends all came up with either geothermal energy was being produced their or that something more sinister was happening; they where trying to push the Earth with a giant rocket of sorts. It was ridiculous, of course, but we didn't put it past a bunch of aliens that where enslaving our race.