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 Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2006 10:21 pm
DISCLAIMER
There's no way in hell I'm writing a disclaimer for this. If all those goddamn InuYasha RPs can get away without one, then I'm not wasting my time.
But! I will let you guys know that this RP will contain elements from Ghost in the Shell, White Wolf's World of Darkness, Outlaw Star, Starship Troopers (the book, not the movie), Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Wild ARMs.
Naturally, I'll cut out the crap that sucks and/or doesn't make sense.
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Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2006 12:01 pm
The History of Filgaia By Earth's Standards, Filgaia was a planet composed of the rough coagulation of various fiction genres, ranging from wild west to classic fantasy. Royal Castles loomed over villages with saloons, magic coexisted with--and amplified--science, and men went to battle with demons...but only once.
It was the thousand year war, but it was not a war of typical proportions. It began with the arrival of the Elw. Few know why the Elw came at all, but what is known is that the Elw brought science, magic, and a great deal of mystery to an otherwise desolate world. Filgaia was covered with the healthy green of plant life, and prospered at this time. This age ended with the invention of the automaton. Sentient mechanical beings, they were built to carry out menial tasks. However, forced into slavery mere days after construction, they rebelled, and violently so. The hastily-christened "demons" made it their goal to destroy the humans and the elw, and convert Filgaia into a haven where only demons could live.
To combat them, the humans and the elw created golems, large, mostly humanoid, machines with a lesser sentience, but enough to act on their own, for want of direct orders. Eight golems were created, each representing one of the fundamental elements of nature. The golems proved too difficult to control for all but the strongest-willed, however, and the project was scrapped before the elw scientists managed to develop a means of containment for their power. Most were buried in secret chambers in elw research laboratories.
After this, the elw left the humans to fight while they developed weapons to combat the demon scourge. After much waiting, they created the Guardian Blade, a sword created of the same "living metal" used to construct the demons. This sword was theorized to be capable of slicing through the fabric of reality itself. However, it was dismantled after its first battle for two reasons: It seemed to have defeated the demons in one fell swoop, and it had scarred Filgaia in the process. Filgaia, already devastated from the war, was now in such a crippled state that it was impossible to recover on its own. The Elw retreated from the doomed world into a pocket dimension of their own, leaving behind only the ruins of their ancient laboratories.
500 years passed. All records of the Elw were lost, save for the ruins of their laboratories, and all the data contained within was lost to binary decay and hardware corruption. Salvaging what it could, humanity developed technologies based on combinations of their own innovations and what was known as "Ancient Technology," creations of the Elw. Slowly, people were recovering from the thousand year war with the demons. Fil'gaia was on edge, still capable of supporting life, but just barely. For a short while, the Monarchy of Ysondre supported the affairs of the world, coordinating humanity's efforts to survive and to thrive.
However, for many, this was just a veil. A thinly laid cover for oppression and totalitarianism. The further from the Capital of Ysondre one traveled, the worse conditions became, until, on the edge of the world, the Ysondrian Knights were directing forced labor camps. Outraged by this, a group of five rebel Ysondrian Knights formed a new organization, the Congressional Knights. Unfortunately for them, they fell behind in virtually every aspect when compared to the Monarchy of Ysondre. The only upper hand they had was that, since their primary motivation was war, they had already formed a squad of eleven "heroes," dubbed the "Lambda." The war raged for seven years.
And then, Ysondre discovered the Living Metal. It was in a dormant state, but their top scientists immediately recognized the inherent potential within. They studied it for a year, until there was an accident. One of the containment suits that the lead scientist had been wearing while working with the Living Metal had been breached. Contact with the Living Metal resulted in a horrifying and disfiguring death that has been wiped off the record books. After that day, the lead scientist disappeared completely from society.
Meanwhile, the war continued, devastating people's lives, and reflecting this destruction on the landscape of the world. The single thread by which the life of Filgaia hung was now in danger of being cut. The remaining scientists in charge of the Living Metal project set a new goal: To create a means by which to save the environment of Fil'gaia. They had achieved their goal within a year, and created the first nanomachine, one of untold trillions designed to repair the environment of Fil'gaia, when they encountered their first problem.
There was no one to turn it on.
The nanomachines were self-repairing, self-replicating, self-sustaining mechanisms, and contact with them resulted in a horrible, disfiguring, and excruciatingly painful death, due to the metal's incompatibility with the user's genes. The scientists proceeded to gather human tissue samples for genetic experimentation so that they could find someone who could activate the nanomachines as soon as possible. Then, the project encountered its second problem.
There was no longer enough funding.
Even the Living Metal project required money to continue, but the war required even more attention, and the Ysondrian government was more interested in its own self-preservation, as opposed to the distant possibility of the resurrection of the planet. The scientists, being the only ones understanding the plight of the world, pleaded with their king for funding, but he would hear none of it. At last, the general of their armed forces was allowed to take over the project. His ambition was one entirely different. Upon seeing the first test subject of the Living Metal project, the original lead scientist, killed by the Living Metal's attempt to graft itself onto his skin and internal organs, he immediately demanded that they produce weapons of war using the technology, or be faced with a complete disconnection from any funding, resulting in an subsequent discontinuation of their research. The scientists reluctantly agreed, knowing that they, at least, could continue to learn from the metal.
Included with their funding, they received fresh test subjects. Orphaned children. Knowing none of them possessed the proper genes, they attempted to induce an artificial viral evolution, modifying their genes. The evolution only produced a single compatible test subject. The rest died in the process. The Living Metal project created a new weapon, called the ARM, a cruel joke on the military's part, as ARM stood for the project's original intention, "Automated Repair Mechanism," but was actually an arm taken up in war. Test subject #MP75A9 was immediately dispatched to the Royal Castle of Ysondre. When the Congresssional Knights attempted a coup, MP75A9's attempt to use his ARM resulted in catastrophic failure. The force was equivalent to ten nuclear bombs. The castle, the surrounding city, and everyone therein was destroyed, including MP75A9. He attempted to contain the blast, causing serious damage to his body, which he repaired using his ARM. He was unsuccessful on both counts, however, as he was destroyed, the nanomachines dispersed and replicating across the world, but not activated for their true purpose.
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Currently, Filgaia is in a state comparable to limbo. It hangs on the edge of death, still clinging to life. The nanomachines, while small enough to remain unnoticed, are omnipresent, pervading through all of Filgaia and its atmosphere. Due to changes in the structure of the nanomachines as a result of MP75A9's attempt to combine his body with his ARM, most of Filgaians are capable of manipulating the nanomachines to create ARMs of their own, though degrees of success vary from person to person. They simply draw from the environment around them, and form a weapon or armor of their own design. These ARMs are unique to every ARMs user, as determined by their genetic code, and while it is possible to manipulate one's own ARM intentionally to change its appearance or function, doing such would be extremely difficult. To date, no one has been compatible enough with the ARM system to manipulate the network it has spread across all of Filgaia.
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Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 10:48 am
The History of Earth To understand Earth, one must dismiss all the trappings of common sense and realism in natural reasoning. Mythology exists, and most of it is true, however, much of it overlaps, describing and discussing the same things, while placing false, or otherwise different labels on supernatural beings. What is important though, is not the names, but the facts.
The most accurate telling of the story is as follows: In the beginning, all was void. Then God created the swirling masses, coalescing into the reality known as Earth. God created life and death from nothing. Upon the creation of humans, Lucifer became jealous, and corrupted them. God discovered this and banished him into the pits of hell. This is what was told. However, this is not the truth. God created the Archangels, the first Seraphim, and assigned them to create the Earth. One Angel for each day, the world slowly came into being.
However, on the seventh day, Lucifer, the instrument of creation, looked down upon the world, and all that was in it, and saw the amazing potential of the human race. Proud of this creation, he presented them before God, who struck them down. Human beings had much potential indeed, but it was far, far too much. If they ever rebelled, they could pose a threat to the heavenly firmament. Lucifer and the seven angels were banished into the whirlwind void of Hell, not a place of fire and brimstone, nor a place of isolated cold, but a place void of all senses. As further punishment, God created weaker, lesser humans, and forced the fallen angels, the Demons of the world, to watch in horror as their souls dissipate into nothingness, their essential elements reconstructed into lesser constructions.
God created a world of suffering and death--a world where sadness, fear, and anger were the human condition. God invented mortality. However, because of this, God also created birth. And so, the first son of the world was born. His name was Cain.
The story of Cain and Abel shows Cain inventing murder, out of jealousy of Abel. He is forced to walk the Earth forever, branded by God as fundamentally immortal. However, there is more to this story. In the struggle with Abel, Cain was mortally wounded. God preserved his life as a form of punishment, and cursed him with an unnatural drive, a thirst, a hunger for blood.
Cain was the first vampire. Not undead as is the case in standard mythos, but a soulless body, subsisting on the life force of others. Cain's hunger was insatiable, matched only by his miserable loneliness. No one could understand the torture of being without emotion, without soul, forever cursed to walk the Earth. Cain had a plan, though. Cain would MAKE them understand! Thus was the second generation of vampires born.
As generation upon generation of vampires were created, and walked among human beings, God saw this as a problem. Thus, he struck them with a fatal weakness to sunlight, and cursed them with disfigurements, separating them all. Still, this was not enough, and so at the tower of Babel, his devastation of human organization by means of creating languages sent shockwaves into the vampiric underworld.
Even then, they posed a threat to creation, and so God's rage was implanted into beings of spirit, turned flesh. God created werewolves. His instructions to them were to hunt down the corrupting factors in the world and protect it from harm. Unfortunately, the self-named Garou were twisted by the ancient rage of the Heavens, and believed that an entity known as "Gaia" who represented the world, and not the world's creator, was compelling them to destroy the Vampires. Still, they were carrying out God's objective, so they would be allowed to exist. All was going well, and the struggles between vampires and werewolves continued until the birth of Jesus. You see, Jesus was a demon.
Demons are not inherently evil, just as God and his angels are not inherently good. Angels and demons simply fight on two opposite sides of a war, a war focused on the inner potential of the Earthling humans. You see, even though the current humans possess a mere fraction, a shadow, of the power that the originals held, they had it, and that was what was important. Jesus gathered followers who possessed particularly amazing potential and named them his Apostles. The Apostles were the first true magi, holding the keys to reality itself, and capable of bending or breaking it at whim. With help, they were mislead into ripping apart the barrier that kept the demons in hell away from reality. Many remained in the torrential whirlwind of the underworld, but several escaped, and used the mages to disperse themselves in time, where they carefully planned the formation of other religions, using the same stories and history created by God, but placing the worship on idols. The more successful the demon was at gaining faithful followers, the more influence he would have over the course of events in the world. After all, the fallen angels known as demons were originally designed to create and guide the creation of the world. Jesus, being the first to escape from Hell, was arguably the most successful.
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The four supernatural factions that deal in the events on earth know of each other and have their hands in worldwide events, manipulating things to their design. Earth occasionally comes under attack from enormous supernatural beings from an unknown origin. These are the incarnations of Angels. Their duty is the absolute desctruction of the renegade supernaturals--including the werewolves, in that they are agents of unpredictable chaos--and the destruction of the human race, to prevent the rise of any further supernatural beings.
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Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2006 11:55 am
The History of Vana'diel
Centuries ago, Vana'diel was a land of gods. Chiefly important in the divine heirarchy was the duality of Altana and Promathia, who, while direct opposites, were "twin goddesses" and through whom the magic of the world, Ether, flowed. Ether, powered by the souls of the departed, could be manipulated by nearly all of the races inhabiting Vana'diel--including the "artificial" Gradian race--and they used it to prosper and benefit the world. The gods appointed a Grand Duke to rule over the nations using the false nation of Jeuno, and operating behind the scenes by using his older brother as a figurehead.
However, due to events that have been forever lost in history, the hero, Fenrys Mystblade, was forced to destroy Altana, and Promathia in the process, since one cannot exist without the other. The Ether current slowed to a crawl and only manifests itself in natural forces such as magnetism, gravity, and electric polarity, to name a few. Gradually, magic came to a stand still.
The magocracy of Windurst fell apart completely, as political positions were determined by the proficiency with which politicians could manipulate Ether, and the fundamentalist regime of the royal family of San d'Oria shattered when news of Altana's demise was leaked to the public. Bastok would have stood fast through this, but the reliance of the two other major nations on it for goods and services resulted in a massive trade surplus that nearly crippled the world economy.
Eventually, the magical races of Vana'diel were eradicated by their own lack of a desire to do anything at all, including furthering their own species. Of those who remained, no one was capable of manipulating Ether any further, except by more mundane, discreet means, such as the creation of advanced electronics, but since this is the only way that it could be done, the people of Vana'diel advanced technologically far faster than those on Earth could possibly have imagined. Almost immediately, Vana'diel progressed far past 21st century Earth in technological standards. Only a few centuries after the collapse of the governments of Windurst and San d'Oria, the science known as "Functional Prosthetics" was born. Similar to Earth's prosthetics, Functional Prosthetics allowed willing movement in prosthetic limbs by attaching nerve endings to wires. While it takes time and physical therapy for the mind to adapt to the changes, once it has, the patient is capable of switching between prosthetics for the affected limb at will, provided that the prosthetic limb functions on, and has installed the same drivers, and produces the same functions as previous limbs. In addition, the development of the LiNKED drug prevented infection from the prosthetics, while minimizing inhibition of the immune system.
Further research was conducted using the Functional Prosthetics technology, as development began on the Orbital Frame project. Orbital Frames were large machines designed to be fully controlled by nerve-wire interface. Most were designed to be humanoid in shape, so that minimal training could yield adequate control of the device, but more advanced specifications included various additions to the machines, including but not limited to flight and transformation. Unfortunately, not all worked as planned. In the initial test, Chief Engineer Sydney Black was rejected by the orbital frame, which went berserk and destroyed much of the underground laboratory outpost, before it ran out of energy and shut down. The chief engineer piloting it at the time was rendered comatose and would have been paralyzed from the neck down if he had ever woken up.
However, further technological advances created a solution even to this problem. Sydney Black was the first person to be given a fully prosthetic body. It was crude and looked very unreal, and he was initially mistaken for an older Gradian--not surprising, since it also looked nothing like his original body--but it functioned well enough for construction on the Orbital Frame project to complete. Sydney realized that the reason for the initial rejection was that a nerve-wire connection was too raw, and developed LCL, or LiNKED Connection Fluid, which filled the insertion tube for pilots of Orbital Frames.
Full-body prosthetics became more popular with the development of the cyberbrain. Sydney Black was actually the only person to undergo full-body prosthetics while retaining his organic brain, and the result was a slow, but steady degradation in the functions of his frontal lobe, leading to symptoms similar to Alzheimers. The cyberbrain stalled this, and allowed easy transference between multiple prosthetic bodies by uploading and downloading minds into them. It does not create immortality, however, since the mind goes through binary decay, and eventually loses the functions of the frontal lobe anyway, but the process is much slower and far less painful when compared to what the organic brain goes through.
Many opposed cyberization, claiming that the process causes a person to become a machine, however, it cannot be denied that the conveniences created by being able to download knowledge were many and great. This ability was limited by how much space remained on one's personal artificial hard drive, however, and to learn more than that, it is necessary to learn in the practical manner--by studying.
The conveniences granted by cyberization also opened a gateway to an entirely new kind of crime. People began hacking into other people's brains. A skilled hacker could alter memories, fabricate emotions, or even prevent someone from seeing the hacker standing mere inches away, but due to the nature of brain hacking, it is only possible to do these things by connecting with your own brain, and triggering a firewall with a direct connection to your own mind is extremely dangerous, potentially causing the erasure of the mind.
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Vana'diel's government is centered around Bastok now, although efforts are being made to rebuild San d'Oria and Windurst, as they are vital trading points with the independant territories of Kazham and Rabao. A special force has been attached to the Public Security Sanction, referred to as department 14 (Public Security Sanction is publicly believed to have only 13 departments) and this department deals primarily with cyber-crime, ranging from bank hackings to cyber terrorism. Orbital Frames are used to carry transports between Bastok and the moon, "White Eve," where heavy mining is under way to acquire resources for the rebuilding of the world governments, and to build an orbiting space station where the miners of White Eve can live, minimizing the travel time between work and home. Orbital Frames has not been outfitted with combat equipment, but they would be a force to be reckoned with, regardless.
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