Survivor communities outside the known world

[Mayabird]

The eastern Canadian discussion reminds me of Ruth's fic about the same area. 

[Mayabird]

A little theology of my brave new world.

The Scribe

A new colony was being planned; the island was already being cleansed.  It would be fortified, and then the first pioneers would move in.  Soon after, they would receive a priest, to teach and heal and protect souls from sin and monster.  The priest would need books, so the Holy See was filling the order.

Bobcat Smith had lost both his legs in an accident, but his arms were still fine and despite his poor education, his handwriting was neat, so he was recruited to become a scribe.  Maybe one day they would have the resources to build a new, larger, less finicky printing press, and easily print many copies of precious books, and then scribes wouldn't be needed and some other job would be found for him and the others, but Bob didn't think he would see that day. 

He pulled himself off the skateboard and onto the chair of his ancient desk, supposedly old even before the Plague and haphazardly repaired.  A couple others were in the room – old Jana, another scribe, deaf in one ear, mostly deaf in the other, and blind in one eye, and an elderly cat who slept most of the day.  The room was quiet other than their breathing and scratching.  Bob carefully read over the list.
A Bible, of course.  If the press wasn't busy it was always printing more out.  He'd ask for one.

General First Aid.  That was actually being printed at the rickety, finicky press that very moment, since it was the second-most needed book.  Having a couple hundred copies would be useful, to replace tattered old editions and even keep a few dozen spares for later. 

History Since the Plague.  Bob had been working on a copy earlier that week, but it was a rough subject, and when he started on the Second March of the Cree he just couldn't continue.  It had been set aside ever since, as he worked on other things.  Maybe someone else would finish it, or he could copy another book first. 

First Lessons.  The combo book for learning to read and learning valuable lessons about the world.  Bob remembered those days of his childhood fondly, and guessed that he still had the book memorized.  Rule One: “They mostly come at night.  Mostly.”  Rule Two: “Monsters can be stopped by destroying the brain.”  And so on.

Maybe that would be good to start on right now, but what else was there?  Questions and Prophesies of Pope Mary.  That one he hadn't copied before.  Bob considered asking Jana to pass the book since she was beside the safe, reflected briefly on the futility, and got back to his skateboard to roll over, get the scribe's copy, and return. 

A leatherworker would add the cover later, so Bob did not worry about that.  He pulled out a page of paper, thick and hardy unlike the pages of the ancient days, and checked that his old pen was filled with ink and worked on the blotted page.  Then Bob carefully copied the title page, and filled the blank for his name as scribe.  The blank for the date would be filled once the book was done.  He turned to the first page.

Q: Why are some but not all humans Blessed to resist the Plague?

A: First ask, why did God release the Plague?

Q: Why did God release the Plague?

A: He did not!  Humanity did, in our arrogance and blasphemy, and we nearly destroyed ourselves.  Because God granted us free will, He allows us to do both great good and terrible ill. 

Q: Why are some but not all humans Blessed to resist the Plague?

A: So not all of us would die.  This mistake was made by the hands of man, and our hands must be the ones to fix it.  God will grant us no miraculous salvation from our own mistake, but in His mercy, He will tip the scales for us, just enough, to prevent our entire destruction. 

Bobcat began to copy the holy words. 

[Solokov]

I wonder if radiation would mutate trolls even more or kill them.  I'm highly interested in what fantasy elements you have thought up for it.  Don't know if I'd want to read all of it if it's super dark, real news is dark enough. 

Real world radiation off modernized arsenals?  The initial groundbursts (because no reason to use airbusts since it's not an enemy that can be taken out with emp radiation) between the heat, pressure wave and burst of neutron, gamma and x-ray radiation would likely kill anything/anyone within the effective blast radius (much wider kill area if they set for about 200-300ft above the deck for detonation than if the weapons were detonated at the surface. Most blast maps you see are calculated at ground level at sea level with a neutral barometric pressure). Even then, the most your looking at is a month for sure death from exposure to surface radiation and your biggest hazards are clean air and water. After about 2 to 3 months background radiation should be down to almost normal (elevated long teem cancer risk if I remember the numbers right should be no higher than the workers at grand central station) aside from some structures that will still be hot for years to come.


...however this is a fantasy setting. Go with Fallout aparpg style radiation, stuffs hot for hundreds of years and mutamts abound.



 

I’m imagining people living underneath Moscow in it’s rabbit warren of underground shelters and spaces. There is not one community, but many enclaves and they all live in loose alliances based on need and resources.

Specialist skills are hard to come by, so the enclaves have their own individual coveted resources. Doctors are especially needed, next come technicians and then come everyone else.

The monsters that live above are hungry and equally covetous of their spaces. Sometimes an entire enclave would disappear, only to reappear in another space later. Some times new enclaves are discovered.

Not everyone fears, not everyone is an enemy. Not every enclave fear the monsters, not every enclave is human anymore.

Realisticly everyone in the metro system, D-6/metro-2 line included would pretty much die most likely, kinda why I made moscow basically a tomb city in my stories in the altverse ssssona thread.

Neat idea though and very 2033ish.



On a related note, has anyone claimed anything on the west coast of the US, hawaii, or the bering strait? If not, dibs? I've a few ideas rattling around my mind that need to be released on the fandom.

[ButterflyWings]

@Solokov. Go for it!

I imagine most of this being in-world the equivalency of half heard rumours and talk.

-ButterflyWings

[Mayabird]

Solokov, go for it.  The only Pacific kinda-writeup I've seen was Ruth's map of the new Japanese empire. 

ButterflyWings, yeah, those are strongly held beliefs by the Lake Superior folks but may not have any basis in fact.  I'm working on another vignette about a person who personally new Pope Mary and what she really did and was capable of, but it's been a little rough making it work.  It's a different take on returning magic. 

[ButterflyWings]

Solokov, go for it.  The only Pacific kinda-writeup I've seen was Ruth's map of the new Japanese empire. 

ButterflyWings, yeah, those are strongly held beliefs by the Lake Superior folks but may not have any basis in fact.  I'm working on another vignette about a person who personally new Pope Mary and what she really did and was capable of, but it's been a little rough making it work.  It's a different take on returning magic.

Mayabird, I wanted to say I really like your vignettes. 

[Mayabird]

Why thank you!  I have another.

The Soldier

When he was a small boy, Pete Mannila had been excited to join the military, as all first-born were required to do.  He would travel beyond the island he had always lived on, maybe even beyond Lake Nipigon itself, see the world and heroically drive back monsters.  He always played Soldier when the kids played Zombies and Soldiers, and when no one wanted to play he staged mock battles with bushes and log piles.   All the adults around had done some kind of soldiering at some point, even if it was just guarding the palisade around their island, so little Pete begged stories off of everyone.  Sailors had stories of mers, some of them small but tricksy mutants and some bloated zombies.  Former scouts had tales of fleshy zombie nests and treasures, which got grander and more fabulous at each retelling.  One time some members of the Balloon Corps stopped by and told about the world from the bird's eye view, how one had even looked down into a Death Zone safely from above.  And then there was his uncle.  Uncle Weston told him, in fragments out of order, about Marquette.

Twenty years before, the Marquette Campaign began.  At the time people had grandly called it the Recovery of Marquette.  The pain of the loss of the Great Expedition was fading, and people were looking for another big plan to push towards the future.  The Americans down south had been spoke of “the lost capital of old Michigan” with its two lovely cathedrals and endless wealth of iron and how, if they could not reach the survivors in the distance, perhaps they would reclaim their own territory first and build up a better industrial base for a later attempt.  Besides, Marquette was the smallest of the Death Zones, so it should be the least difficult. 

So there had been a buildup, troops and weapons and other supplies, and soldiers were sent in to scout and burn beachheads.  Nests were blown up in winter, and in summer zombie and mutant stragglers were lured into kill zones with noisy firecrackers.  There had been lookout balloons before, but now it was being formalized into an international unit, with untethered, directed traveling for aerial recon. A clean area was being carved out nearby for the base.  The stories coming from the south had been so exciting that Weston and many others had volunteered to aid in the efforts, and two boats sailed to join the armies. 

Weston did not, would not talk about what adventures he had, what he had done before everything fell apart.  It all paled before the Omega Horror.

It was like a mega, but something far worse.  If a mega was the final form of a troll, then the Omega Horror was clearly the final form of a mega.  No one knew how large it was, if it was fully grown or still spreading.  Underneath and inside the ruins of Marquette, it snaked and oozed.  Chunks of it, large as mutant bulls, could break off from the rest of the mass to attack, and then rejoin.  Tentacles larger than houses could burst from the ground at any moment, for any reason, and smash an entire platoon or fling rocks high enough to hit balloons or far enough to hit boats on the water.  Even worse, it could summon zombies and mutants from far afield, so areas that had been cleansed were no longer safe and were overrun. In a last ditch effort, they had tried to burn and detonate as much of the city as they could, but the Omega Horror was so large that it shrugged off the damage. 

They had thought that they knew everything about the Plague before then, the terrible things it did and could do.  In that terrible campaign, they discovered that they barely knew anything, that their grand schemes were futile, and their lives would have to remain furtive and skulking on the edges of the endless darkness.  Unlike three fourths of the others at Marquette, Uncle Weston had survived in body;   he had not survived in spirit.   

Pete's enthusiasm for soldiering faded, but as the first-born of the family there wasn't anything to be done.  Perhaps though he would be kept for guard patrols around Lake Nipigon or along the Nipigon River, still honorable work to guard their haven.  But when he came of age, after he was done training and spent a little time on the mainland, Canada was asked to fulfill its treaty requirements and send soldiers for the Cordon of Marquette.  Among those sent was Peter Mannila.

Every day was a mix of fear and boredom, except for the days that were terror and action.  If he could survive five years, he could be rotated out and sent back home.  He and the others guarded the last remaining base so in the fall they could reburn the wide belt around.  There were not enough soldiers in all their lands to truly keep a cordon, to maybe, eventually starve out the Omega Horror, but the grassy strip hopefully lessened the numbers of zombies and mutants called to the Horror, to melt into and replenish it.  And they could keep watch, the soldiers and miracle-worker and army of cats, to make sure that if the Horror itself, in pieces or entire, decided to move there would be some kind of warning to people beyond.

[Mayabird]

I think I should give a little more explanation, since I probably won't be able to have characters info-dump all this realistically.  Marquette (which is the largest city on the Upper Peninsula, though still not very large) in my story's history became the capital of Michigan after the fall of the lower peninsula/most of the rest of the world.  It held out for a few years before it fell also due to refugees moving in, bringing illness and Rash-monsters following.  Due to that psychological line in the sand that got drawn for everybody between pre-Illness and post-Illness times, everybody except for a few educated priests remembers Marquette as the glorious capital which was lost. 

The Church is Christian, though the religion has changed a bit what with the end of the world, and has elements from Catholicism, Lutheranism, and others that all got mashed together to make a kinda-sorta unified belief system.  The Church isn't just for religion but also handles most education and medicine and unofficially acts as the overarching American civil government, as the American 'government' consists of the military, which is focused entirely on fighting Illness-monsters and scavenging, and village councils (sometimes elected representatives, often democratic votes of all the adults in the village) which only manage a small area; if the Church hadn't become powerful as it did rather early on, it's possible a congress might've been convened later with representatives from the villages (the new Canadian Parliament at New Ottawa on Lake Nipigon works this way - the Church didn't penetrate into there as quickly).  It really is too powerful and that will cause issues in the future beyond the time of these vignettes.

Death Zones (or sometimes called Dead Zones) are rebranded Exclusion Zones, where there are just too many Illness-monsters to go.  Marquette was the smallest of them, since it was a much smaller city than the others that became Lake Superior Death Zones (Duluth, Thunder Bay, and Sault Ste. Marie) even after the refugees had poured in, so the military figured it would be the least difficult to reclaim.  When that went terible wrong, they became even more terrified to go to the Death Zones because holy crap if they found that abomination in the smallest one, what would they find in the bigger ones?  Or the huge ones, like Chicago?  (Sure, Key Eshbach went there and survived but she snuck in and snuck back our quietly, and God obviously tipped the scales for her more.)

As for the Omega Horror - I do not believe one exists in every former city, but when there's some sort of unpredictable mega-mutation thing going on, something will go even more spectacularly wrong.  Copenhagen got murderghosts, and this little city got a super-giant that can call others to it, assimilate them, and got so big that it buried itself underground. 

[Juniper]

I think I should give a little more explanation, since I probably won't be able to have characters info-dump all this realistically.  Marquette (which is the largest city on the Upper Peninsula, though still not very large) in my story's history became the capital of Michigan after the fall of the lower peninsula/most of the rest of the world.  It held out for a few years before it fell also due to refugees moving in, bringing illness and Rash-monsters following.  Due to that psychological line in the sand that got drawn for everybody between pre-Illness and post-Illness times, everybody except for a few educated priests remembers Marquette as the glorious capital which was lost. 

The Church is Christian, though the religion has changed a bit what with the end of the world, and has elements from Catholicism, Lutheranism, and others that all got mashed together to make a kinda-sorta unified belief system.  The Church isn't just for religion but also handles most education and medicine and unofficially acts as the overarching American civil government, as the American 'government' consists of the military, which is focused entirely on fighting Illness-monsters and scavenging, and village councils (sometimes elected representatives, often democratic votes of all the adults in the village) which only manage a small area; if the Church hadn't become powerful as it did rather early on, it's possible a congress might've been convened later with representatives from the villages (the new Canadian Parliament at New Ottawa on Lake Nipigon works this way - the Church didn't penetrate into there as quickly).  It really is too powerful and that will cause issues in the future beyond the time of these vignettes.

Death Zones (or sometimes called Dead Zones) are rebranded Exclusion Zones, where there are just too many Illness-monsters to go.  Marquette was the smallest of them, since it was a much smaller city than the others that became Lake Superior Death Zones (Duluth, Thunder Bay, and Sault Ste. Marie) even after the refugees had poured in, so the military figured it would be the least difficult to reclaim.  When that went terible wrong, they became even more terrified to go to the Death Zones because holy crap if they found that abomination in the smallest one, what would they find in the bigger ones?  Or the huge ones, like Chicago?  (Sure, Key Eshbach went there and survived but she snuck in and snuck back our quietly, and God obviously tipped the scales for her more.)

As for the Omega Horror - I do not believe one exists in every former city, but when there's some sort of unpredictable mega-mutation thing going on, something will go even more spectacularly wrong.  Copenhagen got murderghosts, and this little city got a super-giant that can call others to it, assimilate them, and got so big that it buried itself underground.

Anyway oh my god I lived in Marquette for the past six years and only moved from there a few months ago when I graduated NMU !? Its surprising to see it brought up considering how small it is.


So needless to say I approve of this 10,000% honestly though I think I've talked in other threads about how I think the U.P. would do really well in a post rash society. It has everything the Nordic countries have that benefited them. Its very cold, has a small population, and plenty of forests and mountains.

Although to add I always thought post rash society in the upper peninsula would be influenced by Native American culture and beliefs because with my experience living there, there's a decently high Native American population there and Native American culture seemed to have a decent amount of influence on the upper peninsulas own little subculture. Also, the upper peninsula actually has the highest concentration of Finnish Americans / people of Finnish heritage than anywhere else in the U.S. so I always felt that would be an influence in post rash upper peninsula and we might even see mages influenced by Finnish tradition. There's even a neat little Finnish themed gift shop in Marquette (that unfortunately I only went to once during the whole six years I was there)

[Mayabird]

Juniper, hope you don't mind that I killed Marquette and then filled it with unspeakable horror.  I had hypothesized before that, rather than collapsing in one fell swoop like Sweden and Norway and clawing their way back up/barely holding onto survival since, Finland may have initially survived better but had declined to the current state in SSSS.  Decided to use that idea here, that the U.P. survived much better than most the rest of the U.S., but that meant survivors converging on the place.  Heck, they may even have kept the most powerful radio station on to bring in survivors, in an understandable attempt to save them from being picked off one by one, but which ended up being disastrous. 

Also I got an idea for these vignettes when I took a trip to the Kewanee Peninsula with my boyfriend to see his grandmother and his large, extended, very blonde, Finnish family.  They had (what I'm going to continue to call) a compound with a sauna on a sandy beach.  Traveling around, I couldn't help but notice how 1) isolated and 2) accidentally defensive the area was, above and beyond the rest of the U.P. even.  There's only one bridge to the northern half and it can be lifted!  It's an artificial island!  Their snow is ludicrous! 

As for the Native American culture, I agree, and on top of the Americans and Canadians I wrote in my notes that there is a separate Ojibwe/Chippewa nation where magic returned first, only I don't know much about them and don't want to be a racist jerk so I'm a little scared to write about it.  Might help if I had any sort of art or Photoshop skills so I could make a proper map.

[Yuuago]

on top of the Americans and Canadians I wrote in my notes that there is a separate Ojibwe/Chippewa nation where magic returned first, only I don't know much about them and don't want to be a racist jerk so I'm a little scared to write about it.

Some research could help. Or it'd at least take care of the "don't know much about it" part. (I've put on hold the thing I was working on, for similar reasons - need to do some reading.)
My local library has a dedicated First Nations department - is it possible there is something similar where you are? It might be a place to start.

[Juniper]

Juniper, hope you don't mind that I killed Marquette and then filled it with unspeakable horror.  I had hypothesized before that, rather than collapsing in one fell swoop like Sweden and Norway and clawing their way back up/barely holding onto survival since, Finland may have initially survived better but had declined to the current state in SSSS.  Decided to use that idea here, that the U.P. survived much better than most the rest of the U.S., but that meant survivors converging on the place.  Heck, they may even have kept the most powerful radio station on to bring in survivors, in an understandable attempt to save them from being picked off one by one, but which ended up being disastrous. 

Also I got an idea for these vignettes when I took a trip to the Kewanee Peninsula with my boyfriend to see his grandmother and his large, extended, very blonde, Finnish family.  They had (what I'm going to continue to call) a compound with a sauna on a sandy beach.  Traveling around, I couldn't help but notice how 1) isolated and 2) accidentally defensive the area was, above and beyond the rest of the U.P. even.  There's only one bridge to the northern half and it can be lifted!  It's an artificial island!  Their snow is ludicrous! 

As for the Native American culture, I agree, and on top of the Americans and Canadians I wrote in my notes that there is a separate Ojibwe/Chippewa nation where magic returned first, only I don't know much about them and don't want to be a racist jerk so I'm a little scared to write about it.  Might help if I had any sort of art or Photoshop skills so I could make a proper map.

It's okay, I'm just really happy that it got included in someone else's theory / scenario. I'm sure it was very lovely while it lasted c:

And ah yeah, I think the Keweenaw would fair really well. I've also always thought it would be a good idea for survivors to go to Isle Royale.

[Solokov]

This is the first of what I plan to be a few short stories set along the pacific alliance.

Spoiler: A short Lesson • show

 ZULU: 0800 LOCAL: 2200 LOCATION: Pele’s Refuge-Museum of the Fall

The students milled about quietly in the rapidly darkening night, several were yawning as they woke up. The teacher in her fleet whites looks like she’d been carved from marble and basalt as she stood stock still at a parade rest waiting for her students to form up in their lines. They were almost all 7, with the exception of two who’d turned 8 and their teacher’s assistant, an older boy of 12 who was in his trainee greens. The rest were in hand me downs, a mix of different uniforms, old and new, enemies and allies forced together. “Once again, form up. It was your idea to change your class hours to fleet time. So live with it. Julius, is everyone present and accounted for?”

The TA’s head snapped up as he finished off his count, “Yes ma’am, all the students are accounted for. fifteen students present, one assistant, and you, two are sick with the flu and are at home.”

she nodded before turning on her heel and walking through the open doors behind her. “Remember, no touching.”

the students fell in, following along with the young TA bringing up the rear as one of the docents shuffled up, an ancient looking gray haired bear of a man, his accent was heavily accent with Slavic intonations. “Gute evening Petty Officer…. Or well morning I suppose. This is their first time at the museum, here Da?” She shook her head, “No, this is their second trip.”

“Gute, gute.. sweet children, future of our people, welcome to the museum of the fall. As we walk to the first exhibits, tell me why are we here?”

They quietly talked among themselves as they started walking, having formed a sort of half circle around the old man as he followed him into the museum proper, finally one of the bolder students, an Admiral’s son by the name of Adam spoke up “Because our ancestors survived?” “Correct in a way, but not the answer I wanted. We are here to remember the past, the sacrifices it took to survive the fall. An easier question, what happened seventy-seven years ago?” “The blight”

“Correct, and?”

“Most of mankind fell to darkness.” He nodded, before continuing. “Yes, most, but not all. And why is that?”

A few answers were said, but the old man shook his head before one of the girls raised her hand sheepishly and he pointed to her, as he walked backwards with practiced ease. “You, yes?” “The first admirals put their grudges aside, the old anim…animalsities” “Animosities” the TA quietly whispered. “the admirals of the bear, the dragon and the eagle… they met in the siber sea and chose to stand together and save as many as they could.” “A textbook answer… not altogether wrong child. In truth, the Chinese admirals did not trust the Federation or the States after the firebombing of Beijing…. Even after the Krakens tore through their “fleet of charity and reclamation” they did not want to join us willingly.” He sighed before waving to the first exhibit. “Which brings us to this. What is it?”

Sitting on a pedestal was a steel canister roughly three feet long, two feet in diameter with shock sensors poking out like cat whiskers along the rim.

The class answered in unison, “A clanger.”

“And what does it do?”

“It sings to the krackens, lures them in then brings pele’s fury upon them.”

“good, good. … Let’s see how well you know. Who made it?” The students mumbled a bit till they had two different answers, half said “Pike of the enterprise”, while most of the rest stayed silent, though a couple said “A-Div.”

“Hmmm…Pike, or A-div… you could say both are right. Admiral Pike realized early on the flotilla was at risk to the cursed beasts of the sea, the Krakens, so he turned to A-division, the master engineers that were keeping the Big E afloat without resupply and proper parts. ‘Build me a weapon to draw in and destroy these beasts’ he told them. “ He coughed before continuing, “For six days and nights they toiled in their engineering bay, locking out anyone and everyone ranked e-4 and above before producing the first clanger. It was a crude device, a wind up monkey with cymbols taped to an old anti-ship mine that may or may not have been ‘borrowed’ from the Krustchev. They chose a clear calm day south of the refuge to test it, well within range of the Missouri’s guns.” The class was quietly listening, hanging on every word and imagining the scene. “They say that you could hear the toy from the island, I was but a boy of three at the time so I do not remember, but it called in a kracken from the depth, the beast ate the clanger and then erupted, releasing it from its torment.” “Come now, we have other exhibits to see tonight.” He shuffled off along the museum the class following along entranced as he spun tales about the various people, weapons, events and legends that had occurred, been made and lived over the last 70 years.

The next one is going to be set around year 50 and involve first contact between the pacific alliance and the delta tribals along the sacramento river delta.

[Mayabird]

I added a guest kudos to your stories.  Think it's alright if I start posting on Archive of Our Own too?

[Róisín]

Mayabird, come and join us on A3O - it's great!