When the tears came from the sky, man looked up not in wonder: but a final terror.
In the year 2018, earth-bound observatories studying the distant fringes of the solar-system made a startling discover. In conjuncture with the orbital Kepler telescope scientists confirmed the existence of a large rocky body traveling through the solar system towards the inner solar system. Measurements of the rocky mass as roughly three-quarters the size of the Earth's Moon. Observation of the rogue body over the next year narrowed down the course and trajectory of the planetoid. Its speed, direction, and trajectory suggested in the astronomer's calculations that it would cross through Earth's orbit.
At its estimated size, the planetoid would be sure to destroy all life on Earth in a rain of fire as it tears Earth inside out.
Dismissed initially by the wider public ignored the dooms-saying it still ran and bubbled in the apocalyptic minds of Earth.
Over a decade later, the planetoid was closing faster, and with it the certain inevitability of its impact. Within decades of its finding it would - or could - hit Earth. There was an inkling of public concern and world leaders and engineers began debating how to avert annihilation.
As observance of the rogue body lengthened, so to did the panic heighten with greater certainty. Serious effort was put into preventing the apocalypse by leaving Earth, or rendering the planetoid harmless by one way or another. And though with all the millenia of human development behind them, progress in the 20th and 21st centuries and all the Earth's resources even mankind could not tackle its salvation without sacrifices: the construction of the Arks.
With the diversion of global resources to build something, terrifying new issues arose. Lack of control to suppress epidemics in the global south saw the rise of biotic resistant disease. Once familiar ailments now with a new profound risk; turbuculoses, influenza, cholera, typhus bubonic plague. The poorer, overpopulated regions of Africa, South Asia, and East Asia were gripped with rampant disease with a lingering phantom risk elsewhere.
And then there was the human disease. Confident their actions would afflict no long-term repercussions for their actions, groups resigned to their death rolled out the red carpet to the apocalypse. The most dangerous forcing themselves into the computer infrastructure of the US and Europe: crashing them. Or burning into the stock market and burning billions in stocks and trades. Causing compounding hysteria and complications.
The outburst of chaos was not sudden. But meandered towards the surface like a low molasses. But unchecked it crawled on its belly into the final light.
Then in the year 2042 astronomers turned their telescopes back to the sky, and found to their renewed shock the shotgun hidden behind the curtain.
Just months away an asteroid, or a large comet had passed through the blinding light of the sun and shattered in the heart and gravity of the heavenly Sun. Now a long drawn out line of deadly meteorites the former comet or asteroid was coming in close to Earth and fast. Astronomers estimated the rock to have been at least the size of Mount Everest when it was whole.
It wasn't any longer than a year before the first hit.
Trailing fire long and thing behind it, the first impacted. The scattered rain lighting fires, racking the ground with Earthquakes with the force. Those that exploded before they hit the ground exploded with a nuclear shockwave, blowing down buildings and clearing entire forests as shrapnel raining from above. Rocks that hit the sea did so with such great force the waves cleared entire shorelines, forced rivers to flow backwards, and tossed cargo vessels into the heart of cities as they were drowned and turned to swamp.
The damage was as man had pictured the nuclear apocalypse. They forced man into the dark dark, man had been thrown back. Its back was broken and the Arks that were to be built to save humanity lay smashed in Europe, America, and Asia. There was no hope as man looked up to the sky as the smoke cleared and they witnessed the lumbering iron-gray death sailing towards them.
In those clear skies in the night of the Americas men and women looked up as the foreign moon came to meet their own. It was a clear nights sky, with a pure, full, white moon. But struck as if by a train it split open and bled as the foreign body found not Earth: but the moon. The heavens sheered and tore themselves apart as the moon crumpled and melted away and two became one.
IT evolved, and revealed its new self burning dull. It cast its bloody illumination upon the night. There it was in the sky, a midnight sun. Our second sun.
... A century and a quarter later.
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Map Legend:
Green - safe land
Dark "Coastal" blue - regions of regular tidal inundation. The Bahamas as well are under the curse of being so low in elevation much of the island chain is plunged underwater on a regular basis forming a chain of almost ghost islands.
Black - RP limits. It's not to say these areas aren't relevant but the areas blacked out are done so to keep the RP and its story focused on a specific location: the Caribbean.
The world a century and a quarter after the last impacts.
Humanity in its devastation has been knocked back from its formerly high perch. The old infrastructure that had ran the modern world is like broken glass on the ground and unsalvageable to the children of the old societies. The devastation of the the meteors breaking so much of humanity's back that the rest ceased to function. Famine and disease later only killed more of the population off until the world population was yanked back to 19th century levels.
To complicate humanity's efforts to thrive in this new world more, the wild and dramatic tides brought by the moon regularly leave swathes of the coast underwater at regular intervals. The salty water of the sea flooding the old ports and making safe ports a in-demand rarity, not only for trade but for travel. And even wider along the American and Caribbean islands' coasts are the regular wastelands left behind by the salt-water that washes into the coastal lowlands with regular persistence. Magnified by the legacy of the old world's climate change and deterioration of coastlines the high-tides have purged the life from the coastal wetlands and left them a barren salty mud-flat when the tides recede.
While tidal pools may be found deeper inland, it's hardly as if those'll help.
Lunar effects go further to create dramatic weather, persistent regions of lightning similar in vein to Catatumbo Lightning and stronger weather cells. But of more intrigue to the adventurers, travelers, and merchants of the world is the persistent mystery of the internal North and South American continents. While not inhabited necessarily, the strange fogs and banks of lightning that roll north and south from each continent as the seasons shift give further merit to the belief of ghostly interiors, and as such ghostly treasures.
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Weather:
One of the major fundamental differences in this world versus the old world is the altered states of the weather. Produced seemingly anomalously from the North or South American interiors, or produced from the more extreme effects of the new moon on axial tilt.
To accommodate this for the RP I'll be rolling dice through the RPGuild's dice feature and rolling on a few factors: target location, severity, and type (hurricane, fog, thunderstorm, strong winds, length of "rest", etc.). Every player will have an assigned location number designating their ID in the dice-rolls. Likewise, even if you're the primary target that doesn't mean you'll be the only one since this RP is not a global adventure and much more regional.
Weather Dice Registry:
1 - Haiti - AaronMK
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Application:
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Player territory map:
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