The World
The world was shrouded in darkness. A massive Dyson Sphere covered the Sun, channeling all energy via extremely high power relay satellites back to the Earth, Mars, and the various moons of Jupiter and Saturn, for the purpose of fueling enormous Starforges - facilities that produced matter from energy to sustain growth in a barren system. As a result, there was no natural light in the solar system save for that of stars, which was faint at best.
Massive cities dotted the landscape of Earth, towering into the sky, daring the gods to challenge them. The oldest and richest cities at New New York, Kyoto, Moscow, Dubai, and London even reached into space - marvels of modern engineering. Lights shone out in all directions from these cities, but they couldn't compare to the light of the sun that graced the land even at night before the Sphere came up. The areas between cities had crumbled, withered - all natural plantlife on the planet that demanded light had succumbed to starvation, and water almost never appeared inland due to a lack of rain. Even the winds had mostly died.
Outside the Cities, the land was nearly pitch dark and completely hostile. The scraps of the city dwellers, thrown into enormous landfills, had given rise to a new pecking order. Hideous mutant beasts roamed the darkness, feeding on scraps and on one another. Cannibalistic wildlife was rampant. While there was non-animal life Outside, it predominantly consisted of various strange and disgusting fungi and extremophilic microbes. Bioluminescent life was rare, but not unheard of - and usually signified death to those who called the Outside home. A few very rare fungal 'trees' could be found, growing out of the filth of the junkyards' organic wastes and giving off a soft bluish-green glow, and communities of Outsiders would frequently spring up around them, though they wouldn't last long. There simply wasn't enough material to drive off the wild beasts for long.
Inside the Cities, however, life was strong, vibrant, chaotic. In most places, social classes were organized by height, with the homeless often surviving off of fallen scraps and living in ancient shells of buildings on the surface, and the rich living in decadent palaces atop the towering constructs. There was grass - flowers even - and many, many trees, growing from the planters that had been haphazardly placed along every reinforced walkway, every road. Moss, ferns, vines - everything - hung down from the towers. The Cities felt more like rainforests with metal trees than anything, and the citizens took great pride in their supposed dedication to life, never giving a thought to what things were like Outside.
City dwellers were often clamoring over one another to express their individuality, trying to prove who was the 'toughest' or the 'nicest' or the 'prettiest', and blended into one uniformly grotesque mass of cosmetic body modifications and cheap cybernetics, most of which didn't even operate as well as the original parts. Each district of each city had its own smell, its own flavors, and most of them weren't particularly good. To drive the value of money and power up, most of the manufacturing companies intentionally sold subpar products to those who couldn't afford to eat well. Cheap flour was cut with sawdust, 'cheese products' were a single covalent bond away from being inedible plastics... Even the meat wasn't quite real on the lower levels. But it was more genuine there, with less political maneuvering, less corruption.
In the upper levels, formalities took precedence over genuine behaviors, and visual modifications to the body were seen as disgusting. The food was formulated to perfectly satisfy each person's individual tastebuds, and fine cloths woven out of engineered synthetic fibers made up a fashion style that hearkened back to the turn of the 20th century and the outbreak of the first World War. They lived in a completely different world from those below, never having to care for anything beyond which petty insults had been thrown about that day. While some altruistic sorts did exist, who sought to help those below them, the majority felt they were above the rest of society (if you'll pardon the expression).
Vehicles by-and-large consisted of trains, trams, monorails, and elevators. Privately owned vehicles were only present in the top few miles of the cities, where excessive roads winding between the city plates and towering structures were deemed unsightly and done away with. Construction vehicles existed, of course, but those were operated exclusively by government contracting agencies, and losing track of one of such vehicles was a capital offense, as the last time one had gone missing, it turned up in the hands of a revolutionary group that proceeded to send the six mile tall Bank of Moscow headquarters toppling over the outer walls and into the Outside, killing two million people.
The Job
A group of terrorists, the Icarus Initiative, has been widely publicized by the media in recent days. They claim to want to change the world, to want to destroy the Solar Collective that owns the Sun and all power production in the system. Small-scale bombings have been happening at power waystations near cities, causing small-scale brownouts, and the Icarus Initiative has started making threats to bomb the Transfer Stations #4 and #7, which provide solar energy to the entire tower-city of New New York. Rumors are flying around society of the Icarus Initiative having obtained nuclear weapons, and the bottom levels of New New York have become a propaganda battlefield.
Those with their heads screwed on straight recognize that cutting power to the city would do nothing but rapidly cause the death of over four billion of its citizens, with the other several hundred million scattering to the Outside. Prospects for long-term survival only cover 0.1% of those in the city, and a panic is rising. As bad as things are for people, nobody particularly wants to die over it, and rewards are being offered by the thinly stretched police force for information regarding the heads of the Icarus Initiative - or, even better, the heads of the heads of the Icarus Initiative.
There are no real restrictions on who can join the hunt, so long as the hunt is completed before catastrophe strikes. Any age group, any race, any species, any social class. It doesn't matter - and the reward for success is both fame and enough money to sent a bum from the trash-covered bottom level to the upper palaces of the nobility, if they feel the inclination to do so. The recruitment is, as of yet, small in scale, and old-fashioned paper flyers have been posted on bulletin boards throughout the city where anyone can see them and take a copy. The first business meeting for the would-be Hunters would be in a hipster-operated coffee shop on Level 3A, which was only six hundred feet above the ground, at the cross of Cunningham St., Biker's Lane, and The First Ascent. Apparently Starbucks had managed to grow into a police-sponsored meeting place.
All events in this RP are set to occur in and around New New York. The number of possible locations within the city is pretty intense, so if you can think of a place, it probably exists there.
Rules and General Info
I'll try to be as reasonable as possible here without ruining everything for everyone.
1: If you want to get involved with the RP, you post your character sheet in OOC first and mention me. You DO NOT start posting without getting your CS accepted, and you DO NOT post your CS in the Characters tab until accepted.
2: I'm okay with it taking a while between players' posts. However, if it's more than a few days, I will auto your character in as limited a fashion as possible to keep them with the group. If you're going to be gone for a while, let me know so I can put your character on a bus or something until you get back. If you completely disappear with no warning, you may return and find that your character has spontaneously combusted or otherwise been removed from the story.
3: I don't care about romance. You can do it if you want, but anything even vaguely sexual or overly detailed needs to be done via fade-to-black or total ambiguity (For instance: Character A was seen leaving Character B's room the next morning.). Keep the fun stuff in PM. Please. For the children.
4: Post length is mostly irrelevant. I personally very much enjoy long posts, but I recognize that people don't always have the time or the inspiration to write a full length novel for every post. All I ask is that if you post, you further the story or provide useful information. The absolute minimum is contributing to a conversation or performing an action, and even then, I'd prefer if you had at least a few sentences for descriptions and details.
5: If you're uncertain of whether a given form of technology exists, ask me. If it's reasonable, I'll at the very least attempt to find a way to shoehorn something similar into the lore in some way that's not totally contrary to how reality works.
6: No fucking Sues. This might be a high tech world with high end cybernetic enhancements and genetic modifications, but that doesn't make people good at everything. If you want to make a clever and creative character, then you'll have to at least be as clever and creative as that character in reality - because you had better declare every reason why your character would know something unrelated to their actual profession in your character history, and you had better declare everything in your post. Don't just pull things out of your ass - that won't fly here.
7: No fucking godmodding.
If you break the rules in the IC tab, I will have the Mutant Containment Agency drag your sorry ass to the lab against your will, where they'll perform horrifying experiments on your character for the good of science. And no, there isn't any possibility of rescue.
Here's your base character sheet. Post it in OOC and I'll accept it. Or not. Be reasonable with it, okay?
A note: This is Casual despite the extensive lore. I just happen to be good at shitting out text like a gas station burrito. My standards for posts are pretty low - went over that in the rules. Just don't be a dillweed, 'kay?
If you can think of a character type that fits the races, I don't care if it's a robot maid catgirl with a katana and daddy issues - it'll probably fit, just by merit of there being so many possibilities when dealing with a high tech city of over a billion people.
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