What was that about dinosaur ghosts?Yeah, oil is full of dinosaur ghosts. They’re… trapped in it, or something. We don’t really bother with the specifics. A lot of the old refined by-products like gasoline turned back to crude oil during the Upspring, and it’s alive. Millions of years trapped under the rock gave them a hell of an appetite, too, and it looks like ten out of ten food critics recommend long pig for the discerning dino’s pallette. Luckily they don’t really move around much, so as long as you avoid their hot spots you usually don’t need to deal with them that much. They’re all over the ruins, though, especially the major metropolises like the LA metroplex.
Typically if (when) you
do come across these, it’ll be in one of two flavors. The first, most common, and preferable type is the legion construct. Those are scraped together amalgamations of old world tech and scrap metal, stitched together by the living pitch. These are hundreds or thousands of ghosts all glued together, moving in tandem. They’re big, not very fast, but they’ll turn you into paste if you’re too slow to jump out of the way. They’re hard to put down, if you don’t use fire, but while fire makes short work of these it also risks making the problem far worse. General practice among anyone who finds one of these is to either trap it or run from it. Trying to kill it is too big a risk.
The second type of encounter you might have with dinosaur ghosts is what happens when you burn the oil. As it may surprise you, setting fire to the chains trapping the ghosts inside has a bad habit of letting them escape. For a blessing, these ghosts are old enough that most will immediately disperse upon being freed, but it’s never all of them. There’s
always a few left behind, and not being tied to an army of their fellows means they’re a lot faster and a lot less clumsy.
You see, the big problem with the dinosaur ghosts and their hunger is that ghosts are spiritual beings. A legion construct might stomp you flat, but that’s a physical attack. It only affects your body. Sure, you’ll die, but your soul is still in one piece, and you have a chance to one day walk the earth again. Freeing them from the pitch removes that mundane element of their risk. Because I kind of buried the lead when I suggested they wanted to eat your meat. A spiritual being is a spiritual threat, and a pack of unbound dinosaur ghosts will tear your soul apart like a pack of hyenas with a baby lamb. If you’re lucky, the body left behind will stumble into another legion construct and turn into its next coat of paint. If you’re not, your old meat suit gets to join the other zombies haunting the ruins, stumbling around and reacting on mindless instinct like a terrestrial jellyfish.
You mentioned kaiju?Kaiju were mentioned, yes. So were “Atomic Zones”, and vague allusions were made to radiation mixing with magic. You can probably figure out the rest.
It mutated animals into giant monsters?Okay, maybe you can’t.
The mixture of magic and radiation doesn’t mutate animals, it generates new life, spontaneously. These are kaiju, as in the original meaning of the word. “Strange beast”. Most aren’t much bigger than normal animals (or magical animals), but they have a tendency to grow under duress. Some of them grow
a lot under duress. These are the kaiju that get hunted with mechas. It’s kind of a shame, all things considered. They can be pretty cute.
Also worth noting, despite comparing them to animals and calling them beasts, kaiju can fall pretty much anywhere in the kingdom of life. Plant kaiju are fun to deal with. Fungus kaiju aren’t.
You mentioned the moon a couple times. Or was it moons, plural?It’s plural. There are two moons, one for each sundered half, bound to their respective sides.
Where did the second moon come from?It didn’t. It’s the same moon, just reflected on the other side of the wall.
So it’s fake?No, it’s real.
So what’s the deal with it? You said not to look.Because you shouldn’t look.
Why not?It’s bad.
I get the sense you don’t want to explain this to me.Okay, look. The Upspring changed a lot, and not all of it was pleasant. Oil’s full of ghosts, reactors are breeding grounds for monsters, the planet got split in half, but the worst, the
worst, thing to come out of magic’s return was what happened to the moon. If it seems like people don’t want to talk about it, it’s because they don’t. No one likes talking about the moon.
Okay, but what happened to it?It’s alive.
They’re alive. The moons aren’t just a big rock anymore, they’re eyes. And they like to watch. We say not to look, but that’s really just a general rule of thumb. There’s no actual harm in it, usually. But if you get in the habit of
never looking, then you’ll be less likely to look it in the eye when it’s fully open, when it would
actually hurt you. Because if you
do look it in the eye, your only rational hope is that you have a friend on hand who can kill you before the worst happens.
...The worst?The reason you don’t look at the moon. Metaphysical inversion. Your soul becomes physical, changing your body into something monstrous, twisting every aspect of who you were into the worst reflection of itself. We call them “Moonstruck”. Rumor has it there’s a trick to avoiding becoming one, but the only people who would know for sure are the Kizugumi moon hunters in Japan, and they aren’t keen to share. “The best way to avoid becoming moonstruck is to not look at the moon”.
For a small blessing, the moons don’t open fully nearly as often as the old lunar cycles would suggest. Observatory mages keep an eye on them as part of their job, and there’s a daily forecast with current cyclical trends published in the morning paper. So long as you’re keeping yourself in the know, you probably don’t have anything to worry about.
You’ve mentioned ghosts, monsters, and kaiju. I need to know. Are there dragons?There are eleven dragons.
How specific.Yeah. They’re big, and powerful, and occasionally sapient. They all look different, and can do things nothing else can. Only one of them actually looks like a traditional idea of a “dragon”, and only superficially. The word is really more of a catchall term we use for them. They don’t really seem to care.
Near as we can tell, each one corresponds with an elemental aspect. They weren’t
born as such - they all kind of just appear. The mages in the observatories assume they come out of the Wall, but we’ve never actually seen them do it. They
probably don’t age or breed, and we’ve never seen them eat. If they die, they just reappear somewhere else a while later.
Yes, they have names, mostly, and we number them in the order they were discovered - not necessarily the order in which they appeared, since some of them were hard to find, so that would be too difficult to determine for sure. First one to show itself is the one that best resembles a traditional western dragon - we call him Panzer, the “Flying Armory”, but he doesn’t speak. He’s definitely clever, but probably not sapient. He first showed up in the old American empire and spends his time hunting old world weapon stockpiles.
Next was the “Polyhedric Angel”, Maayan. This thing also doesn’t speak. It just kind of… sits in the Red Sea, firing jets of water at anything that gets close. Dragon hunters insist on calling it “she” for some reason, because they’re all insane. I don’t know why they call it an angel.
After Maayan was Bismarck, who’s a big flying whale. She also doesn’t talk. She’s usually pretty calm, just drifting from place to place, but she can summon some absolutely devastating hurricanes if you piss her off. Apparently she has female sex characteristics, which isn’t something anyone needed to know, but now you do. That’s also why we have to preface “don’t breed” with “probably”. Dragon hunters and observatory mages both agree this is probably just a form of mimicry, though, since a lot of dragons make themselves resemble normal animals.
Next we’ve got Omukade, the Crystal Centipede, who spends all his time sleeping around Mount Fuji. No one is really eager to wake him up, though apparently the crystals growing between the gaps of his chitin can be mined for resources. After him was Unukalhai, a big snake. Also called the Star Viper, he keeps a collection of floating islands in western China, and was the first dragon to show itself that actually talks.
Realm and Woe came right after the other, the Oak-Strong Bear and the Breaking Hind. These two follow each other in circles across Europe, and went back to not speaking. The next dragon to appear though, Hell Wasp, not only speaks, she’s downright friendly. Apparently she’s prone to loneliness, and hangs out in California surrounded by women.
Chimera, “the Mutant’s Obelisk”, is… weird. The first dragon since Maayan to appear as something non-biological, it’s a statue sprouting dozens of twisting, misshapen arms. It apparently doesn’t speak, but it
does communicate, and not even the dragon hunters like getting close.
Wandering Snail is a spaceship. You can see it - or “her” - passing in front of the Wall sometimes. The Traveler in the Dark patrols the gap in the sundered Earth, occasionally disappearing out into the void for a while before returning. There were apparently plans to try boarding it at one point, but who knows how that’s going.
The last one to appear is also the only one without a name. Referred to as “the stranger with the dragonfire blade”, this dragon takes the form of a
person, clad in armor. He apparently travels around challenging people to duels, saying he’ll only accept a name from the one who beats him. Dragon hunters love this dude. They would probably propose marriage if they could.
You said they corresponded to different “elements”?Oh, right. Here’s the list:
Panzer, “The Flying Armory” - Fire
Maayan, “The Polyhedric Angel” - Water
Bismarck, “The Sky Whale” - Wind
Omukade, “The Crystal Centipede” - Earth
Unukalhai, “The Star Viper” - Gravity
Realm, “The Oak-Strong Bear” - Wood
Woe, “The Breaking Hind” - Rot
Hell Wasp, “The Queen in Rust” - Metal
Chimera, “The Mutant’s Obelisk” - Radiation
Wandering Snail, “The Traveler in the Dark” - Electricity
The Stranger with the Dragonfire Blade - Magic
Hopefully you found it enlightening.
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