Recaps

New Kyori Outskirts, Zxenopolis, Eternia

It's been exactly one-hundred and fifty years since Aerdak was destroyed. One-hundred and fifty years since the Emergence began to reshape our world into something none of us could have ever imagined.

Those who are cursed with long life tell it to us like it's some kind of fairy tale or mystical event, and honestly, they're probably not too far from the truth. A lot has happened in the last 150 years, but the short of it is this:

For longer than anyone kept count, the world was a small, mostly quiet place up until the day the Chordosians attacked Cherinia -- an event known as the Chordosian Zero Day. Little did we know that one event in history would cause a butterfly effect that would permanetly alter the way we view the concept of an era in time. For a short few years, the world was in chaos, both literally and metaphorically, until one day, a group of heroes decided to step up and fight back. After what we can only imagine to be a nearly impossible journey, they managed to defeat Chordos and return the world to peace. That was until they discovered Aerdak.

Aerdak hoarded every scrap of real knowledge and every piece of true technology the rest of us were never meant to touch. KAE, they called it. Forbidden knowledge locked away so the world would stay slow, quiet, and submissive. Then, a hundred and fifty years ago, the same heroes that once saved the world decided to put Aerdak in the ground, and the gates were opened.

It all came out at once. Hundreds, if not thousands of years of progress crammed into a century and a half. We went from oil lamps to Delta-Gamma Energy Cells, from horse carriages to the Eternian Hypertrak, from slow rumors to the EternoScape, faster than any world was ever meant to grow. Cities across the world shot up from the dirt overnight, transforming brick and stone to chrome and neon and an ever-growing debt. Half of us walk around with more metal than meat, and the other half can't afford to eat. Every nation that got its hands on the most powerful Emergent Technology wanted to keep it that way, so they capitalized on the Paradox Sea and ensured nobody else could grow to their level of power. Great Sakuria, The Republic of Iceburrgh, Eternia, United Stellaria, S.R. Sgamora... all sitting on their tech with their teeth bared, none of them brave enough to shoot first, all of them waiting. 

The part they don't mention in the fairy tale? Aerdak wasn't only hoarding knowledge, no, they were keeping something together. Once they were gone, it almost seemed like reality itself had lost a piece of its own memory. That's what we think the rifts are; tears in the world where reality forgets how to be itself. They've been opening up all over for years now, most of them only for a few seconds before scabbing over and closing, lest some poor bastard get too curious and approach one.

We were enjoying ourselves in a small Scraper's Bar in the outskirts of New Kyori, drinking, eating, and looking for gigs, the only reliable source of income in this world unless you're a corporate sell-out or lucky enough to have been born in a part of this world that's smart enough to avoid Emergent Tech entirely or actually care for their citizens.

Suddenly, we all heard it, a crack, a loud explosion, similar to what we've been hearing in the various datastream clips on EternoScape. We decided to check it out, since to be honest, seeing one of those rifts in person sounded cool, and who knows, maybe we could've gotten treasure.

But, it wasn't a rift. It was a capsule. Some kind of pod, made of a deep red metal, scorched black and half-buried in the crater it had dug in the streets. There were some 'forcers scattered around it, four or five of them, already dead. Down in the wreck, folded up and twitching, was a single mechanical figure which at the time resembled a crumpled up piece of scrap from Hellspace itself. But alas, it was still moving, still trying, and still scanning. It called itself "Achilles."

We didn't get long to look. The bodies started moving, pale things crawling up out of their bodies. Slick and grey and hungry, "nihilslime" as one of our PDL's mentioned. We fought our way clear, stuffed those slimes into a cop car, threw a makeshift fire-bomb into it, and ran for the sewers after the slimy fellows decided to turn into some horrid fire elemental monstrosity. We grabbed the robot, yanked open the grate on the sidewalk, and jumped down.

We made it down into the dark, smelly, and uncomfortably warm waters of the underground sewers. That's where we met Pot, a Xenocryptia; jittery, fast-talking, and living in a pile of gods know what. It told us we couldn't stay out in the open carrying a fancy clanker around, and gave us the location of a nearby criminal hideout. We followed the instructions until we arrived at a small hideout, the kind of place people end up when the real world has no room left for them.

The closest thing the place had to a leader or boss was a Burrgian called "Big Blorp", though there was nothing big about him. He was small, even for a Burrgian. He looked over his friends and allies the way most people would look after a stray cat. Blorp explained how he had taken care of abandoned children and took them in as his own, raising them to fight against the systems that had hurt them. 

There was a plasmoid drifting near the back of the place, shifting colors and trying to blend in despite the new faces. Hyrae, from the Dark Sea. Used to run cargo through the shipyards until the lockdown sealed Eternia shut and left every dockhand in the city with nothing to move and nowhere to move it. 

Then there was Glummy. It took us a second to figure out what exactly we were looking at, because a Xenocrawl Walker (or as the Burrgians call them, "glumbugs") is usually the kind of thing you're supposed to run from. Flesh-eating, mindless monsters that even the most joyous of Burrgians fear. Except this one said hello. Apparently, somebody - likely Pot - had put an intelligence chip in him, and now there was a person behind the layers of flesh. Gross, but interesting to say the least.

Off in the corner, not talking to anybody, was a shadowmorph named Ekks Omux. He worked for a man named Johnathun Nightwood, and you could tell just by looking at him that he'd seen something he hadn't quite finished comprehending yet. He didn't introduce himself. He just watched the robot we'd dragged in and never broke line of sight.

We met Nightwood himself soon enough. Nightwood is a family name almost all of Eraea recognizes at this point. His ancestor, Jimmy Nightwoof, was once of the old heroes, a president of Iceburrgh during the start of the Emergence, and a savior of sorts to his people. Johnathun's blood buys him doors most of us will never get near, government insiders, special deals, reputation. He carried himself like an average person, which in a way probably made him more similar to his ancestor than any of his other well-off relatives. Every so often he'd take a dose of something Blorp had cooked for him. He explained that he was exposed to some pretty potent chemicals and strong radiation as a part of his old job working for Auratachi's research division, and Blorp's the only one who can keep it from killing him outright. Maybe that's why a name as powerful as Nightwood is keeping company with criminals. 

New Kyori Sewers, Zxenopolis, Eternia

We slept in the sewers that night. You get used to the place faster than you'd think, especially with Blorp's shockingly effective air fresheners. By the time we had all woken up, we'd stopped feeling entirely like strangers. Blorp and Nightwood has cooked us up a surprisingly decent meal and had setup a small little area with a portable screen to watch the news on. It seems we got lucky, as the authorities weren't looking for us specifically, just whatever robot came out of the pod that had crashed. 

Morning had also brought us some new faces. Someone by the name of Ash Davies, human, seemed to be somewhat untrusting of technology. A fair viewpoint to have nowadays, so we didn't judge. 

But it was Nightwood who got things moving again. He'd noticed the datashard Niklas carrioed, the little black-market sliver, and asked to scan it (though it wasn't much of an ask). Niklas let him, and they found a rogue AI on the shard. Something that predated most AIs nowadays, likely pre-Emergence. The AI was titled "Dr. Feeelgood" and ran on a KSEXE entitled "Encode". 

Nightwood told us he had something. A mechanical skeleton, probably some salvage from a previos mission, sitting in storage with no mind to run it. He figured the AI on the shard could host it and give the voice a body. We watched him work, and watched the entity on the shard pour itself into the frame, stand up, and look around like it had been waiting for a very, very long time. It called itself by its own KSEXE identifier, Encode.

After that, Nightwood didn't waste any time. He'd been scratching his head and blueprinting the purpose we could serve for him since the moment he saw us dragging a scorched robot behind us, and now, with the crew rested and a new voice given a body, he finally laid it out. 

He started by introducing us formally to Ekks. The shadowmorph hadn't said much since we arrived, just watched the robot with a curious look. Now, he gathered us around an EternoSlate and inserted a datashard into it. It displayed a recording, a recording of Shadowsphere, evidenced by the way the lighting behaved unnaturally. Rifts were tearing open, wider than anything we'd seen on the EternoScape feeds before, the footage shaky and jarring before it cut to a static screen of a single frame. A vast, pulsating rift shattered open in the Umbral Skies. An Auratachi hovercraft hovering beside it. And next to that, a scorched pod, the same kind of pod we'd seen just yesterday.

Nightwood shortly began explaining that he'd sent a crew into Shadowsphere a while back. Good people, strong mercs, the kind you send when you need a job done right. Ekks was the only one who walked back out, and that shard was most of what he had to show for the whole journey. Getting into Shadowsphere was hard enough given their anti-emergent curse, and getting back out was even harder. But the footage proved Auratachi had managed to not only get their way into Shadowsphere, but that they'd also been furthering their research and experimentation on the rifts, and that they were somehow involved in whatever Achilles crawled out of. Both Ekks Omux and Johnathun Nightwood III wanted and deserved answers. But you'd only find such answers in Auratachi's own systems, deep in their EternoScape networks. 

So that was the job. Get to the local Auratachi Research Center, enter their localized Bytescape, and pull two things. Whatever Auratachi knew about those rifts and how they're involved with Shadowsphere, and anything at all on the record about Achilles, the pods, or where they came from. The reason he wanted us specifically was because of the very robot we're seeking information about. Apparently, Achilles has some sort of unique technology that can bypass a majority of the entry barriers most corporations put in place on their Bytescape access.

He warned us of the dangers. The whole of the New Kyori Enforcement Alliance and possibly even SEEKERA (Sakurian-Eternian Emergent Knowledge and Energy Research Alliance) were probably looking for Achilles. Our way in was also a target on our backs. Getting into the Auratachi Research Center was even harder, but Nightwood had something almost nobody else in this city had; contacts. Burrgian ones, government ones. He told us that we he could give us a ride on his Nightwood Industries Burrglith-3, a state-of-the-art armored truck which, with his status, could get us into the visitor's lobby of the Research Center. All we had to do was actually get to a dataport, not be spotted by anyone, and steal the information without being noticed. Easy, right?

Nightwood told us that if we succeed, he can grant us an exit out of Eternia to almost anywhere else in Eraea. He also said he'd pay us more than we could ever imagine should we succeed.