#blbs

BLBS

With their main concern being to metaphorically tread water in the ruins of human civilization, construct society has, in many areas, barely progressed its technology past where it was while humanity was still around. In fact, whole industries have been left to rot in the aftermath: transportation, long distance communication, weaponry, textiles, and all but a few aspects of food production, to name a few. Architecture has been mostly reduced to patch-jobs on existing structures. Computing is about where it was in 2005, but the internet is a thing of the past.

However, not everything has either stagnated or decayed. Power production is at its greatest and greenest the city has ever seen, a necessity for a species that only sleeps about 15 minutes a day, though they somewhat cheated on the greenness. Its easy for your power plant to have no waste emissions when its generating electricity directly off of construct manpower. Most consider it basically their job, something to structure their lives around. Just show up at your scheduled time each day, then keep yourself busy while you run in a human-sized wheel for the next four hours. Listen to music, chat with your mates, watch a film, whatever keeps your head occupied while your body gets all its excess energy out.

Acid Rain

BLBS

Constructs are essentially immune to most forms of conventional weaponry, largely due to their lack of specialized internal structures. The sort of tissue-shredding that bullet’s wake inflicts does little damage to construct material, and they have no blood to worry about losing. Though the energy and compression of the impact itself does destroy some material, the relatively tiny surface area of a bullet means it is more likely to blow through the construct entirely than deliver its full energetic payload. Higher caliber rounds can help alleviate this problem, but it would still take something on the order of several hundred direct hits in rapid succession to bring down a construct. Given their speed and maneuverability, in addition to being relatively small targets, helicopter-mounted rotary guns are about the only viable option for those wishing to pursue this avenue of attack. Slug-type ammunition fares better in the damage department, being physically larger and heavier, but this also limits its maximum range… and range is one’s best friend when dealing with constructs. Explosive munitions, ultimately, are the best answer for a military trying to take out a construct.

Constructs themselves rely on their incredible strength and shapeshifitng ability to do damage. Though most of their options limit them to melee range, there are way around it, such as throwing anything sufficiently massive they can get their hands on, or manufacturing their own projectiles out of hardened material from their own bodies. Up close, expect a flurry of punches, kicks, claw swipes, or other, more exotic melee attacks. On the defensive front, the same hardening can be utilized to form arm-mounted shields, defensive walls, or even full body armor, capable of outright deflecting most small-arms fire.

Needless to say, because of the above, modern construct society has little use for human-designed weaponry, aside from explosives. Fights between constructs, when the goal is to outright kill the opponent, are long, drawn out affairs, lasting multiple days in extreme cases. Part melee brawl, part game of cat and mouse as each tries to get in hits without retaliation, they only end when one combatant becomes weak enough to be eaten by the other. For conflicts that are less serious (i.e. almost all of them), all that usually happens is a bit of posturing, some trash talk, and about a fifty-fifty chance that the claws even come out before someone backs down. If it does come to blows, its usually a quick affair, with minimal damage to either party. The energy required to fight someone just usually isn’t worth it unless they absolutely, positively, definitely must die today by your hands, and that sort of feeling just doesn’t come up often.

Though it never managed to be properly weaponized, the single most effective construct repellant is nothing more than fresh water, the fewer dissolved solids the better. Due to the precise molecular nature of construct material, it dissolves readily and painfully in water. Seawater is, mercifully, far closer to saturation point, and thus isn’t able to do nearly as much damage. Though it is technically possible to kill a construct by submerging them, the combination of their relatively low surface area and atypically high density means that, even if water was being circulated and filtered constantly, the process would usually take several days, which is more than enough time for said construct to either escape the container they were being held in or swim to safety. I suppose if you dropped one into the middle of the ocean from a plane it would probably work, but good luck getting them onto the plane and then off of it again.

Acid Rain

BLBS

Everyone’s a shapeshifter with the capability to mimic clothing. You know where this is going.

Hint: everyone is technically naked. No one cares because real clothes get damaged way too easily anyway.

Acid Rain

BLBS

If you thought having practically immortal beings with a taste for human flesh was a bad enough situation in a land where there are at least other people with superpowers to slow them down, dumping something on the order of a few hundred of them onto Earth circa 2005 was a nightmare. Sure, not all of them were keen on making more of themselves, and there was a decent handful actually committed to protecting humanity, all it took was one… who made dozens more, who, under their thrall, in turn infected dozens more each, and so on.

The clashes between the two sects of constructs, as well as their fights with the military, caught untold numbers of people in the crossfire. Despite the best efforts of The First and those on his side, it soon became clear that they were fighting a losing battle. Even as they killed off the leaders of the hivemind and released their thralls from their control, more would continuously appear, growing their numbers far faster than the pro-humans ever could. They were desperately plugging leaks in a dam, unable to stop the water from trickling in as new leaks sprung, unable to keep up with maintaining the dam long enough to be able to bail the water steadily rising around them.

The First, sensing the futility of his endeavor and coming to terms with the fact he was never going to be able to return to his home, eventually gave up and retreated into the wilderness, never to be heard from again save for the occasional brush against the hivemind.

It took barely ten years for humanity to go extinct. At the end of it all, about fifty million constructs had been made, though many had perished in the fight for humanity’s survival, or would soon perish in the wars and skirmishes to follow.

With their primary source of both food and conscripts gone, many hives either turned on each other or themselves. Cannibalizing your fellow construct, it turned out, had a two-fold benefit: an immediate, if difficult to acquire food source, and one less construct competing with you over whatever wildlife the land had to offer. Hives broke apart or outright disintegrated, often by their leader consuming their own thralls. A few small groups formed in an attempt to farm their own food, but they were often set upon by raiders.

Over the next few years, the construct population would dwindle to the point where feeding on their own kind became an untenable solution, so spread apart were the solitary hunters and the budding farming communes. The population remained steady at about a million for more than a decade as everyone slowly came to grips with the fact that they were essentially immortal. The builders of the great cities and communities they had once lived in were now all gone, and now here they all were, scraping by an existence on a dead and lonely world. What would they be doing in a year, a decade, a century from now? A resounding and worried “now what?” echoed across the hivemind as the years went on.

The answer came from an unknown source, possibly The First himself. “Work together, you dumb fucks.”

And so, after much deliberation, they gathered themselves in the ruins of Los Angeles, the driest large city still standing after all the fighting and later neglect. It would be difficult, but perhaps they could rebuild, continue where humanity had been cut off.

Not long after, a method for creating new constructs without the need of a human body was discovered and, although slow, was employed in a desperate attempt to grow their population.

Acid Rain

Much of the history of the valley following the great strangeness that resulted in all this has been largely lost. Heck, just how long its been since said strangeness has been lost to time. It doesn’t really matter to most of us, anyway. We’ve got more important things to worry about in the here and now.

I will say one thing, though, there are tales among the bugs about their old folk hero Grandfather Jeremiah, the first human to raise a grub as his own. Well, said grub was his own kid, and he just couldn’t bring himself to kill it like the others. Hey, can you blame us? A freaky grub-baby that just eats and eats in a time of famine? Not exactly something most folks would let live. But he took pity on it and fled into the wilds to raise it. Then he came back to take more under his wing, kinda like some sort of crazy cat lady. Eventually he had a thriving community stationed out in one of the libraries around here, taught them all to read and everything.

The races of the northern continent were first introduced to humanity following their exodus from their destroyed homeland to the south. The refugees that managed to escape headed north, over the treacherous mountains of the Isthmus of Panama, and through sang-controlled land. They were given no trouble by the strange species, and even helped along until they reached their borders along the edges of the Rocky Mountains, where they eventually formed their first large permanent settlement. Within a generation, they had laid claim to a decent sized area of land and had gotten their government and infrastructure back to pre-disaster levels. As the decades rolled by, they expanded ever outwards, first peacefully, snapping up land no one else particularly cared about, making moves to assimilate the chira to the north and the yaan to the west, annexing sang land to the east. Eventually, the sang, the largest and most technologically advanced power on the continent for hundreds of years, pushed back.

What started as a few skirmishes over land eventually turned into all-out war, and everybody felt it. The chira were fractured between those that lived with the humans and those that refused. The yaan found themselves pushed all the way to the western coast as oil was found on the other side of the Rockies. The sang discovered the hard way that the military might of humanity was not to be taken lightly, and their kingdom was bisected as the human forces broke through their center and began colonizing the eastern coast of the continent, pushing the akass who lived there to the islands of the gulf. Those sang that now found themselves cut off from the capitol to the south eventually made their way up north into kigaya territories. And still the humans fought, as what had started out as a way to acquire the resources for their growing population and industry had now, over the generations and elections, had mutated into an all-out conquering force, hell-bent on making sure those aggressive non-humans didn’t try taking their land.

Eventually, though, they broke. Stretched thin from the massive amounts of territory they had laid claim to and from the bloody stalemate with the sang on their northern and southern borders, the empire finally collapsed in on itself. First, the eastern colonies broke away, forming their own nation. Then panic erupted when it was discovered that their robotic fighting force (which had started out as a way to replace the labor lost from sending the able-bodied away to war, before being conscripted themselves when they ran out of able-bodied) was now being produced entirely by more of the same robots. A bomb was planted in the citadel, home to the servers and controls that kept the factories running, believed to now be entirely staffed by robots. The bomb went off… and the cascading power failures took out most of the cities still on the citadel’s grid as their generators exploded. Most notably, much of the land west of the Rockies warped, and eventually fell entirely to the void past the old coastline. It’s a small miracle the yaan survived, and, in fact, still flourish in these fringes of reality, but the taven who lived further north, and had by and large been unaware of the warfare elsewere, suddenly found their homeland rendered uninhabitable. They headed west, into the lands many of the chira had been pushed into. The chira were now pushed west themselves. The kigaya, between dealing with the incoming chira and the sang refugees, found their country fractured into three, with one fragment becoming the joint kigaya-sang fellowship known as Caltrek. Really, the only people who got out of this whole clusterfuck unscathed were the noya, and they had no idea any of this was happening. Hell, most of the other races didn’t even know they existed at the time.

As the human empire collapsed and shattered into thousands of warring city-states, the eastern colonies, calling themselves Malabar, seemed to be holding strong. Then, about a hundred and fifty years later, civil war erupted, splitting the north from the south and, eventually, the independent nation of Oben off from the south. In the hundred years or so since, everyone’s been patching up the best they can, and they’re all in something of an uneasy truce. In fact this is the case for much of the continent in general, with each nation too focused on patching up its own problems, many of them caused by the war, to care much about the others. The only exception lay with the taven.

In the nearly three centuries since they had been forced from their home, they had tried to make the best of their new situation and trying to accept the fact that they were never going to return. Though things seemed to be going well, resentment simmered in their unconscious. All it took was the appearance of a new, charismatic leader, Onei, to bring these thoughts to the forefront. Though he could not promise to return them to their homeland and great cities, he could certainly promise them revenge. Under his leadership, they would sweep across the continent, punishing the remnants of the empire that had so wronged them and, in the process, unifying the place into one, harmonious whole to prevent such a terrible war from happening again. But they couldn’t do it as they were. They hadn’t truly fought a foe in centuries, and they needed to step up their technology if they intended to not just compete with the sang and humanity, but completely overwhelm them. The first step was to improve their ground troops, which they did by extensively outfitting them with cybernetics. Organs which could so easily fail were replaced by efficient, indestructible synthetic counterparts. Senses were enhanced, and eventually overwritten by electronic receptors. All soldiers were wired directly into central command to better improve communication. Their lower jaws were removed in symbolic ritual, the ultimate sign of dedication to the cause. It was seen as a noble sacrifice, a way to finally and effectively make a strike back at the enemy. They went into conversion fully expecting to fall on the battlefield, but not before taking a few thousand humans, kilinik, and sang each with them. They were to be the warrior spirit, the embodiment of their race’s collective burning hatred and indignation at those who would dare take away that which was most precious to them.

Its debatable whether the brainwashing started here or when Onei began forcibly converting the rest of the population. There was no way they were going to win without everyone making an effort, and what better way to ensure that than by convincing them of it. And so, in the span of merely five years, the entire taven population was under Onei’s direct control, and he had his eyes set on Valen.

The taven war hit the continent like a bolt of lightning. A veritable tidal wave of taven supersoldiers and their war machines flooded south and into Valen, annihilating any resistance they came across. As they marched, the towns and cities behind the front lines had their remaining citizens undergo the same conversion process, and were quickly subjugated under Onei’s will. Some remained behind to maintain supply lines and other infrastructure, but many were conscripted into the fight, shoring up any losses they may have sustained in the capture of the settlement in the first place. As the years rolled on, the taven line pushed ever outward, only slowed, never stopped, by the combined might of the Caltrek and Valen militaries, later joined by the Malabars and Oben once things started looking really grim.

And then, as quickly as it had all started, the thralls suddenly retreated. A civil war had broken out amongst the highest officials in Onei’s empire, and some taven had managed to use the chaos to shake their mental shackles long enough to finally take him out. The system is in complete uproar. Some commit suicide on the spot, others go on crazed rampages, slaughtering their fellows by the hundreds. The war effort now turns to rescuing and rehabilitating as many of their people as they can. To this day, one can still find humans, taven, kilinik, sang, kigaya, noya, and chira with their jaws removed, still running on eternal life support.

Ironically, Onei’s war actually accomplished one of his goals. Following the devastating war, what had initially been an uneasy truce eventually became full-fledged peace as everyone realized that they could not take another terrible conflict like this. The taven were in absolute shambles as they tried to rebuild their civilization a second time. The chira had taken massive losses as scout thralls under Onei’s control, and the noya weren’t much better off. Valen looked like the aftermath of an apocalypse. The eastern human nations, particularly Northern Malabar, had taken a beating, as well as Caltrek and the kigaya nations of Eten and Jaris. The southern sang kingdoms had had the war come to their doorstep, and were in the process of defending their borders when it all ended. No one could think about attacking one another, much less had the energy and resources to do so. And so, for the first time since humanity made its way to the north, the continent experienced universal peace.

It wasn’t to last.

No formal war broke out, but had events not transpired like they had, it almost certainly would have. Northern Malabar, nervously eyeing their neighbor to the south, began development of a bioweapon. They had no intention of using it, mind you, it was just something to have in case things got out of hand, of course. Well… things got out of hand. One of the resarchers on the project was contacted by a biogenetics company in Oben, offering an exuberant reward and better job security in return for the incomplete bioweapon. He agreed, intending to smuggle a sample out of the country. He was caught trying to leave the city where he had been stationed, and was threatened at gunpoint to come into custody. In a spiteful act that could have easily doomed the entire world, he instead shattered the vial on the concrete floor of the crowded train station he’d been cornered in. Thousands died that day… but something else was born in that moment. Some incredible miracle happened, some chance interaction between the weapon and a waking victim, and a new form of life was created amongst the corpses in that station: a seeming impossibility, an empowered virus that completely hijacked cells it infected, transforming them into a highly mutable, virtually indestructible, and incredibly strong semi-liquid slurry. Infiltrating every nook and cranny of its dying human host, it replicated his form flawlessly. Most shockingly, it was intelligent, having copied his neural structure as well. The first construct had been created, impossibly strong, incredibly fast, and whose diet consisted only of living organisms, absorbed whole and screaming.

This, however, was not an immediate disaster. The First was, ultimately, not interested in creating more of his kind. Unfortunately, samples got out, spread around for research, and many of the subsequent constructs created had different ideas. Though they were often quickly routed by The First and those sympathetic to his cause, they invariably managed to make at least a dozen or so more constructs before they were taken out, each with the potential to cause more havoc. For the moment, however, this wasn’t the biggest problem on the horizon.

The void on the western coast was beginning to move rapidly inward, and the south was experiencing the same. If the movement continued at a steady pace, it would be a century before the continent was subsumed, but if it was exponential… they had barely a decade to find a way to reverse the damage. It seemed like an impossible task. How does one go about repairing reality itself? Especially when they had no idea what was causing the breach in the first place. Blame got passed around quickly, reasonable or otherwise, and old prejudices reignited. Humans were one prime target, but the taven and yaan also came under fire. The hyper-efficient power generation of humanity was also blamed, as were empowered individuals. The latter eventually led to outright riots in Oben as one local governor rose to prominence on an anti-empowered platform, promising to utilize their extensive genetic research to eliminate the problem completely.

Eventually, a solution was finally devised by a joint taven-human effort as the yaan fled over the Rockies, the void nipping at their heels. It would require an incredible amount of power to deploy, more than they could currently generate, but, in theory, the device they had created would essentially snap reality back into shape, like flicking out a crumpled blanket. An unusually powerful and semi-famous human empowered was contacted to provide the energy for the machine. They made a big show and ceremony about it and everything, broadcast it across the continent. Yes, humanity probably had a hand in the current situation, but they were going to fix it, permanently, just you see. Here, see the human hero make the future secure for all races!

It solved the problem, partially. Good news: it instantly repaired the world. Bad news: it just as instantly took every last empowered out with it, even those that hadn’t awakened yet. Millions dropped dead that day. Due to the nature of the genes responsible, the empowered would eventually reemerge, but this was small comfort at the time. Nearly everybody had lost someone, or at least knew someone who had.

The constructs, however, were absolutely fine, and now found themselves unchallenged by people with superpowers. This was all the excuse a few of them needed to attempt the total conversion of the human race. After all, they were pretty much better in every way compared to baseline humans, they were doing them a favor, really.

Still reeling from having their population literally decimated, and now faced with a steadily growing population of practically invulnerable beings hell-bent on making more of themselves out of their people, the humans were rightly terrified, and rapidly searched for a solution. The other races begrudgingly helped, not particularly sad to see the humans go after the long string of disasters they’d left in their wake, but also not wanting to have to deal with the constructs, who were likely going to be much like their hosts, only worse. After many potential solutions either failed or backfired spectacularly, one final, last-ditch answer was proposed: why don’t we just take all the constructs, and push them somewhere else?

BLBS

With humanity extinct, there’s only one species dominant on Earth once more: the construct. No one is quite sure where they came from, heck, their own history only speaks of The First being born from the worst of humanity, almost certainly metaphorically. In addition, no one is quite sure how they work biologically, other than the fact that they completely lack internal organs of any kind, instead being composed of a highly mutable, extremely resilient semi-liquid… that also readily dissolves in water. And is probably organic in some way, considering they still need to eat and breathe. And, you know, is also somehow capable of supporting an intelligent, incredibly human consciousness despite lacking a brain, or any neural tissue whatsoever. Their best scientists have been working on it for a while, but the only thing they can come up with is the incredibly obvious statement that they are completely unlike any other known organism.

As beings, constructs look outwardly indistinguishable from a human, save for an increased resting body temperature and the occasional error in reconstructing structural color, best seen in their inability to properly replicate blue eyes. Indeed, every construct was created using a living human body as a template, consuming and killing the person in the process. However, they are immediately recognizable by their inhuman abilities; incredible strength and speed, rapid regeneration, and ability to shapeshift. Masters of disguise, they can readily mimic other humans, and are easily capable of forming their body into a weapon. Meter-long talons, armor plating, combat tentacles… the list is only limited by individual creativity.

Though the average construct eats far less than a human overall, they have a very restricted diet, unable to digest anything other than living tissue. Everything else simply becomes an irritant lodged within them. This has led to the extensive farming of chickens in construct society, as they are the perfect livestock for their needs; easily transportable, prolific breeders, quick to mature, practically omnivorous, and just the right size for a weekly meal.

Acid Rain

I’d like to say that the apocalypse brought everyone together, that that old ingrained racism and sexism and classism is now a thing of the past, burned away by the crucible of survival. Truth be told, we pretty much just shifted our focus. The folks over in the western foothills? Unwashed and incestuous, the lot of them. The guys living down on the old community college campus? Hard-working but dumb as a bundle of sticks. And on the other side of the highway? Violent savages, to a man. And then you have those freaky mutant bugs. Thankfully they keep to themselves for the most part, because goddamn they’re disturbing.