Sub|Liminal [open]

The apocalypse was probably our fault.

No one is sure, of course. The conditions were right for it - countries on the brink of war, climate on the brink of collapse - we had been sitting atop a precipice for quite a while, thinking it was the top of a mountain. It wasn't until it was too late that we would realize it was the tip of a tsunami.

The question of what set it off is one that everyone wonders about, but no one answers. No one has time to answer. Digging into the why of the situation would be a luxury, and there isn't any luxury any more. We have to focus on survival. Maybe, in a thousand years or ten thousand years, things will be better and someone will sit down and sift through our remains and find out what really happened, but it won't be in our lifetimes, nor our childrens'.

We know about the fires. Cities burned. Towns, fields - people tell stories about great walls of fire rushing across the land, stretched out as far as the eye could see. We don't know how accurate those stories are - the apocalypse was over a hundred years ago, there's no one left who was alive back then, but they still tell stories about the fires. That was what took out most of the infrastructure - everything burns, if you burn it hot enough or long enough. What remained of the buildings was often hollowed-out husks, and what remained of the technology was usually only fit for the junkyards.

We know about the famine. It wasn't just the cities that burned, after all - farmland burned, crops burned, livestock burned. It's not easy to move a barn full of animals, and often there was nowhere to move them. People took what they could, when the fires came, but so much more was left behind to burn.

We know about the plagues. They call them the Chorus Plagues, because it wasn't just one plague, it was several, all working in concert. Some of them were old plagues that we'd thought were gone - yersinia, typhus, variola. Others were new plagues that we had no names for.

They say that between the plagues and the fires and the famines, humanity lost ninety percent of our population. Everyone wonders if that's true - could there really have been almost ten billion people on Earth? It seems impossible, but any time you go somewhere that used to be populated, you can find skeletons. They say that you could smell the rotting flesh for miles, in the first years after the apocalypse, but it's all just bones now. No one buried them - no one had time. Sometimes children play with them. We don't mind the bones.

We have other things to worry about.

There's the sky, for starters. It's polluted by something - we call it the miasma. We don't know what it is, whether it was part of the apocalypse or just something that got in later. What we do know is that anything that goes higher than about 18 meters crumbles. Buildings, towers, trees... people, if they go up that high. Animals. There are hardly any birds any more. The ones that are left are either small common ones like sparrows or the smart ones, like crows and jays. It takes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes if whatever it is happens to be big enough. If you go to the remnants of the old cities, you can see the skyscraper remnants - squat, fat buildings where the tops have dissolved, like someone took a picture of the skyline and cut it with a pair of scissors.

It makes travel across the land harder. They used to have airplanes, in the old world - huge flying things that could cross a whole continent in less than a day. We have trains instead. They work well enough, if we can keep them repaired, keep the tracks repaired. The problem with that is that there aren't enough resources left on Earth.

You would think that with less people, we would need less resources - and that's true to an extent, but the problem is that all the resources that were easy to get at were acquired long before the apocalypse happened. Back then, people relied on new technologies to delve deeper and strip the world of whatever it had left. We don't have those technologies any more, and the surface resources have vanished, meaning we need to find them somewhere else.

And that brings us to the membranes. We don't know if they were there before the apocalypse and we just never noticed, or if they were there because of the apocalypse, or if they're just something that came later. The membranes are places where the universe - the reality of it - is... thin. It's not easy to push through, but we can do it. The problem is that what's on the other side isn't any better. If it were, we'd just live there.

It's not. The veins are horrifying, every single one of them. Most people won't go into them at all. The ones that do come back with lasting damage, or not at all. Sometimes the damage is obvious, physical. Other times it's something in a person's mind that leaves them chilled and incapacitated, cowering under a shelter and screaming at shadows. Someone has to go in, though, because even if the veins are bad, a lot of them still have resources in them. We send people in on ventures, desperate people usually. People who have no choice, or at least not any better ones.

If they come back a few times, we promise to take care of them. We keep that promise as best as we can, even if it's only because we know that without them, it might be us.




Terms:

Apocalypse, The: 137-141 years in the past, the exact number depends on what people consider the beginning or whether they count from a high point. The end of civilization as we knew it.

Chorus Plagues: A series of deadly plagues that, combined with the fires of the apocalypse, served to wipe out almost 90% of the human population.

Membrane: A thinner part of reality, where our world pushes up against something else. People can pass through them, if they dare. Some membranes will lead to the same vein, others to different ones.

The Miasma: Something up there in the sky that disintegrates anything higher than 18.14 meters. It's invisible and intangible, but it's always there.

Vein: Another world or another realm or another reality, something on the other side of one of the membranes. Some of them are better explored than others, and in some of them we know some of the rules and have a better idea of how to stay alive. The newer veins are anyone's guess.

Venture: A mission across one of the membranes. Sometimes these are to scout out new veins and try to figure out how reality works in them and report back, other times these are to gather resources.



Conditions:

Welcome to Sub|Liminal, a post-apocalyptic portal horrorscape RP! This RP is definitely going to involve some body horror, so if that's not something you're comfortable with, this one probably isn't going to be your thing.

All characters are going to be venturers, so plan for that. They can be on their first venture or have some experience already, though ideally not too much experience just yet. The starting location of the RP is Mexico, near what remains of Chichén Itzá. The top of the Temple of Kukulcán (previous height: 30m) no longer exists.

CS can be any style, but should include:

Name:

Age: Minimum 17

Physical description or image reference: Either is fine

Hard skill / Combat skill, singular: Fighter or medic? Guns or knives? Fists or technology? You get to be good at one thing. Choose it wisely.

Soft skill / Noncombat skill, singular: Good at diplomacy? Negotiation? Appraisal? History? Environmental analysis? Cooking? Again, you get to be good at one thing. There will be opportunities to pick up additional skills through RPing.

Background / Why you're in this: Make sure to include why you're joining this venture.