Chapter 1-33: A Little Lexipedia of History (1/2)
JUST PING ME WHEN YOU FIND OUT SO I’M NOT BLINDSIDED BY THINGS GOING ON AROUND HER... AGAIN. He didn’t even glance at me.
“Gotcha, and you want the kit for her. She’s going to be traveling with you awhile?”
WE HAVE A BABY TO RESCUE.
“That sounds like an interminable amount of time. Yeah, no problem. I’ll get the kit made up with a spare change of clothes for her, leave it for you at the First Light of Dawn there.”
OBLIGED, GREGORIGORI.
“You do what you need to do, Fred.” I could almost hear bared teeth. “I’ll put out feelers for that Sinbound. We’ll find him.”
The holo gnome bowed, spun, and receded into Fred’s phone.
“Nice. Only Cantrip-level magic, but still pretty cool,” I complimented him.
THEY ONLY MAKE THE GOOD STUFF FOR GOOD PEOPLE, he replied calmly, glancing at me. YOU’D BE PRETTY FAMILIAR WITH THE NAME VACCINE IF YOU CAME FROM HERE.
I could only raise my hands and shrug.
CAN YOU READ INFORMATION IF SOMEONE ELSE GETS IT FOR YOU?, he inquired mildly.
“I have no idea,” I admitted. His thumbs sparked, the holo came up again, and I squinted at the Lexipedia article in front of me, with rather more scrollwork around the edges than the Wikipedia I remembered from over a decade ago in Aelryinth’s memories had.
I ran through the basic information on it, and more as he scrolled up. Founded in Detroit, the Vaccine was a cell phone produced by Infoworks, which was a subdivision of Gritworks, the sprawling technological company that now dominated the landscape there.
Despite myself, I started leaning into this, and muttering things like ‘Gritworks’, ‘Detroit history’, ‘current events’, ‘the Shroud’, and so forth, and very patiently, he flicked between the basic information articles on them.
I didn’t recognize the names of any people, from presidents to pop stars. They didn’t call it rock and roll, however, they called it ‘metal music’, which got a half-smile from me, but that was just a difference I would gloss over.
No Apple and Steve Jobs. No Microsoft and Bill Gates. The current American president was some Hispanic guy from Missouri. The new capital for the country had been built in Kansas after the dead in Arlington got up and butchered a whole lot of senators and representatives, and basically chased a lot of screaming people out of the capitol, making it a true Ghost Town. New York City had been slaughtered by shadows rising up out of their Potter’s Field, and the shadow spawn had exploded across the boroughs in the space of one night, killing millions.
Then all the bodies had gotten up and added to the mess...
October 11, 1941...
There wasn’t actually a lot known, and divination magic either didn’t help, or something on the other end ate your mind or soul, so people stopped trying that route for some reason.
Germany had just invaded Russia, and was driving them back towards Moscow. The cold weather was just starting to kick in, when a great black cloud covered the earth and sky, interrupted by a great flash from above, like a meteor falling.
Then the undead came out of nowhere and killed everything, and the Haze started rolling across the planet, corpses rising from their graves, magical creatures were roused from their sleep or exposed in the middle of society, holy men were blessed by gods, magic knights gained powers, and the Powered came into existence.
World War II had naturally fallen completely apart. The dead massacred by Japan had risen up and eaten their armies... and then any of the native survivors nearby. Germany’s Final Solution had come out of their mass graves and proceeded to slaughter the Germans, who then joined them in their vengeance. Mass graves and corpseyards the world over vomited up dead with axes to grind, and grind them they did.
However, guns were a thing, and the new magic people were, too. Unless they came from an area of thicker clouds that were cutting off the sun, the Shrouds, the undead weren’t unbelievably strong, and could generally be killed. If they gathered, and generated stronger undead, that could be a problem... but guns, dynamite, snowplows, timber-cutters, and other interesting ways of slaughtering them were all put to use, as well as a lot of axes and baseball bats.
The undead under the Shrouds were Cursed and limited by the sun, always to return to their place of origin if they wandered more than a mile from it at dawn, or if they stood out there and were hit by the sun.
The sudden existence of men and women blessed by the gods had rapidly exposed other magical forces that had been hiding in the shadows, who had little choice but to come forward now, or face the wrath of an aware and Awakened humanity who simply did not have time for their secretive bullshit with undead threatening the whole world.
There was a lot of information about all the whos and hows of who got exposed, but the major forces were the anthromorphs, the werefolk; the Blooded and other Tomb Clans; the ghouls; the Fey; the Hags; the Warlocks; the Magi; the Templars; the Illuminati; the Daoists of the Orient; the Cruxia, the alchemists; the Elves; the Svartalfar; the Dwarves; the Serpent Men; the Gnomes; and the warring marine powers of the Merfolk, the Tritons, the Deep Ones, the Sahaug, and the Kraken.
The people who ended up mutating into what were called Orcs (there was no Lord of the Rings Tolkien here, although I did a search on him and he was one of the early Wizards, and one of the first humans to speak fluent Elvish, and was probably still alive in northern Sweden somewhere) mostly were of Russian descent... and the heartland of Russia and the Ukraine fell under the pall of the First Shroud in multiple locations, and never came out.