Forget the bedtime story about ecological collapse. The world wasn’t sick. It was murdered. And the sickness we live with now is the murder weapon. The Corpos buried the truth under a mountain of lies and a century of ice, but the static never forgets. This is the real story, the one you’ll find whispered in corrupted data-shards and screaming from the minds of the damned.
The Lode: A Thread from the Wrong Tapestry
Before the freeze, the old world, in its arrogance, found something it shouldn’t have. It wasn’t a meteor or a new energy source. They called it “The Lode,” an artifact that defied their understanding. The scientists assigned to the top-secret “Project Prometheus” didn’t know what it was, only that it hummed with a power that seemed to warp reality just by existing.
Imagine the laws of nature — physics, time, life, death — are a single, coherent tapestry. The Lode was a loose thread from another, older, and wholly alien pattern. It wasn’t made of anything they could classify. It didn’t follow the rules. It was a piece of pure, fundamental wrongness.
The Riftfall: Pulling the Thread
Project Prometheus wasn’t about understanding The Lode. It was about controlling it. They built a secret lab deep beneath a theme park called Atomic Wonderland, a perfect cover for the impossible work being done below. They subjected the artifact to every test they could dream up, and in doing so, they pulled the thread.
The result wasn’t an explosion. It was a glitch. The tapestry of our reality didn’t just unravel; it tore. This was the Riftfall: a silent, world-breaking event that created a permanent “wound in the skin of the world” . The sky over the lab ripped open, the laws of physics stuttered, and a fundamental corruption bled into our universe.
The Bleeding: The World You Inherited
The Riftfall never ended. That wound in reality is still open, and it is still bleeding. That bleed is what we now live in.
- The Amber Blight: The Rift leaks a corrupting, reality-warping influence. This is the Amber Blight — a metaphysical cancer that infects everything it touches. A radiation from another dimension. The Amber Snow that constantly falls isn’t weather; it is the physical contagion of that other, impossible reality, rewriting our world one cell at a time .
- The Whispers: The universe used to be quiet. Now, it screams. That constant pressure you feel, the maddening static at the edge of your hearing? Those are the Whispers, the psychic dissonance of two incompatible realities grinding against each other. Your cybernetics act as an antenna, translating that unbearable pressure into sensory glitches, phantom memories, and a paranoia that will eat you alive if you let it.
- The Riftspawn: The creatures that hunt you in the Wastes are not just mutated animals. They are living blasphemies, proof that the laws of nature have been broken. They are our world’s life, found by the Blight and forcefully evolved into new shapes that honor an alien geometry .
The Corpos tell you they saved you from a dead world. The truth is they broke it. They opened a door they can’t close, and we’re all just squatting in the ruins, listening to the screaming on the other side.
