[INTEL BRIEFING: PROJECT PROMETHEUS // CLASSIFIED] SUBJECT: The Lode, The Thread That Unraveled the World
Every story has a beginning. Every apocalypse has a patient zero. For our frozen, screaming world, it was an object. The Corpos called it “The Lode.”
Don’t ask what it looked like. The few recovered files from Project Prometheus that describe it are contradictory, insane. Some call it a perfect sphere of impossible blackness. Others describe a crystalline structure that shifted through colors the human eye was never meant to see. The only thing they agreed on is that it was not of our world. It was a loose thread from an older, wholly alien tapestry, and the scientists, in their hubris, decided to pull on it.
The Lode is the weapon that murdered the old world. When they activated it in the secret labs beneath Atomic Wonderland, it didn’t just explode. It tore a permanent, screaming wound in the fabric of reality: The Rift . The artifact itself was consumed, shattered, or… something else. But its psychic stain, its moment of activation, was burned into that location forever.
The original may be gone, but its ghost remains the most dangerous prize in the Everwinter.
- The Legend of the Shards: The most common story is that The Lode shattered when the Rift opened. The Corpos, especially Dynamic Evolution, have been secretly funding expeditions into the deepest parts of the Wastes for centuries, hunting for even a microscopic fragment. A single, stable shard of the artifact would be a source of limitless energy, a key to understanding the Rift, and a weapon that could rewrite reality all over again.
- The Source of Forbidden Power: The legends that drive the desperate are about the smaller, recovered artifacts. They say the legendary netrunner Null didn’t just hack the Interlink; he tried to jack his mind directly into a Lode-shard, believing it was a direct line to a digital god. The Ascended whisper that the fragments are holy relics, and to be near one is to hear the unfiltered voice of their god. To the power-hungry, a shard is the ultimate prize.
- The Psychic Stain: You can still feel its presence. The Transient Echo that haunts Atomic Wonderland is said to be the living memory of The Lode’s activation, a psychic wound that will never heal . To witness it is to get a glimpse of the raw, cosmic violence that broke the world, a truth that has shattered the minds of lesser explorers.
[TRANSMISSION END]