The sky tore open, the world began to scream, and the freeze began. The official story calls what happened next a “brave corporate-led exodus”. That’s a clean word for what it really was: a panicked, selfish scramble for the lifeboats while the world drowned. This was the great schism, the moment humanity was split in two: those who could afford a ticket to the stars, and those who were left behind to rot.
This is the story of both. It’s the story of where you come from.
The Golden Ticket: Life in the Drifts
The ones who got out — the corporate elite, the well-connected, the ancestors of today’s Vaulted — didn’t escape to a paradise. They traded one hell for another. They fled to “The Drifts,” a scattered network of orbital habitats, deep-space stations, and bleak mining colonies.
If your story begins here, you are a stranger to this world, newly awoken from cryo-sleep. Your ancestors didn’t live; they endured. Imagine generations born and raised in cramped, metal corridors, breathing recycled air and eating nutrient paste under the eternal hum of life support. A life sentence of servitude to the same corporations that “saved” them. After a few centuries of that sterile, grimy existence, the promise of a real planet, even a broken one, starts to sound like a golden opportunity. You signed a contract with Dynamic Evolution, trading that life in a can for a one-way ticket down to the cradle of humanity, dreaming of a fresh start they never told you was a lie.
The Long Winter: The Ones Left Behind
For every soul that escaped to the Drifts, thousands were left behind. They faced the apocalypse head-on. They watched the sky break, endured the first unnatural blizzards of the Everwinter, and witnessed the birth of the first horrors that crawled from the Wastes. They are the ancestors of everyone born and raised on this planet.
If your story begins here, you are a true native of the Everwinter. Your history isn’t one of sterile corridors, but of a desperate, clawing survival in the ruins of the old world. Your ancestors huddled for warmth around the geothermal vents that would one day become The Bastion. They were the first to fight the Riftspawn, the first to go mad from the Whispers in the static, and the first to learn the brutal rules of this new, broken reality.
Their children and their children’s children inherited that struggle. They have the Blight in their blood and a cynicism forged in the long dark. They are the Runners who know the city’s bones, the Outlanders who know the Wastes’ secrets, and the people who see the off-worlders not as long-lost cousins, but as naive tourists about to be devoured.
So, when you craft your story, this is your first question. Were your ancestors the ones who paid for a ticket to a sterile cage in the sky, only for you to return centuries later as a stranger? Or were they the ones left behind, the ones who clawed their way to survival and passed that grit down to you?
Either way, you’re inheriting a broken world. Welcome home.
