The world as we knew it is has ended.
But it didn’t just go quietly. Or loudly. It cracked and shattered so hard, those left behind can’t even agree on what “the world as we knew it” means.
It ended not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a retcon.
There were too many last survivors of lost worlds, too many sorcerers, too many visitors (royalty or otherwise) from strange magical lands, too many scientists specialised on every area of knowledge ever studied plus a few more they made up on their spare time.
There was too much time travel, parallel universe travel, mystical dimension travel, faster than light travel, and travel of kinds that weren’t even a thing before someone did it.
There were too many returned from the dead, or never having been dead after all, too many people born in the 60s who fought in World War II, who have been teenagers for 50 years, oh, so many things that were stretched out over the years until they just didn’t fit.
History was changed, fixed, changed again, and when necessary, even recreated from scratch, so many times that nobody is quite sure what it was supposed to look like anymore, and that was before it all came crashing down like so much stuff crammed into a closet where it didn’t fit so your room looked presentable and in the hopes nobody would open that door but of course they did.
And then one man vowed to stop it. Or maybe it was a woman. Or neither. Ironically, we’ll never know.
This person, anyway, vowed to put an end to it. They mapped the very cracks in reality that caused their alarm, and used these to hop through history, and erase every superhero and every supervillain. They saved every dying planet so their survivors wouldn’t end up here. And I can’t even begin to understand what they did about the sorcerers and their enemies.
Of course, anyone could have told them their plan was quite completely insane. Obviously, the last thing reality needed was to be messed with more. While it’s true you can’t make an omelete without breaking a few eggs, there’s also such a thing as using gasoline to put out a fire, if you forgive me for mixing my metaphors, and ignore the smell of burnt eggs.
Now the people left behind come from a million places (big cities and barbarian kingdoms and retrofuturistic fauxtopias and nightmare lands and who knows what else) with a million histories which, even accounting for parallel worlds, can’t possibly all be true at the same time.
Only one thing unites all these lands and their inhabitants: they all remember the heroes and villains. Everyone owes their lives to at least one hero at least once, and everyone knows someone killed by a villain, and some people even have it the other way around too. The names, faces, and details don’t necessarily match, of course, but that matters little, since none of them are still around anyway.
It’s our world now, even though calling it a “world” verges on poetic license, and somehow we have to live in it.
The optimistic say everything is possible. To which the cinycs reply, “exactly”.
Hosted and narrated by:
Lalo Martins (lalomartins)
Started 02/18/17.
Scenes played: 4
License: Community License w/ Creative Commons
