Apocrypha Redux
Posted: Wed Jun 19, 2013 10:28 am
I'd been sitting on this one for a while until I finally dusted it off and looked at my old notes. And to be honest, of all the old Siege/Arty collabs on the OZ, Apocrypha was one of my favorites. I'd always loved it when Christian angels and demons show up in stories - be it Supernatural or DF. Good Omens is one of my favorite books, and TSW was such a massive disappointment that I'm sure NT has driven that horse into the ground.
But post-apocalyptic verses never really breathed as much as the bigger verses on the OZ. Sure, there was 20XX and Fatal Friday, but compared to OF, SOTS, CSW, and OZC, they were side projects at best. But Apocrypha always had a special place in my heart. I wasn't really able to dig it up on the wayback machine, so a lot of this is just elements from flashes of memory writ large. But this project is one of those folders I've had on my desktop for awhile, along with Shadow Tempest, TE, and myriad other projects. Since OF and Westworlds are breathing again, I wanted to get some new ideas from Siege and Arty while the iron was still hot.
APOCRYPHA – REDUX
It’s been twenty years since the world as we knew it ended.
April 13, 2036. We were wrong. So very wrong.
99942 Aphosis. Not big enough to be the end in and of itself, mind. But it greased the wheels. The first catastrophe.
Tens of millions dead in the ensuing Chinese Civil War. It was until the plague hit that we had an idea of what Aphosis had gifted us.
The world changed. A nuclear standoff in the Middle East didn’t help.
To be honest, we’re not sure who pushed the button.
But we do know that it’s been fifty years since the apocalypse began.
High command may have the specifics, but in this unholy clusterfuck of a melee, no one’s quite sure. One buddy of mine did the math and he thinks we’re sitting at the turn of the twenty second century. I’m sure the folks in the ships from Limbo know the specifics, but seeing as they’re carving out their own territory in the name of the Colony Belt, I’m exactly keen on asking them.
The hellgates were their own problem. Insidious, like. Not a giant portal so much as a creeping sickness, a stain. We didn’t realize the plague was the first manifestation of the Gates, but when they started to organize things really went down the shitter. And mutate. See, they were still bound in the early days.
Demons. It used to leave a dirty taste in my mouth. Now it sends chills down my spine. You can never be too careful, even today. It starts as a whisper, and by the end you’ve torn your family limb from limb.
Nowadays we try to stay away from the enclaves. I’m not sure if they’re collaborators or the real deal, but it doesn’t matter. By now they hold dominion over each continent. Mammon’s citadel sits on what used to the Big Apple, and the greater area is a desolate wasteland. Asmodeus camped Paris for a while until the Second Unified took to the catacombs. We haven’t had contact with the region for a month now. It’s all dark.
Africa stood as humanity’s stronghold for the longest time. We had finally started to fight back. It was V-Pacific Day, when the combined UNR fleet managed to shove a nuclear missile down Leviathan’s throat.
We always expected gents in white robes, harps and angelic wings. Not the six-winged wheel of fire that destroyed the CAP for the Remnant fleet. That’s the thing about Angels, see. You can’t look at them for too long before your eyes burst from their sockets. Humanity, as a base lot, can’t handle their form, their true essence, and since the Host didn’t exactly come in peace they have no intention of cloaking their true forms like the Legion did. They weren’t here for followers.
They were fulfilled a scorched earth policy in the most meaningful sense.
The UNR is underground these days, and I don’t like talking about command for fear that I might be cozying up with a Damned Soul, eh? We move around, mostly out of necessity. The Host is always there, always searching. A single Seraphim is a match for an entire squadron of Night Ravens, and considering we’ve only recently managed to get our jets up in the air in the past couple years the danger is omnipresent.
Belphegor had been sitting in the central crater for close to twenty years when the nuclear strike took out his fortress. At first we though the fat bastard has taken himself out out of shear boredom. Then the ships came down from on high. I remember clutching at my flask that day in the Hokkaido underground, watching the silver crafts on the monitors and thinking just as things couldn’t get worse, here were honest to god aliens.
The Colonies might have well been alien to us for the response we received when we sent a team of envoys. The Host will burn you were you stand, the Legion will enslave you to the will of their Baron, but the Limbo will judge you. At least the Host, assholes that they are, are inscrutable. The demons are fans of ol’ Dante. But the Colonies got it in their heads that we brought it on ourselves. The verdict’s ain’t nothing but guilty, but I hear conflicting reports, see, on the sentence. But seeing as the Limbo’s advance teams are stuck on this rock the same as us, I throw my weight with Najid from the Cantina. Neural collars are the way to go when you need manpower to wield your high tech lasers and armored walkers.
And that’s not to consider the free powers. Amon’s been hunting humans, walking the earth since the dawn of time. Papa Wrath’s reputation is fleeting, because not many stories get out when there aren’t survivors. Behemoth’s been rampaging across South America, Hell’s first son against the Host. I was there when the Amazon went up, trying to pull the last people out of Brazil. The screams still pull me out of my sleep, covered in sweat.
There’s the Van Winkle Teams, now those bastards you have to watch out for. Humanity’s been practicing at killing each other for thousands of years, and we’re not going to let a war between heaven and hell get in our way. Put under right after things got serious, right before someone pressed the button and the first arrows took to the sky, they’re starting to come out now. Four man teams, and can you imagine?
You leave one Armageddon to find another. I wish they didn’t have gear to put Limbo to shame either. Six decades on ice and one the biggest threats UNR HiCom is facing. New Zealand went dark, right as we had establish a real stronghold there. But at least other groups are doing some good, carving out sections of Sou’Frica, you know? And then there’s the best of them, who put down their mission when they saw what Earth had come to and decided to join the Remnant. Hell, though, the thought’s still there, that if these teams are coordinating, they might have a shot of coming out on top of this mess.
Hell’s on their own, and they’ve always been. They fight each other, they lay waste to hundreds of miles throwing down with the Host, but at least you can talk to them. They can’t rule the world is everyone on it is dead.
The greatest weapon in all of this isn’t anything that comes out of a gun, though. It’s hope. It’s knowing that the Host isn’t invincible, that they can, in fact, be put down, and put down hard. When the Limbo ship decided to plow its nose straight into the Angel we’d been calling Gabe, hope finally began to leak back into the camps. And that, Nicolai tells me, is key. Not every patron demon makes himself know, he told me over a bottle last week. Despair lives within each of us, and up until now he’s been winning this chaotic shitstorm we call a war. General Morgenstern’s broadcasts are the glue, though, that’s been holding the Remnant together. We’d been lost without him, and it’s with him that the UNR’s been able to dish out for the first time in decades.
No one’s seen hide or hair of Old Scratch, which is ironic, considering Asmodeus always referred to him as Brother Pride. You’d think he’d be leading the Legion or at least sitting in his icy lake, organizing it all while chewing on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. But nothing. Thin air. And that’d be the most frightening aspect of this century if not for the Old Man himself.
The Host doesn’t talk much. Burning eyes and ears and all that. But I personally don’t think this is sanctioned, if you catch my drift. I don’t want it to be, you get it? He’s almighty, he’s omnipotent, he can snap his fingers and move onto another universe? What does it mean if he’s not involved? Or worse, is gone? A lot of people still pray, but I’m too bitter. It’s not hatred, see. I’m carving my own path with the rest of the Remnant, but damn it all. It’s they why that, beyond all the horror I’ve seen on the mortal coil, then keeps me up at night. The metaphysical implications are terrifying, and it’s no wonder suicide takes just as many lives as Limbo or the Van Winkle teams.
I sat down with Colonel Zeke last week for coffee and we got to talking about superstitions – if such a thing can still exist – going around the camps. He looks at me over his cup and says to me, if we’re in the throes of the end of the world, where are the four horsemen? I don’t remember Mammon in my scriptures, but I can quote Rev Six at you all day long. He waved away the steam and mentioned the tales of the three travelers that UNR intel’s been tracking for the past decade. The man in white always foreshadows an Angelic attack. Eight times in the past year, followed by an attack.
Zeke’s pretty nervous by this point, looking left and right. Amon’s been pulling double duty, but intel at least is sure he or she – they’re leaning towards she, mostly based on Aussie mutterings – exists. A few wanted to associate Behemoth with Famine, but Zeke wasn’t buying it, he said. But the EIS could track the vectors of the plague, and whenever it occurs, and the man in black is always on surveillance footage at each ground zero, staring right into the lens.
Now that’s what has HiCom all aflutter, Zeke explains, because these mystery men aren’t working for any one side. But wherever they go, death follows short behind. The Pale Horse itself, I asked? Who the fuck knows, Zeke says, leaning back into the holding chair. God knows there’s been enough death to go around with someone seizing the title.
Every now and then some asshole tries to whip the Remnant into a twitter using the good book. Pointing at Rev and making this relation and that, reaching into the hearsay around Aphosis’ aftermath. HiCom’s always quick to shut them down, but it’s fairly clear nothing really went according to plan if this is the Apocalypse with a Capital A. We’re writing our own chapter now.
And who knows? Maybe, hundreds of years from now, when humanity finally takes its place amongst the stars and leaves a dead Earth behind, we’ll tell tales of the Apocrypha to our children.
But post-apocalyptic verses never really breathed as much as the bigger verses on the OZ. Sure, there was 20XX and Fatal Friday, but compared to OF, SOTS, CSW, and OZC, they were side projects at best. But Apocrypha always had a special place in my heart. I wasn't really able to dig it up on the wayback machine, so a lot of this is just elements from flashes of memory writ large. But this project is one of those folders I've had on my desktop for awhile, along with Shadow Tempest, TE, and myriad other projects. Since OF and Westworlds are breathing again, I wanted to get some new ideas from Siege and Arty while the iron was still hot.
APOCRYPHA – REDUX
It’s been twenty years since the world as we knew it ended.
April 13, 2036. We were wrong. So very wrong.
99942 Aphosis. Not big enough to be the end in and of itself, mind. But it greased the wheels. The first catastrophe.
Tens of millions dead in the ensuing Chinese Civil War. It was until the plague hit that we had an idea of what Aphosis had gifted us.
The world changed. A nuclear standoff in the Middle East didn’t help.
To be honest, we’re not sure who pushed the button.
But we do know that it’s been fifty years since the apocalypse began.
High command may have the specifics, but in this unholy clusterfuck of a melee, no one’s quite sure. One buddy of mine did the math and he thinks we’re sitting at the turn of the twenty second century. I’m sure the folks in the ships from Limbo know the specifics, but seeing as they’re carving out their own territory in the name of the Colony Belt, I’m exactly keen on asking them.
The hellgates were their own problem. Insidious, like. Not a giant portal so much as a creeping sickness, a stain. We didn’t realize the plague was the first manifestation of the Gates, but when they started to organize things really went down the shitter. And mutate. See, they were still bound in the early days.
Demons. It used to leave a dirty taste in my mouth. Now it sends chills down my spine. You can never be too careful, even today. It starts as a whisper, and by the end you’ve torn your family limb from limb.
Nowadays we try to stay away from the enclaves. I’m not sure if they’re collaborators or the real deal, but it doesn’t matter. By now they hold dominion over each continent. Mammon’s citadel sits on what used to the Big Apple, and the greater area is a desolate wasteland. Asmodeus camped Paris for a while until the Second Unified took to the catacombs. We haven’t had contact with the region for a month now. It’s all dark.
Africa stood as humanity’s stronghold for the longest time. We had finally started to fight back. It was V-Pacific Day, when the combined UNR fleet managed to shove a nuclear missile down Leviathan’s throat.
We always expected gents in white robes, harps and angelic wings. Not the six-winged wheel of fire that destroyed the CAP for the Remnant fleet. That’s the thing about Angels, see. You can’t look at them for too long before your eyes burst from their sockets. Humanity, as a base lot, can’t handle their form, their true essence, and since the Host didn’t exactly come in peace they have no intention of cloaking their true forms like the Legion did. They weren’t here for followers.
They were fulfilled a scorched earth policy in the most meaningful sense.
The UNR is underground these days, and I don’t like talking about command for fear that I might be cozying up with a Damned Soul, eh? We move around, mostly out of necessity. The Host is always there, always searching. A single Seraphim is a match for an entire squadron of Night Ravens, and considering we’ve only recently managed to get our jets up in the air in the past couple years the danger is omnipresent.
Belphegor had been sitting in the central crater for close to twenty years when the nuclear strike took out his fortress. At first we though the fat bastard has taken himself out out of shear boredom. Then the ships came down from on high. I remember clutching at my flask that day in the Hokkaido underground, watching the silver crafts on the monitors and thinking just as things couldn’t get worse, here were honest to god aliens.
The Colonies might have well been alien to us for the response we received when we sent a team of envoys. The Host will burn you were you stand, the Legion will enslave you to the will of their Baron, but the Limbo will judge you. At least the Host, assholes that they are, are inscrutable. The demons are fans of ol’ Dante. But the Colonies got it in their heads that we brought it on ourselves. The verdict’s ain’t nothing but guilty, but I hear conflicting reports, see, on the sentence. But seeing as the Limbo’s advance teams are stuck on this rock the same as us, I throw my weight with Najid from the Cantina. Neural collars are the way to go when you need manpower to wield your high tech lasers and armored walkers.
And that’s not to consider the free powers. Amon’s been hunting humans, walking the earth since the dawn of time. Papa Wrath’s reputation is fleeting, because not many stories get out when there aren’t survivors. Behemoth’s been rampaging across South America, Hell’s first son against the Host. I was there when the Amazon went up, trying to pull the last people out of Brazil. The screams still pull me out of my sleep, covered in sweat.
There’s the Van Winkle Teams, now those bastards you have to watch out for. Humanity’s been practicing at killing each other for thousands of years, and we’re not going to let a war between heaven and hell get in our way. Put under right after things got serious, right before someone pressed the button and the first arrows took to the sky, they’re starting to come out now. Four man teams, and can you imagine?
You leave one Armageddon to find another. I wish they didn’t have gear to put Limbo to shame either. Six decades on ice and one the biggest threats UNR HiCom is facing. New Zealand went dark, right as we had establish a real stronghold there. But at least other groups are doing some good, carving out sections of Sou’Frica, you know? And then there’s the best of them, who put down their mission when they saw what Earth had come to and decided to join the Remnant. Hell, though, the thought’s still there, that if these teams are coordinating, they might have a shot of coming out on top of this mess.
Hell’s on their own, and they’ve always been. They fight each other, they lay waste to hundreds of miles throwing down with the Host, but at least you can talk to them. They can’t rule the world is everyone on it is dead.
The greatest weapon in all of this isn’t anything that comes out of a gun, though. It’s hope. It’s knowing that the Host isn’t invincible, that they can, in fact, be put down, and put down hard. When the Limbo ship decided to plow its nose straight into the Angel we’d been calling Gabe, hope finally began to leak back into the camps. And that, Nicolai tells me, is key. Not every patron demon makes himself know, he told me over a bottle last week. Despair lives within each of us, and up until now he’s been winning this chaotic shitstorm we call a war. General Morgenstern’s broadcasts are the glue, though, that’s been holding the Remnant together. We’d been lost without him, and it’s with him that the UNR’s been able to dish out for the first time in decades.
No one’s seen hide or hair of Old Scratch, which is ironic, considering Asmodeus always referred to him as Brother Pride. You’d think he’d be leading the Legion or at least sitting in his icy lake, organizing it all while chewing on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas. But nothing. Thin air. And that’d be the most frightening aspect of this century if not for the Old Man himself.
The Host doesn’t talk much. Burning eyes and ears and all that. But I personally don’t think this is sanctioned, if you catch my drift. I don’t want it to be, you get it? He’s almighty, he’s omnipotent, he can snap his fingers and move onto another universe? What does it mean if he’s not involved? Or worse, is gone? A lot of people still pray, but I’m too bitter. It’s not hatred, see. I’m carving my own path with the rest of the Remnant, but damn it all. It’s they why that, beyond all the horror I’ve seen on the mortal coil, then keeps me up at night. The metaphysical implications are terrifying, and it’s no wonder suicide takes just as many lives as Limbo or the Van Winkle teams.
I sat down with Colonel Zeke last week for coffee and we got to talking about superstitions – if such a thing can still exist – going around the camps. He looks at me over his cup and says to me, if we’re in the throes of the end of the world, where are the four horsemen? I don’t remember Mammon in my scriptures, but I can quote Rev Six at you all day long. He waved away the steam and mentioned the tales of the three travelers that UNR intel’s been tracking for the past decade. The man in white always foreshadows an Angelic attack. Eight times in the past year, followed by an attack.
Zeke’s pretty nervous by this point, looking left and right. Amon’s been pulling double duty, but intel at least is sure he or she – they’re leaning towards she, mostly based on Aussie mutterings – exists. A few wanted to associate Behemoth with Famine, but Zeke wasn’t buying it, he said. But the EIS could track the vectors of the plague, and whenever it occurs, and the man in black is always on surveillance footage at each ground zero, staring right into the lens.
Now that’s what has HiCom all aflutter, Zeke explains, because these mystery men aren’t working for any one side. But wherever they go, death follows short behind. The Pale Horse itself, I asked? Who the fuck knows, Zeke says, leaning back into the holding chair. God knows there’s been enough death to go around with someone seizing the title.
Every now and then some asshole tries to whip the Remnant into a twitter using the good book. Pointing at Rev and making this relation and that, reaching into the hearsay around Aphosis’ aftermath. HiCom’s always quick to shut them down, but it’s fairly clear nothing really went according to plan if this is the Apocalypse with a Capital A. We’re writing our own chapter now.
And who knows? Maybe, hundreds of years from now, when humanity finally takes its place amongst the stars and leaves a dead Earth behind, we’ll tell tales of the Apocrypha to our children.