Pandora's Inheritance; Modern-Fantasy 1x1

[Heyseuss]

Note: I can do more than one 1x1 in this setting, incidentally.

Pandora's Inheritance is all about how people react to the unexpected; magic comes back in a catastrophic and traumatizing fashion and the better parts of human nature often find themselves taking a back seat when people are freaking out. Pandora's Inheritance is very much about how society adjusts to the emergence of magic in a modern society -- a realistic appraisal of how people like you and me would respond to it.

Pandora's got run here before; below is a listingis a listing of the work done on it, but other work on the setting was done since that storyline was run.


Table of Contents

The OOC
Pandora's Inheritance IC
Pandora's Inheritance OOC

Emergent, Manifested - A nice way of describing someone who came up with powers in the last couple months, when this all really started. This is the politically-correct term for it in the United States and Canada. There are many more less flattering terms, of course.

NPC's - Disparaging term for regular humans, especially the people that hate Emergents (such as many of the religious fanatics in the country) used by American Emergents in turn. Particularly popular with the ones that have been caught and put in camps. It was a popular term among roleplayers, before roleplaying games and science-fiction novels were pulled off bookstore shelves during the last couple months of hysteria, and outright banned in certain states, as if they were the reason all this came about.

Shame-kisser - A disparaging term among anti-Emergent groups, primarily religious, for people who support the rights of Emergents. It refers to the 16th century myth of one of the rituals of witchcraft, the Osculum infame, involving a kiss to the anus as a show of subservient. It was first used by a famous televangelist mid-sermon, and caught on from there.

It's July, 2010 and the uncertainty of life, often buried deep in the psyche of humanity, is suddenly a raw and very exposed nerve. Things have emerged and the false serenity of society is irrevocably swept away on a tide of the supernatural.

The world is turning upside down. Things are emerging from a long dormancy, their spirits either finding flesh on their own or fusing with the nearest host and twisting them into something else. From the beautiful to the freakish, it was almost as if someone unlocked a spiritual prison and threw the doors wide open, and all the inmates took their chance and ran out into the wider world.

Magic came back in July 2009, and people suddenly manifested abilities. Some changed shape to mishapen or supernaturally beautiful beings, others manipulated energies by their will and mind. Society was not prepared, and fell into all sorts of social unrest, including lynchings, riots and vigilantism. Not everyone was grabbing a shotgun or gardening tool to go after these newly-minted 'Emergents' but there was a torrent of hate on the TV and on the radio, a furious argument about how to respond.

Irrationality won out.

Initially, at the behest of the more vocal and hardline group of Americans, yelling for the government to 'do something,' the government tried arresting Emergents and interning them in camps, much like the Japanese in WWII. They justified not extending constitutional rights to the Emergents via the 14th amendment, stating that there was no provision for 'nonhuman' sentients.

It was a disaster. In August of 2009, there was a mass uprising against the government's containment facility at Nellis Air Force Base where Emergents took over the compound and then used their abilities together to break the siege the military had on the facility -- all this on national television, including the part where the military opened fire first, in reponse to the throwing food and paint at a tour bus full of reporters by the inmates and a somewhat overkill response. Then it came out that the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon were running experiments on the emergents during the month or so of time they were able to hold onto them.

One of the other emergent tactics during the negotiations was to use their connection to the spirit world and other abilities to glean information that the government didn't want release; all the political opponents of Emergents found detailed, and highly accurate, dossiers being issued to the media from the pro-Emergent factions connecting all the dots and showing where the bodies were (figuratively and literally) buried.

There was a rash of political resignations as the ranks of anti-Emergent politicians and other publicly active figures, such as media personalities, were 'outed' by the information the emergents were getting a hold of. The Speaker of the House was put into the White House with a mess on her hands, including the responsibility to negotiate with tens of thousands of angry people with supernatural powers who had the ability to fillet her career as well as placating the people that wanted to burn them for witchcraft.

During a long series of negotations, a second wave of magic came; spirits and mythological creatures started manifesting. Suddenly, household pets were breathing fire or flying, and places like San Francisco's Golden Gate park was overrun by mischievous wood nymphs.

The government position of taking the hard line against Emergents collapsed, largely because they were losing members of their faction by the day to scandals that were being handed like box-gifts, wrapped with a bow, to the media and because the rest of society needed the Emergents as a go-between with capricious spirits and creatures of magical power.

Despite the full re-instatement of their rights, many Emergents didn't go back to their old lives, but instead moved to places where they would be around their own, feeling that safety in numbers was their best bet, like many other beleagured minorities. There is a weary truce between the NPC's and the Emergents in most cases, but some cities are more progressively minded than others -- they realize that Emergents are useful and potentially profitable.

That doesn't mean all is well. There are many groups out there that hate and fear the Emergents, many of them political and becoming more influential by the day as life continues to turn upside down and then turn upside down again just when things seem to stabilize.

--

OOC stuff:

I'm pretty loose on character ideas, but, ideally, the characters are still figuring things out. I'm loose on what magic entails. The plot is almost more about how people react to the situation than what they can do with magic.

I haven't gone into the details of how magic has affected the world, because I'm honestly hoping that it will come out more in the RP. I did use events from a previous RP under the same name on this that I did, but I kept it broad and general as much as possible. In general, I'm interested in doing 1x1's on the basis of this setting, unless there's so much interest that people more or less demand I put up an OOC in the advanced and turn it all group.


Suffice to say, this is more like 'Carrie' than 'Blade'; I'm not so interested in having long-established secret societies of vampires and werewolves emerge from the woodworks to take over the world. They, like everything else, are a fairy tale that suddenly shows up, and those people that do turn into them are as new to it as anyone else.

(That's strictly to avoid another Underworld/WOD type cliche of vampires secretly running the world-- there's plenty of those elsewhere. This is about something different.)

The plot will involve questions of politics and culture, rights and law and morality at the bottom line. I pretty much envision that the plot will take place in Boston, but I can move it to another city and do some of the same things -- Frisco and New Orleans probably qualify as the most magical cities in the Country outside of Boston itself. New Age, Voodoo and Salem Witchcraft seem to form a 'mystic' triunvirate of cities with some sort of heritage or cultural inclinations in that direction.

[SanityStealer]

Deal me in. This looks incredibly interesting.

[Heyseuss]

I'll set up an OOC. There's more material that's been written up since 2009, when the old RP ran, largely incorporating events from the RP and sort of linking where the RP left off to the wider picture.

Edit: OOC is set up. I just had to throw in the more detailed setting stuff, but I stopped short of picking a city for the setting. I figure we can be flexible about where things happen.

http://www.footstepsofghosts.com/t3451-pandora-s-inheritance-sanitystealer-heyseuss-1x1

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