(The screen is dark, a charismatic and old-sounding voice speaking)
( This song plays.)
Rigel Three. Such a boring, generic and nonromantic name for a planet. When the first human colonists arrived, the United Nations Space Exploration Committee (UNSEC) was quick to christen it as such: it orbited the star Rigel and was the third planet. No more naming planets after ancient gods or figures of mythology: the human world was secular and politically correct now. A loaded name such as "Jesus" or "Allah" would simply not do.
Of course, human nature is not so easily overridden by rules and protocols: upon seeing the desert landscape with ruins of an ancient and long-gone alien civilization jutting out, the colonists let their imagination run wild. The human mind pictured a once great culture, wiped out by... what? What indeed. Nobody knew, but the melancholy vista spoke volumes. This people had been destroyed by some cataclysmic event, an apocalypse of sort. And so, the colonists came up with a name, one that stuck and spread to new arrivals and the press.
They named it Postapocalyptia.
(Screen flashes to white, slowly sharpening into a picture of an endless desert. Wind blows, sand flies, the usual clichés. From now on, imagine drawn-looking stills of the described scenes.)
Arid and barren and consisting mostly of sand and rocks to the untrained eye, Postapocalyptia, or Postpoc, didn't really attract many settlers at first. Sure, there were the alien ruins, but those were hardly the first ones humanity had encountered, and who would really care about the skeletal remains of once great structures reaching into the sky? The answer is, obviously, archaeologists. So Postapocalytian society evolved into a collection of small townships where these explorers would find places to stay, along with fueling points and outposts where they could rest and recuperate during their journeys into the desert.
That is, before they discovered timonium.
Named after its finder, timonium was a wondrous substance. Sprinkle it onto the sand, and crops would grow even in the driest desert. Fill your vehicle with it, and it would behave like a more efficient version of Betelgeuzean biofuel. Drink it, and you die a horrible and painful death (yes, someone tried). Most importantly, burning it would generate exorbitant amounts of energy, at the cost of heavy pollution. And it was freaking everywhere. It looked like wherever you drilled, you could find some of the stuff. In fact, its many uses and spread across the entire planet made scientists speculate that timonium wasn't, in fact, a natural element, but a substance engineered by the now-extinct aliens of Postapocalyptia. And oh boy, did it start a 25th century version of the Gold Rush.
Several energy and agricultural companies immediately took notice and landed their people on Rigel-3, only to be massively disappointed. It turned out that the reports the settlers had sent back home had been greatly exaggerated. While timonium was extremely useful in an underdeveloped place like Postapocalyptia, there were practically zero uses for it anywhere else. Those days, most crops were grown in massive hydroponic complexes, there were much cleaner ways of generating similar amounts of power, and alcohol was still the substance of choice for people who wanted to drink themselves to death. Feeling cheated, the corporations gathered what little initial staff and equipment they had brought and left the planet.
Or would have, save for the fact that they couldn't.
You see, unbeknownst to most of its denizens, Postapocalyptia had also become a test site for a new orbital power plant. Situated at the Lagrange point between Rigel-3 and its moon, this plant would collect a mixture of solar rays, cosmic radiation and gravitic energy, then convert it into electricity by some combination of science and witchcraft (presumably). Since it was all very new and experimental, nobody really understood the math behind it, so of course it was a matter of time before something got royally fucked up. Namely, the plant blew up, creating a massive gravitational flux in the system that prevented any spaceship from entering or leaving the system, lest they be crushed like tin cans on the ocean floor. Somehow, the planet itself wasn't affected, probably because of its own big-ass gravity well, but the settlers were pretty much stranded.
And so, cut off and most likely forgotten by the rest of the world, the people of Postapocalyptia lived on. Law was in the hands of groups who had the most firepower, which initially meant the small armed security forces Gazprom and other corporations had brought with them. Gradually, these turned into something resembling a police force, but only in the larger settlements. In most parts of Postpoc, law was getting rewritten every day in the wake of the last gunfight as Vagabond bands fought hostile wildlife, bandits and each other in search of alien artifacts and riches.
Ah, yes, the Vagabonds. Such a curious occupation could have never arisen anywhere else. Part explorer, part archaeologist and part gunslinger, these reckless wanderers braved Rigel-three's deserts in search of... what? Varying greatly in temperament and motivation, often the only thing that separated these men and women from regular homeless people was that they had (or at least pretended to have) some sort of scientific interest in the alien ruins dotting the landscape. They were wild, unpredictable and often feared by "decent" folk, with tales of their exploits told at campfires and dingy bars all across the planet. Of course every Postapocalyptian child wanted to become one when they grew up. People kept their distance because of the respect--
"One hundred grand?! Are you shitting me, you sumbitch? You trying to rob a man blind or what? I should take your head and mount it up as a warning! For other thieves! And make your cock into a... a wunderbaum!"
Well, maybe not out of respect.
(Music chances)
A PORTAL TO THE MULTIVERSE PRODUCTION
AN AYREONIA ROLEPLAY
(Short clips of the characters doing their stuff, ending in a freeze frame with text)
Ayreonia as Hiram Dupont, the Driver
Cylarn as Russell Gellar, the Ex-Soldier
Mincaldenteans as Severine Fields, the Rogue
Esternial as Ezekiel Eins, the Schizo Chef
Ultramania as Thomas Wayne Jr., the Creepy Guy
Jessjohnesik as Anna Brand, the Hot Doctor, and her BFF Dahl
Bering as Michael Dave, the Scientist
Pan Asian Amercian Coalition as Elsha Johanshen, the Prodigy
Transoxthraxia as Furia Madog, the Psycho
...and Lucy as herself!
(shot to Lucy and the gang speeding through the desert, with some of the people sitting on the turret, passing a bottle between them, camera pans as the tank rides into the sunset. Just as the screen is about to go black, a burst of gunfire can be heard, followed by manic laughter)
POSTAPOCALYPTIA
