L
Leodiensian
Guest
Original poster
The Last of the Generation
A story of small towns and superheroes
We called them Extras. Shorthand for "extraordinary". That was the phrase that kept cropping up in the newspapers when they started happening. Extraordinary people. They look like us, walk like us, talk like us. But when I was a five year old child, I was never televised tossing around eighteen wheeler trucks like Tonka toys.
The first Extras were born in 1985, though we didn't notice their existence until about 1990. At first it was seen as a sudden upswing in the number of child prodigies out there. When the more out-there cases started cropping up, we began to realize that something was wrong. Still, it took us a long time to get the world governments co-operating enough to properly document what was going on, to number births, map population numbers and categorize them all, to set up infrastructure that could handle their unique needs. By the time we had it all figured out, and of course we didn't know this at the time, it was the beginning of the end.
We didn't know it at the time. Extratech was hitting the market, revolutionizing the energy, military and medical sectors. Masked vigilantes straight out of the comic books were ripping apart crime-ridden inner cities or walking shirtless through gunfire in the Middle East. New Extras were cropping up in every corner of the world. Some of them fought for us, some used their powers for themselves. Crime transformed, so did the law. Scientists were trying to understand Extras at a genetic level, figure out what made them tick. It was all very distracting.
So distracting that it wasn't until 2005 that we realized no more Extras were cropping up, anywhere in the world. The last Extra had been born in 1995. And we looked for them, believe me. But that was it. Ten years of wonder-kids, a little over six hundred thousand total, who grew up and couldn't make more wonder-kids. Every Extra is infertile, for whatever reason. Maybe their mutations did it. Who knows? But we would be getting only one generation of metahumans.
Now it is 2015 and the world is turning against the Extras. Rarely overt hostility, but more that we realize they've cost us more than they gave us. Sensing that hostility and perhaps dreading their growing irrelevance, the Extras have begun to retreat from the cities that were predominately their home. They started banding together into small communes, moving en-mass out into the countryside to live in small towns. They started referring to themselves as "The Generation". Truces were made between heroes and villains as the communities grew and became safe havens. And the eyes of the outside world have turned intensely on these Havens, for fear that the Generation will turn against the world..
.......
TL;DR - slightly more grown-up X-men.
The game takes place in Glenville, Delaware, a revitalized ghost town. Glenville is located on the east bank of Red Clay Creek and on Bread-and-Cheese Island. It was abandoned after suffering severe flooding and storm damage in 1999 and then again in 2003. The government bought out homeowners in 2004 but it soon became a squatter's haven for on-the-run supercriminals, meaning worker crews refused to risk their lives carrying out planned demolition orders.
Glenville became a Haven for members of the Generation in 2010 when Victor Gehrman, formerly the high-profile hero and super-soldier Siege, settled there and began working to make it habitable again. Over time others joined, mostly of the Generation but some humans too. Now Glenville has a population in the low hundreds, fresh water and working electricity. There are murmurings that Glenville is wholly off the grid and will soon declare secession.
Maybe you live in Glenville or you just arrived from the world outside. But this is your life now. What will you do to keep it safe?
A story of small towns and superheroes
We called them Extras. Shorthand for "extraordinary". That was the phrase that kept cropping up in the newspapers when they started happening. Extraordinary people. They look like us, walk like us, talk like us. But when I was a five year old child, I was never televised tossing around eighteen wheeler trucks like Tonka toys.
The first Extras were born in 1985, though we didn't notice their existence until about 1990. At first it was seen as a sudden upswing in the number of child prodigies out there. When the more out-there cases started cropping up, we began to realize that something was wrong. Still, it took us a long time to get the world governments co-operating enough to properly document what was going on, to number births, map population numbers and categorize them all, to set up infrastructure that could handle their unique needs. By the time we had it all figured out, and of course we didn't know this at the time, it was the beginning of the end.
We didn't know it at the time. Extratech was hitting the market, revolutionizing the energy, military and medical sectors. Masked vigilantes straight out of the comic books were ripping apart crime-ridden inner cities or walking shirtless through gunfire in the Middle East. New Extras were cropping up in every corner of the world. Some of them fought for us, some used their powers for themselves. Crime transformed, so did the law. Scientists were trying to understand Extras at a genetic level, figure out what made them tick. It was all very distracting.
So distracting that it wasn't until 2005 that we realized no more Extras were cropping up, anywhere in the world. The last Extra had been born in 1995. And we looked for them, believe me. But that was it. Ten years of wonder-kids, a little over six hundred thousand total, who grew up and couldn't make more wonder-kids. Every Extra is infertile, for whatever reason. Maybe their mutations did it. Who knows? But we would be getting only one generation of metahumans.
Now it is 2015 and the world is turning against the Extras. Rarely overt hostility, but more that we realize they've cost us more than they gave us. Sensing that hostility and perhaps dreading their growing irrelevance, the Extras have begun to retreat from the cities that were predominately their home. They started banding together into small communes, moving en-mass out into the countryside to live in small towns. They started referring to themselves as "The Generation". Truces were made between heroes and villains as the communities grew and became safe havens. And the eyes of the outside world have turned intensely on these Havens, for fear that the Generation will turn against the world..
.......
TL;DR - slightly more grown-up X-men.
The game takes place in Glenville, Delaware, a revitalized ghost town. Glenville is located on the east bank of Red Clay Creek and on Bread-and-Cheese Island. It was abandoned after suffering severe flooding and storm damage in 1999 and then again in 2003. The government bought out homeowners in 2004 but it soon became a squatter's haven for on-the-run supercriminals, meaning worker crews refused to risk their lives carrying out planned demolition orders.
Glenville became a Haven for members of the Generation in 2010 when Victor Gehrman, formerly the high-profile hero and super-soldier Siege, settled there and began working to make it habitable again. Over time others joined, mostly of the Generation but some humans too. Now Glenville has a population in the low hundreds, fresh water and working electricity. There are murmurings that Glenville is wholly off the grid and will soon declare secession.
Maybe you live in Glenville or you just arrived from the world outside. But this is your life now. What will you do to keep it safe?
Extras are people born with extraordinary talents. Think X-men style mutants. They are the only known metahumans in the world. These powers range widely in terms of nature and scope, from people able to light small flames on their fingertips to Superman-esque paragons. Physical manifestations of mutation are common, making Extras stand out; they might have shocking colours of hair, feathered wings or glowing skin. There are roughly 600,000 Extras in the world and all Extras were born somewhere between 1985 and 1995. All Extras are infertile. No-one knows where the Extras came from, how their powers work, why they're infertile or why they stopped happening twenty years ago. There are many, meany theories. Extras were commonly celebrity figures due to their rarity and talents. Many pursued careers in the media or politics, while others worked in the military thanks to the tactical advantage their powers provided. Since comics existed before superhumans, many Extras who grew up on Spiderman went on to become masked vigilantes themselves. Others turned to crime, using their powers to carve out the life they wanted. They quickly became crime lords and major public menaces, unable to be challenged by normal rivals. Of course, many more Extras wanted normal lives.
Extratech is the term for super-technology created by Extras with the relevant powers. These are your teleporter belts, your freeze-guns and shrink-rays. While super-smart Extras have made great advances in real-world science, Extratech defies real science and can do "comic book" things but are much rarer and difficult to get a hold on. Specimens of Extratch appear to have some sort of connection to the Extra that created it. On the death of Judith Harkin, aka Madam Tinker, all of the amazing suits of walking mecha-armour she'd created suddenly stopped functioning. Still, a healthy black market for such items exists, both among ne'er-do-wells who intend to use them nefariously and collectors who just want something unique and special. During the late 90's and early 00's, Extratech was heavily adopted and industrialized. However, this tactic proved to be a boon short-term but injurious long-term as anything that happened to the inventors would cause widespread chaos. An amazing, impossible building would collapse on the death of the architect. Life-saving medical devices worked only as long as the doctor who created them was alive and kicking. And in general, surviving Extratech in recent years has begun to decline in power and reliability because of (or perhaps foreshadowing) the end of the age of Extras. Now most examples of Extratech only reliably work in close proximity to their makers; that building might only properly stand so long as the architect is inside of it.
