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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 19, 2018 0:50:26 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Loonies article directory.MYSTERY & INTRIGUELegend and myth are popular pastimes in Looney bunkers, but are seen as little more than sources of entertainment. Thanks much to their more readily-available histories and better record-keeping, tall tales are rarely considered better than fiction. Outside the bunkers, however, many mythological accounts have emerged to explain the Loonies' origins and supposed purpose. Many survive as oral traditions, isolated purely to the towns they were invented in, and many more have gone on to be circulated in story books and other media. This is an open topic.
If you'd like to invent a myth about the Loonies, feel free to post it here! Since this is fiction within fiction, the sky's the limit. Go nuts!
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 19, 2018 0:51:46 GMT -5
THE GODSONS
Of the various tales surrounding the Loonies, one of the most popular is their depiction as the Godsons - literally, the children of an unnamed god. According to the story, the Loonies were, at a time, the last inhabitants of a dying Earth. The following is a rough summary of the Godsons legend with its most popular elements.
They were spared from famine and debasement by a great power, one that swept away the Earth's troubles into the sky and wrapped them as the Shield of Torment to protect the planet. Below, in the ravaged wasteland left behind, paradise bloomed again. The last of mankind were then rechristened as the Godsons, and catapulted from the Age of Despair into the Age of Bounty.
For a time, there was peace. The Godsons lived in endless prosperity. Hardship had been forgotten. Cities of glass and stone flourished across the planet. The Earth healed more and more with each day as the great power labored to restore it. In doing so, the Earth was transformed, reshaped into something new and young. For years, the power toiled, working without need and without recompense. It worked purely for the selfless betterment of humanity as its adopted children, with love and passion for every man and woman of the planet.
One day, unexplained, the power grew silent. The Godsons reached out, only to find nothing. They looked past their aegis to find an empty cosmos, devoid of light. They attempted to leave Earth to search on their own, only to find that the shield that sheltered them also imprisoned them. Fear and dread overtook humanity as they sought answers. Without their savior, the Godsons fell into an age of decay, where old hatreds renewed and vile passions ignited once more. The Age of Hate loomed and threatened another great fall for mankind.
As their struggles reached their peak, the brightest of the Godsons gathered together. A plan had formed to seek out their caretaker. It was as simple as it was audacious; if mankind could not escape the new Earth, they would take it with them. The research and labor invested into the project of moving the planet was considerable. It halted the downward slide of the Godsons and put their passions towards a noble purpose. Centuries of work saw the Earth changed again, reshaped at the hands of mankind. Precisely a millennium after the power's disappearance, the planet was finally deemed a worthy vessel for the search. With its first launch, the Age of Yearning was upon humanity.
The Earth wandered the stars in search of its protector, with the Godsons at the helm. Millennia passed by without success. To sustain themselves, the Godsons built upon the Earth. They grew the planet with their own works, acting in homage of their guardian. The Earth swelled as it travelled, as cities stacked upon cities and the engine powering the planet grew beneath them. The shield that had protected the Godsons grew with it, but it strained to cover the planet. By the sixth millennium, a great rift formed in the shield. It was the beginning of the Age of the Sun.
The rift was feared as the end. Without the power that forged it, the Godsons believed it to be a sign of the apocalypse. Instead, it was something else altogether. Descending through the rift were the Sun's Children, a people who had been touched - and abandoned - by the same power that saved mankind. Their story was no different; spared, then left alone, they sought out the great being that had saved them. They left their home, only to lose their way among the stars. The Godsons welcomed them to their cause as kindred. The Sun's Children settled in floating cities, clustered about the rift they had fallen through.
Over time, more of those touched by the power passed through the rift. Each of their stories aligned. Some were not as forgiving as the Godsons or the Sun's Children. They had grown bitter and resentful over their abandonment. They preached of the quest to find the great being as a hunt, a search for retribution. Division grew as more arrived with the same passions that had nearly destroyed mankind. By the tenth millennium, war broke out once more on Earth. Catastrophe struck as the Earth's engine was sabotaged. The quest halted. The Earth was still. The Age of Darkness began.
The war ended with a retreat into the lower levels of the Earth, into the dungeons and under-cities. The survivors there worked desperately to restart the engine in the core of the planet. All the while, they continued their struggles, bickering and clashing with anyone outside their families. Entire peoples were wiped out by spite and dissent. Some descended into darker depravity and embraced death as the only truth of life. United as the Red Hunters, they claimed the surface. Those who remained above were subjugated, broken, and changed. Monsters ruled above, while those still faithful were pushed further and further towards the core.
It was during the Age of Darkness that the power returned. It found a dead world, dominated by the black-hearted. The Shield of Torment lay in shambles and ruins sprawled across the engorged Earth. In finding its children broken, the great being was left stricken with grief. It worked over the planet, as it had in the beginning, and reshaped its cities and machines into tombs. The Earth swallowed up its dead in a mournful funeral for the lost and damned. The Red Hunters were crushed as the world grew and pressed them against the Shield of Torment.
To seal the rift, the great being encased the Shield of Torment inside a new, pristine world, a shell surrounding the old. It worked furiously to spare those few noble survivors by returning them to paradise. As its labors reached their conclusion, it saw the great engine in the center of the Earth. With heartbroken fervor, it slipped beyond the rift in the Shield and found its way to the center of the planet. There, it remained. It merged with the great engine for a final purpose; to use its power and memories to resurrect the lost and return them to the world it had created for them. With the great power's interment, the Age of Darkness ended and finally gave way to the present-day Age of Oblivion.
The few leftover could no longer recall their struggles, nor the name of the world they lived upon. In many ways, it could no longer be justly called Earth. In time, they lost themselves and became new peoples. Only the Loonies remain of the lost Godsons, and only the Space Loonies remain as the last of the Sun's Children. The Cult of Meat rose from the survivors of the Red Hunters, their crimson domains fuelled by the horrors that escaped the Shield of Torment. Set continues to wander, as the great power in its core writhes in anguish at the center of the great engine.
This legend encompasses a great deal of historical facts and conjecture. Variations on it are countless in number. Common modifications include the replacement of the "great power" with that of "the traveller". Some split the power - or traveller - into multiple entities or persons, typically ranging from two to four. Names and concepts of the story vary widely, but frequently center on the same overarching plot. The great power and the great engine are elements that are rarely excluded. Derivations of this central myth are commonplace and the Godsons story is, itself, a culmination of other, simpler legends.
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Post by Insano-Man on Oct 17, 2018 19:56:08 GMT -5
THE MINER'S TABBY
Looney miners are no stranger to ghosts. They put up with spooky noises, rogue AIs, creepy monsters, and spectral horrors on a daily basis. For most of them, they do what Loonies do best. They chase them off with shooting, yelling, and a collapsed tunnel or five. For one very special ghost, they treat it with a townie's sense of superstitious camaraderie. Deep down in the depths of Erf, about half of Looney miners on the planet have a special little companion in the dark; the Miner's Tabby.
The boys and girls in orange pay homage to a phantasmal cat they see as a ghostly guide to Set's underground. Tradition says that the Miner's Tabby leaves dead rats and vermin in places that are dangerous. The more exposed and messy the kill is, the more things might go wrong. It meows near the bunker's entrance, welcoming lost miners back home. It purrs beside precious mineral deposits, yowls over near underground lakes, and hisses whenever there's something wicked afoot. It plays games by chasing boots and slapping ankles, turning heads around at random - keeping the rear and flanks at their duties. To the miners who believe, it's a friendly ghost with their best interests in mind.
To the ones who don't, it's just funny noises and falling rocks. Science has tried long and hard to explain it all away. Mostly, it focuses on swapping out the tabby for logic. Small critters tend to suffocate or die of poisoning faster than a Looney in a full breathing mask - like canaries of yore, pointing out gas pockets. Meows are straining steel in the base's halls, or working equipment near the industrial section - which is usually close by to the mining caverns. Purrs are windflow or structural stress on readily-accessible resources. Yowls are water flow from lakes and rivers, going from roars to cat noises with all the complicated acoustics of Set's underground. Hisses are just hisses - just not from cats.
The main sources of conflict are the occasional reports of miners encountering the mythical tabby during digs and tunnel sweeps. They've reported seeing its silhouette, finding it lurking at the edge of flashlights, and glinting its eyes in the darkness. Some even claim they were close enough to give it a quick rub on the cheeks before it went back to its duties. The common component of most encounters is the MASTER network. Miners who've been shipped around on the network, whether long in the past or just yesterday, are about ten times as likely to report an encounter. Regular MASTER network travel heightens the likelihood. Research into the subject has tried to explain it away as jump sickness or reassembly glitches, but most don't buy it.
Despite it all, most bunkers see it as a harmless superstition; Looney miners only hold to it when it doesn't run face-first into reason. The Miner's Tabby persists and pervades, from the Chambers of Myth right on up to asteroid bunkers in the Scuttler Slice. Tabby cats feature regularly on miner badges and unit art. Miners working in networks or Looney-rich territories like to play with the colors to make them stand out. For some, the Miner's Tabby is even officially recognized as an acting sergeant, charged directly with subterranean security.
For most people, the Loonies' ghost cat isn't much more than a story. The tale goes that a Looney bunker, deep down in the Stone Layer, found a tabby cat wandering around in their mining tunnels. For most bunkers, they would've ignored it. It was mangy and starved half to death, eaten up with cave fleas and busted on a hind leg. For a bunker that deep into Set, that far from the surface, it was a miracle. For once, the miners said, something wasn't trying to eat them down there. They adopted it and cleaned it off right away. It was a windfall for morale; a peppy, fuzzy mascot that kept the back door free of rats - and it wasn't a little crab monster, to boot.
Some time later, the Loonies knocked down a cave. The goal was to bottle up a horde of horrors they'd accidentally let loose on an exploratory dig. For the most part, the operation was a success. The monsters were locked down. The screaming in the caves stopped up. What no one saw in the explosion was a cave-in not far from the mining caverns' entrance. The tremors sent out from the demolition work had knocked down a few supports and a cave roof. Deep in the rubble was a little monster - with a tunnel rat's tail sticking out of one corner of its mouth. The little tabby was trapped. No one knew it had been caught in there. With no one out looking for it, the animal ran out of air and slipped into darkness.
The miners didn't report their star pet as missing. They never knew it'd died. People noticed the cat had stopped slipping in for rat juice pick-me-ups, but something odd was going on down in the tunnels. Little rodent bodies were still turning up. Little fang marks were still being found in tiny monsters' necks. Every once in a while, a mining team reported hearing meowing, yowling, or hissing in the distance. They'd all assumed the tabby was just having fun out there, taking its fill on cave mice. It wasn't six years later that a dig team uncovered a familiar skeleton - and came back saying they'd heard purring inside the walls.
Even after the skull was identified and most of the base mourned the loss, the miners held on. They didn't grieve for a second. Each of their teams heard the same noises in deeper tunnels; a cat happy, hungry, or angry. They started to learn the same signs people know today; stay clear of the bodies, never ignore the noises. The rest of the base thought they'd lost their minds. Helmet logs turned up nothing. Even then, psychological evaluations came up clean. The miners held on. Their little buddy had never died. He'd just found a way to up his game.
The details of the story change up between facilities. Sometimes, the bunker is up on the surface, with the cat coming up from the Chambers of Myth. Sometimes, the cat's a dog. Sometimes, it's a ferret. Sometimes, the cat never dies, and vanishes into the underground with its spirit left behind. Miner tradition is to invent a new spin on the myth for each bunker, to help keep up the art of storytelling, but most stick to the classic. For story-minded townies and travellers, the legend's a precious commodity. Some even claim to have run into the little phantom themselves - with tales a few miles taller than Looney sources.
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