Futuristic Nights (Open)

[Solosgar]

The woman landed on the rooftop, her breath misting underneath her helmet. She tilted her head upward to gaze at the stars above Mars. The stars shone down upon her, cold and unforgiving, diamonds in velvet.
A footfall. She tensed. She jerked her hand upward, confirming that the briefcase still dangled from her wrist. It was dented and blood smeared, but its silver locks remained clasped shut.
Two more minutes. Please.
"What do you think you're doing here?"
She didn't turn around. She already knew who it was.
"Surrender now, and I'll be merciful. Once I'm done cleaning your blood off of the walls of your cell, that is."
The woman clenched the briefcase tighter.
"Stealing the Guren Code? Your fate was sealed when you lifted it off that pedestal."
One hand descended to the black hilt attached to her hip.
Another step. Closer, now. Broken glass from the window crunching under a metal boot.
"We have more information to get out of you. Otherwise, you'd already be dead."
Breathe in. Breathe out. She had to maintain her calm. The pickup ship would be here any minute.
"They won't be coming for you, I'm afraid."
Her breath caught, and she felt a cold trickle of fear run down her spine.
"Shot down two minutes ago over the wastelands. We knew your plot before it even started. Stealing an exo-suit? I'll confess, that caught us unprepared. But this was inevitable. You were always the rogue, after all."
The sound of his respirator was closer now.
"Come back to me, my little bird, before I clip your wings forever."
And in that moment, she knew what she had to do.
The woman whipped around, flinging her sword at the man behind her. He dodged easily, then lunged to grab her wrist.
But she was no longer there.
She kicked into the air, her body flying.
The man's voice grew urgent. "Just what do you think you're doing?"
The woman soared into the air, her body defying what little gravity existed in the Mars atmosphere.
She swung the briefcase in front of her.
"Damn you!"
But the woman's leap began to run out of lift, her body stopped in midair...
And then she started to plummet down, down, down toward the streets and ships beneath. Her arms extended to either side as she began to fall, entering increasingly dense levels of hovercraft traffic, to where she, too, was nothing but a spot of light in a sea of darkness...

Please reply if you are interested. More details will follow.

 

[Elekta Kount]

OOoh, any room for space marines?

 

[Solosgar]

OOoh, any room for space marines?

Yes. I have many ideas for this series, but I'm looking for at least 7 people to express interest. There will be more of an explanation offered with each person who demonstrates interest.
I will assume that liking it means you're interested, southkovenz ?

Fragment 1: Escape

The effects of global warming were impossible to forsee.
That's what I tell myself, looking back on the civilization we once had. But as I walk through these ruins, is it possible to believe that?
I long to take off this helmet, to shake out my hair and breathe in the air of our ancestors. But doing so would be poisonous. The combination of sewage, radioactive waste, carbon dioxide, and other contaminants have made this place a madhouse of ways to die. We are only safe within the bunker, where everything is clean.
Scattered across the broken street are torn newspapers, with faded headlines. "SUPERSTORMS RAVAGE WORLD, IS ANYONE SAFE?" "HURRICANES STRIKE EAST COAST, KILLING THOUSANDS" "NO END IN SIGHT: GLOBAL WARMING ONLY GETTING WORSE."
They used to call this place New York. I know this because my father, as he died from radiation poisoning, told me so.
"Someday, they'll come back for us," he said, letting out a hacking cough. "Your grandfather and his friends escaped the superstorms long ago by hiding here. The ones who got on the spaceships, they told us they'd return. Someday, they'd clean up New York City. It's your duty to survive and carry on the old stories, of what this place was once like. That is why I named you Seer... You must hold the past within you. I believe in you, Seer..." And with that, he died.
When he told me that, I believed him. There was a time when every day, I would climb to the top of the ruins of the Empire State Building, and stare up at the sky, watching for the entrance of a spaceship. Within my mind, I saw them as great fiery comets that would streak down from the sky and land. People would pour out from it, arms open, welcoming us. We'd clean this Earth and build a house like my father said existed. It would be on a beach, once we filtered the broken glass from the sand. When the oceans were cleaned up, we would go swimming. And someday, we'd play in forests, forests without mutated trees, forests not affected by the nuclear fallout from the Third World War, the War of Survival. The war where some were able to leave the Earth and others had to stay, stay behind and wait.
Because they told us they'd clean up this place one day.
But were they telling the truth?
I was a boy when my father died. Now, I am an old, old man, and my knees ache and my hair falls out. My children, now adults, kindly listen to my tales of the world before, but I see them shaking their heads behind my back. And their children? They lack the respect to take me seriously. The only one who believed me was my wife, Joanne, who died two days ago.
I suppose it's time for my story to end as well.
But I want to see it one last time.
The sky from the Empire State Building.
I hike through the desolate ruins, stepping over crushed yellow cars with TAXI signs and fallen streetlamps.
I get there soon enough. One door hangs ajar, and the other has crashed to the ground entirely. I step over the second door and enter, then begin climbing stairs.
Higher and higher I go, as the stairs grow increasingly treacherous. It was eighty years ago that I last came to this spot, and the passage of time has done it little good. One of the stairs collapses behind me, but I pay it no mind. This is the last time I'll come here, anyway.
It takes me hours, but I reach the top. Or rather, the highest point. It used to be much taller, but now it is tilted and broken.
At the top, I lean back against the tilted edge of a wall. It's obvious that the stairwell originally continued to go up, but everything else is broken off.
I sit there, waiting for something, anything. Waiting for that ship to sail over the horizon.
But when it doesn't, as I know it won't, I grasp my helmet with my hands. My fumbling fingers find the switch, and I slap it, unlocking my helmet. With a tug, I yank it off.
I hold my helmet in my lap and breathe in, deeply, savoring the strange combination of scents. I wonder if my children will ever smell this, or their children? I wonder if they will keep living in that bunker, abandoned by the rest of humanity, with the products of their greenhouses as food sources. Maybe someone will come someday, but as my limbs begin to ache, I doubt it.
My head lolls back, and the world swims before me. It won't be long now.
And then I see it: a single streak of light above the horizon. A ship. It's coming for me. Coming for us.
I smile. It was always there after all. I reach out my arms, open my hands, as if to cradle it between my hands.
Escape...

 

[Mitchs98]

Consider me interested.

 

[Solosgar]

Very well. Here is another Fragment (although not as long as the last one because I have work to do).

Fragment 2: Rule
They do not question me, the soldiers who line up here every day.
They lost the reasons for questioning long ago.
Every morning is the same routine: I stand at the podium, waiting as the men and women file in through the doors to the barracks.
I amuse myself by seeing if I can count the different Classes sometimes. Their masks make spotting them child's play.
The Class 6 soldiers are the most common, with their masks shaped in a cruel grin. Their white surfaces are polished, with black mesh covering the two eyeholes and mouth slit. There are also plenty of Class 5 soldiers, who have masks that are shaped like cheerful, complacent smiles. They always seem the happiest, even if their Shoujo surgery has marred them for life.
The few Class 7 soldiers are disconcerting. They're the newest, and their faces are realistic, idealized versions of the faces they once possessed. Yet something is still off: the eyes never move, the mouths are frozen half-open, the nostrils exactly even.
I can see a few of the older Classes, but by now most of them have died in service or been terminated. That's the fate all of them face eventually: extinction as newer models roll out of the factories.
There are one or two Class 2 soldiers, their masks ornate theatrical productions. Strange lines mark them up, and the areas around their eyeholes are colored black.
A single Class 1 soldier stands in the front, maskless as all of them were. The man's face is covered in red cracks on the surface of the skin that glow with an unearthly light. His eyes have black sclera, and white irises that dart around blankly with clicking noises.
I wonder if he is the last, the only one of his kind left. His face is scarred with battle wounds, but he stands strong, even as he is enveloped by a swarm of Class 5 soldiers.
I clear my throat.
"Today, we attack the Freedom Federation's last hideout on Jupiter. Expect strong resistance. For the Order!"
"For the Order!" The cry is echoed from a thousand throats.
Is this what it means to rule? To have absolute power?
My role is little more than a figurehead at this point. Ever since the Class 5 update featured mental uplinks, the soldiers receive all of the necessary data through them. My post is an old tradition, from a time when such meetings were necessary.
Down below, I see a group of Class 6 soldiers approach the Class 1. Their masks are blue, indicating that they are from the laboratory. The Class 1 does not resist, even as they put his hands into cuffs and lead him toward a small red door to the left of the stage. The termination door.
Once, he must have been on the top of the pecking order. Even a Class 1 is far stronger than an ordinary human, after all. They were heroes, brave souls who went under the knife for their country. But as the newer Classes came out, he must have been pushed out of power, fading from an idol to a foot soldier to a single figure on a sheet of paper.
Did he feel what it was like to rule? To be in charge, to have a thousand soldiers responding to you, yet know you are but a cog in the great machine?
Rule...

 

[Solosgar]

After another person shows interest, I will post a description of the actual RP, and a short Fragment.

 

[SheepKing]

This sounds pretty cool!

 

[skulzortheskeletalsamurai]

Is there going to be robots or androids? I'm interested

 

[Solosgar]

Here is a description of what the RP will actually be like:

The year is 2162, and humanity has abandoned Earth.

Global warming began to accelerate at a drastic rate, and by 2032, Earth was seriously polluted. Despite the best efforts of politicians to switch to clean and renewable energy, there were many who didn't believe the warnings. But by then, it was too late.

Chaos took over the world as each nation struggled to launch its best and brightest into space, to escape the superstorms that now plagued the Earth. Hot heads in the leadership positions led to atomic bombs being fired, the first since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus began World War 3, also known as the War of Survival. For almost a decade, space programs on Earth transported people as quickly as possible to settlements on Mars, Mercury, Venus-any planet, really. Each nation had different survival tactics. The Japanese, for instance, settled on Jupiter, creating cubic housing units that rotated around the massive planet like its moons. Meanwhile, the Russians took over the moon Titan, and established underwater colony pods beneath its icy surface.

Yet for many civilizations, the most convenient option was Mars. And so it was that a large percentage of the people who escaped Earth settled there. Originally, each nation established their own headquarters on Mars, but the War of Survival had split the nations into different factions. Many of the most powerful countries formed Majora in 2044, a nation that quickly began to gain power. They crushed many smaller nations present on Mars, destroying their culture and language, forcing them to assimilate into the ever-growing nation of Majora.

However, the fighting was difficult, and victory was uncertain until the invention of the Burai. Through an extensive surgery which was dubbed "Shoujo," it was possible to create the first re-engineered super soldiers. The exact details of Shoujo remain classified information, but it is a surgery in which a person's bones are extracted and replaced with a hardened metal alloy, and their muscles are replaced with strong and flexible fibers. The side effects of this surgery included an increased appetite, bleeding and ringing in the ears, occasional paralysis, and a loss of normal features. The subject's eyes are altered so as to provide the Burai with better vision, but such a change also inexplicably causes their eyes to change colors to black sclera and white irises. The skin of Burai also becomes cracked, with red light issuing forth from the cracks within the skin. After the first Class, or edition, of Burai, they began to take pains to hide their abnormal appearance. Theatrical masks, like those used by the ancient Greeks, are standard-issue. They are unrealistic, but at least hide the monstrosity behind the mask. Also, the masks provide a degree of unity and anonymity.

The first Burai, or Class 1, were dubbed "Warriors." Created in 2049, the Warriors were much stronger than normal humans, and able to crush wood with their bare hands. It was with their abilities that Majora conquered many settlements.

However, other nations began to pour increasing amounts of money into inventing their own Burai, and abandoned their space programs, leaving millions stranded on the Earth in an apocalyptic, ruined world. In order to counter their foes, Majoran scientists developed the Class 2 Burai, or Guardians, in 2055. Their design was made more energy-efficient, and easy to produce. The original Warriors had only received operations that replaced their muscles with fibers, while the Guardians also had reinforced bones.

Many years after the Guardians rolled off the operating tables, the Class 3 Knights were invented in 2077. After countless experiments on captured soldiers, Majoran scientists had developed a procedure to fully remove bones and replace them with steel bars. Although the new Shoujo was much more painful and expensive, the results were beyond anything the other nations had. No second-hand Burai could compete with the Knights' bone structure. Before the implementation of Knights, a common anti-Burai technique was to use extreme force and crush their bones. The Knights, however, were no longer vulnerable to such attacks.

Created in 2092, the Class 4 Sentinel units were another breakthrough in Burai technology. Scientists managed to install breathing units in their bodies that enabled them to survive underwater and in space. Sentinels became the preferred units for attacking spaceships, as their small size and speed made them difficult to hit. They soared through space, with the help of thrusters built into their arms and legs. Although their appearance was much less humanoid, they were far more powerful warriors.
The Class 5 Ninjas were invented in 2110. They were the first units with Mahou, mental uplinks that enabled communication with their leaders. Their design also possessed the revolutionary Keikaku Units, arms that would fold out of the back. These arms could carry different weapons and tools, such as blowtorches and laser guns. Two of them were fused onto each Ninja. At this point, Majora's dominion spread across the whole of Mars, and onto its moons. They actively fought with many other nations, and were on the brink of conquering Venus and Mercury, where the Chinese, Koreans, Spanish, and Germans had settled.

The Class 6 Protectors were created in 2127, and are the most recent and common unit to date. With their power, Majora took over Venus and Mercury, and has begun sieging Jupiter. The Protectors feature powerful Mahou, and four Keikaku Units.

Only recently have the Class 7 Assassins come into being. Unlike the other units, their faces are far more realistic. Although their eyes don't move and their mouths are frozen, at a glance they could be mistaken for humans, hence their Assassin title. Their full specs are unknown. It was believed that Majoran scientists are working to develop a Class 8 that look perfectly human, and could be used as undercover agents, but these rumors have been debunked by leaked diagrams of exoskeleton armor that will be featured in the Class 8.

Now, Majora's dominion stretches across half of the Solar System. Their hundreds of thousands of soldiers defend them, and bring new settlements under their heel every day. Yet there are those who fight for freedom, who try to bring down Majora and stop its dictatorship.

Which side will you join? And what will you do when opportunity comes your way?

 

[skulzortheskeletalsamurai]

Mmkay so is that a no for droids and androids? Because I can settle for cyborgs.

 

[Solosgar]

There may be some robots. I am still ironing out the details, skulzortheskeletalsamurai
Also, here is a list of what the different planet settlements are like:

MERCURY:
Due to its extreme temperatures, all settlements are below ground, and their entrances are surrounded by insulated domes that don't let in the scorching heat or freezing cold. A center of Burai training and the Shoujo facilities. Owned by Majora.

VENUS:
Civilization on Venus consists of floating pods linked by a network of tube bridges. These pods circle in Venus's outer atmosphere, forming an artificial ring around the planet. An epicenter of technological development. Owned by Majora.

EARTH:
Most of the millions on Earth died within years, from radiation poisoning or in wars between the gangs that formed on the surface. The thousands who are left hide out in bunkers, rarely daring to venture to the surface. Not owned by anyone.

MARS:
The first settlement outside of Earth. The entire planet is covered in massive buildings, and large basements have been dug. Hovercar traffic is immense. There are grounded, normal buildings with highway levels 1 to 100, and there are "floaters," which are satellites normally owned by the government. There are also buildings on Phobos and Deimos. The planet itself is currently undergoing a major atmosphere boost, as Majoran scientists have begun pumping oxygen and water into the air to try and provide Mars with an Earth-like atmosphere. The air is still currently unbreathable except for right next to the atmosphere vents. The capital of the Majoran empire. Owned by Majora.

ASTEROID BELT:
Many countries have stakes in here due to the mining potential, and it is believed to be a rebel headquarters. Majoran sweeps of the belt have become more common, however, which makes it harder for enemies of Majora to hide there. Not owned by anyone (though Majora controls a great deal of it).

JUPITER:
Spaces in the gas layers are occupied by cubical units that rotate around the massive planet. Currently being sieged by Majora, but in control of the Japanese and Vietnamese. The moons of Jupiter are owned by many other groups, from resistance fighters to old countries. Owned by Japan and Vietnam (though under siege).

SATURN:
Settlements have been carved out of the ice and rocks that make up its rings. Artificial rocks and ice have been used to seal together units, making them into housing areas. Very unstable and not well-populated. Its moons, however, are host to many of the smaller European and African countries. Owned by many countries (but not Majora).

URANUS:
Pods float in the liquid-gas layers of the planet, barely needing support to keep them from sinking. Owned by Middle Eastern countries and other African countries.

NEPTUNE:
Wind turbines harness the 2,000 KPH winds and turn them into a great deal of energy, which is used to keep the many "orb cities," which are cities that are contained within massive clear orbs, floating above its surface. Owned by South American and North American countries, especially Canadians.

PLUTO:
Unknown, as Majora has yet to extend to this distance.

 

[skulzortheskeletalsamurai]

This Is cool and interesting.

 

[Solosgar]

We only need 2 more people to express interest, and the plot can begin. I already have plans for what will happen.
Also, please inform me if you prefer world-building or Fragment vignettes.

 

[skulzortheskeletalsamurai]

Whatever is easier for you.

 

[Camden]

Looks rad, and yeah, either one.

 

[Twyllvarlais]

Very interested. Solosgar

 

[Elekta Kount]

Wot, no Chinese?

 

[Solosgar]

Wot, no Chinese?

"The moons of Jupiter are owned by many other groups."
The Chinese own a large number of them, 22 to be exact, in an area known as the Red Sector.
But I didn't have time to go into specifics.
Anyway, it appears that we have 7 people. I will post the actual RP soon.

A bit of important information:
Admission will be in waves. I have plot points that I want to establish, and various things to implement. The 7 who have expressed interest will be the First Wave.
A Discord will be created at some point. Stay tuned.
If this project becomes successful enough, it may become a hosted project.
Other people-feel free to express interest. There will be a Second Wave before long.

 

[Camden]

Are we Burai or Humans? (Or up to choice)

Are we Majora agents or nah?

 

[skulzortheskeletalsamurai]

Are we Burai or Humans? (Or up to choice)

Are we Majora agents or nah?

You flagrant droidist.

 

[Solosgar]

Are we Burai or Humans? (Or up to choice)

Are we Majora agents or nah?

It is all up to choice. I will publish a character application sheet. There will be some requirements, as there are going to be 7 items that will be distributed.
The requirements are:

-1 Burai Majora soldier
-1 Burai rebellion soldier (rebellion factions will be announced)
-1 Majoran civilian who is on the fence

Once we have met those conditions, everyone else can select random other roles. Anything special, however, will have to go through me.

 

[DailyRoLord]

Interested.

 

[Camden]

Alright, sounds good!

What are the basics of other technological achievements? I.E. gravity manipulation, FTL travel, terraforming, etc.

 

[Solosgar]

Alright, sounds good!

What are the basics of other technological achievements? I.E. gravity manipulation, FTL travel, terraforming, etc.

All will be revealed when I post the RP.

 

[skulzortheskeletalsamurai]

Does each person need multiple characters.