Smog (Quantum 6) [GURPS 4e]

Blame Secret World Legends, honestly.  Game dropped this week.

Smog (Quantum 6) – Google Docs

Smog (Quantum 6)

 

This hell world is the perfect place to put prisoners who you don’t want escaping, don’t want plotting, and don’t want aging, either.  There’s something about the timeline’s atmosphere that puts most hominid species into suspended animation: whatever it is, the stuff doesn’t seem to cause any lasting harm.  Both Homeline and Centrum thus both use Smog as a convenient dumping ground for particularly troublemaking individuals who need to be put on ice for a little while.  Yes, ‘both.’  Infinity has a facility on the Northern Hemisphere, Interworld runs one on the Southern, and nobody says anything official.

 

Well, nobody said anything up until last month.  That’s when they found what might be a third holding facility.  And nobody knows who put it there.

Smog, 2004

 

Current Affairs

A mysterious prison facility on a mysterious prison planet is making a lot of people in two timelines lose a lot of sleep.

 

Divergence Point

1,000,000,000 BC(?). Something in the atmosphere went weird then?

 

Major Civilizations

Western (sorta)

 

Great Powers

Infinity, Centrum

 

Worldline Data

TL: 9

Quantum: 6

Mana Level: None

Centrum Zone: Red

Infinity Level: Z1

 

Life on Smog never really developed past the plant/insect stage. The atmosphere is oxygen rich, but more importantly there’s a weird gas in the atmosphere that knocks out anything more developed than, say, a frog.  The same gas makes it hard to see more than ten feet in any direction; hence, the name for the timeline.  Also: the same gas apparently interferes with parachronic detection equipment.  Neither Infinity nor Centrum realized that until quite recently, and they were not happy to have this particular revelation.

 

Outworld Involvement

 

If you’re wondering why Infinity and Centrum are using the same timeline to host their most problematical prisoners, the answer’s simple: neither timeline realized the other was there until well after their respective facilities were up and running.  Rather than start a particularly bizarre and surreal war, the two timelines decided to instead tacitly avoid each other. Thankfully, the two facilities (Infinity’s is located at Manhattan: Interworld’s at the approximate location of Sydney) are sufficiently far apart that avoidance was easy. Or at least not intolerably difficult.

 

This third facility (located on Sicily) has however made a tense but workable situation into a more tense, and much more unstable, one.  The Sicily facility is long abandoned, has no immediately obvious ‘tenants,’ and may in fact be a total ruin: then again, it may not be any of those things.  Both Infinity and Centrum would love to find out, but each is stymied by the other.  

 

Worse, the same complications about actually starting a war on Smog apply.  The nature of the atmosphere makes fighting tricky: you don’t have to kill the enemy.  You just have to make him get a lungful of air, then drag his body off.  It’s just too easy to capture people with a head full of secrets on this alternate, which is probably why the war hasn’t started yet…

 

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