Nap City Beats (Remnant Fluff)
Three suns glow just above the clouded horizon. The dim triad sheds halloween hues. It’s what passes for tuesday on Utnapishtim. Some people use new days. Today would be Gugalanna. Valor can’t manage it. It sounds too much like gargling mouthwash.
It’s brighter here than it was on Titan, her old home. There are lots more people, dressed in glowing neon and drinking colourful drug cocktails. They move purposelessly along bright-lit walkways and skybridges, returning home above cars that hum merrily through the thick air.
Great district walls expel a 70/30 nitrox mix, a base attempt to keep the atmosphere of Earth in place, and aether-winds astray. Purple-hued, sparkling aether coils around these walls, hanging like tentacles from rainclouds and rising like sprites from morning fog. Valor is outside those walls, among the people with no cards or credit, the ones whose destinies were not tabulated in a spreadsheet. Refugees. Rescued folk. The random few who meant to travel elsewhere, and ended up here.
Very few who lived here before. Very few who see what Valor sees.
Less crowded streets. The same clothes – fashion has been frozen for thirty years. Old streets, buried beneath new buildings. Ghosts in offices, haunting those who claim their open-office workstations. The spirits of the city seek to claim Valor’s sanity, and no cybereyes can stop the Second Sight. No matter how much silver and gold Valor uses to replace nerve and mind, the fact is the same: Her soul is branded, and she does not know its owner.
Valor clutches the mushroom hoagie she purchased from a corner store to her chest. There is something familiar about street food. The worse the better. Valor doesn’t feel right taking a meal from someone who hasn’t called her dirt. Though they don’t usually call her anything but creepy. The old war vet, from a war no one can remember. The kooky cyber-crone.
They don’t understand that she can’t control her own life.
The blink happens without warning, as it always does. The sandwich is gone. The hunger remains. The city burns. Souls spiral from shattered spires. A dark vortex fills the sky, not this sky but every sky across this universe, groaning and hungry. Names untold pour from star and stone. Survivors scream. They clutch at eyes and ears that bleed tar and venom.
Valor feels an urge; protect these people. Protect those who will become ghosts. If she can save one, even just one, then people will believe her. There will be one less ghost in the present, one less doubled soul.
A person screams, and Valor grabs them. Holds them tight. “It’s okay,” she says, over and over. “They cannot touch you. They can only scream. Do not listen. Do not listen. Do not listen.”
Valor is clutching her hoagie. People stare. Did she jump that time, or was it just a hallucination? Valor can’t be sure. All she knows is that this keeps happening, over and over, time an endless loop growing and retreating, the moment of her rebirth locked into existence.
There has to be purpose to this.
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One of the survivors of the Pulse, a Remnant may be from either the world of Science or the world of Magic. A scientist left alone on a space station for years. A nomad who believed themselves to be the world’s last giant. A goblin that has never seen the sun before today. A time-travelling cyborg that never knows when she’ll be next – Remnants are unique and strange, even feared.
For those already in Nap City or other metropolitan areas, the Pulse was apocalyptic. Monstrous transformations, energetic transmissions – literal portal storms – ripped apart the original colony and its populace. For those in Alterpishtim, the death of their world was signalled by the Pulse. Survivors of that event were dragged through into this universe, sometimes violently. Sometimes, a magical soul was dragged across without its body, creating another kind of Remnant: husks that mindlessly hunt for souls.
Confusion and misdirection are a Remnant’s bread and butter. Besides their mysterious origins and powers, they are continuously hunted for what they know – which often isn’t much. Still, the UEC and the corporations want to know what the Pulse was – and what’s coming. Remnants are like mosquitos in amber – a treasure to the right collector.
--- (My personal fav fluff from the sourcebook. Valor has a tough time -- it's difficult to maintain relationships when you don't know when you'll be next -- or where)
