Waiting for the Fallout
Speculative fiction in the game world
A speculative fiction written in the game world, but based on photographs I took of real-world signs, as an early promotion of the game launch. Link is here but may or may not be active, so full text is below.
The fallout shelter sign is old, and those who don’t know better aren’t even sure it’s pointing to anything real. The clarification, “IN BASEMENT,” was clearly pasted on after the fact, and doesn’t help much with the sign’s credibility. What would we need it for anyway, most modern city-dwellers think, and some are too young to even remember a time when such signs hung over the populous like the distant, flashbulb promise of a mushroom cloud.
But the Awakened Ones remember.
Nobody walking the world with awakened senses can pass by this sort of sign, rare as they are nowadays, without at least a frisson. Of hunger, of hate. Of knowledge deeper than anyone should have. Many of the vampires have been around for long enough that the signs represent just one tick in a long list of historic human crises: war, famine, plague, death, the Ice Age, the fall of Rome. Oceans rise, empires fall, as the modern poet says. The Cold War provided unique opportunities, though, for feeding: paranoia has a piquant flavor, though too much leads to indigestion of the worst sort. The madness of crowds, stuffed scared into a shelter, made for easy meals, if bitter ones.
The newly awakened ones, for the most part, have shared enough memories that they, too, feel the shadow of the bomb, taste the tinny onrush of fear, and shudder, heading quickly away toward their bars and brothels and amusement parks, seeking brighter, non-canned food. Contrary to the popular mythology, most vampires get a lot more enjoyment – and nourishment – out of people who are not facing down their own deaths.
As for the werewolves, they have no use for the places. Underground bunkers, walls thick enough to keep out radiation, no sunlight or green growing things or even rocks that might once have been kissed by rain? No thanks. To the wolf-kin, these places are as close as things get to anathema: symbols of the human capacity to rampantly destroy the natural world. Passing these signs, they sniff the horror of it all, high and old and sweat-stained, and hurry on.
The mages, though. These places carry a resonance, a potent reminder, a truth that must not go unstudied. The Truth of Survival informs a great many mystical organizations, and underlies, in some way, every human endeavor from the creation of fire to the creation of the Internet. And the iconography? Five seconds’ thought will show it’s impossible mages didn’t develop it, encoding it with specialized wards and equally specialized lures, imbuing the symbol with all the terror – and associated promise of safety – that it still holds.
Only now...nobody’s sure what they’re using the shelters for. We #followthesigns, and we wait.
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