POst Conquest: the Long, Cold Awakening.

Consciousness creeps in slowly, like a guilty husband. Groaning, he lurches to his feet, blearily shaking dew and pine needles off. He looks eye out over the desolate landscape; desert, rock, mesas, dried riverbeds, more rocks, deserted internet start-ups....

“Eeeyurgh…oh, what a toot,” he mutters, taking a staggering step forward as the world revolves around him; he stops. Something is missing. He looks down and realizes with a shock his feet are bare! “Ai-yah! My sandals!” He stumbles around in a circle, as he always does when searching for something. “Where? What did I do with them?”

A room, he remembers vaguely. Lots of people. Happy people. Happy laughing drinking people. Celebrating great convention victory. “Aha!” he mutters thickly. He must have taken the shoes off to drink champagne from them, only to give up because you can’t drink champaign from a sandal. Also, drinking from a shoe is just yuck. But…where? The palazia, is deserted, windswept, lonesome.

"I need a drink", he growls, and abruptly another lack makes itself felt; he frantically searches through his gear then falls to his knees in despair. “My shaker! My chrome shaker with the chrome strainer and the chrome measuring lid! The shaker that’s been better than a brother to me! How will I fix my martinis without it?” Where could his shaker AND his sandals be? He sits and ponders the mystery.

Sometime later when a neighborhood vulture is deciding on a quick bite just to see if he twitches, he leaps up. “Volarie! Of course!” he hollers, scaring the bird. "In retrospect, it’s obvious. Some helpful spouse or something took the shaker and put it in the Volarie room with the sandals. And the Volaries, in their native friendly colorful state, probably mistook them for ritual objects".

His eyes narrow as he looks out into the harsh wilderness. “Don’t you worry my precious shoes and shaker. I will get you back. I will find whoever is responsible, and then…then there will be HELL to pay."

He checks his wallet. “I hope Hell will be happy with $2.37, because otherwise I’ll have to put it on my credit card.”

The Despair of my Steampunk Archetype:

I'm STILL not a pirate, damn it!

Your result for The Steampunk Archetype Test...

The Aetherist Bodger

27 Swashbuckling Engineer, 15 Crazy Clockwork Tinkerer, 7 Charming Noble, 33 Roguish Pirate, 31 Mechanical Fian and 67 Aetherist Bodger!

The aether carries the information, the aether is information. You are one of the few who know the ins and outs of Aether Terminals. You can access information across the Aethersphere, tapping into the Aetherpipes of anyone you want and stealing the information stored in their datatanks. Some think of you as a myth, a legend created to scare people. You are no myth or legend, you are quite real and you are currently reading the Queen’s AetherMissives.

Take The Steampunk Archetype Test at HelloQuizzy

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I define Under the Green Moon as a "Far Future Post-Technological fantasy". Since it's set 30,000 years in the future, one thing I've grappled with is the common idea of the Singularity essentially stopping history. I finally decided that rather than choosing between a Singularity or the growth-collapse cycle of civilizations, I'd have the Singularity be one cause of the growth-collapse cycle. I decided that at least three or four civilizations have grown up to the point where they have experienced Singularities,/Ascensions/Apotheosis/Whatever, transforming fair-sized chunks of the Earth before leaving for Elsewhere, and allowing the "unfortunate" people left behind to start building their own civilizations. As a result, the main effect of Singularities in this world is to leave a lot of interesting and mostly useless junk lying around. Which means I don't have to detail them all that much.

The natural question that occurred after I mentioned this idea was : Why should a Singularity civilization leave Earth? So i came up with some reasons which may or may not factor into the game:

1: Earth is paradoxically too central and important to be left to one faction, so at this time it's regarded as a combination nature preserve and farm club- any civilization that achieves Transcendence is asked to leave and clear the field for new groups. Some civilizations may resist, which has resulted in some geographic changes over the years, such as new seas.

2: For a number of civilizations, transcendence may require the resources available in space; I have actually described the solar system as a partial Dyson Swarm, though I'll leave it open (and irrelevant) as to how many of them are actually functioning. Alternatively, moving into hyperspace or whatever may make communications far more efficient. Thus, the leave.

3: Who says they're gone? Do ant's in a garden really know what humans in the house are doing? Likewise, the current native of Earth don't really notice any transcendent activities inside the scattered arcology-sized crystal monoliths scattered around the world, or in a particularly tenacious plant that has a mycelium network reaching practically everywhere, or in floating dust particles that may for the basis for what the current natives call "magic". If there's the occasional odd outbreak of auras or earthquakes, well, "strange weather we're having".