The Alphaville Herald

Second Life Back Stories: The City of Lost Angels

by Alphaville Herald on 29/03/07 at 5:58 pm

[All the fanfare about Second Life and virtual worlds more generally has to do with the builds and the things you can capture with Fraps and screenshots. But in my view that isn't where the action is. The builds and textures and skins and clothes are just eye candy designed to facilitate the creation of in-world narratives and histories. But those histories are being lost and the content is evaporating into the aether. Or are they? While groups and guilds record their histories, we we seldom get to see them and share in them. I thought it would be a virtual public service to begin publishing more second life RP back stories. Today we begin with the back story to The City of Lost Angels. Screenshots are mine. --Uri]

The End of the Beginning: The Story of the City of Lost Angel’s

by Suzanna Soyinka
©2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 – Angel’s Respite

The conceit of the human race has always been its most curious aspect. It was the early part of the 21st Century, a century that had been much lauded in fiction and fantasy alike to be the next great Golden Age of humanity where all the ills of the world would be erased by technology and all of mankind would finally be working together for the greater good.

Writers though, are often idealists. The 21st Century came, and the technology came with it. But instead of saving the world, it was compartmentalized and corporatized, copyrighted, registered, trademarked and patented, and turned into the chains of the system that bound the whole world into dependence upon it. Much of the world fell under this new technology based domination without even a single protest, but some of humanity resisted, some turning to logic, others to activism, but many turned to religion.

Religion, always a major facet of human existence, came into prominence again in the late 20th and early 21st Century through the unconscious rebellion of mankind towards the vastly changing world of the new age. The old establishments of Western and Eastern theology, and the spiritual safe zones they had always represented, standing between humanity and the forces of evil, were politicized and refocused to try to stop the changes coming to the world.

Fundamentalism rose up in the world like an uncontrollable fire. Wars and rumors of wars, terrorism, biological attacks, political pogroms and propaganda became the tools of the nations of the world. The differing idealisms fighting each other for dominance in a world that had gone far beyond the control of any of them.

The Old United States, in its pursuance of fundamentalist policy world wide, eventually overextended itself, bogged down economically under the weight of multiple wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela, it became a super power in name only. U.S. currency became worthless on the international market, triggering major economic depressions world wide. Just as the Golden Age was supposed to dawn, it seemed that humanity was truly entering the next Dark Age.

The people of the Old United States eventually lost faith in their governments ability to recover from its entrenched warfare and economic ruin, and did the only thing that was left to them to do. Anarchy and rebellion broke out all over the country. Plunging an already dark period of the nation into even darker times. The federal government had no resources to call on to stop it, having committed nearly all its monetary resources and ninety percent of its military forces to its operations overseas, The White House put out an order to the state police forces to quell the rebellions, but met with little success as the state level law enforcement agencies had even less resources available than federal agencies had and the police on the streets knew, in the end, where their loyalties truly were and much of them sided with the rebels themselves.

It was during the revolution within the United States that odd reports began cropping up, people coming up missing, bodies being found drained of all their blood or horribly mutilated, strange cases of what appeared to be spontaneous combustion and of people apparently killed with brutal biological weapons that immolated and melted the flesh and organs from their bones. Much of this was originally written off as factions using unknown weaponry, possibly stolen from top secret federal labs, but that was not the case, the monsters of myth and legend, that had always carefully survived quietly under the surface of human society had thrown aside the cloak of secrecy that had hidden them for so long, and were now starting to openly show themselves in the new darkness that mankind had created.

Years of chaos ensued, with many pitched battles in major cities all over the country. The Battle of Seattle, the Chicago Massacres, the Battle of New York, all of them sad and dark periods in the history of a once great nation, but none of them as dark and chaotic as the Battle for Los Angeles.

It was in Los Angeles that the first vampire Coven openly rose to power among the battling factions of the city. Casting aside centuries of co-existence with humanity itself, the vampires of the city came together under the elder leadership of Suzanna Soyinka, an ancient vampiress.

The Elder, Born originally in the 11th Century in Novgorod, Russia, was turned by a vampire of ancient descent that was currently ensconced in the Byzantine Church as a Greek Orthodox Arch Bishop, at the age of 30, and lived the next two centuries in Pskov as a vampiress, living amongst the populace and widely feared by the superstitious as a witch or demoness. Until 1238, when she fled the Mongol invasion of the Kievan state in the 13th Century, and traveled to Rhoda, Spain, where she lived quietly among the populace for nearly 600 years until immigrating to the United States under the guise of an expatriate member of the Spanish Royal Family, just after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that began World War I. It was never investigated if she was involved in the assassination in some way.

After establishing herself in the United States, Suzanna lived primarily in New York City, living a quiet but opulent lifestyle at the top of the Rockefeller Tower Center, while investing her rather substantial wealth in the pursuits of well known business tycoons of the time.

During the aftermath of WWII, Suzanna moved to West Coast, to the growing cultural center of Los Angeles where she met with other vampires of the area and eventually, after a few decades of establishing her dominance, formed the first Coven of vampires in the city. They did very well in the growing prominence of the city as their work guiding the creativity within the newly established industry of entertainment in Hollywood did a great deal for not only making them a lot of money, but also advanced their agenda of ensuring humans knew about vampires, but continued to believe that they didn’t exist.

In the chaotic beginnings of the 21st Century, after the final deaths of several elder vampires in the pitched fighting between the rebels and the police and the military remnants and the gangs of Los Angeles, Suzanna finally rallied the Coven together to fight as its own force in the struggle for power and control of the city. The vampires were quite simply unstoppable. Human forces were not equipped to deal with them, gangs were simply torn to shreds and left hanging from the ceiling in pieces in their safe houses by vampire strike forces. Police and military forces were subverted and turned or killed, over time, the vampires began to hammer something close to a brutal and iron fisted order out of the chaos that had been tearing the city apart.

During these fights, challenges to their dominance that were not human in origin started becoming apparent. Vampires and their thralls alike were being occasionally found, mutilated and torn to shreds in a way that could only be attributed to one kind of being, the Lycans, the age old nemesis of the vampire in myth and the silver screen, were also somewhere in the city brutally asserting their physical strengths against any that got in their way.

Humanity lost hope entirely. After nearly three decades of war, rebellion, and now monsters among them all. They fell back into a primitive, almost tribal state amongst the buildings and cities of their dominance in the world. Gangs and syndicates formed. Crime families and mafias took what territory they could and worked to attempt to bring the humans under their own control to attempt to survive in this brutal new world. The world of man was bleak and hopeless, a shadow of its former greatness, still in possession of much of its previous technology but unable to fully reproduce any of it, mankind, through religion, once again looked to heaven for release, and learned the harsh meaning of why its said “Be careful what you wish for.”

In the summer of 2032, after it already seemed the human race was in its darkest hour, the Armageddon of religious prophecy began. The Earth itself, passing through the tail of a massive comet named Wormwood, was enshrouded in several months of near total darkness and burning hydrocarbon fire and huge cometary fragments cascaded through the sky, blasting the cities and the landscapes of the world and setting the them afire again. In the chaos that ensued, the first gates from Hell opened and the demons poured through ravenously, killing humans and immortals without care or preference, and the wars began again with all the factions fighting each other and the demons on all sides.

During the onslaught, a great trump was sounded, and the skies caught aflame from horizon to horizon, and down from heaven came the Angels of God, bearing the flaming swords of justice and riding velocipedes into battle…flying through the skies with holy vengence, they fell upon the demons, fighting them in a timeless battle between good and evil on the very streets of Earth itself.

Humanity raised its hands in supplication, crying out to be saved by the angels, taken up to heaven and saved by the Rapture, but the Angels just passed them by, the fight between God and Lucifer having absolutely nothing to do with humans after all.

And now we stand in the thousand years of war, the world is a very different place, humans and vampires and lycans and demons and angels and nekos and supernatural beings all fight for the future they want to make happen, in the Pacifica territory of the Confederated Republic of North America, completely cut off in contact from the Central Badlands and the Atlantica Territory, in the city now known only as Lost Angel’s.

How the story ends, will be told by those that live in these times…in the City of Lost Angels.