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In FD 2049, leading quantum scientist Dr. Delores Nordstrom announced that she and her team at the Xobinom University of Time and Space would be receiving funding from the government and military to help their research into wormhole technology for transporting soldiers, resources, and assets across long distances in a matter of moments. Nordstrom and her team had already sunk nearly four years into the project, when an archeological dig in the old ruins around the Zemeful capital of Zeme’kun attracted their attention. For decades, Dr. Nordstrom had been studying the ancient Agar - the ancient prehistoric people who came long before the modern Agaradorans - and funding digs in their ruins with her own money. Both her wives had left her as the tiefling’s ambition pushed her further and further into academic squallor. Most ruins turned up fractured keystones, things that would take years to reassemble.
But this dig was different. Finally, something remarkable was found - a centrifugal keystone that could activate a radial gate. These radial gates were said to be able to allow the old Agar to travel across vast distances in a single step, using the energy of the planes to act as cosmic tunnels. Dr. Nordstrom knew this was the key, and with the help of the Xobinom military, Swiftly, she and the military requisitioned the dig’s findings, paying off the workers and telling them to remain silent - bringing it all to her lab in the mountains of Xobinom. However, one of her assistants - a young linguist named Ana Suliman - attempted to warn Nordstrom that there had been a massive mistranslation, and that “distances” meant “dimensions” in the Agar language. Unphased, Nordstrom pushed on, unveiling the prototype Nordgate on Radiant Day FD 2050. Everything had gone wrong, just as Ana had warned, and Nordstrom could only watch as her greatest creation was the undoing of the modern world. Planar chaos ripped across Agarador in hours, and then the true fall of the continent began. Within each of the eight regions of Agarador, at the labs where Nordstrom had sent the other keystones, massive portals opened into the planes of the Dream, and massive elementals and their forces pushed through. For it had been so long in their memory since the Agar had forged treaties and made agreements with the Elemental Primarchs that all the elementals knew was anger and rage. Their peaceful slumber had been interrupted, and they were wroth. Cities fell and crumbled like children’s building blocks, landscapes were melted and reformed like clay, and rivers and lakes broke their banks. Massive windstorms ripped across the plains, snowstorms and ash storms and fog that lasted for months blew constantly, and mudslides coated hundreds of miles. The world of Agarador lay in cataclysmic ruin, thanks to one individual’s hubris. FD 2050 soon faded, and the lightens flew by as mortalkind slunk into hidden valleys, deep bunkers, old city undergrounds - anywhere where they could hide from the elementals. Modern civilization had nothing to combat the primordial magics of the past, and given that no one truly recalled the knowledge or wisdom of the Agar, the only solution was to hide and survive as long as they could. Cities were absorbed into great forests, residential neighborhoods into rolling steppes, and huge power plants became magical fonts. |
Ancestries Concepts from Ivy Pond
Art by Laura Renfrew
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Concept Art by Rachel Marten
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