Post by Jay on Feb 11, 2018 20:07:41 GMT
The Event
No one knew how it happened.
Almost 150 years ago, a blast came over the city of Broadripple, consuming it from its core outward. The epicenter of the blast was thought to be the laboratory of physicist Galileo Bronto, now the most despised man in the city's history. Darkness came over the city's people. All around people flew, out windows, down the streets, and vanished into the darkness that had overtaken Broadripple's skies.
Then peace.
Broadripple found itself with a new, white sky, an eternal fog. There was no sun, no clouds. The air was still, without even a breeze or gust to assist the chills on peoples' spines. Slowly, they came out of their homes to examine what had happened. A deafening silence in the atmosphere made it easy to hear shrieks and screams blocks away, the faint sounds of the river flowing.
Galileo Bronto was assumed dead. He was nowhere to be found in the smoldering ashes of his laboratory. His assistant, Jack Blackburn, was found cowering in a pub somewhere down the street.
Nowadays, this new life is normal. People can't leave the city. Surrounding it is a refracted, shimmering mirage of an open field, hills contorting and bending in the distance. If you walk toward the hills, you never return. No one knows what awaits when you step out, except that you vanish once you do.
The city is powered by the river, which seems to flow endlessly from the boundaries of Broadripple and out again on the other side, constantly cycling, constantly moving. This power grid was set up decades after the event, bringing electricity back to the city. Wires and transformers shoddily tower over the crowded streets of the overpopulated Broadripple.
There is no weather. Rather, random waves of magnetic, temporal force seem to come over the city from time to time. The lights flicker and go out before it happens. Being caught outside during one of these temporal storms have been known to completely lobotomize a person. Depending on their severity, they can turn one's brain to mush if they don't get inside.
The people of Broadripple are a new generation. This city is all they know.
They have never seen a sky. They have never seen stars. They have never felt wind or rain or snow. They have never heard thunder crackle. They've never seen nature, forests and mountains and valleys, oceans and beaches and caves.
Well, all except the children of Blackburn's Home, the only people able to escape.
The Blackburns
Jack Blackburn did not end his research in that little pub. He knew Galileo Bronto, knew what had happened to the city. Bronto had discovered a way to cross spacetime with a new device he invented. But in doing so carelessly, inherited a bug. This bug was like radiation, spreading through him, something Bronto only recognized when it was too late. It poisoned him, and caused an immense pressure in his chest after. He felt as if he were going to explode. He made his assistant Blackburn track everything he was feeling.
The sickness was written down as time sickness.
"Don't ever jump," Bronto would wheeze. "I did it too early. We weren't ready."
Bronto was not prepared for what his sickness would cause upon its apex, however. One afternoon, lying in his laboratory in Broadripple, the scientist knew something was coming.
"You need to go," he told his assistant, wheezing. "Go now!"
Fearing what was going to happen, Jack complied. He ran down the street, and was knocked to the ground as the event occured, a sonic boom of sorts knocking him from his feet. People around him flew and disappeared into the sky that ripped away above him.
Bronto was dead, thrown thousands of dimensions through spacetime and torn apart. Broadripple was consumed into another world, a niche between dimensions, a lonely, confusing place in time.
Blackburn found many of Bronto's papers intact, however, and vowed to continue the scientist's work on spacetime. He began searching for a way to cross spacetime safely, lining up different ways with the research Bronto hypothesized shortly before his death. The scientist, driven to madness by his illness, always spoke of rabbits.
"There are rabbits out there," he would say. "Everything is different, but there were always rabbits."
In Broadripple too were rabbits. Blackburn bought some from the market, and he began to prepare a bound once more. But he couldn't do it. He was the last hope for Bronto's research, the last hope for transporting the city back to their dimension. He couldn't experiment himself.
So he got children. He coaxed orphans from the street to help him out, giving them shelter in exchange for their experimentation. He sent them across dimensions with tufts of rabbit fur, and it worked. They were perfectly healthy, apart from some nausea and other side effects.
His experimentation quickly moved from his laboratory to a new, larger building. He opened Blackburn's Home for Abandoned and Troubled Children, and began taking in more of these orphans.
Though his experimentation began as a way to deliver Broadripple away from the niche in time, he feared the people's anger, the same anger they still expressed towards Bronto. Though he discovered a way to return to the dimension from which Broadripple came, Blackburn became mad with power, loathing towards the people of Broadripple. He didn't want them to take his machines away from him, and didn't want the chaos that would ensue when these machines were discovered-- but most of all, he wanted to keep them to himself. He didn't want them to condemn him as they did Bronto, and he didn't feel as if the city deserved a return. At the height of his madness, he hid the coordinates to Broadripple's dimension instead, burning all the paperwork leading to it. It died with him.
He passed his technology and his apprehensions to his child, Galileo Blackburn, and on to his grandchild and further his great-grandchild, Clancy Blackburn.
The Marbles
Marble hunting became a regular thing under Clancy Blackburn. Clancy has always been a troubled man, a mysterious man. The pointer finger on his dominant hand is missing, but he never says why.
The marbles became his recent obsession. No one knows what they are or why they are where they are, but he always knows their locations and beckons the children to retrieve them for him. They are incredibly valuable to him, those small, glowing spheres, more valuable than the children could ever realize.