zara3447
where the wild things grow
Application (soft*) Deadline: January 5th
*please have a placeholder post of some sort up on the CS thread by Jan 5
*please have a placeholder post of some sort up on the CS thread by Jan 5
· · ─────── · · ─────── · ·
k e n o p s i a — temporary ooc
k e n o p s i a — temporary ooc
Hello!! Welcome to the temporary OOC thread. Official OOC will be on Discord, and invites will be sent out at the end of the application period (which will not be for a while).
Please ask your questions here, or in DMs! I'll also be posting answers to lore/character creation/plot relevant questions here if I get asked any in private.
· · ─────── · · ─────── · ·
conduct rules reminder
conduct rules reminder
Please be kind and respectful to all. Discriminatory, bigoted, or bullying behavior towards others will not be tolerated, and will result in immediate expulsion. This RP is LGBTQ+ friendly; all sexualities and genders are welcome. Pronouns will be respected !
We are here to have fun as a collective, so please keep that in mind!
· · ─────── · · ─────── · ·
setting lore & faqs
setting lore & faqs
A Brief Recap of the Horrible Years Pre-ISEP
— On the Nature side of things, there were quite a few problems. Tectonic volcanic activity increased, making the air nigh-unbreathable without a filtration mask. Massive ice cap melt coupled with temperature-associated thermal expansion caused sea levels to surge. Desert regions became even more arid while coastal regions experienced disastrous flooding. Natural disasters, particularly storm-based ones, abounded as the warming Arctic disrupted global wind circulation, which had particularly devastating consequences for the equatorial regions of the world.
— On the manmade side of things, humanity took those problems and said "look, Ma, we can make it worse!" Freshwater sources were lost to acid rain and ocean encroachment. Droughts and disasters ruined farmland and fisheries. Since the turn of the millennium, medical professionals have been screaming that antibiotic resistance is coming to bite us in the ass, and now: teeth, meet cheeks, ft. a whole lot of dead livestock and people. The rapidly growing scarcity of resources only made powerful countries scramble harder to hoard what they could. (Ethics? In this global economy? Who can afford that!)
— Nuclear war always feels like something of an inevitability in all those End of Times stories. Having been so unfortunately proven right in this case, what can we say except that yeah, mankind knows itself well? Every nation will point a finger at someone else for being the one to fire the first shot. The United States. Russia. China. Who started it doesn't really matter, in the end. What matters is that volleys were exchanged. Nuclear war is too devastating to be a drawn-out affair, and a collective ceasefire was negotiated before nukes could do the job of ending humanity without giving the apocalypse a chance to, but not before the significant cutdown of the global population and the crippling of major military superpowers.
— Smaller scale disputes and territory/resource wars had been occurring on and off everywhere for decades, but it went officially Big and Nuclear about ten years prior to the date your characters were frozen. Exchange of nuclear volleys didn't last long at all, maybe a month total between the first and last shot was fired.
— In a way, nuclear war was a good thing. If you squint really, really hard. It leveled the international playing field in terms of power, made those global superpowers more willing to listen, to negotiate, to cooperate with the littler guys. This allowed for the International Space Evacuation Project to form as it did. And the rest, as they say, is history,
— The nuclear war was short, but the messy fallout took a while to clear, international politics and peace treaties wise. ISEP was formed on the heels of that, about nine years prior to your freeze date.
Cryosleep? How'd That Work?
— Freezing all those people takes time and resources to do, so the Cryo Phase was a sort of staggered release/rollout process. Each region did it a little differently depending on the country's government, and how obvious it was that the rich and powerful were going to be getting off on the earlier waves of Ark Ships. For a country like Australia, the resources-to-people ratio was sufficient to ensure a decent number of open spots on the earlier ones for common citizens. These spots were application based, though the public tagline was that Cryoshed assignment date was an equal chance lottery. They'd have space for everyone, of course, by the end, with the only difference being how early a slot you managed to pull.
— Everyone in a Cryoshed would have been put on the same ship. In Australia, you would have submitted an application with a preference listed for how early or late in the rollout you'd like to be, but alas, once you get your assigned date and batch, that's simply final. You get what you get.
— Timeline wise, people began to be frozen far before Ark Ship construction finished. Cryosheds served as human/Cryopod storage warehouses basically, until they could be mass loaded onto available Ark Ships. This particular Cryoshed in Otway was one of the earlier scheduled ones, so at the time that your characters were put to sleep, the current ISEP status was that Ark Ship construction was on its way, and you all would wake up on the ship as it arrived at the habitable new planets.
— How the Cryo stuff actually happened, specifically, is that you would have gone to your assigned Cryoshed on your assigned date, and been led to one of the hundred or so Cryopods lining the walls. There's a footlocker (think military style) built into the base of each tank unit for your belongings. Tests and calibrations were done by the laboratory team, a nanobot infused cryoprotectant solution was injected into you intravenously, your skin was slathered with a protective gel, and then you stepped into the chamber to be frozen into Cryostasis.
— The time slots would have been scheduled like surgery, so you didn't wait in line really, you showed up at your time slot. If you'd arrived early, maybe you would have met a couple of the people scheduled ahead of you in the day, but there wasn't a real waiting in line situation. You could have seen the sleeping faces of the people in tanks preceding yours, maybe, if you'd cared to look, but odds are that you don't recognize anyone else in the room waking up with you.
— Your characters in this Cryoshed specifically were frozen about a year into the Cryo Phase rollout.
Security and ISEP
— The superstructure of ISEP's security division was national military based, with additional manpower supplied by private contractors and companies. High security areas such as the innermost labs were guarded by high level state soldiers exclusively, but regular assignments—while organized by the government and overseen by military officials—were often contracted out to various organizations. No private companies had any true Decision Power, but the government sublet people to make up the manpower numbers.
— Cryoshed security teams were organized with the head of security being an actual Army Officer, but the rest of the group was likely composed of both private contractors and soldiers.
— Though a significant bulk of cryostasis would have been happening aboard the Ark Ships for the lab scientists, ship launch crew, and security (the ships would be carrying the necessary equipment of course and there's little need to worry about sabotage after everyone's asleep aboard), a lot of military personnel would have been frozen pre-launch as well. As more and more of the populace got frozen on Earth, they proportionally whittled down the security arm as well.
Society in the Decades Before the End (aka. Capitalism, Babey!)
— As one RPN user so eloquently put in my DMs, society in the decades prior to the end of the world could be summarized as a hypercapitalist hellscape. Huge wealth gaps and quality of life disparities, extremely competitive job markets and insanely high living costs, the upper class hoarding more resources than they need and the middle to lower class working three jobs at sixteen to try and earn enough to live on. Think MacDonald's minimum wage, think Amazon worker conditions where people are dropping in the middle of a shift from dehydration, think factory sweatshops but not just in third world countries anymore, as everything becomes industrialized and commercialized.
— With the end stage capitalism mindset, the arts necessarily became somewhat obsolete. Few people had the time to hand-weave a basket or stitch a dress when life was so busy and living was so demanding, and there's a machine in a factory doing it all at a fraction of the effort and cost. Education in the arts became something of a mark of status. You're not gonna be learning an instrument or how to paint or make pottery unless your family is rich enough to blow the money and time on picking it up, because odds are you are not going to be part of the most talented and lucky 0.001% who can manage to make a real career out of it.
— There was almost a bit of a revision back to feudal society, where rich families acted as patrons/backers for those select few lucky artists, and having wealthy and influential backers was just about the only way to make it to the top of the pyramid.
The Trans Experience™
— The basis of HRT/gender-affirming surgery remained the same, with very advanced technology (ex. permanent E/T hormonal regulation implants, fancy surgeries that allow a MTF individual to have a fully functional uterus, etc) being reserved for those who could pay for it. Capitalism always means wealth gap, so the average trans individual in most countries wouldn't have access to anything too different from what we have now (ex. they'd be relying on periodical HRT doses that they pay for themselves).
— Societal attitudes would have gotten more accepting in general, globally, about trans people and individual gender expression, but the downside of that is that it's, again, linked to capitalism. It's Big Pharma going "sure, we don't care what you want to identify as. You wanna buy E? Hell yeah sister, come buy some" as profit becomes God, with little regard for doing what's best for the people themselves.
— (Interjecting here with a real life Not-So-Fun Fact: did you know that many major pharmaceutical companies have closed down their antibiotics research and development branches? Because it's just not as profitable to make a one-dose medicine that someone takes and gets better on, versus something like a statin that a consumer will have to take for life.) So could biotech and biomedical advances come up with affordable long term solutions for the general public? Sure! But that just wouldn't make them as much money as an individual paying for suppressants and supplements for life would ( :
· · ─────── · · ─────── · ·
Links to the Interest Check and Application Thread
Links to the Interest Check and Application Thread
Last edited:
and yess there can definitely be plot shenanigans with mom's Cryopod c; )
I'll take a look at the forms tomorrow when I have more time, and I'll react to your posts to let you know there's no information missing!
