Most of you have already read this in my journal, but it's so hard to read in the journal formatting so I decided to post it as a submission.

Comments and input are greatly appreciated, so don't be shy. =P

All characters, names and other notable details are © Steve Hayes. Please ask if you wish to use any of my characters and ideas in your artwork.

---

Well... I guess it's time. This is a big read, but I believe some of you might enjoy it. This is more or less for me to put in writing for the first time so I don't have to breathlessly explain it to people in a random-fashion.

Time to explain my character, Solàagstran and his co-characters and where exactly I'm going with him. I don't really care if anyone pays particular attention to this. This is a story which is meant more as an outlet for my imagination and honing my writing/drawing/anything-related skills and you guys can choose to follow it if you want. I personally like the idea and I'm really excited to see where I can go with it.

Now I know everyone has a character with backstory that they're writing into an epic novel of some sort and that's really fucking cool, I think. Only they always keep saying "I'm gonna write a story for him/her!" and they never end up doing it. Well I've been putting together the ideas for this for years, even back when Neox was the main guy in it, before I took him off the roleplay scene. I have a rough timeline and the way I want to go about writing is not in novel form. Hell no, I don't want to subject anyone to having to read a myriad of pages of my terrible writing to get the basic universe of my story.

The way I'm going to do it is I plan on jumping around the timeline a bit, make it almost like an oral-history, except nobody is really interviewing anyone, it's just bits and pieces from many people's perspectives. And it's not all going to be in writing. In fact, I'm going to try and make as much of it NOT in writing as possible. Graphic-novel-style stuff, maybe a few short-stories here and there, and I'm teaching myself how to animate in 2-D (and depending on how long this is in the making, I may even pick up some 3-D) This will be as visually pleasing as I can make it.

Anyway, so here we go...

The time is somewhere modern-day... maybe a little further in the future (2100 or something, the specific year is irrelevant at this time). Point is, civilization is roughly where it is now: technology is a big part of our existence, governing bodies have evolved somewhat (The European Union acts as its own country regarding external affairs, military, etc. and the UN collapsed after corruption chewed it out from the inside.) All that kind of shit.

Now here's where I get metaphysical for a minute. Think about all the creatures of myth and legend that coloured our history millennia ago. Dragons, minotaurs, unicorns, wizards, witches, all that stuff. Well my explanation for it is this: We live in a universe that is closely parallel to another, separated only by a thin veil of spacetime. These creatures of myth dwell in the other universe on a planet extremely similar to ours. Landmasses, oceans and seas, all of these are the same between our world and theirs. The only thing that differs are where changes have been made that did not naturally occur: terraforming, constructions, etc. And every once in a while throughout history, due to anomalies in Quantum Entanglement, beings from that world randomly appeared in our world and vice versa, leading to the records of strange creatures in our legends (as well as strange disappearances, the Bermuda Triangle being a particularly thin barrier between our world and the other world.)

So one day, the veil simply collapsed. All beings from both worlds were suddenly present in the same plane of spacetime.

And with the amalgamation of two spacetime planes, the differences between our two worlds created a catastrophic event. Humans aren't the only civilized species between the two worlds. There were other intelligent species that had their own cities placed in the same convenient locations by rivers, on shorelines, wherever the land was rich and profitable. While all the atoms of our two planets simply combined phases, the atoms of any of OUR buildings which didn't happen to agree with the atoms of THEIR buildings broke apart, causing massive explosions and all sorts of destruction where any of our cities resided in the same places theirs did.

So if you were from either side, your house, your city, just erupted into a ball of flames all around you, strange creatures were suddenly running around doing the same thing you are: panicking... what would be the first thing that came to mind?

Invasion. Both sides thought they were being invaded by the other. With no similar languages between any two species, the result was total war.

So naturally, with mass destruction of major cities across the planet, everything was chaos. Weeks passed where skirmishes broke out with humans killing mythics and mythics killing humans. (Mythics being the term that humans later called the otherworldly beings after they made the connection between them and our beasts of legend.) After a while, though, the governments of the world slowly formed a coalition and decided that this was, indeed, an invasion, and it was our duty as humans to eliminate the opposition.

And guess who thought the same.

By the time the cataclysmic first contact had begun to fade, both humans and mythics were amassing against each other. The population-loss for both sides was massive: the total population of the planet, including ALL sentient beings, is roughly 5-billion. Huge when you consider that two different worlds combined numbers and we were at 6.6-billion to start.

After time, languages were learned by both sides... some pacifist groups from an assortment of species formed, seeking peace between all creatures. These, of course, failed miserably at every turn. The cost of the First Contact was too great; it was ingrained in the minds of every species. The result was the War of No End.

Society of Advanced Science and Research. SASR. A pre-First Contact organization of the world's elite scientific minds and numerous corporate sponsors and endorsers, originally devoted to the advancement of human-interests, technology and medical-sciences. They were not their own corporation, but their work was everywhere. Before First Contact, they had made ground-breaking discoveries in nano-technology which unlocked cures for numerous diseases, found ways to change, copy and generate the genetic-code of a living creature which had multiple uses in limb-regeneration, plastic surgery (now dubbed plastic coding, since no surgery was involved anymore), and much more, and they were the developers of the Direct Dynamic Terra-Lunar Tether.

After First Contact, they were quite possibly the only organization that didn't fall into disarray. Quite the opposite. The entire labor-force of SASR was composed of passionate individuals who didn't work for money. As long as they had the resources, their research would continue, and they had STOCKPILES on the moon, where they operated a facility uknown to almost everyone on Earth. Before First Contact, the leaders of SASR kept the society in-line with the belief that they were acting entirely out of the interests of humanity, and while many of their experiments and products were controversial, nobody could argue that they didn't make a positive impact on human life.

After First-Contact though, most of the founders/co-founders had died in the cataclysm, and a new governing body rose to the top. The new leaders saw opportunity... and profit... in the war that spawned from the chaos. They began hunting for these enticing new creatures and harnessing their mysterious powers, performing horrific experiments to create weapons for either side of the war to buy while the scientific minds fed their hunger for discovery with these new assignments. SASR became a large, formidable power in the war, and they seemed to be the only ones who weren't actually fighting anyone. Seemed to be...

So now I'll explain Solàagstran and his part in all this. He's our protagonist, the guy that most of the story will follow.

He is of the species, the Surksàasna. Think of them as an evolved dragon of legend. They are mentally equal with humans, for the most part. They were the more pridominant species of their old world; their numbers were greater than any other sentient species from their side of the veil.

The Surks have their own society, very communist in structure. They had "leaders," but these were only people who organized public works and occupations and the like to streamline their culture and society. Every Surk was capable of every task required to keep their cities structured and running. For example: if a building needed renovations or repairs, their leaders would select who they thought would be best for the job to complete it, and that was only if one of the regular citizens didn't notice and take action on the situation his/herself prior to any leadership needing to get involved. They had specializations, of course, Surks who ran businesses to keep up supply-and-demand, but again, any Surk could take that position, no qualifications needed. They were a highly-advanced civilization.

Surk society also operates on a Spartan-like clan system. Males and females of a young age can choose to embark on a pilgrimage, traveling across the lands inhabited by savage creatures to small, remote villages where they train to become warriors. Each village is its own tribe, and each tribe hails to the city that its members were from, acting as the city's protectors in a time of crisis. After all, just because the Surks were the more intelligent species of their world, doesn't mean they were the ONLY intelligent species. Other creatures fought them for basic needs like food, ideal habitat locations, or just plain for fun.

Every Surk has an attunement with a certain element or a property of matter. Some Surks have an affinity for liquid, while others have an affinity for flammable materials. Some can even alter the atomic bonds of certain objects, allowing two objects to pass "through" each other. The humans call it "magic," but it's simply the fact that the Surks learned and mastered the bond between mind and matter. They still operate within the bounds of the Laws of Conservation of Matter (in which matter can neither be created nor destroyed), and each Surk has a certain specialization with a property of matter which they choose to study at a young age. Other properties can be learned, but it takes much time and practice to learn even just one. This gives them a huge advantage over humans in certain situations where Pyro Surks can cause things to spontaneously combust in a combat scenario.

The ability to alter matter comes at a price, of course. While keeping to the Laws of Conservation of Matter, they also fall under the Laws of Conservation of Energy. Large usage of their abilities tends to exhaust them if they don't rest and recharge. Surks also have their own technology based on the same ability to control matter.

Now Sol, he's an anomaly. He was never able to become attuned to any element, or property. He's a black sheep that way. He is limited only to physical abilities, which forced him to become a paragon of his species for strength and speed while training in one of the tribes. He also has a speech-impediment because of this. Surk language is about 30% inflections of the very same bond they use between themselves and matter, but between each other. Much of the Surk vocabulary has multiple meanings for each word, and while talking, they project the implied meaning to the mind of the other somewhat telepathically. Sol doesn't have this ability, so he has to painstakingly explain what he means by use of more obscure Surk words. This means he doesn't talk much to avoid the frustration.

Sol is a bastard son of a marred relationship. His mother was raped by a reject of Surk society, a male Surk who provided nothing to the city in which he lived, and he was exiled for it. His father was as mysterious as he was filth. The rape was random and it happened when Sol's mother was venturing outside of the city outskirts. As much as she hated the act, she was extremely proud of her son. Her elemental affinity was also a mystery, nobody ever saw her use it. Little did Sol, know, this combination of mystery was also the reason for his apparant lack of an affinity. It planted something deep inside him which shall become known at a later point in the story.

After First Contact, Sol rose to the top and united the Surks of what the humans called "Western Canada," amassing an army and training them in an abandoned lead mine in the Canadian Rockies which they retrofitted over the years and converted into a fortified base. Sol's name became well-known to anyone. The human governments code-named him ARES, the Greek god of war. He is ruthless, precise, and an expert tactician. He is known for leading strke-groups of no more than 5 or 6 Surks and completely cleaning-out an entire base, and leaving before a distress call can even be sent out.

Sol is fond of human languages and quickly became fluent in several of them. They allowed for him to convey meaning without having to project it telepathically, and he primarily uses it even with fellow Surks. English is a requirement if you fight alongside him.

Sol's best friend, Ràastransrr, is the only one who can fully understand him when he speaks Surk, because Ràas has the ability to work the language-bonding in reverse, and can read Sol's inflections even though Sol can't project them. Because of this, Ràas sometimes acts as Sol's translator for the Surks who don't know any of the human languages that Sol can speak.

And so there's the backstory. The main body of the story will be mostly my works uploaded here, but for anyone who read through the whole thing, I'd like to hear your input. I'm really excited to see this come to fruition someday.

Thanks for reading!

-Steve