When Tangents Attack: Hope Springs - A Land Out Of Time
Even
before everything changed, the isolated region of Hope Springs, West
Texas, was a land out of time. Isolated by a number of natural
features, and by distance. Even midway into the 20th Century, people
there lived largely as they did in the past.
Of
course, after the
change, there were a lot more monsters.
In 1951, an area
of salt flats within the Hope Springs region was decided was a test
area for a new kind of bomb, the so-called X-Bomb. Designed to
operate like a neutron bomb - killing the living targets while
leaving structures intact - it was an abject failure. What it did
instead is tear a hole in reality itself, drawing not only the flats,
but the entire Hope Springs region through into a pocket dimension
where new and strange laws held sway.
The people were
resilient, and used to changes, but even they were unprepared for
what was to come. The lingering radiation from the detonation seeped
into the earth, into the fossilised bones of the ancient behemoths
that lay buried throughout the region, pooled in the caverns and
passages and abandoned mineworks that honeycombed the area, leeched
into the water and the air and everything and all that it touched,
it changed.
By the time Katherine Eleanor McLuskey was born in the settlement of Revelation, West Texas, in the early years of the 21st Century, the people living within Hope Springs had managed to adapt to their new conditions. Growing up on her family's ranch, Katie's life was nothing exceptional. Working hard, putting up with her six older brothers, doing chores, dealing with attacks from varmints and critters* from out of the mountains or The Badlands, and it probably would have remained that way if not for two events.
First, there was the day several of her father's herd went missing and, on impulse, she followed them deep into the wilderness. She was just headed back when she was attacked by a horde of varmints, forcing her to seek shelter in a series of narrow cave tunnels. She remembers the floor collapsing beneath her and being swept along by a torrent of oddly luminous water, but after that, nothing.
Days later, she staggered into town, physically unharmed but somehow, the weird X-radiation had changed her. She was at least a foot taller and stronger'n an ox. As the weeks went on, she discovered other abilities. She could sense the presence of other X-critters, and communicate with animals, however these changes hadn't come without a price. Her moods, which had been tempestuous, were now quite literally calamitous. Emotional distress could cause her to literally melt down, exploding in a devastating ball of X-energy.
Despite this, she used her powers to protect her family and settlement, and things would have settled back into what passes, in Hope Springs, for normal if not for the arrival of a threat from beyond! From the outside world beyond Hope Springs came a would-be world conqueror, the mysterious Doctor Diabólico. He made an arrangement with local villains - he'd provide them with advanced weaponry from the world beyond the mountains, and they'd round up monsters for him to use as an army to unleash on the outside world.
Joining forces with outside world hero, The Texas Torpedo, she helped him repel Doctor Diabólico, but became curious about the outside world. With her family's permission, she headed out and was signed up at the Claremont Academy in Arcadia in order to get used to and learn about the world beyond Hope Springs.
PART THREE: A LAND OUT OF TIME
Hope Springs is a pocket universe created in the initial X-Bomb Tests. Inside the pocket dimension, it's much bigger than the corresponding outside area (which is cordoned off by the government).
If
you think of it like the map of a big open world sandbox game, you
have a pretty good idea. It's smaller than the corresponding area
would be in the real world, but that's because everything's closer
together and they've edited out a lot of the big open empty bits
where nothing's going on. If you think of it taking up a similar
sized area as Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, you should be pretty
close.
The whole area is surrounded by mountains in a kind
of natural wall around the valley There's a big area of
salt flats (known by locals as The Flats) which was ocean back in
primordial dinosaur times, where the original testing area was.
Within that area, there are two major landmarks - Glory Tower, the
original bombsite, now a massive tower containing a coven/cult of
nefarious scientist/warlocks, and Upside-Down-Town, the underground
bunker and command centre (kinda like a Fallout-style Vault).
Both
of these places are in an area of the Flats known as The
Never-Never-Land (as in 'never never go there. An' if you do, you'll
never-never be seen again!").
Another area is The
Maze, a network of cracked-earth canyons which serves as the hideout
for desperate outlaw bands and roaming packs of varmints alike.
The
Badlands is another area. This is rugged wasteland, kinda like a
cross between Vasquez Rocks and Monument Valley. Lots of outlaws hide
out there, but there's also a LOT of critters come from the Badlands,
so lots of outlaws get eaten there, too.
There's the
Farmlands, which have most of the arable land and access to a lot of
the rivers and underground springs and wells. The Farmlands are
dotted with small settlements like Katie's home town of Revelation.
Others include Prosperity, Epiphany and Respite, but they're all
overseen by The Fort. Called Fort Hope by its inhabitants, it's a
gigantic walled city. They have access to a greater level of
technology (mostly Steampunk-style tech - including a trainline), but
tend to be authoritarian and treat their inhabitants as if they were
cogs in a machine, not people.
The Rulers of the Fort have ties
with the Black Scientists of Glory Tower, and sent trainloads of
citizens off to the Tower for unknown purposes. These trains always
return empty of people but full of the results of Glory Tower's dark
science.
The whole Valley is honeycombed with caves and
tunnels and there are vast underground realms which are mostly
unexplored, though there continue to be rumours that Fort Hope's
prosperity is built around a vast network of mining operations
stretching out beneath the surface of Hope Springs in a massive web
of villainy and despair.
All-in-All, it'd probably
make a great setting for a weird steampunk Western-meets-Kaiju rpg,
like a cross between Fallout, Tremors, and Deadlands.
__________________________________________________________
Hope Springs came to be the same way most of my ideas come about, by unleashing an unstoppable torrent of story nonsense. In one of the games I’m playing about a superhero high school, we got told to create slightly older characters (Senior Students).
I had the
idea of a super-strong character with a cowgirl motif and without
warning, my brane decides to blindside me with two phrases completely
outta the blue; “The Atomic Cowgirl” and “Queen of the Dinosaur
Rodeo”.
“So,” I ask, “How does this work?”
My
brane gives me this dang look like, “I’m so glad you asked” and
before you can say, “You found the marble in the outmeal! You get
to drink from the FIREHOSE!”, this ungodly mix of early issues of
The Hulk, Ray Harryhausen’s ‘Valley of the Gwangi’, The
‘Deadlands: Hell on Earth’ rpg, Mark Scott Ricketts’ and Mike
Hawthorne’s ‘Whiskey Dickel: International Cowgirl’ and
countless other fruits of an ill-spent youth blasts my skull.
It’s
hell in here, I tell you.
(
* - In Hope Springs terminology, any monster smaller than a human is
a ‘Varmint’. If it’s between human and house-sized, it’s a
“Critter”, and anything bigger than that is a “Booger”. There
are also “Big Boogers”, which tends to be reserved for
Kaiju-types. If it looks more like part of the landscape than a
creature, it’s a Big Booger.
Just to add to the potential
confusion, “Critter” is also used as a generic term.)
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