All good things come to an end

[theearth]

This will be the last mod post on this community. Save The Earth is over. It was a blast, and we hope that everyone who played here had fun, too. Stay as awesome as you are!

There will be a successor game, raisetheearth, run by Lexil (of L), Ken (of Lily, Saretha, Natalie), Zalein (of Cesar) and MaxSalsa (of Winter).

All of that said, there is one last IC post for Day 4 on the IC comm for playing out the aftermath of the invasion. Boy NPC tags will be continued.

Going by the threads so far, it has become clear that the Boy has been "defeated" for good, as player characters have already managed to a number of crucial points with him. More information on this can be found at the bottom of the "storytime" under the cut/in the second blockquote.

Thus the game will end as follows:

On the morning of May 2nd, the 4th day of the invasion, enemy soldiers around the world will suddenly cease their attacks. They will tell anyone around them who might hear to go home and make sure that their parents and children and other loved ones are well, and then return to their ships and take off, returning to whence they came from.

The Animals will return to their resting states... and a sight can be seen above Las Vegas and Locke City: A orange-red dragon, rising from within an unconscious Arthur York's body, flies up over Las Vegas, circles over it for a few times and then barrels into the mountain. It instantly heads for the bottom of the mountain and curls up on the gold hoard there. And there it will stay, too. At the same time, Phillip Santorini faints somewhere in Locke City. From his body, a quite different being rises and floats above the city for a while before diving right into the ground, sending tremors through the city for a while as it dives down and burrows deep under the city. The Animals of Locke City and Las Vegas have thus been replaced, and Earth has resealed all her openings, enabling those who live on her to rebuild ...eventually. The Animals will now rest until such time when they should be needed again.

Characters who went to the aliens' home world will be escorted back to Earth personally (please either thread this out with the NPC or contact Kira-mod if you wish to handwave/know ahead of time). In return for each of them, one of the named aliens will be able to return to their place, so by the end of this exchanged, Geoff, Badri, Meredith (if he survived), Young and the Zhangs will all be gone.

The world isn't in a good state after their departure. North America is to a large part inhabitable or at least in a terrible state - it's pretty much your standard apocalyptic setting, complete wasteland in some and "only" ruined shambles in other areas. South America, Europe and Asia are partly in a terrible state, but in other parts all right or even untouched. Even Oceania and Africa, which saw no direct Enemy encounters, carry scars due to the world serpent smashing against them in places when fighting, though they remain for the most part as they were before the invasion. Obviously, even areas of the world that are untouched on the surface will see the disaster on their doorstep with international trade being down, tons of refugees and displaced persons all over the world, and so on.

The numbered will also find that the whole world is an echo boundary now - they won't lose their echoes anywhere any more, unless they lose them completely. Doppelgängers and Wolpertingers stay around if they survived the invasion, but all other Animals go back to sleep. The teleporter has been destroyed in the attack on Locke City.

And in this place, we'll give you a bit of story time. THIS IS STRICTLY OOC KNOWLEDGE. It is also tl;dr – simplified and shortened but still long. Still, it seemed to us that leaving the StE arc of this universe, you deserve to get at least a rough look at the part of the part of the “background info” that likely won't show up again in RtE (if it seems incomplete, that is because other parts will likely show up again in RtE).

In the original timeline, Earth was not a her yet, it was an "it" - a rock in space, not an entity. On this planet, reality wasn't as fixed as it is on ours, and adhered much more to how things "should be" - the good guy always won, and so on.

But things weren't perfect, and people didn't always agree. And sometimes those grew worse, and eventually, there was a war so terrible that suddenly all humans could agree on one thing: That the war should be over, or should never have started, that it „should not be“. This first-ever universally shared perception was so powerful that it managed to tear a hole into time and reality, and there was only one way to fix it: To remove all humans from the planet. To not entirely let go of humanity, one human should be put into an ark designed to allow for them to be just by themselves and create a world around themselves as it "should be" (the group of people that had built this ark had meant to built one for every member of humanity, but at this point only one was finished) and eventually recreate humanity. But while there was still a discussion over who should be the chosen one, two parents who just loved their child too much put their little boy into that ark and sent it away. The ark fell into the hole in time.

And our timeline happened. In this timeline, Earth is sentient to at least a degree. It was created by all of humanity and indeed all of life on Earth ceasing to exist all of a sudden, which turned all of their souls into Soul that then joined up. All those Soul units joined up into one being: Earth.

For a long time, the collective entity Earth just floated through space, her timeline existing along with a lot of other timelines - these other timelines being those in which your characters existed. But then the child in the ark woke up. An infinitely powerful being in a world where barely anyone else was left who could control what „should be“, he still was only a child and couldn't imagine very much at once. So his scope of what "should be" was limited to the inside of his ark - he simply couldn't comprehend there being more.

And all that "should not be" ended. The worlds didn't explode - the timelines simply sped up infinitely and unravelled within seconds, the universes in which characters' worlds existed reaching their end within a few heartbeats of the boy's time (this is also why StE has no pull-points - all characters' lives went down as in canon, no matter how long it took). The only timeline that survived what that of the Earth entity, because she was still inherently linked to the Boy at this point, and in time what little survived of the other timelines gathered on her. Millions of years passed before the Boy looked out of his ark, and in this time, something happened on Earth:

Continents. An atmosphere. Evolution. And finally, humans.

But then the Boy peered out of his ark and saw that there was something that wasn't a part of the world that he had created through his ideas of how it "should be". He first was interested and curious, but then Earth refused his meddling and being the aeons old eternal child that the ark made him, he threw a temper tantrum at seeing a place that wouldn't just conform to how it should be according to him. The war was short and devastating, bringing upon the last ice age. Earth created the Animals as her defences: Parts of herself, made up of thousands and millions of pieces of Souls, guarding the weakest points of herself. After the battle, the Boy retreated and the Animals were laid to rest.

And humankind developed, and the Boy sulked and then made plans as to how to not lose next time. He would have to be more crafty, slow and careful... (It is important to note here that he never quite understood what the life on Earth, or even Earth herself, was. He just saw that it was there and wouldn't just be nice to him.)

But even when trying to be stealthy, he wasn't stealthy enough. When the first infiltrator entered Earth's sphere, she caught him and activated a rather different defence mechanism from the Animals: She took advantage of the Soul pieces that resided in some of the people who walked her surface – that is, the last remainders of the unravelled other timelines that were stuck within ordinary humans. The numbered. For this, she first had to weaken the Animal Seals - this caused the pink lights.

Now, Soul contains recorded lives, and this Soul would give more information to the body and mind whose soul it had become. And for the first time since the pieces of Soul had arrived on Earth a long time ago, they slowly came back to life again... and this is how echoes turned people into their "preincarnations".

Why didn't Earth just reactivate its Animals to level Tiny? Not for love of the people who live in Locke City - Earth is a collective, not an individual, and as such it is very hard for her to "agree" on a course of action that goes beyond the most common one, which is wanting to survive (this is also how the Animals, which are smaller parts of Earth, function - self defence (which includes the defence of Earth) is the one thing that they will do because the collective of Soul that they are made of can't agree on anything else). No. It needed them as they were to keep out the aliens, or at least the stronger ones.

What are the "aliens"? They are, essentially, beings that the Boy created by thinking that they "should be". A child should not be alone, a society needs this and that person to function - they aren't figments of his imagination, they are real and individuals (more or less - the more actual thought went into one of them the more of an individual they are - the soldiers of the invasion are really more or less persons cloned 99 times and altered a bit each time to resemble individuals while Young, Badri etc are very individual persons) but in the end they are creations of the Boy's mind that can act independently of him because they aren't parts of him - the Boy is the ultimate individual, unlike Earth who is the ultimate collective. All life on Earth is individuals that are essentially unrelated to Earth or the Boy, with exception of the wolpertingers and doppelgängers, which is parts of the Earth collective merged with individual life - either through one Earth Soul physically merging with one or more animals, or through one Earth Soul doing a negative print of a numbered human and acting as this negative print's soul.

The Boy's creations needed to waken the Animals and have them destroyed. Their methods varied - Tiny still needed a lot of human help, plotting and time for that with Wise Snake, while the stronger Meredith needed a bit less help and time for Crablobster, and then it started to get a lot faster and easier with Young and the Zhangs arriving. Young in a way had a special role because she was not supposed to take action but was specifically sent to figure out the Animals.

The numbered that at the end of the invasion went up to meet the Boy made him realize and learn a few things about the life on Earth, that until then had been absolutely abstract for him, and most importantly made it clear to him that those people are humans like him, but with the important difference that unlike him they still live in relationships, something that he only vaguely remembers from before he was placed in the Ark. That those relationships are as great, if not greater, than what he remembers having with his parents, and there are many different kinds. But he also learned about what living in relationships means – that there are other wills and needs which have to be respected, that they need time and effort to develop, that they may work out but also may not work out, that they take someone who is entirely outside of you.

He decided that all of that means that he should interact with the life on Earth in single relationships because they are like him, and their relationships have as much worth as what he had with his parents. But also that they are outside of him and not something that he can touch without their permission. So as long as animal life exists on Earth, Earth will be safe from him.

(He might have adopted a few birds or other living beings in return for sending all numbered back to Earth. This depends a bit on threads that are still happening, but it's quite likely.)

Please use this post for telling each other where your character stands at the end of the invasions, if they survived, perhaps even if you'll continue on to RtE, and say your goodbyes. There is a general questions thread below for your last questions and comments.

So long, and thanks for the fish! It was a blast.