The final part of our week-long introduction to the world of The Day After Ragnarok brings us up to the present day of the setting. From the text:
It is 1948, the third year without a summer since the Fall of the Serpent. America’s Pacific fleets sailed home, to shore up the Western remnant of a shattered nation. The Evacuation of ’46 ended in death and horror; only General Macarthur’s troops kept order even on the West Coast. With Washington gone, a controversial election made California Governor Earl Warren the President of the United States, or of six of them, anyway. The war in the Pacific is over—holding on to Hawaii is challenging enough—and the Russians are welcome to the wreck of Europe. It took two years, but the last of the great monsters have been driven back down east of the Rocky Mountains. The Americans—and Texans—have their own continent to win back, from the things that wash up now with every Atlantic tide. But left alone across the Rockies for years of famine and fear, the survivors may be building their own future without waiting for permission from Los Angeles or Austin.
Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Buffalo, Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Memphis: Such city-states survived the Serpentfall by being more willing, and more able, to push other folks to the wall. They had to feed their people when the grain was poisoned and the water was full of vileness. They had to act fast, and cut up rough, when the crisis hit. And for these cities, the crisis isn’t over yet. All across the Poisoned Lands, from Houston to Hudson Bay, life is still brutal, short, and all too interesting.
What’s left of Wales and Cornwall still swear to King Henry IX in Sydney, as does Australia, and a third of India, and what’s left of Canada, and South Africa in its own accent. The battered British Empire made an armistice with Japan through gritted teeth, and looks at independent “Congress India” with bitter regret. But the Empire survives.
It is British Petroleum who came up with drilling the Serpent for oil, and Royal Dutch Shell who set up the great cracking plants in Wales and Kenya to refine it. The Russian advisers in Arabia and Persia don’t like it, but there’s nothing they can do, yet. It is the Royal Navy that dives deep to salvage things from the rift where Jörmungandr rose. It is the Royal Society who have cut into the Serpent at Hereford, and (at hellish cost) brought back living samples of the things, the cultures, swarming in its cavernous belly. It is Rhodes University men in South Africa who took those writhing creatures and strapped them down and drew out the sera and built the equipment that allowed Sir Edmund Hillary and his team to climb to the top of the Spine and look down at the curving world. It is Vickers who brought Jean-Jacques Barre from France (and salvaged Goddard’s plans from the wreckage of Roswell) to build the rocket planes to get the Royal Rocketry Air Force (RRAF) there faster. It is Prime Minister Menzies and his government who alone seem worried about what Stalin means when he promises a “final titanic struggle.” Spies, and rocketeers, and oilmen, and speleo-herpetologists gather in Sydney and Capetown and Plymouth and Nairobi, and wonder if the sun has set on the British Empire at last, or if somewhere in this smoke-stained, poisoned world there is still room for a green and pleasant land.
Click the image above at right for a glimpse inside the workings of the British Empire’s top secret Experimental Ophiurgy Group.
Next week: We start previewing a bit of the crunchier parts of The Day After Ragnarok, and Ken Hite answers your questions about the setting and design!
One Response to “Foreshadowing Ragnarok #5: The Eagle Broken, The Lion Waiting”
Reading these documents has really got me stoked for this setting. I loved the reference to Professor Challenger and Lethbridge-Stuart!
By Chris Halliday on May 11, 2009