Avatar

"Well if I was a car. I bet I'd be a good car."

@clear-kuriboh / clear-kuriboh.tumblr.com

♠Grim/Emmet♠ 27 - They/He - Ace COPPY BADGE REAL?? SO POGGIES. Ask me to tag things!
Avatar

Pin still not spiffed up, oh well. If you're on mobile this is all u can see so...

Call me Grim or Emmet, I'm very shy but if you reach out to me I will try to be social!

I reblog what I like, and don't personally talk a lot. But maybe that will change, I'm working on it.

I tend to go on tag trawls and reblog a lot from specific tags, this is usually related to blorbos. :)

My current brainworms are FNAF (Daycare Attendant and William Afton) and Postal (I'm playing Redux and P2, so, that's all I really know rn~)

Until I make this pinned more cool, why don’t ya check out my Neocities? It’s riddled with GIFs and hard on the eyes. :)

Avatar
reblogged
Avatar
foone

There exist another dimension called The Empty World. It's very much like ours, in fact it seems to have been identical up until a few weeks ago, but it always seems that way. If you go there today, it was identical in late february, and if you go there this october, it'll have been identical until september.

It's empty, as you might guess. There's no humans, and no animals bigger than a cockroach. The sky is grey, and it slowly rains ash. It's colder than our world by a bit, enough to require a jacket even in summer. The streets are empty, the cars parked neatly in their garages or in lots, but they're all empty and abandoned, their doors locked like they expect their owners to return any minute now.

The newspapers left on stands don't mention any oncoming disaster. We have no idea what the TV or internet would have said: the power is out. The power is very, very out. Not just the grid, but batteries are drained. The cars won't start, the emergency lights are out, and anything with solar panels seems to be getting less energy than you'd expect, even with the perpetually overcast sky.

It's a very silent world, like the calm after a snowstorm. Sounds don't seem to echo as much as they should, nor does sound seem to travel as far. The radio spectrum is empty except for static, there's no one transmitting on any frequency.

There's fewer fires than you'd expect. Even places you'd expect to soon catch fire without human intervention are still standing, undamaged. Campfires can be lit but with difficulty: something is keeping them from burning as they should. Even if you pour kerosene on a campfire it'll barely grow, it's like something sucked the energy out of everything.

All the locked buildings are still locked. Alarms don't sound if you break in (understandable, given the power situation), and of course no one comes to investigate. So The Empty World is your oyster: you can break in wherever you want (provided you can physically do it: some doors are pretty hard to pry open even with tools), take whatever you want, and bring it back here.

Everything resets when you leave. You always enter The Empty World like it's your first time there, like this just happened and you're late to the party... but the party keeps getting rescheduled. You can even take something multiple times if you want.

When you enter The Empty World you get there at the same relative position as you are on this world. If you're in New York, you show up in the empty New York. If you're in Topeka, you show up in empty Topeka. So you have to travel around this world to get to where you want, and you can't just appear in the middle of a bank vault... unless you break into the vault from this world. (So it's great if you work at a bank and want to steal from your employer without repercussions, but not so useful otherwise).

You don't just have to take things, you know. You can take computers and files and books and diaries. You will have to deal with recharging laptops and breaking through any security when you get back, but it's doable.

So, imagine you've just gotten access to The Empty World. What are you going to do with it? What will you take, and where will you go?

This is a writing prompt if you want it to be. Feel free to write/draw/whatever about this setting!

And don't worry about "canon": there's something enough weird going on with this setting that's enough to justify variation in the setting. Maybe when you go there, you eventually find out what caused the death of the world. Maybe that doesn't agree with what I find out when I go there. Maybe your world isn't as empty as it seems! This is partially based on a reoccurring dream I had, and in one instance the "empty" world was full of people hiding. Hiding from what? I never found out. Maybe you will.

Just stick "based on/Inspired by The Empty World by Foone" somewhere in/on anything you make about it. Otherwise go nuts.

Some things that might be fun to explore, ones I intentionally didn't nail down: (I have theories but I don't want to make any of them concrete)

  • What's all that ash in the air? You could stick it under a microscope/Gas chromatograph. What it is could be a big hint as to what happened to this world
  • I mention in one of the reblogs that two or more people can go there at a time, but there's only one return trip. What happens to people left behind?
  • The power is out, and this extends to batteries. Sure, maybe the coal plants and nuclear power aren't running anymore, but what about hydroelectric power? Why isn't the hoover dam still making power?
  • As multiple people have suggested, what if you go above the ash cloud? What if you launch a balloon or a rocket?
  • I mention the newspapers not saying what happened, but maybe this just happened too fast for them to get a new issue out? Maybe you could go to a TV station and get their computers running again (bring in your own batteries, or bring their computers back to our world). Maybe they did cover what was happening.
  • There's lots of straightforward ways to get rich by stealing and/or duplicating things using The Empty World. What's the most interesting thing you could do by its ability to let you travel into places you couldn't normally get to (because of guards and locked doors)?
  • Here's a thought: rescuing recently destroyed/stolen things. It's based on the world of a few weeks ago, right? What if the Louve burns down, and a lot of priceless art is destroyed. If you jump into The Empty World anytime in the next couple weeks, they'll still be there, untouched. You could "steal" them and return them to this world.
  • You're in The Empty World and you hear a scream in the distance. You brought no one with you. Do you run towards the scream or do you get out of there immediately?
  • Did you wear a respirator into The Empty World? Have you been breathing in all that ash? Maybe that has repercussions.
  • You arrive, and someone has written a message in the ash. A warning. For people like you.
Avatar
alkatyn

I feel like you could have a setting with people raiding and "prospecting" post apocalypse setting style, but a certain percentage of them just never come back, and we don't know why. So everyone who goes is taking a chance that whatever it is that's getting everyone else gets them. Only a few percent die, so y'know, it could just be people having entirely mundane accidents, right?

That's a great addition. There would be plenty of mundane accidents, yes, because of foolish people overestimating their ability to get out of situations they themselves caused. Locking themselves inside bank vaults, getting stuck breaking in, etc. Enough people are going to get themselves killed that of course they're gonna be mysterious disappearances, and that's going to be known about by the other explorers.

They're gonna enter with trepidation because while they're pretty sure it's just entirely mundane reasons, they of course can't be sure.

And that's an interesting situation, whether they're right (it's entirely mundane) or wrong (there's something living in there).

Avatar
kassil

When you say no animals bigger than a cockroach - does that include all the animals smaller than that? If the ash has any kind of sharpness to it, those really shouldn't last long, but if they're still around that really brings into focus what the ash is.

If there's insectoid life, is there microbial? Could someone determined break into biological research facilities and liberate samples of plagues that are being studied to find cures for?

What's the state of the water like? Slowly getting befouled by ashfall, I expect, but if the nature of this world is "dead/dying" maybe even the waterways are getting sluggish, more than they'd expect from getting ash-choked. (Things like Hoover Dam would gradually jam up from the ash getting into the turbines, I'm sure.) But I expect someone like Hershey would decide to send extraction teams to pump supertankers full of no-longer-claimed water.

Do things like solar panels start failing faster than expected? If not, I bet there's at least a few research groups, homesteaders, and weirder in different "instances" of the Empty World, who've packed what they need to get the power required to run a camp or a house or whatever, there long-term. (But how many ever come back, really?)

Does anyone have stories of others leaving, and then finding their own way back? Because I could imagine stories of that, where the person who left first didn't show up back home, or possibly even no one even remembers them.

Yeah. Small animals are still around, although they seem to be in smaller numbers, like many of the bugs and insects and other animals died out at the same time.

What the ash is made of is one of the explicitly unexplained elements in the setting, that's for individual authors to answer (though I have some theories, of course).

Microbial life was unaffected, much like the plants. There's still plenty of deadly disease samples in labs if you want to go risk your life there, yes.

The water is fine other than the ash, they're still flowing. The dam thing is electronic/mechanical, the Colorado River is still flowing, there's still tides and waves.

But I don't think Nestlé could make much use of it. I've not specified exactly how you get into The Empty World, but you can't take/bring more than you can carry among your group. So you could get 20 strong guys with big plastic drums, but that's still only a few hundred gallons a trip. You can't really bring a tanker in The Empty World.

Existing solar panels in The Empty World are not functioning, more so than the ash clouded sky would imply. You could definitely bring some functioning ones into The Empty World, but they wouldn't work very well, simply due to the limited amount of sunlight. You'd have electricity for longer if you lugged a generator and a bunch of fuel in.

And there are of course stories about people getting lost and finding a way out. There's stories about all kinds of things. People finding survivors or monsters in there, groups coming back after being lost for months, people finding places where the electricity inexplicably works, people bringing back things that shouldn't be there: alien artifacts or mystic objects of power.

They're probably just stories. No one has brought back proof of any of this... But that doesn't mean they're not true. They might be.

As far as what's known to be true (or at least widely believed and not disproven): it seems when you enter The Empty World, you have a ticket to get back. You can return to our world by doing something similar to how you got to The Empty World (but you'll arrive at your new location: you don't get transported back to where you entered). But you only get one ticket.

If two people enter, they can come back as a group without issue. But if they get separated and one of them isn't there when the other returns, they are stuck. Forever.

That's the general belief anyway. It's equally possible that the instant one person leaves, the whole world blows up and the others die immediately. Or maybe space vampires eat them, who can say? We have no way to talk to anyone left behind, so we can't find out from them what happened. You can't leave a camera or sensor behind either... Well, you can, but you'll never be able to get the data from it.

BTW, one thing about the ash: there's not enough of it piling up. If the world has been dead for weeks, you'd expect there to be weeks worth of ash piling up in the streets. Nope. It's only as much as would seem to have fallen in a few hours. Like the world died a few weeks back but the ash only started falling this morning. Odd, isn't it?

I'm honestly surprised, given Tumblr, that no one has suggested they'd use The Empty World for DIY HRT.

The pharmacies are still stocked. Estradiol and testosterone are pretty shelf-stable. You could easily stock up.

Avatar

little used fantasy trope i love: when two people are playing cards in a shady bar and it's the tense moment where they show their hand but it's a fantasy so they can't say things like "full house" or "royal flush" so they same some nonsense like "three crowns and a dead crow" and the crowd is like "oooOOHH" so we know that's good

Avatar
immortalfool

Other character smirks: "Well, I've got a castle on four omens."

The crowd "oohs" louder, so we know that it's Much Better™️

thats how i feel watching scenes with regular cards

Avatar
Avatar
ppeachx3

every sonic fan has a super convoluted au in their heads that they will most likely never put to paper because its just so indepth and detailed that it'd fill an entire library

Avatar
Avatar
lifblogs

“You put porn in child safe spaces.” Then why do the “child safe spaces” have ratings and tags, Karen?

Avatar
evilwriter37

AO3 AND TUMBLR ARE NOT CHILD SAFE SPACES. Yes, it’s true that a lot of child safe spaces are being destroyed on the internet, but ao3 and tumblr are not those places and were never meant to be. LEARN TO CURATE YOUR OWN INTERNET EXPERIENCE OR GET OFF THE INTERNET.

You are using an unsupported browser and things might not work as intended. Please make sure you're using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.