Anonymous Lepers
04-02-2004, 04:22
The Anonymous Lepers live (fortunately for the rest of the world, since they have very unpleasant habits and you wouldn’t want them living next door) on a medium-sized island in the Southern hemisphere. The island is in a temperate zone, with an abundant supply of minerals, including iron, nickel, copper, molybdenum, bauxite, tin, and uranium. The coastal areas were once lush and fertile, with two semi-circular chains of mountains forming a broken ring around the island, enabling coastal lowland climates to remain warm and mild. The southernmost chain is volcanic, including several active volcanos. The center of the island is a dry, plains region with a mineral-rich subsoil including lots of silicon and anthracite coal deposits in the foothills of the non-volcanic mountain chain.
Until about fifty years ago, before The Awakening Of Eldrad, it was an ordinary modern state, developing in ordinary ways, with a moderate level of industrialization, a decent economy, and a modestly representational government.
At that time, a mining company opening up a new mine in the central plains area made a most curious find. In a substrate indicating a seemingly-impossible age (more than thirty million years,) they found what appeared to be part of a statue—a hand.
Amazed (because the undisturbed nature of the substrate indicated that it was impossible that The Hand could have been placed there by human agency,) the miners called in the scientific community. Amid great excitement, The Hand was transported to the country’s most advanced scientific facility for study.
To make a long story short (you can watch it on Doctor Who for all the technical details, except that The Doctor doesn’t exist, of course, so he wasn’t there…) during the course of the scientific investigation, The Hand was subjected to a sufficient quantity of nuclear energy to re-activate the coding buried deep within its silicon life-form matrix. A matrix formed on another world, more than (duh) fifty million years ago, when The Hand was attached to the form of Eldrad The Supreme, a genocidal, psychopathic biogenetic scientist and would-be Dictator of the Planet of Kastria. He was foiled by the then-King of Kastria and supposedly executed by molecular disintegration of a spaceship launched into Kastria’s sun (just to be on the safe side.)
Unfortunately, the molecular disintegration beam was flawed, and the spaceship exploded, scattering larger-than-molecular fragments of Eldrad into space. One of which (the hand) eventually attached itself to a comet, and was carried to Earth in its tail more than thirty million years ago.
The Hand took control of a janitor at the scientific facility, and used the janitor to take him into the facility’s nuclear reactor, where Eldrad used the nuclear energy to reconstitute himself, using the janitor’s carbon-based DNA as a pattern, so he would look ‘human.’
In ‘human’ form it didn’t take Eldrad long to take over the facility, and to begin the takeover of the unfortunate Island. Unfortunately, he didn’t fully understand the vulnerability of carbon-based life forms to nuclear radiation, and in the course of experimenting to create a race of “Supermen” who would enable him to take over all of Earth, he managed to precipitate a nuclear meltdown and disaster that would have wiped out all life on the island if he hadn’t preserved some of his experimental samples, which ultimately became the mutants known as The Anonymous Lepers.
However, the island was devastated, the economy wiped out, and most of the population gone. Eldrad has spent the last thirty years cloning generation after generation of Lepers, researching the nations of the multiverses, developing such weapons as his limited resources will allow (almost all biological and chemical in nature, since that’s what he knows best,) and planning to again become Ultimate Ruler of Everything.
What Eldrad doesn’t realize, however, is that in the process of amalgamating with the janitor, he picked up large parts of the janitor’s consciousness, memories, knowledge, etc. And the janitor was a rabid racist and elf-hater. So the elves are first on his list, if possible.
Eldrad is no dummy, and he was a skilled military tactician back on Kastria, but he is severely limited by the shortage of his resources. He knows he’s only capable of being a small annoyance at the moment, and could theoretically be easily swatted by one of the huge, powerful, militarily elite nations of the multiverse. So his plans are discreet, and long-term.
He also doesn’t really (in spite of his amalgamation with the janitor) know much about humans. So he does not realize that the mutant humans he has created have much stronger wills of their own than he would credit. He creates them in batches as the resources become available, gives them their orders, and expects them to obey. Once he’s set them working, he doesn’t pay much attention to the lower echelons.
But some Anonymous Lepers have discovered the remains of the Island’s former civilization, and realized the nature of their true heritage and the scope of the disaster that has overtaken them. Unknown to Eldrad, a small, determined resistance network is forming in the heart of his realm.
Until about fifty years ago, before The Awakening Of Eldrad, it was an ordinary modern state, developing in ordinary ways, with a moderate level of industrialization, a decent economy, and a modestly representational government.
At that time, a mining company opening up a new mine in the central plains area made a most curious find. In a substrate indicating a seemingly-impossible age (more than thirty million years,) they found what appeared to be part of a statue—a hand.
Amazed (because the undisturbed nature of the substrate indicated that it was impossible that The Hand could have been placed there by human agency,) the miners called in the scientific community. Amid great excitement, The Hand was transported to the country’s most advanced scientific facility for study.
To make a long story short (you can watch it on Doctor Who for all the technical details, except that The Doctor doesn’t exist, of course, so he wasn’t there…) during the course of the scientific investigation, The Hand was subjected to a sufficient quantity of nuclear energy to re-activate the coding buried deep within its silicon life-form matrix. A matrix formed on another world, more than (duh) fifty million years ago, when The Hand was attached to the form of Eldrad The Supreme, a genocidal, psychopathic biogenetic scientist and would-be Dictator of the Planet of Kastria. He was foiled by the then-King of Kastria and supposedly executed by molecular disintegration of a spaceship launched into Kastria’s sun (just to be on the safe side.)
Unfortunately, the molecular disintegration beam was flawed, and the spaceship exploded, scattering larger-than-molecular fragments of Eldrad into space. One of which (the hand) eventually attached itself to a comet, and was carried to Earth in its tail more than thirty million years ago.
The Hand took control of a janitor at the scientific facility, and used the janitor to take him into the facility’s nuclear reactor, where Eldrad used the nuclear energy to reconstitute himself, using the janitor’s carbon-based DNA as a pattern, so he would look ‘human.’
In ‘human’ form it didn’t take Eldrad long to take over the facility, and to begin the takeover of the unfortunate Island. Unfortunately, he didn’t fully understand the vulnerability of carbon-based life forms to nuclear radiation, and in the course of experimenting to create a race of “Supermen” who would enable him to take over all of Earth, he managed to precipitate a nuclear meltdown and disaster that would have wiped out all life on the island if he hadn’t preserved some of his experimental samples, which ultimately became the mutants known as The Anonymous Lepers.
However, the island was devastated, the economy wiped out, and most of the population gone. Eldrad has spent the last thirty years cloning generation after generation of Lepers, researching the nations of the multiverses, developing such weapons as his limited resources will allow (almost all biological and chemical in nature, since that’s what he knows best,) and planning to again become Ultimate Ruler of Everything.
What Eldrad doesn’t realize, however, is that in the process of amalgamating with the janitor, he picked up large parts of the janitor’s consciousness, memories, knowledge, etc. And the janitor was a rabid racist and elf-hater. So the elves are first on his list, if possible.
Eldrad is no dummy, and he was a skilled military tactician back on Kastria, but he is severely limited by the shortage of his resources. He knows he’s only capable of being a small annoyance at the moment, and could theoretically be easily swatted by one of the huge, powerful, militarily elite nations of the multiverse. So his plans are discreet, and long-term.
He also doesn’t really (in spite of his amalgamation with the janitor) know much about humans. So he does not realize that the mutant humans he has created have much stronger wills of their own than he would credit. He creates them in batches as the resources become available, gives them their orders, and expects them to obey. Once he’s set them working, he doesn’t pay much attention to the lower echelons.
But some Anonymous Lepers have discovered the remains of the Island’s former civilization, and realized the nature of their true heritage and the scope of the disaster that has overtaken them. Unknown to Eldrad, a small, determined resistance network is forming in the heart of his realm.