You awaken, dazed and confused. Your eyes open to a submerged blur. A few bubbles drift past the green-tinged watery background in front of your face. You find that you cannot move your arms; after a few seconds you realize that they’ve been locked down. Manacles hold them and your legs tight, another metal belt around your waist helps to keep you in place. Trying to recall how you ended up in this spot, you try to think back into the blankness that is your past. The memories slowly seep back into your brain, almost painful after what seems like thousands of years of thoughtless dreaming.

You remember your DNA being set on fire, after being captured for the secret experiments of The Corporation; you remember being strapped down to a lab table, looking up through the glare of overhead surgical lights at men in lab coats, corporate logos embroidered on their pockets. The name on the logo escapes you, and then something else catches your attention – the memory of the faces of those two men wearing lab coats, smiling and looking happier than Cheshire cats with birds in their mouths. Those faces burn in your brain. You try to shake your head to clear the thought, to clear the remembered pain, and feel it snag on something. Reaching back, you feel a great metal needle-spike lodged into the back of your skull. After a second, cutting through the sense of horror and panic, you dimly remember a dream, which informed you about the neural jack they implanted in you to help in your training.

In a rush, a flood of other training dreams return to you, flowing through your brain. Flashes of knowledge and history flow into your mind; bits of skills twitch into your muscles. You struggle, wishing to be free of your Cryogen Tank, and suddenly your form shifts into a metal shaft and pierces its way out of the tank. You relax and return to your human shape. Your lungs burn, pulling for air; because the hull of your spaceship has been breached by millions of tiny space fragments over the last ten thousand years. And then your form begins shifting, changing into liquid metal. You dont need air in this form. Your brain finishes sorting through the massive pool of knowledge it has collected, and presents the information to you.

You can remember now.

You know.

You are immortal.

Again, here’s a link to the COTA pdf. The Victus Games homepage has additional information about the setting and we have plenty more to come if there’s sufficient interest. We welcome feedback in the comments below, by email (victusgames at gmail dot com), or join the Google group. We’ll make announcements at our twitter account @victusgames if that’s a preferred information channel.

Related pages:

• The Children of the Ark squidoo lens
• The Victus Games squidoo lens

What we wrap most tightly, gains the greatest benefit by being let go.

The act of letting go of ideas here each morning has brought much peace and energy into my life. I’ve met fine folks who’ve influenced my worldview with their generous contributions. This lead me to wonder what else I keep bundled up, either out of fear or simply through not knowing any better.

Open Source RPG System

My friend Aakin and I (along with generous contributions from Eli and feedback from others) have spent thousands of hours creating, modifying, play testing, and finally editing a game called Children of the Ark or COTA for short. It’s a breath away from our first publishing but has been on hold since Aakin has been busy tracking down work. I’d like to release the game in a way that players can share home brewed modifications and even feed back the most popular mods to us for follow on releases.