Xess

[Linwelin]

Xess, Year 4055
It's been millennia since what has been deemed ?World's End? on the planet Xess, and though most landmass has disappeared into the sea when it rose, the world?s population has stabilized.

The world has a large, now uninhabitable main continent surrounded by a few elliptical rings of islands. The land itself is a wasteland, due to the increased gravity from the dense asteroid collision millennia ago that completely rearranged the entire planet. Sheer cliffs have appeared everywhere, vegetation and creatures that could not adapt to the change have vanished, leaving only harsh, giant plants and animals to roam what is left of the planet. Though the seas remain the same, the sky is varying shades of purple due to a strange mixture of gasses in the outer atmosphere. The atmosphere is still primarily oxygen, but due to the other gasses there are still occasional and mild acid rains.

The reason for these atmospheric gasses, after exploration and research, seem to be coming from where the asteroid struck Xess, which is on the opposite side of the planet. The asteroid pulled the water to that side of Xess, flooding the majority of the planet. What humans now live on was once a small mountain region in the middle of a deep ocean. When the tides were pulled away by the asteroid?s gravitational force, much of this region was unearthed.

As for how people live, it is thanks to the grav-tech that was under development when the world was whole. Now perfected, these grav-domes envelop cities to shelter from the planet?s deteriorated environment. They counter the planet?s new gravity so that the general populace isn?t fatigued to an extreme by simply existing. These domes also allow for the existence of livestock and vegetation that otherwise would have died out. Thus life is fairly similar to how it was ages past in the domes.

There are those who have adapted to the gravity, their bodies evolving slightly with each generation to obtain the circulatory and muscular system necessary to withstand the new pressure. Their legs are slightly larger than normal, and their arms narrower along with the rest of their body. These are the Adepts, the humans that have developed beyond human limits, acquiring a more powerful and dexterous physique. These mostly live outside the domes, living in nomadic communities on the islands.

An even stranger existence is that of the Prophets. They are a very old society and their numbers are few, but ancient lore tells of their desperate warning of the disaster, their persecution by the masses, their years of hiding, and the convincing of those they believed beneficial to human kind to join them on the farther reaches of Xess, avoiding the asteroid by living where civilization exists around now, the mainland Salundius. However, with the Great Collision, the Prophets? powers were corrupted somehow. They gained more power, but at the cost of their balance; whenever they use their abilities, they can loose the abundant power they obtained, unleashing all sorts of dangerous phenomena. They exist among the general populace, and some are accepted by their peers, but many stay in hiding, afraid of the persecution they could face.

For any others that wish to venture outside the dome, they need a full set of grav-tech gear to survive, or even walk. The benefit with these suits is they can be manipulated to allow for propelled jumping, and have a shock system that absorbs falls. Adepts are unable to move normally if they were to attempt to wear these suits, as the suits cannot keep up with their increased strength and dexterity, breaking apart. Custom suits with lesser effects can be made, but at exorbitant rates.