Apex Impossibility - I
In the World Torn Apart, there is a great sea of unpassable liquid crystal that burns with great smokestacks of bold-colored Myst. This Sea of Myst can be seen from many dal away, and its colors — magentas, honeycomb golds, peacock blues, hunter greens — rise and meld in the upper atmospheres of Torn. This Myst is not some mundane vapor from an otherworldly sea. It is the sea itself, and too a sea of infinite possibility; within the Myst there boils into and out of existence a virtual particle that is a singularity-copy of everything that has ever existed in Torn, and everything that could have existed, and mayhaps everything that ever will exist.
These particles cause the Myst to storm. Lightning flashes in juniper-dyed helices. Thunderous peals echo throughout the clouds, and the sounds of something wet and snapping, like bone and flesh, can be heard over the trumpets. The particles come together and they make something not yet alive that falls into the sea to be annihilated; or it is alive, a thing that should not be constructed chimerical from elements incompatible.
Behold Impossibility. A lifeform of hyper-dimensional power greater than any one single thing that has ever drawn breath in the Beyond. If it is lucky, the Impossibility falls into a weirdling stack of Myst that bridges this time and space with some other place out in Torn. The Impossibility, mid-fall, newborn, is warped without comprehension and thus set loose upon the alien world.
This has been a problem for a good many scavengers. Impossibilities are, to them, the bronze age mythic monsters we know that Gilgamesh fought, such as the Divine Bull, but turned into science fantasy aberrations powered by abstract concepts or quantum philosophies that they use for their own ends. In Torn & Beyond, Impossibilities will serve as incredible obstacles to be overcome, as their likelihood to be warped to anywhere within Torn means they can make their debut at the most unlikely of times.
Though Impossibilities are made up of the virtual elements of essentially everything, there are certain logics that they obey. These logics dictate their forms and abilities, and in this way these logics have been used to create three paradigms of Impossibility. Each paradigm has its own traits and natures and can be thought of as a completely different kind of obstacle to overcome. Likewise, each of the three paradigms requires a different set of mechanics to overcome.
The three paradigms are:
The Apexes, born from predacious would-be’s. They must be hunted and killed as any predator should be. Combat is used to overcome an Apex Impossibility.
The Idolics, named as such due to their uncanny resemblance to avant garde idols and images. Idolics can rewrite reality around them and are immune to death as we know it. They use a variant combat structure that involves solving them to find their weakness as much as surviving them.
The Parasitics, which as their names describe are parasites. They may come in the forms of light, sound, or myst themselves. Parasitics involve no combat but instead must be cured before their dooming logics take over.
In Torn & Beyond, you will not be given a list of Impossibilities that fits these paradigms. Instead, you will be given comprehensive generators designed for each paradigm that allows you to create your own Impossibility. These generators will give every statistic that is needed, and there is enough variety in each generator to create at least twelve completely unique Impossibilities of each paradigm. So numerous the options, however, that by having one Impossibility share the trait of another, you could create thousands of these things for your scavengers to face.
Killing any Impossibility is not without its merits. Not only does doing so restore hope for the scavengers (an unintroduced mechanic), their blood is a holographic ichor incredibly valuable. Not only is this ichor a component in many Torn medicines and poisons, it is ultra-nutritious. One drink of an Impossibility’s ichor fills the stomach for ten days and prevents the need to eat or drink. Drink too much, however, and a crippling sickness could leave an ignorant scavenger laid low for many days.
The painting included with this post is an Apex Impossibility. In our next post in this series, we’ll be breaking down the mechanics of this Apex, and going over how it was created from the generator. For a preview, just imagine what if this horrific thing hunted you not in the present, but in the future, and if the fear your tomorrow-self feels in that battle, and the wounds suffered, were sent back in time to you in the present. Then appears the Apex, prepared to consume its now-weakened prey.
A fight for the legends indeed.
