by Mary Rice

Created on: February 20, 2011

Prologue To Hell

Time is a linear sort of thing, but it's not smooth or level. Like a meandering river it has peaks and valleys. If one looks close enough it has something else that makes it amazing. It has bubbles, or rather it seems to be made up of bubbles. Large, small, nestled against and within one another, they cluster together like so many random thoughts to form a path. Bubbles have membranes and membranes allow for the passage of things; ideas, beliefs or events. Back up a bit and look at the larger picture once more and you'll see puddles in time, where fat clusters of bubbles move sluggishly and gather like some great pile of eternal foam.

It is in one of these puddles, like a puddle by the sea, that events transpire. It is a single bubble, into which ideas and culture from its neighbors have seeped. It is a vast and ancient puddle. There are many social and economic seepage’s. There are time seepage’s as well, so that within this single, solitary bubble you find many things from different times and places.

Indoor plumbing co-exists easily with magic and mystical creatures. There are dragons, vampires, elves, pixies, and men. The potential of combinations between these are infinite. You have names and persona’s from other bubbles in this puddle, diluted or muted by their passing through the membranes, so that they are familiar and yet they are unique unto this bubble of time. The social class system seems to have fared better, perhaps because humans are so adaptable and mutable that no matter the number of membranes they slid through they retain their sense of self, or place. Whatever the cause, social classes endure in this bubble. They give structure to it's shimmering exterior.

All bubbles seem to look alike, but as they are all along the slipstream of time they must be different, or else they are not separate things. This bubble, the one we are focused on, the one in the vast, sluggish puddle in the river of time, is known only as Nexus. Within Nexus there are vast cities, rolling plains, tiny hamlets, soaring mountains and far more. It is vast and in many ways still unexplored.

There are other points in Nexus. Points that time has been gentler upon, where it has flowed through slowly, gently, shaping without corroding. In those paces great stories unfold. Stories and lives. Hopes and dreams of inhabitants. Some are just human, common, uncommon, fragile and mortal, upon which time feeds. Commoner or noble, it makes no difference

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