Klub Zmaj

Seven Years
Humanity has been through seven years of darkness, seven
years of want, seven years of violence and death and suffering
and dreams. After all this time, finally we have a chance
to strike back against our oppressors. There has never been
a war more desperate than this war: fought at the greatest
risk with the greatest costs for the greatest gain. Your story
will be about that war. But this story part is not about that
war. That war is your story. This is about how it came to
pass.

Right now, this moment, the very moment that you sit
down to play the game, humanity is struck by an unprecedented
and mysterious alien attack which the survivors
will name the Bliss. The Bliss is sinister, immediate, and
worldwide: adults are struck by a sudden tiredness, and
those that go to sleep do not awaken. They seem to be in
pleasant dreams, but react to no external stimulus. Within
a week, nearly all of the adult population of the earth is
incapacitated. Society, particularly industrialized society,
falls into total chaos. For the first few months, children are
mostly shell-shocked, and try their best to live out their
ordinary lives. But, as food runs scarce, and the reality of the
situation becomes apparent, the survivors turn to looting,
violence, and gang warfare. As food and supplies become
scarcer, the suffering becomes more terrible. Disease and
animal attacks claim even more lives than warfare. Those
that grow too old fall into the Bliss much as their parents
did.

To make matters worse, within two years the aliens develop
or simply deploy their remote drone technology. While the
aliens are unable to easily affect our world from their home
in the dream world, their remotes bridge that gap in a terrifying
and effective way. Existing in both the dream world
and the real world, they are gigantic automatons wrought
in flesh and metal. With fiery rays and noxious smokes,
these remotes lay waste to any outposts of human civilization.
Heavily armored, they are effectively invulnerable. You
must run or you must die. Within a year, there is no place in
the world still safe for humanity.

And that is life for the next five years -- a life lived in tunnels
and pits, running and hiding, full of violence and disease
and fear and doubt, wretchedly clawing for survival, a
dwindling species of children with a future of darkness, fire,
and pain.

But that is not the end of the story. There is still hope for
humanity’s future. A small group of survivors, led by a
still-waking adult, have managed to reverse engineer the
alien remotes, and have used this technology to make a
new generation of weapons that can be used to strike at
humanity’s enemies in their world of dreams. This weapon
is called an Alien Numina Inversion Machine -- or ANIMa
-- and it allows a teenaged pilot to enter the dream world
and form a mechanized battle-suit out of the spirits of her
friends, lovers, and enemies. With this weapon, she can
fight the aliens on their own terms, striking at the very
heart of their occupation. Now, after seven years of despair,
this brave group of soldiers are striking the first blows of
a war that will determine the fate of humanity, earth, and
their own hearts.

In the game of Bliss Stage, you will tell their story.