My work for this week has centered around continuing to define the history of the world that resulted in the tower, including researching possible cataclysmic events. A rough schematic image will be uploaded later. Iteration on previous assignments has been ongoing, and changes are included in this post.
Main focuses of research include:
Supervolcanoes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervolcano
Volcanic winter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter
Ice ages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
Snowball earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
Meteor strikes/asteroids: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event
Extinction events: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
It has been recommended that I look into acquiring The Cube, and I hope to do this soon.
Current iteration:
The location for the tower is a fictional/fantasy world that is loosely based on earth (basic physics and gravity still exist) but contains many differences, such as a smaller global scale and different creatures that populate the planet. A basic "human" race still exists, however.
Introduction
Ancient legends told of the end of the world, when the fiery serpents that slept deep within the earth would be awoken and would raze the land, hunting and feeding upon anything that lived on the surface. These dragons would roam the earth for a century before finally returning to slumber.
Today the land is shrouded in a heavy fog, and one last remnant of civilization remains: a solitary tower. The tower reaches high into the heavens, overlooking the Great Sea while the ruins of civilization lie below.
In one of the lower chambers of the tower, a young man awakens to find himself alone in a bed, cold machinery all around. He has awoken in the regeneration chamber, a place where the bones of the deceased are used as a foundation for new life. He finds himself alone in the tower where life has either moved on or ceased to be.
Structure
The tower is just one of what used to be many such towers that dotted the landscape. However, a cataclysmic series of events have either partially or completely destroyed all of the others, so that the young man finds himself in the last standing tower and the last symbol of the civilization that once flourished. These towers were once connected by skytrains and zeppelin travel, as well as surface and subterranean methods of travel, and they largely represented the center of the major cities of the world. It was initially believed that these towers would protect humanity against the scourge of the planet that would eventually come, but these towers later became a symbol of the city they were founded in, and carried certain prestige along with them. When the cataclysm happened, the survivors fled into the towers as the rest of the world was burned and covered in ash. Interaction with other cities became increasingly rare as lines of communication were broken until finally none were aware if the others still stood at all. The dominant technologies at the time used steam and combustion, as well as primitive methods of conducting electricity, and these were used to keep the survivors living for decades after the cataclysm.
Atlas Formatting
The atlas will take on the form of a collection of various journals and recordings of the survivors of the final standing tower. These will be the method by which the young man who finds himself there will become acquainted with the tower as well as find clues to his own past.