THE WORLDWhile the group was having an adventure of sorts, the Council falling brought unforeseen consequences. In its absence, a group of seven men made up of the most wealthy or politically ambitious (or both) calling themselves Red Dragon conspired to divide this world into ten regions. These regions had no consideration for town borders, but rather just trampled over the national identities of each town. The nations were eager to strike out on their own apart from the influence of the Council, like a pregnant lady longing to give birth, yet the Red Dragon with ten horns and seven heads was threatening to do away with such nations. They weren''t elected, and they couldn''t even get overthrown since most people didn''t even know they had taken over! But to those who did were told that Red Dragon was a humanitarian organization. They made themselves seem like a peacekeeping organization, when actually they were more like a protection racket. If they refused to pay, riots or other calamities would mysteriously start in their area. As long as town mayors paid up, the effect of this shadow governors was relatively minor. Or so it seemed...

    Taxes were raised, and income tax returned. Schools that before had posters which said ?Be your own person? ?Respect freedom in others, and you will be free? or ?In God we trust? now said stuff like ?Obey the rules? ?If you see something, say something? and ?Bullied by mail? Delete it and burn it.? Society had gone from a largely libertarian system to one where people were encouraged to be censors, snitches, and follow senseless rules. Of course, this system couldn''t really support itself, because human beings hate this crap. Riots broke out, poverty spread, and crime became prevalent, because now there was law and order. And in the outskirts, there was digging.

    Normally, digging for technology and ancient artifacts was a sort of unspoken taboo with the Council active, but once they were gone, golems were set to work. This is not supposed to mean that the Council wanted to suppress history. Quite the opposite, regular citizens who went to schools learned nearly 14000 years of history, and some scholars knew more. Technology on the other hand, was viewed as dangerous unless introduced slowly. The reason behind this is called the Black Box theory.

    The Black Box is as follows, a square object finds its way to... let''s say, chimps. Those who find it, figure out that pressing a button or pulling a lever will do something like toasting bread, refining copper, or lighting a room. Besides splitting it apart with a rock, which will break the object, the chimpanzees have no real way of understanding what they are looking at. In the same way, as technology enters assembly lines or becomes automated, it keeps general knowledge of how to create things lost, and materials become increasingly difficult to acquire. Suddenly, something as easy as a toaster becomes lost. With the addition of centuries, people would only understand how to make devices from looking at a completed model that are sort of like the original. The higher the technology, the more pronounced this effect. They dug some of this technology up, but struggled to figure out how to use it initially. This theory meant that while people were experimenting with the limits of technology such as nuclear weapons, they might accidentally ruin or destroy the world if they built something wrong.

    They found a few old scrolls from before the Great Phoenix War, when the technology of the original Earth was still vaguely known, and they found bits and pieces of machines. Some fired laser or bursts of plasma. Some seemed ready to go somewhere but for the archaeologists not knowing how to turn them on. These objects were collected, sanded in some cases, and cataloged by function. Others were saved to see if they could be pieced together with other machines.

    Apparently, at one point, technology used coal, then oil for quite some time, and then electrical power fueled machines, leaving it up to the latest power source how clean the energy was. This lasted for awhile, until people finally figured out how to produce clean equivalence engines (short for matter-energy equivalence, the process of turning matter into energy rather than radioactive fission). Lastly, came perpetual energy. Unfortunately for the world at large, it would take some time for people to understand these latter devices. So like inventors of the time just before the Great Phoenix War broke out, the technology they adapted was very half-baked. Rather than high-quality and clean technology, it could best be described as nuclear steampunk. The vehicles and devices used very dirty (in both senses of the word) coal-burning engines to move gears that basically shattered the uranium inside with a mallet. The resulting powder was also heated up, generating some energy, but also oxidizing with the air. Generally, uranium air is probably not a good thing, and uranium air with coal ash was worse. Crops died and people got sick just from testing the devices out. And these engines also tended to melt themselves down from extreme heat of these reactions, making them rather clunky, but they worked well enough for armies to consider using them. It is important to keep in mind that such devices also had little to no lead or other shielding, and as such were a massive headache in the days to come both in terms of radioactive disposal and in terms of treating those affected. At some point during human history, a working theory of energy use was developed, called the Renewability Principle. After having power sources gradually run out, one by one, they developed safe versions of renewable energy (having learned from the hype of solar and wind energy, after having graphene from solar panels pollute the water, and wind energy kill birds in large numbers) using a principle that “any energy source worth using should be taken in a way that it could continuously be drawn.” Applying this theory, they found green energy that actually was green, and not simply hyped by self-righteous pricks. But these archaeologists knew nothing of this, and cared even less. They just kept digging, seeking more treasures.

    In addition to guns, propulsion, bombs of questionable safety and worth, and engines that were poorly put together, some medicine, agricultural technology, and a number of labor-saving devices also came to light. There was apparently one that cooked pancake batter into a square grid, and another that was called ROO_ _ _ (the other letters had scratched off) which was a rounded disc that seemed to be put on the floor for some purpose. The archaeologists digging these things weren''t always sure how to use these devices though, and until a power source that didn''t give everyone black lung and fallout poisoning was developed, some of these were put on development hiatus. Sёar?h the N?velFire(.)net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

    These devices were interesting but the lack of oversight, or rather the overabundance of the wrong sort of oversight, meant that even a harmless food grinder turned healthy meat and potatoes into something so processed that it couldn''t be said to be nutritious. For the sake of progress, all previous restraints went out the window, with none to put the brakes on violations of ethics. Genetic engineering was already a fetish with sorcerers, but under this pursuit of “progress” it developed to extremes in strange creatures.

    All technology has pros and cons. With the discovery of old tech, alchemy also improved. Piping systems for carrying water, cheaper methods of creating and spreading cement roads, and other such things began to become options for progress. Since the fission engines weren''t exactly doing them many favors, they researched transporting energy of ley lines through metal conduits called leystreams. But easier transportation during wartime also means enemy troops can invade more quickly and easily, and more energy for devices means the water and soils vitality was being stripped. Water became stagnant, and crops died as readily as with radiation. This in turn converted fertile into dry cracked deserts. These cracks in turn caved in creating potholes in the soil. Worse, these holes in the earth sometimes broke through negative energy lines; zombies rose from the ground, and feasted on the living. Good times.