Eidolon PROTO is the final Eidolon miniseries before we begin our transition to playtesting Threadspinner! Episode Count: 5 Crystal as WiFi X Molly as Cascade Incursion Iris as Tacit Dragoon Luke as The GM There’s nobody left who remembers a time before The Machine. At least, nobody down here. Up in the tower they say the Inventors, the men that built The Machine, they’re still alive after all these years, dining out on our misery, laughing and feasting and toasting to the despair that reigns down below. The year is 2XX6. In the last century, or maybe the one before, Man learned how to channel lightning into metal to create light, then learned how to channel lightning into stone to create thought. That was the beginning. Every step in human history from that day forward was a step toward the construction of The Machine, though no one knew it yet. Bombs were detonated, bullets fired, minerals extracted, oceans drained. And now, today, we reap the fruits of our ancestors. If the world has survived beyond the City, we’ll never know it; it’s surrounded on all sides by endless wasteland, the ground too cracked and dry to support any life at all, the City’s supplies stretched too thin to support an expedition to find out if it really does go on forever. The City stands as the last bastion of civilization, the last bastion of humanity, the last bastion of life on earth. A garden, mercilessly tended and culled by The Machine, a perfect system of steel and sorrow, a computer brain half again as big as the city that controls every moment of our lives; when we wake, when we sleep, when we work, when we die. The Machine’s control is absolute, enforced by autonomous drones that patrol every corner. This is not a world that can be bent to your will, to anyone’s will but The Machine’s; The World has been removed from the Fate Deck. There is no joy here, no cause for celebration; The Sun has been removed from the Fate Deck. This is not a world where you can achieve the impossible; The Magician has been removed from the Fate Deck. You can never hope to triumph through force over a being as powerful as The Machine; Strength has been removed from the Fate Deck. No, this is a world where Hope Rides Alone, where the only reason anyone has to go on living is the faintest spark, the secret prayer that maybe some day someone, anyone, will rise up, will find a way out of this hell, will bleed and sweat and cry and reveal a new path for the rest of us. The Star is still in the Fate Deck, though its light burns dim. Who would dare stand against The Machine? Does courage even exist in this immiserated age? Even if someone were foolish enough to try, where would they find the raw calories to resist on the starvation diets enforced by The Machine’s brutal government? Who could possibly stand against this? You, of course. It started ten years ago. The Machine is powerful and it sees so much, but its eyes cannot be everywhere. You formed a resistance group, nearly twenty strong now, headquartered out of an old decommissioned sewer tunnel. The work is slow, the cracks in The Machine’s armor so thin that hardly anything can slip through them. There is a junkyard on the outskirts of the city, a vast expanse of discarded mechanical debris, old models of robot enforcers, obsolete components of The Machine that it has discarded without a care. The scrap heap goes on for miles, and in The Machine’s perfect efficiency it has determined that it need not surveil every inch of the space, so long as its walls are high and its guards well-armed. It never counted on you finding a back way in. For two years straight your team dug through the cracked and dusty earth, tunneling from the sewer system to the ground beneath the junkyard. It was grueling, backbreaking work, and smuggling the dirt out to the surface was a near impossible operation on its own. And it was only once the tunnel was completed that you could begin your true work. In the dead of night you scour the junkyard, salvaging anything you can find. By definition, everything here is older, frailer, and weaker than the firepower you intend to use it against. But for all its power, you have one thing The Machine does not: rage. A lifetime of suffering has honed you, forged you, molded you into being of pure vengeance, every cell of your body screaming to tear The Machine apart piece by piece, to drag its black-hearted Inventors through the streets of the city until the asphalt strips their bones bare. The plans were finalized eight years ago, and for eight years you’ve toiled in the dark, soldering components directly to your flesh, wiring weaponry to your heart, replacing your humanity part by part with diesel-fueled, chrome-finished violence, vicious neon screaming for retribution, data sockets bloodthirsty for justice. You are no longer Man, but you are not Machine either. You are something new. A symbol. A symbol that humanity can rally behind. A symbol they can channel their anger through. A symbol for the death of this world and the birth of the next. An avatar of the age itself: an Eidolon. Black stormclouds pulled the sun away hours before nightfall, giving you more time to work. Torrents of rain hammer at the tarp hanging over your work area, the ground trembling with bursts of thunder as you complete the final touches on your new forms, ready, willing, and prepared to fight. Who are you?
