Earth 6047: Homo Montis

It’s a well-known fact that wind tends not to blow over the mountains all the way – pressure is too high, and convection circuits develop in the air. Thus, fallout has a much lower chance of settling on and killing you if you’re very, very high in the mountains. Also, much of the world’s population before the war was located at the base of the mountains – China is bordered heavily on the west by the Himalaya range, the Rockies and Sierras split heavily populated parts of America down the middle, and the Alps lie in the center of Europe. It’s only natural that many people would want to flee to these areas after their entire livelihood had been nuked into dust.

However, like the desert, the mountains proved remarkably inhospitable, and their inhabitants would almost certainly have died out had some fallout not gotten through. Luckily, it did. Over generations of enhanced mutation, they’ve developed heavy, thick layers of skin on their hands and feet and lengthened fingers and toes, as well as shaggy body hair. In fact, they are almost similar to the mythical yetis of old civilization, though the comparison is obviously lost on them.

Their habitats are, as previously mentioned, typically the Alps, the Rockies, and the Himalayas, as well as a large part of the Andes. They live in massive stationary villages, more often than not on the sheer sides of mountains. They send out large hunting parties every day to forage for vegetation or kill any of the surrounding animals, violent or not. The villages are typically a collection of large familial groups; the heads of a family feel a need to spread their genetic material as far as possible, which accounts for the species’s excellent degree of aptitude for their environment. Homo Montis society tends towards matriarchy, which is an oddity among the other species who, while being egalitarian out of necessity, haven’t quite given up their preconceived notions of a masculine society, even after thousands of years of redevelopment. Old habits die hard.

The subspecies divisions amongst the Homo Montis are many, but generally very hard to separate: based on one’s altitude, one tends to see a gradient of development. However, two major subspecies are recognizable.

The first is that of the mountain-dwellers who really understood what the fallout could do to them, and took steps to safeguard themselves. They are the descendants of a large number of scientists and intellectuals who really knew what was happening in the apocalypse and handled it as calmly as they could. They live in massive cave complexes under the mountains, and are the best-preserved of the Homo Sapiens descendants. Also, they are easily the furthest-advanced: many of their caves are man-made, and while cave-ins do happen on occasion, they have grown less and less frequent as the cave-dwellers perfected the art of digging. They are also the only subspecies to live in what can really be described as “cities.” Huge numbers of them, generally over a thousand, are able to live comfortably in their cave complexes, running through dozens of densely packed miles of rock like anthills. Their physical appearance actually differs quite little from the Homo Sapiens of old. They have similar hands and feet to the mountain-dwellers, but their body hair is quite a lot less pronounced. They also have amazing night vision, able to extract the smallest light source and exploit it to the fullest. Their skin tends to be very pale, and they wear full-fledged clothes to protect it from the cold in the caves, usually consisting of heavy fur traded from the outside tribes of mountain-dwellers in exchange for crystals grown in the mountains, which the outsiders value immensely. Their cities hold the greatest repositories of human knowledge known to post-man, typically traded or even stolen from the Emergents of the cities, and their researchers work tirelessly at deciphering the ancient books for the benefit of what was once humanity. Their society is the only one on Earth to hold a full-fledged council on affairs: once a year, the leaders of the various cities, known as Sages, gather in a specific host city to discuss how best to continue their crusade of knowledge, a meeting known as the Concourse of Sages. The only thing holding them back from invading the rest of the world is their small numbers, their rampant pacifism, and the ice-dwellers.

The second subspecies is not remotely as friendly as the first. They are defined not by their habitat, but by their fallout exposure. Dwelling in the Ural mountains, the traditional border between European and Asian Russia, they are the descendants of a group that wandered for years east of the main Russian cities, with no direction, under a fallout-ridden sky, after being abandoned by their fellows, who fled south and became desert-walkers or water-dwellers. Only their bitter desire for revenge on their traitorous comrades kept them alive long enough to reach caves in the Urals and safety, and it appears it has manifested itself in their genes. They have typical mountain-dwelling features, but added to their heavy calluses are vicious, hooked claws and long, powerful legs, meaning they not only have dominion over the Ural mountains, which they guard with an iron fist, but the Russian steppes just west of them. They feel their borders are constantly threatened by the cold-desert Homo Aridus, and so the steppes are constantly awash with bloody guerrilla warfare between the fast, light degenerate mountain-dwellers and the huge, tank-like desert-dwellers. The skirmishes have developed into small, bloody, and inconclusive wars on many an occasion. Degenerates, as they are spitefully called by most outsiders, do actually have a unified society: warlords, known as Hunters in Degenerate society, control the entire population and send them out to seek prey, whether it be animal or post-human, for food every day. However, an equally barbaric threat has recently crossed over from the Arctic ice: the Homo Glacialis, who seem intent on at least raiding the other species of post-human as much as possible, if not razing their civilization entirely, have set up a beachhead at the norther end of the Ural mountains. Unsurprisingly, this complicates things for the Degenerates. Heavily.

Important Mountain-Dwellers

Sage Shal-Ennikar of Shalisar is considered the most powerful cave-dweller currently alive. Dwelling in the eastern Himalayas, she is simultaneously in a position of great power and great danger. Her city, Shalisar, is built under where a watchtower on the Great Wall of China once stood, and its greatness lives up to its auspicious location: she commands a trade empire that reaches into the Mongolian steppe to the north, the Indian Ocean to the south, the ruined cities of former China to the east, and even the sparsely populated Plateau of Tibet to the west. It is a beacon of light and knowledge to the rest of the world, and regularly hosts the Concourse of Sages in the Himalayas. She is extremely generous with her knowledge, and believes the rest of the world has a right to know what her people take for granted. This has put her at odds with the other Sages, who tend to be quite conservative, but none of them can do anything because she can buy them.

However, her fervently egalitarian treatment of the other species has put her starkly at odds with another very powerful man: Kassan Ai-Mantri Takesu, the warlord who is currently cutting a swathe through the Asian mainland in search of late-wave Emergents to destroy.

Many of the Emergents fled their cities, not knowing what else to do. She has accepted them with open arms. Most people say that was a mistake. Now, Takesu’s agents constantly attempt to infiltrate her organization and destroy her. Several assassination attempts have been made upon her, and the latest was nearly successful. She has even learned to fight since the situation became dangerous, a trait which has been unheard of in cave-dweller society for centuries. She uses a long metal staff, which she has trained to use with frightening speed. It has a large blade on one end, and it is regularly coated with crystal residue. This doesn’t make it any sharper, but it is incredibly painful to anyone who gets it stuck in them: if she cuts you, you’re going to fall over, and you’re going to scream very, very loud until the little slivers of hard white metal come out of you.

She stands tall for a cave-dweller, which is to say about as tall as an average mountain-dweller. She has been called quite beautiful, but has never taken a mate, as it is a taboo for Sages to reproduce: the cave-dwellers are wary of hereditary succession. She has pale green eyes and light brown hair, and her skin, far from being the starved, translucent cast of most cave-dwellers, is pleasantly tanned, as she spends a large portion of her time outside negotiating with local tribes of mountain-dwellers. She is, on the whole, totally fearless, and it may or may not get her killed very soon.

Retributor Anzal-Selik does not like you. Or anyone. She sits alone in a cold, spherical cave in the Ural mountains every day. The only time she allows human contact is when she is talking to her subjects or fighting, and the only time she ever shows emotion is when she is fighting, because she generally turns into a godlike killing machine at that point.

She is the current Retributor, the highest office in Degenerate social order. The Hunters all report to her; usually they do it fearfully. She has never killed a messenger, or even been noticeably displeased with anyone, but the aura she emits is absolutely terrifying. People who are around her tend to edge towards the door or, if she is facing them in combat, scream and run, in which case they are dead. She is is scary not because she kills people, but because she constantly feels as though she’s an inch away from it.

She hasn’t actually done anything for Degenerate civilization; Retributors never do. However, she has proven a tactical genius in the war against the ice-dwellers; she seems to think in the same way they do, which has led to voices being raised against her. The owners of the voices are usually quickly thereafter relieved of said voices, along with the rest of their larynx, throat, and often head, and the bodies are never, ever found. It is unlikely she is one of them or even in league with them, because they kill any post-human who isn’t them on sight and nobody speaks their language. However, there are suspicions. Never voiced, of course, heavens, no, but there are suspicions.

She is very, very tall, and her hair is very, very black. She is not attractive in any sense of the word: she has taken the whole ritual scarring Retributors do a little too far by scratching a mark on her face for every steppe-walker and ice-dweller she has killed. Obviously, her face is hideously scarred. To compensate, she wears an iron mask all the time, fitted to her face somehow, by the only steelsmiths in the Ural mountains. She carries a reproduction of an old Russian broadsword in one hand, also fashioned by said steelsmiths. People who don’t know her (everyone) says she has an infatuation with steel. That is not true; she has an infatuation with blood. Your blood, specifically. And everyone else’s.

~ by pieboy on August 10, 2007.