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{{Quote|The thing that, in the end, will probably doom us all--is that the people with real power are less interested in stopping the end of the world--than profiting from it.|Mark Russel}}

==The Beginning of the End==
You might be thinking, "Who even says 'nigh' any more?", but we all do now.  We all knew the end was really, exceedingly nigh when the first Gate opened in the middle of 6th Avenue in downtown New York City on July 7th, 2055.  Ground traffic was permanently snarled after that, but honestly, that was nothing new.

We thought it was aliens. Of course, now we all know the folk that walked through that first Gate are just as desperate and on-edge about the end times as we are.  Their world is getting pulled apart, all its world energy, or whatever, getting sucked from their side of the Gate over to ours.  Scientists have got a lot of crazy ideas of why some of the Gates push energy into Earth and others draw it away, but most folks just think the Gates are here to destroy everything we've ever known, and a whole lot of other things we no nothing about at all.

Of course, that was just the first Gate.  More popped open shortly thereafter.  The second came a week later, and those were the first actual monsters humanity had seen since... well, probably ever. Maybe dinosaurs or something. I don't know. Anyway, things got bad really quick after that.  More Gates opened all over the world, sometimes several in a day, sometimes after a few weeks.  These days, there's dozens of Gates near every population center, and who knows how many more are outside the cities.

We had to build walls. A lot of folks in the rural areas decided to stay and fight to protect what was theirs, but as far as anyone knows, that didn't really work out too well for them.  Radio silence.  Maybe there's a few left that were savvy or savage enough to keep ahold of their land and kin, but it doesn't seem likely.  The areas between the cities are badlands, overrun with monsters and worse things.  Some folk, in their desperation, brave the wilds to try to salvage valuables, or bag a trophy.  But that's a job for the young and the foolish.

As the world slipped every more rapidly towards the abyss, civility broke down. People thought they had nothing to lose, so they tried to take any piece of civilization they thought they could keep, and murdered, burned, or slandered those pieces they couldn't.  Governments struggled to maintain relevance once travel between cities became too dangerous, or too expensive, to justify the projection of power.  Instead, local warlords, powerful corporations, and charismatic spokesmen gathered tribes to build fiefdoms, and used those tribes to conquer adjacent fiefdoms.  It was city-block against city-block for a while there.  We all counted ourselves lucky to wake up each morning.

I know. I KNOW. "But that was all 20 years ago," you're saying.  The world didn't end.  New Gates stopped appearing, and the walls keep the monsters back. Mostly.  Things are going to work out, right?

The thing you need to realize is that we're all ''kept'' behind these walls, and the news we hear is the news they ''want'' us to hear.  And the Gates? Each of the tens of thousands of Gates that dots our world, either pulling us closer to the end, or pouring in the life's blood of some other world's final days, they connect us to other worlds. Other places.  And those other places? They've got Gates, too. And nobody who has ever walked out of a Gate, or walked into one, has any idea ''why'' those Gates started happening. Have they ''really'' stopped? Or are they just ''telling'' us they've stopped?