posted 06-03-99 04:44 PM ET        

One Thursday lunchtime, almost as quickly as it had began, the Apocalypse ground to a halt.

Across the scorched and mangled battlefields of Earth, the victorious soldiers of of humanity looked about them, and saw a sight which had not befallen many of them for weeks on end. The trenches emptied. The guns fell silent. Fighters returned to the airfields that spawned them. True peace had overtaken the landscape. The cheers of the soldiers, indeed, the cheers of all of humanity, echoed throughout the land. It had been called many things by many people; Judgement Day, Ragnarok, Armageddon. The defenders of the planet had gone toe-to-toe with the ultimate power in existence and emerged victorious. So, the people celebrated.

Their jubilation did not last long.

When the euphoria finally subsided, the people cast glanced over their world. Or rather, what was left of it. The war with the Maggottonians was short, but in that short time, more devastation had been unleashed than in the entirety of Earth's history. Whole continents were shattered. The great cities of the world, with populations numbering in the millions, were blasted into dust. Toronto. New York. Mexico City. Rio de Janiero. Paris. Moscow. Cairo. Beijing.

Fully one-third of the world population, over two billion people, had been killed. The survivors saw that little remained of their once-proud land, and many fell back into barbarism, little more than technological warrior tribes fighting over the pithy scraps of a once-glorious civilization. Still, there was a ray of light, a piercing beam of hope in this torn, lawless land. While the greater landmasses of South America, Africa, and Asia descended into the pitfalls of chaos and anarchy, a few areas lifted themselves out of the abyss and prospered. The burgeoning nation-states of North America, Europe, and Oceania are functioning examples to this struggle to rebuild civilization. Five hundred million more people quickly died in many regions of the world from disease, starvation, or war. Earth is still a dangerous place with its share of menaces, domestic and extraterrestrial, familiar or inhuman.

An overtaxed society had been blasted apart in the fires of purification. The biblical Armageddon had indeed come. But from these ashes, the phoenix began to rise again.

posted 06-04-99 05:16 PM ET            

Now NIM, on the other hand, is pretty much a home grown phenomena. It was first sighted in a thread titled �Amen Brother Greg� long ago in June, 1998, in the pre-crash forums. That thread, I believe, was the single longest thread of these forums. IIRC it approached 400 posts before an immature and irresponsible person nexused it. Many many powers have been ascribed to NIM including immortality, omniscience, omnipotence and the removal of warts. Numerous people claim to have knowledge of its secrets, but only Brother Greg himself, they say, knows all.

posted 06-06-99 11:49 AM ET            

1. Fjorxc is pronounced "Fee-ork".
2. CWAL is pronounced as "See Wall".

Hope that answers your kwestions.

posted 06-08-99 10:02 PM ET            

This thread is supposed to be the prelude (all right, trailer) to my upcoming story.

posted 06-09-99 05:20 PM ET            

Nope, this isn't gonna be a story thread. But it'll probably be a long time coming, though. It's gonna be long. I mean real long.