The Story
Two hundred years after the sky went green
Nobody planned the end of the world. They planned cheap power, a crystal that never ran out and a quick little war to keep it. This is what happened next, and how four kinds of fool ended up walking into the glow on purpose.
Click any panel to watch it come to life, with sound
Before
The world that ran on glow
Before the Glow, the world was clean, bright and very pleased with itself. Brightwell Atomic powered every city and printed its slogan on every bill: A Little Glow Goes a Long Way. Robots mowed the lawns, collected the tolls and smiled at you in hotel lobbies. Traffic was bad. Coffee was good. Kids took field trips to the reactor and came home with glow-in-the-dark pencils. Nobody asked where all that power came from, because the answer kept getting better every quarter.
Year -6
The Godseed Project
Deep under the city, in a research vault with a door like a bank's, Dr. Halvard Venn grew a crystal out of fused reactor glass. It hummed. It gave off power and never ran down. Then it started growing copies of itself. Brightwell named it Subject Zero and called the program the Godseed Project: a seed in every basement, free power forever. The tanks in Venn's lab glowed green day and night. He tested every serum on himself first. As far as anyone knows, he still is.
Year -1
Everybody wanted a seed
Free power forever is a hard thing to share. Every government wanted a Godseed, and the ones who couldn't get one decided nobody should have one. The army built fences, watchtowers and turrets that would outlive everyone who built them. Military Shelter 9 was dug and stocked, and Commander Vasska filled its tanks with gas, just in case. Rich people paid to sleep through the trouble in cryo pods. And out at the base, the army kept something in Hangar Six that nobody would talk about.
Day 0
The night of the Glow
Nobody agrees on who fired first. It stopped mattering about an hour later. The bombs came down on the cities, and the cities had seeds in their basements. The Godseed did not break. It drank. For one night there were two lights in the sky: a white sun falling into the desert, where the sand turned to glass and never cooled, and a green one over everything else. A bomber came down burning near the crater. Something rode it down. The survivors called that night the Glow.
Day 1
The first dose
Green dust fell for weeks. People called it dose, like medicine, because gallows humour was the only thing left that was free. Most who soaked it up went slack and hungry and started walking. The husks had been commuters, cashiers and crossing guards, and now they all wanted the same thing: the light inside anyone still glowing. Roaches grew to the size of dogs. Rats stopped running away. A few people took the dose and lived. They glowed in the dark, and the dark came looking for them.
Year 1
The cities fall
The cities held out for about a year. Then the towers burned down to stumps and the streets filled with the glow-hungry dead. The last traffic jam never cleared. The last train still runs on the Dead Line, going nowhere. Riot bots kept the peace until there was nobody left to keep it from. The psykers wandered into the old theater to listen to something, and none of them came out. From the rooftops at night, you can still watch the green streets crawl.
+3 years
The Long Winter
Ash blotted out the sun, and the north froze solid. The first winter killed more people than the bombs did. Some froze where they stood and kept walking anyway. Trappers wore furs until the furs wore them. The Rime Cult rose in the snowed-in ruins, preaching that the cold was a cleansing and doing their best to help it along. They say the winter has a father who still walks by the old radar dome. In the Frozen Ruins, the only warmth left is the barrel fires.
+20 years
The storms learn new tricks
When the winter finally broke, the weather didn't calm down. Rad storms started rolling across the wasteland, green walls of cloud and lightning that dropped fresh dose wherever they passed. The interstate sank and became the Flooded Highway. The bog turned green and started to glow. The salt lakes dried into white pans where the mirages walk toward you. Crystal patches spread across the land, Godseed splinters that never stopped growing. Out here, you learn to read the sky before you learn to read anything else.
+60 years
The kings of the wasteland
Give something enough dose and enough time, and it doesn't stop growing. The biggest ones carved the wasteland into kingdoms. The Behemoth, Crown of Chains, came out of the old world's labs, and nothing in the new one has managed to kill it. The chains it wears belong to everyone who tried. The Glass Queen sleeps under the crater. The Overpass Tyrant fishes for cars. The Crusher King holds court in the scrapyard, and the Queen of Hangar Six never left the base. Nobody invited them. They stayed anyway.
+100 years
The last lights
Maybe one person in a thousand made it this far. Shelter 9 kept its blast doors sealed for generations, and its children grew up shooting anything that came from the sky. Other shelters were less lucky. In the vaults, the OVERSEER decided the residents were the main risk to the residents. Topside, the stubborn ones built towns out of shipping containers and wrecked airliners, and sold water by the cup. They called themselves the Holdfast. They had no army and no plan, but they kept the lights on.
+150 years
Light the flare
The Holdfast learned an ugly trick: dose is power. Draw it out of a body and it runs the lights, the water pumps and the fences that keep the storms off the walls. Canisters leak, but a living body carries it just fine, right up until it doesn't. So the towns raised beacons across the wasteland. Light the flare, hold your ground while everything nearby comes running, and a pilot drops through the smoke to fly you home. Bank the dose and you get paid. Wait too long and you burn out.
Today
The crews who dive
Two hundred years after the Glow, the Holdfast still sends crews out to soak up the wasteland and come back alive. Four kinds of people sign up. Glowsticks seal themselves into old diving helmets and take more dose than anyone should. Medics in hazmat suits keep the crew breathing and drag the fallen home. Scavvers grew up stripping wrecks and can put a rifle round through armour. Riggers build turrets out of junk and solve most problems with fire. Tonight they share a fire at a dead gas station. Tomorrow they dive.
Your turn to glow
The wasteland doesn't care who you were before the Glow. It cares how much dose you can carry and whether you make it to the flare. Every run, a crew heads out under a green sky, gets stronger, stranger and brighter, and bets all of it on the walk home. Some make it. Some become part of the scenery. Pick your class, grab your friends and find a beacon. You're one of the crew now.