A RIFTS ODYSSEY
Disclaimer: I own nothing in this story.
Notes: This is rather an old project that begins about 10 years ago. It was first inspired by the Palladium product "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle" or "TMNT".
I found the inspiration to create a hybrid of human and animal to play in the role-playing game "RIFTS". I created a Coalition States Feline mutant with the class of Ley Line Walker. I constantly revised and updated the concept and character.
Then two new products of Palladium and one cartoon sparked a true explosion of creativity. Silver Dawn, my Alicorn OC is the final result of a long journey.
The setting of "Chaos Earth" is only for the origin of the character.
Prologue
Earth, December 21, 2098
The future holds nothing but promise.
Humankind has enjoyed an age of science, learning and relative peace for over fifty years. The human genome has been mapped, explored and tweaked. Medical cloning, genetic manipulation, nanotechnology and advanced bionics are all a reality. Most diseases have been cured, the average life expectancy is 180 years and new breakthroughs in medicine promise to extend life 50% longer than that. Thus, a ninety-year old looks and feels like a thirty-year old, the mind sharp and the body strong.
The ocean depths are a new frontier being plumbed for secrets in medicine, farming and history. The fringes of outer space are also being conquered with several national and international space stations locked in orbit around the Earth. The moon is home to the Cyberworks Aerospace Network, a mega-corporation that specializes in space research, robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality robot systems and is a leader in space exploration. Other small colonies also exist on the moon and a tiny outpost has even been established on Mars.
Back on Earth, massive megalopolis-style cities cover the globe. Skyscrapers regularly exceed 100 floors and ribbons of highways cover the landscape. Hovercraft of seemingly infinite variety are the latest in automotive technology and have all but replaced conventional "wheeled" vehicles. The highways and byways of the civilized world are made of a new concrete that last ten times longer than anything known in the 20th Century. What "wilderness" remains in North America and much of the world are nature parks, cultivated logging territories and government sponsored preserves.
Even more impressive is the fact that after 27 years of terrorism, vendettas, treachery and war across the globe from 2001-2028, the major nations of the world put aside their differences to bring about a new age of peace and science. The world had finally become the "global village" people had talked about ad infinitum during the later part of the 20th Century. All the major powers shared their ideas, technology and resources, truly working together.
Poverty, inequity, injustice and war still existed and there remained impoverished and hostile "third world nations" but they were in the minority and generally considered exceptions, outcasts and backwater places.
There were many contributing factors leading to the new "global age of prosperity and learning" but three had the greatest impact. One was a universal weariness of constant strife and war, another was the North American Alliance Pact (the United States of America, Canada and Mexico) and the third was an unexpected series of explosive technological breakthroughs that set the world on its ear and sparked the imagination of people everywhere. The sharing of knowledge, the mutual exploitation of ideas and the sharing of technology among many friendly nations led to unprecedented succession of advancements and breakthroughs that had a domino effect, spawning more innovative ideas, breakthroughs and rapid exploitation of those ideas that gave birth to a new age of science, technology, cooperation and excitement.
If this were not the Golden Age of Humankind or the Age of Prosperity, it was without a doubt the age of wonder. Humankind felt unchained, and now believing anything was possible, looked to conquer the universe before them. Old age, sickness and human frailty were all washed away, outer space and the inner space of the oceans and the human body became the new frontiers and the impossible seemed within reach in every direction.
It is said that all good things must come to an end and so it is that the Golden Age became tarnished over the last twenty years.
One of science's and society's obsessions centered around the area of human augmentation. The quest to create the perfect human, physically, emotionally and psychologically. All sorts of research and technology involving genetic manipulation, cloning, chemical augmentation, brain implants, nano-machines, cybernetics and robotics had been developed in the quest to make the ultimate human. Many offered diverse and diametrically opposing views. Many claimed to be superior to the others for one reason or another and each was pitted against the other in a fierce social-economic war to win the world market. The ever increasing pressure of intense competition, the desire for personal recognition and unbridled greed put a quick end to two generations of international exchange and cooperation. It put a chill on the Golden Age of Science and ushered in a new age of secrecy, ruthless business maneuvering and the reckless application of crackpot theories and shortcuts in problem solving and product testing.
This turn of events made nations and corporate powers reexamine other areas of technology and pull back on the availability and exploitation of their scientific discoveries. This caused a slowdown in technological development which translated into a sharp decline in the global economy. Worse, after two generations of peace, many of the "wonders of the Golden Age" were now being applied to the military. Robotics, cybernetics, lasers, super alloys and other advancements, even genetic engineering, cloning and other medical discoveries held vast potential for war.
Even the vast majority of world powers who did not rush toward military supremacy looked at their fabulous creations with a twinge of horror. For two generations, they were so busy creating, building and developing scientific wonders that they had not realized they had unleashed a thousand Genies from their bottles. Suddenly they realized how recklessly they had thrown themselves into science without completely thinking the global ramifications and the potential for misuse and outright evil. And as the fairy tale warns, once unleashed, the Genie can not be easily put back.
Heroes of science and business were now condemned for being short-sighted, greedy and even outright villains concerned only about fame and profits (many were). The nations suddenly found themselves as "rivals". The age of enlightenment was over. Envy, suspicion, paranoia and disharmony raged, reshaping the landscape.
The "new Cold War" era had arrived with a vengeance.
Still, all in all, the world was a better place than anything known in previous centuries. Most believed this decade of reduced growth simply represented a natural slowdown, stabilization and necessary move towards responsibility that would turn into an even greater age of advancement and prosperity.
Life was good. The future bright. And it would all end tomorrow.
The man was old, very old by the 20th Century standards. With the prodigious leaps in medical care, he was approaching 128 years old. Not a record, but simply an average number for the era. Still some medical problems during his early days condemned him to a high-tech wheelchair with a medical care-unit constantly surveying him and injecting various medical drugs. Ironically, the unit or Bio-comp was almost the same that was used to create the "Juicers", the chemically augmented super-soldiers.
His name wasn't important. His function... No, his PROFESSION was important...
Important because his long life-dream was finally realized.
To the public he was a geneticist among others, but to him, he was first and foremost a "Brony".
Brony, a portmanteau coined from Brother and Pony and designating the male fans of the cartoon known as "My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic". A cartoon based on a product of Hasbro that was simply, in the beginning, small toys for little girls.
Its fourth incarnation, created by Lauren Faust, was such a success that it touched the heart of almost everyone who saw it. Children, teenagers, adults and older people of the two sexes felt something deep inside them resonating with a cartoon about multicolor talking ponies in the magical land of Equestria and together they built something that never ceased to grow.
One dream that many Bronies and Pegasisters (the female part of the fan-base) have and wrote about it was to somehow having Equestria real. Generally by being transported into the magical land. Fictions about that theme abound and many heartfelt wishes were expressed on its realization.
Of course, it never happened...
But the old man also never gave up. It was one of the lessons from the cartoon. He tried to see if Science would be able to pierce the walls between dimensions in vain...
He then had the idea to go the other way. If he couldn't go to Equestria, he would find a way to BRING Equestria to him. In one form or another...
The result of more than half a century of research was before him: A bio-containment tube, a giant vertical transparent tube with a greenish oxygenated and nutritive fluid, various electronics probes and tubes for the life-support of the floating life-form inside.
He couldn't stop the tears of joy from his eyes as he looked upon his creation. She was a small equine of four feet at the shoulder. Her coat was a creme color, her hooves black and her mane and tail were silver. He also knew her closed eyes were emerald-colored and faced forwards on a surprisingly humanized equine face. Her most striking features were the pair of feathered wings on her sides and the unique spiraling horn on her forehead. The name he choose for her was engraved on the tube.
Silver Dawn was the result of the progress made in genetic manipulation, cloning and nanotechnology during this Golden Age of Science. And, originally she had been... human...
The old geneticist had a vast room overcrowded by his... past errors. Silver Dawn was meant to be perfect, so he tried and experimented a lot in genetic engineering, cloning and gene splicing. He rapidly determined that he couldn't create a pony, any kind of Equestrian pony, from nothing. The creations obtained from a pure equine basis were also lacking the... spark he was searching for.
So he continued to experiment and dissected his failures to progress on his path. He finally found that only a chimera using a human base was his best shot. Using military funding and the growing paranoia around genetic research, he appropriated by legal and illegal means the knowledge of foreign labs and his own country research made in Texas which enabled him to pass the last hurdle: Magic.
During the beginning, the old man discovered that Magic DID indeed exist on Earth but was so feeble in scope and power that it was unusable for him or would required decades of hard study from his creation. The research of his peers showed however that Psionics were a reality and more easily available.
Well, since Magic was closed to him, he would give his creation a level of psionic powers equal to an Alicorn of Equestria.
The alteration of a human into Silver Dawn had been painstakingly planned from the very beginning. The old man used the existing public medical system to search for a compatible DNA that he could splice with various species. He kidnapped the specific young girl and carefully brainwashed and indoctrinated her with ABSOLUTELY everything from "My Little Pony", even the fan-base creations. He even took great care into creating a background appropriate for an Equestrian Alicorn along with including the basic skills necessary for a princess. Finally, hoping for another miracle, he downloaded all he found about magic on Earth.
The twelve years old girl was then progressively altered physically by nano-machines as her cells were spliced with genetic material from many species and reworked by nano-viruses and implanted artificial chromosomes. Nothing from her original body escaped from multiple alterations as she was designed to be the point of origin of any and all equestrian ponies. The goal of the old man was to recreate all the attributes of an Alicorn with the exception of replacing Magic with Psionic.
And now, a year after he began the final phase of his Masterwork, Silver Dawn was a reality. Tomorrow he would prepare his secret lab in Atlanta for her awakening, another delicate phase, and his life-dream would be achieved. The only thing he couldn't arrange was for a proper Cutie Mark. He managed to give her flanks the capacity to change the pigmentation of the coat and linked the controls to her subconscious, but so far no Cutie Mark.
He frowned as he consulted the readings of the bio-tube. Artificially maintained into a dream-state to better reinforce her conditioning, Silver Dawn had... an agitated sleep cycle for some time. It was now one week since this particular pattern, sign of an intense cerebral activity around the pineal gland, appeared on his monitoring and nothing he did with the brainwashing/indoctrinment apparatus worked to resolve this small problem. Perhaps his creation was sensing the moment of her glorious awakening..?
Earth, December 22, 2098 at midnight and thirty seconds: Day One of The Great Cataclysm.
Notes: Silver Dawn is mostly a Eugenic Hero from "Heroes Unlimited". With an unlimited budget...
I didn't put everything in her but she is significantly more powerful than any beginning heroes. The first chapters will deal with her origins, what is Chaos Earth and the events leading to her arrival on RIFTS Earth.
This is Silver Dawn writing. My author has FINALLY wrote a story about me. Of course, he took the worst version for my origins AND the world of my adventures.
I am mostly an artificial Alicorn genetically created. And I am going to a world where EVERYTHING can happen.
Oh, and don't think you'll see more than a few chapters. My author is notorious for having a fickle muse that give him a few chapters and then went on a totally different story.
Still, I hope you'll enjoy what he will write.