current author's note:
The story works, I think, in either the G1 or G2 setting simply because such a vast amount of time passes that the origins of the thunderians and MummRa and 3rd Earth evolve into myths. If you're a recent G2 fan and don't know what a throwback thunderian is, see my original authors note below, and know this: that throwback is a fanon term a lot of us came up with around the years 1999-2001 to describe thunderians who looked more feline than human. If you can find an original G1 version of Grune and compare him to the other thunderians, you'll know exactly what I mean.
taken from my original author's notes at Treasures of Thundera, August 19, 2001
i've got somewhere around half the story written already, the problem is that it's all on paper and i have to type it out and then edit and stuff. i don't have much time and i wasn't going to post it here until it was all done. but since nothing else was happening here, why not? it'll force me to finish it faster this way.
it's not easy to explain this story. like the tittle suggests, it takes place in the future. it's not a nice future, to say the least. what else? if you're wondering what a 'throwback' is, look at grune or the thunderian guards in that time-travelling episode, i forget the title now. these are thunderians with very pronounced feline features. in this future they're not considered 'worthy,' what goes on will be explained fully.
you'll notice several types of creatures missing, snarfs, berbils, wollos, in other parts i haven't typed yet their absences are explained. mummra is there, though, and he makes his presence known in subtle ways.
oh and the thing with names, i'm not good with names so i'm borrowing them from another cartoon series and stuff. (like i said somewhere else, there's only so much you can do with the cat names...) the names are a mixture of greek and latin but they shouldn't be too hard to pronounce and there aren't that many new characters so i'm hoping they'll be easy to remember.
"One Million Years" by RD Rivero (2001-10-02)
Part One
The piercing howl of steam whistles sounded the ending of one shift and the beginning of another. Although their jarring alarms ceased in a matter of seconds, the hot vapors they emitted lingered in that damp, sooty underworld as swirls of hot gasses, streaming across high ceilings and skeletal supports – the ancient ironworks upon which the heavenly city of Metropolis had been built. The foul air was at best arid, resonating the slightest ticking of the infernal machines. At worst it was smog so thick, so brackish that only the strongest could survive – for long. Often – and that 'day' was no exception – the pollutants would form violent clouds along the vaulted tops of the main chambers and rain a dark, rancid filth of sweat, ash and fungal grime.
Motion. Everything everywhere was in motion. Slow or steady. Even the noxious air was kept in constant circulation by the fans that cooled the rapid, timeworn wheels, gears and cogs. The machines ran nonstop, except for those few days out of the year when their parts were checked, oiled or replaced. The workers, too, the throwbacks rejected by the elite of the city above, were slaves to an eternal flux, as untold thousands labored in ten-hour shifts, day after day after day.
The imperfect Thunderians toiled to their deaths in deep, dark shafts that few in Metropolis knew or even dreamed of. And when they were not wasting away their lives in perpetual, societal bondage, they would 'relax' up on the surface of Third Earth, a land once covered by lakes and forests, wide, living rivers and snowcapped mountains, a planet once beautified by untamed oceans and bright, blue skies but that a never-ending line of industrial machination had reduced to a wasteland replete with foundations of bulk steel and titanium frames, jetting pipes, turning blades, teeming cesspools and gapping holes dug straight through the planet's core. And darkness, perpetual darkness but for those few spots here and there where the city had not yet reached.
That abhorrent hell of moonless, starless night teemed with the humming of machines vibrating. Power generators, steam turbines and pistons – it was an awesome feat of engineering, a spinning, whirling fervor that went nowhere. Progress had transformed the planet into an artificial entity and all the processes that Nature had once taken care of now had to be synthesized. Machines that cleaned air, machines that purified water, machines that decomposed wastes into more useful compounds. All of that and more required unyielding attention. No, the metallic heart of the city could not be allowed to stop, not for a moment.
Up from the hives of the bowels of the earth came the exhausted workers of the past shift. Time had long ago drained their emotions and so without expression they gathered onto the rolling sidewalks from all directions in absolute chaos. From lions to cheetahs, sabertooths, the masses came together in a mindless unity born of necessity. Their uniforms, like their exposed fur, were dirtied black with soot and clung onto their bodies like a permanent, second skin. Their masters issued them only one pair of garments their whole adult lives and if or when those linens disintegrated, outside of the charity of others, they were gone forever – many of the men were naked but because of the darkness and the filth few ever, really noticed or cared.
Inch by inch the walkways merged and the lowly cats were brought into freight elevators that lifted them up to the surface levels while others were dropped down to replenish the hives with refreshed blood. Up and down, down and up, the air echoed the trampling of heavy feet that evolved in step to an eerie and silent funeral march.
At the 'upper' levels foremen herded their sluggish, weakened counterparts into cubicles. Within the males bred with the resident females, the overseers timing and monitoring to make sure that the act was done quickly. That there was no frivolity, no stalling. Boys were instructed on the working and maintaining of the machines that they would one day soon service for the rest of their lives. Girls, at even earlier ages, were put aside into nurseries and cubicles where they would bide their time in sporadic isolation, conceiving or birthing young in an endless chain that stretched out to their own gruesome, putrid ends.
What little free time the workmen had was spent loitering about immense, gothic-like rooms, fraternizing in pools. There they ate, drank or slunked into stacked, horizontal shelves one, two or three at a time for a different sort of relaxation. Yet, even there, they were kept in motion, never allowed to stay at the same area for longer than an hour.
Such was the world that the Thundercats had created, but how could it be that the descendants of Liono and his allies, the Warrior humans, would find themselves in such a precarious situation, such an uneasy balance? After one million years of bliss few knew, less cared and for the most part the people were content. Little had changed and so it seemed, after ages of complacency, that little needed to be changed. The first, few steps into that brave, new world were tiny, unnoticeable. Many of the ideas were already there, so artfully, cleverly disguised. The snobbery of the Thunderian nobles, the prejudices of the humans, only the slightest push was required for those ancient, ignorant tendencies to spiral out of control. It was, in effect, only a matter of time.