What is this?
Tales Of The Lost is a tie-in to my big project- well, one of my big projects- a RWBY fanime (possibly the first, definitely the best) called The Lost Kingdom. You can find it on DailyMotion, and it does have its own website (just thelostkingdom, on a free tk domain, you'll know it's the right one because it looks like the 1990s). I've done two episodes so far, with a whole season planned and the third episode in production. It's not set in the Emergence-verse, but is rather a spiritual successor with some similar themes and ideas.
Tales Of The Lost is in a similar vein to the Asides I wrote for Emergence. These are side stories, extra background, and humour tangents related to the main story. Most of them won't make sense on their own, some will help fill out the lore of The Lost Kingdom. Unless otherwise noted, all are canon and all are written by me.
I'm kicking this off with a pair of entries that go back to before it all began, setting up key background events from two very different perspectives. I suggest watching the first episode of The Lost Kingdom first before reading these, although reading both then watching the first episode probably works too.
Tales Of The Lost
Day Zero In America
For Robert Joesph Donovan, the day began much the same as any other. His alarm went off at 7:00 AM, he snoozed it once and then dragged himself out of bed ten minutes later. He stepped into the kitchen of his one-bedroom apartment, groggily slammed an off-brand coffee pod into his off-brand coffeemaker, and hopped in the shower. Fourteen minutes later, he was freshened up, had coffee in hand, and was generally feeling much more human.
Robert- Bob to his friends- stopped for a minute to check the traffic on his phone before heading out the door. He figured he would skip breakfast or maybe get it at the office, which was his plan every second morning. It was 7:41 by his phone- he didn't bother with a watch- when he pulled out of the parking lot in a deep blue 2011 Toyota Corolla. It was cool and slightly wet, average weather for DC in the middle of November.
As usual, he followed the monotone turn-by-turn instructions of Google Maps religiously, even though he'd probably driven this route enough times to do it blindfolded. He crossed a bridge over the Anacostia River and rolled with the dense traffic into the heart of Washington, DC. Something didn't feel quite right, but he ignored the feeling, and by 8:45 had already pulled into his usual parking spot.
Bob strode into the Solidity Solutions office within a few minutes of his usual time. Unusually, nobody greeted him at the door. Usually Mark, one of their database developers, would be standing by the door on his phone wasting the last few minutes before the actual work day playing a marijuana farming game. He would typically ask Bob about his project, and Bob would reply with a noncommittal answer.
But Mark was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Cindy, the receptionist. Bob shrugged and paid it little heed, continuing into the office proper. To his surprise everyone from the intern to the boss was gathered around the television at the far end of the room.
With possibilities from "funny cat video" to "team-building exercise" on his mind, Bob Donovan edged into the crowd trying to get a look. What was actually on the screen was about as far from that as it could get.
"What the hell is that?" he asked out loud, as a knee-jerk reaction. "It's a joke, right?"
The TV was tuned into CNN, where a breaking news report had interrupted whatever the normal programming had been. He recognized the landscape they were showing- a park just inland from the Patuxent River that he had been to multiple times. But it was the strange, rippling, bright thing cutting across it that took his breath away. The best description he could think of was a twisted mirror crossed with a shimmering puddle, stretching across the park and into the sky.
"No, man, it's real," Mark said from beside him. "They're calling it a 'discontinuity', whatever that means. They're saying there could be another world on the other side."
"Could be," one of the interns emphasized. "Maybe it's just…" He trailed off, missing a suitable explanation.
The video feed changed to an extremely serious-looking Army general at what seemed to be an impromptu press conference.
"As a precautionary measure, the surrounding area has been evacuated and the National Guard has been activated to secure the area. Again, I would like to stress that these are precautionary measures only; the discontinuity is stable and appears to be harmless in nature. Additionally, we are in contact with experts across the nation and around the world who are working diligently to determine the exact nature of this discontinuity."
"Yeah, but what about what's on the other side?" Mark asked, real fear masked beneath artificial snark.
"It's not a gate to hell, Mark, you play too many video games," Bob dismissed. He wasn't entirely convinced it wasn't an impossibility.
At this point, we are urging citizens to stay calm and continue to go about their daily lives. The discontinuity is stable, the site is secure, we have no reason to believe there is any threat to safety or national security. With that being said, we are continuing to monitor the situation closely, and will continue to keep the public informed on any new developments.
"Hey, you heard the man, everything's under control," Alexandra Langwell- to most of the office, she was simply the boss- announced loudly. She put on a brave face, but most of them realized she was trying to convince herself as much as everyone else. "It's not the end of the world here, let's get down to business."
Deciding that the everyday need to pay the bills superseded any concern over the seemingly supernatural happenings less than fifty miles away, Bob shrugged, pushed it to the back of his mind, and headed to his cubicle.
By lunchtime, the day had already been declared the least productive in the three-year history of the company. No one could shake the strange happenings in their backyard out of their minds. Programmers tabbed between code editors and livestreams, the secretary constantly snuck glances at a feed on her phone, and Bob couldn't focus on the expenses and accounts on his screen with the speculations and announcements playing through his headphones.
Fear and curiosity were the order of the day, not focus and drive. Discontinuities were the topic of the day, not enterprise software solutions. Who could focus on delivering a product when the question of whether they were alone in the universe burned so brightly?
Bob headed out for lunch, which was his usual routine. Rather than going to his usual destination of the Dunkin Donuts downstairs, he wandered down the street trying to clear his head. He ended up at a small, slightly scungy but appetizingly smelling pizza-by-the-slice place four blocks down the road.
"You see that discontinuity thing out by the Pax River?" the owner/operator asked casually as Bob paid for his two slices of pepperoni and can of Diet Pepsi.
"Yeah, the whole office is talking about it. We've hardly gotten anything done all day."
"No kidding." As he handed back the change, he joked, "Hope it isn't an alien invasion, I just renovated my kitchen. Shame to have that all ruined."
"Well, I live out in Hillcrest, so they'll flatten my apartment first," Bob quipped back as he took his pizza and left. Like the pizza man, he threw a charade of humour over very real concern.
Bob was hungrier than he had realized- he hadn't eaten anything that day, having been caught up in the excitement and then spending the rest of the morning trying and failing to get a project budget in line. By the time he'd made it back to the office, all of the pizza and most of the Diet Pepsi was gone. It had been a surprisingly good meal, and he made a mental note to try the pizza place more often.
The sojourn had made him five minutes late, but nobody seemed to care. He settled back into his office, but once again found himself unable to make any headway. On a good day, he could really get into the flow and zip through figures with nothing else in the way, but today, it just wasn't happening. His mind wandered and the minutes ticked by.
"Hey, hey!" a voice called from just outside his office. Tara, one of the project managers, leaned through the threshold, ponytail hanging at an odd angle. "Bob!"
With a few taps on his phone, he muted the audio stream he'd been listening to, then took off his headphones. "Yeah?"
"Boss says go home," Tara told him with a shrug.
Mind still addled with a maelstrom of thoughts, he asked, "Really?"
"Yeah. Nobody's getting anything done, so, fuck it. We're shutting down for the day."
"I guess that makes sense," he admitted, but Tara had already disappeared. He pocketed his phone, shoved his headphones in his bag, then made sure his documents were closed and computer shut down before leaving. When he'd first joined the company, he'd left the system logged in overnight and caught unholy hell from IT because of it.
Half the office had already left before him. There were a few other people in the parking lot, but many of the cars had already gone. He suspected that the other two companies in their building had closed up earlier, but didn't spend much effort pondering. Instead, he got in his car and headed for home.
The traffic was slightly worse than usual, but he'd still be home far earlier than normal so he didn't mind so much. The radio was tuned to his usual classic rock station, which was a welcome reprieve from the barrage of speculation and reports that he had listened to for most of the day.
He was on Pennsylvania Avenue, almost to the bridge, when traffic ground to a halt. His first reaction was to sigh, thinking maybe someone had gotten distracted and driven into someone. Then Sweet Emotion, playing over the radio, was cut off and replaced with ear-piercing EAS tones. Like most of the drivers around him, he shut off the engine and stepped out almost instinctually, wondering what was going on.
A loud roar, like a jet airliner but much louder, echoed around them. Six flying machines that could only be described as sci-fi airships lumbered toward them from the east, the direction of the discontinuity. They were large and odd-looking, with long forward sections, bulkier aft sections and metal feathers emerging from the stern. Missile trails zipped down from above the clouds to meet them, and the sounds of explosions and gunfire echoed in the distance. The wavering tone of a civil defense siren cut through the din and underscored it all.
The regular day had become anything but.