[So]Rice's Modelling and Painting Sweatshop

The world that we knew is gone, the old civilizations cremated in flames of their own incitement…

A status quo had arisen. Each nation fearful at striking out at its fellows for fear of retaliation, of mutual annihilation. Not one of them wished to stand down, to be subjugated, and to be incinerated alone. But in an instant, the precarious balance had crumbled.

Bombs fell, buildings toppled, cities burned, and civilizations were annihilated as weapons of unseen power wrecked havoc across the globe. Titanic ships roamed the seas and giant planes thundered through the skies. The Earth rumbled, the land shook, and the oceans raged as fire fell from the skies and a sea of atomic fire swept across the globe. Over two thousand years of human progress was reduced to ruin.

Entire cities were leveled with thermo-nuclear weapons; those not erased were left to waste in a new world. Plagues born from the infernal cocktails of biological weaponry swept across continents murdering without quarter and forever altering those who resisted their effects. The land was polluted beyond restoration. The rivers were choked with acid; forests not burnt grew into virtually inhospitable jungles of alien flora. The sky was chocked with an impenetrable cloud of poisonous ash and sulfur.

The devastation was total, the planet doomed to extinction. It seemed impossible that anyone could survive. But out of the ruins, fragments of a few proud empires continue to wage their perpetual wars among each other and ideologies anew…

To begin the perpetual tread towards extinction once more…