Now, to start off, I'm big into cosmic horror, quantum bullshit, and all sorts of similar 'real and not real are matters of opinion and circumstance' types of thinking. So my take may not be the take that a lot of people get.
First, background. It seems that at some point in the recent past, within a decade at most, a Scary Cosmic Thing happened. We hear this in reference to the Void Outs that were mentioned. More on those, even though there isn't much. This Scary Cosmic Thing caused another world, which we'll call Hades for now, to intersect with our own. It seems that this is literally a realm of the dead, and so that means the living and the dead can now dip back and forth, world to world. There's likely some heavy qualifiers here, but I'd be disappointed if it was free. One such qualifier is that the dead are very clearly unnatural. Whether a mobile skeleton, or something more arcane and eldritch, returning from the dead has a price. Not necessarily on you, but on those around you who you interact with.
Back to the Scary Cosmic Thing, it naturally constituted a societal collapse event. It also likely unmade a lot of infrastructure, meaning getting around the continental US is an exhausting task, even without hostile city states and eldritch jackasses wandering around.
Now, regarding the infrastructure being 'unmade' and the Void Outs they mentioned. They're probably the same thing. Essentially wiping away any trace of human or intelligent hands. Including actual humans. A Void Out is a scary event where buildings, cars, roads, trash on the roadside, possibly even farmed plants, and anyone standing around them just... disappear. They stop existing, replaced by pristine wilderness, untouched by human actions. Terrifying.
Which takes us to YouTM played by Norman Reedus. You're an operative for an undisclosed group, although it seems like you're a Fed of some acronym or another. Your job is quite simple. Make contact with american city states, and get them to establish more permanent communications through various means.
Your ability to discern the locations of eldritch and unkowable entities makes you invaluable. Where other operatives would simply go mad from trying to perceive the 'BT's, you can perceive them in a way that doesn't immediately harm your sanity, allowing you to function even in close proximity to them. Function might boil down to 'fucking run', but it's far better than 'gibber madly in the corner as your brain dribbles out your ears'.
You're assisted in this 'perceive the unkowable' by a Bridge Baby. Likely some stillborn thing, straddling the line between living and dead. The bridge baby, combined with your higher than average ability to see spooky shit and not go bugfuck insane allows you to die in new and interesting ways succeed where others might fail.
The downside, is that you can end up crossing over INTO Hades without actually dying. Whether this is where everything lost to a Void Out goes, no idea. Maybe parts of Hades have turned into fully fledged american cities and societies.
We don't know. What we do know, is that Hades seems to be much more fluid and warpy than the living world. Things there are far more... probabilistic and arcane than here. Walking down the street for milk might end up turning into a slog across a long dead but still raging battlefield, or a long trek through spooky jungles. Getting back, ditto. You might face the souls of dead people, holding semantic powers based on who they were in life, and what they've done since dying.
Think Silent Hill. The horrible psycho parts of it.
Leaving Hades? Probably difficult for other people, but you're Supa Extra Speshul and you've got a Anchor Baby to the land of the living.
And, leaving Hades, you get all sorts of possibilities. Take magic and shit back with you? Doable for some people. Probably scientologists or something. Pull the souls of your former squadmates back with you, so they can fight some more? Shit, they'd probably thank you. If they had lips. Or skin. But they do have fingers and guns, so they're happy to shoot things until they can thank you properly.
So, to recap, Scary Cosmic Thing happens, large parts of america and probably the world just get yeeted into oblivion overnight, crazy people figure out how to pull magic out of ANOTHER FUCKING DIMENSION and predictably go on tears through what's left of society, bandits also figure things out, Fascism makes a comeback because that's just what happens when shit goes horribly wrong don't think about what that suggests about people DON'T THINK ABOUT IT, and Madame President who may be a guy but is so fucking decrepit that I'm not sure at all and don't want to offend them because they're probably a vampire or some fucking thing, has decided that because you're an Extra Speshul Main Character, all this shit is now YOUR PROBLEM. She's just gonna lie in the oval office and tap her morphine button a few million times fuck you very much.
Joy.
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