I guess.... technically? I don't even remember my old username, lol. I just remember that I used to have an account here. I guess count me as a newbie, though, 'cause I haven't really been on the site in a long, long while.

Will do! And yeah, the spreadsheet is already insane, and I haven't even finished planning the first main story path and it's branch-offs. 

To start off, thank you so much for the compliment! I haven't edited it yet, but thanks anyways. 

For your first two paragraphs, please see my first reply in the thread. I think I answered it there, but feel free to ask any more questions. 

Good idea about the 2020 bit. I wanted to choose a date that seemed important while not making us too advanced. I think I'll bump it up to 2050.

And... yeah. That phrasing about the science bit is wanting. I meant to say that there was no rigorous science. Basically, our "science" is limited to endlessly copying what records we do still have and more ancient-Greek-sequences endeavors. For example, we still know about basic germ theory and how infections work, but we don't know how to make vaccines. We know the Earth is round, but that's only because of an Ohioan Aristotle figure re-discovering it. Et cetera. 

Yeah, I copied it in from Pages.  

The character is going to be a Tribe-Folk from the Ohio River Valley region, right outside the borders of the Others' borders on the Appalachians (they control most of the East coast.) The catch to the story is that you start out just in normal Tribe-Life to introduce yourself to the world– trading with cities, fighting off bandits, generally surviving– and eventually you can choose to do things as diverse as accumulating wealth, gaining political power over a city or your tribe, uniting the Ohio River Valley region, finding love, or exposing the secrets of who the Others really are. 

Oh, and thanks for the ideas! I think I'm going to edit it to be told to the character directly from a shaman-dude, like an oral historian some something.

So, I'm thinking of writing a post-apocalyptic story. (Yes, I know, you can all release the collective sigh.) At this point, I have the reason for apocalypse all thought out, and I have typed up an introduction. Forgive me for any typos, please, it is midnight after all! I would, however, just like some critical opinion and questions. So, here goes:

Eight hundred years.

Eight hundred years, nine months, and twelve days since they first landed.

The sun never stopped rising. The moon never stopped cycling. The tide never stopped ebbing or flowing. The birds and butterflies, whales and salmon– they never stopped migrating. And the people never stopped fighting. 

The world continued as it always had, even after they landed. That’s what a natural scientist would tell you. Not that we have those anymore, not really. There are no real “natural scientists" in a world with no science. Well, they have science. Never forget about them. Always gently probing outside of the neat little boundaries of their frontier empire, snatching the good Tribe-Folk and Kingdom-Folk and Republic-Folk away from their own families and people and into their grand cities, to be enslaved, or ogled at, or probed, or Gadd knows what. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. An introduction would be in order. Here is what happened, or what the closest things we still have to “historians” say happened. It may seem a bit nonsensical, but that’s because we still don’t have the details. We probably never will.

January 1, 2020. Two thousand-twenty, the big two-oh two-oh. The New Years’ Eve celebration was fantastic. The party after the ball dropped over Times Square was something for the ages. People smiling, dancing in improvised drunk jigs, kissing that certain someone with a 1989 Robin Williams commanding them to carpe diem. And that was the general feeling of the time: carpe diem. Well, that would be the last time, too. Everything changed that midnight, in New York and the world over.

The new year was hardly three hours old when it struck. Without warning, every satellite around the Earth was destroyed. Signal was lost instantaneously the world over. Minutes afterward, every store of weapons of mass destruction on the Earth– our only weapons to fight back with– was infiltrated. Squads of the invaders piloted silent, undetectable jetcraft to each location, all at the same time, coordinated exactly to the minute; if the WMD was located in a submarine, their craft could easily submerge and destroy the offending ship. Any military personnel who stood in their way was mercilessly slaughtered, incinerated or eviscerated by white-hot projectiles from the intruders’ rifles. The invaders’ jet-black armor covered them from head to toe, with only an opaque purple visor as a break from its sleek, insectoid uniformity; there was no penetrating the armor, and there were no true chinks to take advantage of. Only two invaders were killed on their mission, and then only because of concentrated heavy arms. Every WMD on Earth was destroyed. At the same time, the operatives sabotaged or destroyed almost every anti-WMD defense system on the planet.

The next morning, chaos ensued. GPS was gone, and with it, much of television, international timekeeping, a high-speed Internet, and location services. The world ground to a halt. What was left of interconnectivity was all spreading the news of one thing: aliens have destroyed our nukes. The BBC got its hands on the cadaver of one of the few slain “alien” operatives and unmasked it before the public. The face certainly did not look human. The clock struck 10:00, January 2. And with that, the invasion began.

Unbeknownst to the global public, several ships the size of large cities had suddenly appeared in Earth orbit the day before. They were the source of the quiet nighttime invaders, and they would soon be the source of the apocalypse. The ships let loose hundreds and hundreds of thousands of massive kinetic missiles onto the Earth as they orbited. Washington. New York. Beijing. Berlin. Amsterdam. New Delhi. Bangkok. Rio de Janeiro. Athens. Rome. Every major and half-major city on Earth, beginning with the largest and slowly working down to even those with 10,000 people or less, was systematically annihilated. Those few who fled or lived away from urban or suburban centers were safe. Those who did not or were not died. Billions perished within a day.

The details of what happened next are not clear. Suffice to say, the alien people settled. On every continent, they settled, and they seemed ready to conquer the globe. Nothing was stopping them. Nothing at all. But, all of a sudden, they stopped. They never crossed far beyond the Appalachians in North America or the Congo in Africa, and they mostly abandoned any semblance of presence in most other places. Nobody knows why. Anyone who wants to know is either killed or captured, and the captured never return. Eventually, the remaining people just grew to accept the strange Others who populated the boundaries of human civilization. Or, at least, its tattered remains.

It has been eight hundred years since those two days.

Eight hundred years, nine months, and twelve days since they first landed.

The sun never stopped rising. The moon never stopped cycling. The tide never stopped ebbing or flowing. The birds and butterflies, whales and salmon– they never stopped migrating. And the people never stopped fighting.

I'm thinking of actually stylizing it to seem like a narrator from the setting itself is telling the story. Put a bit of mythology into it. Is that a good idea, or could that be too confusing? I don't know. This is why I'm here for advice. 

I'm not completely new here, but the intro message told me to put a message here. So, here I am. I guess.

I actually found this site about four years ago and created an account, and I haven't really been back since. But, I forgot the password to my old account– and I wouldn't want to be associated with my old self, anyways– so here I am with a new one.

Hey.