Crumbling Utopias

Option 1 - The Crystal Palace

The Arcology glitters like a diamond set in verdant rolling hills.  Nature has reclaimed the land, and after many, many years there is very little sign of the near-disaster that led to humanity encapsulating itself in sealed biospheres.

Within the Arcology is a utopia of advanced technology and social harmony - but for some the deprivations needed to maintain the delicate balance that permits human survival chafe, and more importantly the controlling ideology is saccharine sweet in its effort to keep everyone on an even keel and incapable of discord.  They yearn for struggle, for some sense that their existence has some meaning. They find the ideology that keeps their society running suffocating, and now they have a plan: a way to break out of their packed-in-cotton lives and strike out to create a new society of their own.

And soon, they will glimpse the iron fist that the placid, smiling faces of their rulers has hidden for generations.

Option 2 - The Lost City

The Great War ended everything.

Nuclear, chemical, biological and ultimately nanotech weapons tore down our cities and left the survivors trembling amid the rubble.

Slowly, and with great effort, tiny pockets of civilization have started to congeal amid the twisted wastes, but nothing is the same:

The Great War changed everything.

Radiation, retroviruses, DNA targeting nano-weapons, all these have combined to warp Nature into shapes we would barely recognise. Strange creatures have emerged from the ashes.  Familiar creatures have changed, grown from our subjects to our rivals in the race to reclaim the Earth.

Against this backdrop, a light has risen:

One community of like-minded beings has slowly gathered the strength to build economic and intellectual wealth. A handful of perilous trade routes have been established between this center and a handful of areas that can feed into the civilization engine in various ways.  Journeys can only be undertaken on an irregular schedule, but there seems to be promise: the Elders have found evidence among the scraps they have gathered of the knowledge of the Ancients that this is how the Ancients rose to such heights.

An expedition sets out, cutting its way through the glowing jungles and tribes of savages that sprawl across the landscape.  But disaster strikes!

An attack, a storm, and the caravan is scattered.

Individuals, even small groups are doomed so far from the heart of the growing civilization - things are just too foul, too savage for the weak bodies of the parts of the whole.

Luck!

A handful of survivors stumble on the entrance to ruins of the Ancients, and quickly secure themselves inside.  As they rest with the winds of corruption howling outside, they soon realise that this is no ordinary ruin: this is just the entrance to a vast complex that not only stretches far and wide below the canopy of the jungle, but seems also to delve deep into the bedrock.

The world outside is still far too dangerous, but perhaps there are tools or valuable secrets surviving here that could be used to help them return to civilization alive.

But if random travelers can stumble on the entrance, so can many other things.

What horrors wait in the depths?

More importantly, even if the depths are still secure, will whatever still lives there be friendly?


Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10662/10662.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Product.aspx?x=dnd/products/dndacc/254600000

Meanwhile in the Tragic Kingdom

Name the movie:

The tale starts with the birth of the brave and powerful King’s son, driving yet another wedge between the king and his brother who – despite being physically weak – is the more canny of the brothers and resents the way in which he has been marginalized.  The King makes matters worse as time goes on, teaching his son to treat the kind and intelligent Court Advisor as a fool, publicly humiliating him by making him the butt of practical jokes, and instead favouring the semi-coherent ravings of a half-mad mystic as guidance for his rule. 

As the Prince grows, he becomes ever more spoiled and arrogant, going so far as to deliberately disregard the Advisor’s warnings in favour of a frivolous adventure that takes him into a dismal slum populated by the kingdom’s oppressed underclass. The young Prince trespasses and mocks the conditions in which the underclass lives, and finds himself on the sharp end of trouble when he’s cornered by a group of toughs.  The King, however, has been warned by his loyal Advisor and uses his own power directly to slap down the toughs and make personal threats of retribution against the people of the slum if the Prince is ever harmed.

Despite this near-miss, the Prince becomes even more obnoxious, and at last the Royal Uncle can take no more – dissatisfied with what he sees the future holding for the kingdom, he goes in secret to the slums and makes contact with the fierce fascist revolutionaries there, harnessing their ability to mobilize the downtrodden in support of his try for the throne. Together, they formulate a plan to assassinate the Prince in a hunting “accident” and when the King leaps to his son’s aid – ever the brainless “hero” – the Royal Uncle takes advantage of the situation to kill the King as well.

The Prince survives this assassination attempt, but horrified at what his incompetence has wrought, he flees his responsibilities and eventually takes up with a pair of ne’er do well fools who spend their lives in dissipation and idleness. As the Prince grows up in the company of these sodden idiots, the Usurper’s grip on the kingdom begins to crumble:

He eliminated all the real challenges immediately of course, using the muscle of his fascist allies, but the ladies of the court are resisting him in every way they can, using their position to stymie attempts to get the economy working properly after the confusion of the coup. Knowing that only the Advisor has the brains to truly challenge him, he has him jailed and kept nearby, but the Advisor turns out to be too loyal to the old regime and willing to watch the kingdom fall apart rather than help the Usurper in any way.

Desperate for some way to save her homeland, one of the young ladies of the court flees the kingdom, throwing herself into self-imposed exile as a way to hone her skills and perhaps return one day to dislodge the Usurper from the throne.  One of the two dissipated fools who adopted the young runs afoul of her, and as she is about to skewer him the Prince Prince – who has grown into a fine bully-boy to protect his two “uncles” – arrives to save the day. The two cross swords, but are an even match, having been trained in their youth by the same masters.

In the course of the battle she recognises him as the rightful heir, and begs him to return with her to set things right. At first, the Prince refuses – not only is he still wracked with guilt for his recklessness and cowardice in running away from responsibility in the first place, but he has grown used to the indolent lifestyle of his “uncles” and reluctant to make any major changes.  She puts her charms to work, however, and ultimately seduces him before manipulating him into joining her to at least see what has become of his kingdom.

Arriving, they discover that the ladies of the court have given up all hope of help coming from outside, and have attempted a counter-insurgency only to be beaten mercilessly by the fascists, who are now straining at the flimsy leash the Usurper holds on them. Seeing that a full fascist takeover is imminent, the Prince and his Consort organise the royals for one last attempt at regaining power.  In the final battle, the Prince is brought face to face with the Usurper, and is forced to kill him.

In the aftermath, the fascists are driven back underground, those loyal to the Usurper are forced into exile, and the Prince re-establishes the power of his line – reinstalling the Royal Advisor, but also using his power to offer positions of authority to the dissipated “uncles” and other cronies, and once again looking to the addled mystic for advice.

And so the cycle begins again.

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Source: The Lion King http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/