The Far Side of Utopia

 

The Incursion:

The First Meeting of Kor’s World and the IDS’s World.

The IDS’s Homeworld was at a relatively stable point; international powers were in a fairly content gridlock. Wars still flickered around the edges, but the scale was flicking flames instead of raging forest fires. Magic was a myth to the general public, dimensions were a concept of theory, math, or fiction.

Then came the Incursion.

Most people didn’t know what was going on – an understandable sentiment, since it made little sense. Even now sorting out the details of what happened is a dubious enterprise. Out of seemingly nowhere came people that would carry many epithets, but would ultimately be known only as “people from Kor’s World”. They made no effort at communication, merely started to systematically destroy the infrastructure of the world.

A Nuclear powerplant? They’d destroy it. Senate building? Definitely destroyed. Their goal wasn’t clear – some speculate in retrospect it was an effort to decapitate civilization on the world itself. What is clear is that they were brutally effective – while their lesser automatons were capable of wiping out entire armed army squads (let alone nearly helpless police forces) their Red Armored Soldiers were invincible before military technology. Short of using Nuclear Weaponry on their own population centers, there was no effective way to combat these individuals; while not truly invulnerable, their high mobility and utterly devastating powers made any attempt to fight them conventionally almost meaningless.

It was discovered in time that they deployed from high altitude platforms, originally giving the belief they’d come from space. This would later be disproved with the discovery of the Bridgepoint, but it was a wide spread early belief. These platforms also proved to capable of the casual destruction of almost any target they chose, but as they were vulnerable to mass military counter attack, they usually did not reveal them until an area was pacified beyond that capability, a feat of advanced (and likely magical in nature) anti-detection systems.

However, Kor’s World made an enemy that they couldn’t ignore or easily crush. Magic had long lurked in secret societies of the world. Their motivations varied. For those that had been manipulating the world from the shadows, they simply couldn’t allow their sandbox to be trampled. For some it was merely self-presevation. And one, perhaps one of the greatest of them, the Ervon Magical Society, a global presence that had played a vast role in containing the continued secrecy of magic, they could simply not remain spectators to this level of devastation. While the others waged war against the invaders on their own, the Ervon Magical Society stepped forward and turned over their magical knowledge and resources to the desperate collation forces.

Combining this with the first captured technology of the invaders, the Collation’s gears started to turn. It would not be overnight, and they remained not entirely effective as the war between the Kor’s World invaders and the various magic societies (and the governments still capable of producing military assets as fast the invaders smashed them to bits) turned into a bloody slugfest.

As all both sides stumbled towards exhaustion, the United Collation unveiled the first primitive autocasters. Weapons the enabled humans to fight against mages. These weapons were not terrible effective in the sense that someone wielding on could defeat a Kor’s World Solider (or even a mage – most of whom were still hostile to the United Collation as well – they had little interest in turning the world over to them anymore they did the invaders).

But they were effective in the sense of a dozen – or even a hundred – people armed with them could. And in the new three sided war, this would be enough. All sides had been devastated by the opening chapters, but one of these was not like the others. One of these had literal millions of people to recruit. The result was inevitable, and the United Collection ended the war victorious.

From there a new global government was established to fill the void, and the IDS was established to investigate what happened, and make very sure it never happened again.

Contact:

The Entrance of the IDS to the world of Malsa/PACT politics.

The IDS’s appearance in this new world was far less drastic then the Incursion. They were discreet. They poked around. They spoke oddly, but learned the differences in languages that seemed to share similar roots.

They started to push things a little here and there. Certainly they were noticed, but everyone assumed they were agents of someone else.

It wasn’t until they shut down a magical research facility with considerably force things heated up. It would later be discovered the facility had acquired an autocaster and was researching what it worked. Where they got it is still unknown, but the IDS realized they may not have as a good lid on the situation as they had hoped, and the factions of the new world realized there was an IDS.

Though it was sudden in occurrence, the IDS had planned heavily for this eventuality. In playing the factions off each other with the knowledge that interdiminsional goods and technology to their adversaries would ruin them, the IDS did “negative bargaining” – ie: we won’t police smuggling against your enemies if you don’t agree to our treaties. Since that was something they couldn’t allow, most people were forced into treaties with only minimal concessions on the IDS behalf.

While from the IDS’ prospective this made for minimal intervention and technological contamination, this wasn’t necessarily popular among the people signing the treaties, especially as countries already behind the superpowers had no incentive to sign – they knew the superpowers were already leveraged against each other, and therefor had to be strong armed by the larger nations who didn’t want to see these countries get advantages denied to them into signing.

The policy of leveraging their power through the control of smuggling and trade permissions has largely remained IDS doctrine; however, as the IDS has had more things they want, and tried to extend their power, they made more concessions in order to get them. While the IDS now has almost global defacto power and immunity, the bleed of technology has jumped, and autocasters are now widespread in the new world; what cards the IDS has left is an open question.