Artemisia's Fractured Reality

After a cataclysmic event of unknown origin, the once whole Artemisia was broken into islands of stable reality surrounded by a new body of seething dark liquid rising into a sky-high wall of darkly-colorful fog.

Predictably, there were people who tried to wade into the soup, for various reasons. It was quickly discovered that there was no traversing the foggy water on foot or in conventional vehicles--like a particularly weird, unreal ocean, it pulled people into it if they waded in too far or stayed too long.

The people who did make it back had nothing to tell that wasn't baffling. Some did not remember anything of their time in the void at all. Others remembered having a moment of recognition that everything was working like it did in their dreams, with events and places flowing from one to the other with no connective tissue, and everything--no matter how weird--making perfect sense at the time. After that lucid-dreaming moment, every one of them had found themselves washed up on the ground just outside of the void, sometimes a fair distance from where they had gone in. Thus was Artemisia's newest, most dangerous, and most inconvenient ocean dubbed "The Dreaming Void."

Hazards from the Void

As if all of the mundane repercussions of separation were not enough, the void itself has proven to pose ill-defined dangers to nearby areas. Occasionally, hundreds of feet of the seething liquid begins to swim and gather itself momentously, as though something enormous is thrashing in its depths, and then everything within a half-mile radius is instantly smothered in dark and fog.

The inundation can last for up to a day, and as the liquid and fog slowly recede, the land where it sat is revealed to have been scraped entirely clean--of plants, of pavement, and of people. Any building not completelly submerged at the inundation's high point will be eaten away rooftop to basement along the tide line. The rest will remain, standing untouched or sagging down from loss of structural integrity.

As frightening and unpredictable as these sudden floods are, the only way to be sure one is safe from them is to not be near the coast at any time. Unfortunately, some who live there cannot afford to move away, as any open housing near the center of several islands was almost immediately laid claim to by various bad actors who are now charging through the nose for the privilege of living there. Who precisely has taken over varies from locale to locale, but the most common is criminal organizations, followed by individual opportunists who have heard of the days when basic housing wasn't guaranteed by the government and real estate wasn't just for rich people who wanted to buy a bigger place. For the first time in a century, people have to accept the idea of rent--and often quite high rent--or risk going homeless.

Other effects of living near the void shores are less easily measured, and the people who don't live or work nearby mostly chalk them up to existential stress and paranoia.

"I've been dreaming more than I've ever dreamt in my life," one resident reported, "and real vivid dreams, too. Not all bad, not all nightmares, but they're still kind of exhausting. And the ones that are bad are...just, wow. Like, there's this awful sense of helplessness, and something I need, just, desperately, like my existence depends on it, and there's this person nearby who won't let me have it. And I'm full-out screaming to them that I need this, that's how bad it is, and they won't listen. It's someone I'm really close to, who should care, and no matter what I say, they won't listen. And there's no reason for them not to. I hate those dreams, to be honest.

"Anyway, the neighbor, Shelley? She woke up standing outside her house, halfway down to the shoreline. It freaked us all out bad. So she started locking her doors before falling asleep. And it happened again! Her sister has rigged an alarm in the driveway, and I hear it go off every night I'm awake. So now her sister comes and grabs her, but none of us know what'll happen if her sister sleeps through the alarm one of these nights."

Life in a Fractured World

Artemisia was no longer one entity in which travel and transport from any Point A to any Point B was possible. The world had been rent, and each piece had its own immediate struggles. However, some of the social shockwaves were felt across most locations. These included but were not limited to:

• Communication between islands consisted only of wireless-type tech (wired infrastructure lost to the void behaved oddly). After the first week--in which central government tried to blame the catastrophe on the psions, and then tried to quell panic by publicly killing them--communications became extremely sporadic and so limited as to sometimes be nonsensical. The resulting loss of electronic communication separated families and interrupted the transfer of government benefits to all outside the mainland.
• While the bulk of the resources consumed by regular people came out of fabricator-style factories, some services--like certain hospitals--became isolated to a single area only, and people were stranded with now extremely dangerous illnesses that until days ago had been easily treatable.
• Central government basically ceased to exist everywhere outside the mainland, with all sorts of local solutions having to be implemented. Some of these involved...less than ideal individuals taking over laws and their enforcement.
• The collective trauma drove demand for escapist activities--including some very illegal ones--to skyrocket, making the criminal organizations who trafficked in them suddenly far more influential than government in some locations.
• The rarer naturally-grown and prepared commodities suddenly became virtually worthless in the areas where they were manufactured because huge amounts of demand were cut off with the islands. At the same time, they became extremely valuable in the areas that had lost touch with their producers, causing prices to go through the roof and making them commodities that some people would literally kill for.