Gloaming
I wish this had been discovered before Rasputin. 80's tech, 30's cars, 40's fashion, and undead conspiracies? Way better than cold borscht! But mine is not to wonder why...
A Twilight World
Vampires, yes; Sparkly, no.
The BREACH First-In team found themselves outside an upstate New York farming village at dusk. They stayed hidden until they'd gotten a few glimpses of the locals, adjusted their clothing to come close enough to local style, and headed towards the flickering streetlights of the "main drag". It was at this point one team member did a little figuring. "Hey, we've been here at least 2, 3 hours... and it's not any darker. Or any lighter."Within the town itself, clocks... quite a lot of them... said it was 3:15, and by the street activity, open stores and restaurants, and so on, the assumption was this was PM, not AM. They acquired a small amount of local currency, then had coffee at a local diner (a routine ritual for BREACH explorers when appropriate). They found the service more suspicious than seemed warranted.
Other than the endless, unchanging, twilight, everything seemed normal (for an alternate Earth). The local year was 1986, which surprised them, as fashions seemed more 1940s and the automobile designs more 1930s. But there was a color TV visible inside the bar, and the paper had ads for portable cassette players and video recorders, though their design and styling were distinctly 'retro'... which here, evidenty, was modern.
They avoided asking about the sun. There was no mention of it in the paper, and asking people about things they consider facts of life is a good way to get marked out in a way that often led to shootouts, escapes, and a lot of paperwork once you got back through the breach.
The library was not helpful. The books they had were mostly modernish pop culture, which could reveal a lot in the right hands, but that wasn't what they were looking for. History, bound old magazines, archives... those were, the librarian haughtily informed them, "for professionals only".
Well, they were professionals. BREACH professionals. Which meant a little breaking & entering was just part of an honest day's work. There, in the "forbidden" vault, was all they could wish for: Newspapers from 1900 showing "the freezing of the sun", tales of panic, faux-scientific explanations, and eventually, in far too short a time, a global acceptance that this was how things were, are, and will be: A sun forever setting.
They were not expecting, particularly, to be ambushed by a leather-clad "punk" vampire and his pack of equally 80s-themed ghouls. To be fair, the vampire was probably not expecting one of the out-of-town visitors to shout "N Protocol!" and be met with wooden and silver bullets, engraved with common religious symbols, and blessed by what BREACH called "the Bar Association". Even so, two of the team were killed, and the rest, unexpectedly for a first-in team, followed protocol and headed for the breach point, instead of doing what first-in teams usually do, which is get in even more trouble.
BREACH sent in follow-up teams, more prepared, and learned a lot, but most of the resources they'd need for full operations here were already committed to Rasputin. This was not a unanimous or popular decision, and analysis of Breach Shield logs show the world's frequency has been illicitly accessed multiple times from New York, London, and San Franciso. Who has been accessing it, under what (if any) authority, and if they're allied or independent all remain unknown.
Fin De Siecle
In late December, 1899, a group of powerful undead -- mostly vampires, but quite a few others, such as liches, mummies, and ghouls, had, after decades of careful negotiation and maneuvering, agreed to momentarily set aside their labyrinthine plots and centuries-long schemes against each other, and unite in the casting of a spell of extraordinary power -- a spell to end the sun, locking Earth into eternal night where they could rule openly. The humans they needed for food stock would be kept alive in great underground vaults, were they would also labor to build luxurious necropoli, even as the surface world became locked in ice.Perhaps they lacked the power they thought they had; perhaps some unknown group managed a partial counter-spell; perhaps they were betrayed from within by those who had other plans for humanity. In any event, the Earth did not freeze, nor did the sun blow out like a match. Rather, somehow, the sun now seems to hang forever at the horizon, bathing the world in twilight. The cycles of temperature persist, warming during 'day' and cooling at 'night'. Snow falls in winter (where it normally does) and melts in spring (likewise). Plants grow as if the sun still shone upon them (but they do not follow its light). The moon is gone from the sky, but the tides still flow.
The creatures of the night have much more freedom, now, but not the absolute supremacy they planned. Humans still outnumber them by vast margins. Following the spell's partial failure, the tenuous alliance crumbled, and many of the eldest found some form of death in the shakeout and chaos that followed.
Those who survived worked to limit human response. The events of 1900 were given a slap-dash patina of pseudoscience. The history of the world prior to 1900, a world of sunrise and sunset, was slowly but ruthlessly banished. Talking, writing, or thinking about a world of dawn and dusk has become taboo. The words vanish from language, or become synonyms for a time of day measured by a clock.
Over the decades, the supernatural forces have indeed become more numerous and more powerful. Few doubt their existence, even as few dare draw attention by speaking of them. Cities have grown into towering collections of skyways and bridges above, mazes of alleyways and twisting tunnels beneath. Few and far between are towns or villages where power is not vested in the hands of something not human, even if it's not always public what or who truly rules. A hundred different lesser horrors prowl and feed, unhindered by the sun, but still driven by their ancient instincts to prefer those hours when it would have been night.
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