RUIN: Unofficial BREACH acronym meaning "Radioactive, Unknown Inhabitation"
Unknown Dooms
The acronym RUIN is used very unofficially and off-the-books to refer to an all too common category of parallel worlds, those with high levels of background radiation at the breach point, signs of an industrial or later culure, and no nearby indication of inhabitants or targets for exploration: In other words, the likely location of a nuclear war. It's accepted this means missing out on many possible discoveries; few apocalypses are total, and high radiation might be highly localized. However, equipping the team with anti-rad gear when there's no indication of a good route to explore (meaning they might travel days before spotting anything) combined with risk of their protections being damaged far from the breach point, discourages prolonged travel. Thus, a handful of worlds have little known about them but what a few hours or even minutes worth of exploration around the breach point can reveal. (A good example of a borderline case is
The Wall. There's an obvious path to a likely city, but the radiation outside the sheltered valley is very high.)
A few examples are:
Lot Lizards: A large, flat parking lot, comparable to that for a major amusement park, sprawling around the burned-out shell of a two story building, most likely a "superstore" or perhaps a mall. The interior is gutted, and some bones found during brief exploration indicates death by interpersonal violence, not fire or radiation. The dominant life forms in the region are a wide range of brightly-colored reptiles who thrive on the tough grass slowly reclaiming the asphalt, small insects, and each other. This plethora of species gave the world its temporary designation.
Rushless: A damaged, but still recognizeable, version of Mount Rushmore (based on stellar observations), with only three portraits. One of them was quickly identified by historians as King George III; the others don't have obvious matches. Background radiation levels were high, but one historian conducted their own unauthorized trek in a hazmat suit to try to reach the assumed visitor center in hope of learning more. It had been plundered and not even a souvenir t-shirt or a single miniature replica remained.
The Interchange: A sixteen-lane, multi-level cloverleaf highway, now mostly collapsed, with equally wide roadways sprawling out around it, somewhere in what corresponds to the American midwest, around Kansas. The interior of each 'leaf' once held a large multi-function business, of which only one even partially survives. It clearly had several eateries, a gift shop, a massive fuelling station, and a vehicle maintenance/repair facility. The material of the road is unknown; the best anyone can guess is a polymer-infused mettalic alloy of some kind, fantastically strong, which makes its collapse rather frightening. The writing is a variant on the English alphabet, with aspects of Cyrillic and a few Futhark runes. The fuel seems to have been, if the translations are remotely correct, some sort of ultra-battery that could be swapped in and out rapidly. This technology is at odds with what can be inferred as the rough date of the assumed war, which was in the late 1960s. Very little in the way of writing survived, and no intact vehicles. Not only is there high ambient radiation, while exploring, the first-in team was caught in what can only be described as an 'energy storm', which killed one person who had the misfortune to be on the uppermost level of the collapsed structure, while the rest of the team was luckily checking out a partially-intact (but empty) sub-surface storage room.
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