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There exist another dimension called The Empty World. It’s very much like ours, in fact it seems to have been identical up until a few weeks ago, but it always seems that way. If you go there today, it was identical in late february, and if you go there this october, it’ll have been identical until september.
It’s empty, as you might guess. There’s no humans, and no animals bigger than a cockroach. The sky is grey, and it slowly rains ash. It’s colder than our world by a bit, enough to require a jacket even in summer. The streets are empty, the cars parked neatly in their garages or in lots, but they’re all empty and abandoned, their doors locked like they expect their owners to return any minute now.
The newspapers left on stands don’t mention any oncoming disaster. We have no idea what the TV or internet would have said: the power is out. The power is very, very out. Not just the grid, but batteries are drained. The cars won’t start, the emergency lights are out, and anything with solar panels seems to be getting less energy than you’d expect, even with the perpetually overcast sky.
It’s a very silent world, like the calm after a snowstorm. Sounds don’t seem to echo as much as they should, nor does sound seem to travel as far. The radio spectrum is empty except for static, there’s no one transmitting on any frequency.
There’s fewer fires than you’d expect. Even places you’d expect to soon catch fire without human intervention are still standing, undamaged. Campfires can be lit but with difficulty: something is keeping them from burning as they should. Even if you pour kerosene on a campfire it’ll barely grow, it’s like something sucked the energy out of everything.
All the locked buildings are still locked. Alarms don’t sound if you break in (understandable, given the power situation), and of course no one comes to investigate. So The Empty World is your oyster: you can break in wherever you want (provided you can physically do it: some doors are pretty hard to pry open even with tools), take whatever you want, and bring it back here.
Everything resets when you leave. You always enter The Empty World like it’s your first time there, like this just happened and you’re late to the party… but the party keeps getting rescheduled. You can even take something multiple times if you want.
When you enter The Empty World you get there at the same relative position as you are on this world. If you’re in New York, you show up in the empty New York. If you’re in Topeka, you show up in empty Topeka. So you have to travel around this world to get to where you want, and you can’t just appear in the middle of a bank vault… unless you break into the vault from this world. (So it’s great if you work at a bank and want to steal from your employer without repercussions, but not so useful otherwise).
You don’t just have to take things, you know. You can take computers and files and books and diaries. You will have to deal with recharging laptops and breaking through any security when you get back, but it’s doable.
So, imagine you’ve just gotten access to The Empty World. What are you going to do with it? What will you take, and where will you go?
This is a writing prompt if you want it to be. Feel free to write/draw/whatever about this setting!
And don’t worry about “canon”: there’s something enough weird going on with this setting that’s enough to justify variation in the setting. Maybe when you go there, you eventually find out what caused the death of the world. Maybe that doesn’t agree with what I find out when I go there. Maybe your world isn’t as empty as it seems! This is partially based on a reoccurring dream I had, and in one instance the “empty” world was full of people hiding. Hiding from what? I never found out. Maybe you will.
Just stick “based on/Inspired by The Empty World by Foone” somewhere in/on anything you make about it. Otherwise go nuts.
Some things that might be fun to explore, ones I intentionally didn’t nail down: (I have theories but I don’t want to make any of them concrete)
- What’s all that ash in the air? You could stick it under a microscope/Gas chromatograph. What it is could be a big hint as to what happened to this world
- I mention in one of the reblogs that two or more people can go there at a time, but there’s only one return trip. What happens to people left behind?
- The power is out, and this extends to batteries. Sure, maybe the coal plants and nuclear power aren’t running anymore, but what about hydroelectric power? Why isn’t the hoover dam still making power?
- As multiple people have suggested, what if you go above the ash cloud? What if you launch a balloon or a rocket?
- I mention the newspapers not saying what happened, but maybe this just happened too fast for them to get a new issue out? Maybe you could go to a TV station and get their computers running again (bring in your own batteries, or bring their computers back to our world). Maybe they did cover what was happening.
- There’s lots of straightforward ways to get rich by stealing and/or duplicating things using The Empty World. What’s the most interesting thing you could do by its ability to let you travel into places you couldn’t normally get to (because of guards and locked doors)?
- Here’s a thought: rescuing recently destroyed/stolen things. It’s based on the world of a few weeks ago, right? What if the Louve burns down, and a lot of priceless art is destroyed. If you jump into The Empty World anytime in the next couple weeks, they’ll still be there, untouched. You could “steal” them and return them to this world.
- You’re in The Empty World and you hear a scream in the distance. You brought no one with you. Do you run towards the scream or do you get out of there immediately?
- Did you wear a respirator into The Empty World? Have you been breathing in all that ash? Maybe that has repercussions.
- You arrive, and someone has written a message in the ash. A warning. For people like you.
I feel like you could have a setting with people raiding and “prospecting” post apocalypse setting style, but a certain percentage of them just never come back, and we don’t know why. So everyone who goes is taking a chance that whatever it is that’s getting everyone else gets them. Only a few percent die, so y’know, it could just be people having entirely mundane accidents, right?
That’s a great addition. There would be plenty of mundane accidents, yes, because of foolish people overestimating their ability to get out of situations they themselves caused. Locking themselves inside bank vaults, getting stuck breaking in, etc. Enough people are going to get themselves killed that of course they’re gonna be mysterious disappearances, and that’s going to be known about by the other explorers.
They’re gonna enter with trepidation because while they’re pretty sure it’s just entirely mundane reasons, they of course can’t be sure.
And that’s an interesting situation, whether they’re right (it’s entirely mundane) or wrong (there’s something living in there).
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