Atlantean Ascendancy

**Dev. Status** | Conceptual

For its previous iteration. See here

"*Though Gods they were*

*And as the elders of our time choose to remain blind*

*Let us rejoice and let us sing*

*And dance and ring in the new*

*Hail Atlantis!*"

- "Atlantis", Donovan
The Atlantean Ascendancy are the children of the makers of the Tacitus; the ancient and long-dead Hyksos of Mars. A subspecies of humanity that has developed on an entirely separate path, the Elf-like Atlanteans are the most true to their Orthodox interpretation of the Tactisus' messages and as the self-proclaimed "High Alaeva" culture, consider themselves to be the first to speak for their kin in all cases. Using a combination of alien-derived, self-created, and psychic technology as well as a mastery of biological sciences and many stranger abilities and control over water itself, the Atlanteans seek to prepare for what they believe is the coming end of days that the Tacitus had warned them of and cleanse the world of starborne evils so that the Hyksos Nation may live again through them once they reach the stars to avenge their gods.

## At a Glance

 **Visual Themes** | Organic in nature, with significant basis on aquatic lifeforms (especially shells and coral) and elements of the Italian renaissance, the Byzantines, fantasy High Elves, Zora, Aquaman, and Minoa/Mycenea Greeks.

## Background

### Sinking

The story of Atlantis begins with the story of a species known as the Hyksos, a civilization that inhabited Mars in the distant past. They were a wise and powerful species whose influence spread far across the known universe, peaceful and heavily devoted to the arts and sciences with a protracted temporal span of civilization. For the longest time, it would seem that Mars was the crown jewel of the known universe even when Earth was a barren ball of toxic gas and green iron-filled seas. Though the young, feeble sunn did not warm their planet very much, they were a cultured people who spread far and wide across space. But all golden ages come to an end. A meteor landed on their colonies in the distant past, the space rock spreading a deep and thorough corruption that they would come to call "Ahurazad" or "green poison" in our tongue and would beget a grand cataclysm in an old war

Their civilization did its best to preserve in the face of this strange toxin, but in time the "fire's essence dripped to the blood of the worlds and erupted in cataclysm" and the "great harvest" would begin. The Hyksos did their best to fight against the strange and enigmatic invaders, but they were already devastated by the poison that had gone through so many of their most valuable territories and had empowered many who resented their actions to ensure peace int he stars, and the invaders were ill inclined to give them the turn to turn ploughs into swords. One by one, their worlds were scoured of their presence by them whose deadly force swept aside all the resistance that they could muster. In time, they came for Mars itself, where the Hyksos threw everything they could conjure in one last ditch defense.

In the final battle of this war with these invaders, they were wiped out, but not before compiling all they knew of them and their poison into great portable databases that they spread across the universe to warn others of the coming of their foes and how to prepare, so that others might succeed where they failed. Having harvested everything they needed from their world, the invaders then withered the once lush world of Mars into a barren rust covered desert. The database they sent to the earth was clipped by one of the invader's ships as it flew, breaking into two pieces and landing in different areas of the world.

One piece, smaller but more easily understood, landed in what would one day be South America billions of years later. The other part would fall into what would one day be the waters near Africa by a wholly different culture somewhere in what is now Morocco more than one hundred millennia ago. Found by a woman who would be known as "the First, Serene, Ascended Primarch" and is currently called "Atlaeyn" by current Atlantean historians, the device shared the knowledge of how to prepare for the coming doom, and it seemed only those directly related to her could fully understand its meaning once it reformatted her at a physiological level into an oracle to pass its guidance in absence of some of its systems to allow for decipherability. With the knowledge she had gained and the resources that the Tacitus had been found with, a cache of equipment that carefully self-maintained to serve as a sort of care package for any who would take up the fight against the radioactive menace that had annihilated them, she was able to start forming an early civilization, one of a strange mix of primeval spirituality and alien technology and psychic might with enhanced bodies and seemingly endless lifespans that they dedicated building up the infrastructure to do so before settling in, forming a religion based on the teachings of their new "holy text" and nobility based on one's ability to decipher its secrets.

Once ready, they sank these enviro-dome cities beneath the waves, which would be a safer place than the land from the poison as well as the monsters of the sky, which in their corruption of the Hyksos tongue they called "Ahzra" or "fire". Naming the first and greatest of their many great dome cities "Atalatea" after their first Ascended Primarch, the Atalateans began to evolve to suit their new conditions. Due to the lack of UV rays from the sun, they became quite pale as a rule, hair colours that would be found strange on the surface began to develop thanks to the modification brought about by the great Oracle Device, bodies became leaner and more streamlined, as muscular bulk in the form that humans are familiar with were not conducive to their new life.

### Divergence

They became somewhat taller than normal humans, and they grew distinctive long, slender, and pointed ears of a more hydrodynamic shape and their lifespans lengthened significantly to the point where no Atlantean has ever been recorded as dying of old age past the time when their phenotype became what it was now, and visitors being struck by how they all seemed to be young adults, adolescents, and children. Leading a mysterious man in red and black to come to their cities in the year 8,000 B.C and examine these people, where he identified a symbiont given to them by a Hyksos machine that was recovered by them, and reversed engineered it and improved on it to not only counteract age and cancer but virtually all injuries and sickness for his own purposes. Dubbing themselves "Alaeva" or "guided people" they were now a distinct branch of the human family tree, helping give rise to the archetype of elves after chance encounters with the ancient Norse.

Once underwater, the Atlanteans began radically diverging from the branches regular human civilization would take even as they evolved, a separate subspecies of the Homo Sapiens family tree known as Homo Sapiens Nymphaea. Having constructed their cities with the help of the Hyksos machines that were unleashed that the database had been activated and mysterious others they found beneath the waves, they looked towards advancing their technology and society towards combating their great foe. It was however, slow going as they were in essence, trying to build an industrial base from scratch with the aid of an incomplete Hyksos Guardian Matrix. Furthermore, was the problem that the rule of the descendants of Atlaeyn was frequently challenged by other noble families who could understand to some degree or the other; the works of the Atlantean's progenitor gods. Warfare was common among the sea-peoples; fought with an odd combination of primitive and advanced weapons.

### Ontogenesis

The cities began to develop different cultures, though unified by their acceptance of the works of the Hyksos as divine and that the green poison would come and herald the beginning of a great trial that would culminate in a grand battle between good and evil. However, the interpretation of these basic fundamentals would fragment and split into differing beliefs. While their cultures were united by some threads, they had their own differences just as would occur from such geographical separation. Atalatea proper would come into being in warm waters well within the tropics, somewhat to the southwest of their Moroccan and Iberian homeland. The first and the largest of the Atlantean great cities with many vassal cities underneath its rule, Atalatea would become a place of great wealth and culture. Though its fortunes would sometimes ebb and wane, she would always rise again.

The other great nations of their kind would include Mu in the Pacific, which often made war with a species that had already developed intelligence and tool usage in the geothermal depths of the deepest sea in an effort to expand their domain, Oranbega closer to the Americas which would focus primarily on the development of biological sciences and psionics and seek attunement with the vital force of life itself, and Kadam in the Indian ocean which had sought to master the artifices of science and industry, though the Alaeva would not be limited to just these alone. Such as the Dawuardins, better known as “dwarves” by the humans, who, unlike their kin, chose to live underneath the mountain range of the Alps and the Hollow Earth to master the material science and artisanal craft, leading them to diverge the most in appearance and culture, that the Mu don’t consider them as Alaeva.

Atalatea become the first to codify its faith and create ordained priesthoods, giving it a great advantage in the struggle for religious as well as military, and political dominance. They affirmed that the Hyksos were the prior generation of deities who would give birth to the later, newer generation, which would be ruled by Azariya, the supreme goddess of the Oceans, the Void above, Sovereignty, Warfare, Passion, and Power. Her first consort and husband, Tarkyras, was the God of the Skies, Warriors, Fathers, Nobility, Hospitality, and Order. Like many polytheistic faiths, many deities would share a portfolio or two; while whereas Greek mythology famously ascribed all the Olympians to one incestuous family, the Atalatean deities would be of many houses. Born of the defeated Hyksos, these deities were the watchers and the most powerful gods born of humans, with others accepted as existing but as simply inferior.

The Scrin, destroyers of the Hyksos, were cast in the light as being a pantheon of demonic monsters, along with other alien civilizations the databases said were hostile to the Hyksos, such as the Imilki, the Hierarchy, and the Silent Ones, though the Scrin were said to be the worst among them - bearers of the evil flame that poisoned and burned worlds, bringing limitless ruin. The bloodline of the Ascended Primarch was said to be directly drawn from the line of Azariya, making each of them truly of divine blood, with other nobles having varying admixtures of other deities in their lineage. The wider people were also acknowledged as having some divinity in them, which was part of why the Atalateans were so cultured while the surface people, who knew not the gifts of the Hyksos, were so pitiably backwards. They had metal working, fine clothing, agriculture, literature, and great cities. While surface dwelling humanity still floundered about with stone, animal skins, hunting and gathering, cave paintings and grunts, and lived in mud huts and caves.

Whereas some cultures developed into imbalanced gender roles among the sea-peoples, Atalatea would maintain a balance between the sexes, if one that somewhat favoured women given that their chief deity was female and their head of state was always to be a girl, giving women a somewhat but still noticeably greater prominence in their culture, though in terms of legality they were to be equals. While Atalatea would go through many periods of conservatism followed by sexual revolution, generally they were sexually open and widely accepting of abnormal preferences. Given their warm climes, love of swimming, and their body evolving to live in the cold ocean (that being within the freezing Siberia is considered warmer than normal), they would often wear scandalously little by most surface dweller standards, particularly as food crops had a much higher priority than those harvested for fabric and the sea was rather lacking in suitable animal skins for the purpose. Wood was substantially rarer than on the surface, requiring special plots or domes to grow, and through their examinations of the texts of the Hyksos, they found ways to create solidified forms of water that were not cold.

This "permafrost" would become a key building material of the seapeoples whenever they needed to work quickly rather than rely on the matter-to-energy and energy-to-matter conversion systems to fabricate something tougher or longer lasting, saving up ceramics, glass, plastics, stone, metal, and wood for other purposes. Psychoshells and Ghost-Coral, materials, based on seashells and corals repectively, that would respond to psychics in a manner that would allow them to change and alter their shape according to the mental desires of the controller were also widely used as a relatively cheap construction and armouring material, favoured for the ease of working with it as one could sing or even simply think of their desired shape for attuned deposits of the material to transform into. Other Alaeva would look to other places to expand to beyond the seas, such as strange pockets in space and time that they could gather additional resources from or build bases within.

Fire; already something hated for its connections to their great enemy, became seen as a necessary evil, needed to build the works of civilization but always to be contained and controlled. After the passage of thousands of years and continued incremental advances, the Atlanteans would form a sort of holy roman like arrangement to try and settle affairs between the cultures of the sea-peoples. A secular elected Monarch dubbed the Uzarinas would be selected from the nobles, while a Prime Minister figure (though the title is more properly translated as Chancellor) dubbed the Hiszary would be elected from the common-folk, with the Ascendant Primarch being the unelected divine figure; something akin to a more active Pope or Japanese Emperor in the Shogunate era. This triumvirate would not always work out as this Confederacy was quite loose at its formation and the composite states still warred amongst each other often, but it was a start at least.

### Hail Atlantis!

Atlantis and its sister cities had on-and-off contact with the surface world throughout many thousands of years, nearly always looking down upon the surface dwellers. Eventually, they would decide to sink their society; isolating themselves from the surface world. Especially after they had taken in exiled royalty from the city of Troy in the distant past only for a figure from a place known as "Roma" to come looking for them centuries later, drawing curiosity from the Atlanteans for sharing their biological gift of ever-youth and strange knowledge, seeming to at first fall in love with the Ascendant only to betray her and pillage the underwater realms to slay the trojan exiles and take fragments of precious lore from them.

Eventually though, the great underwater wars waged in the wake of conflict with the Kumun and the Abyssal creatures was sparked by Mu in retaliation for the signing of peace deals with the Earth's other children and the promise to cease efforts to settle in their territories and withdraw from claimed colonies. Mu, which had built its fortune on such conquests would turn its armies upon the others and beget the great sundering with its massive armies and vicious tempered fanatics. A war that it would eventually lose, but not badly enough for true incursions into the realms of what had come to be known as the Dark Kin for their embracing of fouler sides of their being. There would be more wars between the Alaeva elsewhere and elsewhen, with Mu being the mastermind of only some of them, but Atlantis would continue to affirm its hegemony. After the expenditure of much blood, sweat, and tears; Atalatea stood as the first and highest of the whole of underwater civilization and Atlantis' priorities would shift back to more peaceful endeavours..

The Second World War went by largely unnoticed by the Atlanteans, who simply made sure their cities blended in when the Allies and Soviets warred for the depths of the ocean, and the Third went by with equally little heed paid to it. So long as the surface dwellers and underworlders did not directly threaten their lands, all was well. Then all that changed in 1968 when devices they built to detect the presence of the green poison as defined by their Hyksos databases alerted them of the arrival of a meteor in China bearing the substance, causing a great wave of panic among them. This was further worsened by the shockingly swift deployment of the most terrible of weapons as the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China obliterated each other in green poison-based nuclear fire. The optimism of the golden age was replaced by the realization that the day the Hyksos had warned them about had come; the poison was here and the demons would soon follow.

Already the Ukrazol and other demons who had arisen after the departure of the Hyksos Gods but the long-sight devices of the Atlanteans had warned them of were recorded as probing around the world, and many Atlanteans had fought against their oceanic probing attempts, engaging in secret wars with the their USO fleet and its aquatic species that sought to explore the oceans which had caused no small degree of concern among them. Now the great enemy had sown its seeds. Further adding to the apocalyptic fervor was their encounters with the Protectorate, which was beginning to seek its pure state and activate with renewed purpose around the world; leading to encounters with the metal monsters, and the Kumun began stirring with a vengeance, leading the Atlanteans to believe that the Hegemony was preparing for war with the surface. Then came reports of unrecorded factions of humans, the Concordiat, whose ideals proved unpalatable to the Atlanteans, and the Norse, who surprisingly sought them out for an alliance, having made a secret pact with them of their world and bringing about union between the Atlanteans of the two worlds.

The Fylkirate came in search of resources to rebuild their home after their own devastating war and were prepared to fight to take them, and they also sought to lend a hand to helping this world survive what they fervently believed would be its Ragnarok if they didn't do something to stop them. Because they needed to first regather strength through violent means, they wished to remain hidden for the time being, not the least because if they revealed themselves; the Concordiat would surely try to act against a potential future breach in their own secrecy protocols. Though they believed that the Atlanteans were just and could be trusted to engage in secret trade and military cooperation. Agreeing, they decided that the first encounters with the Atomic Chinese military was the last straw, and Ellastraza approved the decision to bring the sea-folk to the surface again.

In dramatic fashion, the Atlantean cities rose to the surface and announced themselves to the world in the wake of World War 3 and the emergence of Atomic China. Overnight, a new formidable world power had added itself to the world stage and sent the balance of power entirely out of whack. The only thing perhaps even remotely comparable was the rapid industrialization and rise of Japan and Siam into great powers on the world stage, the sudden assault of the Empire-League-Guard Axis in World War 3, or perhaps to a lesser degree the unification of Germany and Italy. But all of those had come from \*somewhere\* the world was aware about to some degree or the other in the past. This, however? This was a new force with tremendous reach and unknown capabilities and foreign ideologies and culture appearing entirely out of thin air. But as the Atlanteans themselves could charitably be called "vaguely aware of very nebulous and inaccurate information of surface geopolitics", the surprise was at the very least: reciprocal.

## Gameplay

### Build System

The main building in an Atlantean base is the Aquapolis, a large dome-shaped building. Unlike other factions, the Atlanteans build mobile facilities from the Aquapolis, which need to deploy in order to start producing units. These facilities are capable of deploying on either land or sea - they have two facilities for light and heavy units, along with a similarly mobile Training Centre, which trains Atlantean infantry. Only the factories and the Training Centre are mobile - all other buildings and defenses must be built in a build radius around the Aquapolis or an Aquapolis Foundation. To build more Aquapoleis, an existing Aquapolis must build a Terraformer, which can permanently deploy into an Aquapolis Foundation. The Aquapolis Foundation provides a small build radius but does nothing else. It can then be upgraded into an actual Aquapolis.

### Tech System

Atlantean generals can obtain higher levels of clearance to build units by building Sky Wire on hardpoints on their Aquapoleis. Aquapoleis have a limited amount of Sky Wires it can hold. Necessitating the construction of multiple Aquapoleis in order to fully unlock the Atlantean tech tree and the superweapons themselves.

### Superweapon

The Atlantean superweapon system differs from others in the way that the building that fires the superweapon is already on the field when the game begins - the Aquapolis. However, it cannot charge the superweapon and must rely on Reclamation Device, which are available after building a Royal Court, to charge it up before it can fire. Each Vapour Pool built reduces the time needed for the superweapon to charge up. The Atlanteans only have one superweapon, but it can be spammed once enough Reclamation Devices are built.

### Amphibious

Thanks to spending their lives living underwater, and technology gleaned from the Tacitus. All of the Atlantean forces are completely amphibious, some can even submerge, but experience debuffs when on land - effects vary from unit to unit, but the main point is that Atlantean units cannot fight at their full potential when on land.

### Degradation

Atlantean technology is extremely fragile and their soldiers are trained to fight at their peak, and at full health they have a slight boost to their stats. However, their stats will start to sharply decline the more health they lose (at 75% they have lost half their strength and at 25% they will lose to the Electrical Protectorates in one on one), thus they are heavily reliant on healing units, structures, and defenses to fight at full strength, and must often retreat at low health.

## The Revered Armada

Note: All units are fully amphibious, and all of their structures can be built on land and sea