Ascendancy of Atlantis

**Dev. Status** | Conceptual

"*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

## At a Glance

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

## 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 galaxy and indeed known space, with even the younger Imilki Ecumene fearing to tread against them. But all golden ages come to an end. A meteor landed on their homeworld as well as most of their colonies, the space rock spreading a deep and thorough corruption that they would come to call "Ahurazad" or "green poison" in our tongue.

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 worlds, and the invaders were ill inclined to give them the turn to turn plows 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 the Andes. The other part would be found by a wholly different culture somewhere in what is now Morocco more than fifty 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. With the knowledge she had gained, she was able to start forming an early civilization, her successors coming closer and closer to completing their great project, cities in the water, 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, 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 year 20,000 B.C 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 dispatched from Mars in the year 20,000 B.C, 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. Having constructed their cities with the help of some automated Hyksos drones launched at earth when it detected 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 lacked a scientific method and much of their progress was based on the nobility's understanding of the database and other Hyksos artifacts that were launched at Earth by automated facilities meant to help any who had begun reading these devices. 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 metal forged weapons on land and in the sea as well as environmental domes.

### 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.

Atalatea become the first to codify its faith and create ordained priesthoods which would give 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, of Warriors, of Fathers, Nobility, Hospitality, and Order.Like many polytheistic faiths, many deities would share a portfolio or two; qhilw 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 also the most powerful gods born of humans, with others accepted as existing, but being 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, with this being part fo the reason 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 and their love of swimming, they would often go about wearing 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, saving up ceramics, glass, plastics, stone, metal, and wood for other purposes. 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 something akin to the Holy Roman Empire as they grew increasingly hegemonic over the other cities. 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 while the rival cities of Lemuria and Mu carved out their own spheres and the pre-existing Abyssals objected to the spread of the Aelva, but it was a start at least.

### Hail Atlantis!

Atlantis and its sister cities had on and off contact with the surface world over the course of 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. With the last contact with the surface world being taking in a number of refugees from the fall of Byzantium, and then from renaissance Italy a hundred years later. These people would help introduce Atalatea and her fellow cities to some renewed concepts of liberalism from the surface world and thus set in motion more modern forms of undersea politics. The centuries rolled on and eventually Atlantean civilization would face the crisis that would turn it from a loose confederation of states into a true unified society in a great war fought in the twenties. After the expenditure of much blood, sweat, and tears; Atalatea stood as the ruler of the whole of underwater civilization and Atlantis' priorities would shift to rebuilding.

The Second World War went by largely unnoticed by the Atlanteans, who simply made sure their cities blended in when the Allies and Communists 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 1972 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 a number of other starborne demons 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. Already Lemuria and Mu were starting to make their own power plays. 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 as the Abyssals began to marshal in greater strength. 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.

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 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.

## The Revered Armada

Note: All Atlantean ground units are fully amphibious