You perished with every other human and every adult Outsider in the night of fire, when our frantic last-ditch effort to destroy them brought a comet screaming down from the stars to land in Earth's oceans. The atmosphere burned; it rained salt water for weeks until the omnipresent clouds finally brought on endless winter.

Then it snowed.

You are still around to witness this because you were bound to one of the Outsiders' stolen children at the moment of its hatching. As much as it hates you for being forced upon it like a parasite--and for the horrific act of murder that killed its race and yours--it keeps you animate because it needs you. You are its sole source of nourishment, and if you vanish into nothingness, it too will wither away and die. And, though young and ignorant of the world yourself, you may still know something that will guide it back to the rest of its kind. You may know enough about the dead world to provide it with a crucial clue, an essential something that lets it and its family rebuild themselves from nothing.

But it will never forgive you for what your people did to it.

Desperate to win their war with the Outsiders, humankind drove a comet into the seas, killing millions in a matter of instants. Those who survived the first impact perished to a soul when the atmosphere ignited and burned away in a conflagration of poison and ash.

Now the planet's corpse is slowly beginning the cycle of regrowth, without a human hand in the works. The cities of the world are ghosts and husks, standing exposed to the elements. Everything larger than a cat has been wiped from existence, leaving fish and songbirds and rodents, roaches and rabbits to repopulate in those places that aren't too poisoned or spent.

Outsider children walk the world unopposed, dragging with them the human husks they were bonded to like broken, dirty toys. Their songs echo through the night, bouncing off the atmosphere as they call to each other with radio waves and slowly begin to regroup.

For them, invading our world was a desperate war of expansion. They came into existence in the same blink that we began to shape thoughts; we cast them on reality the same way you cast a shadow in strong light. For a time, our numbers stayed the same: Every human who was born cast an Outsider into existence in their realm; every human that died took one of their number out of existence. If an Outsider perished of war or disease, famine or childbirth, then a human life was similarly snuffed out.

Then a brilliant young mari discovered the underlying cause behind their lives and deaths; id peered through the veil occluding our world from theirs and found that both species were tied up inextricably with each other.

Then, id found a way to cut the ties.

No longer kept in check one by the other, both populations boomed--but the Outsiders' grew faster. Much faster. Too soon, their world was bursting at the seams, and every generation born was smaller and weaker and frailer than the last, grown sick and starved without an equivalent human life bolstering them.

Desperate for some solution, for more places to live and a better source of food, they burst the veil between our world and theirs, flooding across into Earth in an inky black horde.

We fought back. Of course, we fought back, but when they could vanish into thin air and take whatever form they felt like--when only our mightiest weapons could fell them, and their mere presence tore apart everything we made with our own hands--we were doomed to be overwhelmed. Only in the eleventh hour was it discovered that human blood and Outsider eggs could be used to hatch Outsiders under our control--even if the bond could only be made with the very young--and by then the comet had already been turned onto its fatal path.

No small number of families spent their last few weeks in an agony of unknowing when their children were stolen for the project. (A smaller number spent those weeks in relative largesse, having sold excess children off to benefit the rest of the clan.) It all amounted to nothing in the end; or, worse than nothing: The Outsider children bound to human lives consumed those lives to survive the holocaust that ended the world, and now are the sole inheritors of the dead earth.

(Do not let the appearance fool you: Though you cannot see their claws and teeth, they can still tear through you in an instant.)

They cannot see or smell but they can taste and hear; they echolocate in the place of vision and can pick the tiniest molecules from the air with their paper-thin tongues. Their speech is garbled and shrieking, broadcast on radio waves; even if they did not intend us to fear them, the frequencies they use pierce through humans and chill us to our cores. Only the dead are immune to this instinctive terror.

They can fly, pass through walls as if they weren't there, and change their shapes for a short time--though they will always appear as they do in their true form, glossy-black and yielding to the touch, as if they were made of warm, thick ink. Bonding one at the moment of its hatching awakens these abilities in a human host, but it gives the Outsider exclusive access to its host's life-force, often to the host's detriment. Bonds are nourished solely by this life-force; should their host be killed, they will die, unless they exert all their will to catch their host in that place between life and death.

Those hosts who are thus husks lose all the frailties of a living human--but all the benefits, too, along with the ability to command their Outsider against its own will. Instead, they are locked into an eternal power-struggle against becoming puppets themselves, and only rarely might prevail upon their bond to act other than its wishes.

There are three sexes of Outsider: The winged males and females, who are strongest in war and diplomacy, trading and travel, and the delicate mari, the egg-bearers, born so rarely that wars have been waged and nations toppled to secure access to them. In place of wings, the mari have a second set of hands; as they are so often sheltered and cherished and immured behind walls for their entire lives, they have come to rely on their cutting intellect and bent for scholarship to keep themselves occupied when not brooding a clutch. They have no place in government and belong to whoever is strong enough to fight for them, but their planning and discoveries have driven the rise of industry and civilization among the Outsiders.

Not that this matters any longer, as every adult of any sex perished when we burned the sky.

Romance? Sure, I guess. It's not the point of the RP but I don't care what you do with it as long as it's within the site's rating.

Uh, mari? Mari. They're a third gender. They have a second set of hands instead of wings (so they can't fly), and are the actual egg-laying/nest-tending sex.

Singular form is "mar". Their pronoun is "id" (see character sheet for how that declines).

This helpful little chart should explain any other problems with referring to them: male female mar Plural -s -s -i Parental father mother kith Spousal husband wife marn Avuncular uncle aunt kirn Sibling brother sister ither Child son daughter marther No.* (young) boy girl ith No.* (old) man woman mar

*Nominative.

Anything else? To let me know you've read these, go watch "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" and tell me what's not a creative color.

(more questions will go here as they're asked)

All Outsiders begin hating their bonds. There is no exception to this.)