To start off this reminiscence of how things were, I first must oblige to indicate what that actually means. In all tenses and purposes, the world which we used to live in never actually fell, but instead saw the destruction of an overbearing authority in which the rest of the world rejoiced, while their own seemed to have collapsed in sadness. Indeed, the destruction of the Tornun Republic is not the first or perhaps the last story to be told in similar diction. In order to provide any real contrast between what has happened during the Zero Day atrocities and what may happen in the future, we first must delve into the past.

    When I was a child learning about the history of our people in the great city of Valu, there was incredible emphasis on the misdirection of the Xiqen Empire. It was seen as an empire based around the separatism and concentration by a global ruling class, which defined slavery as its main source of income; those who did not work, did not eat. What little did I criticize, however, were the similarities between their accusational efforts against the Xiqen Empire and our own modus operandi of how we live. The Tornun Republic treats its citizens like glorious heroes no matter their walks of life, so it was preached. It wasn’t until I was unshielded from these lies that I began to take hold of the proper notion of what could have been perhaps the greatest slander in Ciphrus history, or at least the recorded history. 

    These recollections weren’t obtained by righteous means, either. It was by pure coincidence and happening that I stumbled upon the information which perhaps would change my outlook on the history of this planet forever, and it began with the greetings of an unusual individual -- the first of which I had ever witnessed: a Knomnolite.

    In Tornun, Knomnolites are these mystical yet dangerous and demonic creatures. They have no soul, no right of will, and no moral compass. They are excluded not because we fear them, but because it seems to juxtapose strength by ejecting them from our society. I had never seen a Knomnolite before I turned the age of forty-five years, and nearly three years after our world -- the Tornun world -- had ended: three years after Zero Day.

    The Knomnolite in question had never actually told me his name, but I had not sensed a great deal of anger or resentment towards me and what he described as “senseless bigotry.” At the time, I did not understand because my mind was clouded by the messages planted deep within my mind that these people were senseless savages. Only now, four years after our encounter, do I realize what his words truly meant to me. I can recite them with near perfect memory, and to not belittle his words, I will do so here:
    In a world built deeply on the destruction of a single demographic, it is imperative that despite these shown bases of strength, I cannot only realize with their resentments, but also loathe them deeply. The messages brought on by your authorities are not only concentrated in their hatred of unity, but propagated by their desire for dissatisfaction among an ever growing outrage which plagues the land like you believe we plague your cultures. In the limelight, I cannot show you, but only love you the same as I love my own people. We are forever one, and the destruction of our culture will not only reinforce that, but build deep regret upon its completion.

    This Knomnolite man with no name told me a bearing truth which still weighs heavy on my shoulders to this day, nearly eight years after our world changed. His message is one I thought of every day, not because curiosity delved me into deeper critical thought, but because the tone at which it was delivered was not only wrought with assertion, but also pain and misery. There is no greater emphasis on the essential and vital power of love for one another than what was our history, and what is our future. The Xiqen Empire and the Tornun Republic are not only greater authorities built on the desire to select and ostracize a certain people, but they are essentially one and the same living in two separate points in time.

My journey into the unknown started first through an unusual experience with an anomaly. We hadn’t seen one in over sixty years, yet it had appeared right here in the center of Tornun without much remorse for the inhabitants of a nearby village among the Agrivide.

    The area had been sectioned off by Tornun officials less than a week prior to my arrival, but it had already managed to eradicate half the nearby town in an aeronautic frenzy. A twister had taken out a portion of the town and killed thirty of its inhabitants, but with strange reports of its definition and size. Weather dopplers had not picked it up, and as quickly as it spawned, it had dissipated in a matter of a minute. Furthermore, many residents described it as invisible, as though warping the space around it rather than a genuine bundle of air. Indeed, none of it was caught on camera, as all of the town’s electronics had ceased functioning ten minutes prior to the anomaly’s arrival, only to reestablish after it had left the area.

    All of this sparked debate among nearby meteorologists, until specialized Tagon teams were sent in to investigate if perhaps it was indeed, another anomaly. The thing about anomalies, however, is that each one discovered on Tornun had behaved differently, but approached once every sixty five years. Each anomaly had detectable traces of Termoyl, meaning it was somehow related to the Terrasque's influence on the world. The thing about this anomaly is that it was five years early, contained no traces of Termoyl, and was perhaps the most destructive of any in the history of the Tornun Republic. This anomaly remained for exactly twenty one days, fourteen hours, and seven minutes (21:14:07:00, as marked on our timestamp). This was its exact measurement with no variation whatsoever, except for a three millisecond offset; note those values with care.

    In those twenty-one days, my team alongside Dr. Resebel’s cell was responsible for identifying its cause and functionality. What we found was unlike anything ever procured from past anomalies, and the trend of ambiguity continued.

    My mention of this anomaly is important to the history of Ciphrus, because the anomaly was a direct window to its past. In some way, this anomaly was tethered to the residual events of the region by means of very basic information in the form of radio and light signals. A great many of these radio signals, combined with occasional wavelengths among the UV and visible light spectrums (which were emanating from the anomaly’s “core”), were able to be decoded with information discussing the atmospheric composition of the planet around ten thousand years prior to the current era. Compounds such as carbon dioxide combined with methane were detected in extremely high volumes, suggesting some sort of industrialization. From our understanding of the history of Ciphrus, that would be nearly 6,000 years before the industrialization of the Xiqen Empire, which was a two-century endeavor.

    These implications were immediately relayed to appropriate channels, but the anomaly itself (indeed the existence of anomalies in general) was hidden from the general public. These findings insinuated that a third civilization had lived among the planet, and had industrialized it long before the written history of Ciphrus had initially suggested, and to the degree of which it had manipulated the planet, it was likely a political powerhouse, perhaps controlling most or all of the planet at the time.

    These findings had brought up initial questions that I felt I would never have the answer to. Who were the first people on Ciphrus? Why was the history of that time period so enigmatic? If they were so advanced, why do we see no ruins or evidence of their civilization on Ciphrus? Most importantly, why did this, or any anomalies occur at all? This began my fifteen year venture into the unknown -- of which continued through the days we live in what they call the New World.

I was not asked for more assistance in anomalies until the detection of the asteroid in 12555. In that meantime, I rigorously underwent a psychogenic obsession with the things I had witnessed that day at the Agrivide anomaly. Admittedly, it affected even my personal relationships including my marriage. This research was proven not to be in vain, but more on that later.

    There was a Collective conference on the newest anomaly that threatened the entire planet at hand: the asteroid. People of the highest power were all collected in one spot; morbidly and tangentially, my mind was on the state of the world had a bomb gone off and killed seemingly all of the most important people in the world.

 Radars situated on the Upper Shelf had detected a large asteroid on a direct collision path with Ciphrus. Ciphrus’s predicament was absolute in a way, as the mass of the planet made any kind of large scale space exploration (or modification) a near impossibility. In the past, the Xiqen Empire had actually managed rudimentary space flight using Tagon, but such talk among the Collective would have possibly had me killed -- or worse, fired -- and so I had not brought up the possibility. This bias would prove to be a further complication in the predicaments nearing Zero Day.

    At the time of the meeting with the Collective, there were several proposals at hand, including a large mass ejector to perhaps blow it into separate pieces, thus minimizing the damage. This proposal was the most sought after by the Collective, and its construction promptly started in the Southern Dismiss. I was headed as one of the lead researchers on the asteroid and its origin, especially because Termoyl had already been detected emanating from its surface.

    Finding Termoyl in space is nothing new -- the Terrasque holds a considerable amount of influence on Ciphrus’s local celestial family. However, this asteroid was interstellar in origin, and moving at an incredible pace alongside that. It was a cosmic improbability -- the asteroid was destined to impact with Ciphrus.

    For the next six months, my team focused on its relation to Termoyl and the Terrasque, but to no avail could we have found any correlation between the two aside from a gradual shift in its trajectory over time, and it was clear that the Terrasque had far more influence over its surroundings than initially inspected; its reach was system wide, and possibly interstellar.

    Eventually, the trajectory of the asteroid had been projected to miss us narrowly, but after this sigh of relief among the Collective, there came a far deeper and sinister plan which was evident in their progression, and these moments are what had awoken me from the Republic’s dreamstate that they had imposed on me. Indeed, after this sigh of relief, the Collective’s plans to continue building their colossal weapon had not been hampered, and the official reasoning behind the asteroid’s narrow ticket to extinction was attributed to simple miscalculation. It was then I had realized that the powers that be were hellbent on obfuscating their real intent.

    A year later, the asteroid came, and it had passed Ciphrus just as predicted while the whole world watched in a day of anxiety. After the second sigh of relief shared by the whole world, then came the coughs and the fevers, the war and the famine, the fear and death -- the event known as Zero Day.