Running Out Of Time

Original

Lepidus and Co. was a company formed in 2014 with innocent enough intentions. Its founder, a Mr. Lepidus, was a young business man with all the ambition in the world and all the money to back it up and all he ever wanted was to make the people of the world happy with themselves. He created a service called modification, where a person could use chemical surgeries to make themselves faster, stronger, and closer to their ideal of perfect. The problem was that the modifications only seemed to work on the newly revealed race of shifters. Lepidus didn’t mind, but much of the rest of the world did. After all, the humans had feared the shifters since the day the first few ousted themselves but the modifications gave them a way to justify those fears.Lepidus never meant to cause a war. But his son did, with the company and its army of enhanced warriors that quickly matched the human’s armies in strength and size. Tired of years of discrimination, the shapeshifters fought to win their place in the world and by greed or other devices they took too much. The war between shifters and human devastated the world, turning farmlands into miles upon miles of dusty soil and forests into fields of ash. Nations are gone, lost in the divide between shifter and humans and in the end, the modified shifters won out. A new government was formed by the former company of Lepidus and Co. and it was called the Imperium.Life moved on from the war, as it always does. The shifters built new cities on the backs of the now right-less humans, locking out the ruined world with high walls. Slowly but surely history began to portray the humans as soulless monsters that were the real cause of the war, even as the humans were rounded up and thrown into work camps on the outskirts of the city to produce goods for the shifters. Others were taken in by the Imperium’s army and delivered to scientists that would transfom them into a creature stuck between the lines of shifter and humans. Yet others would escape to live underground in cities protected by mazes of tunnels ventilated by poisonous gas. Some even bide their time behind the walls of an abandoned army fort, kidnapping shifter in attempts to make them human.Despite all of this, the city functions as if everything is fine and it is according to the Imperium. That peace won’t last long however, not with the elections coming up and a new party running against the Imperium. What’s worse is that they seem to be working with the strange cultists that claim to be able to cure shifterism. Only time can tell if the city will survive or fall into ruin. But everyone's breath reek of escape.