'A' is for 'Apocalypses.'

‘A’ is for ‘Apocalypses.’ The fiction of The House That Nobody Built and The Last House in the Sky is unique in that it’s a Post-Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic world. The citizens have had to handle giant meteors, and then an enormous flood, and then the zombie uprising, and then the dinosaurs coming back. Let me tell you: zombies get passé after a t-rex eats your dad.

No one knows if there's a common reason or cause to the catastrophes. We know they happen every 200-300 years, with exact chronology being difficult to chart what with meteors and hungry robots consuming all the charts every 200-300 years. But everyone more or less acknowledges that the first really good apocalypse was The Apocalypse of Sauropods, when dinosaurs decided to roam the land again. They’d been extinct for so long that they were considered myths. Fans of mythology were very upset with the unexpected feathering. Everyone else was upset that they were being trampled to death. The diseases they carried with them alone overturned entire biomes.

About 250 years into their reign, the gremlins launched cities into the sky. This put them out of biting range, and with their manipulation of lightning and mechanics, into very good conquering range. They were so technologically advanced that they turned all the (literally) lower cultures into reality television and entertainment. Their obliteration of lower people for amusement was viewed by others as the Apocalypse of Gremlins. In under 300 years they mastered alternative energy, levitation and prosthetic bodies, and began to unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence and inter-dimensional travel. Very good until the artificial intelligence turned on them. That was the Apocalypse of Automatons, which crashed all the flying cities, and set robots roving the landscape to consume all biological life forms. As far as we know, gremlins went extinct, and technology has stalled out at the “push broom” level ever since.

The automatons didn’t have a real empire, but rather, more of a buffet. They were the new apex predators, able to prey upon sauropods, gryphons and manticores, forcing sentient life into smaller groups, underground, or to the fringes of the west and the icy south. Automatons became so dominant that, naturally, 200 years later, they were the victims of an apocalypse. The Apocalypse of the Shock was a freak lightning storm an entire continent wide, which fried over 95% of all automatons. Evolution kicked in a few bucks and taught the t-rex to hunt robots.

In the previous period of largely underground civilizations, the imps grew in political and magical power. Previously a species gremlins bred as pets, imps possessed keen intellect and inclination for elemental manipulation. With the automatons out of the way, the former inbred slaves created their own proper empire, consuming much of the west, and enslaving triclopes and humans for their labor. Rather than technology, they studied the primal forces of the world, believing their demonic ancestors were a better route to power. Within 230 years, they opened a rift into what theologians might call “Hell,” in order to summon those ancestors. Those ancestors promptly set the planet on fire in what non-theologians refer to as “The Apocalypse of Demons.”

It was a great war that required all species to band together and fight off the fiery tyrants. Never in recorded history had there been such a moment of pan-culturalism. And then the moment past, and since more humans were alive than any other species, they declared their own empire, swearing to get it right this time. We’ll find out about them at ‘E’.

We still don’t know if there’s a singular reason or pattern to the apocalypses. We only know that oral traditions have them running back to the beginning of time – presuming that the beginning of time was an apocalypse that savaged nothingness. Upon inventing the telescope, many gremlins lapsed into hopeless nihilism upon discovering apocalypses had apparently already blown up every other planet out there.

Tomorrow: ‘B’ is for ‘Bacteria (and will be way shorter).'