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Description

Alrighty, have a horror map for Halloween! The basemap here was pulled together from several different sources: the original was made by Lowtuff, the Antarctica patch was made by Spinovenator (with some changes made by me), the Madagascar patch was made by me but heavily based on its projection in oshron's Cassini basemap, and bits and pieces were taken from TheKutKu's tidally-locked Earth basemap. I'm exhausted enough that I feel like I'll crash any second now, so I'm gonna set an alarm again, take a quick nap, and add the full description when I wake up.

EDIT: Whoops, the above turned out to be one of my trademark complete lies, because I completely slept through both the alarm I set and the two backup alarms. Gonna copy-paste in the description real quick, so let's all agree to pretend it was always there, yeah? Yeah? Alright, I'm gonna go grab breakfast, y'all behave.

It was a crisp autumn day when they came, their pallid metallic ships leaping from the abyss into Earth's orbit in a heartbeat and beginning a slow, dread-inducing crawl towards the poles. The world could do nothing but watch in fear and wait for an ultimatum from what were undoubtedly alien spacecraft, praying their intentions for the world were not malicious as they broadcasted their paltry attempts at diplomacy to the unstopping ships.

The crew of the alien ships ignored the broadcasts completely. Employees of a transuniversal organization somewhere between an NGO, a PMC, and a planet-wide snuff film production company hiring its services out to the thousands of alien Roland Emmerichs littering the multiverse, they called themselves the Voyeur-Meddlers of the Eternal Perihelion. For this job, they'd been commissioned to engage artificial gravity machinery over the two poles of the planet to simulate the effects of stopping its rotation without actually going to the trouble of doing it for realsies (budget concerns and all), deploying a network of camera-equipped camouflaged drones around the planet to capture the events as they were happening but otherwise not interfering: their client had been very clear that they were not to engage with the native lifeforms, viewing this as something that would "ruin" his "visionary" disaster film by going unnecessarily meta about it. Audiences didn't want to think about why this was happening, they just wanted to watch shit get destroyed in new and exciting ways with the bare minimum of plot in-between to string it together. So the Voyeur-Meddlers simply engaged the artificial gravity engines and deployed their drone fleet to record the chaos as it happened.

The oceans began moving north and south rapidly, flooding the polar regions of the world while leaving the equator to dry up. Frigid megastorms formed at the poles as the atmosphere followed the seawater. The air grew thinner and thinner at the equator, spurring a global migration crisis as inhabitants of equatorial nations fled north and south. Terror and desolation reigned, and the Voyeur-Meddlers and their client drank it all in.

Unfortunately for them, humans were not the kind of species that would sit about and watch their home destroyed, and this iteration of humanity had a few tricks up its sleeve the Voyeur-Meddlers had never seen before. So as a massive equatorial supercontinent formed in the wake of the ever-deepening polar oceans, those who knew or thought they knew how to drive away the Voyeur-Meddlers leapt into action. Deep in the woods, the mayor of an island town in the northern Great Lakes cracked open a pitch-black tome he had sworn he would never touch again to make a desperate bargain with the only entities he thought might be stronger than the aliens. In Loimwe Protected Area, Tatmadaw agents returned to the ancient temple they'd discovered there tucked away in a cave network years before and began puzzling out the inner workings of the enormous mechanical devices at its heart. Trapped with their family in Toronto as the floodwaters crept ever nearer, a delusional tourist glared into their own eyes in a grimy hotel mirror as they tried to force the universe to bend to their will. All around the world, humans reached out to the dread powers lurking beyond the confines of the universe as they understood it and made deals with them to stop the transformation of their world, unknowing of how many other people were doing the exact same thing... and in one united cacophony, all of their prayers were answered.

Then the borders between reality and that which lay past it fractured. Then the continents began to slowly, agonizingly shift and move. Then the seabed tore itself asunder as beasts old and foul emerged from its depths. Then the acolytes of the abominations they now worshiped whether they liked it or not found themselves gifted with monstrous powers in return for their piety. Then the people of Earth looked up to the night sky and saw it looking back with every single one of its unblinking eyes.

The world stopped working as it was supposed to for quite some time after that.

Time was... difficult at best for a while there, moving in juddery uncertain fits and starts that never quite seemed to apply to the whole world, and when it finally returned to a more linear consensus like what the Earth had enjoyed before, mere days or weeks had passed in some parts of the world, while others had been through hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years in the same amount of "time." The latter at least meant that Earth's ecosystem has been able to repair itself fairly easy (thank you, evolution!), albeit not without some very strange additions and distortions having been made in the process, not all of them mundane. Additionally, Earth's atmospheric composition remains patchy and odd around the equator with little regard for local topography or climate, and more often than not how breathable the air is seems more based on whether the people remaining in the region thought it would be or not. This isn't exactly unexpected: while the laws of physics are mostly (heavy emphasis on "mostly") back to how they're supposed to be, they're still shaky around the edges and prone to being fickle, vibes-based things at best. There's also the issue of the lingering eldritch abominations, who don't do too much direct interference anymore but certainly loiter around the periphery cutting deals with any mortal dumb enough to think said deals won't end with them dead, horrifically transformed, or trapped in a personalized torture dimension for all eternity. Their continued existence is one of the primary motivators driving the Hatchetmen forward in the modern age.

The northern hemisphere is tentatively dominated by the Mahajanga Accord, an alliance system run by Hawaii and Madagascar, both of which started off as mere regional thalassocracies but have blossomed significantly since then. By luck, Hawaii maintained much of the preexisting infrastructure and cities of the former U.S. state by the same name, which conveniently was located on the northern coast of the river basin filled with lush rainforests large tracts of the northern Pacific seabed have transformed into, but upon its reconnecting with the rest of the world there've been some awkward questions about where exactly the non-Native Hawaiians who previously constituted a very large percentage of Hawaii's population have gone. The answer turned out to be "deported to a series of bantustans located in the climatologically impossible arid swamplands to the west," which Hawaii's deflected criticism of by pointing out just how frequently the old United States did the exact same thing, and besides, they're doing fine now, aren't they? Outrigger canoes with some slight supernatural modifications that originated in Hawaii are now the dominant means of personal transit through the rivers and canals of Hawaii's growing empire, which have spread across the northern hemisphere and been enthusiastically adopted by the rest of the Mahajanga Accord members. The kapu system has been resurrected as well, as has Hawaiian religion, though Huna occultism has a substantial underground following (particularly in the western bantustans) and has evolved in a rather human sacrifice-y direction. The many miracles performed by Hawaiian traditional healers have seemingly proven hoʻoponopono practices correct, which anti-Hawaiian elements elsewhere in the world claim to be one of the many ways the world has been unnaturally warped from its previous state; over a fifth of the populace of the rest of the Mahajanga Accord has converted to the native Hawaiian religion in response to this, and traditional Hawaiian healers are located in essentially every population center of note across the northern hemisphere save for in the most virulently anti-Hawaiian nations.

Madagascar resembles its old self somewhat more than Hawaii, for any given value of "somewhat more." Among the humans who made deals with powers beyond their understanding in hopes of saving themselves from the Voyeur-Meddlers was a Malagasy man who begged for Madagascar to be placed in temporal stasis until the crisis had resolved itself. This was achieved, with Madagascar reemerging from its preternatural stasis as reality began to assert itself (though not in the right geographic location), but in the process traditional Malagasy perception of time had been granted to everyone in Madagascar and, like the practice of ho'oponopono, "legitimized" without a doubt. Now, anyone born on the island of Madagascar is capable of envisioning the passage of time itself via a sort of superimposed vision, seeing the past growing out in front of their eyes and feeling the future as it advances through the backs of their heads. Asides from giving anyone born in Madagascar some level of blurry precognitive abilities (some are stronger than others with seemingly no reason or pattern to it), the most gifted have a limited ability to outright rewind time by envisioning the stream of time pulling itself back into their eyes, though continued use of this power leaves them with telltale bloodshot eyes that gradually shift towards a reddish-blue gradient radiating outwards across their sclera, as well as an unfortunate tendency to slip into chronologically-disconnected madness if the power's overused. Some of these "gifted" Madagascans have gambled it all and traveled east to the Isles of the Black Altars to cut deals with one of the abominations lurking there in exchange for the ability to shift back and forth through time at will, additionally leaving them with luminous golden eyes, but one way or another these poor souls are all doomed to accidentally create self-fulfilling paradoxes personalized to be as hellish as possible before becoming trapped within the impossible labyrinths of the Bastard's Box.

Currently organized under a confederal government which receives the constant advice of a caste of time-rewinders to ensure nothing can ever truly come as a surprise to it, Madagascar is the only nation capable of outcompeting Hawaii for sheer raw power, something additionally granted by the Madagascan capture of the Voyeur-Meddlers' North Pole artificial gravity engine less than a decade ago (they've been trying and failing to coordinate with the most agreeable southern hemisphere nations on seizing the South Pole engine so the Earth's climate can finally be returned to what it used to be). What additionally grants Madagascar so much power is its de facto rule over the Confederation of New Amardia, which was meant to be the ultimate compromise name... and is, if by "ultimate compromise name" you mean "the only name the inhabitants would've hated more is something like 'Greater Sykespicotland'." [1] A so-called "Malagasy Raj," New Amardia is a confused mix of Ukrainians, Turks, Russians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Iranians, Central Asians, Hindus, and many, many more who flooded into the region as the oceans and atmosphere began to shift. It's basically a giant Madagascan resource extraction colony, and while the native workers are at least paid a living wage, that doesn't mean they're happy about the whole de facto colonialism thing, nor about being kept at peace with their neighbors at gunpoint by Madagascar. The Madagascans don't see what their problem is- peaceful multiethnic countries are possible, they've managed it- and at any rate, they're preoccupied with their ongoing hunts for the ancient Abrahamic religious artifacts they know have got to be hiding around here somewhere. Granted, it's not like they really need them, but in a world like this there's no such thing as overkill.

While technically not part of the Mahajanga Accord (if only because they don't have any true national entities), the seafloor dragon tribes of former North America are also worth mentioning. A result of a Canadian attempting to make yet another pact with entities beyond his understanding, the drowning victims of Canada and the United States were revived and transformed into sea dragons, which all things considered seemed like a pretty good deal, until... actually, yeah, no, given what happened to some of the other poor idiots who tried similar things, these guys practically got off scot-free by comparison to other parts of the world. While almost all of them suffer from species-wide body dysmorphia (which seems to be an inherited trait for supernatural reasons, unfortunately) and figuring out how to adjust to their new bodies and lives was rarely an easy or pleasant process, the sea dragons have settled into their lives as aquatic hunter-gatherers by now and some of them even doubt that they were ever human. As the sea dragons' gills don't exclude them from being able to breathe above water, they've been able to work out several (mostly) mutually intelligible trade languages with the Hawaiians and Madagascans that's half vocalizations, half recycled fragments of Malagasy, Hawaii, Inuit, Quebec, and American Sign Language, so the sea dragons have been able to make a killing off of resource-diving in the drowned ruins of Canadian and American cities. (The previous Hawaiian queen was petty enough to contract a New Yorker-descended sea dragon tribe to bring the badly rusted, but otherwise mostly intact Statue of Liberty to the surface solely so she could have it put on display in New North Waianae as a trophy.) An increasing amount of young sea dragons have been outright moving to the mainland for better opportunities in recent years, resulting in an influx of immigrants across the Mahajanga Accord member states and quite a lot of cultural clashes in the process.

The most dramatically shifted of all the old continents was Antarctica, which was pushed north accompanied by devastating earthquakes, rolling over flooded South Africa and crashing into the African continent, kicking up massive amounts of dust and debris and creating a new mountain range so high it makes the old Himalayas look like a collection of anthills. Trapped in one of the many pockets of temporal isolation plaguing the devastated Earth, the scientists stationed in Antarctica were left abandoned and struggling for survival in the wastes of the blasted Antarctic continent, cut off from the rest of the world. As the Antarctic ice cap slowly transformed into a gigantic mass of something that looks and feels like ice but rots as if it were made of meat and the native life of Antarctica changed to match, the scientists and researchers were transformed, too, unknown energies slowly warping them into gangly, unnaturally pale humanoids too skeletal, corpse-cold, and almost birdlike in their mannerisms to be mistaken for human. The dominant powers of Antarctica are the American-formed Rossee Empire (a corruption of "Ross Sea"; similarly, its capital at Murdos is a corruption of "McMurdo Station"), an emotionless "low-tech atompunk" technocracy that worships heavily distorted versions of the Founding Fathers of the former United States as messianic figures and takes concepts like Manifest Destiny and prosperity gospel as twofold divine and psychologically-natural imperatives, and the Mongol-esque Aarridka Empire, the product of an Argentinian/Chilean-dominated mix of Argentinean, Chilean, Uruguayan, Czech, American, Ukrainian, British, Dutch, Turkish, South Korean, Brazilian, Polish, Spanish, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Bulgarian scientists fleeing the Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetlands when both were sent crashing into Africa, and the terrified scientists pulled together and formed their own society at the foothills of the impossibly high mountains to their north. The Aarridkans speak a language that almost sounds like Spanish if you're not paying attention but is totally unintelligible to any other language and worships the Rotting Ice like a god, holding gut-churning rituals involving ingesting small amounts of the icy rot in tandem with cannibalism of slain enemies, and it was once the terror of all "Afrantarctica" until its ongoing attempt to invade the largely Mozambican-Tanzanian-South African-descended People's Empire of Great Nampula made clear how ineffectual its military is against any other than itself. Th

The Cosmologists scare the peoples of the northern hemisphere far more than Aarridka once scared the south, but this is more because their origins and motives are completely unknown. While the waterlogged corpses of flooded North America were busy getting themselves agonizingly resurrected and transformed into the ancestors of the sea dragons, an enclave on the northern East Coast that was still just barely above sea level at the time saw the emergence of a being calling itself the Cartologist, a pale, long-haired creature that certainly looked human and promised salvation to any who would join it in its endeavors. Those who agreed were transformed into one of the Cosmologists, pitch-black feline-like entities with large yellow eyes, limbs which seem to float disconnected from their torsos at the shoulder and hip joints, and no mouths, communicating solely through telepathy; additionally, the Cartologist has imposed a jarringly punk-esque dress code on them, seemingly for no apparent reason other than to amuse itself. [2] The metallic observatories of the Cosmologists now entirely cover the mountainous islands ruled by the Cartologist, whose origin and motives remain completely unknown due to its refusal to hold court with diplomats from any outside powers. Contact with the Cartologist and the Cosmologists comes only at the whim of the Cartologist in the form of audio broadcasts sent to specific radio networks around the world; any vehicle which attempts to approach the domain of the Cosmologists simply halts at an invisible barrier and is slowly, inexorably pushed back, and not even the Madagascans have figured out how to break through this barrier. Once the natural (for any given definition thereof) flow of time restored itself, the Cosmologists broke their isolation for the first and only time, working at an impossible speed as they constructed gravity-defying floating train tracks at a rate of hundreds of miles per hour, the tracks spiderwebbing out from the impossibly tall gunmetal-gray tower that seems to be the Cartologist's "home base" and stretching out around the world. The moment construction was complete, thousands of unmanned maglev trains were discharged onto the tracks and have ceaselessly rode the tracks of the Rail That Weaves ever since, only stopping to return to the Cartologist's tower to perform unknown tasks before immediately reemerging. The automated trains appear to be observing certain parts of the world, but what specifically they're observing is unknown, and many aspiring young theoretical supernaturalists have broken their minds (mundanely or otherwise) trying to figure it out. Neither the Cosmologists nor the Cartologist have indicated any willingness to explain the purpose of the Rails That Weave, and some speculate that even the Cosmologists don't know and only the Cartologist understands their true purpose.

When the Earth descended into chaos, the Voyeur-Meddlers of the Eternal Perihelion freaked out at first, assuming that their lack of foresight was going to get them fired for sure. However, as it turned out, their client actually loved the supernatural chaos consuming the world and ordered them to keep the camera drones active, already salivating at the prospect of the sheer amount of cash he'd rake in from what'd undoubtedly be the revolutionary blockbuster of the year. Those drones remain active, recording everything of interest on the broken Earth, but especially around sites of high supernatural activity: the Voyeur-Meddlers' client's ambitions have shifted in the time since their arrival, and he's since transformed it into a holovision series as popular as it's convoluted back on his homeworld, though there are ongoing protests in many major cities demanding the show's cancellation as politicians and media figures debate the morality of plunging an entire planet into apocalyptic conditions and killing billions in the process for the sake of entertaining the masses. The Voyeur-Meddlers are less optimistic than their client about whether this project will be perpetually sustainable, especially after Madagascar seized control of their northern artificial gravity engine and forced them to retreat to the engine stationed over the south pole, and with a new bill (nicknamed "Sol-3's Law" after Earth) that would impose a blanket ban on airing any entertainment media which shows any sapient entity's death or physical/psychological harm having recently passed through the fourth house of the heptacameral legislature of their client's home nation's government, the Voyeur-Meddlers are seriously considering just demanding their client pay them in advance, then fleeing this universe before they're tracked down by said government's justice department and forced to pay damages to the affected populace of Earth.

The Cartologist is not inclined to let them escape without consequences. The best and brightest of its Cosmologists have already gathered enough data for it to pinpoint the universes and planets of origin of the Voyeur-Meddlers and their client alike, and now it has sent over half of its Cosmologist workforce to begin work on a branch line of the Rail That Weaves with its terminus at the South Pole. One way or another, the things that brought about the desolation of Earth will suffer for their actions... and once the Cartologist has fed upon their terror and agony until it is bloated with the sheer power of it, then it will be able to open the door to the universes beyond this one and wreak a brutal justice of its own upon all who drank in the deaths of billions for nothing more than temporary amusement.

Its plans have been made. Its maps have been drawn out. Its Cosmologists are prepared. Vengeance awaits.

-

[1] Funnily enough, I did have an idea once for a postapocalyptic Mesopotamia-centered state created by stranded American soldiers in Iraq, who for some reason thought naming their country "Sykespicotia" was a good idea. (To make matters worse, they mispronounce the -picot- part as if it rhymes with "apricot.")

[2] Like so: 64.media.tumblr.com/b0e82772eb… [2.1]

[2.1] I admit, maybe the reference is a tad heavy-handed, but even if it wasn't so obscure I doubt more than one or two people will get it, it's my map and I get to make the incomprehensible creative decisions of uncertain quality.

Description

Alrighty, have a horror map for Halloween! The basemap here was pulled together from several different sources: the original was made by Lowtuff, the Antarctica patch was made by Spinovenator (with some changes made by me), the Madagascar patch was made by me but heavily based on its projection in oshron's Cassini basemap, and bits and pieces were taken from TheKutKu's tidally-locked Earth basemap. I'm exhausted enough that I feel like I'll crash any second now, so I'm gonna set an alarm again, take a quick nap, and add the full description when I wake up.

EDIT: Whoops, the above turned out to be one of my trademark complete lies, because I completely slept through both the alarm I set and the two backup alarms. Gonna copy-paste in the description real quick, so let's all agree to pretend it was always there, yeah? Yeah? Alright, I'm gonna go grab breakfast, y'all behave.

It was a crisp autumn day when they came, their pallid metallic ships leaping from the abyss into Earth's orbit in a heartbeat and beginning a slow, dread-inducing crawl towards the poles. The world could do nothing but watch in fear and wait for an ultimatum from what were undoubtedly alien spacecraft, praying their intentions for the world were not malicious as they broadcasted their paltry attempts at diplomacy to the unstopping ships.

The crew of the alien ships ignored the broadcasts completely. Employees of a transuniversal organization somewhere between an NGO, a PMC, and a planet-wide snuff film production company hiring its services out to the thousands of alien Roland Emmerichs littering the multiverse, they called themselves the Voyeur-Meddlers of the Eternal Perihelion. For this job, they'd been commissioned to engage artificial gravity machinery over the two poles of the planet to simulate the effects of stopping its rotation without actually going to the trouble of doing it for realsies (budget concerns and all), deploying a network of camera-equipped camouflaged drones around the planet to capture the events as they were happening but otherwise not interfering: their client had been very clear that they were not to engage with the native lifeforms, viewing this as something that would "ruin" his "visionary" disaster film by going unnecessarily meta about it. Audiences didn't want to think about why this was happening, they just wanted to watch shit get destroyed in new and exciting ways with the bare minimum of plot in-between to string it together. So the Voyeur-Meddlers simply engaged the artificial gravity engines and deployed their drone fleet to record the chaos as it happened.

The oceans began moving north and south rapidly, flooding the polar regions of the world while leaving the equator to dry up. Frigid megastorms formed at the poles as the atmosphere followed the seawater. The air grew thinner and thinner at the equator, spurring a global migration crisis as inhabitants of equatorial nations fled north and south. Terror and desolation reigned, and the Voyeur-Meddlers and their client drank it all in.

Unfortunately for them, humans were not the kind of species that would sit about and watch their home destroyed, and this iteration of humanity had a few tricks up its sleeve the Voyeur-Meddlers had never seen before. So as a massive equatorial supercontinent formed in the wake of the ever-deepening polar oceans, those who knew or thought they knew how to drive away the Voyeur-Meddlers leapt into action. Deep in the woods, the mayor of an island town in the northern Great Lakes cracked open a pitch-black tome he had sworn he would never touch again to make a desperate bargain with the only entities he thought might be stronger than the aliens. In Loimwe Protected Area, Tatmadaw agents returned to the ancient temple they'd discovered there tucked away in a cave network years before and began puzzling out the inner workings of the enormous mechanical devices at its heart. Trapped with their family in Toronto as the floodwaters crept ever nearer, a delusional tourist glared into their own eyes in a grimy hotel mirror as they tried to force the universe to bend to their will. All around the world, humans reached out to the dread powers lurking beyond the confines of the universe as they understood it and made deals with them to stop the transformation of their world, unknowing of how many other people were doing the exact same thing... and in one united cacophony, all of their prayers were answered.

Then the borders between reality and that which lay past it fractured. Then the continents began to slowly, agonizingly shift and move. Then the seabed tore itself asunder as beasts old and foul emerged from its depths. Then the acolytes of the abominations they now worshiped whether they liked it or not found themselves gifted with monstrous powers in return for their piety. Then the people of Earth looked up to the night sky and saw it looking back with every single one of its unblinking eyes.

The world stopped working as it was supposed to for quite some time after that.

Time was... difficult at best for a while there, moving in juddery uncertain fits and starts that never quite seemed to apply to the whole world, and when it finally returned to a more linear consensus like what the Earth had enjoyed before, mere days or weeks had passed in some parts of the world, while others had been through hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years in the same amount of "time." The latter at least meant that Earth's ecosystem has been able to repair itself fairly easy (thank you, evolution!), albeit not without some very strange additions and distortions having been made in the process, not all of them mundane. Additionally, Earth's atmospheric composition remains patchy and odd around the equator with little regard for local topography or climate, and more often than not how breathable the air is seems more based on whether the people remaining in the region thought it would be or not. This isn't exactly unexpected: while the laws of physics are mostly (heavy emphasis on "mostly") back to how they're supposed to be, they're still shaky around the edges and prone to being fickle, vibes-based things at best. There's also the issue of the lingering eldritch abominations, who don't do too much direct interference anymore but certainly loiter around the periphery cutting deals with any mortal dumb enough to think said deals won't end with them dead, horrifically transformed, or trapped in a personalized torture dimension for all eternity. Their continued existence is one of the primary motivators driving the Hatchetmen forward in the modern age.

The northern hemisphere is tentatively dominated by the Mahajanga Accord, an alliance system run by Hawaii and Madagascar, both of which started off as mere regional thalassocracies but have blossomed significantly since then. By luck, Hawaii maintained much of the preexisting infrastructure and cities of the former U.S. state by the same name, which conveniently was located on the northern coast of the river basin filled with lush rainforests large tracts of the northern Pacific seabed have transformed into, but upon its reconnecting with the rest of the world there've been some awkward questions about where exactly the non-Native Hawaiians who previously constituted a very large percentage of Hawaii's population have gone. The answer turned out to be "deported to a series of bantustans located in the climatologically impossible arid swamplands to the west," which Hawaii's deflected criticism of by pointing out just how frequently the old United States did the exact same thing, and besides, they're doing fine now, aren't they? Outrigger canoes with some slight supernatural modifications that originated in Hawaii are now the dominant means of personal transit through the rivers and canals of Hawaii's growing empire, which have spread across the northern hemisphere and been enthusiastically adopted by the rest of the Mahajanga Accord members. The kapu system has been resurrected as well, as has Hawaiian religion, though Huna occultism has a substantial underground following (particularly in the western bantustans) and has evolved in a rather human sacrifice-y direction. The many miracles performed by Hawaiian traditional healers have seemingly proven hoʻoponopono practices correct, which anti-Hawaiian elements elsewhere in the world claim to be one of the many ways the world has been unnaturally warped from its previous state; over a fifth of the populace of the rest of the Mahajanga Accord has converted to the native Hawaiian religion in response to this, and traditional Hawaiian healers are located in essentially every population center of note across the northern hemisphere save for in the most virulently anti-Hawaiian nations.

Madagascar resembles its old self somewhat more than Hawaii, for any given value of "somewhat more." Among the humans who made deals with powers beyond their understanding in hopes of saving themselves from the Voyeur-Meddlers was a Malagasy man who begged for Madagascar to be placed in temporal stasis until the crisis had resolved itself. This was achieved, with Madagascar reemerging from its preternatural stasis as reality began to assert itself (though not in the right geographic location), but in the process traditional Malagasy perception of time had been granted to everyone in Madagascar and, like the practice of ho'oponopono, "legitimized" without a doubt. Now, anyone born on the island of Madagascar is capable of envisioning the passage of time itself via a sort of superimposed vision, seeing the past growing out in front of their eyes and feeling the future as it advances through the backs of their heads. Asides from giving anyone born in Madagascar some level of blurry precognitive abilities (some are stronger than others with seemingly no reason or pattern to it), the most gifted have a limited ability to outright rewind time by envisioning the stream of time pulling itself back into their eyes, though continued use of this power leaves them with telltale bloodshot eyes that gradually shift towards a reddish-blue gradient radiating outwards across their sclera, as well as an unfortunate tendency to slip into chronologically-disconnected madness if the power's overused. Some of these "gifted" Madagascans have gambled it all and traveled east to the Isles of the Black Altars to cut deals with one of the abominations lurking there in exchange for the ability to shift back and forth through time at will, additionally leaving them with luminous golden eyes, but one way or another these poor souls are all doomed to accidentally create self-fulfilling paradoxes personalized to be as hellish as possible before becoming trapped within the impossible labyrinths of the Bastard's Box.

Currently organized under a confederal government which receives the constant advice of a caste of time-rewinders to ensure nothing can ever truly come as a surprise to it, Madagascar is the only nation capable of outcompeting Hawaii for sheer raw power, something additionally granted by the Madagascan capture of the Voyeur-Meddlers' North Pole artificial gravity engine less than a decade ago (they've been trying and failing to coordinate with the most agreeable southern hemisphere nations on seizing the South Pole engine so the Earth's climate can finally be returned to what it used to be). What additionally grants Madagascar so much power is its de facto rule over the Confederation of New Amardia, which was meant to be the ultimate compromise name... and is, if by "ultimate compromise name" you mean "the only name the inhabitants would've hated more is something like 'Greater Sykespicotland'." [1] A so-called "Malagasy Raj," New Amardia is a confused mix of Ukrainians, Turks, Russians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Arabs, Iranians, Central Asians, Hindus, and many, many more who flooded into the region as the oceans and atmosphere began to shift. It's basically a giant Madagascan resource extraction colony, and while the native workers are at least paid a living wage, that doesn't mean they're happy about the whole de facto colonialism thing, nor about being kept at peace with their neighbors at gunpoint by Madagascar. The Madagascans don't see what their problem is- peaceful multiethnic countries are possible, they've managed it- and at any rate, they're preoccupied with their ongoing hunts for the ancient Abrahamic religious artifacts they know have got to be hiding around here somewhere. Granted, it's not like they really need them, but in a world like this there's no such thing as overkill.

While technically not part of the Mahajanga Accord (if only because they don't have any true national entities), the seafloor dragon tribes of former North America are also worth mentioning. A result of a Canadian attempting to make yet another pact with entities beyond his understanding, the drowning victims of Canada and the United States were revived and transformed into sea dragons, which all things considered seemed like a pretty good deal, until... actually, yeah, no, given what happened to some of the other poor idiots who tried similar things, these guys practically got off scot-free by comparison to other parts of the world. While almost all of them suffer from species-wide body dysmorphia (which seems to be an inherited trait for supernatural reasons, unfortunately) and figuring out how to adjust to their new bodies and lives was rarely an easy or pleasant process, the sea dragons have settled into their lives as aquatic hunter-gatherers by now and some of them even doubt that they were ever human. As the sea dragons' gills don't exclude them from being able to breathe above water, they've been able to work out several (mostly) mutually intelligible trade languages with the Hawaiians and Madagascans that's half vocalizations, half recycled fragments of Malagasy, Hawaii, Inuit, Quebec, and American Sign Language, so the sea dragons have been able to make a killing off of resource-diving in the drowned ruins of Canadian and American cities. (The previous Hawaiian queen was petty enough to contract a New Yorker-descended sea dragon tribe to bring the badly rusted, but otherwise mostly intact Statue of Liberty to the surface solely so she could have it put on display in New North Waianae as a trophy.) An increasing amount of young sea dragons have been outright moving to the mainland for better opportunities in recent years, resulting in an influx of immigrants across the Mahajanga Accord member states and quite a lot of cultural clashes in the process.

The most dramatically shifted of all the old continents was Antarctica, which was pushed north accompanied by devastating earthquakes, rolling over flooded South Africa and crashing into the African continent, kicking up massive amounts of dust and debris and creating a new mountain range so high it makes the old Himalayas look like a collection of anthills. Trapped in one of the many pockets of temporal isolation plaguing the devastated Earth, the scientists stationed in Antarctica were left abandoned and struggling for survival in the wastes of the blasted Antarctic continent, cut off from the rest of the world. As the Antarctic ice cap slowly transformed into a gigantic mass of something that looks and feels like ice but rots as if it were made of meat and the native life of Antarctica changed to match, the scientists and researchers were transformed, too, unknown energies slowly warping them into gangly, unnaturally pale humanoids too skeletal, corpse-cold, and almost birdlike in their mannerisms to be mistaken for human. The dominant powers of Antarctica are the American-formed Rossee Empire (a corruption of "Ross Sea"; similarly, its capital at Murdos is a corruption of "McMurdo Station"), an emotionless "low-tech atompunk" technocracy that worships heavily distorted versions of the Founding Fathers of the former United States as messianic figures and takes concepts like Manifest Destiny and prosperity gospel as twofold divine and psychologically-natural imperatives, and the Mongol-esque Aarridka Empire, the product of an Argentinian/Chilean-dominated mix of Argentinean, Chilean, Uruguayan, Czech, American, Ukrainian, British, Dutch, Turkish, South Korean, Brazilian, Polish, Spanish, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Bulgarian scientists fleeing the Antarctic Peninsula and South Shetlands when both were sent crashing into Africa, and the terrified scientists pulled together and formed their own society at the foothills of the impossibly high mountains to their north. The Aarridkans speak a language that almost sounds like Spanish if you're not paying attention but is totally unintelligible to any other language and worships the Rotting Ice like a god, holding gut-churning rituals involving ingesting small amounts of the icy rot in tandem with cannibalism of slain enemies, and it was once the terror of all "Afrantarctica" until its ongoing attempt to invade the largely Mozambican-Tanzanian-South African-descended People's Empire of Great Nampula made clear how ineffectual its military is against any other than itself. Th

The Cosmologists scare the peoples of the northern hemisphere far more than Aarridka once scared the south, but this is more because their origins and motives are completely unknown. While the waterlogged corpses of flooded North America were busy getting themselves agonizingly resurrected and transformed into the ancestors of the sea dragons, an enclave on the northern East Coast that was still just barely above sea level at the time saw the emergence of a being calling itself the Cartologist, a pale, long-haired creature that certainly looked human and promised salvation to any who would join it in its endeavors. Those who agreed were transformed into one of the Cosmologists, pitch-black feline-like entities with large yellow eyes, limbs which seem to float disconnected from their torsos at the shoulder and hip joints, and no mouths, communicating solely through telepathy; additionally, the Cartologist has imposed a jarringly punk-esque dress code on them, seemingly for no apparent reason other than to amuse itself. [2] The metallic observatories of the Cosmologists now entirely cover the mountainous islands ruled by the Cartologist, whose origin and motives remain completely unknown due to its refusal to hold court with diplomats from any outside powers. Contact with the Cartologist and the Cosmologists comes only at the whim of the Cartologist in the form of audio broadcasts sent to specific radio networks around the world; any vehicle which attempts to approach the domain of the Cosmologists simply halts at an invisible barrier and is slowly, inexorably pushed back, and not even the Madagascans have figured out how to break through this barrier. Once the natural (for any given definition thereof) flow of time restored itself, the Cosmologists broke their isolation for the first and only time, working at an impossible speed as they constructed gravity-defying floating train tracks at a rate of hundreds of miles per hour, the tracks spiderwebbing out from the impossibly tall gunmetal-gray tower that seems to be the Cartologist's "home base" and stretching out around the world. The moment construction was complete, thousands of unmanned maglev trains were discharged onto the tracks and have ceaselessly rode the tracks of the Rail That Weaves ever since, only stopping to return to the Cartologist's tower to perform unknown tasks before immediately reemerging. The automated trains appear to be observing certain parts of the world, but what specifically they're observing is unknown, and many aspiring young theoretical supernaturalists have broken their minds (mundanely or otherwise) trying to figure it out. Neither the Cosmologists nor the Cartologist have indicated any willingness to explain the purpose of the Rails That Weave, and some speculate that even the Cosmologists don't know and only the Cartologist understands their true purpose.

When the Earth descended into chaos, the Voyeur-Meddlers of the Eternal Perihelion freaked out at first, assuming that their lack of foresight was going to get them fired for sure. However, as it turned out, their client actually loved the supernatural chaos consuming the world and ordered them to keep the camera drones active, already salivating at the prospect of the sheer amount of cash he'd rake in from what'd undoubtedly be the revolutionary blockbuster of the year. Those drones remain active, recording everything of interest on the broken Earth, but especially around sites of high supernatural activity: the Voyeur-Meddlers' client's ambitions have shifted in the time since their arrival, and he's since transformed it into a holovision series as popular as it's convoluted back on his homeworld, though there are ongoing protests in many major cities demanding the show's cancellation as politicians and media figures debate the morality of plunging an entire planet into apocalyptic conditions and killing billions in the process for the sake of entertaining the masses. The Voyeur-Meddlers are less optimistic than their client about whether this project will be perpetually sustainable, especially after Madagascar seized control of their northern artificial gravity engine and forced them to retreat to the engine stationed over the south pole, and with a new bill (nicknamed "Sol-3's Law" after Earth) that would impose a blanket ban on airing any entertainment media which shows any sapient entity's death or physical/psychological harm having recently passed through the fourth house of the heptacameral legislature of their client's home nation's government, the Voyeur-Meddlers are seriously considering just demanding their client pay them in advance, then fleeing this universe before they're tracked down by said government's justice department and forced to pay damages to the affected populace of Earth.

The Cartologist is not inclined to let them escape without consequences. The best and brightest of its Cosmologists have already gathered enough data for it to pinpoint the universes and planets of origin of the Voyeur-Meddlers and their client alike, and now it has sent over half of its Cosmologist workforce to begin work on a branch line of the Rail That Weaves with its terminus at the South Pole. One way or another, the things that brought about the desolation of Earth will suffer for their actions... and once the Cartologist has fed upon their terror and agony until it is bloated with the sheer power of it, then it will be able to open the door to the universes beyond this one and wreak a brutal justice of its own upon all who drank in the deaths of billions for nothing more than temporary amusement.

Its plans have been made. Its maps have been drawn out. Its Cosmologists are prepared. Vengeance awaits.

-

[1] Funnily enough, I did have an idea once for a postapocalyptic Mesopotamia-centered state created by stranded American soldiers in Iraq, who for some reason thought naming their country "Sykespicotia" was a good idea. (To make matters worse, they mispronounce the -picot- part as if it rhymes with "apricot.")

[2] Like so: 64.media.tumblr.com/b0e82772eb… [2.1]

[2.1] I admit, maybe the reference is a tad heavy-handed, but even if it wasn't so obscure I doubt more than one or two people will get it, it's my map and I get to make the incomprehensible creative decisions of uncertain quality.