Backstory 

 

A legless child born to a penniless immigrant family, Cali struggled to survive. His mother died two years after birth due to health complications. At the age of 5, his father was shot dead on the streets of LA by local police. Having no family residing in the country, Cali was sent to sooten under the crumbling roof of an orphanage. Displeased with such hemming confinements, he frequently ran away into the grime of  the inner city, constantly in the search for money and business and learning to manouvre with elegant skill with his crutches. He struggled to avoid the police and public service and feared an end to his lucrative immorality. At the age of 8, he was finally wrangled into an adoptive home, where he was victim to          and abuse. He rarely stayed home, and did not attend school, despite constant threats from child protective services. He instead frequented the school of his dear friend, Bazz, in order to operate his              business.

As home conditions became increasingly more unbearable, Cali resorted into murdering his own adoptive parents at the age of 12. Sympathetic to his trouble, Bazz's family allowed him to live in their house and hide him from the police. In his stagnation, Cali began his adventure in the field of biomedical mechanical engineering in the hopes of creating useful and lifechanging prosthesis for himself and others. Fascinated with the fragile structures of life, he also studied biochemical engineering in parallel conjunction, eventually leading to the creation of the first gelatinofungal organism, Chubs, who grew as his close friend.

The organisms spread, slaughtering billions and dissolving humanity to its current sparse state. Cali managed to survive with Bazz until the foundation of the Los Angeles Citadel, the LAC, where he garnered power and influence through his monopoly on weaponized limbs and machina and his companionship of rebel force leader Carissey Cox. Once the city's unhappiness reached its peak, Cali and the rebel forces overthrew the presiding citadel council. Cali spearheaded his way through the the ranks of the New Order, appointing himself and Carissey as leader. Now that this objective was reached, the two searched for more daring ventures.

At the age of 22, Cali embedded Chubs into his body, fusing it with his cerebellum and allowing the two to coalesce into an ungodly being. This caused him to stop aging and gave him regenerative and transformative powers. Seeing this immense source of power, Carissey grew distrusting and selfish. He embedded a dormant jelly into his own body, obtaining the powers for himself. He deported Cali to the British containment camps in Africa, where thousands of innocent individuals were forced to endure their entire lives in unfathomable agony and suffering. Meanwhile, Carissey's corruption grew increasingly grotesque. He enforced a totalitarian military policy and imprisoned and tortured thousands of innocent inhabitants. Neighboring citadels grew worried about LA's worsening condition and fearful of the order's hostility. In a turn of revolting injustice, citizens of the LAC were not privy to the affairs and workings of the order, and so nearly all of them blamed Cali for Carissey's misdeeds. Even his longtime friend Bazz, who was one among the thousands of wrongfully imprisoned and tortured.

During encampment, Cali grew numb and unresponsive. Time seemed to ebb directionlessly. After a while, he stopped moving. After a while, he stopped thinking. He laid there, naked and grimy, slathered in once humanly juices, in a room full of equally hopeless victims. After what could have been days or decades, there came a child. It seemed so vile, so depraved to him that an innocent creature could face such atrocity, and he grew angry. His pettiness reawokened, he escaped the camp with the child and made way through the battlefield of Africa to the mercy of the coast. 

Unfortuna                       g the way caused Cali                                   against his own will.

Once at the coast, Cali infiltrated a British aerial combat base, in which he stole and piloted a jet back to California. Once there, he realized his misfortune was only dawning.

Carrisey's malignity had brought the citizens of the LAC to a violent revolt, and the citadel's military was reacting with much greater savagery. On top of that, neighboring citadels were repeatedly threatening with the promise of nuclear bombardment if treaties of unification and military secession were not made. Carissey had no plans of aquiescing.

Cali made his way to the Citadel Headquarters where he finally faced Carissey after an arduous journey home. Unable to be placated, Carissey                             and revealed his intentions to escape the citadel before the atomic barrage from the surrounding citadels arrived. Unable to move, Cali was forced to watch Carissey as he made his escape. Once he regained sufficient strength, he began to crawl his way to the telephone. If he could just manage to call the other citadels...

None of this would happen.

But Bazz got there before he did. 

She was understandably enraged. For all she knew, Cali had trapped her in that prison for years, where she was subject to countless tortures and experiments. She was even implanted with a jelly symbiote of her own. But she hadn't wanted this.

She had made her way through unnoticed, armed only with a sharp fragment of rebar. She reached him, and upon seeing the object of all her suffering, pierced through his lungs.

He could not reach the phone, and the bombs were on their way.

In a last resort, Chubs exhausted all of their energies in order to construct a barrier around the two fragile humans.

The city was covered in fire before anyone was even aware of the whistling in the sky.

It has been three hundred years since that tragic day.

Now, among a jungle of concrete and decay, a strange sphere dots the landscape of the ruins of Los Angeles. It is about three meters in diameter and emits a subtle warmth. You feel uneasy upon touching it. As if something is looking at you. The sphere is covered in pores. When it rains, a circle of dryness surrounds it, as if it was a sponge. You place your hand on it. It starts to sink. Further and further in, swallowing you with immeasurable strength and hunger, until the force required to pull you away is enough to tear you in half. 

But one day, it's full.

You place your hand on it. It starts to twitch. 

They're awake.

---

 

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