Excerpt from "Rifts Earth" Ethnographic Survey #122-A
To: Captain Jakob Grimm, Commanding Officer
From: Otto Herzog ("The Black Forest")
Date: 26.05.2607 CE, Splicer Calendar
Subject: Indigenous peoples of the planet beyond the God's Eye; an analysis
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As the commanders of the Interdimensional Recon Team are aware, the so-called "Rifts Earth" appears to be historically similar to the Earth from which humanity originally hails in our universe. All evidence points to the dimension on the other side of the God's Eye being some form of parallel universe. As far as we can tell, historical development occured identically to our own until the late 21st century. It's here that a point of divergence takes place; a massive worldwide disaster that levels the planet and results in the near-extinction of humanity. This apocalyptic event, popularly dubbed the "Great Cataclysm," halts all further social and technological progress for hundreds of years. Whereas in our universe, humans expanded into the stars and eventually colonized the world on which we Splicers now live, such a renaissance of space exploration never occured for the humans of the Rifts Earth. Their future traveling the stars was savagely curtailed by the end of civilization. From what we can surmise, space travel and related technologies are now largely lost or forgotten.
It seems that following the Great Cataclysm, the world fell into a Dark Age of sorts (or "Second Dark Age," for those familiar with ancient history and the Fall of the Roman Empire). We've been unable to ascertain exactly how long this Dark Age lasted; I've heard numbers ranging from two-hundred years to a millenium. During this dismal period, all sense of civility and reason vanished as governments collapsed, cities burned, and people died by the millions. Those who survived the Great Cataclysm, in order to continue surviving in the Dark Age, must've had to resort to extreme measures. I feel as though I can distantly sympathize, for humanity had to make some similarly extreme choices when we began our war against the Machine. Hence, we now have the Splicers.
Without civilization, social institutions, and formal education, many humans started to regress back into a more savage mode of existence; one in which survival was paramount. Basic needs replaced loftier interests in higher learning; the laws of nature replaced the laws of man. After several generations, nearly all knowledge of the world prior to the Great Cataclysm became forgotten, surviving as misremembered snippets of lore. A vast majority of the humans that we've encountered on Rifts Earth have slipped back into tribal societies. They are savage, superstitious and ignorant; post-apocalyptic barbarians living in a vacuum devoid of modern learning and civilization. They have been remolded to become as harsh and unforgiving as the dinosaur-filled swamp in which they make their home. The fact that their world is also populated by non-human migrants of a thousand varieties (known as Dimensional Beings, or "D-Bees") undoubtedly makes survival even more of a competitive endeavor.
At one point, it was speculated that humans everywhere on the planet had reverted to a similar form of existence. However, our team's encounter with an organized expedition from outside the swamplands - the "Bostock Expedition," humans equipped with highly advanced vehicles and technology on par with pre-Splicer tech - indicates that apparently not all humans have turned to barbarism. It's obvious that Rifts Earth offers much more diversity than we initially thought. The revelation is both exciting and disconcerting.
As previous reports have indicated, the Interdimensional Recon Team has spent over eight weeks in the company of a specific tribe of barbarians, and it is this "Duck Tribe" that will be the subject of the following report. This report will be the first of a series of ethnographic surveys intended to provide brief overviews and analyses of the indigenous factions of Rifts Earth. And so we begin with our allies. For the perusal of our superiors, I humbly submit the following report.
Hail House Häus!!!