Bay 12 Games Forum

The world as we once knew it died in mutagenic fire. Spurred by the ever-widening gap between ideologies on opposing sides of the political spectrum, pushed and prodded by exceedingly wealthy corporations and individuals with nothing better to do with their time, worldwide war broke out between the nations of the Old World, a war like nothing seen before or since. Global nuclear holocaust was just the beginning; as opposing superpowers grew more and more desperate, old projects better left dead were dug up, remnants of an institutionalized attempt at harnessing the occult. Thus did swarms of techno-organic horrors flood out of the Divided States to clash against the elemental legions of Super Serbia. Cults to ancient horrors sprung up in the geopolitical madness of world war 3, and cthuloid entities crawled out of the sea to put an end to all humanoid life. They purged the coastlines and swept five hundred miles inward before being halted by a desperate coalition of shamans, wizards, and amateur occultists from the world over, banding together into an organization known as WIZ-COM. Elite teams of immortal wizard commandos struck out at the global clusterfuck for hundreds of years, rescuing the sparse survivors and reforming governments as they went.

When they finally managed to cross the writhing sea of animate bleach and reach Australia's shores, it was with understandable surprise that they found the place mostly unchanged. Sure, the outback was now full of strange sand monsters, flying vampire iguana bat hornet swarms, and other ridiculous amalgamations of nature's savagery, but this wasn't anything to frazzle the friggin' Aussies of all people. Sure, they'd bunkered down and turned their major cities into walled fortresses like most of the rest of the world, but a fair portion of their population lived outside of the walls, coexisting somehow with the mutagenic environment. They claimed they warded off genetic drift and spiritual corruption with some arcane concoction called Vegemite.

Australia's main issue after the first magical bombs had dropped was the way it had affected the emus. For some reason the increased magical radiation in the air had unlocked some vestigal evolutionary evil encoded in the DNA of the creatures, turning them into cunning, evil creatures with an appetite for pecking humans to death and a visceral thirst for the destruction of organized humanoid society. They had begun raiding human settlements almost immediately, and had been advancing their technology, population, and level of organization as the years went on. The tempo of their raids was increasing every year, and they were growing closer and closer to breaching the walls of some of their major cities. It was for this reason that the arrival of WIZ-COM was welcomed. The Australian Prime Minister, an enigmatic being known only as Andy, came to an accord with the organization: Australia would join WIZ-COM and devote resources to their fight against magical evil in exchange for their aid in completing a project they'd been working on for decades with no success. WIZ-COM agreed eagerly and sent their best alchemists and arcane theorists over to the labs in Sydney.

With WIZ-COM's help, the Australian's project began to see some progress for the first time in a long time. Spurred by the visions of well-respected surfer shamans, the Aussie government had been attempting to recreate a bodily vessel for a great Australian hero from times long past, who saw the plight of the animal kingdom under the tyranny of the emu from the spirit world and wanted badly to end their reign of terror. With WIZ-COM's menagerie of magical resources, Australian ingenuity, and a sample of the hero's genome miraculously kept preserved through the ages, the body was constructed and the host spirit summoned into his new corpus. In the year 2500, Steve Irwin was born once more.

In life this Australian legend had known nothing but respect and admiration for all species of animal, seeing their joyous ferocity as an expression of the wondrous variety of life. He had died as he lived, experiencing the natural world without restraint or regret, and traveled to the afterlife content. But the emergence of the emu threat had disturbed him, for these were no longer natural creatures - some evil from another dimension was exerting its effects through the conduit of the emu, and would seek to suborn the natural world that he held dear under their merciless heel should they triumph. Ir-Win would not let such a fate pass, and so was granted a second existence, fused with the essence of beasts most ferocious and gifted the ability to take the best of the natural world into himself. Thusly empowered, he dove into war against the emu, and the tales of his battles against the devious creatures are a thousandfold.

There is the issue of the Monster in the Dark being under a compulsion to eat Redcloak and spit his amulet out if he ever betrays Xykon, though.

Though that isn't much of a failsafe anymore due to Redcloak's whole substitution ploy.