This is from a role-playing game that I wrote called Tesseracti; the idea, heavily influenced by Grant Morrison's "The Filth", was that you were an operative recruited by a shadowy, mysterious organization called the Tesseracti who basically acted like border police between a variety of pocket dimensions and Earth. For a variety of reasons, I never got it done, but I think that the concept is interesting. Anyways, these are some details from one of the pocket dimensions, Alien US.
Shaking the dirt from the cellar floor onto your bacon and eggs is a neat image, I think.
ALIEN US:
Alien US is the United States circa 1954 or so, complete with drive-in movie theaters, soda shops, a strong military - and its skies are swarming with alien spacecraft. As far as the Tesseracti can determine, the echo was created from the paranoid fear that the Russians would someday invade or infiltrate the United States, a theme which was reinforced by the pop culture of the time. In the case of Alien US, the aliens have already infiltrated and invaded, and the United States is now under military occupation from an alien culture.
A lot of the major capitals have been flattened, resulting in the human populace transferring itself into a multitude of small towns which look disturbingly similar - a fountain in front of city hall, a Main Street populated with various Mom and Pop stores, a high school with a football team, and the occasional punk just to liven things up. Everybody lives normally. Rock and roll is still on the rise, there's a television in every home and everybody's just repressed enough to keep the society working - for the moment.
But the shadows of flying saucers still sweep over the town at regular enough intervals that nobody looks up anymore. There's no government anymore; just a puppet President who lets the people know what the aliens are planning. Periodically, the saucers land in order to disgorge squads of bug-eyed men, complete with spacesuits, fishbowl helmets, and green, slimy skin. They don't do anything to you unless you happen to provoke them - and they're kind hard to provoke, what with their alien emotions - but they do strange things when they land, ranging from mechanically throwing a ball for a stray dog while recording the results with an enormous array of scientific equipment, to systematically disassembling a store and moving the parts into one of their craft, apparently with the intention of rebuilding it somewhere else. For alien invaders from beyond the stars, they're pretty benevolent. They don't experiment on humans, they don't mutilate cattle, and while they do rule the Earth, they do so as a looming background presence. If you aren't in the resistance, you don't have anything to worry about.
Of course, there's a level of resistance. People gather together in lonely farmhouses, or in the basements of drugstores, or in disused schoolrooms to plan out a way to resist the alien invaders - whether to poison their supplies, knock one of them out of the sky with a stolen National Guard artillery piece, or attempt a raid on one of their science squads. Every one of them lives in mortal fear of suddenly being caught up in the brilliant searchlight of a flying saucer, but they resist just the same. Occasionally, they even score successes.
In the present day, the resistance movement in Alien USA has managed to claim one or two "shadow communities" using alien technology to keep hidden; they've also riddled the skeleton of the United States' government with enough moles to be able to bring the weight of the US army on the aliens when they day comes. The alien plan has become somewhat clear: They're trying to build an exact replica of Earth on another planet - the buildings remain the same, but the terrain around it is very much like the moon. The resistance currently theorizes that the aliens are trying to recreate our planet on Planet X, with the eventual intention of transferring the human race to it, then strip-mining our world down to its molten core.
Initial Tesseracti analyses have revealed a number of things. As the reigning echo theory suggests, the echo's world has been frozen in both cultural and technological development - a "doll world" effect, where everything is the same despite the development that should be taking place. Despite fifty years worth of cultural development, it's still the 1950's - duck's-ass haircuts, poodle skirts and live, black and white TV are the order of the day. The Tesseracti have found that technological progress literally can't occur. Force-seeding scientists with advanced technical knowledge simply didn't work, as the scientists seemingly forget what they were taught a few days later.
Tesseracti activity in this dimension is fairly energetic. It's a good place to rest and recover, as long as you wear the appropriate hostileflague and don't screw around with any of the natives. Of course, since the dimension is so peaceful, some of the Tesseracti have created a new sport that they refer to as "duck-hunting." After attracting the attention of a flying saucer, the group tears down a road until the flying saucer is far enough away from civilization, then takes it down with something appropriate from the weapon orchards. All that's left to do once it hits the ground is to get the barbecue started, and you can have as much bug-eyed alien as you can eat. Those in the know say that bug-eyed alien tastes a lot like human flesh, which is gamy, like venison. The Tesseracti has put a one-per-month limit on saucers, to avoid drawing too much attention, but the ban is largely self-enforced.
POTENTIAL RECRUIT TYPES:
THE HOOD MADE GOOD:
You were in the resistance since you were twelve, helping your father set up the meetings for the resistance cells in the neighborhood, standing watch for saucers, shadowing alien sentries if they happened to wander through your neighborhood, and always, always watching the skies. When you were fourteen, the aliens captured your dad and two of his friends on their way home from a fishing trip, replacing him with a waxy-skinned automaton that said all the right things - but wasn't your dad. Your mother tried to kill him every day - a butcher knife in the throat, poison in his food, a back-shattering blow from a sledgehammer - but he would just regenerate, showing up the next day in his chair, shaking the dirt of the cellar floor off of his shoulders and into his bacon and eggs.
You missed your dad, but you hated your neighbors worse than the aliens. They had just abducted your dad. Your neighbors knew that they'd replaced him, but they were too scared of the aliens to do anything but treat the replicant as if he was the real thing. You hated that. Hated them. You became a hood to scare them, to make them as much afraid of you as they were afraid of the aliens. You got rid of the automaton for good one night, tying it to a chair in your father's old rec room and setting it on fire, and driving your mother to live with her relatives in one of the hidden communities.
On your way back, you had to almost drive off the road in order to avoid a car that was fleeing from a saucer, somebody in the back blazing away the pursuing craft with a tommygun. You'd dropped out of the resistance, but you followed them anyways, hoping that you could rescue at > least one of them from the inevitable abduction beam. When they brought down the saucer with what looked like a cross between a typewriter and a handgun, you couldn't have been more surprised. When they inducted you into the Tesseracti, and told you that you'd be fighting for something much larger than just the freedom of your echo, it nearly broke you - but you recovered. The grafts itch a little, but you've found out that the taste of bug-eyed man tastes a lot like victory. And vengeance.
ALIEN QUISLING:
You always resented the aliens. You fired your slingshot at them whenever they flew overhead - you never hit them, but not for lack of trying. You always hid from them when they touched down, but you found yourself drawn to them anyways. You watched them arrest somebody that they thought was in the resistance, using beetles the size of your two clenched fists in order to hunt him down and paralyze him, all inside of his own house. As you grew up, you reailzed just how deep their influence went. They were the driving force behind your world, and everybody was terrified of them. And you started to envy that power, especially when you realized that for all of your friend's talk, they were just as afraid of the aliens as everybody else.
It started out small. You stood around and watched the aliens for a while while they cracked open a mailbox and scanned the letters with something that looked like a baseball-sized alien eye suspended in a cross between a specimen vat and a handgun. They ignored you while you watched them, but when they were finished, one of them gave you a flat sheet of metal with a glyph engraved on it. You stared at it while they left, thinking.
It took you two nights to finish mowing the vacant lot so that the unmowed grass formed the shape on the sheet. It took you five minutes to pour the gasoline, one minute of fumbling before you lit the match, and a year of your life as the aliens trained you as their agent on earth. At least, you think it was a year. You kind of lost track of time when you were in the learning wombs, and when you came back, you knew that you couldn't ask anybody how long it had been since you'd been away. You've lost contact with everybody who knew you before, and you can't re-establish contact without arousing suspicion. It's not so bad, really.
You have to admit that the Tesseracti made the aliens look like a bunch of chumps. They had you out of your echo and into a liquid containment tank in two seconds, and by the time that you figured out that you could breathe the liquid, they'd deactivated every implant in your body and made it quite clear that you were on your own. You didn't kick at all. You were used to the idea of being in service of somebody more powerful than you were, and the Tesseracti had become that new somebody. Now, you're a double agent. Triple agent, really, since you've got a low rank in the resistance. The Tesseracti have called upon you a few times to do some external missions, and you've become aware that your world was just one of many - one of the better ones, but not as good as primal Earth. You're trying to find a way to play all three sides off against each other so that they'll let you free - but you can't talk about that now. They might be listening. Shhh. Shhhh.
POODLE-SKIRTED VALKYRIE
Two! Four! Six! Eight! Two in that diner, four when the collaborators tried to escape and ran into you on the way out, six in that raid on the National Guard outpost - you kinda regret that cute soldier that stumbled onto your team - and eight when you finally got aboard one of those saucers. Well, okay, the eight was your team's score, not your score, but you did kill five - one human, four aliens. Two, four, six, five just sounds like you forgot to count by twos, though, so it's always two, four, six eight when you hit the field and start cheering for your home team.
You were exactly like everybody else. You did track and gym when you were in junior high, then moved to cheerleading when the time came - all of your friends said that you were pretty enough to do it. You were nervous that you'd start feeling the blood on your hands again when the time came to audition, but you came through without a hitch. You threw up a little afterwards, but it was okay.
When the Tesseracti recruited you, you made a point of why you were so good at killing things. They checked you over, and they told you the truth: You were an exceptional human being, but you hadn't been enhanced. And you weren't psychopathic, even though killing didn't particularly bother you.
So, you're doing the usual until the Tesseracti needs you again - spying, killing collaborators whenever you can, and enjoying the nervous silence that you get whenever you're around other members of the resistance. You'd never hurt any of them, of course, but it tends to be a little easier to get your way if they don't know that. You're living a pretty happy life, all things considered.
Blood's a bitch to get out of a poodle skirt, though.
BUG-EYED MONSTER OUT OF ITS DEPTH
This is _so_ not how it was supposed to work out. You were supposed to be a third-glanded corporal, occupation-phylum in the Ninth Private Army of Klortho the Magnificent, a member of a unit that had managed to bid high enough - with the aid of your own small fortune - to get the plum duty of occupying Earth. Every member of the unit had been married to each other before you left for the duty, and you even had a clutch of eggs that you thought would come to term, perhaps inspired by the Earth's chill climate.
You were in pursuit of some thralls who had dared to fire at your craft when one of them suddenly flash-froze half of your saucer, rendering the metal so brittle that it only took a stiff crosswind to break it cleanly in half. You succumbed to the reflexive cannibalism of your species as you were plummeting towards the ground, and landed with your teeth buried in your love-brother's throat.
When you woke up, you were on an operating table, with a surgeon-thrall leaning over you. You released the pheromones that should have incapacitated him, but he just laughed and squirted you in the face with water, which was humiliating. He explained, matter-of-factly, what you were - just a figment of the collective unconsciousness made solid - and what the Tesseracti had revived you for. You would never see your unit again, which was a relief, considering that most of them would still want to eat you.
You'll never be able to work on primal Earth, of course, but you are cleared for the weirder kinds of echo work. You've still got a good idea of how your race's hyperscience works, and while it's a little primitive when compared to the Tesseracti's, it does the job. The man who introduced you to the Tesseracti, Dr. Henge, has actually become a friend of yours, since you both share the same black sense of humor and the ability to enjoy a good dissection. Maybe someday you'll go back and assassinate Klortho, gorge yourself on larval caviar and become the new Father-Mother of your race, but for now, you're enjoying the sense of superiority that your position brings.
