Tokyo has broken down and is now gone.
July 12, 1998. That day, the Veil disappeared, and technology that we thought was imaginary rapidly spread throughout the world. Tokyo also enjoyed the benefits of that technology, now known as paratech, and led to an economical growth that allowed them to survive the 2009 financial crisis, which I think it’s why we were caught unprepared.
The whole world was caught off guard. The Manhattan event of September 11, 2001. Even though anomalous terrorist attacks were capable of destroying a city, they were man-made disasters, and the great majority of people were convinced that we’d conquered calamities. We thought such things had become obsolete before the Veil’s collapse. But in the end, mankind could not overcome natural disasters.
December 17, 2017. On this day, Tokyo was destroyed. It remained destroyed for 26 years. That day was the beginning of an unending nightmare.
A new form of calamity engulfed Tokyo.
2017/12/17/6:00/Somewhere in Osaka/
Murohashi Pharmaceutical Industries, Company Employee
I think the world has changed a lot since the curtain fell.
Flying cars have become a reality, information can be directly inserted into your brain, and long-distance travel is done in an instant thanks to dimensional roads. The future I had dreamt of as a child had become the present. In urban areas, skyscrapers of 1000 to 2000m tall standing proudly. And in between, people come and go through their sky-high corridors.
But even in this completely altered world, ordinary life continued. Work continued as usual; if anything, it increased.
Even though it was still dark, I was on my way from Osaka to Tokyo early in the morning for work.
With the construction of the dimensional road, access from Osaka to Tokyo can be done in 20 minutes. Traveling long distances has become much easier. Whether by land, sea or sky, all traffic systems are managed by automatic technology and traffic management systems. Because of this, traffic jams and delays are a thing of the past, and we no longer worry about being late. Even the weather is automatically controlled, and constantly optimised. The weather forecast is always right, so I don’t forget my umbrella anymore. In a few years, the number of incurable diseases decreased greatly, and my wife, who I thought had an illness she could not be cured of, got better. The new world had become an earthly paradise.
But even then, nothing can change that work that involves long trips is rather exhausting.
I was thinking about this as I drove my automatic car from my home towards the Tokyo area dimensional road.
2017/12/17/7:30/Site-8127/
Foundation’s Japanese Branch Researcher
That day the Foundation was busy as usual, and there was no urgent matter particularly troubling us. At the very least, there was no chances of a new K-Class Scenario emerging for the day.
The Foundation has become weaker. It was held responsible for Event Persephone in 1998, and departments were being dismantled left and right after the Manhattan Chaos in 2001. The Veil had long since fallen, and para-objects were being brought to the light. The anomalous was commonplace.
But there was a range of principles that should be kept away from the public’s touch. There’s principles humanity cannot even comprehend. True anomalies that the Foundation has to keep away from the masses.
No one at the Foundation could have accurately predicted what happened today. Of course, one could expect such an event, but the event itself surpassed all expectations. At the very least, no one from the Japanese Branch was able to predict it.
It was a principle we couldn’t understand.
And then, it happened.
2017/12/17/9:17/Shiodome, Tokyo/
Central Television News Flash
“Emergency alert. A considerable number of simultaneous anomalous events have been observed, including human combustion events, reality destabilization, several anomaly emergences, small-scale dimensional collapse, sudden temperature fluctuations, and more. Do not approach abnormal or suspicious items. If you find any such object, please make a report to the special dedicated number. I repeat…”
2017/12/17/9:30/Ōtemachi, Tokyo/
Murohashi Pharmaceutical Industries, Company Employee
At first I really thought it was simple misinformation. I mean, I couldn’t understand what the media was saying. It was so cluttered in strange reports that it all felt like a dream.
The reports were saying that the water and sewer systems were flowing backwards, with sewerage meant for the river flowing back towards the tap water, and tap water not coming out of the faucet when the tap was twisted. On the contrary, the water was going back into the tap. The water and sewage were going backwards, as if watching a video in reverse.
High-voltage currents erupted in Odaiba. The viscous electric current swallowed the reclaimed land, short-circuiting and destroying it. No natural volcanoes exist in that place. The sun was abnormally shiny too. Even for a world where the anomalous had become everyday, this was abnormal. But even then, I honestly didn’t believe in it. I thought it was a project, or a prank of some sort.
2017/12/17/10:30/Asakusa, Tokyo/
Foundation’s Japanese Branch Agent
I was off-duty in Asakusa at the time. However, I quickly returned to service due to the anomalous event that struck Tokyo.
Asakusa was going through structural changes due to conceptual flows causing a shape surplus. Akihabara and Asakusa suffered a chaotic substitution of divisions, damaging utilities, substantially disabling GPS, and causing many fires.
Evacuation routes became meaningless, worsening the situation. Automatic driving was no longer useful due to equipment errors, and the traffic system was paralyzed.
People became panicked as they vanished or were cut off, dragged into other areas by the land replacements. The Foundation and the GOC offered support, but were powerless against this nightmare that appeared too suddenly and expanded far too quickly.
These disasters not only occurred in Asakusa, but also all over Tokyo.
2017/12/17/10:30/Site-8127/
Foundation’s Japanese Branch Researcher
What we established through observation of realities and timelines was that the source of this was because of the anomalization of natural disasters. It was horrible.
The absurd catastrophe destroying Tokyo was a “natural disaster” for the anomalous world. The cause of this disaster was neither a terrorist attack from a Group of Interest or rampage of some paratech. It was simply a natural disaster. “It could happen again, sometime, somewhere else”, just like an earthquake or a typhoon. And it was also said that, unlike previous natural disasters, these new para-calamities could not be predicted by the Foundation.
As for the cause of this incident, it had been an anomalous earthquake. Earthquakes, which I’d thought we’d overcome through crust control. But the nonexistent crust, something akin to a tectonic plate, had moved in a fatal manner. It was unable to affect the earth, but the energy generated was quickly altered in an anomalous manner. As a result, it became a “conceptual earthquake” that shook time, space, cognition, existence, and all other concepts in the world. Electricity erupted with a viscosity that’s never been seen before, hydrodynamics were fully reversed, with fluids flowing backwards, space-time was distorted and displaced, and everything in Tokyo was shaken. A relevant report was quickly written, and the phenomenon was temporarily given a number and a class.
The staff of the Foundation’s Japanese Branch was also mobilized to deal with the situation.
2017/12/17/11:57/Tokyo, Cabinet of Japan/
Cabinet’s Emergency Countermeasures Office Staff Worker
Most of Tokyo’s local governments stopped functioning. An emergency of this degree had never been seen before, and the Countermeasures Office was in chaos. Even though the Self-Defense Forces had been mobilized to the capital, rescue operations were difficult due to the anomalous calamity that kept transforming the city. We were unable to carry out any sort of measure. It was hopeless.
The number of deaths and missing people was already at 40,000. Furthermore, we’d lost contact with the Bunkyō, Sumida, Taitō, and Meguro wards, and the center of Tokyo, as well as Chiba, Ibaraki, Saitama, and Kanagawa were being swallowed by the anomaly. We were also cornered, as the Chiyoda ward, where the cabinet and the imperial palace, extremely important institutions for the preservation of normalcy, were suffering from the replacement phenomenon.
Thus, we decided to “only prioritize the most important stuff”.
There was no time for anything else. The government, the Foundation, and the GOC decided to abandon Tokyo, using the excuse of “focusing on measures against the anomalous disaster for the sake of evacuating, making sure no one is left behind”.
From this point on, the situation in the fallen Tokyo only worsened.
2017/12/19/12:30/Shibuya, Tokyo/
GOC Strike Team Member
Tokyo had turned into a threat. Each threat we were meant to eliminate was being swallowed by an even bigger threat, to the point where, according to the GOC’s behavior standards, we would have needed to get rid of Tokyo itself. The water flowing backwards was swallowed by a massive tsunami of cars, and the cars were swallowed by the continuously recomposing buildings of Tokyo, transforming everything into a pile of scrap.
Furthermore, the restructuring phenomenon affecting buildings and cities worsened with the passing of time. The moment I thought I saw buildings from the south growing in all directions, every building in front of me deflated and disappeared.
The vanishing buildings appeared above our heads, 4000m above Tokyo. A massive amount of buildings, some 1~2km tall, moved up into the sky, covering all of Tokyo.
The sheer size of the massive structures made their fall seem slow. At the time I was convinced there was no way I’d survive.
That’s when the buildings began to fall down like heavy rain.
The downpour of buildings almost ended everything in Tokyo.
2017/12/19/13:00/Tokyo/
Murohashi Pharmaceutical Industries, Company Employee
Tokyo had collapsed and had been rebuilt time after time. There was no way of returning to the place you were before. Tokyo was in a state of panic, and neither GPS nor maps were of use. Thousands upon thousands had escaped through helicopters and aircrafts, but they weren’t coming anymore.
I couldn’t recognize my current location. Where I was had recombined several times, and every concept had fallen apart.
I was looking at a Tokyo that kept changing, keeping a rather calm demeanor, only thinking about how I wanted to hear my wife’s voice once more. Telecommunications were no more. The base station had probably recombined, and was nothing but rubbish.
Then I noticed debris was raining from the sky. The chance of coming back alive kept becoming more and more unlikely. What will happen when I die?
I was thinking about this as Tokyo kept changing when the debris began pouring down all over the city.
Maybe this was how most people in Tokyo felt. They realized there was no chance of escaping Tokyo, realized the normalcy preservation organizations weren’t able to come, and died without being able to do anything about it.
I didn’t know how far this would spread, but I understood that Tokyo and what was important before this all began wouldn’t go back to how it was.
But even then, I wanted my loved ones to be alive and well. I’m sure most other people in Tokyo spent their last moments thinking this.
2018/1/7/18:00/Gunma Provisional Cabinet/
Provisional Cabinet’s Tokyo Incident Countermeasures Office Staff Worker
The complex anomalous disaster that started on December 17, 2017, in the heart of Tokyo, and continues to this day has been dubbed “the Tokyo Incidents”. Following the Foundation’s K-Class Scenario classification, normalcy preservation agencies from all over the globe arrived. But the situation is that the destruction of Tokyo has left all of Japan at risk; the country is dying.
Even if the backing of several states has helped, the economic loss caused by the destruction of Tokyo is too high.
The rain of buildings hasn’t stopped. If a building falls, it’s rebuilt, repositioned, and it falls again. This will continue. Other anomalies have also continued.
2031/11/15/Site-8127/
Foundation’s Japanese Branch Site Director
Tokyo is in ruins. It continually becomes ruined. We don’t know when this will end, and there’s no rebuilding plans. So rather than wait for the end to end, Japan has decided to start anew. The capital has been moved to Gunma. It was a difficult matter, but thanks to it we’ve built better capital faculty buildings and cutting edge normalcy preservation facilities such as Site-81Q5 and the Foundation's Japanese Branch Headquarters.
Millions were left to die, and the buildings continue to fall.
2043/12/27/Foundation’s Japanese Branch Headquarters/
Unknown Editor
Incident “Tokyo Incidents”
Date of Occurrence: 2017/12/17
Summary: Series of anomalous phenomena occurring simultaneously in the southern Kanto region, centered around Tokyo. Accompanied by the destruction of Tokyo.
Casualties: Over 3,5 million dead; over 6 million missing.
Cause: Variety of altered natural disasters (Anomalous disaster). It’s been confirmed in both baseline and alternate realities that neither organizations nor technologies were the cause of the disaster.
Countermeasures: Incident classified as K-Class Scenario; Foundation, GOC, and other allied parties implemented methods to decrease the damage, but had no significant results. Furthermore, the anomalous phenomena continues to occur to this day.
Note: On December 27, 2043, it was confirmed that the anomalous phenomena that had been continuing for 26 years was rapidly coming to an end. In response to this, the K-Class Scenario designation was removed, and survey actions in the former Tokyo are currently taking place.