Editing Exalted (section)

===The Great Contagion and the Balorian Crusade===
So while the Dragon-Blooded were doing a fairly good (although not nearly as impressive as the Solars) job of running Creation, the Deathlords were building a doomsday plague.

“Taste the bitter poison mixed from the ashes of our hopes and the tears of betrayal in the dark pit of our tortured souls!” said the Deathlords, presumably while wearing too much eyeliner, and unleashed their doomsday plague into Creation.

“This sucks,” said 90% of the living beings in the world, as they promptly died.  Including plants.

“Hey,” said the Deathlords to the Fair Folk, who were into that sort of thing, who lived in the Wyld outside of Creation and didn't like the idea of a place that didn't just change according to their thoughts. “Just about everyone in there's dead now. If you went in, ate the souls of the survivors, and tore the place down, no one could stop you!”

“Thanks for the heads up!” said the Fair Folk, and promptly invaded in force.

“This is bad,” said one of the surviving Dragon-Blooded to her friends. “Fortunately, I just remembered that there's a sealed-off control center for an ultimate magical doomsday weapon that the Solars made for defending Creation against exactly this sort of thing. Let's go on an epic world-saving quest to get in there!”

And so they went. On the way, they came across a shitton of Lunars fighting the Fair Folk.

"Oh shit, Anathema! Let's fight!" One said. The Lunars rolled their eyes and kept fighting.

Another one said to them, "Hey, if you cover us, we can stop this whole thing, and then we'll pretend we never met you and keep feeding Creation the cock-and-bull-story about you being demons!"

"Deal." The Lunars said. And they bought the Dragon-Blooded time to get to the Imperial Manse.

Most of them died trying to get past the defenses, but eventually, two Dragon-Blooded finally made it to the control panel.

“Please insert soul to activate this device,” said the control panel.

“What does that mean?” asked one, and then the other shoved her into the soul-extraction device.

And so this unnamed Dragon-Blooded, through an act of supreme badassness/[[Eldrad|dickery]], gained access to Creation's greatest magical weapons systems and used them to blow up the Fair Folk.

“I hereby declare myself the [[Scarlet Empress]] and ruler of the world,” she said.

“Nuh uh!” said some, until she blew them up. This brought lots more people over to her side, and thus was born the Realm, which is the major power in the world today.

Still, some said, “You were just a lieutenant who got lucky and stumbled across some doomsday weapons. We still have some doomsday weapons of our own, and we'll fight back!” The Scarlet Empress wanted to blow them up too, but a lot of her weapons didn't reach and she was kind of afraid of a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario, so, despite the occasional invasion attempt, they remained independent.

And so things went for over 750 years, until fairly recently, when the Scarlet Empress just up and disappeared. Having named no successor, the entire Realm is now leaderless and gearing up for civil war to see who's gonna be the next one of the Scarlet Throne. Right now, they've got this spineless bureaucrat warming the seat, but this guy is a total pussy who's basically being manipulated by whichever member of the shogunate is feeling power-hungry today. If you've seen Scrubs, imagine Ted with twenty-something Kelsos to suck up to. 

Meanwhile, the Yozi known as the Ebon Dragon discovered where the Sidereals has stashed their cage full of Solar shards. They told the Neverborn, tantalizing them with the idea of the power of the tools that destroyed them.  “Hey, we can twist those and use them to create our own invincible deathknights!” The Deathlords pointed out. "We'll tell you where it is, just give us, uh, 50 of them!" the Yozi promised, planning to reap the benefits if the plan succeeded and covering their asses if it didn't. “Deal, let's go get that cage!” Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for everyone else), half the Essence Shards got loose. Now, once again, there are Solar Exalted.

And that's where the game begins.