Cthonics

When the trumpets blew, much of man's works were destroyed ...on the surface.

The horrors of the Revelation did little to penetrate the Earth, mostly devastating the vast legacy human kind spent several millenia building above ground. The comparatively smaller, but still impressive, legacy humans had created underground and in mountains was largely unaffected.

With the towns and cities and military bases we'd all known about suddenly untenable, people who knew about these constructs lost to time and a willful aversion to publicity led the exodus to them. It was in these subterranean shelters that the resistance started.

Now these towns are the most advanced human settlements to be found, as they evaded most of the damage done in the Revelation and subsequent war. They're now known as Hades Towns due to their cthonic nature, and their locations and interior layouts are closely guarded secrets to prevent Celestials from being able to teleport into them.

The Refuges
Even reduced to half its population, humanity lost none of its fabled determination. As the Revelation raged overhead and outside, those humans who had not been killed in the heavenly onslaught of the trumpets planned.

They made plans to recover the world. They tried to advance what they already had. They tried to figure out what was coming. Some said it was aliens playing deadly games, aping an ancient human prophecy in their attack for psychological warfare or just a laugh. A lot believed that it was, well, what it was. That God had finally decided to hit the lights and lock the doors and was doing a bit of clean up first.

Eventually, life in the bunkers and facilities became the new normal. Even when food started to run out because the facilities weren't built to house several million people, that just became the new normal. People started venturing out into the raging apocalyptic catastrophies for food and supplies.

And people started dying. Some facilities grimly turned to cannibalism. Most just burned the bodies to save space.

The First Hyperions and the First Attacks
It was in the Hades towns that manipulable supernatural energies were first definitively discovered and studied. While humanity had theorized, imagined, dreamt, deluded and lied about them for years, a year after the first trumpet blew, people found these wonderous, terrifying powers with no room for doubt. Children would be found playing with their imaginary friend--which everyone could suddenly see. Over stressed adolescents would go insane, and toys around them would spring to life. It would begin to rain or snow inside the facility.

The people who were able to channel these energies were caller hyperions--after Helios Hyperion of Greek myth, the titan who is said to be the first to understand the movements of celestial bodies. And they were quickly studied. It was found that two major types of this energy existed, the external, almost immediately coloquially called magic, and the internal, quickly called psionics. These two types where found to be further dividable as hyperions learned how to use them.

The first hyperions advanced in power slowly, in fits and spurts. There was no precedent for what they could do, and they had to experiment. They soon had opportunities for practice, however, as it was shortly after the hyperion energies were discovered that the attacks began.

Hades Towns were accustomed to assaults by raiders. Only a couple years after the first trumpet, however, and they found new threats. What are now uniformly known as Celestials, were at that time hideous monster and awesome warriors, intent on tearing through the defenses and snatching as many live captives as they could. Some Hades Cities fell to their first Celestial attack. Others managed to fight it off and take stock of the new threat. It was soon discovered however, that these fights were something like the best exercise and training ever. A single conflict could improve a man physically and mentally as if he'd spent a year working out on machines and being instructed. The hyperions found even greater gains, sometimes making major breakthroughs in the development of their powers in a single night after years of experimentation. This phenomenon was quickly labeled "Inspiration."

Many towns were in communication with others, and so there was something of a concerted, cooperative effort to advance hyperion techniques. Eventually though it just... tapered off. A lot of powers and spells were discovered and codified. A lot of them helped the cities survive. but they hit a wall. Some blame it on the end of the war, and these people tend to rove the new landscape, looking for Celestials to murder for inspiration. New powers and spells are still discovered, but by and large it's a solo effort now.

Towns

 * Arras (in what was Northern France)
 * Dyar Catacombs (Washington, DC)
 * Dyar Bunker (Washington, DC)
 * Cheyenne (Colorado)
 * Smithsonia (Washington, DC)
 * Sourasky Hospice (Isreal)
 * Rambam Hospice (Isreal)
 * The Magic Empire (Florida)
 * Botan (Tennesee)
 * Sweden (Sweden)
 * Whitley Park (Surrey, England)
 * Moskovskoye Metro Dva (Moscow, Russia)
 * Shadow (X) (through out US)