great war on earth, one in which no restraint was used, no mutually
assured destruction, for nuclear weapons came into the hands of those
who cared not for any life, not even their own. Tensions were high for a
decade, and in the following segregation, the peoples of the earth lost
their personal connection with their enemies, and, as always happens,
ceased to view them as equals, but instead as evil ones bent on their
destruction. Things came to such a crisis that at last a little flame
was lit and it grew and grew until it became a full scale nuclear war.
The destruction was total: no one was exempt, as almost everything, and
everyone, was destroyed. The only surviving place was this island, which
is the sole habitat of the delcator beetle, a small insect that digests
nuclear waste and neutralizes it. The first few decades were horrible,
before the atmosphere recovered enough to return to normal, and in that
time things mutated and grew gigantic. The trees and foliage, as you
see, are an example of this, even the redwood trees of old were nothing
compared to the trees of Daem. And the Zards and Canitaurs grew and
changed as well, and, as we lived on either ends of the island, as we do
now, our forms morphed into the separate forms that they now take.

"And that is where our conflict turned violent," he continued, "For it
is our desire, on both sides, to return the earth to its previous state.
The Pastites want to return through time and stop the destruction before
it happens, because we believe that the past is what must be changed in
order to change the present and future. It is the actions of the past
that brought about the present woes, and it is they that must be undone.
For their part, the Futurists want to change the present through the
future, to go into the future and bring back its completion, in the form
of restored RNA cells, which is congruent with their belief that the
past is the past and all that matters is that which is yet to come, that
which still has the hope of existence."