Bad Futures...?

[TigerEmperor]

While pondering some ideas on what I should do for the Lore Incarnate slot for a Praetorian character I made recently, primarily to ensure I remained thematically appropriate to his background and basic character concepts, I got thinking: what would a bad future related to this character look like?

 

Mind you, I do not mean the character meeting a bad end so much as bad happening because of the character.

 

As an example, the character I was thinking about would be Mind-Dagger, the Praetorian counterpart of my other character Mind-Knife. Like his counterpart, he's the great-great-great-grandnephew of Gerhardt Eisenstadt, the man would be become Lord Nemesis. Like his counterpart, highly intelligent, considerable psychic potential and ability, got a Ph.D. in criminal psych, and joined the Praetorian Police Department. He acted as an interrogator and created criminal profiles, while also acting as a liaison to Powers Division. While he was at work one day, the Resistance came and killed all his family, including his kid sister. He hunted down the Resistance cell responsible and left them a psychically lobotomized mess for the PPD to pick up, then left the PPD to fully join Powers Division. He has no sympathy for any Resistance member, no matter who, how, or why.

 

It was suggested that, due to the Well wanting to correct an imbalance or to be amused, or both, he ended up with Nemesis Lore pets as well, and that got me thinking that one of the bad futures as a result of Mind-Dagger and how he would act under specific situations [such as the people of Primal Earth not improving, even in the face of an external or planet-driven threat, but in fact socially degrading and letting more tragedies like his family's occur with increasing frequency] would look...

 

Frankly, starkly like Praetoria but with some changes. Such as a brass-and-steam steampunk aesthetic, more people in the defense and policing forces, very strict [maybe even mechanical] rules and codes for specific areas of life and behavior, seers networked a bit like Arachnos's in that they reinforce each others' holds on themselves and earnestly believing before said hold that "Imperator Eisenstadt's will be done." Or even taking corrective action, such as interfering with peoples' thoughts at even the basest level to prevent them from acting on those thoughts [not necessarily stopping the thinking but preventing them from doing it and 'painting' the thought in a repulsive light]. Curfews and emphasis on the learning of morality and ethics, especially why it was important to be a specific way and how and why a situation came to be from different ethical standpoints but skewed. And some bright spots that underline but don't deny the bad, such as the Ekaterina Eisenstadt School of Humane Arts, built for his lost sister who loved painting and dancing and playing with the family dog. And few would want to step out of line for fear of hearing the lockstep of well-made leather and steam marching towards their door, if they hear anything before the arrest. "In the Imperator's name." and "For Master Eisenstadt!" being common invocations.

 

As such, what would some of the bad futures for your characters look like? Would they be decidedly dystopian, a la when you fight Lord Recluse? Or would they seem a little too utopic to be okay, like Praetoria? Somewhere in between? What happened and what makes this future world that way? And would the character believe that such a future may even be necessary?