First Survivor

The First Survivor of the Great Crash is believed to be the first person to emerge from the colony ship. He first settled at the native village that would become New Eden City.

Early Survival

Even if I had not transcended the limitations of time and space due to the accident that night in the lab, I would never have forgotten that first night, the sheer horror of it. As I clawed through the wreckage of the pod, and drug myself to the surface. The horror of the ship and the screams of those who had also awakened, but would not survive that first night, forever entombed and impaled, crushed and immolated by the very mechanism of our ambition to conquer the stars.

That night in the woods on this unfamiliar world. The zombies, the skeletons, and worse. I dug myself a grave and hid in it, shivering. The noises were the worst. The scittering and scratching of things in the dark, the snorting and huffing, the crunching, claws on stone, the distant fizzing and explosions. And later I would know much, much worse. By daybreak I crawled out of that grave as if the world was giving birth to me, and maybe it was. I made my way, I don't know how far, until I saw at last civilization. I was rescued.

Upon my approach imagine my disappointment to find a shoddy wooden village in shambles. The inhabitants were a good, honest people, and seemed as afraid of the monsters as I was. That first night, one offered me their home, and I slept in relative safety. I could not communicate with them, their language nothing but what seemed like gestures and honks. They seemed eager to trade, but I had nothing to offer them.

I saw they had a humble church they had cobbled together out of stone. So they worshiped some God, or Gods, had some culture. The wrong God, judging by their surroundings. I wonder if this was it for me, if I should settle down and be happy as best I could, as they had untold generations ago. This is where Humans started too, in the mud, before Technica. Maybe we should have stayed there.

I looked at what they had, and knew that would never be enough. At that moment I had even less than they did, save my wits, and what I had learned before we began this cursed journey. There was a blank stone wall next to the house I had slept in, and I could see the glint of some semi-precious materials. A cat was rubbing up against a stone, the first animal I had seen that wasn't a monster, and a good omen. I christened it the Lucky Cat. I pressed my face against the rock, warm from the sun. It smelled like petrichor from the nights rain. And there, in that place, I begin to work.

- Excerpt from The Lost Papers

Founding of LEIGH&CO

The story of LEIGH&CO begins with the story of LEIGHMart, which the First Survivor opened in a small shop in New Eden City. Over time the mercantile blossomed, but in order to support its growth, a currency and broader economy was required. Also as demand increased, so did the need for technical machines to produce the goods required by the Colonists which were emerging from the woods. Thus the Central Bank and the Praxis Arcanum were created. Together, these three enterprises formed the early core of LEIGH&CO.

Accident

Sometime in Y1 NESC, the First Survivor was engaged in a scientific experiment. Details are scarce, but it seems that the First Survivor was accidentally locked in a test chamber with a device designed to exploit End Energy. The First Survivor immediately vanished and was presumed dead.

It would later emerge that the exposure to End Energy had altered the First Survivor, granting him para-causal powers.

Conspiracy Theories

Not everyone believes the official account of the First Survivor. Some hold that the First Survivor was actually a stowaway on the colony ship and was responsible or the crash itself, due to either inept mischief or sabotage depending on the account.

Other theories hold that the First Survivor is not a man at all, but rather an alien, perhaps one that had been imprisoned by his race on this world. They point to the First Survivor's supernatural powers as evidence of this, and reject the official account of the accident, pointing out that there are no living witnesses.

Yet others say that the First Survivor always possessed para-causual powers, but simply hid them until his control over the world was widely accepted enough by the rich that he no longer felt a need to hide it. A related theory, albeit even more fringe and implausible, is that there never was a crash in the first place, and that we are all living in a computer simulation that the First Survivor ultimately controls for his own amusement.