Hello Holotrainers
We continue talking about the fan lore I'm building for Holozing. A while ago, I made a post compiling all the basics of this lore I'm creating, and among them, I'm developing two timelines: one in the past where the creatures live on the Elemental Islands and are just beginning to make contact with humans, and another where those creatures no longer exist in the world.
Or at least they are not seen in physical form, but rather they are part of a virtual world that contains something like their biological footprint. In between, there's a whole mystery about how the creatures became extinct from their habitats and who was involved in this entire extinction process, perhaps the most interesting point of my story.
In all of this are the VIALS, which in the game are a kind of capsule containing random creatures that you can buy to add to your team, but in my lore, they will be something a little darker: encapsulated bioenergy with all the genetic codes of the now-extinct creatures.
Something like a hard drive in this future, with all the information about certain creatures, not only about their "species," but also about their specific behavior, all so that it works correctly in the simulation of that old world of the Elemental Islands along with its creatures.
As the Elemental Islands became empty, something unsettling began to become evident to the inhabitants... Few humans actually coexisted with the creatures: it wasn't a typical extinction. There were no corpses, no remains, no signs of predation or natural disasters large enough to justify the disappearance of entire species.
It was as if every creature had been erased, vanished overnight. That was the beginning of the Great Silence, the event that splits your lore into two timelines: the vibrant and wild past of the islands, and the future where only their digital echo remains.
The first researchers discovered an impossible pattern: microscopic traces of condensed bioenergy where entire colonies once lived. Tiny flickers of life, but lifeless, as if each organism had been compressed and stored somewhere else.
This gave rise to the theory of "the transfer," a process where the creatures didn't die, but were extracted from physical reality. No one knew who was behind it, but the signs pointed to an operation far too complex to be natural.
Decades later, when no creatures remained on the islands, the first VIALS appeared. They were sold on the black market as relics, as forbidden artifacts capable of "reviving" fragments of extinct creatures in a semi-conscious digital state.
But what few knew was that these capsules weren't simple DNA containers: they were living archives, complete packages of compressed bioenergy containing something far more valuable than genetics: the behavioral memories of each creature. Each vial contains a specific creature, yes, but also its history, its temperament, its reactions, its traumas and joys honed over thousands of years of evolution. It's as if an unknown civilization decided to back up the entire ecosystem before shutting it down.
That's why the creatures inside the simulation aren't "NPCs": they behave like real beings, because they are, but confined within a synthetic world built so they don't collapse without their original environment.
This only applies to the future timeline where the creatures have disappeared and there are characters trying to understand what's happening. It reminds me a lot of the Lorax story, but as always, I want to know your opinions and understand how you see this addition of the VIALS.