Edenian Amnesia

The contagion which caused Edenian Amnesia was water-based. As nearly all refugees arrive in Eden via the The River Without End, the sister goddesses saw spiking the waterway as the most efficient way to distribute their contaminant.

Sufferers experience both the blurriness of some memories and the all-out removal of others. The contagion seeks to keep the core of a person’s being intact at all costs, which is why it simply smudges some memories while cutting out others entirely. The idea is to make them accept the mish-mashed, hodgepodge reality of Eden more easily. For example, when Earthling refugees from the year 1912 arrived in Wonderland, which felt more a Renaissance Festival than the steampunk version of reality they’d just come from, their memories were adjusted to make the transition smoother. Others arriving in the far-off but far more modern cities of Nunya, required far less manipulation. And many who arrived in the technologically advanced lands of The Reek suffered little if any Edenian Amnesia at all. They needed all the help they could get just comprehend the city of the future they’d been plunked down in.

There was no treatment available. The condition was permanent. That said, this permanence didn’t stop some refugees from flocking to the Edenian Athenæum to seek out information about their lost reality which might help them piece together their patchwork pasts.

Most sufferers went on to lead pleasant, fulfilling lives in their new reality. Some, however, suffered from delusions of grandeur brought on by their freshly blank slates. For folks like the False Kings, many of whom believed in their core that they deserved better than life on Earth had given them, their blurry memories were an excuse to rewrite their own histories—often to justify heinous, self-serving actions.