Welcome to the Ringnet

Part Three- Odin's Curse

Some things are to be said about this world.

There was a bit of a fertility crisis already amuck— the radiant skies, quite literally full of toxic, glittering ions— couldn't have helped. When old Odin died, the secrets of the Ring schematics died with him, but the Ring company kept manufacturing the rings in the same old damned way. So he, and his rings, did not help that infertility crisis at all.

If Odin could have heard this, he would have laughed— his deep, booming laugh that shook the dust from the pillars of the world that held up the sky.

And here was why.

Odin had programmed the ring to limit his beautiful wife's options. He knew her ways (and his own too— he had his own share of escapades in the 5 year's war)— and knew there was a strong chance she'd find someone during his five-year stretch.

So he programmed the ring to cause immense, debilitating pain when Friia tried to sleep with another person. Then the ring would trigger a burst of hormonal excretions, paired with the induction of a memory of himself— this would endear her more to him.

Knowledge only remained in streaks and smears— a lot of doctors and scientists had died in the first Fallout (and of course in subsequent armed conflicts.) So in a realm of popular pseudoscience, it was decided scientifically that miscarriage did some irreversible harm to the female body— it bound it indefinitely, as a sort of anxious response, to the original bearer of seed. If a miscarried woman tried to have intercourse with another man, she would have a sort of "allergic reaction" and cause immense internal pain.

Whether he intended this or not, when Odin died, the ring's intentional design flaw (in a case of streaks and smears, the manufacturers men understood the HOW of the making of its components, but not the why, or how they worked) caused miscarried women intense pain when they slept with anyone but the conceiver of their dead child. In a world where miscarriage rings were quite popular, nobody questioned their role in the fertility crisis. Miscarriage anxiety, then, was a separate issue.

And so Odin singlehandedly caused the second Fertility Crisis of humankind.

If we could revive Odin, he would roll in his grave, cackling earthquakes and shivering roots that caused trees swaying, swaying the endless nuclear wastes. His bouts of laughter would then trail off and end in a slight concern.

The slight concern, then, was of the population sort-- and of the survival of humanity.

This second fertility crisis halved then quartered the already meager birth rate, causing humanity to be a very weak species indeed.

Socially, there were other repercussions of the widespread use of the miscarriage rings.

It was possible to see a woman with 10 miscarriage rings-- and this was someone to be avoided. It was a general consensus that, ignoring the obvious sexual loss, someone devoted to that many Miscarriage Rings could never give you the love or attention you wanted.

Men who wore the miscarriage rings (though this was uncommon) when sleeping with a new partner would receive extreme phantom pains in the uteral region, which would trigger the ascension and pains of other parts in the same region— sometimes (and nobody knew why) causing permanent physical damage. Most of these men swore off sex altogether. There was a high increase in rate in the creation of monks and priests in this era of miscarriage rings.

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Hello all!!

Okay so obviously I'm not the best at keeping deadlines. But I'll definitely keep posting these!! Thank you so much for reading this far :))

The next part is alot longer than the prior sections! It will be uploaded soon :)

My best

--DS