In North America, it’s currently winter.  Winter here lasts approximately eleven and a half months, where temperatures hardly ever crawl out of the negatives, and where a fringe society of whack jobs, land-lovers and psychopaths have been living for the last eight years because they don’t have enough sense to move to some place warmer.

You see, while everyone was enjoying a media fueled psych-out over Global Warming, the Earth was getting quite bored of the tedium of life. Here it had been spinning for the last few odd million years with nary a change in scenery. So, on one faithful Autumn day, the polar ends of the Earth simply shifted. Polar Shift had been a theory in the scientific community for years, but even the four people working on theories at the time were surprised at the pace of the change. In the span of twelve hours the mass of ice commonly known as Antarctica was beginning to take up a very lofty position just under the equator while a very good chunk of the planet’s living population was beginning to discover temperatures that would usually be referred to as “unlivable”.

As to be expected, mass hysteria settled in twelve hours and four minutes after the fact. Substantial effort on the part of the Governments across the planet would be taken in the next few days to ensure their continuing survival, while those in the affected areas would be left to their own devices.  Instantly, the best and brightest brains in the business of continuing human survival got to work, while angry men in red and blue clothes got to work stealing whatever work the scientists managed to do.

 In some parts of the older world, ancient tendencies came out in those who thought the end of the world had survived, leading them to believe that the end of the world was at hand.  These hairy people believed that Ragnarök was upon them, and that only the strongest and smartest would be allowed by the gods to start the human race anew. So they too donned red and blue fatigues and beat the ever-loving crap out of each other.

At least they had a reason.

It was from this short-sighted religious bloodbath that Ragnarok Arena was formed. No holds fighting with whatever the fringe parts of society manage to find laying around or crank out on their own,  sometimes in the hopes that the other faction’s scientists have managed to crack something out that would help them live a better life, sometimes just to blast the ever-loving crap out of one another.