Our timeline is only one bullet in the cosmos chamber. Pulling the trigger rolls the revolver of reality, sending History on an alternate trajectory.

In the 1880s, Thomas Edison contracted typhus, biting the dust prematurely. Wishing to further Edison's work, the financier J.P. Morgan backed a young promising scientist, Nikola Tesla. Without Edison, Tesla fixed up his own ideas, developing alternating current machines, unrivaled.

By the 1890s, visions of transmitting wireless power through the Earth's atmosphere tickled Tesla's fancy. Encouraged by Tesla's progress, Morgan funded a conducting tower in the mountains of Colorado Springs, equipping Tesla with a team of eager scientists.

One night in the tower, Tesla believed he received communications from the red planet, Mars.

For the next fifty years, reaching the red star fixated Tesla. His team developed electromagnetic spacecraft, and his passion spurred an early space age, plunging mankind through the sea of stars. Tesla's coil towers and geothermal pyramids paved the way for oxygen and water facilities on Mars, radically terraforming the red planet.

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Romancing the era of their forefathers, colonizers exchanged soil for alien dust, extending the days of the wild west to the frontier planet.

But in 1939, disaster struck Earth.

That yeller cuss Hitler reimagined Tesla's inventions as weapons. The atrocities of WWII eclipsed WWI. Seeing his life's work abused, Tesla keeled over and died, wishing he'd never been born. Hitler attempted to claim Earth, and craved Mars.

With all nations tangled up, Earth's support to the Martian colony dried up. Stuck with technology they couldn't advance, Mars regressed, slowly growing inhospitable to human life.

Over the next hundred years or so, things got nasty. Under the ravenous rule of tycoons and barons who hoarded scientific knowledge, the Martian settlements stagnated in a perpetual Edwardian wild-west. Criminal outlaws flocked to Mars. Corruption plagued lawmen. Commoners lost hope.

Now, the red planet herself rears, bucking unwanted passengers off her back. And deep within her canyons, dormant secrets rouse.

She's a place where one can take a shot of whiskey or a shot in the back. Slinging a revolver is a sure way to survive.

Ride high or die, on red dead Mars.