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========================1. Background========================================
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THE FIRST INCIDENT 26.04.1986

At 1:23am on Saturday, April 26th, a scheduled test of Reactor 4 in the VI.
Lenin Memorial Nuclear Power Station resulted in a nuclear meltdown that would
contaminate a wide area and produce a cloud of radioactive fallout blowing 
across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia as well as parts of eastern and western 
Europe, Scandinavia, the UK and as far a?eld as eastern areas of the US. It 
was the worst accident in the history of nuclear power and the social, 
political and ? nancial costs were unimaginable.

All it took was a simple operating mistake to collide with a routine 
experiment designed to test the emergency cooling system. These two innocuous 
events led to intense over-heating of the reactor core, the creation of 
volatile oxyhydrogen and explosion that scattered radioactive materials over
a wide area, igniting everything its wake.
The areas in the immediate vicinity were subject to rapid evacuation. Such
wasemergency that over 160,000 people – all within 30 km of the accident
– left without thinking they would never see home again. Over the years, 
visitors would remark on the ghostly presence a city abandoned could have,
as though an entire population were merely in the next room, waiting to 
return. In time, the theories of how such an accident could occur would
mutate beyond reason but for that night and for the weeks that followed,
was told the story of the moment; a tragic narrative on East/West relations
and a commentary on nuclear power. The word on the lips of a generation 
was: Chernobyl.
 

--- Directly from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R Manual


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THE SECOND INCIDENT 13.04.2006

The second incident, when it occurred, was perhaps even more surprising than
the first. Of all the internationally renowned scientists involved in the 
cleanup of Chernobyl not one would have expected even the slightest rumbling
to occur within the massive concrete sarcophagus that had tamed Reactor 4.
Not expecting, however, is a far cry from not occuring and the explosion, 
when it shattered the early hours, showed just how shallow Chernobyl’s grave 
of fear was. If the first explosion saw the end of the Soviet Union and the
cold war, the second would see the beginnings of something even more 
terrifying. The immediate effects of the blast were dif? cult to observe, 
evenmore to understand but within years the Zone around Chernobyl was
starting to attract a group of people convinced that prosperity lay in the
ravaged land. These people, a mixed bunch by any standards, came to be
known as Stalkers.


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And so it begins...

You are such a stalker, you were found close to a burned out truck that was
struck by a lightning bolt, somehow did you survive it but you have lost
your memory, all that is left is your PDA with a picture of someone called
Strelok and the note that you have to kill him. Why? YOu have no idea.
Neither do you know who you are or who he is, but you have the feeling 
that you have to do it. And so you set out to find this Strelok and carry
out your task.