Concerning the Hiway War and her Lasting Effects (Final)

It was in the third year following the Bomb over Bravo that the Lonestar entered its proper Industrial Age. Like the common cactus plant, which grows upwards and triumphant upon the dross and rot of its older self, the workcamps of New Bravado stretched outwards and upwards towards the sun. 

Progress is exponential, theory dictates, and given the time, space and safety in which to grow, a population may reobtain and surpass their previous technological eschalon by degrees. In the relative peace of the 03’ PHW (Post-Hiway War), the people of New Bravado were given this opportunity in spades. 

Ramshackle tents and shacks were replaced piecemeal by proper frames, walls and roofs. The land was tilled and tamed by the same kind of stubborn folk that have always made these rocky scrublands their home. Bit by bit the landscape took upon the shape of a settlement, and progressively a town. Isolated, on the edges of sand and fire, New Bravado became nonetheless a destination on the minds of the brave, entrepreneurial, and desperate. 

The Ox was completed in the first four months of that year, thanks to the efforts of two Doctor O. Sam-Manual Sung and Doctor B. Squire but its maiden trek between the town of Essex and New Bravado was not until some two months later. A pilgrimage, the train was attacked by a band of Tainted, Natural Ones and Lascarians and nearly derailed. The Ox Killers, a new identity ostensibly under the power of Holy Mother Queen Jasper, claimed the effort - nearly provoking a war between the Railroad Commission and the Tribes Disparate in the weeks following. 

Felicity Redfield, CEO to the Railroad Commission, genius inventor and investor, saw opportunity where others saw conflict and negotiated a contract with the Tribes Disparate that served them both. Holy Mother Queen Jasper would keep the Ox Killers at bay, using her own soldiers as railjacks to defend the Ox as it makes its way across the Blastlands - and in return her nation state reserves the right to ship wares up and down the line between New Bravado and Essex without surcharge and to gather yearly in the boomtown for the purposes of political summit. Shale, brother and right hand to the High Mother, negotiated the bulk of this contract and it is his ambassadors that reside in New Bravado to this day. 

As a stone rolls, the town and its reputation gained inertia; the ruins below lent New Bravado the sheen of opportunity as again and again delvers dragged up artifacts and rarities that made them not humble spelunkers panning for gold, but wealthy gentlemen and women whose reputation was only outstripped by their wealth. 

It was the stories of these first delvers that drew the attention of the wastes. Three hard years stole the hope in the tired eyes of Braves and those affected by the Hiway War. Three hard years made meanness comfortable in the hearts of itinerants and refugees. But three hard years were the fallow fields in which hope would again take root because as cyclic as human wickedness is, so too is the goodness of man and the belief that better times are yet before him. 

And so the Lonestar arrived; in wagons, or flatbed trucks, on foot, or in the greasy cabins of the Ox, and by sea. The second Indulgence came and went, taking with it lives and contracts but affirming its place as a Bravado Tradition. The Punkerport grew, as did the Junkerpunk’s general resentment towards the Railroad Commission - a kind of offhand rebellion that did more to legitimize the RRC as the ultimate power and the Junkerpunks as their anti-establishment counterpoint. 

The town grew at pace in the later months of that third year, developed a haphazard culture, a half dozen work crews, infrastructure to support the delving population and the kind of halfway houses that their occupants never really leave. Private contractors sold their finds out of The Maw or liquidated them for brass to be sold up the line in Essex. 

The town developed a kind of comfortable cadence of capitalism that lasted all of two months. In the summer of that third year disaster struck in the form of western raiders that descended upon the muddy, radioactive caldera That-Was-Bravo in the first year post-bomb; Firebrands.

Festooned with bullet-casings, blast-glass and all the same bravado the town touted, the Firebrands blew up a section of track halfway between the burgeoning boomtown and Essex, rendering the rails unusable and the Ox’s goods forfeit for scavenging. Their motivations are largely unknown, though their penchant for explosions is common knowledge. 

Now, some two months following, the track’s re-completion looms. The alleys and streets of New Bravado are temporarily dark. With no way to ship down the line, the town has become isolated. Little information enters or leaves as the only mechanism by which a layperson may easily migrate is currently decommissioned at the empty rail station just south of Essex. There are whispers of strangeness, of the Mortis and her servants, and of returned persons who have no business among the living. As a scientist I am hesitant to record these claims lest I give them credence. But as a scientist I must also acknowledge that there is no more uncommon dirt than that tread by the Braves.

An old adage rings in my mind as I pen these final sentences that bring us to the contemporary state of the Town Bravado and Her Outlying Territories. This is a place that bends but does not break. That endures and endures and endures again. A roughshod and rowdy testament to the hubris of man that waxes and wanes as surely as the moon. For never in the history of the Lonestar have I known a place to render its people so stubborn or staunch. Nor have I known a scrap of land so dearly loved and returned to. 

So go west, you young and yawning; you beleaguered and bastards. Go make the world your children will live in. Go find your fortune in the sharp angled hills and dusty wells of the Worlds Before and Below.

This author lost their home when the Hiway war began in earnest. The world we live in now is not my own nor do I have the energy left in my tired bones to reclaim it. Instead I will pen your triumphs for those who follow after. Go forth and succeed knowing your victory is immortal. 

Stay Brave. 

Dr. Pernathius Goodfellow 

August 03’ PHW

Concerning the Hiway War and her Lasting Effects (cont.)

If the first year following the exodus out of the Lands Bravado was a period of reset, during which the bones of the old burned in hellfire and the culture of a people died with their constituents, then the second year was a rebirth.

Like ashes scattered over a fallow field, riotous growth followed after. The discovery of grand mystery under the old town swept us up and along like a demagogue her flock. 

At first it was a trickle - a few dedicated Delvers disappeared into the mud to find the roots of that perfect obelisk of white stone springing up and out of the caldera. Within days they returned, eyes brighter than the treasures they found and adventure on their lips.

Below us, they said, there are steel doors that guard something precious. They spoke of blinking lights that still function. Live munitions that click and whirl like analog machines. Long stretches of corridor bored out by ancient machinations that turn the stone smooth for miles and miles. Nothing like the Lascarian Tunnels of Old Bravo - twisting things chiseled by time and circumstance - but something deliberate and terrifying in its implications.

More delvers followed. Irons and Retrogrades, mutants and evolved for whom the residual radiation was merely an inconvenience, dove into the Ruins like Saltwise into brine and came up again and again with ancient metals, defunct computing devices, niceties of a fallen world and, very occasionally, the delicate pages of notes held together by little more than the careful handling of their discoverers. 

And the Lonestar heeded them. 

What happened next was a complex two-step of bureaucracy and belligerence. A paperwork whirlwind that, when the cyclone died, created a powerhouse capable of producing a dynasty.

What was previously the Road Commission laid the first tracks near Essex, the first city on what would become The Bravado Line. The newly christened Railroad Commission contracted out evolved and mutant strains to carry and lay corrugated steel and heavy wooden beams along the old trade routes between the two settlements, while Warden Tabitha St Mercy of Prudence Penitentiary employed her penitent work crews to begin the same process on the Bravado end.

Using notes safeguarded for generations, the Conglomerate, a collection of Digitarian houses who possess a great and shrouded interest in the Ruins below New Bravado, began the process of constructing the first high-powered locomotive in the Lonestar. The Ox, at that time a skeleton of iron, steel and super-plastics, would eventually become a gestalt amalgamation of construction equipment, a half dozen derelict trains and the engine of a single downed jet plane. Contracted and funded by the Railroad Commission the Conglomerate employed the great and surviving minds of scientists and psionists alike in their research centers in the town of Waking to provoke the monolithic iron horse into motion. 

But all great movements cause waves, and the process of rebirth is often as bloody as it is brilliant. For all the steel and will of its warden, Prudence Penitentiary for the Peregrine and Penalized buckled under the weight of work crews, its guardship, and the compressed conditions of its cell blocks. Riots ensued and the sickness of man was put on morbid display. In the far displaced land of New Bravado, with no larger authority to appeal to, Warden Tabitha St. Mercy closed the doors of her prison and let Wrath determine the outcome.

Colloquially we now refer to the Penitentiary as Killhouse Prison in reference to this massacre, for when the doors were opened there were little more than corpses on concrete. The survivors begged for the Warden to again resume control. Amidst her Wrath there was Pride in her work and so the Warden struck a deal with her prisoners and the tradition of the Indulgence was born. No prisoner would be made to serve more than a year in the Prison, if they were smart. For once a year all prisoner contracts would unilaterally expire, rendering them free people. Twenty-four hours later the contracts would be reinstated, the doors would close and Warden Tabitha St. Mercy would sic the Law Dogs upon the retreating backs of any prisoner who loitered in her city.

And so, with the tradition instituted and upheld, Prudence Penitentiary resumed its work on the railroad with gusto, outstripping the paid workers of the Railroad Commission by several weeks. The uptick in bodies begged a question, however. The Killhouse Massacre was the most devastatingly fatal event since the Bomb that decimated Old Bravo. Without a proper morgue, many of those first prisoners escaped, we assume. Perhaps they retreated to the Dune Sea or fled east towards the Clutch.

Both the Railroad Commission and the Prison found themselves at a loss. Without a way to control the flow of bodies, a prisoner could simply commit an infection to the cause of their escape. Without a mechanism by which to enforce order in New Bravado the system would fail, and without voluntary work crews seeking to shorten their sentences the railroad’s production would be brought to a grinding, painful halt.

The Grave Council, a collection of Undead strains lead by the powerful Takheeta Firstborn, stepped in as the solution.

Through ritual and rite the Council of Grave Decisions determined the location of each morgue-to-be. They dispatched Graverobbers and Grave Touched to these sites, and committed their own bodies to the creation of these morgues and, in a brilliant exchange of power, negotiated total ownership of these sites and the right to tax anyone who used them. 

Now that their lives and afterlives were solidly controlled under comfortable capitalism, the survivors resettling the area found a great darkness lifting - literally. A land that had been burning with hellfire now burned with the lights of hundreds of new homesteads. In the spaces between powers, the voids of civilization, new stars were lit aflame. Had these people always been here? Or were they deposited on the shores of this disaster like flotsam on the beach after a storm?

Wherever they came from, they brought with them the salt of the earth, these settlers of the lowlands and hollers. They were the early risers, once more planting the seeds of hope into the soot-streaked soil. New quiet folk for a new settlement. Keepers of the land and Tenders of the hearth. Quick with a witty comment and slow to judgement. A magnet for a network of community bonds across the region - the Lovelace Family began to be used as a surname and identity of these landsmen, hundreds of families finding kinship under their good name. Thousands of strings of stories and lives tied together in hope for a beautiful agricultural future.

And among these quiet neighbors, there remained institutions of charity and well-being. Now that the immediate harm of the Great Disaster was healing, the Widows of the Lonestar turned their eyes to where else their kindly influence could improve the lives of others. They took a keen interest in the work of the Grave Council, and lent their weight into helping to prepare places of sanctuary and rest for those weary from work, sickness, and disease. Anyone seeking a meal, bed, or safety at their door was never turned away - including a large number of those who managed to escape the tall walls of Killhouse Prison. Above all, they sought to protect a populace that had, for too long, been victimized. 

To the north the Tribes Disparate under Holy Mother Queen Jasper thrived. Maintaining a friendly rapport with the Braves that saved their people, Jasper committed workers to the cause of re-building the city of Bravado even as she kept an iron grip on the thirteen tribes that writhed and strove beneath her. Houses formed, with figureheads who swear fealty to the Holy Mother in a feudal framework that benefits both the Lady and those who report to her. The individual tribes vie for her attention and favor, some committed by blood and sword - others by convenience.

The Junkerpunks, a loose coalition of seafaring folk, begin to earn the name alluded to in the first chapter of this long-form essay. Among their ragtag ranks a leader emerged, a Saltwise of dangerous charisma and wit, Sinker Swim captains the flagship of the Junkerpunk flotilla. 

The nature of their separation from the naysayers of the Clutch encouraged in the Junkerpunks an  underdog mentality that never truly left their culture. Seeking out the downtrodden, desperate, and dangerous to swell their ranks the Junkerpunks quickly became known as pirates, bandits - but also coy merchants in an era where few ships navigated the inland seas of the Spoiled Coast.

It was this mercantile mindset, this author believes, that lead the Junkerpunks to build a modern-day Tortuga in the middle of the lake that was Old Bravo. The marina, cheekily called the Punkerport by locals, trucks in undocumented finds from the Ruins as much as it does raw imports of food and supplies for the delve-camps there.

The Junkerpunks, in the second year of their watery pilgrimages, found an accord with the Spiderhause Redstar who have, in recent years, taken up residence in Essex and its surrounding plane-space. Both underdogged, both committed to uplifting those who otherwise do not have the means to achieve their own strength, the members of Spiderhause left the land that had treated them poorly to try again on the open sea. What the Junkerpunks lack in organizational skills and raw, coordinated strength, the Redstars of Spiderhause make up for in spades.

In the second year following the Bomb that destroyed Old Bravo, the world began again to turn. The hole in the sky closed up, mostly. The water in the lake might never be drinkable in our lifetime but the fish seem to like it just fine. The riotous growth-post-nuclear burned in the summer and regrew again in the following spring, just as it always has. These events in isolation beget no particular question. But in aggregate, in the context of the bomb and its thereafter effects, this author wonders aloud what arcane circumstances render this land livable again after only two years. And if the truth of this place is merely old, or truly ancient.

It is said around these parts that things are happening that have happened before. But it is this author’s humble opinion that previous trends do not indicate future behavior. And that just because something has happened before, does not mean it will always happen.

-  “Concerning the Hiway War and Her Lasting Effects”

By: Dr. Perenthius Goodfellow