the corpse of waking prime
The skyship-city of Waking once hung in the skies over the San Saba Territories like a dripping, industrial thunderhead. Now, it is a monument to hubris, a crashed ruins on the outskirts of Bravado, where it was “landed” during the events of VOX POPULI. Gestalt, this city is made up of the weary remains of thousands of smaller airship vessels, dissolved wholesale and channeled into a once floating city whose attitude shares its namesake - Waking Prime.
Waking’s history is shrouded at best, and utterly inscrutable at its worst thanks to the concerted efforts of its citizenry to build atop itself until the past is rendered a derelict foundation for the gleaming and new. Some rumors suggest that this may be one of the ancient TITAN CITIES, similar to the Lost City of Barogue, while others have claimed that it was the beating heart of a den of mad scientists before the Hiway War known as Aggieland.
While the surface city remains mostly intact, the interior decks remain dangerously irradiated and uninhabitable. The radioactive approach to the husk of the city has been cordoned off as the WAKING EXCLUSION ZONE and remains a reminder of the insidious dangers of the irradiated runoff and wreckage from the emergency landing. The only truly safe way to reach Waking now is via airship, but the Railroad Conglomerate continues to seek out a safe way to reclaim the interior. They have recently commissioned deadly ventures into the radioactive decks below, in dangerous but profitable LIQUIDIATION RUNS. If a survivor stays too long in the lethal hot zones, they will simply melt away as their body fails at the cellular level. Even Retrogrades are not immune to the deadly radiation within.
The robust technology Waking once used to stay afloat has failed, a hundred different energy sources passing through the arcane geometries of The Capacity Engine; the mechanism that once fed the monolithic and mortal engines that propelled the city’s fifteen hundred stabilizing jets. While it was functional, it could create such sulphurous byproduct that the runoff - which secretes from every seeping joint of the city’s vast hull, would poison the lands below and render the fields fallow and unlivable. Now that built up toxin seeps into the lands and waters near Bravado.
While the gleaming crown of Waking, Eureka Tower, a tower so high and pristine as to belong in a different era of the world, beams archly out over the wastes of the San Saba - its inhabitants are still unable to see the filth below for all the filigree. However, the city remains the seat of the San Saba Board, and they still claim the capital of the Territories from atop the corpse of their former airship.
In the Boardroom at the penthouse level of Eureka Tower, the most powerful personalities in the Lonestar scheme and schism - while below in the gleaming streets of the Magnolia District the first ever Waste’s Fair was held in celebration of the merger between the Railroad Commission and the Conglomerate - and the formation of the San Saba Board. While the luster may have dimmed on the surface city, the Board is determined to remind any that would question their will why they remain the government of the San Saba Territories — One way or another.
