"The World That Was"
Another Dieselpunk Rouge writing!
Image is a cross section of the maginot line, an inspiration for the megacities present in the story.
Music curation;
The world left behind was singed and cloaked in black ashstorms. Where mighty cities once spanned the globe there were now only cinders and echoing silence. The sky and earth became one with another. Grey columns of dust,debris, and smoke bridged them and the sun, the sun was swallowed whole while the seas boiled. Poisoned ebon rain fell for a time until it shortly became snow, black gravely snow. Death came at an anthrocene ending scale.
Some of the mega-hab cities that came up in the Perpetrol epoque of the early 1900's managed to seal themselves up to try and ride out the dawning great winter. Some few survived until the present. Other small islands existed amongst the sea of extinction. Small bunker towns and villages, each weathering the end of the world in their own way. That winter lasted three long decades. Now is the time of the Nu-30's, in which humanity returns to the surface as the sun returns.
The Thaw, the warming of the Earth as debris clears the atmosphere, allows for a brand new period of adventure and reclamation of the world that was. Large cities and abandoned machinery are the prize of adventurous scavengers and settlers make their way to every corner of the continent. forming confederations of settlements. The loyalties of which shift and turn as material conditions, and Unitarian attention ebb and flow.
As humanity scratches from the earth a better world than the isolation of the last three decades, old world powers stir in hidden places. The sealed megastructures open, hidden communities and holdouts take to the world in the shadow of the past. Old grudges and the scramble for Antebellum technology drives new conflicts while the Unitarians loom, ever building and growing its pre-war arsenal of war machines, automata and gene-crafted soldiers ever greater. The wild independence of the post-thaw world wanes as the unitarians dominate and colonize settlements across the world.
It has become all too apparent that the tyranny of the past has not died, it has slept only long enough to nurse its wounds. At the head of the hydra, the Unitarian party, the last president of the United States; President Peter Barosky. The lights and glamour of the world that was are now lost, and the machines that brought humanity to its greatest heights now barely serve enough to sustain small populations. Men kill for fuel and food in the wastes that were once North America, and where civilization tries to take root the insidious forces of greed, ignorance, and reaction threaten to infiltrate and dominate the people once again.