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I Believe We Can Change

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“When I was a child men made merry about bears and bulls, their strength, their stamina, their ferocious tempers. Me, I looked to the turtle, how they plodded ever onward about ants and cazadors, paying them no mind, and when the noonday sun came they burrowed in the earth and bided their time. Bears and bulls may be mighty creatures indeed, but when the noonday sun comes overhead, and the cud wilts and withers, they fall all the same. And then? Well then the turtle plods onward, making merry on their corpses.”

To borrow from Caesar Sallow, who himself borrowed from Hegel, the conflict between thesis and antithesis breeds a synthesis. So it was in the 2280s when the old powers of the NCR and the “Legion” as it was known at the time, met and did battle over the Hoover Dam. Both sought to claim control of the Dam and the greater Vegas area as a means to secure their dominance as the power of the west, but to the surprise of both neither succeeded. Instead, rising from the ashes of the north, the Free Republic of Vegas ousted both would-be superpowers from their territory. The NCR fled west back to Shady Sands to popular resentment, and Sallow’s Legion moved south to the Rapids to regroup and launch a third assault. However, the conflict that the two engaged in, and their contact with each other in general, started a runaway effect that would prevent either power from rebounding in the face of their mutual defeat.

In the west, the end of the Vegas Campaign soon spelled the end of the Kimball Administration and the old guard. This was followed then by the economy of the NCR, which had long depended on the appropriation of land and resources from bordering nations, coming in on itself. Attempts were made at centralizing the state, reestablishing a gold standard in the face of free-falling water and grain backed economy, but the refusal of the northern states and, most notably, New Reno and Vault City, to follow these policies spelled their doom. While the NCR Administration retained popular acclaim around Shady Sands and the areas around Dayglow and The Boneyard, by the turn of the 24th century it existed in reality only in those areas.

The shambling mess that was the NCR met its final end in the aftermath of the Second Barrons Rebellion. While much like the first rebellion the Barron Families were defeated and their assets seized, but then the administration was immediately met by calls from citizens and lobbyists to distribute the land and farmsteads of the north to the people, a call which the NCR ignored by nationalizing the farmsteads instead. This was met by popular demonstrations, which soon devolved in riots, and then a civil war. By 2322 the last loyalist stronghold had fallen and soon the loose rebel coalition collapsed in on itself. After a little over 130 years the NCR was finally dead.

This was not to say the dream of California was dead, but it reemerged in many different permutations, and the successor states that followed the NCR were far more centralized, orderly, and ceremonial than the old NCR. One example, partly inspired by the Legion, down in the Boneyard a rebel faction declared an empire, later downgraded to a kingdom, known as the Transcolorado Kingdom, which claimed spiritual descent from Tandi. Throughout the former NCR all sorts of similar experiments in government, from technocracies, to bureaucracies, to more equitable republics were forged. By the 2340s the states of the former NCR, with some exceptions, came together again to declare the Union of California, a supranational union of states dedicated to mutual peace and to respond to the changes that had occurred on the other side of the Colorado.

Caesar soon died as his men reached the Rapids and the Legion descended into infighting for a new leader. Although the Praetorian Lucius was the legal successor to Caesar, the then Legate Lanius challenged his right to the throne. This challenge was soon met by a public duel to the death in a fighting pit constructed by Caesar’s Landing. In the fight Lucius was easily outclassed and was beaten to the ground. However, before Lanius could kill him Lucius’ supporters stormed the pit and seized Lanius, repeatedly stabbing him to death before raising Lucius into the air and declaring him the new ruler of the Legion.

Lucius, declaring himself Lucius Augustus I, set the path for the reformation of the Legion based upon his knowledge of Caesar Sallow’s original ideas. Vegas was lost to the Legion however and so the linchpin of Sallow’s plan, his New Rome, was lost as well. With this in mind Lucius marched eastward back to Flagstaff, however he first went to claim Yuma, the Mihono Tribe, and the Baudelios so as to return home in triumph. From Flagstaff Lucius oversaw the transformation of the Legion into a settled society with a standing army, which he renamed the Empire of Mars. Using the contents of Sallow’s personal library and his own edict to recover old world texts, Emperor Lucius established districts, taxes, a civil service, and even a post office. His later reforms included the establishment of tributaries instead of the old policy of annihilating tribes, which earned him titles such as Lord of the Navajo, from his procuring the tribute of the renewed Navajo Nation to the north. Lucius’ final act, which would not be completed in his lifetime, would be the creation of the greatest library in the Southwest, which unlike previous attempts by groups such as the Brotherhood would hold works on the social sciences, economics, governance, art, and poetry.

Lucius would be succeeded by his adopted son, Nathan, who would take the name Aurelius Pecos Centaurus I. This would establish the Empire’s policy of adopted emperors instead of royal descent, and with it an academy of governance dedicated to rearing each emperor’s adopted child for the task of leadership. Aurelius and emperors after him would lay the grounds for further cultural changes, such as the expansion of the Imperial Cult to include the spirits of all emperors, local animal and nature spirits, and the gods of formerly conquered tribes and tributes, most notably the Twin Mothers. Perhaps the most revolutionary change, in terms of opening up the Empire to the outside world, were moves, accelerating in recent years, to allow Caesar Sallow’s former comrades, the Followers of The Apocalypse, to operate within Imperial Territory.

Outside of the realms of the Empire and the Union of California the “Wasteland” continued to move forward. To the north the lands of New Canaan grew in strength, and now lead by their holy land the Mormon States of the west have become a formidable pact in their own right. In recent years the Canaanites have attempted to make inroads to the Northern Khanate of Idaho, though while received warmly not much has happened beyond well wishes and the exchanging of gifts. In Wyoming and Eastern Idaho, the Shoshone people have risen once again to prominence, as the Sage Grass and Sheep-Eater Bands have extended their grip over the Windy River and Yellowstone, and with them the waterways and roads to the Further East. A common boast of the Shoshone as to their strength to outsiders is “We survived an apocalypse once before, a second means nothing to us.”

Other changes have rocked the West, namely in the formalization of former highway bands and tribes into settled nations, growing rich off of trade between the agricultural and technological powers of the West. Chief among them are the 80s, who despite their towering settlements and packed bazaars still run yearly races along the great strips of the Long 80. Elsewhere in the northwest the cities of Cascadia, dominated by the “Mountiemen” and their merchant marines, prod outward, and now ships can be seen entering the harbors of Transcolorado from as far away as Victoria, and if rumors are to be believed, the reclusive island nation of Haida to the far north.

The world is changing, and with it perhaps men are too. Although men are still distrusting, and arms are still brandished by the nations of the West, guns have scarcely been heard across the wastes for generations. Perhaps as men may change, war may have changed with them, or maybe it might be best that we not have to find out again.

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eddsworldbatboy1's avatar
What about a time if ncr won new vegas

Or is this where the courier never arrived