Editing Legacy: Ashes of Houston (section)

== Fallout: Ashes of Houston==

War. War never changes.

The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth.

Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory.

Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower.

But war never changes.

In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: petroleum and uranium ore. For these resources, China would invade Alaska, the US would annex Canada, and the European Commonwealth would dissolve into quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth.

In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, on October 23rd, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.

But the end of the world was not the end of everything. In many ways, it was a new beginning.

A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large underground Vaults. Others rode it out on the surface. As they rose from the ashes and inherited a radioactive world, they began to rebuild. Some held onto they had from before the war. Some deliberately abandoned it. Others lost it and became primative tribes. But life, society, civilization... it continued. A legacy of what the world before. Life continued among the ruins.

And of course, scant few generations had passed before conflict reared its head again as the survivors grew in number and gtathered resources.

Because. War, after all, never changes.

The Texas Commonwealth was one of the thirteen commonwealths of the pre-war United States of America. Created in the mid 20th century, it was comprised of the former states of Texas and Arkansas, and borders the Four States, East Central, Gulf and Plains Commonwealth.
Industrial might became the watch word of Texas as the resource wars raged in the last days of the old world. The military machine the United States had built in its desperate struggle with China to secure the last resources on earth. And off it, as the battles in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon, fought by marines launched in Texas, would prove. Bullets, lasers, vehicles, power armor, bombs, missiles; there was a never ending demand for all of them, and they were provided by the industrial might of America's heartlands

The oil fields dried in the late fifties, to serve a ravenous population. Mining and oil concerns, desperate for more drops of the precious black fluid, dug deeper, devised new methods to try to find more oil. Most of them failed. Some of them succeeded. By 2077, a handful of fields in Texas were one of three locations on planet Earth still producing oil, which was immediately consumed to feed the industrial machine. Houston was the center of this.

Said machine came to a screeching halt on October 23, 2077. Nuclear bombs rained from the sky. Silos in Texas fired back, and were hit by counter-fire. Multiple bombs hit the city itself, though the relative small size of the warheads left the bulk of the downtown district relatively intact.

By 2167, the swamps had reclaimed the shorline and parts of the city of Houston. Life began to return as survivors set up various

Old fusion plants, brought online in the last years of the war to support the military industrial complex, still function somewhere deep under Houston, powering robotic factories that were never told to stop.

The ports contain both military and civilian ships, abandoned since the war, along with their cargos. Chemicals from the industrial plants have leaked into the bay, mixing with radioaction from the bombs, producing substances foul and dangerous. The animal life that survived is utterly imicable to human life.

Rumors of miracles medicines, stored in the Texas Medical Center, drew scavengers into the city. Few survived what they found there.

South of the city, the massive United States Space Administration facility remained, rockets pointed skywards. The last launch never taken. The payloads still waiting in the bellies.

This is Houston. This is where civilization in Texas has begun to be reborn.