Editing Legacy: Ashes of Houston (section)

==Homeland==


[https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1_7oCdOxE-lgCRKKDoSnwzEjn6BuWKKspeUNz0A5_7eA/edit?usp=sharing Map of the Homeland]

=== Settlements ===
*Sawgrass Combine Plant, part of the Baytown industrial district, a prewar tractor and heavy equipment manufacturer. It had all of the tools they needed to maintain their mechanized vehicles and to salvage the wrecks along the roads. Since setting up shop, they've done their best to turn it into a fortress with defensive lines and defensive emplacements to keep their enemies out.
* The former vault 23 lies under Ashwood - its facilities still operational and seemingly vital to House Akon. But the majority of our holdings these days are firmly above ground - an extensive agricultural experiment turned cornucopia. Knights and militia patrol the roads and borders regularly, and defensive earthworks dot the region. Providing safe rest and long sight-lines, you could say these outposts and lookout are a signature of House Akon territory.

=== Landmarks ===
*Base Camp: Haven for the Scouts, the original campground where the waited out the end of the world.
*Art Vault: A vault built to preserve art for eternity. It served as the place which the ancestors of the Eternal Masquerade were able to survive the initial nuclear strikes and retains a quasi-religious status for the nomadic artists, with people--especially young people--returning there on pilgrimage for artistic inspiration.
*Reclaimed Lab: lab - reclaimed by nature - and tended by partially uplifted animals. Kind of smack dab near Fresno. I'm also to understand this is kind of where a branch of this huge Houston hospital complex thing is. While also being shortly north of the Scout's (who have perky animals!) initial camp grounds. This will presumably tie into my own family in...some fashion. Blending humans with animals, and blending animals with humans are just two sides of the same coin. What's better? Animals with the smarts of a human, or humans with the strengths of an animal? House Akon knows the answer to that question, but the world might shrug differently! Beneath the reclaimed lab tended by partially uplifted animals, a vast catacombs filled with failed genetic experiments. Are the uplifted animals creating them in their efforts to 'succeed'? Are they trying to keep their 'failed siblings' quarantined? Completely divorced from each other until some eejit breaks containment because they couldn't let the animals do their thing in peace? Something else!?
*The Lost Library, formerly the Houston Public Library, survived surprisingly well for a few years after the bombs due to solid construction and shelters built into the basement. The Scouts visited occasionally, trading supplies for knowledge and learning. But when raiders began attacking the library, the remaining librarians sent out a call for help but had no good way to contact the Scouts. By the time word reached them, they arrived to find the library lost, the books burned and its inhabitants dead or enslaved. They drove the raiders out but the damage was done, and it taught the Scouts an important lesson that survival was about more than being self-sufficient, one had to be a member of a community. These days it's mostly a burned out shell, occasionally used by groups of raiders, but the scouts honor it as a memorial.
*The Texas Energy Company Refinery Complex, a massive petrochemical plant that has become a morass of toxic chemicals, radiation, and what ever horribly mutated could live there. Despite the danger the super mutants are singularly focused on exploring and securing the place. The reason is that Lt Norstrom was part of the Scourging of Necropolis, during that operation she found some old business records that TEC was bought out by West Tek to retool the refinery for pharmacutial production.

=== Hazards ===
*Vault 18: This vault is carved out of a tunnel extension built off the Bayou Place underground parking in the Theater District in the north side of Downtown. The sudden activation of a radio station broadcasting the collected works of Beethoven on a long loop drew the Knights of San Jacinto there from their sinking Monument Redoubt, thinking the signal presaged an opening Vault that would need protection from the ravages of the Wasteland and could possibly supply new recruits. It did indeed serve as notice the vault was about to open, but the opening door revealed a pile of decaying corpses. The state of them indicated people who had been violently slain while struggling to open the door and escape within the past few weeks - sometime after the music started. Concentrated attacks by a convoy of raiders arriving along I-45 from as far away as the Aggie Abbotoir (College Station) also looking to plunder the new Vault drove the Knights to retreat after forcibly re-seating the vault door. Most of the raiders moved on but the Star Table is reluctant to send recon teams to ascertain its current status until their situation stabilizes.
* Vault 18 was always more than a shelter. Beneath the main Vault—a fact lost even to most residents—lay Sublevel Theta, a sealed pre-War research center. This lower level was dedicated to Project Elysium, a program designed to solve the ecological collapse by creating hyper-adaptive flora and fauna. Its staff included geneticists, xeno-botanists, and Vault-Tec "specimen designers." When the Vault fell silent, Theta remained locked down. Automated systems continued their work, accelerating experiments in a closed-loop biosphere… until the Vault door above was forced. Now, with its upper levels breached and containment protocols disrupted, Sublevel Theta is exposed. The "untamed wonders" born there—bioengineered predators, mutagenic plants, self-directing fungal networks—are already moving upward into the ruined Vault and the Houston tunnels beyond. What's worse: Theta's databanks still hum with invaluable scientific records, and rumor has it a functioning pre-War AI is guiding the ecosystem like a gardener tending its greenhouse.<br>

=== Threats ===
*Major Threat: A drought so severe that famine is a certainty.
*Threat: Carthage Raiders: Since the fall of the Old World, raiders and bandits have become a persistent problem. Texas seemed to be filled with people who'd rather take another man's work than put the effort in themselves. Far to the north of Houston, the town of Carthage has become a center of raiders and bandits all across Texas, preying heavily on trade routes between the shattered cities, using weapons looted from pre-war police stations and military bases. A gang of them, in recent years, have moved more directly into the Houston area to set up camp, notable for the fusion cycles they roam the roads in. After taking part in the failed raid on Vault 18, they've been scouting out the old Lost Library, to refurbish it as a base for their raids in the city.
*Threat: The peddlers of a new drug that removes the desire for beauty. No one knows where they actually create this drug, though rumors say they have a base of operations in a salvaged military submarine in Galveston or Trinity Bay.
* The Wildlands: Where Sam Houston National Forest used to be. Now they're dark and creepy woods, and even the scouts consider them deadly. It'd be strictly avoided by all except for the old remains of Interstate 45 being the trade route between the remains of Texas and Dallas, and brahmin drawn caravans make the trek. But even they stay close to the road, hire lots of guards (a common job for the Scouts), and make absolutely sure to get out before nightfall.