Legacy: Ashes of Houston

Homeland

Map of the Homeland

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!?

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.