Local History
Terminal City's wasn't always called Terminal City. Long before it was settled by the Norms, a people known as the
Kuun lived here. They called the area
Una's Cradle and from what researchers have dug up they treated the natural beauty with reverance. Surprising nobody, the Norms slaughtered them all, erased all records of their existence, and renamed the area
Lake Prosperity.
Fast forward a couple hundred years, and they've managed to pave over half the crater and build a hundred factories bleching out pollutants into the air and water. The name the center of this
Prosperity City.
Trains piped the goods in, ships took em down the
Moon Bear River to Port Lane. Did they use it to better the world? No! It was all guns and bombs and war.
Then the
Covenant came in, on their stupid
Exodus, and took over. Things looked good for a while, they ended the wars and shut down the factories and fed the people. Not that they gave us any choice. You see, everything from above is hearsay, scrapped together. Knowledge of the past is forbidden! They put their dumb
Barons and
Princes in charge and kept us sedated. They played court and we were the peasants.
Eventually those assholes showed their true colors though. The Barons went to
War. A half million people died and Prosperity City was replaced with the
Prosperity Dirth. If it weren't for
Tectonic, we all would have gone, but he sacrificed himself to save us. All that was left was the tip of that peninsula, what would be known as
Terminal City.
It's hard to say a good thing about Prince
Albion, he could have stopped the whole thing from the start. But at least he recognized the awful thing his people had done. He issued an
Eidict, proclaiming Terminal City free from Covenant Rule. They weren't allow to set foot in the city without permission from the newly formed
Parliment.
The Parliment and the
General,
Triss Salinger, kept things real for a while. They rebuilt the city, and housed the refugees, restarted the economy. These days they can't see the forest for the trees. I assure you, they don't want you to hear the things I've got to say.
Terminal City Sights
Now that we're past the boring stuff, let's talk about the City. It's really got everything. You can either rub elbows with the ultra wealthy up in the shining
Aerie (if they let you in), or hit the clubs down in the
Night District like the seedy
Calliope Club. If you're brave enough,
Old Town is said to be full of Ghosts!
Downtown has the shopping and
Uptown is home to some of Arilia's biggest companies like
Ophidicorp and
Jiggle.
Looming above it all is the
Panopticon in the
Justice District. The home of the
Parliament Chambers and the
Terminal City Security Force, it keeps an eye on the city via it's network of digibles that patrol the city. Underneath it is the
Bubble, where they keep the worst of the worst criminals. Nobody wants you to know, but the TCSF is stretched pretty thin. There are plenty of criminal
Metas out there looking to make a quick buck. That's where Terminal City's own super heroes come into play.
Heroes and Villians
Every city has their supers, but Terminal City is the only one where you might actually see one! That's right, without Covenant soldiers around every corner, our heroes will fight crime in plain sight. Everyone knows about the
Stalwart Spartans, the OGs. Back in the day they fought crime without any powers! They even had a team of sidekicks called
The Teen Squad. The Spartans tried to stand up to the Covenant during the war, but it was too much and most of them didn't make it. Nobody really knows what happened then, but metas didn't really feel welcome after
Captain Courageous got executed.
Things got a bit more gritty after that, with teams like the
Darksiders hitting the streets and taking up the slack. This was a mixed bag, we had some good come out of it like
Lady Whisper, and some bad like
Knightfall.
These days, things are a bit brighter. The
Prodigies are trying to keep things safe in old town. Down in the stacks where the TCSF won't even go, the
Block City Beaters are a real lifesaver. Most recently the
Cognitive Dissidents have been seen all over the place. These teams are all a bit junior, but they seem to be learning fast!
But they certainly have their hands full.
The Trust runs crime in the city, with their
Terror Squads keeping the citizenry cowed. They've got their own metas, like the
Brute Squad and
Sleazeball. They keep making more thanks to
Helios.
Outside the City
Things aren't pretty outside the city. The Covenant Barons still rule. On the
Southern Prairie Minotaur has a massive troop build up ready to remember. He's got an axe to grind against the
Engineer, who runs the
Western Valley. The Engineer is some sort of genius, both tactically and militarily. She's said to have conquered the whole continent in three days, so Taurus best know what he's doing. To the North,
Alabaster runs the
Northern Barrens. She's the one who scares me the most. A wrecked
Wasteland separates her from the rest of us, nothing goes in or out except horror stories.
On the edges of the
Prosperity DMZ, aka what remained of the old city, lies
Westgate Transfer Station. The Edict states that all goods go through Terminal City, so everything comes through the station. It's the thin red line, and you can see the Covenant troops staring hungry from the trains as they pull up. It's too bad so many famliies are still out there in the
Rustbucket. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to make it in the city.
Comments