The Grotto

Spiritual headquarters of the Samaritans and the Red Right Hand

Before the war the Grotto was an open-air temple built into the halls and carved from the rock of the northern Portland hills. It functioned as a local attraction, a public park, and a denominational site of worship for a wide number of religious groups. Christians, Hebrews, Muslims, Mormons, and more all had dedicated sites within the compound to gather and perform their rites. It was also a natural fallout shelter, thanks to its high walls and the dense rock of the hills. When the bombs fell the Grotto was the place where Portland's faithful found shelter from atomic annihilation. The Grotto's caves were a place of refuge, but the destruction of the war extended far beyond the purely atomic. Injuries and sickness culled a large portion of the survivors in the years immediately following the Great War. As order dissolved and survival became something only the fittest could claim, the faithful of the Grotto did what they could to assist. The dead were buried or burned en masse to prevent the spread of infection, large-scale funerals were held by those who still cared enough to attend, and the sick and dying were brought to the relatively clean halls of the Grotto when the hospitals were inevitably filled beyond capacity. Over time this practice hardened into tradition. Acts of worship would continue to be held at the Grotto for those who needed hope in their most hopeless hours, and aid would be provided wherever possible by the various faithful. Eventually their practices or worship and medicine would merge together under one name taken from history: The Samaritans.