Tartagloam
Once a bustling industrial town within the extended territory of the Commonwealth of C, Tartagloam now stands as a ruined monument to one of the the largest massacres of the War of Reunification. The ruins of Tartagloam lie at the foot of the Medial F 2/3/5 vertex mountain range.
Demographics
Before and after the destruction and abandonment of the city, Tartagloam has been populated almost entirely by Humans of Elovisian descent.
Defences
The Grand Army of Voxelia sends occasional scouting parties to test the CRF garrisons in Tartagloam, as the city is still considered a valuable staging area for attacks on the Commonwealth of C's holdings in Medial F. While the city's original defense systems, including its defense autonet, are gone, the hollows and barricades created by the ruins make the place nearly impregnable to ground-based assault, while no obvious targets of value remain for aerial bombardment.
Guilds and Factions
The largest factions still existing within the ruins of Tartagloam are Commonwealth Regular Forces garrisons and aid workers from the Sorority of Solace. Parasol Private Holdings occasionally explores the the city to recover lost records and personal items for survivors of the Siege of Tartagloam. Various gangs of squatters, salvors, and dispossessed former citizens still haunt the crumbling remnants of the city. The 125 Hands were originally formed from the vengeful survivors of the Siege of Tartagloam and still maintain a base beneatht the city, though most members of that organization have left the city to infiltrate others, leaving only a small number of Phalanges to harry Voxelian agents in the surrounding countryside.
History
Tartagloam was established as a municipality early in the Commonwealth's expansion, with some signs of Elovisian habitation dating all the way back to the age of exploration. While ambient radiation (Medial F lies beneath the continuous aurorae of the Southern Tesseract) impaired birthrates and raised the risks of cancers in some, the city of Tartagloam eventually grew to a population of over 100,000.
Unfortunately, in its location near territory contested by the Commonwealth and Voxelia, the city was destined for trouble as the War of Reunification ramped up. During the Siege of Tartagloam, the Grand Army of Voxelia repeatedly bombed and shelled the city in an attempt to flush out the Commonwealth Regular Forces garrison located near city hall. Unlike previous assaults during the war, where the rings of thick walls around the city center had proved impervious to Voxelian ground-based attack, GAV airship-mounted high explosive artillery proved to have too long a range for CRF anti-air emplacements to deal with in a timely fashion. Once Tartagloan anti-air defenses were down, it was only a matter of time before GAV bombers began to pound the city defenders into submission.
The local CRF forces are remembered in the Commonwealth for their heroic sacrifice, holding the smoldering, ruined town long enough for allied League Army elements to arrive and cover a civilian and military evacuation. League auto-armor units were able to use the ruins as cover to mount effective guerilla attacks against advancing GAV forces seeking to hold their new prize, while then-experimental auto-armor suface-to-air missles exacted a heavy toll on GAV close air support autogyros. At around this time, GAV logistics trains were also attacked by CRF forces called in from nearby Alvastead, forcing the GAV to retreat or be cut off. While this effectively ended the Siege of Tartagloam, the city was deemed irreparably damaged, and human habitation (save for a few scattered CRF garrisons, bands of criminal gangs, and desperate scavenger crews) has yet to return.
Architecture
Tartagloam's once-gleaming towers now lie in disarray, with many having been toppled either from Voxelia's bombardment, subsequent urban warfare, or simple neglect of maintenance. Most city streets are cracked, partially overgrown places, with pools of broken glass, burnt out automobiles, and jumbles of fallen skyscraper facades choking off access to the city center. Outlying suburbs are in a better state of repair, but lie abandoned, as both Voxelian and Commonwealth of C forces regularly passed through these areas during Voxelia's siege of Tartagloam.
Near the industrial district, where saturation bombing caused a local polymer plant complex to go critical, citizens who were caught in the resulting chemical cloud remain preserved in eerily life-like condition; this macabre place is the source of Tartagloam's fame as the "City of Mannequins." While the industrial district would normally hold appeal for anthropologists from the Manifold Conservation Society for its preservation of the 9970 era, numerous recently-installed field fortifications and squatter's camps suggest that the town remains in a state of violent anarchy.
Natural Resources
While the slightly increased ambient radioactivity of Medial F makes it less appealing to long-term settlement than most regions of the Medial Tesseract, the plain where Tartragloam once stood is rich in natural reserves of petroleum, natural gas, and mineral dye precursors, lending the place well to industrial polymer production.
RUINED SETTLEMENT
9970
Alternative Name(s)
City of Mannequins
Type
City
Population
2031 (formerly ~100,000)
Inhabitant Demonym
Tartagloamites
Location under
Included Locations
Owning Organization
Characters in Location
Comments