The Colossus

The story of the Colossus dates back to 2245, the day when Paladin Haverson was stranded in the Great Dust Bowl. It is not spoken about with outsiders, but thanks to his drinking mates it has made the light of day on the Crawler. Claiming that entering the storm and becoming trapped was not by mere chance, Haverson says he saw a large technological device somewhere around nine thousand feet but lost control of his vertibird when trying to take a closer look.

The Paladin maintains that it was highly likely to be some kind of prototype or secret pre-war project for the military, as he identified the class of ship as being a rigid-frame airship. It was not like others he had seen however, as this one had a much larger deck that he assumed was for launching smaller crafts. He saw no crew or pilot, but asserts that it must be inhabited on some level as he did see a functioning smoke stack that shouldn’t be active if the aircraft was merely being blown about by the wind.

Most people are skeptical, as the area of the storm in which he saw this object is notoriously dangerous. The point of no return, this threshold has swallowed anything that passed over it in the last two hundred years after all. Others have let paranoia and superstition take over, with a secret cult forming in the lower levels that worships ‘The Colossus’. Allowed to exist by the First Citizens Council, they preach that this vehicle is actually the harbinger of the storm and the sole cause of it raging on without end for the past two hundred years.