City Designation/Number:
City 23
Status:
Abandoned
City Type:
Originally agricultural, turned industrial.
Population:
~50
(Total Remaining)
- CPs: 0
- Citizens/Workers: 0
- Overwatch: 0
Year of Founding:
2009
Summary/Lore:
Once a bustling city of musical enlightenment and cultural enrichment, Prague is practically unrecognizable from its former glory these days. Even before its abandonment, the construction of City Twenty Three following the Seven Hour War marked the beginning of a tragic end. The Administration overseeing the city sought to strategically strip it of all its identity, replacing it with the new de facto rule of the Benefactors.
Cherished and historic cathedrals that had even managed to survive the war were brutalized and turned into outposts and hardpoints for Transhuman Armament. Art from medieval origins and gothic stone over half a millennium old were interweaved carelessly with otherworldly metal and machinations, bastardized beyond any familiar human touch.
Prague was widely known even before the war to be an excellent exporter of wine and other amenities, and thus, was primarily utilized for its agricultural scene in City Twenty Three’s beginning. It produced a variety of refined goods tailored specifically for loyalist and Administrative personnel. Ironically, many of these goods produced would not be going to the individuals that slaved away to create them. For a time, the city’s Administration did well to keep the population in check and the garrison well armed. Inevitably, as the vineyards began to dry and the output of posh goods began to decrease in quality, primarily due to the immense output of gases and smog originating from sister cities, the Sectorial Administration deemed the city's output to be insufficient.
Demands and policies were made, and thus, factories were set up en masse over Prague's area of influence. City Twenty Three's new primary export from these factories centered around the creation of armored carriers and personnel transports, with much of the citizenry actively manufacturing pieces of these vehicles to be readied for assembly within automated facilities. Sister cities assisted Twenty Three in choking the skies in a sickening hue, resulting in the further death of all beauty in the countryside of the European regions. Furthermore, the working conditions of these factories were, even in the new order of the world, abysmal. Quotas expected from each individual were set to ludicrous proportions, resulting in much of the population being worked to death while the threat of a weapon remained pointed at their broken backs.
Following rumors and speculation of neighboring City Thirty Six's terrorist cell and successful attempts at resistance, much of the populace began to gain confidence in the possibility of dissidence. Pushed to their limits, inspired, and gaining the support from their own isolated groups of no-name rebels within the city, a district within Twenty Three found their bite and managed to successfully overthrow stationed Civil Protection and gain a foothold against the city's Administration. Due to a severe lack of synthetic support within the district, and wishing to minimize the severity of the reports to those in charge, the Civil Administration tasked the city's sole Civil Protection Captain with handling the dissidence, who then passed it onto the high command of his garrison to deal with.
Unsurprisingly, this backfired. The Captain's underlings deemed explosives and strategic APC missile mortaring to be sufficient in quelling the resistance within the district. While this solved the immediate problem, and scurried much of the discord out of the district, the massive disturbance from the structural damages and Earth-rumbling explosions had awakened and deeply agitated the tunneling wildlife beneath the city—much of which was so deep that it had been unaware of any human presence until the event. Soon, the human resistance was replaced with an insectoid one. Hives began to burrow from the ruined Earth and create massive dirt pits and loose ground, making much of the district unsalvageable from an infrastructural standpoint. As if it wasn't bad enough, neighboring districts had begun to panic and riot, resulting in further instability and discourse. Outraged, the Captain gave a hefty physical and verbal lashing onto those responsible for the decline in stability, and set out to snub out the issue themself by any means necessary.
Their answer was mass headcrab shelling.
The event sits as a stinging reminder for many Civil and Sectorial Administration on the reality of how quickly a stable city can collapse through mismanagement, and is often a point of reasoning for why the Benefactors keep such a tight leash on those in 'power'. The city remains a breeding ground for the ever-growing hive of antlions, and an ever-present tomb for mass hordes of undead.
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