When Platinum met with the leader of the Pacific Republic that had formed on the West Coast, she expected a clever wordsmith capable of winning people over through political negotiations and the like. A politician who gave rousing speeches or a salesman that wheeled and dealed would have been much more like Neon than what she found.
General McCallister wasn’t just giving himself a title after the assimilation began by calling himself a general. He had earned the role long before mana changed the world. She found him sensible and respectable, if a bit tight-lipped and militaristic. It wasn’t that he wasn’t capable of politicking, it was that his style of negotiation was specific to his professional career, and was counter to what she expected. He was clearly an exceptional leadership figure, considering the loyalty engendered in those around him, but Platinum was no bootlicker, and she made sure to form her own opinion to give Neon a proper assessment of who and what he was dealing with.
The man still sported his pre-mana uniform and was a relatively impressive level 80 when she met with him in a nondescript military style barracks at the edge of settlement territory. The General had just finished a daily session of physical training that he held with rotating groups of low level residents. Rather than meet with the ‘foreign dignitary’ right away, he made her wait until his party finished defeating his personally determined quota of monsters. Platinum wasn’t sure if he was posturing, but the simple choice to prioritize relative nobodies in his own settlement over what was effectively an ambassador was a clear message. Whether the message was meant for her or his residents wasn’t clear, but it was effective either way. Platinum understood that he felt respect was a two-way street.
General McCallister wasn’t the Champion of any settlement, but he had maintained order within a pre-mana chain of command that had him as the highest ranked survivor of the known armed forces. Apparently, he had rejected being Chosen with aplomb, taking his oath to the lost country too seriously to accept any others. His sidearm may not have worked, but the interloper knew his intention when he drew and pulled the trigger without further hesitation. It was a clear final response to the demand for shifting his loyalty to deliver the planet to their hands, ‘or else’. Straightforward, clear, and open resistance was his modus operandi. Not exactly diplomatic, Platinum noted, but how much of the story was for the benefit of his troops and how much was the truth was unknown.
The Champion of Silvervalley was someone who took orders directly from the General and all the other settlements fell in line once they demonstrated enough competence to be worthy of accepting aid. Platinum didn’t think McCallister was much of a civilian leader though. He was completely focused on territorial security and maintaining peace rather than rebuilding society or anything like that. The way he saw it, the assimilation was a time of war. There would be a time for civil society to pick up the pieces only if they survived, and he intended to organize the fight until then.
Who were they fighting? Anyone that threatened them. While that put the Primal Constructs at the top of the list, it left their opposition open to humans as well. The General wasn’t shy about that fact when he learned she had come from a highly ranked uncontacted settlement, but he relaxed when she gave him Neon’s ambassadorial spiel. She thought it figured that a military man would be a sucker for the official nature of Neon’s prepared words of cooperation. There was a sort of ceremonial formality in Neon’s offer of friendship that met the General's expectations. While it was clear that McCallister defaulted to a general idea of Team Humanity, he was guarded against threats, both foreign and domestic, seeing his fledgling Pacific Republic as a fragile hope for a free future that needed protecting.
After her time spent with the General, Platinum did her due diligence to confirm Silvervalley wasn’t just blowing smoke when she met with them: claiming much more influence than they truly had, while also testing to see if the General was more dictator than defender. It wouldn’t be impossible for the entire loyalty, order, and respect show to be theater designed to trick someone like her.
Silvervalley was a huge settlement, so it would certainly be influential. McCallister’s troops had erected shelters for millions of people, turning the desert territory into a massive, but extremely well organized and growing refugee camp. The simplification of logistics, thanks to mana, meant they were highly capable of meeting the needs of their residents.
The settlement had inherited the now mostly submerged greater Los Angeles area, while being close enough to have combined with survivors from Las Vegas and the general southwest region. The population was at least as high as Neon Park’s, and the territory certainly rivaled their own, extending several hundred miles beyond the shard. There were even a handful of top ranked individuals on the leaderboards among the peacekeepers, which meant those she met weren’t completely surprised or intimidated by her own level.
Still, she left General McCallister’s headquarters with a response letter addressed to Neon and went north along the new coastal settlements to have them independently explain the dynamic of the Pacific Republic. Platinum was uniquely suited to confirming stories since she could travel faster than word of her visit spread. It was easy enough for her to ditch the military spies that had been monitoring her from the shadows while in Silvervalley with her speed alone. There would be no hard feelings on either side for that bit of caution.
The settlement in Sequoia National Park was the first in a chain of ocean-side and thickly forested territories. It was named Crescent Bay, which made the place confusing, since she hadn’t expected to find the ocean so soon. Platinum was an East Coast girl, so her knowledge of the West Coast was rather limited, but as she understood it, the California Valley was now the California Sea, and the Sequoia settlement was named after a particular Crescent Meadow where the civilization shard had landed.
In any case, they were fully on board with the alliance, from top to bottom. They even had another Champion that worked directly beneath the General. It was a pleasant enough place despite the militant structure. They had developed into a kind of treetop city. Rope bridges connected circular platforms that wrapped around each enormous tree. Each cluster supported multiple buildings in the center, high above the ground. Her first impression was that they were like bird houses with spectacular views of the encroaching Pacific Ocean in the distance, but the feeling that each tree was essentially a city block settled in surprisingly quickly.
It was a style that had been adopted by most of the forested settlements on the new coast. They had their own Primal Constructs that occupied the forest floors and elevating their dwellings had made life significantly easier on a day to day basis. It was kind of the opposite of what New York had to do to avoid their local Gargoyle monsters in the skies, where they ended up primarily in the underground of the subway tunnels.
Second in the chain was a settlement in Yosemite and the last that she visited was in Tahoe National Forest. All three settlements confirmed the voluntary nature of the Republic, the competence of General McCallister’s peacekeepers, Silvervalley’s dominance, and the open cooperation with the more northern Cascadia Alliance. They seemed even more solid than Neon Park’s loose cooperation with their neighboring settlements, so she didn’t feel the need to continue checking within the Republic.
She had been to enough burrough meetings to know how contentious they could be, but the Pacific Republic appeared more stratified, with Silvervalley taking the clear lead and the others accepting their place. Back home, everyone thought they were the next Neon, if only they would get the chance.
No one that Platinum spoke to openly angled for General McCallister’s position, even when she revealed she represented a potentially powerful outside alliance that could rival his leadership. They were boring, unwilling to merely entertain the idea of being backed by anyone else. It was a very different dynamic when compared to the block, borough, and settlement leaders back home.
Three topics came up repeatedly throughout the Republic’s settlements. The first was General McCallister’s plan to subjugate the Fallen Zone, bolstering their newest ally in Kansas by taming the wild areas to their south, and the future plans of reclaiming the rest of West and Middle America. It was clear that he had ambitions of rebuilding a superpower, this time including the closest allies into the whole with the incorporation of both Canadian and Mexican settlements from the start.
McCallister was mobilizing their army, actively seeking volunteers from the entire alliance. He had even invited Platinum to join in on the fun as a way to tempt her into either joining them or dragging her own settlement into the alliance, but the other settlements all seemed to be extraordinarily confident in the General’s ability to succeed. Reaching the East Coast would come afterwards, but the primary train of thought behind the conquest of the Fallen Zone was to ease future burdens.
The Siege Event had spooked them into forming the alliance after more than half of the other nearby settlements fell, and though the remaining settlements succeeded thanks to disciplined soldiers under the General, they were worried about the next coordinated attack from the alien invaders. The Fallen Zone could be nothing else other than a powerful foothold for the aliens to take advantage of, and they wanted to smite it before it developed any further.
Platinum had peeked in on the Fallen Zone herself, at least from the Oklahoman panhandle into Texas, and it was just more monsters as far as she could tell, but she dared not explore beyond the fringes. She could easily sense that more powerful monsters lingered in the region. General McCallister was looking at a difficult campaign in the future.
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The second topic spoken among the West Coast settlements was how the negotiations with the powerful twin settlements run by the Navajo Nation and the Apache Bands were going. Evidently the Native American tribes were independently powerful, with people in the Pacific Republic believing their advantage had something to do with them receiving better classes than the rest of them. Platinum detected some misplaced jealousy and assumed it had more to do with their ability to adapt and fight more quickly than the other settlements. They were containing the Fallen Zone’s westward expansion, after all. They would have had plenty of opportunities to fight and gain experience.
The twin settlements being a major topic of conversation had her regretting her choice to travel North. The Cascadia Alliance was basically the other half of the Pacific Republic, merely having a loose cooperative pact amongst themselves before they joined General McCallister’s organization. Her visit with their southernmost territory in Oregon was brief and similar enough to Sequoia, Yosemite, and Tahoe, for her to conclude they were two parts of the same whole.
The third topic that was on the resident’s lips was the Envoy of ‘Chakram’ that had visited the Sonora settlement, levying threats, and demanding they join some other alliance in Central America. Apparently, nothing had come from the interaction, with the Envoy retreating rather suddenly after admitting to hearing voices, but the Pacific Republic had become more concerned over their potential southern neighbors. They were aware of the Yucatan settlement based on the leaderboards, but they were surprised that the more southern Sinaloa settlement hadn’t been the first to be contacted. In fact, because the Fallen Zone extended south toward Mexico City from Texas, the Pacific Republic had believed they were separated from the Yucatan settlement due to a band of extra dangerous wild territory. The appearance of an Envoy from further south led them to reconsider their scouting focus. Platinum’s appearance certainly reduced the mystery of the East Coast, anyway.
Platinum retained as much information as she could, planning on passing it all along to Neon, but she wasn’t particularly concerned with the internal developments of the other set of settlements. The simple fact that so many existed and were open to cooperation was news enough for her to bring back home.
Neon was the kind of guy that saw the big picture before it was clear to Platinum. She had believed it was simple business acumen before, when she was working in the nightclub, developed through his expensive dorky education, but it had translated straight into the assimilation in an uncanny way. They didn’t teach apocalyptic community building and safety measures in the ivy league, or at least she didn’t think so, but Neon was succeeding regardless.
Neon had managed to keep the northeastern region safe, even without all of the militaristic training that the west was relying on. Her last fight with a Field Boss, even with the Pacific Republic’s and the entire Heartland Settlement’s aid, confirmed that she would prefer to avoid open conflict with such creatures. They were clearly not designed in a way that individuals should be fighting them on their own, requiring teamwork and numbers to manage their larger sweeping abilities. She was more thankful than ever for Neon’s proactive approach to securing their own territory.
He had been interested in making sure they remained connected to other settlements, but a convenient side effect was reducing the development of the nearby monsters and making her life easier back home. It was just another example of Neon recognizing an issue and subtly making sure the burden would be eased in a roundabout way while actively engaging with other more apparent goals.
Platinum had known Neon for too long to believe he ever acted completely unintentionally. Neon was way too smart to have sent her on a wild goose chase without an ulterior motive. Of course Ghost Reef wasn’t in Colorado. Her original mission had been a trick. He probably narrowed down the possibilities as soon as he looked up the potential locations. He had sent her specifically to do exactly what she ended up doing: find other settlements and network with them.
She didn’t think he had correctly predicted the extent of networking opportunities he was setting up by sending her on a continental journey, but once she was presented with them, she had to follow through. She doubted he expected her to actually reach the West Coast, but he must have anticipated her bumping into someone on her long trip. Platinum’s outwardly uninterested attitude was generally a facade. The truth was that she cared quite a lot and took her responsibilities as seriously as anyone else. He knew her personality better than anyone.
She was a powerful representative of what she believed was the most important human settlement on the entire planet. Her elevated opinion of Neon Park wasn’t due to ego, though a more narcissistic person might come to the same conclusion as she had. No, her opinion was based on the community that had been cultivated with Neon’s guidance.
Platinum had visited more settlements than anyone else on the planet, and that was a claim she was completely confident in making. It would take extraordinary circumstances for anyone to beat her worldliness. Her assessment was that Neon Park had managed to transition to post-apocalyptic civilization more cleanly than anyone. The rest were surviving well enough, but from her perspective they were balancing on a knife’s edge, lucky that individual personalities had risen to the occasion, but able to be toppled over by all sorts of difficulties. Those difficulties would come; more settlement events were inevitable. She hoped that people could hang on to what civilization shards survived.
Other major cities that she visited, like Chicago and Denver, lacked the civilization shard to give them the same chance. People who stuck it out were increasingly pressured by the Primal Constructs until they would fall too far behind, but with the way Neon was spreading Neon Park’s influence, chaining other settlements together and expanding their territory, and how General McCallister was expanding influence, those stuck elsewhere only needed to hold out long enough to learn that there was potentially a safe place in the northeast or the west coast. The trip would be a new challenge, but if they had already survived long enough to be considering it, they would find a way. Then, their presence would further bolster the settlements, opening up more opportunities for others to do the same thing.
On the West Coast, the militant attitude was more necessary. After the assimilation began they had a much more chaotic initiation with the settlements. They fought amongst themselves, devolving into panicked havoc as they played king of the hill with the shards until General McCallister proved to be in command of the strongest force and installed his own troops at each of the settlements. Back in Neon Park, defeating the early undead threat and then the cop army’s incompetence turned out to be decisive factors in their own success, establishing the hierarchy with Platinum and Neon at the top much earlier without the need of larger armies and factions. The silent support of some of the strongest borough commanders helped maintain the peace they established at the beginning as various forces grew.
Either way, both coasts had to conquer themselves in order to generate strong foundational leadership. Platinum came to the conclusion that the success of settlements was based on competition.
Neon knew what he was doing. He had expertly navigated them through the apocalypse thus far. She clenched her fist around a solidlight as she whipped herself through the air. Beneath her, it was a rarely interrupted sea of overgrown and snowy fields.
At this point she was approaching the outskirts of Detroit after investigating rumors that there was some form of settlement in the Minneapolis area. The rumors had spread to the isolated Kansans, so she made a slight detour up north for the last part of her trip. She didn’t find any settlements, but she did confirm what Neon Park’s Toronto allies believed, that most of the Great Lakes were just one Great Lake now. Most of Eastern Wisconsin and Northern Michigan were underwater. Minneapolis was a cold coastal town, but if anyone had lingered there, they had moved on before Platinum arrived or they stayed hidden in her presence.
Platinum had been all over the continent, but for the most part, if there were groups of people holding out in the wilderness, they were too wary of strangers to reveal themselves. She didn’t think the space between settlement territory was completely empty, but the apocalypse had created an amount of distrust that would be hard to overcome.
The trip to the north completed the picture she had formed of the continent. Her experience further south, where the Mississippi had widened until it was more of an inland sea than a river, outlined a major divide after she traveled down the northeast coast, then through the middle of America until she worked her way up the west coast. She felt like she had a pretty decent idea of the major changes in the human geography of most of North America.
The surviving settlements were clustered in the north east, between New York City, Boston, Niagara, Toronto, and Philadelphia, with two more groups in weaker positions north and south of Washington DC and one union group clinging to the dry section of Detroit: five shards in total. Most of the territory in between the civilization shards was covered by one or another, establishing a safe-ish north eastern corridor, at least relative to the rest of the land she crossed.
Then there was a strip of civilization shards along the new West Coast, beginning down in Mexico and going north all the way into Vancouver. Supposedly there was a settlement as far as Alaska, but Platinum had developed the impression that it was a settlement in the classic sense, like DC and Detroit, as if people were merely holding out in the frigid north without an actual shard, but insisting they were equally fortified.
The main outlier was Alex Nova’s centrally located shard in southwestern Kansas, and to a lesser extent the Arizona and New Mexico tribal settlements, and finally the Yucatan. All the rest of the civilization shards distributed across the continent must have been lost in the early days or in fighting afterwards. In total, she guessed there were, at most, 20 civilization shards in North America, and that was if she was generously assuming a handful remained uncontacted by either coastal alliance. With almost 250 settlements on the leaderboards, Platinum couldn’t help but wonder how they were distributed in the rest of the world.
The Fallen Zone was certainly the biggest threat to their enormous continent, claiming all of the American South and drifting down into Mexico after being contained by the tribal settlements and the Heartland, but there were so many pockets of unexplored territory, she doubted it would be the last place to flare up.
She wondered what Neon would want to do, though she suspected she would be back in Kansas eventually.