Blight (TU)

The Blight or Midwestern Blight Zone is a swath of tainted land in the center of the Federated States of America.

History

The Blight was created in November 2054 at the height of the Aberrant War. The FBI sought to arrest Aberrant cult leader Calvert Wycoff at his compound in Hastings, Nebraska; instead of surrendering, Wycoff killed himself in a massive explosion of quantum. The initial burst of plasma spread out in a radius of two hundred kilometers, obliterating most of the state of Nebraska. A second wave of unidentified energy spread more than one thousand kilometers - engulfing the rest of Nebraska, the entire state Kansas, as well as large parts of Missouri, Iowa, and Colorado.

The following months revealed the true extent of the damage done. Plants and animals died en mass in the area affected by the second wave of Wycoff's explosion, or mutated unrecognizably. On the edges of the blast zone, food crops that did sprout were nutritionally inferior. The high-yield soy and wheat varieties on which the country's food system depended would not germinate anywhere in North America. The ensuing famine and social unrest lead to the military coup that formed the Federated States of America.

Unity Age

The original Blight shrank rapidly, as the taint faded without an active use of Aberrant powers around to sustain it. The core Blight Zone is sustained by a secret underground city of Aberrants in hiding, though they are not sufficiently organized or powerful to pose a threat. Still, occasional raids and incursions were considered serious enough that in 2110, the FSA signed a treaty with the Fifth Legion establishing the LAST Zone around the remnants of the Blight.

The Blight Project was established by the Psi Orders, primarily Orgotek and the Aesculapian Order, in 2111. The FSA had largely treated the interior of the Blight as a no-go zone, but the Blight Project systematically mapped the affected areas and began experimenting with taint-resistant crops. Research outposts were established within the inner Transition Zone, in cities like Worthington, Minnesota; Garden City, Kansas; and Chillicothe, Missouri.

Geography

The most damaged area of the Blight Zone remains the 50km radius around Hastings, where the few surviving life-forms are mutated beyond all recognition. Beyond this core area is simply a dead zone; with no plant life to control erosion, many areas have lost all topsoil, and look more like the Moon than the Midwest. At the edges of the zone, enough plant life - hardy grasses and shrubs, mostly - remains to forestall erosion, providing an illusion of normalcy, though oddly mutated specimens still crop up periodically

Concentric rings of FSA and Fifth Legion defenses divide the Blight from the rest of the world. The LAST zone, 350 km in radius, is the true edge of the Blight, but additional fences beyond this perimeter prevent unauthorized visitors from venturing in.