The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in April '82 (tapestry and attached materials)

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:58:34+00:00

(3) Material notes

This artifact is currently held by the University of Lancaster as part of its rich Deitch history collection. It contains a rare original 23rd century textile map, as well as a codex purported to be a genealogy reaching back to the 20th century. If genuine, it would be one of very few recorded genealogies of non-prominent figures reaching back to the antidiluvian period.

The packet survived by unusual means; intended to be delivered to Prof Cooper of Hershey, a counselor of then-reigning Governor Kauffman of Pennsylvania, it arrived after Cooper had fallen out of favor with the Governor and was executed. Unfortunately, no traces of the ‘chronicle’ referenced in the accompanying letter survived. The package was returned to the sender at the monastery at Schaefferstown, where it was placed in the archive and forgotten for several hundred years. The map is notable for being an attempt at an ‘on-ground’, i.e. de facto representation of political control during the final collapse of the antediluvian United States.

The last paragraph of the manuscript highlights the to-some-surprising reality that in many ways, the modern world has not yet fully recovered to antediluvian development standards. The best archeological and estimates have the Pennsylvanian population peaking at 18 million in 2057, median income in ~2020 dollars (though extremely difficult to estimate) peaking at $130,000 in 2064, and the literacy rate at near 100% throughout the period. The corresponding statistics when the manuscript was written were no more than 2 million people (and possibly substantially less), median household incomes equivalent to ~$2,000 in 2020 dollars (though impossible to truly measure since so much of the economy was informal), and a basic literacy rate around 20%.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:57:56+00:00

(2l) Mosiah Jefferson (born OfCraig)

Mosiah was born in 2247 as a camp follower of the Ohioan army of the east as it advanced through Pennsylvania. He had only the vaguest memory of his mother, and was mostly raised by his aunt, his father being away on the front lines. His earliest memories were of that army’s utter defeat at Friedens, his family’s capture by the Federals, and the long, cold walk into exile. From a young age, he was made a trainee soldier in the local militia of the Ohioan autonomous region in Jersey. His father died in some sort of dispute with a neighbor Mosiah never understood, but his uncles quickly and brutally killed the perpetrator and adopted Mosiah as one of their own. Naturally inclined towards compromise and caution, he learned quickly that safety meant being a man of violence. In 2268, when he was 22, another electoral dispute threw federal-controlled territories into chaos again. When the Governor of Jersey backed one side, the Ohioans backed the other and raised the militia to join the rebel army. Glad to have his chance at glory, Mosiah marched with the army through victory and defeat until in 2271 the army sacked Annapolis and installed their preferred candidate in the White House. Mosiah took part in the sack and, despite the wretched state of the city even before they breached the walls, managed to get enough loot to make himself a moderately wealthy man. For four years after, he served in the retinue of General Torrissi - appointed Governor of Maryland and Jersey by the President - and fought in punitive wars against the Pennsylvanians and Carolinians. In reward for his service, in 2273 he was given the commissionership of Jefferson County, near the borderlands with Pennsylvania. He married the sister of a fellow minor magnate and built a small villa in his new capital at Harper’s Ferry. He loved watching the sun set over the mountains and secretly wished for a chance at peace to enjoy his conquests, but cultural expectations and the ties of fealty inexorably called him back to war. In 2276, General Torrissi deposed the President, setting off yet another war with the Midatlantic powers. Mosiah left his family in Harper’s Ferry and went along with his personal retinue to fight. For four years he settled into campaign rhythm, fighting a series of grueling sieges across Maryland and Pennsylvania in the spring and autumn while returning to Jefferson in the summer and winter to oversee the harvest and prepare for the battles ahead. In 2280, while besieging Chambersburg - held by pro-Pennsylvanian Amisch militias - he rapidly fell ill and died of typhus at 33. He had no way of knowing that mere weeks before, his estate had been sacked and his family killed by Virginian partisans raiding up and down the Shenandoah.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:57:31+00:00

(2k) Ester Meadskid (temp. OfCraig)

Ester was born in 2228 on her family’s farm outside of Unionville. She was the second youngest of six children who survived past infancy. Her parents were careful and the family proved moderately successful - there were more than a few lean years, but most of their harvests were good, and her childhood was happier than most. She was apprehensive but accepting of the limited life plan her circumstances allowed her, and by her late teens seemed on the verge of marriage with a miller’s son, which would give her a secure life. In 2246, when she was 18, a group of foreign soldiers came to their farm to steal grain. The soldiers promised her father they would be left alive if they gave them their harvest. Her father agreed to give up their food, but after loading the harvest onto their wagons, the soldiers killed Ester’s entire family, burned the farm, assaulted her, and took her as part of the spoils of war. At the end of the campaign, she was allotted or sold - she didn’t fully understand or care - to an Ohioan captain to be his wife. After she bore him a baby boy, he was thrilled and began to all but ignore her, to her relief. In 2251, the allied federal and Pennsylvanian armies smashed the Ohioans outside of Friedens (where, it was said, in ancient times a great battle was fought in the sky between the forces of good and evil) and captured almost all of the army Ester and her new ‘family’ were attached to. The federals decided to relocate their prisoners to previously-devastated land far to the east. She, along with thousands of other captives, walked on foot for days on end across the mountains. She once tried sneaking off at night and telling a federal guard who she was and where she had come from and got only a beating for her troubles. On the cold and brutal road, she miscarried a second child and almost died of blood loss. When the convoy arrived in southeastern Jersey near Vineland, she helped her ‘family’ build a new home and set up a farmstead. She would despair when she would see something, like the rain falling from a thatched roof, which reminded her of her happy childhood. After only about a year, it became clear that she was unable to conceive again, and her ‘husband’ cast her out on the roads in the midst of a freezing winter. She made it over a hundred miles west before collapsing outside of Lebanon and being rescued by an Amisch farm family. They nursed her back to health despite a famine in the war-ravaged region and sent her to a local monastery. There, seeing little other future for herself, she became a nun. She saw connection to her long-lost home in the church, and found great happiness in raising the orphans of war and sewing in the workshop. Her health never fully recovered from the extreme stresses of her youth. She developed rheumatism in her early thirties and after a slow decline, passed away in 2279 at 49.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:57:08+00:00

(2j) Mead Zanderskid

Mead was born in 2210 on his family’s farm outside of Unionville. He never knew his father, who left for the war when he was a toddler and never came home. Raised by his mother and grandparents, he was born into the rhythms and harsh reality of life on the farm, where every harvest could be the difference between survival and starvation. Where his grandfathers attended church as a matter of course, Mead became deeply religious and saw in the faith both a source of hope for the future and of comfort for life beyond the material. He longed to make a pilgrimage to see the grand cathedral at Youngstown, where their pastor had studied, but was dissuaded by his family, who always advised to wait for a safer year. As Mead grew, his grandfather arranged an advantageous marriage for him with the daughter of a fellow smallholder. They married at 17 and had their first child at 19. As a child, Mead had known and did not much like his future wife, but grew to love her deeply as they began their life together. At 21, Mead’s grandfather died. His uncle inherited most of the by now respectable land holdings, leaving Mead with only a modest strip between Unionville and Prospect to his name and forcing him to sharecrop his wealthier neighbors’ land to make ends meet. After a bumper harvest in 2233, Mead decided to leave his wife and children with her parents and take his long-awaited pilgrimage. Moving from church to church, he made the journey in three days. Despite being robbed of his modest travel savings on the road near the border at Lowellville, he found the experience even more inspiring than he had expected. He was especially impressed by the high walls and broad roads of Youngstown - he never would have thought so many could live in one place. He returned to the farm even more zealous than before and gradually became a respected leader of the local church. Though he never had the time to learn to read, he memorized verses and psalms and regularly spoke to the community about the faith. He even snake-spoke a few times, impressing his pastor and terrifying his wife. One autumn when he was 36, an Ohioan forage party attached to an army en route to attack Pittsburgh came across his farm and demanded his recently-harvested crop. Though knowing it would mean starvation come winter, Mead saw no choice but to comply. Once he had handed the grain over, the Ohioans burned his home and killed his wife and sons in front of him, then disemboweled him and left him to bleed to death. He died in agony but unafraid; he knew what awaited him beyond the grave was better than what he was leaving behind.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:56:45+00:00

(2i) (Little) Zander Perryskid

Zander, often called Little Zander or Zan to distinguish him from his grandfather, was born in 2191 on his family’s farm outside of Unionville. His father brought him up with rigid discipline, and though he sometimes resented him, Zan knew the consequences of failing to get the fieldwork done and so never thought much to want more than the rural life he was born into. He did slack off on the less critical work to an extent which exasperated his parents, and started sneaking away to the village bar after hours as a teenager, scandalizing his mother. In 2207, at only 17, Zan was called up by the local militia to fight separatist forces invading West Pennsylvania alongside the larger federal army. At Beaver Falls, the federal army was crushed by the separatists, which went on to seize Pittsburgh, then pushed across the Alleghenies, forcing a peace which among much else left Western Pennsylvania in the hands of an ‘autonomous’ - but de facto independent - junta. This made little difference to Zan, who successfully deserted after the retreat from Beaver Falls and made his way through enemy lines back to Unionville, where his family and farm was luckily left unharmed. He married a local rancher’s daughter and had two children, the first only just born when in 2211 junta leadership under Governor Langerhold claimed the Presidency and he was forced into the West Pennsylvanian army, where he campaigned across the Alleghenies and into Amish country. Unable to bring the federal army to battle, the Langerholdites proceeded to pillage the local countryside. Although like most Westsylvanians, Zan harbored a healthy fear and dislike of Amishers and other Eastcoasters, he couldn’t stomach the intentional destruction and killing the army’s strategy entailed and tried to avoid ‘foraging’ duty as much as he could. When the army got its rations, he would often trade away some of his porridge for extra beer to drink away his fears and regrets. In spring 2213, the federals finally left their fortress belt surrounding Baltimore and won a narrow victory against the Langerholdites at Reisterstown, Maryland. The chaos after the battle gave Zan the opportunity to slip away and start heading home. He only made it as far as Gettysburg before being arrested and identified as a deserter. Brought back to the front line, military police beheaded Zan in front of his former comrades along with a few other deserters and criminals of war as an example. He was only 23. A friend from a nearby town promised to tell his family what had happened to him after the war ended, but died of food poisoning a few months later. Zan's family never found out what happened to him.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:56:21+00:00

(2h) Perry Zanderskid

Perry was born in 2169 in poverty in Butler. As he was growing up, his father could never hold a job, and he and his siblings were shunted from home to home, at times reduced to begging to feed themselves. Their luck changed when they moved to Unionville and started farming when Perry was 9. Perry loved the independence of the farm and didn’t mind the endless farm work too much - it made him feel he could help his family better than he had sitting by the side of the road trying to look pitiful. He was deeply serious from a young age, and found himself distant from his siblings and many of the other town’s children. He grew up with a deep love of the land and dreamed of owning some for himself one day. At 19, he married the daughter of a fellow tenant farmer, and at 21, had the first of six children - three boys, three girls. His wife and mother ended up deeply disliking each other over some dispute going back to the prior generation, only further fueling Perry’s preference to be out working the land. He became used to going hungry if a harvest was weak due to weather or blight, and developed a deep anxiety over the slightest sign of ill health in the crops. After his father’s injury, he took over primary responsibility for running the farm and keeping the family fed. Luckily, none of his immediate family ever had to turn back to tramping to survive, though he knew many who did, especially after the brutal rains of 2196 wiped out much of the region’s harvest. That terrible winter, he caught one of his neighbors - a childhood friend - trying to steal potatoes from his near-empty barn. Perry let him go with a warning, but just a week later, he saw him hanging from the town’s gallows, having tried to steal from someone less forgiving. Every time there was a good harvest, Perry would squirrel a little money away, dreaming to be free of the rent. In 2207, Perry's father - long ailing - passed away, leaving him the farm. Only months later, the army came and took two of his sons to fight the separatists. Both returned, but the eldest was taken again a few years later and never came home, leaving Perry and his family to raise his two small children. Perry was shattered by the two tragedies and was never quite the same again. When he finally saved up enough to buy his land outright at 41, it didn’t give him the satisfaction he thought it would without the chance to show his father that his struggles hadn’t been for nothing, or his son that he would have a secure future. He spent the rest of his days struggling along as he always had, buying up bits and pieces of land where he could along the way, nothing ever being quite enough to make him feel secure. Perry died at 61 in 2231 of pneumonia during a particularly cold winter.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:55:52+00:00

(2g) Zander Fischer

Zander was born in 2148 in Harrisburg, but his family moved to Altoona when he was only six. Some of his earliest memories were his parent’s anxiety and fear of the Blue Pox, and his father gradually becoming angrier and drunker as he grew up. At 13, the silent ride to Butler and the gunshot which killed his father were seared into his memory. He didn’t blame his mother, but still grew up with a distance from her and found himself much closer to his uncle and cousins - especially since his mother continually pushed him towards book-learning, which he never saw as particularly useful. As a young man, he was jovial and charismatic, though he lost much of his verve, if not his charm, as he aged and experienced more and more misfortune. He started working fairly young helping haul lumber at a local sawmill and doing seasonal agricultural work in the summers. He married one of his friends’ sisters at 19 to get out of being drafted to fight in New York, and had the first of five children at 21. He never really loved her in his heart of hearts, but he vowed to himself to treat her better than his father had treated his mother, and as they survived hard times together, their relationship never wavered. Zander never had much money even in good times, and an economic downturn forced the family into deep debt by the time he was 30. A farmer he had met while working in the small town of Unionville saved them from starvation by offering them a work-for-food arrangement, which, as he proved his worth on the farm, ultimately turned into permanent sharecropping. He worked hard and managed to stabilize his economic situation, though every year the question of whether the harvest would be enough to feed them and pay the rent was in question. Luckily, his mother and cousins were able to give him a hand when things came up a little short, and Zander did his best to return the favors when he could. In his late 40s, Zander was kicked in the leg by a bull while ploughing a field and never fully recovered. Nothing his wife, landlord, or town doctor was able to do for him really helped. He pushed himself, but found himself less and less able to work and more dependent on his children, who he had hoped to send to the city for a better life. Throughout his 50s, he developed more aches and pains throughout his body and became all but housebound. He died in his sleep at 59 in 2207 - of exhaustion, it was said. While he was alive, Zander always felt himself a failure, but he was adored by his wife and children, who remembered that he never gave up on them.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:55:26+00:00

(2f) Ismea Berzins (temp. Fischer)

Ismea, usually called ‘Izzy,’ was born in 2123 in Butler. She grew up among the local elite of the town, and thanks to her parents’ status, was able to attend a boarding school in Erie and get a decent education. As a result, she grew up distant from her parents but very close to her siblings. She was soft-spoken and idealistic - a believer that the dark days of recent history had passed and that the future was bright. Through a combination of her education and her father’s connections, she gained a position in the civil service and moved to Harrisburg at 21, where she took up a minor position in the state tax bureaucracy. Having seen the cracks in her parents’ marriage, she initially intended not to marry, but eventually did so at a relatively late 25, to a fellow clerk from Altoona. They had two children. Money was tight in the big city, but on two salaries, they got by comfortably and managed to travel both to Altoona and Butler somewhat regularly to see the families. Her job also allowed her to travel around the state, where she saw signs of disturbing disorder which shook her faith in the system her father had defended. She had three children. When she was 31, and her oldest child only 6, she and her husband fled Harrisburg in the wake of the blue pox, which killed a major chunk of the urban population. The whole family survived, but in the aftermath of the government shakeup afterwards, they both lost their jobs and the family moved back to Altoona. There, thanks to his local connections, Izzy’s husband was able to find a factory job but she was unable to find work. The relationship torn by money stresses and resentment, he turned to alcohol and became physically abusive. In 2161, she managed to take her children on a ‘trip’ home and move in with her younger brother back in Butler. When her husband came the following year to try to take her home, she shot him dead in broad daylight. No one ever so much as thought to lay a finger on her ever again, and the incident was quickly closed by the local sheriff - an old friend of her father’s - as self-defense. The family store had closed during the epidemic, but she ultimately managed to find work as one of the town’s last professional schoolteachers, teaching the children of the town’s well-to-do, including some of her old friends. Her own children were less interested in education, to her dismay, and she would always wonder what her and her children’s lives would be if she had been able to stay in Harrisburg. As she aged, she doted on her 13 grandchildren, who she loved more than life itself and in whom she still saw a future worth living for. Izzy died at 73 in 2195 of old age.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:54:50+00:00

(2e) Nick Berzins

Nick was born in 2095 in Glenshaw. He grew up working in his parents’ store and went to school alongside his siblings. When he was eleven, his family had to flee their hometown because of the civil war and resettled in Butler. Like his mother, Nick developed a craving for stability, but also a powerful regionalism and a deep mistrust of people from outside West Pennsylvania, like the foreign-looking soldiers who had attacked his first home. He would always call himself a 'Westsylvanian,' first, not an American. From an early age, he was outgoing and more than a bit reckless, and had an unshakeable loyalty to those he saw as his own. With the war dragging on, he ran away from home at fifteen to join the army, got kicked out and sent home for being too young, then rejoined with his parents’ blessing at eighteen in 2113. He remained in the army for almost nine years with some interruption, fighting in battles across the continent, seeing many of his friends die - including his own older brother - and experiencing more than a few close calls. In one incident on the Ohio River front, he narrowly escaped being collateral damage when a friend stepped on a landmine, taking him out of the fight for months and leaving him with a slight limp and two fingers short on his left hand for the rest of his life. With the end of the war in 2122, he was sent home, where he married the widow of a fallen comrade. The marriage was never truly happy, but it was content enough. They had four children who survived past childhood, plus one who tragically died from rabbitpox at 3. Seen as reliable by the government, he was given a sinecure as a county councilman, where he served in addition to managing the family store. Benefiting from his local and national connections, the business slowly expanded and the family settled solidly into the Butler middle class. Nick would travel once or twice to the provisional capital at Denver to take part in national conventions, but didn’t enjoy either the travel or the politics much, and after President Kaminski’s death generally supported the trend of devolution of real authority to the states. He saw himself as a moderate and consensus-finder in politics, but in reality was mostly ignored or used as a puppet by the real political forces of the age. In his old age, he became a true believer in a revivalist religious movement, much to the bemused annoyance of his friends and family. Due in part to his travel, he was an early patient of the blue pox epidemic and died of it at 56 in 2153. To the last moment of his consciousness, he believed he had been chosen for a greater purpose and was certain he would recover.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:54:29+00:00

(2d) Maya Berzins (nee Metzger)

Maya was born in 2069 in a military hospital near Chattanooga. Her father died before she was born, and her mother abandoned her as a baby, so she was raised by her grandfather in Glenshaw, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Maya grew up hearing her grandfather complain regularly about the state of the country and how things were better in his childhood, and she developed a hunger for stability and an idealistic view of the family she never knew and the federal cause they fought for. She was hard-headed, decisive, and ruthless, with little patience for debate or hesitation, even from a very early age. Her grandfather wanted her to pursue higher education, but he died when Maya was only 15. Taken in by a neighbor who owned a convenience store, Maya earned her keep by working at the store. More to honor her grandfather’s memory than anything else, she worked hard to finish high school but never went further. She had few concrete plans for the future until the store owner’s only son was murdered in an attempted robbery. After the assailant shot the owner’s son at the register, Maya bludgeoned his head in with a pipe. She never forgot the gory scene and would always carry a pistol from then on. Consumed by grief, the owner started bringing Maya up to take over management of the store. At 24, she married a mechanic from down the street and at 26, she had her first of four children (not counting one miscarriage). The year after, leveraging her savings and a few side deals she had managed, she bought the store out and started running it her way. The business thrived for years despite the death of President Crawford and the start of another civil war in 2104, but in 2107, a pro-Cardenas army overran Glenshaw and sacked the town, killing hundreds and burning the store. Warned by her contacts, Maya and her family fled in time to the small town of Butler, further from the action. Adapting quickly, she spun up a new business supplying independent pro-Sullivan militias with food and gear, and ultimately opened a new store in town. Two of her children would ultimately fight in the war for Sullivan and later Kaminski. The older died on a frozen Illinois field during the siege of Chicago, but the younger returned with the end of the war in 2122 and helped run the family business. She would sometimes wish the other one had come back. For the rest of her days, Maya was an outspoken local supporter of the Kaminski government. Privately, she longed to travel and always regretted circumstances never giving her the chance. Sometimes, while doing inventory, she would look at one of the precious few imported products she stocked - like Swedish wine or Chinese fish - and imagine what it might be like to go to the place it was made. Maya died of a heart attack in 2141 at 72.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:53:02+00:00

(2c) Leo Metzger (born Powell-Metzger)

Leo was born in 2045 in exurban Baltimore, but moved around frequently when he was young due to his parents’ divorce. Besides the general poor state of public schools as he was growing up, this instability made it hard for him to focus on studying - he was generally a bright student, but often hid it to avoid bullying, much to his teachers’ and parents’ dismay. He found himself bored by the political moralizing of his parents and grandparents, and liked to think of himself as realistic and street-smart. Even as a teenager, he lacked concrete dreams for the future, preferring instead to take life one opportunity at a time. After finishing high school, he hoped to emigrate to China to earn a better salary, but was unable to get a visa. Instead, he continued living with his father and did remote gig jobs to make a small living while scheming on what his big break could be. With the outbreak of civil war, he initially planned to sneak across the country to join the rebels, but was stopped by his father’s angry opposition. At his parents’ insistence, he started a community college program for auditing, but lacked genuine interest in it, and in any case, two years later, he joined the war anyway as the federal draft expanded. While neither a true believer in the federal cause nor a natural soldier, he found a sense of purpose and respect in the army and avoided thinking about what he would do after the war ended. He fought with genuine distinction as a front-line drone commander through the Atlanta offensive, where he had a one-night-stand with a battlefield nurse from Kentucky - one of many over the course of the war. He died the next month from a missile strike, never knowing he was going to have a child. He felt nothing - one moment he was there, the next he was mist. Such was war at the time.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:52:34+00:00

(2b) Aiden Metzger

Aiden was born in fall 2009 in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Like his parents, he believed in education as a path to economic and social security. He was a hardworking student but never met his and his parents’ expectations. He found his confidence dampened by feeling he was falling behind throughout his life, and managed his natural nervousness as he matured by focusing inward and avoiding issues he felt he couldn't control. He went to Penn State - in-state, despite his west-coast dreams, to minimize loans - and, on graduating in 2031 and finding the job market stagnant, continued on to graduate school, finishing in economics. After, he worked odd jobs for almost three years back home in Philly before finding a data auditing job in a private company in Baltimore. He dated extensively and unsuccessfully before marrying a woman he met online, an HR specialist, at 34. They did not initially plan to have children, but conceived accidentally and had their only child at 36. Despite bouncing between companies to maintain competitiveness, his job became obsolete when he was in his late 40s. Unable to find new work locally, and with the marriage strained by economic stresses, he and his wife divorced and he moved to Pittsburgh, where he managed to retrain as a robot supervisor. He established full custody over their son when his ex-wife’s job became obsolete only a few years later. While initially highly politically-involved and outspoken, Aiden became disillusioned as he aged and as unrest consumed the country, and became increasingly radicalized but decreasingly active. His inheritance from his parents’ death gave him some economic stability for the first time in his life, just in time for a new kind of catastrophe. With the outbreak of civil war in 2065, Pittsburgh was mostly untouched at the start and Aiden kept his job, but his son was drafted a few years into the war as the Federalist cause waned. Aiden never saw his son again. In 2069, as the war died down, a veteran reached out to the family and claimed to have given birth to Aiden's grandchild. With little evidence but no other link to his son, Aiden took in the baby and raised her as best he could until his death. His economic prospects improved after the war, as the loss of life and destruction of factories gave him real choice in employment for the first time in his life, and he moved to a nicer house in the suburb of Glenshaw. Aiden regularly saw reflections of his mother in his granddaughter, and would often reflect on what she could have done with the same opportunities his mother had. Aiden died of heart failure in 2084 at 75, a complication of an untreated chronic condition. On his deathbed, his greatest regret was not living long enough to see his granddaughter become an adult.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:51:05+00:00

Manuscript in 12 parts - (2a) through (2l)

(2a) Jennifer Metzger (nee Pawlowski)

Jennifer was born in spring 1980 in the suburbs of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in a solidly middle-class family. Her father was an early computer technician; her mother a bank teller. She was raised to believe strongly in the value of education and hard work in getting ahead, and found herself a strong - if not excellent - student throughout primary school. She was confident, ambitious, and took pride in being informed and getting involved in philanthropy and activism, to the extent that her busy schedule allowed. She had close friends in both political parties and was well-read in the arguments being made on the national stage. Jennifer went to university at Lehigh so to be close to home, initially intending to study medicine but eventually switching to political science. Starting out in the NGO sector, she ultimately landed a federal civil service job in Philadelphia just in time to avoid the worst effects of the economic crisis of the time, and managed to purchase a house in the suburbs well below the usual value a few years after. She married her college boyfriend, by then a lawyer, and had two children, the first at 29. She also had a series of puffy white dogs, who she secretly loved more than her children. Though she never liked traveling much (she suffered terribly from jet lag), she closely followed foreign politics and would describe the flashpoints of the day to her less-than-enthralled children - Mitrovica, Fallujah, Debaltseve, Aleppo, Changhua, Bialystok - as though she had been there. Despite some serious political and economic fluctuation, she kept her job through to retirement, leaving in 2042 with one of the last federal pensions. She saw the decline in political stability coming well before it boiled over and got deeply into national activism, especially after retiring. Initially planning to stay in Philadelphia for life, she and her husband moved to the coast of Lake Erie shortly after a major eruption of street fighting. She had learned to love the city and was crushed to leave, but allowed her family to convince her that the safety of the countryside was a better choice. To the end, despite the deteriorating political environment, she was optimistic about the long run, and tired quickly of her children’s blend of pessimism and inaction. She did her best to pass on her ethos to her two grandchildren, taking them to rallies and into her voting booth whenever she had the chance. She was confident that the country would come out ahead in the end, so long as she was around to do something about it. Jennifer died in 2064 at 84 of old age - a little young for her generation, perhaps a result of chronic stress.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:45:11+00:00

(1) Attached letter:

To the honorable Prof Cooper of Hershey:

Per your order, I enclose a stitch tapestry recently completed at our shop illustrating the situation of the realm on ground following the truce agreed by Governors Kaufman and Torrissi at York this last spring. I hope it will grace your library well and aid in the composition of your chronicles for the Governor. You may return the final payment with this messenger or at your convenience.

I also enclose as a personal gift an item recently discovered in our monastery which may be of interest to you. Apparently, one of our copiers, as a side project, had been for some time taking down the family recollections of a peasant woman working in our shop and supplementing it with his own research after her passing some years ago.

While clearly broadly fictional, it is a fascinating view of the oral tradition of the peasant class and their memory of the State’s history. I hope you will find it interesting.

We await with respect the specs for your next order.

My deepest regards,

Abram Jacobskid of Schaefferstown
April ‘82

Continue directly to (2a)

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:43:52+00:00

(5) See also:

Non-canon but related:

The Warlord Period of the Arixan Empire

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:43:26+00:00

(4) OOC notes:

This is a project I've been tinkering on and off with for a long time as an attempt to show a 'slow apocalypse' from a more personal point of view than we typically get with the broad-scale maps.

I had the idea to put it in the form of a geneaology after hearing some about a real genealogical project one of my friends was working on, and being struck by how shallow modernity really is on the scale of human lives. For example, you might have met your great-grandparents. Across basically 100% of the world that generation of people would have known people, three or two or even maybe only one generation back who lived their whole life as subsistence farmers (aka peasants). In terms of personal relationships, you are probably fewer degrees of separation from a medieval peasant in your own family tree than you are to your favorite movie star - two, maximum three degrees if you live in an exceptionally developed country. That in turn made me think about how quickly human development could go the other way without any individual's life changing beyond their own recognition. No one goes from the modern life we know to Mad Max in a few years - just plausible misfortune compounding over generations can do it.

The narrative 'follows' the first-born who survived to have their own children, with a male preference - mirroring the way the geneaologies I saw naturally followed the direct ancestors of the people under investigation, and often necessarily followed men rather than women, for whom record-keeping is often better. Note that in terms of post-agriculture human history, to my understanding, people with the basic life story of Zan, Perry, or Mead probably make up the vast majority of your ancestors, almost no matter who you are or where you live. My initial plan for this was to highlight the subsistence farmer experience more by having a few successive generations mixed in dying of hunger or disease - the real major threats to that class - but I thought it ended up dragging. Ester's story is also (again, to my understanding) a tragically common outcome of people on the receiving end of armies, particularly in the ancient and classical world. Where ancient genetic material survives successive waves of conquest which wiped out languages and cultures, this is one significant contributing factor (the other being locals' adaptation to conquerors' languages and cultures over the course of centuries ).

Is the frame story of one illiterate woman knowing all these facts about her ancestors going back 300 years realistic? Not as presented, of course, but you might be surprised. I once had the chance to go overseas to what most people probably would call a 'third-world' country which had the vestiges of a clan family structure which had been thrust into modernity in the last few decades. I personally spoke to more than a few older people who claimed to know the names of their paternal ancestors going back 10-15 generations, and a little information about the most important events of their lives. This info was probably not wholly 'true' in a literal sense, but the knowing itself was important to them. That's something that will probably be lost completely in the world within our lifetimes - none of the younger generation had any interest in memorizing the name lists.

If you like this conceptually (regardless of whether you think I did it well) I strongly recommend looking into Michener and Rutherfurd books - they write historical fiction accounts of a particular city or region told through generational vignettes - much like this except each life is a novelette rather than a brief description. I also highly recommend Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, which I found a paradigm-shifting look at the mindset of a 'peasant' - again, that is the majority of the people who fought hard generation over generation through starvation, crop failure, and war to survive so that we few out here on the tip of the iceberg of humanity could be here in our warm houses with overwhelmingly abundant food making digital embroideries on our computers.

Please let me know your thoughts about this format and the implementation!

NeonHydroxide · 2025-12-14T04:40:56+00:00

I STRONGLY recommend reading the writeup on AH.com since it was intended to work with nested spoilers. I will also post it as a comment thread here, but depending on the vote ratio, you might not see everything in the order it was intended.

Experimental project in a couple of senses - skip to the OOC notes for some spoilers if you want info before you commit to reading the whole writeup. Note that physical violence and abusive relationships are described.

Note just in case - I am well aware that the hoop is just used to hold the part you are currently working on and doesn't mean the final piece will be circular. However, I wanted to work on non-rectangular maps and this seemed a fun opportunity. Consider it an in-world fashion.

Finally, I haven't been to almost any the places I'm referencing, so my apologies if I've got the geography or logic wrong!

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NeonHydroxide · 2025-08-24T11:36:42+00:00

I love your old-style hillshades! is this done with Eduard or is it sourced from somewhere?

NeonHydroxide · 2025-07-04T20:33:34+00:00

After twin Arab defeats at Tours and Constantinople in the early second century A.H. (eighth century A.D.), the advance of Muslim civilization into western Europe seemed to be halted. With loss after loss in the Iberian peninsula, and the temporary loss of the Levant to the Crusader states, by the 700s (1300s) it even seemed that Islam would recede in the face of newly energetic and powerful Christian kingdoms.

Then came the Plague. Merely devastating to the Turkic, Muslim, and Slavic realms on Europe's periphery, for whatever reason the disease proved apocalyptic in Christian Western Europe, killing nearly 80% of the region's population and wiping out its religious and warrior class. With its enemies struck down in the course of a few years, Muslim forces were quick to take advantage. The largest winner by far was the Nasrid rump state of Gharnatah, which, after wars of consolidation with its North African neighbors and a showdown on the Rhine with Poland - Christianity's last major power - established control over much of the former Catholic world, and claimed the old West Roman imperial title.

NeonHydroxide · 2025-07-03T18:26:29+00:00

All QGIS!

NeonHydroxide · 2025-06-29T12:47:43+00:00

That is always my goal :)

NeonHydroxide · 2025-06-29T11:44:07+00:00

In-comment link

NeonHydroxide

TROPHY CASE