Anon11/21/25, 10:28No.6335775
Fun discussion to wake up to. Here's some requested background lore in order to get us back on track.In the days leading up to the 7 Hour War, humanity was already struggling hard. The Portal Storms caused immense damage both in and of themselves and with the Xenian life they scattered all over the surface of the Earth. Governments evacuated areas that their overstretched and unprepared militaries couldn't secure, with entire regions depopulated and moved into refugee camps established in major cities. These cities, with their concentration of the majority of people and pre-existing defensive perimeters, would eventually become the numbered capital-C Cities of the Combine occupation. Not all people were inside these cities at the time of Humanity's surrender, naturally. Some regions were able to be swept of Xenian life and remained as vitally important food-producing regions. Ports, power plants, water treatment facilities, and intercity railroad lines that lay outside urban green zones were often garrisoned and maintained in order to keep what remained of society functioning. Military units small and large were in the field on various operations. Some people just plain didn't want to be evacuated, and stuck by their homes and property, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone.
When the surrender was announced at the conclusion of the 7 Hour War, many of these disparate facilities and groups lay down their weapons and assimilated into the Combine's authority as ordered, but many also did not. These groups would become the nucleus of the Resistance during the occupation years ahead.The group that our boy Hugo ended up falling in with before the start of the Quest is referred to as, somewhat optimistically, the Central European Command, a polyglottal mixture of City refugees, rural holdouts, and fragmented military remnants from several nations of continental Europe. While partially decentralized, there is an enigma of a leader, referred to only as the "Old Man" and popularly theorized to be anything from a former officer in the German MAD to the leader of a pre-War commune. The Old Man leads the broad majority of the CEC around by the nose with his vanguard of greying ex-military men and hastily-trained post-War militiamen.
Operating mainly in the border regions between what was Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic and keeping a wide but persistent orbit of the three now-Combine cities of Berlin, Dresden, and Prague, the group drifts between regions scavenging food, searching for unpilfered Cold War military stockpiles, and engages in light acts of guerilla warfare; ambushing the occasional intercity razor train or road patrol. Mainly though, the Central European Command, likely numbering no more than 1,500 people in all, abides by the strategy broadly agreed-upon by the wider global Resistance movement, the Uprising Plan.