The Pioneers

The Pioneers were assembled out of people who had each been the only one left of something.

That is how the faction formed, back in Lichdenstein: sole survivors, from unrelated disasters, who found each other. It gives them one value, held harder than a value is usually held, and the value is survival.

In 2540 a later generation of them rebuilds Pioneers Outpost on the far side of the world from where they started, and begins, cautiously, doing more than surviving.

By about 2545 they have industrialised Belucho, which is the first town to industrialise since Lichdenstein came apart.

Read that slowly. Two and a half centuries have passed in which nobody built anything at that scale, because nobody had the surplus or the nerve. The Pioneers Peninsula is where it restarts, and the people restarting it are the descendants of the last collapse.

They put up the Church of the Glowing Cross there. They send balloons to Pichon and the other settlements nearby, which is how travel works now, and which nobody has had for a long time.

They also start collecting the past.

Ancient structures are moved, whole, from across Frangfurd onto the ground between Pioneers Outpost and Belucho, and studied there. They are carried by air, under the balloons of the Orbenator Airship, which is built for the job. What they are looking for is not recorded. What they find is not recorded either.

Around the same time they lay out a simple airfield in the north, Sandstone Airfield. It sits near the middle of the world, and it will not stay simple for long.

A faction of survivors, gathering up the things that outlasted everyone who made them. It is not hard to see why that would appeal to them.

In 2563 they finish building an airship out of copper.

The Copper Maiden takes them years and is made of the wrong metal for the job by every reasonable measure, and they build it anyway, and it works.

In 2565 it goes south over Mono Monte, and that is the first crossing anybody has recorded.

Nobody has seen what is on the other side of that range in living memory or in anyone’s records. What is on the other side is the Wet Lands, and in the middle of the Wet Lands are the Ravana Ruins, which have been unvisited and unrecorded since the man who found them stopped being able to tell anyone.

Beside the ruins is Great Question, with the few people still in it.

They do three things, quickly, and all three of them matter.

They found Camp 0 at the ruins, to study the thing, deliberately, as a subject. They build the Pioneers Airstrip beside it. And they go into the village and get the survivors out.

Back north, the ground they had filled with relocated ruins is tidied up and opened to the public as the Open Air Museum of Belucho.

Nearly thirteen centuries after five men stood in those ruins and took what was in them, somebody has come back, and is taking notes instead.