Bonjour, mon amis.
When last we spoke, we were talking about how New Orleans survived the twin disasters of 2005, got bought by Ares and in the course of those 5 years, put itself in a position to become a corporate boom town by 2010, a truly remarkable feat.
Now we're going to speed up a bit. There's a lot we can say about this period of history but for the sake of brevity, we'll keep to the most significant events that affected the New Orleans Sprawl during this tumultuous time in history. You want clean and organized, go buy Phillipe Johns' "A History of the Crescent: 100 years of change, 1950-2050" and wade through all 1200 pages.
Leading the charge of the doom and gloom that heralded the Awakening is VITAS. A full 25% of the world's population died during the 2 years of the plague including 87.5 million inside the United States and a disproportionate number of those came from the good ol' state of Louisiana. The high humidity and swamps and the polluted waters of such let the disease run wild among the local population.
It's hard to overstate the effect VITAS had on the world. New Orleans had already become a very divided city, and that division became startlingly apparent during the course of the disease. The Central Business District and the French Quarter were fully rebuilt, as were important industrial areas around the docks. However, the proposed rebuilds of the poorer sections of town such as Wards 4 and 9 had stalled when faced with race-related tensions of trying to remove returning former residents and the use of eminent domain.
That means there were two New Orleans at this point - a rich corporate center, surrounded by tons of poverty. When VITAS hit, it tore through the squatting poor population who had no sanitary services, no water or electricity or doctors. When Mexico's government collapsed in January of 2011 sending a flood of refugees north of the border, the situation amongst the poor became even more desperate.
The Awakening and the mana surge played havoc with nuclear reactors around the world and, sure enough, the Riverbend Nuclear Generating Station had an Unexplained Supercriticallity Incident, the same kind of "incident" happening in fission reactors around the world that caused them to do very unusual things, like explode rather than meltdown. A runaway reaction melted the fuel rods and core, releasing a large amount of hydrogen, when then exploded and resulted in radioactive fallout that heavily damaged the Mississippi river and the Gulf of Mexico. The local fishing industry has never recovered.
With oil spills and radioactive fallout and VITAS and piles of corpses burning in the night, you can imagine how the Awakening and Unexplained Genetic Expression was greeted down South. Years of pockets of Protestant Fundamentalism followed by the Pope's declaration against metahumans led to revitalization of rampant racism, the ghost of which has always sadly lingered in the South.
It's not one of the happier talking points, but the foundation of the organization we know as the Humanis Policlub had it roots here, wrapped in the swaddling clothes of the Klansmen.
It wasn't racism against metahumans either as the ongoing situation between the US Government and the Sovereign American Indian Movement was in full gear in these years. Relocation camps and Re-education centers sprang up in the area as they did elsewhere in the country following Jarman's Executive Order 17-321.
Things weren't all doom and gloom for the Big Easy. There's an endless sense of world-weary optimism that seems to linger here, refusing to give up hope no matter how badly things go. That sense of hope got a kick in the hoop when Big Daddy Ares bought NASA on July 28th of 2016.
Since New Orleans was practically an Ares Subsidiary itself by this point, the city became the hub for a lot of technical work that went into the new Project Highrise, Ares' plan to build a space station, their first step towards moon colonization. The next three years saw the creation of the Silicon Bayou as tech companies sprang up seemingly overnight, only to each other and then be eaten by Ares as they tackled the problems of building a privately owned station from scratch. Money and tech-related industry and personnel moved into the area. Though 3M would beat Ares into space by two years with the very first privately owned space station known as Halo, Ares' Apollo Station was a much bolder, larger design. The station came online on April 12, 2019. The infrastructure and business climate built during these years would endure going forward and mark New Orleans not only as a tourist destination but a serious contender as one of the major tech centers on the planet. Once the station was functional, Ares kicked into high gear, formally re-launching Project Apollo, intending to put men and women on the moon and Mars.
While business and industry was changing, so was the face of the city. We mentioned earlier how Humanis got a foothold in the racial clubs already in existence around the area, but let's talk about the other side of the coin.
In September of 2013, a brave group of Irish Catholic Bishops stood against the Church in the wake of John Paul IV's death and declared themselves the Church of Ireland, no longer part of the Roman Catholic Faith. This first protest led to similar actions across the world and in Louisiana, Sister Lucille Bellamy led a delegation of nuns, priests and lay people who broke away from the Church and formed their own, the Church of St. Jude.
Mother Bellamy claimed she was visited in by Saint Frances Cabrini, who told Bellamy of her own struggles in similar situations and encouraged her to follow her heart, no matter how impossible the task may seem. Since these early days, the Church has a large following and shares space in the city with other Catholic churches following the Vatican, mostly without incident.
The Church of St. Jude has a heavy metahuman presence as Bellamy's first move was to deny the Vatican's position and welcome all who would seek shelter with the church. Other things left behind by the church were the beliefs against women in the ministry, celibacy amongst the priesthood and homosexuality. Mother Bellamy would go on to marry her long term partner, Sister Teresa and become one of the few beacons of hope to the population of the Big Easy. Remember this when you run the Shadows here, friends - being invited to Church isn't just a social function, it's a way of determining what kind of person you may be.
Goblinzation and VITAS II both hit in the 2020's. As you can imagine, the Church of St. Jude was on the forefront of both incidents. Racism and hatred reached a fever pitch. Some of the metahuman population relocated to the Dominican Republic after President Goblinized into an Ork and opened the borders to all metahumans. Those who stayed were often pushed to the outskirts of the city.
Race riots rocked the world in the 2020's and New Orleans was no exception, as the infamous Five Ward Fire consumed parts of Lakeview, Gentilly and the 9th Ward. This was both a blessing and a curse as the destroyed areas were rebuilt and the dissidents, disaffected and poor were pushed ever farther outside the bounds of the city into shantytowns that soon took over what had once been subdivisions of the city proper. This decade is when New Orleans began to fully sprawl, gobbling up communities and creating new ones as it expanded and devoured pieces of itself.
Combat Biking started back in 2013, just north of Baton Rouge. By 2026, it had become a major, recognized sport and while the filming was done in Baton Rouge, the parties were held in New Orleans. When the world was introduced to Simsense in 2018, the tech and infrastructure from the Apollo Program allowed the Sillicon Bayou to easily convert to digital simsense editing and distribution. New Orleans became a cultural capitol as well, as the city became a backdrop for the new sim industry.
After the horror of VITAS, The Awakening, Nuclear Disaster and racial riots, New Orleans was still a beacon of hope, a tech center, up and coming competitor to Hollywood, responsible for helping create a private space station and working on sending people to the moon and mars. Not bad, lassiez le bon temps roule, eh? Too bad the world was headed straight for a Crash.
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