
New Helena
The bend in the highway takes you off your course, tempted by the sight of blossoming tulips in the distance. They go on for miles, one could perchance to say. If it were not for the smog, dusting over the fields and brought them into decay at the very edge of some hellsent town…
New Helena.
Welcome to New Helena, the sign reads. Obscure, obscene words graffiti’d onto the sign, the population statistic blacked out and replaced with one simple word. Dead.
It is but a lie. New Helena is alive, thriving in it’s filth and decay. More alive than it ever could have been those odd hundred years ago when Sir Ivanov had sailed over the pacific, knocked off course only to crash upon the shores of Oregon. With no option and no way home, he could only use the remains of his ship to construct what would later become the metropolis of the Northwest.
Yet nothing ever remains as perfect as one wished it to seem, the gold rush driving in gamblers and their bands of prostitutes. When they found not the gold they were looking for, they began to take in more earthly pleasures: women and drink. Ivanov had tried desperately to put a stop to it all, but his most valiant of efforts had failed and late one evening he was snatched from his bed and hung upon the flagpost outside the courthouse.
It was morning when they found him. His wife, Anne, waking to an empty bed. Frantic as she ran through the town in merely her bloomers, amidst the hoot’s and hollers of deviant men. To see her husband’s corpse swaying in the gusty Oregon wind only sent her over to the edge. Unable to see a life for her without her husband, fear led her to extremes, tossing her own lithe body off the edge of Tillamook bridge. Tales whisper that in that moment she had felt the happiest she had ever in her life, flying through the sky and into the ocean blue to never be seen from again.
Until now.
New Helena, present day. One hundred years never changes much, except a population statistic. Old buildings still stand, crumbling beneath the sky scraping buildings of downtown, consuming every sign of a past that must be forgotten. After the Ivanov’s death, under the direction of the new mayor, New Helena became the foundations of what it is today. A gambling capital, full of corruption and crime.
Each district has it’s own tale to tell, wild stories of deception and debauchery. Hidden crimes and lost tales buried underground, never to be uncovered and heard by the ears of man again. There is no past, they will tell you.
There is only now.
Where will you go? Who will you become – or will New Helena simply become you? Do not turn your back to the darkness, for it is approaching quicker than you think.