The story of Terra's birth is an enthralling yet tragic one. A world consumed by the flames of nuclear war, and the rise of a new one from its ashes. However, this old tale does not provide answers to many of the enigmas that torment Terra: How the...
In traditional literature, every story has its beginning, and ours starts in the final days of WW3. The exact causes of such colossal and destructive conflict are not fully clear, mainly because most of the contemporary sources were incinerated in the nuclear apocalypse, but preserved testimonies from survivors of the war and recent archeological discoveries have shed a bit of light into the pre-war period.
The political landscape of the early XXI century world was dominated by various major powers, each one with different aspirations and interests, but three countries stood from the rest: The United States of America, the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. Recovered press articles of the time show that the power dynamics between these nations were quite tense, being that each empire tried to assert itself over the other using espionage, undercover operations, proxy wars and trade warfare, to name a few. Despite the intense rivalry, these superpowers refrained from engaging in a direct war, and it was due to the fact that all three countries had in their possession the most destructive weapon humanity had invented up to that point: thermonuclear weapons.
The power of a nuclear bomb was enough to wipe an entire city off the face of Earth, and the huge stockpiles each nation had meant that, if they were to start a total war, the entire world would be destroyed, leaving no victors. As such, tacit peace between the major nations became the norm in international politics for a long time, and only in counted occasions it was ever threatened.
The absence of large-scale conflicts allowed the blooming of culture across the world, and by the 2000 and 2010's, society had evolved into something never seen before. The culture of those times was marked by the adoption of Internet, a precursor of what would become the Holonet, and the features that characterized it the most were an intense sense of individualism, a high sensibility towards any disagreements and a near-obsessive concern with being respectful. Regarding this last point, a popular legend of the post-war period, which very possibly was based on real events, describes how an actor named Jack Sparrow was falsely accused by his wife of domestic violence, causing millions of users to start a campaign of harassment against him and forcing him to go into hiding to save his skin. Whatever it may be, the truth is that this cultural shift had a negative impact on the nations of the so called "Western world".
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(Anonymous author, 2024. A common example of early XXI century art.)
Over the course of the next two decades, the United States of America experienced a pronounced decline, both economically and politically. Sensing its old rival's weakness, Russia reactivated its wartime industry and began expanding its army at lightning speed. These preparations eventually culminated in the Invasion of Ukraiina, a nation which was located in the present-day region of New Russia. According to Russian sources, it was a special military operation to dismantle the fascist regime of said country, and many historians believe these claims might be true, the reason being that the western regions of Ukraiina corresponded with those controlled by the Bandera Brigade, a post-war fascist paramilitary group which later down the line would become one of the constituents of Neu Preussen, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
