Caesar's Legion and former Legion land

From 2247 to 2282 the Legion grew under the totalitarian leadership of Caesar and his Malpais Legate, and then Caesar and Legate Lanius, and finally, briefly, just Legate Lanius. Starting in Arizona, the Legion grew to encompass all of Arizona and New Mexico, parts of Colorado up to Denver, southeast Utah, and the Mojave. Tribal cultures were conquered and assimilated into Legion authority and culture, erasing their identities and creating a new one in its place completely loyal to the State. After the Legion's leadership is destroyed with the death of Legate Lanius at Zion Canyon, former Legion land splintered into different regions controlled by various centurions and other new authorities that rose up in the power gap, creating a very diverse new tribal presence, over the decades becoming again unique cultures, and reforming a basic trade economy. The land is a very mixed bag with varying levels of safety and conflict, but a loose confederacy has been formed around several of the more stable neo-tribes.

Overview (up to 2307)
Meanwhile, to the east, we come to what was formerly Legion land… after the defeat of LEGATE LANIUS, there was no longer any real authority holding the Legion together. Soon, centurions began power struggles, dividing the Legion into different territories and disrupting trade and basic resources, greatly weakening the whole area and all authority. Seeing opportunity, the Resistance continues their efforts, quickly reclaiming the southernmost lands that belonged to the various Native groups that made up the core of the Resistance, and then going further to disrupt as much of the last bits of Legion structure as possible, creating a plan to transition the region to democratic self-rule. By infiltrating Legion settlements, assassinating their leadership, and encouraging resistance and revolts amongst the slave populaces, they oust the previous order, installing their own transition councils to each settlement. These councils help give structure and organization to the people they just aided in ousting Legion leaders, providing guidance on establishing democratic institutions, and ultimately believing very strongly in cooperative self-determination. Once satisfied they’ve laid sufficient foundations, the council moves on to another settlement and repeats. If order becomes anarchy or a similar system of despotism arises after the council leaves, the settlement will be marked for re-infiltration to help smooth out whatever went wrong, preferably by collective organizing but in the case of stubborn despots, by violence if necessary.

However, these processes are long and take a while to spread further north, leaving much of former Legion land to their own devices, falling back into lawless tribal anarchy. The northernmost reaches of the Legion around Colorado create their own authoritarian order, having been far away enough from central Legion leadership to be better equipped to handle self-governance, and possessing more ample natural resources to subsist off of. Flagstaff, the former capital, being one of the most developed Legion settlements, ends up its own independent city state after a successful independent slave revolt that kills most Legion leaders there, an ambitious urban group of revolutionaries forming communes, providing a surprisingly smooth transition from their forced labor into more equitable and merciful self-sufficient organized labor. A few charismatic leaders help guide the populace through this process and more importantly, help give them an /identity/--they’re going to do something the Legion completely forbid. They’re going to THINK, and more importantly, EXPRESS themselves. With this encouragement, the population is encouraged to gather and meet in public for open discussions about how they want to organize themselves and what their lives mean in this new context. Community watches are also established on a rotating volunteer basis to keep basic order. It’s a rocky process, but eventually Flagstaff stabilizes and becomes known for its demand for literature and being a haven for artists. After about a decade of self-rule, a branch of the Followers of the Apocalypse are established there to help aid the populace in their self-education and healthcare, and a Mormon mission is established to do the same but also to spread the Good Word.

Amongst the more stable tribes in the region near the Mojave, some basic trade routes are established as the loost Tribal Confederacy is formed, helping to stabilize the region.

Western expansion into former Legion land
So New Deseret is gradually annexing parts of Arizona right... probably a fairly straight forward process. Since Arizona was so tribal for so long, there's some really valuable pre war  prospecting that's mostly untouched, and pre war literature and media and technology especially sells for a looottt of money. As the region stabilized, prospectors from New Deseret and New Vegas headed east to make claims and hit it big, irregardless of whose land these claims laid on...

So what happens is there's an influx of mostly Mormon prospectors seeking something more than just a stable agrarian life who are going out into the 'untamed eastern frontier' in order to salvage pre war knowledge and technology to bring to the masses.

At first a lot of the tribal communities at the edge of the mojave and Utah were like sure, yeah, have fun, salvage all you want just give us something in return from whatever you get off our land. So these tribes end up connected to a greater economy and get medicine and other resources, and when there's a substantial enough Mormon population in these boom towns a mission is established to serve their needs.

Missions are more than just churches, they're a part of government and provide public schools and medical centers and other bureaucratic services to the people under its jurisdiction. These services are also extended to the tribals for free (only new deseret citizens and mormons are tithed) and again at first they're like nice, awesome, medicine and education, we dig it.

Buuuuuttt then comes the problem--accessing this economy and these services exposes these tribals to the Mormon faith and Mormon evangelists, who succeed in converting some. Participating in these towns also means you need to like... wear "appropriate" clothing and speak English, and the education provided is very western-centric. So you end up with a growing amount of tribals being westernized purposefully and by accident.

This obviously causes rifts within the tribes... which usually come to a point when the mission decides to petition New Deseret for official annexation, which involves getting an 85% majority of the population within its proposed district to agree to join the nation and become citizens (and thus be subject to tithing), in return for official police protection and access to the new deseret justice system, as well as removing certain tariffs and allowing for government money to invest in public infrastructure and provide other subsidies, and full access to the new deseret welfare state safety net, since all the missions do for free is provide schooling and medical care.

So you can imagine a good portion of the tribals are like, sure, let's do it, but there's a significant unconverted portion left that doesn't want to be tithed or give up their free rule of their own land to a foreign government. But between the tribals and the boom towns in agreement with annexation, the mission's district is annexed anyway.

There's gonna be a lot of conflict within the tribes about this and the increasing westernization of their culture and several tribes just... sort of dissolve? Or like, fragments of them flee east away from New Deseret jurisdiction.

And New Deseret can say that their process was entirely democratic and that the overwhelming majority of these people WANTED to be annexed, which is true, but still because of these complex forces, these tribes are seeing themselves dismantled.

As more tribes fragment and flee east, that's when the resistance starts. Prospecting starts to become a lot more dangerous as foreigners are barred from tribal territories by penalty of death. Some tribal communities with budding missions run them out of town, and tribal caravan routes become closed off to westerners.

But we know how manifest destiny works... prospectors still go out, missionaries still venture in tribal land... and they get killed. The missionaries especially are considered martyrs, and there's a growing frustration amongst new deseret citizens that the government is just letting their people get slain with no repercussions.

What really causes controversy though is illegal prospector settlements popping up very quickly near isolated claims, found later and threatened by tribals who want them gone. These prospectors are new deseret citizens and are asking for government protection but legally can't be given any, which frustrates a lot of new deseret.

But the expansion and evangelization continues anyway illegally, and in response there's eventually tribal violence inside the annexed frontier, trying to drive it back, because the fragmented tribes are claiming their ancestral lands were taken without their true permission and they still belong under their authority.

The Resistance gets involved
And here's where the big drama comes in......

The resistance from before, against the legion? Their old guard reforms and trains the next generation to fight off this new threat. They know this song and dance. They've fought so hard to help these tribes re-establish themselves and their cultures and they refuse to let a new nation expand and destroy this...

So imagine Mariela fighting against New Deseret, against her /brother/...... if she asked him to completely withdraw all of the family's caravans from tribal lands, would he? Or would he be willing to use his caravan to secretly funnel supplies and weapons to the resistance? That'd be grade A treason....

And I'm sure the resistance gets in contact with Lex. She'd be very vocal against this expansion and so would Joshua. Against public opinion they steadfastly refuse to provide military aid to illegal settlements, and speak very openly about how it's wrong to dissolve these tribal cultures and lands like this. New Deseret has no right to determine what "cultural progress" means, and they don't want to repeat the NCR's imperialism

Efforts in Flagstaff to combat expansion
Going back to Zeke in Flagstaff....

He's part of the public anti-expansion movement, but believes in peaceful protest and using existing legal routes to stop the expansion. Flagstaff isn't annexed but it's fairly mixed between tribals, ex legion, and western mormons and gentiles, enough to justify the joint Followers-church outpost/mission that Arcade and Daniel are part of.

He's worked with other local leaders to put forth a strong statement rejecting a possible New Deseret annexation, as well as enacting cultural protection laws, like language laws (similar to IRL Montréal's) that require everything to be bilingual between English and the local tribal dialect.

Working with Daniel, he's also gotten the mission to remove any religious indicators from the spaces they provide public services in, and non-local religious solicitation in public spaces is banned.

Overall Flagstaff is this big mixed democratic hippie artist commune, whose primary industry aside from the media it produces is the lumber industry (Flagstaff is very wooded with pine forests), which is very profitable considering its proximity to the mojave and the more arid south.

As part of his peaceful politics, Zeke helps organize a delegation to go to New Zion to speak on behalf of Flagstaff, and he's there as their representation of the Mormon populace (who also lean anti-expansionist. There's a non-insignificant anti-expansionist movement amongst frontier mormons and new deseret citizens), and brings several other diverse leaders from Flagstaff and some other tribal leaders from elsewhere.

=== Terrorist bombing in New Zion and military escalation

=== The talks seem to be productive until..... the bomb is set off that incapacitates Lex and kills like two other important new deseret politicians

And everything changes. This is a terrorist attack on the homeland that has spilled blood... and violence along the frontier spikes. And we know that Joshua doesn't handle this very well.......

He says they did everything they could to respect the law, but New Deseret won't tolerate terrorism. Forces are mobilized along the frontier and counter-insurgency ops begin into non-annexed land.

A key part of TNG will be an escalation in the violence, causing Joshua to send forces into non-annexed land to occupy some frontier towns in an effort to destroy "terrorist" operations that had been using the towns as safe havens.

Also.... for extra #drama....... Joshua moves down to the military base at Hoover Dam so he can have closer proximity to the frontier to oversee their operations. Zeke is naturally horrified at how blind his father is to the implications of this.)

And at some point the resistance old guard seeks Zeke out for help, because they aren't responsible for the bombings and assassinations--there's a radical splinter faction they think that's gone off the rails and they can't pinpoint them. They would have never committed such brazen acts of violence because fucking obviously this is what it would spark...

They were mostly focused on driving out illegal settlers and halting illegal trade. Yeah they did some ops in annexed land but that was to like... destroy warehouses dealing with illegal trade or to expose corrupt politicians who were breaking the law and enabling illegal settlers, because at least when Lex was around the military made sure to prosecute those crimes. They were working with her and encouraging other legal routes to halt the expansion and it seemed like there was progress until the assembly bombing ruined everything and violent terrorism meant to spill blood broke out in the annexed frontier.

The Involvement of the New Deseret Secret Police
I'm trying to figure out how Vulpes and the secret police factor into this and like... maybe Daylynn's radical sect was trained by them? Lex tells Vulpes they need to secretly aid the resistance so he's like sure awesome, I'll send some agents down to train rebels.

But you know this is agents under Vulpes, they teach every nasty trick in the book "just in case" while instructing them to follow the lead of the mainstream resistance, but then Daylynn breaks them away from it and radicalizes most of the people trained by New Deseret agents?

The mainstream resistance doesn't understand how such brutal and efficient tactics are being so expertly carried out. Only the old guard even knows those tactics because they needed them against the legion, and they haven't taught them to the new resistance because they haven't needed them (yet). And even if they did, they're not fucking stupid and make sure their resistance members understand that overall they need to be smart and responsible with their actions. They don't want a full out war again like was with the legion... anything to avoid that.

Oooh man more drama. Lex didn't tell Joshua she gave these orders to Vulpes and Vulpes knows it would probably be Dangerous to his health if he admitted carrying them out to Joshua, so he has to manage to keep that secret.