The Full Story of the Minorne War
Origins
The full story of the origins of Minorne are detailed in the Project Logs scattered about in the main thread. The summary is that a program was created by a group of American scientists before the Great War to combine the Forced Evolutionary Virus devised by the precursors to the Enclave. This virus' purpose was to turn enemy civilians into the perfect soldiers behind enemy lines. A number of experiments took place, but this one was different. This sought to use psionically attuned individuals combined with radio frequencies to organize and deploy the FEV against Chinese forces and population centers. Radios were in common use among civilian populations, and it would serve the dual purpose of making a third column behind the enemy lines and deny them communications. The project was named the Modified Neural Offensive Radio Network, or MNORN.
Children were taken from both private homes and concentration camps throughout the entire United States of America, and only a few were deemed suitable for the final experiment at the laboratory bunker near Sebring, Florida. For the most part these experiments failed, but one proved to be promising, as the child was successfully merged with the central computer system using the FEV. This was a groundbreaking advance in biotechnology, but due to the imminent outbreak of nuclear war, it was overlooked. The child forgot who she was and almost everything about herself. She was tested upon in a number of horrible ways, on top of already being turned into a mass of flesh and circuits.
When the nuclear war broke out in earnest, a number of bunker scientists and soldiers deserted, but the project head stayed on. Others stayed with him, mostly because they had nowhere else to go. Minorne, as she identified herself, eventually managed to turn them all against each other using mental manipulation through the radio systems of the bunker. A number were turned into mutated horrors much like herself, but eventually she accomplished what no scientist ever had: she managed to adopt the FEV to allow the subjects to obtain a perfect, though genderless, human form. This is much unlike the supermutants seen in the Capital Wasteland or from Mariposa on the West Coast. Unfortunately, the FEV required constant radio transmission to prevent a total cellular failure and collapse.
The experiments and fighting in the bunker after the war caused a failure of the external systems and sensors and Minorne eventually came to believe that the bunker was the world. This was changed completely in 2241, when Nasa Educational Radio came on the air. This was the long-range frequency broadcast in Florida since before the war. This triggered the sensors to reset and caused a reset through the rest of the bunker systems too. A treasure trove of deactivated robots were reactivated by Minorne around the bunker and she began looking for people. At first, all she found were squirrels, a very plentiful creature in the Sebring area, and grown to great size by the radiation in the war.
First Contact and Creation of the Army of Minorne
Minorne first made contact with other people in late 2241, when a scouting party from the Calusa Indian Tribe entered Sebring. They were off-put by the squirrels under Minorne's control, and withdrew after salvaging what they could from the town ruins. Minorne sent the squirrels after them and began attempting to make contact. Unfortunately, the only contact she could make was by deploying the FEV. She did not associate these people with real ones, and it can be difficult to say whether she was aware she was affecting actual breathing people until she began to assimilate them.
Starting in 2242, the Calusa people began having nightmares and bouts of sleepwalking, partaking in unusual menial tasks such as digging or building odd things. The local tribe leaders eventually decided to embrace the experience, believing Minorne to be a deity. They worshipped her and soon were turned into the first Warriors of Minorne, creating the foundation of her army. It is difficult to say what she thought about all this, but it is definite she began to embrace the new role, considering herself a new Queen.
The Army of Minorne initially grew as communities throughout southern Florida began to hear her call and suffer through the same symptoms of that the Calusa had. Isolated homesteads and families were overwhelmed and began gathering outside of the bunker, slowly losing their free will and becoming part of Minorne. Entire towns eventually began disappearing from the region, and the area is still emptied to this day from the call.
The Army of Minorne was organized into Soldiers, Workers, and Princesses. The first two titles are self-descriptive, but the last consisted of both apparently male and female Warriors of Minorne. These were the extensions of herself that Minorne used to communicate with people not under her sway. When a voice was heard on the radio, it would be these creations, not Minorne herself speaking. Sometimes they would be sent to distant communities as "missionaries" and to a degree they were able to have a bit more free will than the rest, but they were all still bound to the whims of Minorne.
The Fruitlands and the First Blood
The Saint Vikings were a community of vault dwellers based in Pinellas County west of the dense urban ruins of Tampa. Tampa at the time was constantly in a state of war between a number of feuding raider tribes, and had been at war for decades. None of the tribes could top each other, but every once in a while a new one would rise or an old one would be exiled. The Saint Vikings had to face numerous attacks from the raiders in Tampa, and they had an ace in the hole. Their vault had been issued a Garden of Eden Creation Kit, which would turn any area into verdant and fertile lands for farming. It could also be used as a devastating weapon.
The Saint Vikings deployed the GECK near the center of Tampa in 2244, losing a good number of their own people in the process. Unbeknownst to them, there was a Vault-Tec storage facility in the ruins. It too contained a prepared GECK device, and it was triggered, creating an area far larger than any of the inventors had ever imagined. These later became the Fruitlands after they were conquered by Vault 37. At the time the Fruitlands triggered sensors all over the world and Minorne's bunker was no different. She saw an opportunity to create a paradise for all humanity, living without the burdens of evil and all good, almost story book people.
The Army of Minorne marched to the Fruitlands and occupied it in 2245. No one was made aware of this until later in the year after the settlements of the Saint Vikings began experiencing the first stages of the Minorne altered-FEV. Other factions in the Sunshine Wasteland were equally oblivious due to the outbreak of the war between the Vanguards and the New Age Corporation and Monastic Brotherhood. The fighting there attracted most people's attention and few paid heed to the warning that emerged from the new paradise.
The Saint Vikings, being the first to suffer, were the first to determine the source of the problems and correctly identified the Army of Minorne as the source of the "Yawn Disease" as the wasteland knew the FEV's effects. Radio communications with the Sunshine Kingdom and the New Gulf Commonwealth led to a cooperative investigation into the phenomena. Vault 40, based in the Everglades became intimately involved in the process, which would prove to be the spark that lit the fuse of the war.
In 2247, raiders from Vault 40 managed to capture and dissect a Warrior of Minorne. The dissection was mostly fruitless, and the results were lost when the vault was destroyed several years later. Still, the vault scientists apparently learned enough to frighten them. More importantly, however, was the fact that Minorne discovered she could feel the pain inflicted upon her extensions. She felt every pinch of the vault dwellers' dissection and she remember everything the scientists had put her through. She flew into a rage, and Warriors of Minorne began attacking the Saint Vikings.
The Minorne War
The attacks on the Saint Vikings in 2247 were answered by a large expedition from the Sunshine Kingdom to Sebring. Their investigations and the research done by Vault 40 had allowed them to trace the source of the FEV signal to Minorne's bunker there. That was when they stumbled across the main army of Minorne. The battle that emerged resulted in almost the total loss of the Kingdom's expedition and hundreds were killed and more became new Warriors of Minorne. Similarly, in the west, the Saint Vikings' town of Hangarville was attacked and besieged, but they were able to hold the assault back for a time.
Towards the end of 2248, Hangarville finally fell to the Army of Minorne and with it most of the veteran warriors of the Saint Vikings. The survivors fled back to their vault and sealed the door. Within the vault, Minorne was unable to detect any of the vault dwellers or even their existence. She withdrew that army and sent it to other places. The Saint Vikings remained fearful and disconnected from the world until eventually a civil war within the vault led to critical systems failures and the death of the entire population. This fate would only be discovered years later when salvagers from Vault 37's holdings in the Fruitlands would stumble across the vault door.
Vault 40 initially faced the brunt of Minorne's wrath. They had possessed outposts and settlements as far north as Fort Myers, but all those were razed as the vengeful army came south. The vault dwellers had in their possession close-air support aircraft and they deployed them whenever possible. The sheer numbers and strength of the Army of Minorne proved to be too much and half of Vault 40's population in the settlements were killed while the rest fled to the vault itself. As with the Saint Vikings, when the outposts outside of the vault fell, she lost interest and withdrew her forces. The aircraft of Vault 40 kept up the fight, landing at an airfield in the Sunshine Kingdom and continuing to raid the army and occasionally Sebring.
At the beginning of 2249, the main war began in earnest as the total combined Army of Minorne struck at the Sunshine Kingdom. They razed Fort Cocoa and prepared to assault Nasacity itself. The Sunshine Kingdom braced itself for the worst, knowing they were badly outnumbered and even outgunned to a degree. A combined army was hastily mustered from all corners of the Sunshine Wasteland. The Monastic Brotherhood, Christmas, Chuolta, the Fellowship of the Palm, the Survivalist Union, and Vault 40 all had forces present in the fight against Minorne's army. Nasacity held barely against wave after wave of attacks. The Army of Minorne was eventually routed as the main army of the Monastic Brotherhood arrived to save the day. The Army retreated but to the amazement of the alliance, the survivors eventually just collapsed.
The End of the Army of Minorne and the Aftermath
The end of the Army of Minorne has been widely attributed to the daring actions of two unknown individuals who had been briefly imprisoned in Vault 37. They sought to gain a mininuke from the arsenal there but were denied and held in a cell after refusing to give their names. They escaped from the vault in a manner baffling the security, as they had never used the door to leave. It is believed that this man managed to singlehandedly disable the wide-range transmitter at the bunker in Sebring. How he accomplished this or how he interacted with Minorne was unknown, though a witness claims that he spoke with Minorne and convinced her to disable the army.
At this point, when this man left Minorne, she began to look inward and became more aware of herself and what had happened. An enlightenment of sorts struck her and she sought to understand what had happened to her and how she could escape the fate inflicted upon her. She tried experimenting with the remaining subjects in the bunker, implanting her consciousness in them, but it would not work. She possessed no more living subjects, but a large number of robots defending the exterior of the bunker.
The robotic defenses may have saved her, as in 2250 and following years numerous expeditions were sent by Vault 37, the Sunshine Kingdom, and Vault 40 to attempt to secure the bunker and its knowledge for themselves. The robotic defenses were powerful enough to defeat this attacks, but they were eventually left weak. The Talon Company arrived in massive force, wiping out the remaining robotic defenses and excavating the site. When they entered the bunker, they found themselves attacked by the living walls, or so they thought. Rather than simply assimilate their minds, Minorne attempted to implant her full consciousness in any of the Talon Company mercenaries. Her flesh was left torn and bleeding from the fighting, but eventually the Talon Company manage to retrieve what they were after and withdraw.
A later expedition was sent by the Royal Archaeological Society of the Sunshine Kingdom. They found only the bleeding walls and the wreckage of the Talon Company's expedition. For the most part they did not explore the tomb, finding old records explaining the source of the whole conflict. The lead archaeologist determined that nothing could be gained from further excavation and the Kingdom's expedition was abandoned. In 2259, the old charges set by the Archaeological Society were detonated by an unknown source and the bunker was buried. It is widely believed that this was the end of the MNORN project and everything that it had spawned upon the Sunshine Wasteland.
