Starting County: Solano County
Local Apocalypses:
- Forest Fires: a devastating wildfire burned through woodland, farmland, and several municipalities in Solano County, aggravated by strong unpredictable winds.
- Displaced Wildlife: millions of displaced hungry predators, including grizzly bears, wolves, and mountain lions, migrated from other parts of California and the recently destroyed forests into Solano’s hinterland.
Faction Name: Mutual Aid & Action Network
Faction History: As the world was rocked by apocalyptic crises, citizen organizers sprang to action in Solano County as their government failed them and the business class fled. An informal alliance of activists, charity workers, firemen, and teachers formed to prevent the raging fires from destroying all of Fairfield and Vallejo, and prevent mass starvation from the collapse of civilization. The firefighters and charity workers established the Citizen Fire & Aid Authority in the first couple months, appointing Artie Kang its leader. Panic and social disintegration were prevented in Fairfield and Vallejo by the Social Action Alliance led by Simone Beasley, a left-wing Black Lives Matter-affiliated collective of community organizers and armed neighbourhood defenders, who promptly seized critical community assets (e.g. supermarkets, power generators) and began coordinating distribution with the firefighters and charity workers. Without businesses or the local government, the next largest group of people able to provide manpower for movement of goods and taking up staffing of necessities were the teachers – the teachers unions of Fairfield, Vallejo, and various smaller jurisdictions in-between unified under Sofia Catalina Ramos, to whom their thousands of workers could be called upon for each of the projects Artie Kang and Simone Beasley needed numbers. The Teachers Working Group has also helped maintain some semblance of normalcy for Solano’s children, which the teachers supervise in enormous classes that function primarily as daycare, freeing up regular citizens to do the work necessary to prevent everything from falling apart. After this constellation of grassroots groups took hold, looters and armed intruders from other counties began migrating into Solano. It was at this time that the region’s most infamous biker gang, the Free Devils, offered to protect what they saw as their community from outsiders, working (tensely) with the antifa-esque Social Action Alliance community defenders. The NorthBay Medical Center, a large complex and one of the county’s largest employers, became the de facto headquarters for this network of citizen groups, and also provided critical medical care. The Center has also attracted professors, engineers, and computer scientists from both businesses whose CEOs vanished and universities that were abandoned. Several months into the calamity, Artie Kang, Simone Beasley, and Sofia Ramos, in a council meeting including representatives of the Free Devils and the Medical Center, formally elaborated on their de facto governmental structure and gave themselves a name: the Mutual Aid & Action Network.
Leaders (3):
- Artie Kang: an older (50s) Asian-American man, ex-Vallejo firefighter who move on to state-level fire response teams, Artie Kang was in his hometown of Vallejo when the apocalypse began. He is gregarious, talkative, kind, overly forgiving, tall and physically muscular, with decades of experience in managing urban and forest fires as a front-line worker and leader.
- Simone Beasley: an older millenial (30s) African-American woman, activist, leftist, and community organizer who took the local Social Action Alliance from a few dozen people to a popular multi-city network. She is well-read, highly educated (Masters in History from UC Berkeley), vegan, atheist, stern, somewhat mean, and a strong public speaker, who moved from elsewhere in California but now has deep roots in Solano County.
- Sofia Catalina Ramos: an older (40s) Latino woman, long-time teacher and teachers union functionary who had just been voted in as president of the Fairfield Teachers Association when the apocalypse began. She exudes a quiet confidence, she is empathetic, a workaholic, a social manipulator, and has lived in Fairfield her whole life. She established her command over the teachers union, using her new position there to compel fast action, and has gained the teachers loyalty even though she keeps ordering them to do manual labour.
Groups (5):
- Solano Citizen Fire & Aid Authority: firefighters and charity workers coordinating crisis response and providing social services. Presumably includes firefighting vehicles (fire trucks, perhaps a helicopter), and charity goods (stored food, clothes, emergency supplies, thrift store items).
- Social Action Alliance: community organizers and social activists. They seized supermarkets, electric generators, gas stations, and other infrastructure. They are lightly armed (small arms and improvised melee weaponry), with some barricading capabilities (e.g. can quickly setup an autonomous zone).
- Fairfield-Vallejo Teachers Working Group: thousands of teachers, the main benefit of which is their cohesion and sense of purpose (and willingness to do manual labour). Have control of schools and their equipment.
- Free Devils Motorcycle Club: local Harley-Davidson “motorcycle enthusiasts.” Heavily armed (shotguns, illegal military hardware, explosives), small fleet of motorcycles, and possibly survivalist caches of ammo and gas.
- NorthBay Medical Center: a hub of medical experts in many fields, and increasingly, non-medical experts from nearby tech firms, universities, and engineering companies. Includes the medical facility itself, tons of medical supplies (e.g. drugs) and technology (e.g. computers).
