It's been over three years since you returned to the city of Los Diablos. Built on the ruins of Los Angeles after the Big One devastated the West Coast, it is a city of ruin and grandeur, the resurrected pearl of what has become the Free Western Territories. In that way, it is not unlike you. Perhaps that's why this is the place you have chosen to call home.
Los Diablos…
Whoever chose to rename Los Angeles after the Big One in 1980 was not far off. The quakes had ripped the entire West Coast infrastructure to shreds, destroying most of the historic districts. The San Andreas Fault had just finished rippling when the Cascadian subduction zone was triggered, and the entire coastline heaved like a shaken rug, sending tsunamis racing up and down the coast.
The seismic upheaval awoke the slumbering Mammoth Lake system, one of the continent's two dormant supervolcanos. Luckily—if such a word could be used for a disaster of that magnitude—the lava chamber under the dormant volcano had not filled completely, and the eruption was less disastrous than it could have been.
What the quakes had not destroyed, the resulting tsunami drowned. And when the ash had finally stopped falling, someone looked at the ruins of Los Angeles and decided that this was no longer a place fit for angels.
Thus, Los Diablos was born.
At first, the government had tried to rebuild the ravaged coastline, but aftershocks and a crashing economy forced the politicians to focus on salvaging the Heartland and the East. The Midwest had been heavily affected by the falling ash, and the resulting food rationing made riots an everyday experience.
As the years passed, reclamation stalled. In 1992, the West Coast was finally declared a free economic zone in an attempt to incite the private industry to do what the government could not.
No taxes. No regulations. No federal government.
To everybody's surprise, it worked. Like the Wild West of old, the ravaged coastline attracted the adventurous and the foolhardy. Enough people wanted to live their lives without being held down by the heavy hand of big government that the wave of refugees turned into a trickle of immigrants. Enough companies wanted to ply their trade without rules and regulations for money to flow in as well. The roads began to be repaired, and the cities were cleared of rubble.
And, right from the start, Los Diablos proved to be a haven for the Enhanced.
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