Pochata Recent History

Pochata State in the west was briefly part of territory claimed by the short-lived and unlamented Aztalec Empire.   Aztechnology troops used Pochata as a base to attack the northeast of the Siou Republic, where Aztechnology had several deep-vault complexes.   These vaults were breached early in the AE-CRV war by sub-launched CRV ballistic missiles -- conventional warheads but significant kinetic energy too, coming from near orbit.   Those bunker-breaker attacks were with the full acquiescence of the SR, who had no nonnuclear means of getting in.   Other AE vaults across Pochata State and the states now comprising Aztalec lasted longer into the war, but most were eventually penetrated by CRV cruise missiles.

The above-ground territory of Pochata State was retaken by CRV fighters after six months of battles.   Always lightly populated, it was not heavily targeted by the AE desperation atrocities of 5 December 1507.   It did recieve some chemical-warhead fallout both directly and from strikes into the SR and Tavatica State.

Since that convulsion of mutual destruction, Pochata State has been subjected to disease -- some as a natural consequence of millions of dead upwind and upstream, and some spread from suspected bioagent stocks leaked from the breached AE vaults.   Further troubles have come from marauders -- the worst occurring after a semblance of order was imposed on the northern CRV states by the new nation of Itza, when their brigands moved south.

Yet further damage has come from wild animals and feral livestock moving through and spreading their own diseases.   Always lightly controlled, the predator species of the hills and mountains have widely spread, seeking dwindling numbers of their wild prey, and settling for humans and and their domestic stock.

Pochata State was an ancestral home for the tribes that have declared themselves a nation nation there.   It and the plains states and part of Polis in the east have been their home since before any formal country existed on Venda.   From all over Venda remenants of those tribes have made their way home, as the AE failed and the drug-enforced slavery of some faded, and as the forced labor of others in the AE's deep manufacturing centers ended, and as ties of tribesmen elsewhere vanished with destroyed cities, families, and society.   They're home to stay.
 

Plains States Recent History

The plains states in the east have been home to the same "pochata" tribes, only in different times of the year.   Many have settled in towns and farms in recent decades, but the ancient pattern continued by some and now practiced by many has been to spend the summer months in the southeast, where grazing is better and the ground fertile for growing.   When weather starts to turn cold, these tribes journey to the upland hills and plains of Pochata, and hole up for the winter.   Some stay in place in the "off season", particularly the less migratory Anteona and Chiquaiah hill tribes.   The conditions of the land since the CRV's demise have driven even more to decamp and grazing herds have to be carefully moved to avoid contaminated areas.

The ruins of Metropolis at the coastal edge of the plains pose a special problem.   No one actually lives there, as killing amounts of radiation linger in spots.   Immediately following the estimated thirty to seventy megaton blast, an immense firestorm swept through the outskirts and onto the plains.   Not all the dead were incinerated, though, and sporadic cleanup parties have entered the outlying areas to gather remains and conduct funeral pyres.   A number of tribesmen have died taking this risk, but it has been considered worth it, to fulfil the sacred duty of cleansing the fouled land.   While living much closer to the land (and much closer to starvation) than ten or twenty years ago, the Pochata tribesmen are not savages.   With salvaged and improvised instruments they have mapped the extent of contamination, and have marked areas that need to be avoided.

Some of Polis was untouched by the missile blasts and is already recovering from the fires.   These portions do at least provide some summer space for tribesmen-caretakers.   Metropolis itself will one day be a resource, even if only of raw materials.   The Pochata tribesmen count it as an open-air iron mine as well as storehouse of other useful materials   Presumably still on the harbor bottom are those ships of the Blue Fleet in port at the time of the holocaust.

The plains area has had more trouble with renegade leftover elements of the CRV military than Pochata State.   Though technically naval units (the whole CRV military was branches of their Navy), there are groups based around several mobile air defense bases.   These have given Andrean escort fighters fits, though the Andreans have taken some out.   Equipped with both surface-to-air missiles and vertical-takeoff jets, their neutralization will be one of the first priorities of the new nation.
 

Polis Recent History

The s'Anaa ti Anou Vu (Clouds-At-Morning) River is measurably cleaner now than shortly after the AE attack, when its banks were choked with bodies - men's and animals'.   It provides no fish fit to eat , though some tributaries now do.   It was indeed covered with clouds after the attack, since Metropolis fell to an air burst.   Millions of cubic meters of it and of the adjacent sea were vaporised, to fog the river valley along with fires' smoke for days.   Most eventually fell as poisioned rain far out to sea.   The blast itself shot a wall of water many meters high up the lower hundred kilometers of the s'Anaa, inundating riverside communities beyond the blast radius.   A quarter hour after that surge, when southward flow had started again, the blast-triggered tsunami that scrubbed hundreds of kilometers of coastline punched another wall of water upriver, capsizing the few vessels that rode out the first wave.

One of the casualties of the first wave was a large Tsimshan Co. refinery.   Millions of liters of refined and crude petrol poured into the river.   The firestorm lit the centimeters-thick slick, and the lower s'Anaa burned for days.   All that's left of many bridges south of the refinery is a few charred and melted beams sticking out of the water.

When the flaming river reached the Axis Chemical fertilizer plant at Choctaal, the ensuing explosion registered on seismographs around Scandia as another minor nuclear blast.   It was months before it was found to be "merely" hundreds of thousands of tonnes of nitrates exploding -- and the result was much the same as if it were another AE missile.   Choctaal is now not the name of a town, but of a semicircular bay beside the s'Anaa.

All these sequential cataclysms left the main river's banks a rubble heap of former towns, cities, and industries.   A slight mercy due to the blast and firestorms is that much of the chemical warhead agents within a hundred kilometers of Metropolis were effectively incinerated.   More drifted in from upwind (to the northwest), so it's not clean land, but it could be worse.

"It could be worse" describes the geography of the post-AE Vendan eastern plains.   Many grasslands survived, some pockets of forest remain, some tributaries run nonlethal, if not exactly clean, some wildlife survives, many of the tribes' vital transport resources, their horses, survived on scattered farms and ranches.