The Son of New Jericho - Prologue

September 7th, 2106 - Memories on a Full Moon

Home. The word defined a community known as "New Jericho", an agricultural town of four-thousand, six-hundred and nine hard-working people for the first twenty-two years of my life, and not once would it have been a lie. When the Emergence happened in the 2010's, holstaurs came from the northwest to set up shop in greener parts of the state. Sometime in the fifties, a three-figure herd of cowgirls known as the Belles moved into town and by the turn of the decade, had married most of the available men in New Jericho (my grandfather included). The Twin Peaks Dairy Company brought us together as a family, in multiple senses of the word, and in turn gave the town an economic boom with the emerging holstaur milk industry.

My father told me of the day that the Federation passed the Responsible Siring Amendment, which legally married a man to whichever parahuman he inseminated. He told me to protect my virginity with all my being for the woman I loved, as he wished he had for my mother. I hadn't known what he did back then, the terrible secret of these wonderful girls who had been such a blessing for us. As man was once called a voracious animal, the parahumans became the new apex predators of this age. They outnumbered us as decades went by, their desires only intensifying with the decline of the human population... it became common place for neighbors to fight neighbors over a man. New Jericho was not safe from this lust, as was clear the night "they" came to town.

Manhunters, groups of monstergirls who traveled throughout the country in search of a way to sate their immense thirst for sex at any cost, had found our quiet community ripe for the taking. I'll never forget that convoy of motorcycles, frames as red as the blood they spilled. In the years we lived with the Belles, the placid cowgirls showed a ferocity New Jericho had never seen in them that night. To the last heifer, they fought as the men packed children and whatever they could into their cars and ran. My father, and hundreds like him, stayed with our beloved holstaurs to defend the town as best they could. I hadn't known then, that would be the last night I would ever see either again.

Four years ago was the night New Jericho burned to the ground, just one of hundreds of small towns to disappear to those who didn't know the raid that caused it.

We drove to San Austin, a refugee territory for victims of raids like us in central Texas. For some this place was a chance to make a life with their children. For others, it was an opportunity to strike back against those who had put us here. The Knight Orders were the protectors of this new land, and offered us a chance we hadn't gotten at New Jericho.

When I joined, they asked us why we chose to take an oath against the Federation. For some it was a paycheck. For others, it was a chance to slay monsters our ancestors spoke of millennia ago. For me, and those who survived the fall of New Jericho and towns like it, we chose this life because we have nowhere else to go.

I swore that I would defend this nation against all enemies, foreign or domestic. I swore allegiance to this Republic, and I swore to obey the will of my superiors for the cause of peace. If we could make this a haven for man and parahuman, if it meant a community like ours could exist in this new land, there would be no price too high for me to pay.

I shall remember New Jericho, in hopes its like could be again one day. Until then, this is the path I must walk as a knight of New Texas.


     - Ian Stahl, Jericho Lance (Order of the Blue Shield)