Jump 190: Mad Max

Jump 190: Mad Max
>Nine of Swords (Cruelty): Being dragged down by the dishonor of others.
Cruelty is an appropriate card for this setting.
>Location: Fury Road
>Black Thumb (900)
This is a world where an expert mechanic would be very important indeed.
>Universal Donor (Free, Fury Road)
Now, that's helpful - both in training people and being able to transfuse if things are a bit too crazy.
>Forecaster (800)
"It's actually not a very lovely day at all!"
>From The Before-Times (700)
Forty? I'm quite beyond that, old son.
>Gardener (500)
A most useful trait to have, being able to make things grow despite the wasteland being so bleak.
>Jumper Run Bartertown! (300)
Making the jerks and insane people work together is going to be almost as useful elsewhere as it is here!
>Keep The Tell Alive (100)
Yeeeah, while I'm not too worried about being the focus of stories, being able to have stories told of rebuilding the world instead of simple violence is important.
>Geiger Counter (0)
This is an important thing to have here too, though not as important as it might have been if I'd had this in Fallout. Still. Going to find a way to build that into the Pip-Boy. Which is being built into the gauntlet. Which I've been making a long effort into replicating for a few dozen jumps, especially with my companion count increasing. Cheat Mode works perfectly fine to copy singular things, but the gauntlet is too complex to function on it. It would take two or three years of copying to replicate the base items that make it up, at a minimum.

Anyway, that aside.

Fury Road starts out with Max being captured, trying to make his escape and being branded as a bloodbag. That's all well and good. But tell me, what happens when the war rig is getting ready to roll out and the Highwayman rolls in, parking right in front of it, with a dozen people in shiny and chrome power armor step out?

When one of them pauses near Furiosa and says, only for her to hear, that the wives will be taken care of and not to panic when she looks inside the rig, while the missing seventh member of the party magics them all into the back of the Highwayman, hidden behind tinted windows, while the car is locked up tight?

When they brush against a warboy on their way up and the next time he reaches up to absently scratch his bumps, Larry and Barry have disappeared and he has more energy than he knew? He'd barely even noticed that the bloodbag had disappeared, and no one else said anything either.

After talking to Joe, they all piled back into the Highwayman and drove back out into the wasteland, and he went into seclusion for three days before his eldest son announced that Immortan Joe has gone to Valhalla to await his faithful war boys. The War Rig simply disappeared on its next supply run. There one moment, gone the next, or so its escort said. Rumors claimed it was seen on the far side of Gastown, though they were quiet about any supposed lack of delivery. Furiosa had come home, and bought her freedom through Gastown with stolen fuel and bribes.

The War Boys eventually went kamikaze to try and join Immortan Joe and nearly wiped out Gastown, leaving no one to pick up the wreckage. Looks like your speech was a bad idea, Corpus. Even Rictus bought into it. Oops!

Sorry, Nux.

Meanwhile the swamps were made back into fertile land, the Green Place brought back, because quite frankly I got sick of these apocalypse-happy settings; the mothers were brought back to it to tend it, while I, Carbon and Imaginos started working the magic to start restoring more of the world. Steven and the ladies helped get things in order, and with a little bit of work and a lot of magic, a couple of months later the world started working again. Sure, resources were still terrible, but the weather patterns got a lot more sane and the soil seemed more fertile, even if the oceans were still a dozen meters below where sea levels hould have been. Not just at the Green, but elsewhere, the desert starting to support more life, both plant and animal.

Really, that's all it took to make the insanity level out and start to die down - when the most crucial resources aren't so hard to get, people don't need to be crazy to survive. Some terraforming equipment scattered across the world to clean things up, some magic to kickstart things... a pity neither existed here before we came. After that was in place and things going well, I decided to check out the globe and see how things shaped up. There's rain on the western coast of Australia, but it was all an uninhabitable mud pit.

Not going to lie though - Fallout was a better world than this one. No FEV here, no ghouls, but less people despite that. Death throughout the northern hemisphere. At best you had bands of people trying to survive in pockets of areas that weren't too irradiated, that were warm enough and fertile enough to support weak crop life, but everything was too scattered for raiders to even be a thing by this point. Maybe years before, but not now. I counted the total number of humans in the northern hemisphere to be less than ten million.

South America was still pretty messed up, though not nearly so bad off as Australia was, but it had much less in terms of fuel. Still, it had plenty of surviving plant life, but since it supported more people it had more potential conflict, what with the famines and the fights. But I do emphasize potential; firearms were a rarity there so it seemed that people with guns were only seen in some sort of knight-like position, and it was a semi-stable situation, as odd as it was.

I looked in orbit just out of morbid curiosity and it looked like Earth had a nasty case of Kessler syndrome. Cleaned that up for them, at least, so when they get back into orbit things will be better. Left a few blueprints around in many places so that humanity can build itself back up too.

As far as where the water went? Well... according to the terraforming equipment when I kicked it on... hot as it is in Australia thanks to the weather cycle being disrupted, that's not the case elsewhere in the world, especially the northern hemisphere.

The water's not in the ocean because it's tied up in glaciers over Asia and Canada, the arctic ice cap is back and better than ever, and Antartica is so big that it's touching South America.

It's an ice age, and Australia is an anomalous island in it. The only reason it's a desert is because the topsoil ended up blowing away when it dried out.

Hopefully in the years to come, after I've gone, things will be a lot more survivable for everyone. Even if it will be a century before international travel becomes possible again.

I did relocate most of the survivors in the northern hemisphere. My conscience would not permit otherwise.