Author’s Note: Reading this background isn’t necessary to understand & enjoy the comic.

DON’T THEY KNOW IT’S THE END OF THE WORLD?

Humanity has become an endangered species. A deadly airborne virus killed off 98% of the

world’s population. World governments failed to contain it. As the disease spread, social and

political institutions broke down. Old ethnic and religious tensions exploded. Global trade

ground to a halt. Wars, famine, and crime ran rampant, and all the while the disease reaped its

silent, deadly toll. Mortality rates of the infected were nearly one hundred percent. Animals

were untouched. Only human beings were effected. Some whispered that such a perfectly

deadly virus couldn’t be natural. That it was engineered…

For three years the disease burned through the human race. By the end of the second year,

large scale conflicts and unrest had ceased. Those who were still alive fled to the

wastelands and margins of society, isolating themselves from strangers and contaminated

areas. Things once taken for granted, like food and fresh water became risky and difficult to

obtain. Finally, mercifully, the virus burned itself out.

For the survivors, their children, and their children’s children, the disease would be enshrined in

history as the Apocalypse Plague. The force that ended and rebirthed the world.

DANCING IN THE RUINS

For those who survived the near annihilation of the human race, the world they

reemerged into was familiar, but changed. The cities, the highways, the power lines,

even the satellites in space were still there… but crumbling. The small numbers of

remaining people couldn’t properly reclaim most of what their ancestors had built,

leaving most of the planet to return to nature.


The remains of humanity slowly built new civilizations, familiar but changed. People are

fewer and more spread out than they’ve been since the Bronze Age. Much old

knowledge has survived, but few have access to it, and fewer can actually build anything from

it. Most people live simpler lives hearkening back to an earlier era. Hunting, farming, and

cherishing their few technological comforts, preserved from the days before the apocalypse.

NEUE REGEL

A new power is spreading across the Earth. Presenting themselves as a philanthropic group of

scientists, sharing the benefits of old technology with the world, the Human

Unity Project appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, several decades after the end of the plague.

Many people flocked to their banner. Some were drawn by the promise of an idealistic utopia, a

new civilization where there would be no divisions of politics, ethnicity, or religion. Most were

lured by more practical concerns: easy access to food, housing, and medical care in a harsh

world where such things weren’t so easily available.

But as time went on, the project’s mysterious leaders took more and more control

over every aspect of members’ lives. And as the number of volunteers for the project dwindled,

it became more aggressive. A military was formed. Surrounding fledgling nation-states were

invaded and absorbed in the name of security and peace.

The Human Unity Project has become the first true global superpower since the plague,

boasting the largest, most technologically advanced army in the world. Tens of millions live

under its control. Information travelling in and out of Unity territory is carefully controlled. The

Project presents itself as an advanced society whose happy members enjoy lives free of crime,

sickness, or hunger, but dark rumors swirl among those outside its control of human

experimentation, population culling, torture, and mind control.

SAVAGES

In its quest to bring every single human on the planet under its control, the Project

now turns its attention to the region in the northeast known as the New Frontier, an

area that was largely uninhabited before the plague, when a great multitude of

refugees fled to the area. Here, on the fringes of civilization, isolation and freezing

temperatures insulated them from the epidemic. Huge swathes of rough terrain and

inhospitable winters have kept the New Frontier mostly free of UNITY interference. In

this environment, an extremely diverse group of squabbling small independent states

have arisen representing a wide variety of philosophies, politics, and religions.

This is something the ideology of The Human Unity Project cannot tolerate. Division and

diversity of thought are dangerous. So the Project turns its eye to these

settlements, to absorb and assimilate them like so many before. The factions of the

New Frontier, divided, disorganized, and technologically limited, are easy prey.

But a young mercenary with a powerful piece of lost technology may have some surprises in

store for everyone…