Eparkhos
Well-known member
In hindsight, the beginning of the Appalachian Conflict was remarkably small. The anti-government forces in the Smokies had been gaining size and strength for several years by the time People's First Citizen Horton was appointed over the Appalachian People's State, and with his aggressive policy against these movements it was only a matter of time until the conflict began in earnest. In May 1990, a tip-off was received about a non-existent moonshine still in an isolated part of Yancey County, and the extremely unpopular Political Captain Lee Atwater--Horton's chief lieutenant in the Cherokee District--was convinced by a sympathetic member of the state administration to investigate the lead personally. Of course, the whole thing was a trap set by an uneasy alliance between the People's Patriotic Movement of William Fesperman, a Christian Socialist group who wanted less government intervention in the region, and the New Blue Legion, a right-wing movement who wanted to overthrow the government completely. As soon as the armored car carrying Atwater and his men reached a narrow bend in the road, they were engulfed in a hail of gunfire that killed the Political Captain and three others instantly and forced the surviving driver to veer off the road. The militias then descended on the wreck and killed the other two fatalities, leaving one Red Guardsman for dead in a grim portent of the brutality that would characterize the conflict in later years....