THE USA IS,
The branches and mechanisms of the government of the United States have been subsumed into the paradigms of differing New Gods. The House is in the thrall of Economy, relocated on a permanent temporary basis to NYC - the President also resides in NYC, and is herself an Economic Avatar.
There are elections, but nobody quite understands how they work, and offhandedly consider them an Economic mystery, and try not to think too hard about it. They change the manifestations of the President to better reflect the desires of the people. She has a hotline to something over there in Moscow (some people vaguely believe in a boogeyman called the USSR, with whom we fought over the Moon). There is an awareness that we are in the second year of this manifestation of the President, and the last manifestation was a lot less fun and approachable.
She can chameleonise to better reflect the governmental wishes of any American. When she talks, a podium and a news chyron appear out of nowhere. When she wins, ticker tape rains from the sky. When she loses, she gets onto a suddenly-appearing helicopter throwing double peace signs, but she doesn’t lose often. She is deathly afraid of plays, surgery, anarchists and Dallas, but we know she can play it cool. Her tie is a bright Economic gold.
Everybody also knows that every time a state joins or rejoins the union, a new silver star begins to orbit the President’s head, and she gets another special move. Once we rebuild the full USA, the President and the Economy will be unstoppable. The stock market will go up forever and ever, and everyone will have three dogs and a white picket fence - and sneakers, with lights in the heel.
Unfortunately,
The Senate and Supreme Court are now Radicarian. The former are supposed to be the very same Senators who were in charge before all this happened (whenever this all happened). They are preserved in one way or another, and some Scavengers probing the Appalachian death-forests claim to have seen ‘em marching about with animal-headed security details, and fucking stupid caveman limos made of bones, hides and rocks. Radicarian loves racist old men. As for the Supreme Court, we think they’re still in sessile session, turned to ancient trees. Roots and branches bind to the neoclassical marble and crack it.
The CIA is a vast, distributed Lunatic Avatar. Men in Black gone totally rogue, in contact with aliens, yetis, cryptids, smoke-demons, 3D polygonal ayahuasca nightmares and all that shit. They act with complete impunity, observing everything, instilling madness, infiltrating every group - shit, your fellow Scavengers might be fucking plants. You should bash their heads open and check for microchips.
Lastly, the most important, well-funded and influential branches of government - the Army, Navy and Air Force. They were extremely easy for Salvation to co-opt, and a greasy radioactive microsun flowers above the Pentagon (also known as the D.C. Dungeon). Planes and helicopters are always roaring, and pilots wax lyrical about lethality, embrace, kiss and unload full magazines into each others’ soft underbellies. The drone creches always spawn more to fly out and select targets for annihilation more or less at random.
The Coast Guard, by the by, remain mostly free of Influence, and are locked in a losing death-war with the encroaching powers of Flood. Due to being Influence-free, none of the competing USAs send them more than token support.
The 16 States of the Economic USA (for now) are New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ontario, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and West Virginia. The rest still exist, they're just under, ah, different management.
It is incorrect to think of this USA as a cogent state, or even of its constituents as cogent states.
Iowa, for example, is ruled by a hereditary dynasty of “Representatives” living in Cedar Rapids (the town that smells of processed corn), who control only the east of the state. They fight for space with the Corrupt giant that rules entrailéd Des Moines, and the resurrected Radicarian inhabitants of the Paleozoic ocean spreading through the air of most of the rest of it.
Atlanta is the home of Coca Cola, an Economic Avatar, and is second only to New York in its holiness to that New God. Some people call it Soda Hell.
Patches of central Ohio are placeless hypoxic memory-sinks, which eat writing and photographs and even the memories of visiting them. You can meet Scavengers who have memories of eating at seafood diners in Mansfield and Marion, but not of who they ate with, why they went there, or who they left behind. Still, Cleveland is now one of the larger Economic cities, headquarters of the eternal fast-food colossus Burger Amalgam, burning like a greasefire.
Detroit was conquered back from one of Opus’ AI, a glitchy, cruel thing with a bad sense of humour called Ford, which is now locked down in the Detroit Dungeon (A.K.A. the Subterranean Factory).
Chicago and Illinois are relatively recently reclaimed - a new city once again, ruled by the Radicarian King of Illinois, then by Prismatic Beauties, and now by the Economic City Authority, who slaver and drool at the untapped markets lying in wait in the Chicago Dungeon.
You may have heard about what’s going on in Texas already.
New York is a sort of holy city of the Economy, unapproachable and forbidden to most (due to the expense, naturally). The President lives in the Empire State Building and hunts deer in Central Park.
Wall Street is the womb and omphalos of the Economy. For Scavengers (you guys), reaching the economic requirements to retire to New York is sort of like being invited back into Paradise and forgiven for everything. For most of you, it might be why you became a Scavenger in the first place, having heard of success-stories going before you.
NYC is not within the scope of an Invisible Hands campaign - or, well, it might be, right at the end, if your Scavenger gets enough money to become a Representative (note: becoming a Representative is a lot more expensive than bribing them, and is mostly reserved for Scavengers with an ideological or narcissistic tendency. I.e. - not much has changed on that front.)
Only New York is purely Economic - the other gods have their sweaty hands in everything, and most of the country consists of bizarre, monstrous wilderness. Highways run through the god-haunted lands, dotted with fakeass places like Buc-ee’s, Denny’s, Wendy’s, Zaxby’s, KFCs, Grandy’s, or Chili’s. Maybe even Spangles or Bojangles. These greased-up lifelines link ever-hustling fortress towns always blazing with electric lights, and under them endless fucking sonovabitch Dungeons, crawling away under your feet, full of shit like giant diner-spiders and mech armies and bomb-entrailed gunge zombies and and and Commies.
Hey! You! American reading this! Tell me something weird (from real life) about your state that I don’t know in the blog comments, or on discord. After all, this is an outsider’s pastiche of your curious land.
