City 12 - Orwellian Nightmare

For almost a decade, we have been ruled by the Combine. Monolithic and omnipotent, the Universal Union of Our Benefactors has incorporated our world into its fold through force of arms, one small acquisition amongst countless others in an empire whose extent lays far beyond our means to comprehend.

From City 17, Dr. Wallace Breen, the puppet administrator of Our Benefactors sees that the dictates of the Mutual Beneficiary are met, so that for now we may continue to exist as a species. Collectively the human race has been reduced to nothing but a cheap and expendable resource, it is only through hard labour and our complete submission that we ensure our continued existence.
Mankind’s destiny is no longer our own, instead we march towards an unknown fate, driven onward by our unloving and unknowable masters.

Within the Cities controlled by the Universal Union, oppression is simply the way of life. We live, we work, and we die ever under the watchful eyes of the Combine Civil Authority. We live in fear of the uniformed, faceless officers of Civil Protection, traitors to our species with the authority to deal out punishment and cruelty with impunity, these men and women have forsaken their own humanity for nought but the vain hope of their own petty survival.
Those who resist die or disappear, those who cooperate slowly lose themselves to the dehumanizing temptations of the Combine, trading humanity and emotion for power and rank until nothing human remains.

To resist, to live outside the crushing grip of the Union, is to live on the fringes of existence. Resistance groups and criminal elements live like rats in the darkest places of the Cities, in the canals, the sewers and the derelict districts where law and order are a distant, rusting memory.

Outside the Metroplexes of the Universal Union, exists only the cursed lands of our ravaged now homeworld. This new ecosystem is host to creatures far beyond our wildest imaginings; some, like the sentient Vortigaunts, are the erstwhile allies of our species, existing under the same crushing oppression of the Combine machine.
Others, like the insectoid predatory antlions, or the saurian Bullsquid hunt us as prey. Worse still stranger creatures use us as resources, like the parasitic headcrabs, puppeting our bodies like macabre marionettes.

To live in this dark future is to be one of the last of our species. It is to exist with the knowledge that we are not alone in the multiverse, and that we are no longer at the top of the food chain. It is to be a mere cog in the great and impersonal machine of the Combine. Whether you live or die, resist or cooperate, always remember that in this bleak and hopeless world; you will not be missed.

Our future is lost, our innocence purged. We are the last generation of man and yet we endure.

A Discord based persistent world RP, set within the Half Life 2 universe.