[b]Nation:[/b] The Vindicators.

[b]Location:[/b] Reduit: a highly populous and heavily fortified residential, commercial and industrial compound constructed around the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in the post-apocalypse ruins of Atlanta, Georgia.

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[img]http://i.imgur.com/Kxoryhm.png[/img]

[b]History:[/b] The Vindicators' story begins with Roger Maxson's revolt at the Mariposa Military Base in 2077. The founder of the Vindicators, Andrew Vaccaro, was a high-ranking U.S. Army member, who served alongside Maxson in Colonel Robert Spindel's outfit. After the discovery of the human experiments at Mariposa, which subsequently resulted in Robert Spindel being found dead, Vaccaro became the impromptu leader of a small faction of the Mariposa military staff who opposed Maxson's new direction. Vaccaro and those loyal to him suspected that Maxson was the one truly responsible for Spindel's death, and that he had framed the event as a suicide to ensure his unchallenged rise to commander of the outfit. When Maxson had the Mariposa scientific staff executed for the brutality of their human experiments, Vaccaro and the small few who sided with him managed to hide away a small number of the site's scientists in an isolated chamber of the base, allowing them to be spared Maxson's rage. 

In the following days, shortly before the Great War, Maxson announced over the radio the desertion of his forces at Mariposa from the authority of the U.S. military. This act, even more so than the execution of Mariposa's scientists, brought a multitude of Mariposa's men to Vaccaro's side. Vaccaro was able to manipulate Maxson's desertion from a loyalist standpoint, using it to acquire support for a now public ridicule of Maxson's emotionally driven decision to execute the site's scientists. Roger, not wanting to escalate the situation, offered that Andrew and the rest of the site's men that remained loyal to the U.S. military would be given the freedom to choose whether to leave Mariposa and remain with the military, or stay with Maxson. The day the loyalist group was to be offered free leave was the day the bombs fell.

The outbreak of atomic war and devastation of the U.S. military forces outside of Mariposa rekindled passionate support for Roger Maxson. Andrew Vaccaro and his group, now considerably smaller than before, were stripped of their freedom to leave, and compelled to sign onto Maxson's new yet-to-be-named organization. Outnumbered, they begrudgingly complied, and were set to leave Mariposa along with the rest of the Mariposa soldiers and all of their families. The day the exodus from Mariposa occurred, though, Vaccaro led his own revolt. The Vaccaro loyalists seized control of the facility's exit just before the exodus was set to take place, and the Vaccaro loyalists, their families and the surviving Mariposa scientists abandoned Maxson, taking a large quantity of military and scientific equipment—as well as all of the Forced Evolutionary Virus serum they could carry—with them. The premature abandonment of Mariposa was seen as a betrayal by Maxson's organization, and their theft of the facility's military equipment and vehicles was at least partially responsible for the ravaging that Maxson's organization took on their way to the Lost Hills bunker. This has resulted in strong animosity existing between the BoS and Vindicators, even up to the present day.

The Vaccaro loyalists, though well-supplied, were largely without direction following the departure from Mariposa. They were U.S. military loyalists, but they found little to no evidence that the U.S. military had ever existed over the course of their journey through the post-war ruins of America. Distraught, Andrew Vaccaro came across a saving grace when his group arrived in Georgia. The former United States Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, was largely intact. Seeing opportunity, Vaccaro led his men to liberate the facility's surrounding areas from raiders and other ne'er-do-wells, and restored the CDC to a functioning laboratory environment. Once the CDC's laboratory was in working condition and its environs were under Vaccaro's undisputed control, he announced the formal creation of the Vindicators. This new group would have as its objective the vindication of the work down by the Mariposa scientists murdered by Roger Maxson, by finding new, constructive uses for the FEV. 

The founding of the Vindicators and the ensuing myths of a swarm of heavily armed military personnel conquering half of Atlanta led to a wave of migration to the CDC. Military remnants all across the American South and Gulf Coast area, either cut off from the Enclave or wilfully ignoring them, were welcomed at the CDC and found a place among the Vindicators. A perimeter fence was established around the CDC, with portions of old ruins being used to wall off the compound from the outside. Whilst during Vaccaro's era a combination of scavenging and feeding off of the original Mariposa haul sustained Vindicator activities, the organization entered a dark period upon his death. The massive build-up of military personnel, equipment and soldiers' civilian families produced severe overcrowding and supply shortages in the CDC compound. An expansion of the compound was necessary, and a new method of supply-gathering more effective than simple scavenging was in order too. The FEV would turn out to come in handy for both problems.

The CDC's place inside of the ruins of Atlanta ensured that the ruins were always kept clean of raiders and wasteland critters, a fact that very quickly came to be taken advantage of by squatters setting up inside of the decaying, half-destroyed buildings neighbouring the walled CDC compound. The Vindicators tolerated small levels of squatter presence outside their walls at first, but eventually came to see the squatters both as a literal military threat and a threat in regards to their consumption of the region's already minimalistic foodstuffs. Thankfully, a strand of the FEV modified to stimulate accelerated and highly resilient plant growth became a potential tool to end the region's food shortage. The Vindicators offered the Atlanta squatters an agreement; a zone permitted for non-Vindicator settlement, to be called 'Reduit', would be constructed around the CDC compound to safely house and maintain order among the settlers. In exchange, the settlers were to serve as labour on FEV-modified farms set up by the Vindicators within the Reduit zone (as well as, without their knowledge, to serve as test subjects for whether or not the FEV-modified food products were safe to consume). The vast majority of settlers accepted, and Reduit's ensuing population boom resulted in the 'zone' becoming the region's largest settlement, far larger and more populous than the CDC compound which it surrounded. New FEV strands were formed to do everything from protect the people against disease to ensure either the docility or death of Reduit settlers that made themselves enemies of the Vindicators.

Over time, Reduit evolved from a glorified refugee camp to a genuine city. The Vindicators ceased to be seen as the Vaccaro loyalist descended upper-class of Reduit, and it came to be that the vast majority of the Vindicator membership were simply people born in Reduit who wanted to help defend their home. The CDC became a purely military, scientific and government compound, with the Vaccaro loyalists now living in Reduit alongside the descendants of the Atlanta squatters, as well as new arrivals to the city. Instead of only being given direct injections of FEV, all Reduit citizens now consume small amounts of modified FEV material in their daily lives. All food and water available in Reduit is laced with some level of biological manipulation, ranging from changes that were used simply to improve yield all the way to concoctions thought up to either protect or control the population in any imaginable manner. 

With the synthesization and modification of the FEV also came a modification to the way the Vindicators operated. The American nationalist patriotic comradery of the early Vindicators came to be replaced by dogmatic and absolute loyalty to Reduit, and to the Vindicators themselves—not as a body of the United States, but as a sovereign organization. The present Commander of the Vindicators, Harold Reed a native-born citizen of Reduit, has propagated these ideological changes extensively. His reign as Commander of the Vindicators has seen the production and release of massive amounts of propaganda into Reduit's radio stations and onto her streets. The law, under his command, has become iron, and the Reduit society centred around self-sufficiency has evolved beyond that to become an industrial-scale manufacturer of firearms and ammunition. Love for the Vindicators and for Reduit has never been stronger, and neither has her army. The Vindicators seem destined to forge themselves a genuine empire in the south-east of the ruins of America. It is a day that Andrew Vaccaro would never imagine, but one that Commander Reed seems obsessed with making a reality.