A Tale of a Frostpunk Mayor

The mayor had been banished to tread the frosty wastes. He had tried his best, Lord he had! But the people, they just expected too much.

Huddling at the back of a cave, trying to create fire but unable, he slumped against the icy wall and tried to work out where it had all gone wrong.

He and his people had found an abandoned generator and quickly set up camp. He'd had a workshop built up with his finest engineers on the clock, researching what they could to help these frozen souls find new meaning to their lives.

A few homes had been quickly established and all able-bodied workers were sent out to scavenge whatever wood, steel and coal they could find.

It had started out so well.

But then it happened. The sick started to get even sicker. He had hoped that the people wouldn't mind caring for them in the warmth of the homes, but they soon required more medical care -- more than they had available.

Hastily constructed medical tents were placed beneath the warmth of the great generator and some fine carers quickly took charge of the situation.

It all seemed to be taken care of. The sick were being cared for, hunters trudged through the snow to find fresh meat to bring back to the settlement, the researchers were researching new technology every day, and the others were bringing in what resources they could from the scattered debris and coal deposits that dotted their surrounds.

But the cold was taking its toll. Soon the people were suffering from the worst frostbite the medics had ever seen.

The only option they had was to amputate their afflicted appendages.

More and more people were falling victim to the great white blight and more room needed to be made in the small medical tents. And so the ex-mayor had signed a law demanding they overcrowd the tents. But soon that wasn't even enough. So he had demanded carehouses be built solely for these limbless souls; they must get out of the medic tents, they were taking up valuable space.

After the ex-mayor had sorted the appendage-less from they who were actually ill, a woman had dared approach him and demanded they use their children to help work.

The audacity!

No, he had better plans for the children. He quickly built up some creches and within a couple of days these new students were ready and able to help in the medic tents -- they would become their future practitioners of medicine.

He furrowed his brow and sighed. Had he not made good decisions for his people?

The audacious woman was correct in one way though. They had needed more workers, and desperately. They needed more hunters to gather food, more people to hunt for debris, and the coal piles were quickly becoming depleted and they desperately needed coal to keep the generator running.

He had his researchers researching other methods of coal extraction, including burning the nearby trees into the black gold, but it wasn't enough. He needed mines constructed -- full, black-bleeding mines! But he didn't have the materials to have these mines built.

Not only did he need more people, he needed resources that were unobtainable just by sitting in this crater. And so he had constructed a great beacon and sent scouts across the nearby region, hoping to find both people and supplies.

Meanwhile more and more people had become ill and there simply wasn't enough he could feasibly do. He had his medical teams, the children were helping as best they could... so he had promised to build yet another medical facility, despite not having any more people to staff it, and hoped that the scouts would bring back more people soon.

Thankfully, they did.

Soon their burgeoning colony had many more hands to help with the necessities required of living out in this frozen wasteland. They had more hunters, a few more medical staff for that placeholding medical centre he had built, there were more people to send searching for resource.

The researchers were doing their darndest to figure out new ways to keep the population heated, well-fed, and well-cared for... but the people, they just didn't care. The very people the ex-mayor had travelled with for so long before they settled here, the people who had voted him into this position of power, were very quickly becoming disheartened with him.

He was trying his best.

The temperature was falling each and every day, forcing the generator to suck up more coal than necessary. It was reaching -40 degrees Celsius each nice and climbing to a mere -30 during the days.

They couldn't live like this. Even his own hope had begun to fall.

Then one day a man fell outside their growing city, a man who claimed to be from one of the settlements they had originally been searching for. Everyone was dead. Everyone. There were no settlements, there were hardly any more people, they were all frozen, buried within the wastes, and it would be their time too soon enough.

The man died on their doorstop. The people screamed. It was all over for them. He needed to do something!

In that immediate moment, there were only two things he could think of -- bring down religion upon the people to inspire hope, or rely on their own order and discipline. Not knowing what to do, he had simply chosen the route of order and discipline.

It had been the wrong choice.

A crowd of people had mocked his decision. They would not rely on order to save them, oh no, they would make their own way back to where they had come from and they would take everyone with them!

They planned to leave within the next fortnight. The ex-mayor needed to convince his people to stay, but hope was so low and discontent was so high... his people no longer trusted in his ability. He didn't know what to do.

He hadn't needed to think for long.

That day... the generator went out. All the coal reserves were gone. He had no people to run the charcoal kilns. The deep coal mines had yet to be constructed due to lacking resources.

And of course, despite his best efforts, he had been blamed.

The people stopped and stared as his own Watchmen of Order grabbed him by his collar and dragged him past the silent generator. They had thrown him into the snow and demanded he leave, told him that they'll deal with the city themselves, that surely no one could be as incompetent as he.

And so he had stumbled across the wastes, unsure of which direction to go, certain he was going to find his death. As a blizzard roared closer and closer, he fell into this old cave and crawled into it as deep as he could go.

But it didn't matter where he was, whether he were out there or in here. It was all the same.

May the people he once served live a while longer whilst he suffered for doing what he thought was right.

 

Until next time. ❄️

 

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_{All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the game: Frostpunk.}