Ashen Leaves

What is this really? Is it the sickness of the plants, or sickness of the ground itself? It’s really hard to say at this point, but let’s see what this is about.

Let’s go back a little bit, to a time when people were only starting to come out of the underground. The first thing they did, of course, was try to grow some crops to produce some food. For a while, this almost seemed like it was almost gonna work, but sadly this didn’t last long. As soon as the plants started growing, it became obvious that something is very wrong here.

The ground here was dead and dry, and the climate was hot, dry and unforgiving, everyone knew that, but dammit, if they could genetically engineer themselves into mole people, then why couldn’t they come up with some sort of a functional crop plant that could grow in this region?

Well, they couldn’t, somehow. Any time it looked like the plants would finally start to grow, they all succumbed to the same strange disease resulting in plants breaking out in these gray ash-like spots, until the whole plant got eaten up by them and turned to ash.

So why did this happen? People tried all kinds of different things to make this go away, from better irrigation to trying to trying to import new soil from different parts of the world, and some of the things did work for a bit but turned out to be too difficult, unsustainable, or just didn’t work very well to begin with. It was as if the ground itself here was cursed.

And it may as well be so. As we are all very well aware, this part of the world got the shorter end of the stick during and after the apocalypse. The land here is much more desolate and infertile, only able to sustain a few plants and animals, all seemingly parasitic in nature, feeding off of each other and fighting against each other for survival. The real war raging on here is the one between these plants.

And while these plants and animals are used to this kind of life, the wholesome crop plants never stood a chance against them. It is believed that ashen leaves are caused by a small parasitic type of an insect, or a plant, you should know that the line between the two is blurred in our world, who would not only feed on these lush delicious plants, but also infect them with their own wasteland diseases.

Now when this started happening, there was really no way back. The people gave these parasites exactly what they wanted and needed to multiply and spread out, while also spreading all sorts of diseases, not only to plants, but also to people who ate them.

Not that people needed much reason to try and leave this part of the world for the better ones, but the shen leaves and it’s consequences really forced people to move away from this area, and also to seek out the people on the other side of the world, in Ä+*4~. Living conditions were much better there, meaning the people there were more able to produce food, and really anything you need for a good life. But to buy supplies from Ä+*4~, they had to have something to offer in return, which push them to try harder to find anything here that they could produce and sell to Ä+*4~.

So really, if you think of it, it was the ashen leaves, a common plant disease, that really pushed T@Ö#Ä3 to have to adapt, develop in it’s own unique ways and work together with Ä+*4~. If it wasn’t for that, well T@Ö#Ä3 might be able to produce some of its own food and supplies, but might quite possibly just stay on some level of what Wasteland is today.