TÉRMINO, C.G. – DEKA 10, 126 PM
Outside the Término Football Club’s stadium on the edge of town, the team’s supporters are ecstatic. A quarterfinal match between Término and their rival Vale Alegre is all that stands between them and the semifinals – a threshold the team has never crossed.
Entering the concrete oval among the red- and blue-clad locals, I find my seat in the southern bleachers. Raucous cheers erupt from the crowd as the team emerges from the tunnel connected to its locker room. The players, many of whom are from the area, are beloved hometown heroes. This season started off slow but has turned into an unexpected thunder run for the otherwise longtime underdog. A few days ago they defeated Santo Jorge, another perennial rival that had beaten them in four of their five previous matches.
As the afternoon fades, the evening light sheds an amber glow on the sharp, verdant mountain peaks behind the northern stands. Between the stands and the mountain peaks, however, lies a latent danger beneath several thousand tons of rocks, dirt, and leaves.
Sandwiched in the thin sliver of flat land between the steep cliffs of the Coluna Mountains and the bay from which it derives its name, Baía de Caranguejos shares a curious distinction with Eaton, North Hegelion. The two were the only Western cities with populations greater than 200,000 to survive the War unscathed, at least in terms of direct, nuclear impact. On Deka 28, 1766 O.S., neither city’s residents faced vaporization, nor heat blasts, broken glass, or firestorms.
While on a backcountry expedition through the Ele Mountains in 89 PM, wilderness explorer Michael Norfolk discovered the shattered remains of the missile that is believed to have been intended to strike Eaton. Federal authorities closed the mountainside to tourists and evacuated the nearby valley. It was feared that, were the conventional explosives around the warhead to detonate during removal, the subsequent explosion would result in a potentially deadly plume of radioactive material.
Thankfully, the warhead was removed without incident and deactivated. Parts of it have been sent to museums across the country, and the exterior casing of the one-megaton bomb currently sits atop a memorial plinth in a secluded part of the otherwise bustling Eaton Central Green.
The situation for Baía de Caranguejos is slightly different, in that the bomb is still very much present, just buried deep underground.
In the opening minutes of the Milito, it is believed that a one-megaton warhead atop a missile was launched from a submarine off the coast of Cabo Grande. The missile, destined for the valuable port and urban center of Baía, ended up crashing first into a mountaintop and then into a flat area down below around twenty-five miles southeast of the city. The bomb didn’t detonate, but it crashed into the ground with such force that the residents of the nearby village of Término thought there may have been an earthquake.
As the Duke of Cabo Grande attempted to reassert control over his domain amid the communications blackout and overall chaos in the aftermath of the War, he heard about the bomb in Término. He said that it was proof from God that Cabo Grande – and more specifically, his sovereignty over it – was meant to continue. This supposed mandate from heaven (as well as the troop of soldiers under his command) helped shore up the Duke’s rule for a short while longer.
Despite the providential explanation of the bomb’s failed mission, grace was not the only thing to fall upon the people of Término. Unlike the Eaton missile, the bomb near Término did partially explode. Though far from the devastation that would have resulted from a nuclear detonation, the one-hundred pounds of conventional explosives wrapped around the warhead did go off when the bomb struck the earth at nearly three-hundred miles per hour. The explosion itself was not especially dramatic, aside from the forty-foot diameter crater it blew into the soil. But it did launch much of the warhead’s radioactive material into the air, and the winds that day carried it over Término and its neighborhoods, parks, and fields. In the years following the War, children played in school playgrounds, adults harvested fruits and vegetables from their gardens, and regular rains washed contaminated soil down from the nearby cliffside into the town below.
After the left-wing Revolução Popular overthrew the Duke in 5 PM, they heard rumblings of illness coming from Término. When doctors were dispatched to the area, they found alarming rates of cancer and stories of otherwise healthy adults from healthy families dropping dead at young ages. Dr. Sérgio Marinho, in his report on the area to his superiors in Baía, wrote that, “the incidence of childhood leukemia is some fifty times the rate in the rest of the republic… the incidence of adult leukemia, twenty times.”
The government, lacking the equipment or expertise to clean up the area, evacuated it entirely. Leila Morais, the Deputy Premier for Health and the Environment called the situation in Término the consequence of “royalist foolishness and idiotic superstition.” Soldiers erected a chainlink fence across the sole road into the community and barred all unnecessary entry.
Thirty-five years passed and the community of Término and its War-era relic went untouched. By the early 40s Cabo Grande had erupted into civil war, and with support from the right-wing governments of Uniguita and the then-independent Vetludo, the Conselho de Salvação Nacional – or, the “Conselho” for short – emerged victorious in 42 PM. The Conselho’s head, General Jorge Oliveira, wanted to bring international investment to build up his newly won state.
Following the fall of Baía de Caranguejos, Oliveira’s men discovered pre-War geologic records indicating significant supplies of oil and platinum in and around Término. The left-wing government had seen the same records, but was uninterested in exploiting the resources. The autarky-minded governing council saw petroleum as a low priority given the plentiful supply of coal closer to the republic’s core, and platinum was of little use to a regime that romanticized the rural peasant over the urban metalworker.
Oliveira, by contrast, saw an opportunity. Increasing international trade and need for fertilizer meant increased demand for oil, and increased mechanization and electronics production meant increased demand for platinum. To help encourage private investors and their workers to return to Término, Oliveira staged a dramatic publicity stunt. Standing in front of the vine-covered fence constructed by the previous regime, Oliveira chastised his predecessors for “squandering our great nation’s endless splendor.” He then hopped into a nearby idling truck and rammed it through the fence’s gate. The road leading up to Término had been buried under the weight of resurgent rainforest and it took him, his troops, the small press corps, and a handful of would-be investors nearly forty-five minutes to reach the old townsite. It too had been buried under a sea of green, but Oliveira promised investors, “profits twenty times the cost of all the weedwhacking.”
For his finale, General Oliveira drove to the northern edge of town, the closest reachable spot to the bomb’s crater. Standing without a mask or any other personal protection in front of the growing forest behind him, he said confidently, “look and see! Nature is cleaning up the past. There is no need to fear this region of bounty.”
In reality, according to longtime aide Alvaro Domingues, Oliveira was deathly afraid. “The general has been taking copious amounts of [radiation prophylactic] iodine tablets, to the point where his doctors are worried,” wrote Domingues in his journal the night before the Término visit. In the weeks that followed, Domingues wrote of Oliveira’s “frequent, illness-related nightmares,” and that, “in the general’s eyes, the mole he had since childhood was suddenly cancerous, and every nosebleed caused by the seasonal dry air was a sign of his inevitable demise.”
Ultimately, General Oliveira’s dreams of private foreign interest in the region were a bust. When the regime refused to allow independent analyses of radiation in the area, Uniguitan and Madawban petrochemical and mining companies recoiled in suspicion. The only companies to enter the fray in earnest were those owned by the Cabograndense government, the National Metal Corporation and PetroCabo. Drawn by promises of cheap, brand-new housing and high pay, the two state-owned firms had no problem attracting workers.
When yet another revolution saw General Oliveira and the Conselho thrown out of power in 56 PM, the newly democratic Cabo Grande soon applied for accession to the Federation. Shortly after Cabo Grande joined, a small team of scientists from the Federal Radiological Institute visited Término to study the long-term effects of the fissile material lodged in the ground nearby.
What they found was unnerving. In their eventual report, they said that while the demolition and reconstruction of Término during the Oliveira regime had made it so the town itself was not dangerously radioactive, the groundwater was severely polluted. Término was downslope from the bomb impact site, meaning that any uranium or plutonium isotopes that leaked from the warhead were carried down by gravity into the town’s drinking water. “Término’s water supply contains roughly 500 times the background level of certain radioactive materials,” wrote scientist Leroy Welk in his analysis.
“To drink the water is to commit suicide in the slowest, most painful possible way.”
Medical records and statistics for the area, which had been carefully altered under the Conselho, obscured continued health risks. “Cancer rates, contrary to regime statistics, are significantly elevated here as a result of the contaminated groundwater,” Welk reported.
President Erika Lankolay’s government responded with a massive cleanup and remediation operation. Tap water was immediately cut off and replaced with the arrival of gigantic water trucks a dozen times each day. Bulldozers arrived and cleared the multiple acres of forest and topsoil immediately surrounding the crater, carrying them off to be disposed of at sites in Uniguita’s deserts. Engineers designed and constructed massive rain-fed cisterns on the Coluna Mountains immediately above the town, which would be removed from the dangers of radioactive contamination. A first-of-its-kind water distribution system saw pipes built above houses and commercial buildings rather than below them. Ventilation systems were installed in the platinum mines to filter in clean air, and Término’s parks were ripped up, overturned, and replenished with new soil.
Roger Ferenc, the project’s supervisor, called it, “the most massive and comprehensive nuclear remediation project” he had ever seen.
Military ordnance disposal teams were unsuccessful in their attempts to retrieve the remaining radioactive material buried deep in the bomb’s original crater. With the new drinking water system and a townwide ban on “unnecessary digging,” authorities felt comfortable declaring the issue resolved.
Despite assurances that Término is safe, federal authorities still kept a tight leash on development north of town. For decades, yet another chainlink fence stood alongside Divisa Street with warnings from the federal Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) against trespassing. By the 90s, scientists studying the area reported that, “so long as no one is drinking the groundwater or eating the dirt, they should be okay.” The especially cautious DEQ interpreted this to mean no industrial or housing construction north of Divisa Street.
Término, starved for space, was able to reach a compromise with the federal government to place one permanent structure north of the boundary: a new home for the Término Football Club.
After years of haggling, additional remediation, and a prolonged construction process, Término F.C. opened its brand-new stadium in 103 PM. The team’s players (nicknamed the bombas) have played in the stadium (nicknamed the cratera) for more than two decades.
Tonight, the air in the cratera is cool but energized. In this town of roughly 11,000 inhabitants, not a single spot in the six-thousand-seat stadium is empty. During the lulls early in the game, I talk to some of the locals crammed into the seats around me.
Paola Carvalho has the difficult distinction of being an environmental advocate in Término. She tells me that she’s not particularly concerned about the one-megaton warhead still lodged in the nearby jungle.
“Honestly, I hardly think of it,” she tells me. “Between the oil derricks and the mine, the bomb is the least of my worries.”
“Our water comes from above, so the radiation shouldn’t affect us that much. It’s like an x-ray amount, if that,” she says. “I’m more concerned about the fumes from the refinery and all those nasty chemicals they use to clear away dirt in the mines.”
João Ramos, one of the thousands in the community employed in the oil industry, sees the bomb as a sort of quirky local mascot. To him, it’s more of a fun fact for visiting relatives than anything to be afraid of.
“We say, ‘oh you know there’s a nuke up the road right? Like right next to the stadium?’” he laughs. “You should see the way their eyes bug out, it’s hilarious.”
Some find the situation a bit more macabre. Though elevated cancer and chronic disease rates in Término are now more attributable to extractive industries than to radiation, memories of the past still linger. Esther Pereira, now 87, was born and raised in the town. Her parents, her older sister, and her uncle all died prematurely as a result of cancers she blames on the area’s radioactive soil.
“I believe that God let me live so that I can carry on the legacy of the past,” she told me in her sparsely decorated living room. Compared to the rest of Cabo Grande, Término has one of the smallest populations of individuals over the age of 65. Health analysts chalk this up to cancers caused by irradiated drinking water consumed prior to the Lankolay-era cleanup in the late 50s. Esther is part of a small clique of “village elders” as she calls them, who remember when parents chastised their children for playing in contaminated streams, or who drank bottled water for the rest of their lives despite assurances from DEQ officials that the new, higher-altitude cisterns were perfectly safe.
“The people who think of the bomb as being some sort of novelty don’t know their history,” she said. “They don’t know how much pain it caused.”
As the game reaches the end, rookie player Paulo Gomes slides towards the ball, his cleats ripping into the turf. After doing the research for this piece, part of me cringes – did he just unearth something? I feel this way even though recent analysis from the DEQ confirms what Paola said earlier – current ambient radiation levels in Término are, as one official put it, “equivalent to being in a doctor’s waiting room.”
My anxiety is suddenly overcome by pure adrenaline. Gomes makes contact with the ball, sending it into the net.
The cratera explodes with excitement. For the first time, the bombas will be advancing to Cabo Grande’s semifinals. Throngs of fans flood the streets as enterprising individuals sell glowsticks for N0.25.1 Meant to emulate phosphorescent rods of uranium, they have become a popular talisman for the team’s supporters.
As the shouting, screaming mass of jubilant fans jump and wave their arms, they sing their team’s song. Roughly translated, it means:
Don’t touch us!
Don’t touch us!
Don’t touch us, or you’ll burn!
[OOC: Around $2 in 2026 US dollars.]