Great Plains Exclusion Zone

Great Plains Exclusion Zone
Type	Exclusion zone
Location	American Republic
Inhabitants	Bionics Protolanguage squids Betty Neil Fletcher Sanderson Other Justice officers
First visited	Issue 6

The Great Plains Exclusion Zone (GPEZ) is a forbidden and rarely traveled region of the American Republic with a dark history. Although Pax's crew never planned to enter this area, circumstances in Colorado force them to do just that.

History

Spoilers ahead. Are we okay with that, kid?

Before the heist

According to Theo, there was a great drought in the 1990s that caused most of Kansas's population to leave. Before the year 2000, the Kennedy Institute for Technical Excellence was established in Lebanon, Kansas, where hundreds of scientists conducted research on Protolanguage. This city was chosen because Lebanon was the original location of the Tower of Babel, a structure that has strong ties to Protolanguage. They discovered that the original language was capable of altering reality, but wanted to stop experimenting in fear of the potential danger. However, the militarized police force, Justice, under President Samuel Ward's administration, took over the project and created a huge Protolanguage signal by shackling the Tree of Tongues with a crystalline version. This endeavor went awry, causing the tree to release countless madness-inducing Echoes and turn a small percentage of the population into Protolanguage-wielding people called Anomals. This effect mostly extended to the United States of America, but some people in Canada and Mexico also gained powers. Due to the unhabitable climate and the presence of confidential experiments, Justice closed off Kansas and renamed it the Great Plains Exclusion Zone. Justice continued to conduct research there and created bionic soldiers, but due to the Tree of Tongues, the bionics turned on Justice and tried to protect the tree from them, with the four-armed bionic acting as their field commander. Justice managed to capture and imprison the bionics, allowing them to maintain control over the tree. Since then, the Justice officers staffed in GPEZ and the Betty's Diner in Lebanon did not get much outside aid.

The Wildflowers sent scouts to investigate and all of them died from the dangerous climate, but the the last one revealed that there was a Justice facility in Lebanon. Since then, no further attempts from outside groups were made to explore the region. The area's sense of mystery caused people to speculate about its true purpose, with many believing that the deities, Bituman and Jane of the Void, originated there. Eventually, the mysterious Anomal, the Stranger, went to GPEZ in search of the Tree of Tongues. However, the Stranger could not find the tree or a way out of the region, leading to her getting infected by an Echo and deluding herself into thinking she is in the afterlife.

Issue 6: The Bad Lands

Sometime in October 2030, a rookie officer, Neil, accidentally releases the bionics, who attack all Justice officers in the vicinity for being enemies of the tree. On the 20th of that month, the crew drives through GPEZ in order to reach their final gig as soon as possible, as their original route is no longer safe due to the Weave libraries being exposed. When the crew's tour bus approaches Lebanon, it crashes into a bionic soldier, causing Pax to leave and investigate for damage. Girl leaves the bus, and Pax will follow in order to bring her back, bringing her to an abandoned building next to a ravine. However, Pax falls into the ravine and gets trapped under rubble, and a bionic approaches her before leaving. Eli frees Pax and the two encounter two pairs of Justice officers on the way, with the second pair being felled by a four-armed bionic. The bionic briefly fights Pax and Eli before retreating, leaving them to climb up a ladder to Betty's Diner. Inside, they find a broken down Betty, Girl, and the Stranger. A new pair of officers show up to question Pax, but the Stranger takes them down with her Vocal. Pax's group finds the Kennedy Institute and a single officer, Fletcher Sanderson. Pax uses the Cancel Vocal to get Sanderson to believe his superiors abandoned him, causing him to open the gate in a desperate attempt to receive the group's protection. However, the bionic leader kills Sanderson and attacks the party before retreating again. At the top of the institute, the party is frightened by the appearance of a giant Protolanguage squid, which is visible to everyone even without using the ME-EM. The squid is passive towards the party, but when a Justice officer confronts the party and gets infected by an Echo, the squid attacks the officer. Several Echo-infected guards swarm the party and attempt to use their number and speed to their advantage, only to be defeated. The party uses Eli's illusionary instruments to play a song, which pleases the giant Protolanguage squid. The bionic leader carries the group into the Tree of Tongue's room, allowing Pax to touch the crystalline tree. This causes Pax to see a vision of Jacob explaining more about Protolanguage. She then finds the female scientist from her vision in the abandoned mall, who explains the history of the Republic's Protolanguage experimentation. That scientist apologizes to Pax for leaving her behind, hinting that the baby the former spoke of in the mall was actually Pax herself. Once Pax returns to reality, the real tree is freed from the crystalline one, resulting in Echoes being pulled back to the real tree more efficiently. The Stranger is freed of her Echo, revealing her as Eli's childhood friend Ophelia. The group then returns to the bus and rides towards Missouri to find a campsite.

Physical description

The crew is only shown exploring the roads of GPEZ as well as some sections of Lebanon, which was once a city in Smith County, Kansas. The air is dusty enough to obstruct vision and there are piles of dirt and sand on pavement and concrete.

Abandoned building

There is an abandoned building near the city limit of Lebanon, which is surrounded by shipping containers, some blue barrels, barbed wire fences, and red tool carts. Next to the building is a completely drained canal with walkways, barbed wire fences, railing, metal bridges, switch-activated ladders, and floodgates. The portion of the walkway closest to the building is broken and unable to support the weight of an adult. The bottom of the canal has shipping containers, barrels, and broken down cars. One ladder in the canal is close to a Betty's Diner.

Betty's Diner

The diner's road sign and building sign are incompletely lit and say "BETTY'S DINER", but with several characters missing. Nearby is a billboard with a Justice officer warning the reader "Do Not Feed Vagrants". The objects surrounding the building include cars, trucks, and dumpsters. The inside of the diner contains the same menus, red furniture, and condiments as other Betty's Diners, but near the bathroom are several misplaced chairs, a mop, and a wet floor sign. The road the diner is on has an abandoned market, a warehouse, and several types of vehicles.

Kennedy Institute for Technical Excellence

The parking lot of the institute has several abandoned cars, a functional Justice car, and dead trees. A barred gate blocks the way to the campus plaza, with a booth in the center of the gate. The right side of the gate has a card reader that requires biometrics. The plaza has a statue depicting John F. Kennedy posing next to a Junior Justice robot, but JFK's statue is headless after the Bionic leader tears it off. The plaza has several dead trees, sections of dead grass, and benches. The crew never enters the campus building, but the outside of the building has stairs and switch-activated ladders leading to the top of the building. The classroom building surrounds a large roofless courtyard, with a tower in the middle. The top of the roof is mostly flat with several obelisks, a gable-roofed section with missing shingles, and flat platforms. The courtyard tower is shaped like a sphere with a cone on top, with walkways and stairs surrounding both the spherical and conical sections. The inside of the tower, much like the whispering room of Elko County Facility, is spherical and has hexagonal and pentagonal pistons. The room is much larger in comparison to the whispering room and has a spiral staircase leading to a circular exit door. The center of the room has an orange crystalline tree, which turns gray after Pax interacts with it.

Items

Main article: Items

• Keychain
• Henry's bowtie
• Institute keycard

Gallery

Shipping container yard

Abandoned building

Top of canal

Bottom of canal

Canal floodgate

Canal encounter

Canal ladder

Outside Betty's Diner

Inside Betty's Diner

Institute parking lot

Institute front gate

Institute plaza

Institute roof

Tower and squid

Illusionary performance

Tree room