ATLANTA … KINDA SORTA

POSTED BY: SOUTHERN GUARD

All right, folks, I want to talk about Atlanta, or Hot-lanta as some call it, and specifically Sweetwater Creek! Seattle’s Ork Underground and its Prop 23 and racist governor got tons of Matrix love, but we’ve had plenty of problems of our own in a place that is just as much a haven for the orks and trolls of the Atlanta region as the Ork Underground was for Seattle. As you can tell by my moniker, I’m a resident. I work for the best security corp on God’s green Earth—and I’m proud to tell anyone who asks, because this place is a trog utopia.

Now, it ain’t really a utopia, I know what that means, but it sure as sugar is the best place this tusker’s ever lived. It wasn’t always like this though, so I’ll start back at the beginning.

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mindset, I edited the transposed document because every single -ing was -in’ because Southern Guard works hard to keep up his southern cred!

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Well before this ol’ boy was born, the gov-ernment of Atlanta had a problem. At least they called it a problem. They had too many orks and trolls, and not enough spaces for them to live. This isn’t true, but it’s what they said. So they offered all metahumans the opportunity to relocate near Sweetwater Creek State Park, where they were going to build housing and a community from the abandoned warehouses and factories east of the

area. The park was offered as a place to farm as well, but that’s not such a keen thing. We’ll get to that in a bit.

This “opportunity” is a real polite way of saying,

“get the frag out!” If you were an elf or a dwarf in those days, it wasn’t too bad, but if you were an ork or a troll, it was like old-time segregation. They even passed laws about how buildings needed to be stronger for orks and trolls and opened a legal way for everyone and their brother to keep out our kind. There was plenty of racial tension early on, but after a while trolls and orks just took to the highway (or the government busses) and moved into their modern internment camp. It was damn tragic.

But, thing about orks and trolls is that they make for a fearsome team. Trolls may be big, but they ain’t dumb. A lot were well-read, including being up on things like construction and business. And not to knock my people as just strong backs, but that’s a thing they do in fact have. The Atlanta

gov-ernment expected them to rot in squalor, because all of a sudden that money for renovation and con-struction just wasn’t in the budget, but when they actually sent out their census workers, they got back crazy numbers and even crazier stories.

The mayor at the time came out for a visit and was shocked at what had become of this once-de-crepit area. So much so that he even tried to get the trolls and orks kicked out so he could gentrify the area. That didn’t go over too well, and the first of many small scuffles went to the group with more fighters over one hundred and fifty kilos. Political pushing came next, but Sweetwater Creek had somehow already made friends with one of Atlan-ta’s biggest powerhouses, the Atlantean Founda-tion. Details of the origins of this alliance are lost to several crashes, but locals talk about a team of trogs who helped out an Atlantean scientist with a series of research trips that located several powerful trin-kets. Point is, they kept the political wolves at bay and allowed Sweetwater Creek time to shine.

With some pressure off and a powerful friend looking out for them, folks felt Sweetwater might actually be a safe place. At least safer than Atlan-ta proper, where lynchings were sAtlan-tarting to come back in style. It wasn’t the brightest point in the capital’s history. But despite this, local population grew rapidly, though unsurprisingly ork and troll populations around the rest of the city plummet-ed. Just about every ork and troll in the city packed up and moved over to Sweetwater. It was tough in those early days. A lot of building, but we had strong backs in abundance.

Once they had the foundation, local econom-ics started to pick up. Cash flowed in, mostly off the black and grey markets, but it was cash and it moved through the local shops, giving Sweetwater its own little neighborhood economy. What came next was the big step Sweetwater Creek needed.

It started with Southern Guard, a classically named security firm that only offered two types of officers: large and extra large. Site security, bodyguarding, transport services, and other small-team operations got them noticed. That and their unique statures. The efforts didn’t stop there, and Southern Guard recently earned single-A status from the Corporate Court during all this Megacor-porate Revision mumbo-jumbo. It was a bit of a shock, since most of the corps out there are get-ting knocked down, not boosted up, but somehow all them AAAs buying up the little guys left space for a few more little guys.

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Atlantean Foundation subsidiary. Trace back the money and the stock ownership, and you’ll find a whole lot of it in the personal portfolio of Shiela B.

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also been getting friendly with DocWagon, another Atlanta native, and operating as subcontracted HTR Teams for the medicorp.

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One big company wasn’t enough for Sweetwa-ter Creek, but security is one of the few markets where size is a benefit, so Sweetwater’s entre-preneurs moved on to a place where size doesn’t matter: the Matrix. Big Tech is a Matrix design, security, and support firm started and based in Sweetwater Creek. They employ orks and trolls with tech skills (and several technomancers, but don’t tell nobody). These two have been followed by a half-dozen or so others, giving Sweetwater a nice smattering of job opportunities for the orks and trolls who live there.

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got a SIN or not. They just employ you in a different aspect of their operations.

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want more info on some Sweetwater corps, check it out.

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With all the growth and the great community life here, it makes me sad to talk about the bad parts. But they exist. First off, Atlanta treats the place like a foreign country. The capital has passed plenty of laws to make orks and trolls feel unwel-come in the city proper, and when they are there they get treated like second-class citizens. It sucks for them, and every other ork who comes to town, but Sweetwater Creek has done plenty to make up for that and welcomes orks from around the world to stay there and just visit downtown.

Bad point number two: A trog utopia can’t stand without those who absolutely hate us coming to try to knock it down. We get our fair share of Humanis protests blocking the highway or marching through our streets. They usually keep it civil, mainly because Southern Guard holds the town’s policing contract, but they’ve

done some property damage, and their verbal assaults don’t go unheard by our youth. Worse than them, though, is Alamos 20,000. They’ve already claimed six bombings, including one that took down part of town hall, but we can’t get any real help in dealing with those bastards because politics being what they are, no one in Atlanta seems to care.

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are so xenophobic, they don’t talk to the smoothie agent that gets sent. The office in Atlanta has been requesting an ork be transferred to work with Sweetwater, but for some reason it keeps getting held up.

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kidnapped in order to keep them out of the Atlanta office.

And we all know who’s doing that dirty work.

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