Lost Vegas, Epilogue: The Wretched of the Earth
And so it was in the year 2710 that a parlay was called between the surviving forces of California and New Mexico in Boulder City. The two parties agreed that something of great significance had happened here, and that the city of Las Vegas had been cursed and its empire was forfeit. The New Mexicans gained control over most of Vegas’s former empire (excepting the newly independent Bajo Colorado), while the Californians retained clientage over the Nevadans. The surviving population was to be split in half - one half would be transferred as slaves to New Mexico, while the other half would be taken to California. The House claimant, Jackson House, arranged for many of those taken in by California to be free, and gained himself mayorship over New Reno. The city of Las Vegas itself was declared cursed, and the local tribes were empowered to kill any who attempted to enter the crater.
And so it was that the nation of Vegas was destroyed. It would be Vegasite slaves that built the new Phoenix pyramid and the floating gardens of Sacramento. Over the intervening three centuries, however, many slaves both in New Mexico and California would earn their freedom. Some made for New Reno while most others established small communities in their new homelands. A new culture emerged, a diasporic culture built on a history of suffering and slavery. The profound trauma at the heart of post-collapse culture was the question why Lady Luck would abandon her chosen people? Some came to the conclusion that it was because Lady Luck never existed at all, that they had been worshipping false idols and thus punished. These pessimists would convert to the local religions and attempt to integrate, but with little success - prejudice remained harsh against the Vegasites. Forced to adhere to their own community, many searched for new answers within their own cultural tradition.
The exile community in Elay would see the most complete codification of this growing religious consciousness. A group of priestesses and priests sought out the oral records of the faith and what few texts remained to construct the first comprehensive account of the Vegasite faith in what was called the Bookie’s Book, later shortened to the Bookie. Being written in California, the character of the Bookie naturally took much influence from Scientology and its rigid theology, while the exile communities of New Mexico reflected the looseness and mysticism of the New Age. The Bookie recounts the history of Vegas and its people, beginning with its mythological pre-regression origins and then Randall House leading his people out of the desert and out of exile to build a paradise with Lady Luck playing a prominent role all the way through. The role of The Odds are notably reduced, resembling Christian angels moreso then their polytheistic origins if not outright abstract concepts.
The ultimate message taken away form the collected tales (and made clear in the commentaries) by the Angelene School was that history operates on people stretching their luck; transgressions are necessary to progress, but pushing your luck too much is hubristic and angers Lady Luck who will strike you down at your apotheosis. Thus the ultimate virtue was not the hedonistic lifestyle of Vegas’s height but one of careful adherence to traditional, tried-and-true methods of living. Most “risks” that ought to be undertaken are ones that have a long history and complicated rituals surrounding them and constant reverence for The Odds that surround each set of actions, with truly novel risks being vanishingly rare and small-scale. Only so-called “High Rollers”, messianic figures with a personal connection to Lady Luck and The Odds, are qualified to undertake the massive risks needed for the community to move forward. One unfortunate side effect of this new consciousness was a constant sense of dread and indecision that paralyzed many Vegasites.
Angelene Vegasism spread out of the Free Zone into the rest of California where it enjoyed massive success. Priestesses and priests took the Bookie as holy writ despite only being recently written, and commended its compilers as High Rollers. Communities reformed their way of life to live in line with ancient tradition. Slowly but surely, this brand of the religion spread into New Mexico, blending with the New Age influenced Vegasism to for a more mystical interpretation that would still be recognizable to your average Californian Vegasite.
Of course, this religion did not fix all of the Vegasites’ problems; arguably, it made things worse. Already they were widely ostracized by the surrounding communities as “suppressive” or as harbingers of “bad vibes”. Angelene Vegasism made the Vegasites stick to their own people and traditions even more readily then they had before, making them easily identifiable as aliens. Most communities required Vegasites to wear some identifying marker, usually a “V”, embroidered on their clothing at best or branded on their foreheads at worst. Pogroms were common, spurred by stories of the Vegasites’ sinful ways.
These stories were not entirely fictional. While the Vegasites themselves mostly refused to partake in the sinful actions they were famous for, they took no such compunctions about inflicting gambling and sin on non-Vegasites: after all, Vegas had originally grown rich on exploration of foreign foolishness, and the more dumb risks taken by non-Vegasites the better the odds were for the Vegasites to succeed. While the casino-temples themselves had largely relegated actual acts of gambling to rare ceremonies and divination, smaller scale casinos and brothels emerged to service non-Vegasites. Such speakeasies were cracked down on by the authorities, and often prompted pogroms when (usually fictional or exaggerated) stories of murder or sexual impropriety emerged from such establishments.
The free Vegasites became something of a wandering people, going from town to town and country to country. Some would set up shop for several decades at a time, while others lived permanently as nomads. They would offer gambling and divination to locals, and were famed for their skills in money management and risk assessment.
Recently, a new intellectual flowering has occurred among the Vegasites of Kuluradu. The Caliph and the various Emirs invited the Vegasites to settle and join their courts following a new series of persecutions launched by New Mexico. Free from much of their historical baggage and declared (entirely erroneously) “people of the book”, allowing them to develop free and unfettered. They’ve taken on much from Islamic thought, and many have acknowledged that the Abhrahamic God is likely the creator of the universe, but Lady Luck is the mistress of Vegas and its people. The first Vegasite wanderers have made made their way west where they are looked upon with curiosity by the people of the feudal core. Vegasite colonies are known as far north as the Pacific Northwest, with one enterprising patriarch having even set up a gambling den in Kechikan.
As for Vegas itself? The city sits abandoned in its crater as it slowly fills up with sand. Untold riches lie in wait, but New Mexican law holds that any attempt to enter the crater is extremely bad vibes and thus punishable by death, lest one bring the dead city’s curse with it. Vegasites hope to return to their home country, but are explicitly forbidden from settling near the city or even along the Colorado. Most of the kingdom was absorbed directly by Dinetah, while the regions adjacent to the old city have been turned into a client state, run by the former slaves of the vegasites who live in constant terror of the ghosts said to haunt the city. Rumors persist of daemons or troglodytes that wander the streets strewn with the debris of the old city and the new, but they are just that - rumors. The only portion of the new city that remains above ground is a titanic vast pyramid, one of the greatest of the casino-temples that now sits at the edge of the crater on a constantly eroding cliff. One day it too shall collapse and give way to the desert, just as Hoover Dam gave way to two titanic walls of concrete flanking the mighty Colorado.
Vegas may have gone bust long ago, but its champions have started counting their cards. Never forget: no matter how long it may seem to be down, in the end, the House always wins.