Jack of Harts

The Lexington Day Massacre is what modern citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia call the day that everything changed. It was not the day they won. They lost, in fact, depending on how you measure victories and losses. It was the day Lexington, Virginia began to fight back with the only currency that tyrants understand. The Fed that killed two elderly protesters sparked a gunfight between the Feds and Rooftop Virginians that claimed the lives of fifteen Federal and Commonwealth officers, twenty-nine citizens of Lexington, and the police chief and half his department. The Feds eventually evacuated the city, though only after they set fire to the majority of the downtown buildings, destroyed the local police and fire stations, and arrested the mayor and his family for taking part in the protest. It was the wrong move for them to make.

Most people did not know it at the time, but the Commonwealth of Virginia as it had existed died the day the Lexington Gazette printed the front page article “Where is Ruby Freemon?” She was not a native of Lexington, but her husband was, and he was one of their favorite doctors. The fact that he had been elected Vice President was a matter of pride. His arrest by the new President angered them. The disappearance of Ruby enraged them. The Gazette’s total suppression on nearly all public networks turned that into a cold hatred. They shifted to old style paper and private virtual networks to get the word out, and they soon became the newspaper of record when it came to any news about Ruby. Their broadsheets spread far and wide all over America via hidden distribution channels. Everybody knew their name and their message, even if few dared to repeat their words in public.

The Commonwealth of Virginia fell into chaos during the Second Great Depression, along with many national governments all over the globe. Their collapse was worse than many in that it revealed a long standing civil war between the eastern and western counties that had gone very cold over the last several decades. The eastern counties and the capital city had effectively become an expansion region of Washington D.C. and fully adopted Washington politics as their own. The western counties hated Washington politics with a cold fury, and the other counties fervently wished the two extremes could just get along and stop antagonizing the other. The arrest of the former Vice President was not a bridge too far for them, but it was one of many paving stones towards it that the eastern counties gleefully placed and polished to a gleaming hue.