Paradise City! Not just an 80s hair metal reference, but also the floating beacon of hope every Badlands refugee pines for. In the history of Badlands Born, Ryan the Creator founded Paradise City after the deader plague hit the Badlands and (literally) killed the party. In true 80s hair metal style, he gathered the refugees onto a mesa used his godly powers to rip it from the bedrock and set it aloft a few hundred feet in the air, then sent it orbiting around the Badlands to gather as many survivors as possible. Also around this time, fanciful technology appeared as Ryan became bored with the mundane and realized he could forge his own realities. So when practical problems like getting people from the ground to floating island appeared, he remembered an old movie he watched with strange flying machines and so he manifested them into existence. Thus, ornithopters were born.
As more people arrived and joined his neo-Victorian floating island, Ryan discovered he hadn’t made Paradise City large enough to hold everybody. He was also having to manifest all its resources, taxing his power and leaving him perpetually exhausted. Bishop, meanwhile, kept leading more refugees to the City and refused joining Ryan’s new world order. One day, this reached a breaking point and Ryan told his best friend, “No more. Paradise is full.” The residents already topside agreed with their resident godling, and so Paradise City closed its gates.
Even with the population capped, the months of manifesting all the food, buildings, and wondrous machines took its toll on Ryan. He demanded city residents take on more of the efforts themselves: farming, manufacturing, returning to the Badlands on scavenging expeditions, and trading with the fledgling Undercity of refugees waiting for a spot “topside” to open up. When Paradise City became self-sufficient, Ryan set up a ruling council to run the day-to-day operations, retreated into his sanctum with a few chosen supplicants and took his rest.
