Forgotten Fiction
In addition to the plot summary below, we have begun to produce "artifacts" from C&C 3: The Forgotten's story. These provide a primary source perspective on the events occuring just prior to where the mod picks up.
Story
The year is 2047. The Third Tiberium War continues to rage on, with the Global
Defense Initiative, the Brotherhood of Nod, and the Scrin deadlocked in a
seemingly endless fight. The incessant warfare continues to cause serious and
lasting damage to Planet Earth, and, even more so, to Planet Earth's
inhabitants. The vast majority of these inhabitants are poor, stuck in
dilapidated Red or Yellow Zones, unemployed, angry, sick, and ignored. In this
state, disregarded by the major fighting powers and left with little resources,
these people christen themselves with the title used by past war victims: The
Forgotten.
The grouping "The Forgotten" is at best a loose lumping together of the various
clusters of people, generally isolated in various decrepit areas of the planet.
They are linked not by uniform, race, or ideology—many at one time supported
GDI, while vast numbers once considered their best hopes to lie with the
Brotherhood—but by status. All victims of The Third Tiberium War, all suffering
from some level of Tiberium mutation, they find company only in those who are
like them. Inherently mistrustful of the forces that be, who are sipping
martinis and ordering men into battle from a bank of computers in some Blue Zone
or dwelling in some ornate "Temple"
in the desert, The Forgotten are unified by their desperation and their hate for
those who have rendered them in such a state. In short, they are a people
abandoned but not incapable, forgotten but not inept. They are a people with
nothing to lose—a very dangerous people indeed.
The closest thing The Forgotten have to a leader is a mutant named Salvador
Trogan, a native of
East Germany. Once little more than a street
thug with no education or formal training, at the age of seventeen Trogan fell
for the ideology of Kane and Nod, and served as a low-level spy for Nod in the
Second Tiberium War. He spent years reporting on Mutant activities and their
connections to GDI. After the defeat of Nod, however, Trogan was left largely to
fend for himself. Nod warped more and
more into a structured global superpower consumed with a desire to possess
weapons of mass destruction and caring less and less about the Mutants,
perceiving them to lack any strategic skills and be too crippled by their
mutations to serve as effective foot soldiers.
During the gap between the wars, Trogan saw himself emerge as the de facto
leader of the East German Red Zones, the man in charge of a populace awed by his
increasingly more heroic war stories. Trogan embraced this role, and realized
that the people saw in him what they did not see anywhere else: a mutant like
themselves who had fought bravely and ably in war, who fended for himself and
his community, and, who, above all, disproved the notion that the mutants were
weak, as he fought his Tiberium illness and outlasted many in the community who
succumbed to theirs.
Trogan proved himself to not only be an expert sleuth and saboteur, but a leader
with tremendous political acumen. Cognizant of the people's struggles and eager
to retain his position, he realized that the one who consistently provided for
the people would be the one who they trusted. Able to lead the mutant community
into the production of certainly meager, but not insignificant, amounts of much
needed food and medicine, Trogan's legend grew. Most importantly, he was able to
spin the occasional outreach by Nod or GDI as a mere effort by a superpower to
bribe the hearts and minds of a local populace they neither understood nor cared
about. In so doing, he remained the only trusted—if not revered—figure in the
community of The Forgotten.
Gradually, as the Third Tiberium War sparked and raged, conditions became worse
and worse for The Forgotten, especially as the continued use of Tiberium weapons
grew the mutants' numbers substantially. Trogan, never one to miss an
opportunity and well aware of the vulnerable position of all three factions,
began to rally and equip his forces in the East German Red Zones. Whether he was
spurred to act by the people's restlessness, or whether he encouraged the
uprising to further his own motives is unclear and unknowable. What is apparent,
though, is that as the war continued in 2047, Trogan's Red Zones were gearing up
for a fight, believing that while they were outgunned in nearly every respect,
they were obliged to fight, if only because there was nothing else to do.
These are the conditions that exist at the beginning of our story. A ragtag
army, led by a leader loyal to no one and composed of desperate individuals in
varying forms of illness, aims to join the fray of the most brutal war in human
history. Whether they think they can win—whether they even want to win, whatever
winning means—is an open question. One thing is certain, however: they have no
intention of being ignored and shunned. Indeed, they no longer want to be The
Forgotten.