RP STATUS - Presently OPEN; all spots are available.
The Two PalmyrasThe year is 1980, and our story brings us some sixty miles west of New Orleans. Welcome to the Louisiana Bayou, a sunken land of marshes and long leaf pines, where a million meanders and the oxbow lakes work together to obscure any sense of direction. Population centers are few and far in between, where the waterways are concerned. Life is not easy in the Bayou; the timber industry is growing ever-smaller, animal skins and furs are losing their luster, and the floods are steadily chipping away at shoreside shotgun shacks and stilt houses. Yet, the people - the descendants of the French, Italians, Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans that defined this region - have yet to go anywhere else.
Welcome to Oxbow Parish, a wild district where the only two towns sit shoulder-to-shoulder. What was once the "city" of Palmyra, once a profitable timber center and sugarcane plantation, is now two divided towns that bask in the dim glow of what their once-united town had been, although this glow can be of many different colors depending on whom you talk to. Once home to six different timber company, there are now only two, and as the two largest single employers in the parish, their rivalry reflects an almost identical rivalry of the two families that not only own the respective timber companies, but also exercise their own de facto control of the two Palmyras through a variety of legitimate and illicit operations.
The Fauberts and the Bedards, descendants of the first European settlers to enter the region. Whether you talk to a Faubert or a Bedard, either will tell you that their respective family was the first to settle the parish. At one time, both families operated idyllic plantations in the region and owned hundreds of slaves. However, time brings war and flood and disease. Like the shores of the Bayou that engulf the parish, both families have eroded from their 19th Century trappings of Acadian faux-nobility. Americanized, bitter, and rotten, the Fauberts and Bedards hate the world and despise one another, locked in a seemingly neverending feud for control of the parish. While waning timber hauls have long been unable to sustain the people of the Oxbow, crime has been a primary economic force in the region for almost seventy years. The two warring families know this, as well as any alligator-poacher or thief or hooker.
The Fauberts and Bedards are the primary forces that motivate organized crime in the Oxbow, and ironically, their organizations share similarities. Although the parish is officially "dry" and should be considered quite puritan in its ordnances, the two Palmyras are kept "damp" by the families, who either brew their own hooch or truck in brand-name beverages from across the United States. Establishments that sell drinks, whether they be a social club selling Coors Banquet or a drink-house where you can buy moonshine by the mason jar, get their stock from one of the two families. Stolen goods, often taken from heists outside of the parish, find their way to fences who then sell the goods to bring money back into their respective family. To a lesser extent, both families have dabbled into the drug trade, however to the extent of moving small quantities of marijuana or speed from New Orleans to a predetermined location on the behalf of a larger organization, such as the Mafia.
For the Fauberts and Bedards, the conflict has been going on for such a long time, that all reason for fighting is lost upon them. They fight and feud, and divide the towns, for no other reason now than inborn hatred. The "normal" townsfolk pick their sides and pay their dues, hoping to avoid the worst of it all. Times are changing; oil companies have begun to speculate about liquid gold within the parish, although with no overtures yet to be made, this appears as a pipe dream to many when compared to the derricks being built in the Gulf. Criminal influences in New Orleans and other nearby cities have begun to bring cocaine into the state on a large scale, indirectly inciting the response of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.
Where will you stand in these changing days?
