This is OPEN to members of the Western Atlantic. Others, if they wish to take part, should send me a telegram. The first few posts will be catch-up posts updating developments since 2018, then I hope RP in earnest will begin.
Sean Collins was almost literally a man without a country. The former Saxmeran trade unionist had been elected President of the Confederation of Sovereign States in 2016 - two years before his homeland declared independence from the country he governed. Standing loyal to his oath and his office, Collins had quietly moved his residence from Saxmere to the Confederal state of Southland.
Then came the disastrous election of 2020. Collins had been soundly defeated in his bid for a second term - but that had been the least of the problems. The other three candidates had split the electoral vote, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. A closely divided house descended into bickering and open fisticuffs and had to adjourn without electing a president.
The bonds of union, already frayed by geographic and political division and once severed by Saxmere's secession, were no longer strong enough to hold the country together. A grand convention was called in Jefferson and despite passionate arguments from the unlikely pair of the soon-to-be-former President Collins and his predecessor and ideological opposite Tom Caine, the convention voted to dissolve the Confederation as it was.
For the second time in two year, Collins lost his home, as Southland seceded and pledged fealty to the Excalbian Sword. It was eventually followed by the now-former State of Deandra after a long flirtation with the growingly leftist Dominion of Upper Virginia. In the end neither Deandra nor Upper Virginia were willing to make a union work when they shared no common border and were likely to be separated by two or three separate nations.
By virtue of little more than inertia and aversion to left-leaning politics, Alud and Trondgaard, and the former Northern Territories stayed in the rump Confederation, but given their size and populations, they were little more than appendages to the State of New Virginia, which all but controlled what was left of the Confederation.
So, former President Collins, unwilling to return to either Southland or Saxmere and unwanted in what was left of the Confederation, began a life of exile, eventually settling unhappily in Courtland, the capital of the Dominion of Upper Virginia. He lived a quiet life, trying to stay out of the public eye, with little company apart from his very tolerant wife and a bottle of whiskey.
