The Escadorra mountain range, a byzantine of sheer rock pushed up thousands of feet up in the air by the colossal forces of the tectonic plates that make up the main Parvusian continent and the Grieuta Ocean southeast of it. The peaks are the highest among the world, creating a narrow but breath-taking scar that runs down along the western shoreline of the continent. In the southern section of the Escadorra range within the domain of the Federal State of Luyana, the collection of warm moist air current off the Grieuta and elevated terrain creates massive seasonal snow and rain that fall onto the slopes of the mountains. Melting snow and rainwater feeds and forms into the Grand Lucana River. The torrenting river snakes and cuts through the creases of the rocky terrain, and at its banks a teeming temperate rainforest grows tall and wide throughout the valleys. Thick and lush, the Lucana Rainforest run down the entire length of the river until it ends and returns its gushing waters to edge of the Grieuta Ocean. At the river's mouth, the burgeoning Luyanian city of Colamia, capital of the Province of Lucano, sits and bustles with the fervour of human activity.
In the decades past, Colamia was a wharf city which served the once prospering fisheries that exploited the millions of Bluefin salmon swimming up the Lucana River to spawn. Overfishing and ecological damage have driven the bluefin population down to nothing, and the fisheries suffered their grave collapse. Attempts to introduce lobster and crab stock into the area met with little success; tens of thousands of fishermen were force to leave their livelihood. Rusted hulls of trawlers litter the beaches or float lazily to tied abandoned wharves. Idled fishermen left the city to work at the lumber mills and mines upriver in the interior towns of Tunola and Vayana, but low world commodity prices dwindled availability of jobs. Colamia, and Lucana in general, descended into a time of high employment and shrinking economy. With these things came crime.
Foreigners began to appear at the docks of Colamia. They were investors of a kind, dressed in tailored suits and carrying wads of money. But their faces carried cool stares and suspicious intentions. They were on a lookout for opportunities in a sinking city, they being harbingers of dirty promises and illicit enterprises. They went by many names; triads, mobsters, thugees, gangsters, conmen, street bosses,...etc. They set the streets alight with pandemonium and violence. Territories were drawn, locals recruited, and neighbourhoods were terrorized. Jobless local men and boys were pulled into the trend of gangs taking over the streets of Colamia. They battered and bled for their new paymasters, their fishnets and lines now replaced in hand by switchblades and handguns. Their despair and poverty spewed forth into anger and blood.
It became to much for the government to ignore, and the Federal State went in one week to claw out the troublesome rats and their litter. Federal Officers in heavy protection gear and armed with automatic weapons took to to the streets to clear out the crime bosses and their holdings. The city descended into bloody gunfights and drawn out sieges. Due process went out the door, and suspected gangsters were simply gunned down on the street. At the end of it, the foreign crime bosses were decimated and their fiefs laid in shambles. Assuming victory, the Federal heavy-handed presence pulled out of Colamia in triumphant. Little did they know that the surviving crime bosses were there to stay, their poisonous seed now rooted deep into the urban grounds of Colamia, ready to sprout back forth.
Cola - in Luyana it refers to a perennial plant which grows deep in Lucano's rainforests. At its stems tapered black striped seed pods sprout, and the old natives of the area used to brew them into a tea that had stimulant properties. When chewed with sea salt, these properties were enhanced. When isolated and refined through modern lab chemistry, cola becomes a fantastic and terrifying narcotic that is twice as powerful as cocaine and much easier to produce. The Colamia underground took to the drug as their own, and its lucrative sale became their main source of revenue. The drug spread throughout Luyana and abroad. As it was yet to be labelled as a banned substance anywhere, cola was deceptively mixed in with cocaine in a cocktail mix labelled coal-cane to warrant its exclusive nature. Eventually, the pieces fell in place and cola on its own was made a Class 3 "dangerous substance" by the Luyana government. Their folly would sink the province of Lucano into the depths of the drug trade and raise it as the hub of illicit cola.
