Polaris
The general assumption in the post-Serpentfall world is that everyone in Greenland is dead. The population was never very large (perhaps 21,000 in early 1945, not counting American troops) and temperatures in the Arctic since the Serpentfall have dropped to the point where seventy degrees Fahrenheit below zero is not unheard of. If it gets much colder up there, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the pole will start freezing, and how that will affect the global climate is anybody’s guess.
At any rate, it’s bitterly cold in Greenland. Civilian radio broadcasts from the island spluttered out by the end of 1945, and the last transmissions always told the same story: too cold for crops, too cold for hunting, and soon both too cold and too dangerous to fish. A few boats of refugees managed to survive long enough to find somewhere even marginally safer, but that trickled to a halt by the beginning of 1946, too. As for US military forces: the Coast Guard evacuated the American presence there before the Big Freeze, and the bulk of those forces now operate out of Puerto Rico with the rest of the remains of the Atlantic Fleet, far far to the south.
Some of the sailors who served in Greenland have spun up the military treasures left there to epic levels, but the real prize of Greenland is cryolite. You need cryolite to smelt bauxite ore into aluminum; and you need aluminum for pretty much everything, these days. The mine at Ivittuut on Greenland’s southwestern tip is accessible by water, and was operating at least until August of 1945. There’s probably enough loose ore at least to fill a ship’s hold, and the industrial titans of fabled Brazil will pay good money for cryolite. And they’ll ask no impertinent questions, either. All anyone has to do is go get it.
And survive, of course. Coast Guard sailors of San Juan delight in telling hair-raising stories of beasts and people warped by the Serpentfall, abandoned and left to fester in the poisoned ice. But sailors are a superstitious, troublesome lot; prone to tall tales and wild fancies. If anyone or anything still live in Greenland, they’re starved, half-dead, and can be easily driven off by a stout band of fighting-men. As for monsters, well: at this point, surely the monsters have run out of things to actually eat.
So, treasure awaits, in the empty towns! …All beneath the green-yellow glow of the New Borealis. And the unwinking gaze of the North Star.
Why do I see false men, puppet things of shadow and dead meat?
And for unwinking gazes, have you considered the upside down queen’s unlidded eye? That one is even the decaying corpse of an ancient star, possibly sacrificed to create an undead star in its center.
Looks like links don’t work. >:(
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There was supposed to be a link to http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20080709 on “false men, puppet things of shadow and dead meat”.
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There was supposed to be a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiopeia_A on “the upside down queen’s unlidded eye”. Though that second one wouldn’t have been discovered in 1945, so people would be more likely to blame either the New Aurorae or the unwiking gaze of the North Star.