The Barrows Mining Company, lead by the steely-eyed blacksheep, Anthony Barrows, purchased the land beneath Oasis outright from the poor moisture farmers who beat him narrowly to it. With industrial means and equipment, the riches that had eluded his predecessors rose to Anthony Barrow via pneumatic pump. Water, pure and clean as a hospital ward and cold as the ground it came from, poured onto the sands of the town that would become Oasis like clear and chilly gold. And from the moment his bottling plant was built, Anthony Barrows’ small empire was born. 

But, here on the strange steppes of the Dune Sea, the heels of men or strains have not tread since the Fall. And though commerce and progress comes to the windy dunes, so too do we come to an old and half-healed wound that has filled with grit in all the time since the blow was struck. 

Oasis sits in the shadow of Trinity, a site that once was used to test the nuclear arms that destroyed the old world. The faithful Darwins there trade in vitrified glass and broker few deals with outsiders, and refused to sell their land to Anthony Barrows. They buy his water, however. And it is by their generational wisdom that the delvers and mining crews avoid the radiation-packed bunkers of expired nuclear material that pepper the Drylands like mines. 

The people of the Greater Wastes flock to Oasis. To buy water, to ply trade and to bathe and to drink. But the darkness of the desert presses in from around and underneath, and the dunes of the sea are ever shifting. The oldest dead rumble beneath the sun-cracked soil of the Dune Sea, bidden to wakefulness by the engine of progress, and turn all together in their terrible Grave.