The talk

West Point Traders Say PvP Is Bad for Business

Word is the shooting is coming to West Point, and the people who trade there hate it. They sat down together, and a rebuild came out of it.

By the Rebel News county desk. West Point, Thursday 7 April 1994. 2 min read.

Evening in a wood-panelled office: six men round a low table on buttoned leather chesterfields. In the front armchairs a bald man with a huge ginger beard, an olive beret and aviators sits back laughing with a cigar and a whiskey, and a long-haired blond man in a pink wide-brim hat, one boot on his knee, lights a fresh cigar; between them a hand-drawn town map lies on the table, its blocks circled in red. Behind them a bearded man in a plum beanie and a bulletproof vest pours whiskey for a moustached man in a cap and a chainmail sleeve, a man in a gas mask and night-vision helmet holds a glass and a cigar he can't use, and a man in a police peaked cap blows a smoke ring. A decanter, tumblers, an ashtray and a box of cigars sit on the map; old portraits and a green banker's lamp behind, a dusk town with thin smoke trails through the window. — Nobody's saying who poured. Rebel News picture desk

WEST POINT. Ask anybody what comes next for West Point and you get a look before you get an answer. The shooting's coming. Survivor on survivor, in the streets. The people who make a living here would like a word.

The money

West Point runs on trade. You can buy a car here, swap a box of rounds for a sack of tins and drive home with change. None of that survives a street where any stranger might shoot you for your boots. Nobody browses with their hands up. Gunfire is bad for business.

The meeting

So the county's biggest names met behind closed doors. Buttoned leather, a green banker's lamp, the good whiskey. Cigars got lit, a map got drawn on, and by the bottom of the bottle they'd landed on the oldest rule in business: give people something to come back to.

West Point gets rebuilt.

The town

This place has form. A cabin where the Salt River meets the Ohio in 1789. A Union fort on the hill in 1861. The 1937 flood put nearly the whole town under water, and people were back mopping the day it drained. Then July '93 and the fence. A week of somebody with a lighter didn't finish it.

A game screenshot from above of a white clapboard church with a steeple and a long wing, the wall facing its car park scorched black in tall streaks, a fenced graveyard of white headstones with a small chapel behind it, and an empty car park with a purple van and a white sedan. — The list, in pictures. Rebel News picture desk

A game screenshot from above of a suburban block: a two-storey white house, a sage-green bungalow, a white bungalow and a timber garage with their walls streaked black, the lawns burned dark in patches, and one house in front with no walls left, only its floor and furniture open to the sky. — The list, in pictures. Rebel News picture desk

The list

The church and the chapel in its graveyard. A block of houses west of it. Mendy's Eatery, the crêpe house, the post office row and the Food Market. The GigaMart, which took the worst of it.

Stendo's

First up is the gun shop behind the GigaMart, because it wears a real man's name. Stendo built Vanilla Firearms Expansion, the gun mod people still call the gold standard. He died young in 2025, and the people who made this world renamed the shop for him, with his family's blessing.

Sunset over a cracked car park: two workers in white hard hats and yellow hi-vis vests, on stepladders either side of the boarded-up doors, lift a big green-and-gold STENDO'S FIREARMS EMPORIUM sign with a red bullseye back onto a soot-blackened cream block wall; a jar of yellow wildflowers on the step, a broom and a swept pile of ash, a red pickup with a trailer of tool chests and a log-cabin bar beside it. — First name on the list. Rebel News picture desk

The caboose

Then the red caboose by the tracks that says Welcome to West Point. The real West Point has one just like it. The grass round its wheels went black and it still says welcome. That's more than most of us will manage if the shooting starts.

Morning by the tracks: a red wooden caboose lettered Welcome to WEST POINT, its far end burned black to the frame with windows smashed and the roof edge gone, stands in a wide patch of scorched ground and charred boards; one worker in a white hard hat and hi-vis vest on a stepladder scrubs the soot off the lettering, a bucket and a can of red paint at the foot of the ladder, roadwork barrels and a striped barrier on the verge and two thin smoke trails over the town beyond the trees. — Still the politest thing in town. Rebel News picture desk

Floods, a war and the end of the world couldn't close West Point. Talk won't. West Point is open for business.

The town

The list, in pictures. Rebel News picture desk

Stendo's

First name on the list. Rebel News picture desk

The caboose

Still the politest thing in town. Rebel News picture desk

Floods, a war and the end of the world couldn't close West Point. Talk won't. West Point is open for business.