Hello everyone! This is a big project I've been planning for a while now. This is a special Loud House fanfiction which takes place in the world of The New Order: Last Days of Europe, a mod for the popular grand strategy game Hearts of Iron IV. The mod (and this story, by extension) takes place in a world where the Axis Powers were victorious in the Second World War.
This fanfic is also going to be a collab between me and my good DeviantArt friend LoudHarveyLefty. The two of us are going to take turns writing chapters.
One last thing: The characters in this universe have the word "Order" appended to their names when referring to them in comparison to characters from other AUs, so the Lincoln in this world would be called "Order Lincoln" when comparing him to other Lincolns, as an example.
With that, I hope you enjoy!
Up… down… up… down…
That was what the girl in the yellow dress saw, as her eyes tracked the up-and-down motion of a telephone wire. A green blur covered the area below the wire as the horde of bushes that had conquered the ground zoomed by. The road line had become a blur of white dashes.
The girl sighed. She was bored. Very bored. She had her stuffed animals with her, but you can only play with such toys for so long. The board games they had taken with them were still in the back of the car. She didn't have any siblings to chat with - she was an only child.
She turned to the readers. "Oh… uh… hello everyone. Didn't see you there."
"Who's she talking to?" her mother questioned.
"Probably some of her imaginary friends." her father replied.
"...My parents are like that. They believe all you people are imaginary." Lacey explained. "Anyways, we're going to be here for a while, so I'll properly introduce myself. My name is Lacey St. Clair, but you may call me Lacey. I'm seven years old and I live in Chicago. Well, we used to live in Chicago - it's where I was born and raised until recently, but we recently ran into difficulties affording our house there, and so we're moving to Royal Woods, Michigan, where we won't be under so much financial strain."
She brushed her hair before speaking again. "My dad works as a diplomat at the German consulate in Detroit, which is another reason why we moved - Royal Woods is pretty close by to Detroit. My family has a history of working in diplomacy-related fields - my grandfather worked in the Austrian embassy during the Great War, and my great-grandfather worked in the Italian embassy."
She scratched an itch. "I don't know how, but I was also born with a natural talent for knowledge in the fields of history, geopolitics and diplomacy. It's because of that that my family has decided to make me the first girl to carry on the family's diplomatic tradition."
"Also, I don't know why… but both my parents believe that we live in a different timeline from you people. If I remember correctly, he told me that in your timeline, the Nazis were actually defeated in the Second World War."
"Hey Lacey, I'm sure your imaginary friends would like to know more about this timeline we live in." Lacey's father quipped.
"I guess…" Lacey said to her father. She turned back to the readers. "Anyways, according to my father the timelines diverged sometime in the 1920s. My father says that in your timeline, following the death of Lenin and the post-Lenin power struggle in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin managed to defeat Nikolai Bukharin and cement his control of the country. However in our timeline the opposite happened - Bukharin defeated Stalin, and subsequently had him killed in a workplace accident."
"Unfortunately for the Soviets, Bukharin's New Economic Policy backfired and caused the Soviet economy to stagnate. The Union was left paralysed, unable to properly industrialise or form a professional military. That was combined with us in the United States being much more isolationist and neutral than in your timeline."
"As a result, when the war came in 1939 the Germans were able to run roughshod over Poland, France and the other states of Europe, with Britain unable to stop them without US aid. Soon enough, German tanks were massing on the Soviet border. The situation in Africa was equally bad - the UK suffered a string of defeats that forced it to evacuate the continent."
"In 1941 the Germans launched their invasion of the Soviet Union. With the Union crippled from the previous events the Germans were able to quickly eliminate the Red Army and capture most of the Union's urban centres. Moscow fell on Christmas Day 1941, and soon after Bukharin was overthrown in a coup and the Soviet Union disintegrated into an anarchic mess of warlord states."
"At around the same time Japan struck Pearl Harbor with an enormous armada of naval and air forces - the result being the decimation of our Pacific fleet and our oil reserves. We were rather ill-prepared, and whilst we were quickly able to call on our remaining navy and churn out materials, we faced defeat after defeat across the Pacific as Japan overran everything - with the military abandoning its bases to hold the line in Australia and New Zealand."
Lacey sighs. "The situation went from bad to worse in 1943, when Germany successfully landed in Britain and overran most of the island. We fought as hard as we could, but by mid-1945, we had no choice but to evacuate. Our president then told us that we could still win and that GI Joe would be storming the Reichstag and the Imperial Palace, but few still believed."
"The final blow came in July. We had planned to hold out in Australia until our first nuclear bomb was ready, but the Nazis beat us to it. On July 4, 1945, the Germans dropped an atomic bomb on Pearl Harbour. Our rebuilt Pacific fleet was wiped out, and the last of our morale shattered. We surrendered not too long after."
"Peace would finally come in August with the Akagi Accords. We were forced to surrender all of our Pacific territories, including Hawaii, as well as some of the Aleutian Islands, and the ports of San Francisco and Los Angeles. We had to pay massive reparations, and the oil embargoes in Germany and Japan were lifted. I can't imagine how humiliating that must have felt..."
"Anyways, now that Germany had won, they began construction on a number of huge projects, including their new capital Hauptstadt Germania, a dam across the Straits of Gibraltar, and Generalplan Ost, the resettlement of Germans in the conquered eastern territories. But alas, their economy was always a shoddy house built on war, and in 1950 the whole thing came crashing down."
"The crash of 1950 killed the German economy, and the overall economy of Europe alongside it. The Axis disbanded soon after, and an enraged Italy, wanting to teach Germany a lesson, established an anti-German alliance called the Triumvirate, in which they were joined by Turkey and a now-united Iberia."
"To make things worse for Germany, a powerful socialist group known as the West Russian Revolutionary Front launched a massive invasion of the German colony of Moskowien around this time, hoping to liberate Moscow and western Russia. This was combined with the SS attempting a coup in Germania, believing that traditional National Socialism had not gone far enough."
Lacey takes a second to remember what happened next before speaking again. "Germany was able to handle this however. For the SS coup, Hitler struck a deal with Himmler to establish an SS-ruled state in eastern France and Belgium, called the Ordenstaat Burgundy, in exchange for Himmler staying out of German politics, and the SS being divided into German and Burgundian branches.
"As for the West Russian Revolutionary Front, the Germans were able to get the aid of Russian collaborators and ethnic minorities such as the Tatars, while exploiting political divisions within the Front. The result was that the Front was successfully beaten back and ended up spiralling down and shattering into umpteen warlord states, like the Soviet Union before it. The Front itself managed to survive, however isolated into the area around Arkhangelsk, and only a shadow of its former power."
"At the same time, Germany had to halt its extermination campaign against the so-called Untermensch of Europe. However, it saw an alternate use for them and turned them into slaves, using them to rebuild Europe. This huge pool of slave labour was able to stabilise the german economy, but it's still on life support even today."
"Here in America, the Democratic Party effectively collapsed following the defeat, and in its place rose the National Progressive Party, or NPP, which is a coalition of socialists, liberals and even nationalists. The remaining Democrats were forced to merge with the Republicans to create the Republican-Democratic Party."
"As I talk to you, the year is 1962. You might be wondering what the global situation is like. In the briefest way I can put it, we are locked in a cold war of sorts between three major factions."
She holds up a finger to represent the number one. "The first major faction is the Organisation of Free Nations, a faction which consists of us, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a few of our client states. They aim to defend democracy where it is under threat and free the world from tyranny."
Lacey holds up a second finger. "The second major faction is Germany's Einheitspakt, a fascist organisation which seeks to maintain Germany's hegemony over Europe. It's seen better times - Germany's economy is still in the gutter, the Wehrmacht is in shambles, the slaves are restless, and riots have been consuming the country for almost 6 months now, fueled by illegally imported American media and Italian cinema."
She holds up one last finger. "The third major faction is Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. This alliance touts itself as an organisation dedicated to freeing Asia from European influence… or at least, that's what the propaganda says. In reality, it's used as a tool for Japan to extract resources from its various puppets and military occupation regimes in East Asia for its own benefit."
Lacey puts down her hand. "There's only one other key faction, the Triumvirate I mentioned earlier, but its future looks increasingly bleak - Iberia and Turkey have both been ramping up their demand for Italy to return their rightful territories, so I don't see the organisation lasting much longer."
Lacey sighs again. "And that's not even mentioning nuclear weapons. Since my world has three nuclear powers - all hostile to each other - my world essentially hangs on a very thin and unstable wire which could snap at any moment, the result being nuclear war and the end of human civilisation. It's why I constantly keep an eye out in the newspapers for any worrying events."
Lacey's father suddenly speaks up. "Lacey dear, we're going to be stopping for a bit so you can have a nice walk and stretch your legs."
"Okay Dad!" Lacey turns back to the readers. "Well everyone, I don't really have anything else to say, so I'll see you in a bit when we reach Royal Woods. Goodbye for now."
She sits back in her seat and closes her eyes, lost in thought about the current state of the world.
Has the light of hope truly been extinguished by the Axis victory? she wonders.