The Nessun’s exact origin is unknown. No one even knows what part of the country their founders came from. All that is known is that at some point during the Locust-Era there was a fortification, a night-long siege, an exclamation in Italian, and victors who would go on to terrorize the country for decades to come. 

Before they started calling themselves the “Nessuns”, they traveled the Locust-Era country in an armed convoy, attacking settlements for loot and nihilistic pleasure. At one point they laid siege to an unusually fortified area. As the night wore on, the defenders started yelling “Nessun Dorma”— Italian for “None Shall Sleep”. It is unknown if they were quoting the famous opera, Turandot, or if an Italian-speaker was trying to bolster morale. Nevertheless, the settlement fell and the marauders adopted “Nessun Dorma” as the inspiration for their name and battle-cry.

Now calling themselves the “Nessuns”, they continued their activities until they met the same fate as many Marauders at the end of the Locust-Era: unable to find new settlements to loot, the Nessuns ran out of fuel for their vehicles, ammunition for their weapons, medical supplies to tend their wounded and were ultimately starved into an extremely vulnerable state. In this state they were captured by survivors in the town of Sloan, Iowa. The survivors used the Nessuns as forced-laborers for the construction of a perimeter wall around their town and as field-hands. Over the next few years, Sloan was approached by the Proto-clans that would become Northway and Agraria. Aside from bordering the Missouri river, an interstate highway, and being surrounded by farmland, Sloan had little to offer either clan and thus was largely ignored. By 2032, Sloan’s leadership realized that they needed a firm alliance with a clan. They were on the borderlands between two quickly developing powers and were fearful of raiding. They had heard through their trading expeditions that Northway was raising an army and determined that their captive marauders would be incredibly valuable for such an endeavor. 

The director of Northway’s military program (and a defector from Halgen’s unit), Major Bogdani was eager to receive the Nessuns. He wanted Northway’s army to be a perfect counter to Halgen’s penal-corps and figured that irregular units like the Nessuns could be a good starting point. Bogdani was unfortunately killed in an industrial accident before the Nessuns arrived at his base in Green Lake, Wisconsin. His successor was a Lieutenant named McKenna “Kenna” Odie. Odie relied heavily on Bogdani’s notes for the planned army, and was slow to dismiss his flawed perception of the Nessuns as model-warriors. Within weeks, the Nessuns had established themselves as leaders in the new army and had begun radicalizing it. Odie made no attempt to rectify this culture when she saw how effective they were at countering raids from the survivors near Arcwater and Agraria. They were also useful for extracting tributes from Northway’s periphery clans. However, the intense cruelty of the Nessuns (all 3,472 members of the army began identifying as “Nessuns”) was becoming problematic. Periphery clans were becoming traumatized and the high-command of Odie’s team was losing control of their army. By 2037, the leadership, motivated by recent developments with artificial metamorphics and railgun technology, had decided that the Nessuns were more of a liability than an asset for Northway and ordered Odie to disband them.

Knowing that disbanding the Nessuns would be equivalent to unleashing Locust-Era marauders in the territory, Odie sought help from an unlikely ally: Colonel Halgen, the military dictator of Arcwater. Halgen’s team had become experts on cultivating fanatical groups and disposing of those groups when the fanaticism became problematic. While the Nessuns and their followers were fundamentally distinct from his Penal-Corps, Halgen devised a mutually beneficial and fool-proof plan with Odie to be enacted in the winter of 2038. 

With strip from the Federation soon to hit Eastern markets, the Guild needed a center to process structural beams. The Spring-city Triumvirate, which had been developing with the intent of becoming a Great Clan, jumped at this opportunity. In exchange for a massive aid-package to speed the development of City, security assurances against the Blue-Column, and all of the other benefits associated with membership in the Guild, the Triumvirate would specialize in the production of steel beams. The only thing stopping the Guild from making this deal was the security of its forces on what would be the furthest South that their ships had travelled. Halgen proposed that Odie put up the Nessuns as an expendable security force for the convoy headed to the Triumvirate. Any Nessuns who survived the journey would be the Blue-Column’s problem. 

Odie used her contacts along the Mississippi river to announce the brutality and coming passage of the Nessuns in order to increase aggression against them. This backfired horribly. Days before the convoy’s departure, the Nessuns figured out that they were being set up and almost mutinied. An emergency council with Odie and several Nessun leaders came up with a resolution. Odie was able to convince most of the leaders to stay with the convoy and eventually have the honor of fighting one of the most iconic Locust-Era marauders. The remaining dissenters were lead by “Quilter” (Shortened from “MILF-n-kids-Quilter” as he was infamous for making the exterior of his capes from the scalps of mothers and the interior lining from the skins of young children and babies.), who demanded safe passage to the Western border of Northway. Odie agreed, and the Nessuns were broken into two groups. She joined the convoy as a form of self-imposed exile and was later employed by the Triumvirate as an expedition manager.

Indeed, most of the “Spiney” (called so because they had the “spine” to stay with the convoy and for their tendency to impale prisoners to the sides of their ships), Nessuns died along the way. The survivors were then crushed under the highly trained and organized forces of the Blue-Column. The West-bound Nessuns found a niche as escorts for cattle herds and as mercenary forces on the North Plains. They eventually made a tight alliance with Clan in exchange for a nearly unlimited supply of crude anabolic steroids. They are now known as the “Beefy Nessuns”. After enduring several months of travel and fighting with the Spiney Nessuns, the Triumvirate had a strong grasp of how dangerous they were, as well as the niche they could fill. The handful of remaining Nessuns were transferred to Clan, a lesser Clan and dependent of the Triumvirate. Name, leader of the Triumvirate’s military believed he saw where Odie and Bogdani had failed to properly utilize the Nessuns. They were simply too disorderly to have any part in a standing army, instead they should be kept on retainer and used only for select engagements. 

The actual fighting style and strategy of the Nessuns is nonexistent. They will use whatever weapons, armor, and equipment are available. Nessuns are free to wield whatever they want, which results in questionably balanced units. They also do not have any formal tactics or combat protocols— they either make ad-hoc decisions or improvise. This is not to say that they are low-quality fighters. Nessuns supplement formal training and conditioning with a lax policy against infighting. New recruits have no protections and many are killed for arbitrary reasons. Initiates are only told that they must continually demonstrate “growth”. This is interpreted as performing tasks quicker, requesting training and advice, and becoming more “brutal”. An individual Nessun is considered to have a similar level of skill to any “warrior-elite” from a Great Clan or DC. 

However, the self-reliant nature of their fighters is not the faction’s greatest asset. The real niche for both kinds of Nessuns is fear. Through the unpredictable nature of their troops and a culture of visceral cruelty towards opponents, the Nessuns have made most groups in America genuinely terrified of facing them in combat. It is a common misconception to think that the Nessuns are just the war-hungry descendants of Locust-Era marauders who have clung on through appalling brutality and luck. Both types of Nessuns have skilled leaders and Callers who work to uphold the faction(s)’s barbarous nature. The Nessuns often work in conjunction with Clans to develop their troops or uphold political balances. It is true that the Nessuns are a “non-productive” entity. They have no trading or production capacity. They are reliant on slaves and contracted workers to maintain their captured ships running and repair their looted arms. Nessuns have a fundamental enjoyment of war; to fight and kill is all a Nessun wants in life. While many of them are hardened sadists, the torturing and disfigurement of prisoners is viewed as a necessary custom for their way of life. While ordinary people live in terror and hatred of the Nessuns, this is not the case at higher levels. To the high-command of any major faction, the Nessuns are one of the country’s most valuable institutions. They provide a “safe” outlet for radicalized fighters that would otherwise endanger the faction. The fear-element of the Nessuns also works to bond groups together. 

The “revival” of the Nessuns has since been mythologized as one of the greatest follies of Northway.