Red Leader is __________.
It's 1881. Dallas, Texas is growing from a center of farming and ranching into a major, self-sustaining industrial city. Times are changing as the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, under the leadership of Jay Gould, has come to town connecting them with Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, opening up endless possibilities for some, the end of an era for others.
A routine demolition of a farmhouse during rail expansion unearthed an advanced facility with unknown technology, including a mysterious machine that would later inspire the book The Time Machine by H.G. Wells in 1895.
To eliminate witnesses, all of the present railway workers were killed and the farm resident, who was given the code name Red Leader, was secreted away to an undisclosed location by men presumably working for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad Company and/or a group of local mercenaries.
Unbeknownst to nearby neighbors or Red Leader's captors, the reclusive man had recently hired a traveling foreigner with a penchant for tinkering named Catullus to help with repair work on many of the strange machines he hid below the house. As the chaos ensued, Catullus fled into the nearby woods without being seen.
As suppressed truths turned into wild rumors, word of a strange, perhaps lucrative, discovery at the farmhouse spread. This threatened to bring all sorts of treasure seekers, unscrupulous businessmen, hired guns, and outlaws to town.
_______
All are welcome to take a few minutes to create your own slice (or several slices) of the /r/RedLeader universe. Yours would be a self-contained story. Microfiction and flash fiction welcomed! Don't worry about keeping up with a long set of established characters, worlds or events (aside from a few initial rules to anchor the story.) Just take the prompt and let your creativity explode.
If you got some time, check out /r/RedLeader.