Los Angeles Falls

Los Angeles was a city that had once glittered like a crown jewel on the Pacific, but that was a lifetime ago. Now, it was a wasteland of broken streets, empty promises, and the rotting corpse of a failed utopia. Corruption had seeped into every crack, every alleyway, every shining glass tower, until there was nothing left to hold the city together.

Billions of dollars meant to house the homeless had vanished into the pockets of slick NGO executives and city officials who spoke in platitudes while living in gated mansions far from the crisis they claimed to be solving. Year after year, new projects were announced, new funds were allocated, and yet the tents only spread further, swallowing whole neighborhoods, transforming once-thriving districts into open-air encampments of misery. The people saw the lie for what it was.

City services collapsed under the weight of spiraling deficits. Police stations shuttered, leaving the streets to the gangs and scavengers. Firefighters stopped responding to calls, and soon the skyline flickered nightly with the glow of uncontrolled infernos. The sanitation department was a memory; the trash piled higher than the abandoned cars, and the stench of decay hung in the air like a warning to any who dared linger.

The public had enough. They refused to pay into a system that did nothing but rob them. Businesses boarded up their windows and fled. The middle class, once the backbone of the city, packed their belongings and disappeared in caravans of moving trucks, leaving behind only the desperate and the damned. Those who remained saw no reason to obey the rules of a city that had failed them.

Looting became survival. Power outages became routine. Roads buckled and crumbled, left unrepaired, as storm drains overflowed and flooded the streets with filth. The rich who had once sipped cocktails in rooftop lounges now hid behind private security, their fortresses of glass and steel looking down on a city eating itself alive.

The rest of the nation looked on in horror. Los Angeles was no longer a beacon of the American Dream—it was a warning. A vision of what unchecked corruption, greed, and mismanagement could create. Other states sealed their borders to fleeing Angelenos, fearing that the same rot would spread. Airlines canceled flights in and out of LAX. Shipping companies rerouted goods to avoid the crumbling ports.

Los Angeles had become a modern ruin, a monument to its own failures. And still, the city burned.