Temple of a New Dawn

The Temple of a New Dawn was an extremist sect of the Darwinist faith, headquartered at the J. Andrew Technology Enclave in Bailey Dominus Columbia South. Founded and led by Currie Arand, a Full Dead woman who had awakened with piecemeal knowledge of pre-fall weapons design, the sect operated with a clarity of purpose that made even devoted Church of Darwin members blanch. Their mission was to force the next evolution of the Strains by retriggering the evolutionary process that had created the Strains in the first place. Massive irradiation. Forced adaptation. The desires, wants, and lives of everyone outside the sect were completely meaningless in relation to the scope and scale of that purpose.
  Currie Arand stood roughly five foot three, spidery in features, with a commanding and stern face whose unblinking eyes showed no compassion or connectivity. She demanded complete dedication and unfaltering faith from every member. Individual identity was the first thing to go. She identified the ego, selfishness, and individual voice as shortcomings that had to be eradicated for the future of evolution. What she called the "folly of human morality" had no place in her temple. Members spent large portions of each day either laboring on devices designed by Full Dead engineers or bathing in waters heavy with radioactive materials, dissolving themselves of the concept of self in service to a cause measured in generations and mutations.
  The sect's weapons program was the product of that devotion. The Temple had harvested massive volumes of irradiated materials from the surrounding landscape and successfully developed isotope separation to create enriched uranium. Full Dead members drove the nuclear research, carrying instinctive memories of pre-fall processes for creating nuclear materials. When Dominus Columbia sent a legion of volunteer Retrograde soldiers to subdue the Enclave, the Temple launched a rocket that traveled several miles before crashing near the center of City Center. There was no detonation. There did not need to be. The troops withdrew before the end of the day. The message required no further explanation.
  Beyond the Enclave, Currie Arand had placed dedicated servants across the wasteland. Mostly Full Dead, these operatives staffed cells in distant locations, teaching the temple's vision to throngs of dedicated Remnants and devoted Accensorites. These cells gathered nuclear materials and resources for the cause, funneling them back to the Enclave. The Temple's ultimate goal was the complete purging of all "inferior" Strains from the planet and the creation of an environment where more Full Dead could ascend as the future's caretakers. Fewer than three hundred devotees in a bunker surrounded by craters and black fungus, and they intended to reshape the world. The worst part, for everyone in range, was that they had already proven they possessed both the means and the will to try.