The Helpers

## Overview

***“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” – Fred Rogers***

The “Helpers”, as they’ve come to be known, is the title given to a decentralized group of aid providers that form an innumerable network of routes and safehouses, spanning across the former Continental United States. The title of “Helper” is the closest term to refer to any person affiliated with this unofficial network. The nature of this group’s work seems to be to provide aid and facilitate safe passage to any impacted peoples seeking to flee The Dominion, The Incorporated States of America, or United States of America (Remnant), to flee to the relatively safe Independent Communes of Ungoverned America and Cascadian Confederation, out of the New American Wasteland into Canada, or to the coastlines to find passage into safe waters.

It is difficult to discern the true nature of this alleged network, as there is no singular leadership or chain of command, but rather a loose agreement between neighboring safehouses or aid groups, to provide direction or aid one step along their lines. This makes the true span or strength of the Helpers impossible to measure, as any given Helper is only connected to their immediate neighbors. The combining ideology of any given Helper is a shared altruism, lending help to those that need it, for its own sake.

### History

The best approximation to the operation of the Helper lines has been to the Underground Railroad, a historic network of safehouses and travel routes to allow the safe passage of runaway African slaves from the Antebellum South, to the free Northern States or Canada, prior to the abolition of slavery and First American Civil War in the United States. The scope of people that utilize this network has grown far past mere runaway slaves, although they can now be found using this route once again. People of Color, LGBTQ+, non-Christians, non-conformists, and any relatives or allies have been found using these networks to flee from under the thumb of the New Dominions.

There is no clear record to follow, nor a set start to these networks, but the prevailing theory as to the start of the Helper networks is that some of these lines of supply and aid have always existed, in some form, between communities spanning townships and counties. When civil strife began to severely impact the United States in the mid-2020s, these networks were some of the first of the safe routes used for refugees to flee the American South and Midwest during the Western Migration. As the New Dominions took power, and the US withdrew their control from the West, official sources of funding and assistance withered, and the Helper networks then became the last reliable route for any refugees still fleeing to take.

### Function

Safehouses are generally operated by proverbial “Aunties”, usually a transfemme or AFAB individual, and are largely left alone on the fringes of battle lines between the Dominions and USA. Due to the regressive gender roles enforced in the Dominions, and the perception of women being either weak or not meant for fighting, the position that Aunties have found themselves in also works as a camouflage, allowing them to operate in plain sight. They are the most widely known portion of the Helpers, being the most visible, and thus taking the brunt of rare official scrutiny.

Despite holding the position of most public profile of the Helpers, Aunties are only a small portion of the Helper networks - some are rural farmers, some hold official positions of authority, such as police officers, in order to look the other way, others manufacture medical supplies when funding is difficult or nonexistent, some are transporters - there is a great many works to be done in all forms to maintain this network, and a hand can be found to do it, but not everyone on these lines are expected to be combatants.

Although these safehouses are largely used to move refugees, that is not their only purpose. No clear ideology leaves no concrete use for these networks, and these routes and safehouses have also been used to move aid supplies and materiel into Dominion zones, to replenish holdout resistance groups still fighting against the fundamentalist regimes in the American South and Midwest. In these rare instances, militant branches of the Helpers have been found providing aid to groups such as Birmingham Underground, Oklahoma Confederacy, various Colorado CIDGs, New Haven Underground, New Florida Alliance, Atlanta Defense Group, Iowa Resistance, Acadiana, and the Nebraska Thunderbird Movement.

***“You can’t give away secrets you don’t know”***

The lines of the Helper networks generally refer to the safehouses Aunties know, and are able to refer to as the next stop, and thus other Helpers, if known, are often referred to as “a farmer out by Auntie \_\_\_” or “a med tech out by Auntie \_\_\_” and so on, to maintain anonymity and avoid scrutiny. Helpers also maintain both community and official support, by being generally good neighbors and helping locally. It’s more difficult to report the person who gave you food or helped you repair your house when you were at your worst to unfamiliar and possibly unwelcome officials. Even in the worst-case scenarios of compromised safehouses, local authorities were never able to gather any meaningful intelligence on the networks, due to no rigid structure of said networks. Plausible deniability is both a difficult hurdle and an effective smokescreen, to reduce the risk of compromising further safehouses down the lines.