Little Rock
From FABT
 Little Rock shortly after the Collector abduction of 2185 CE.
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6 October 2173 CE |
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Little Rock is the capital city of Freedom's Progress and one of the first five initial colonies established on the planet by the Systems Alliance, located in the northern interior of the New Burma continent. Established in 2173 CE by the colony ship Lake Michigan, along with four other colonies, Little Rock was built on a small hill overlooking a ravine that had once been a river with nothing but a small, six foot rock in the middle of the hill, earning the colony's name "Little Rock", with the eponymous small rock used as the colony's town center. Little Rock's population was modest in its initial stages, climbing to just over 3,000 prior to 2183 CE, with many colonists not willing to tolerate the harsh, dreary climate of the planet, with those who stayed remaining due to the relative quiet and its distance from Alliance cultural and urban centers. Following the Eden Prime War, colonist enrollment dropped sharply while Little Rock's population remained static, slowly expanding overtime until the population reached 5,000 in 2185 CE. Despite warnings from the Systems Alliance to the colonies regarding over a dozen colonies disappearing, the colony of Little Rock was largely unperturbed, with only a slight dip in the population. In August 2185 CE however Freedom's Progress would be the fifteenth victim of just such an abduction, with Little Rock itself the epicenter of a massive Collector attack. Overrun with swarms of seeker drones and the entire 5,000 strong population of Little Rock, along with 5,000 from the nearby colony of Riverside, were abducted by the Collectors, who then left, leaving no trace of the abduction. The empty Little Rock was visited hours later by the 12th Explorer Platoon of the Migrant Fleet Marines and shortly after a Cerberus squad, the former of which looking to extract a quarian pilgrim who was present at the colony, and the latter wanting to investigate the disappearance and find out who was behind it. Both teams were successful, although the quarian platoon suffered substantial losses in the process, and both extracted two hours before the Alliance frigate Shiroyama arrived to investigate.
Little Rock lay abandoned, along with Riverside, for several months after the abduction, sealed off by the Alliance military whilst they investigated the abduction. In January 2186 CE, the Alliance military finally pulled out of the area, and a small trickle of fresh colonists began settling Little Rock, although its population would only reach 900 in the wake of the attack, which was only further frustrated by the colony's state of disrepair and its depleted mech force due to its months of abandonment. During the Reaper War, Little Rock and the rest of Freedom's Progress would be ignored by the Reapers, who deemed the planet to be of little strategic value and its population too small, and so they prioritized other, more important targets with the intention to return later, which allowed Little Rock to be one of the fortunate few colonies in the galaxy to never any of the devastation of the war. Little Rock's population increased to 1,400 due to an influx of refugees, many of whom decided to remain once the war was over to start a new life in the colony. Little Rock saw a massive influx in public attention when Liara T'Soni's biography on the life of Javik Ple released in 2204 CE, which revealed the long unknown truth that Freedom's Progress was the lost prothean homeworld. Javik himself would visit Little Rock shortly after, further increasing tourist traffic to the area, and thousands of these would ultimately choose to remain in Little Rock and the surrounding colonies, helping it expand into a larger town as the threat of war between the Dominion and the New Council loomed, with many of them flocking to Little Rock to be as far from any conflict as possible when it kicked off. As a result, Little Rock suffered a population explosion, witnessing massive growth that led to the colony turning into a small city, and only continuing to expand from there. By 2230 CE, Little Rock was the largest city on the planet, expanding out tenfold from its original size, and had a population of 300,000. It maintains tentative trade relations with the prothean settlement of Victory, and aside from a slight dip in its expansion due to the "land grab" in the Andromeda Galaxy and other galaxies by 3000 CE, Little Rock remains the biggest city on Freedom's Progress to this day.