Middle Dakota

On Nover 2, 1889, three new states joined the Union: North Dakota, South Dakota, and Middle Dakota. Unfortunately for all the newly-minted Middle Dakotans, only two of them lasted. Middle Dakota had the misfortune to be located right between two of the lines of power that the hobomancers would later name "songlines." Since the stories that brought these songlines into existence heavily featured bloodshed and genocide, these particular songlines started out corrupt and only got worse as things from other dimensions slithered through the many weak spots that these tainted songlines caused to open up in the fabric of reality. On top of all the other hazards that settlers in the West had to deal with, the good folks of Middle Dakota had to worry about monsters making off with their livestock and families.   By the turn of the century, the corrupted songlines had turned into open wounds, swallowing up the terrain and spewing monsters out of otherworldy portals all along their length. In time these rifts grew so large that even finding a clear path into Middle Dakota could be a challenge. The early hobomancers did what they could to keep the rifts from getting larger, but it was a losing battle. Eventually, the two rifts combined into one giant hole in reality and swallowed up what was left of the least famous Dakota. The tragedy came with one small ray of light: With Middle Dakota completely lost, the Hobomancers were able to perform a powerful magical ritual that sealed the rift and eradicated that corrupted songlines.   This was all before the coming of Galaxikhan, when people still mostly tried to pretend they lived in a rational world, so the people who make the kind of decisions that most people don't know even get made decided that the best way to deal with Middle Dakota was to chuck it down the memory hole. All references to the state--maps, history textbooks, government records--were quietly removed from the official record and stories about Middle Dakota were explained away as Wild West tall tales like Pecos Bill or the Gumberoo. By the 1950s, nobody seriously believed that Middle Dakota had ever existed.   We'd probably still believe Middle Dakota was a myth if it wasn't for Philip J. Stovebender, a self-taught genius who describes himself as an "Akshic Physicist." Stovebender's experiments took him into many alternate realities, one of which was Middle Dakota. The state was still mostly intact, just transplanted to a hellish alternate dimension where the survivors fought off hordes of monsters from heavily-fortified compounds. Stovebender became obsessed with saving Middle Dakota, and his wealth and connections allowed him to arrange meetings with all the right people to eventually get the (needless to say, Top Secret) project funded.   Using what the handful of people who understand such things describe as "an interdimensional plunger connected to a network of pulleys and wenches," Stovebender and his team were able to successfully retrieve the town of Springfield, Middle Dakota, along with a few hundred acres of surrounding territory, which now sits right between the borders of the two canonical Dakotas. Once a few square miles of Middle Dakota were successfully recovered, the powers that be revealed the truth in hopes that public pressure would help secure the enormous funding needed to keep the interdimensional plunger running until the state of Middle Dakota is back where it belongs.