Alternative History Experiment
- Thread starter Masada
- Start date
Cobalt Command
Destroyer of Worlds
My apologies if I came off as an annoyance. I'm perfectly content with waiting for updates if the mod or a player has something clearly more important to do. My problem lies in the fact that I was told Friday/Saturday and left to wait for three days before having the misconception explained.
Still looking forward to the update when possible.
Still looking forward to the update when possible.
cindle
Warlord
I would suggest a non-aggrsion-pact between the ki and ik.
Amon Savag
The Great
Your life's one big excuse isn't it, Masada? Food on the table... I'll take a crap on your table, so you won't want to put food there.
cindle
Warlord
Don't tell them that! Next thing you know there will be people wanting to use money!
Ranna Orders
Spend 1 Point on developing a basic way of extracting a sales tax of 5% on all sales in our major trading cities. Some of this money may likely fall into the hands of the corrupt, but most should go towards helping develop a better concept of the distinction between the imperial state and other entities
Spend 1 Point on helping to establish the basis for basic shipping route on rudimentary boats.
Spend 1 Point on developing a basic way of extracting a sales tax of 5% on all sales in our major trading cities. Some of this money may likely fall into the hands of the corrupt, but most should go towards helping develop a better concept of the distinction between the imperial state and other entities
Spend 1 Point on helping to establish the basis for basic shipping route on rudimentary boats.
Now folks, I haven't managed to finish the entirety of the update. I'm sorry. If its any consolation its almost the same length as the previous update covering only two areas. Granted, the rest of the sections of the update won't be as large or 'unique' but I'm hoping you'll enjoy them nevertheless. Now for the teaser:
See the man. He is tall and fair, he wears a long and gold trimmed cloak of purple. He stokes his fire. Before him, a great host, astride a great plain made small and insignificant in their flickering shadows striving for form in a horizon lit by fires. His people are known as cowards and slaves of men but in truth they are simply rootless. The old amongst them lie in stupor, sketching images in dust they call foreign, as if any man can leave that which sustains them and comforts them in dotage. Always they dream. Not of these easy lands but lands to crack rocks and sunder souls.
On the night of his birth. A star fell. It held low on the horizon never quite rising. It dipped. It swayed pendulum-like turning on some invisible string before fading into nothing. At that moment two cries sounded one of death and another of life. His entry into the world carried her off -- that was the death. He carried one other away. On a plain much like this one all bramble and sickle shaped briar and rock strewn in great rough-hewn clumps. It was said that his birth had heralded his deaths -- that he was good at causing them was not something that needed to be debated, it simply was like the sun rising or crows picking at bodies left to long in the baking mid-day sun. It had certainly got him far. Whether or not that was a good thing he hadn’t decided on. He didn’t really care.
Home is not where the heart is, the heart moves with the body while the mind keeps its distance from temporal shells. Where the one is tangible, the other eludes us, the greatest philosophers of the Waldigo -- if one can stomach intricate first hand knowledge of the brain, that is -- don’t know what makes man distinct from the beasts. I’m not inclined to philosophise over the nature of human thought, suffice to say that we do it regardless of our own foolishness. It is quite an automatic process in that sense. It is only therefore natural that when the Dalycana reached their Terrunaea that some should look back fondly at their old home. They would die and with their deaths would come an additional death of the memories which kept it alive. Memories when passed to another become anecdotes, which turn into stories, which transition into nightmares and so-on till nobody quite remembers all that much except for the pallid reflection offered to us, so many years later, by legend.
History turns. The Dalycana who had been the quarry of the Waldigo in time became the quarrier, chipping at the Kautian face till it fractured over mountains ducked low by the elements and across plains which burn bronze in the suns light all the way to the distant coast. Only now cementing their legends, the Dalycana would set in motion a new set, similar to their own of lands now lost and paradise found. History repeats, limited perhaps by the paucity of our words, insufficient to carry anew a narrative already a thousand years old at this stage. The Kautian for their part would flee until they had nowhere else to go and then finding themselves stuck between the spears of the Dalycana and the embrace of a body of water they could not see the end of -- they choose the more realistic option, rounding on their mounts they broke the Dalycana lines.
They would independent of others create history now. Having defeated the Dalycana they began in small groups to investigate their new surroundings. Each group would bring back reports so similar (for language is limited at this stage) of settlements with walls fit to walls to keep young lovers away from each others embraces, fit to break a nomad’s heart. Now, one of the Kings perhaps smarter or stupider than the others rode up to one of these settlements, quite what he intended to do we can never be sure. Fancy his surprise when these folks, quite innocent of the world, open their gates by casting aside their heavy bars of oak and invite this King inside. His crowning it was said almost killed him -- thundering in his heart, red face and slurred speech. The rest as they say is history, broken promises, King betrayed, family sundered and greed that otherwise constant of human nature given free reign for a span of years – the last would prove fatal and lead to our fallen state.
In the bright temples of this land, which breeds unbroken hardship and obstinance fit to call the sun down from its equally unbroken journey and which is the focus of fevered dreams, cannibals ambitions and religions fit to drown out plains with the locusts like swarms of man, does the world turn. Upon this fulcrum, in the middle of the world lying virginal between three rivers two short, one uncharted, and islands tied together as though by some gossamer thread across a wide sea and loam to make a man cry in mourning for want of privation rested, does the excess blood of the world flow.
When a nation is strong, invariably like any man not sure of his strength and unsure of his opposition, feels the need to strike at the weakest in the line-up, who perhaps unfortunately is our virgin. Not quite virginal with her treatment of the attentions of her violent suitors, however. Striking out with a ferocity not quite her own drawn from some darker place, the frustrated death calls of some long subsumed people melting into the desert as glass melts into the coals of the fire, clear to the eye but still there, waiting for some fool hand to stray over sharp edges as yet un-blunted by time or ordeal.
It would be here that the world was decided. In a land with three things in profusion and not a whit more: temples, nightmare-dreams and blood.
The men of Ik proud and haughty as they had every right to be at that stage marched into our virgin swords drawn. They conquered quite independent of their predecessors with all the efficiency of the tax farmer looking for his next shake-down. They ranged far and wide as far as the borders of the Dalycana taking by storm of siege as they went. Those who refused them entry were treated harshly -- the slaves flowed back in profusion quite distinct from the usual pattern of events in that land.
The immutable rules of the world seldom like to look like fools and even less to be called fools something that the strange monument to Ik pride managed to do. They achieved their own peculiar form of revenge with the rebellion of the southern Ki and the arrival of yet more Waldigo reinforcements. The first would prove to be uncontainable and would prove to be the single largest threat to the Ik ever -- a brother against brothers is in much the same respect as greed a universal constant. The Ki armies would be checked in time and the borders would stabilize but the loss of the south was soon after the event already beginning to have grim repercussions for the financial state of the Kingdom. Quite how this would turn out was not as yet known.
The flows of the slaves would have other more measurable consequences and immediate consequences -- the introduction of the queer philosophies of the Waldigo into civilized company, for one, as well as the sudden impoverishment of many small landowners now driven from their master’s land by cheap newly acquired slaves. Something which continued unabated as the fractious peoples of the [Holy Land] resisted the newcomer with vigour occupying and bleeding its military while more sinister threats formed on the now diminishing borders. This trend was to some extent reversed by the creation of local ‘kingdoms’ under the protection of the Ik but violence has again began to peak.
See the man. He is tall and fair, he wears a long and gold trimmed cloak of purple. He stokes his fire. Before him, a great host, astride a great plain made small and insignificant in their flickering shadows striving for form in a horizon lit by fires. His people are known as cowards and slaves of men but in truth they are simply rootless. The old amongst them lie in stupor, sketching images in dust they call foreign, as if any man can leave that which sustains them and comforts them in dotage. Always they dream. Not of these easy lands but lands to crack rocks and sunder souls.
On the night of his birth. A star fell. It held low on the horizon never quite rising. It dipped. It swayed pendulum-like turning on some invisible string before fading into nothing. At that moment two cries sounded one of death and another of life. His entry into the world carried her off -- that was the death. He carried one other away. On a plain much like this one all bramble and sickle shaped briar and rock strewn in great rough-hewn clumps. It was said that his birth had heralded his deaths -- that he was good at causing them was not something that needed to be debated, it simply was like the sun rising or crows picking at bodies left to long in the baking mid-day sun. It had certainly got him far. Whether or not that was a good thing he hadn’t decided on. He didn’t really care.
Home is not where the heart is, the heart moves with the body while the mind keeps its distance from temporal shells. Where the one is tangible, the other eludes us, the greatest philosophers of the Waldigo -- if one can stomach intricate first hand knowledge of the brain, that is -- don’t know what makes man distinct from the beasts. I’m not inclined to philosophise over the nature of human thought, suffice to say that we do it regardless of our own foolishness. It is quite an automatic process in that sense. It is only therefore natural that when the Dalycana reached their Terrunaea that some should look back fondly at their old home. They would die and with their deaths would come an additional death of the memories which kept it alive. Memories when passed to another become anecdotes, which turn into stories, which transition into nightmares and so-on till nobody quite remembers all that much except for the pallid reflection offered to us, so many years later, by legend.
History turns. The Dalycana who had been the quarry of the Waldigo in time became the quarrier, chipping at the Kautian face till it fractured over mountains ducked low by the elements and across plains which burn bronze in the suns light all the way to the distant coast. Only now cementing their legends, the Dalycana would set in motion a new set, similar to their own of lands now lost and paradise found. History repeats, limited perhaps by the paucity of our words, insufficient to carry anew a narrative already a thousand years old at this stage. The Kautian for their part would flee until they had nowhere else to go and then finding themselves stuck between the spears of the Dalycana and the embrace of a body of water they could not see the end of -- they choose the more realistic option, rounding on their mounts they broke the Dalycana lines.
They would independent of others create history now. Having defeated the Dalycana they began in small groups to investigate their new surroundings. Each group would bring back reports so similar (for language is limited at this stage) of settlements with walls fit to walls to keep young lovers away from each others embraces, fit to break a nomad’s heart. Now, one of the Kings perhaps smarter or stupider than the others rode up to one of these settlements, quite what he intended to do we can never be sure. Fancy his surprise when these folks, quite innocent of the world, open their gates by casting aside their heavy bars of oak and invite this King inside. His crowning it was said almost killed him -- thundering in his heart, red face and slurred speech. The rest as they say is history, broken promises, King betrayed, family sundered and greed that otherwise constant of human nature given free reign for a span of years – the last would prove fatal and lead to our fallen state.
In the bright temples of this land, which breeds unbroken hardship and obstinance fit to call the sun down from its equally unbroken journey and which is the focus of fevered dreams, cannibals ambitions and religions fit to drown out plains with the locusts like swarms of man, does the world turn. Upon this fulcrum, in the middle of the world lying virginal between three rivers two short, one uncharted, and islands tied together as though by some gossamer thread across a wide sea and loam to make a man cry in mourning for want of privation rested, does the excess blood of the world flow.
When a nation is strong, invariably like any man not sure of his strength and unsure of his opposition, feels the need to strike at the weakest in the line-up, who perhaps unfortunately is our virgin. Not quite virginal with her treatment of the attentions of her violent suitors, however. Striking out with a ferocity not quite her own drawn from some darker place, the frustrated death calls of some long subsumed people melting into the desert as glass melts into the coals of the fire, clear to the eye but still there, waiting for some fool hand to stray over sharp edges as yet un-blunted by time or ordeal.
It would be here that the world was decided. In a land with three things in profusion and not a whit more: temples, nightmare-dreams and blood.
The men of Ik proud and haughty as they had every right to be at that stage marched into our virgin swords drawn. They conquered quite independent of their predecessors with all the efficiency of the tax farmer looking for his next shake-down. They ranged far and wide as far as the borders of the Dalycana taking by storm of siege as they went. Those who refused them entry were treated harshly -- the slaves flowed back in profusion quite distinct from the usual pattern of events in that land.
The immutable rules of the world seldom like to look like fools and even less to be called fools something that the strange monument to Ik pride managed to do. They achieved their own peculiar form of revenge with the rebellion of the southern Ki and the arrival of yet more Waldigo reinforcements. The first would prove to be uncontainable and would prove to be the single largest threat to the Ik ever -- a brother against brothers is in much the same respect as greed a universal constant. The Ki armies would be checked in time and the borders would stabilize but the loss of the south was soon after the event already beginning to have grim repercussions for the financial state of the Kingdom. Quite how this would turn out was not as yet known.
The flows of the slaves would have other more measurable consequences and immediate consequences -- the introduction of the queer philosophies of the Waldigo into civilized company, for one, as well as the sudden impoverishment of many small landowners now driven from their master’s land by cheap newly acquired slaves. Something which continued unabated as the fractious peoples of the [Holy Land] resisted the newcomer with vigour occupying and bleeding its military while more sinister threats formed on the now diminishing borders. This trend was to some extent reversed by the creation of local ‘kingdoms’ under the protection of the Ik but violence has again began to peak.
Abaddon
Deity
Looking forward to it, nice teaser
Kentharu
Zebra Commander
That teaser made me cry 
cindle
Warlord
I guess Ki slowed down the update...
qoou
Emperor
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2007
- Messages
- 1,991
Beans? ... It would take a hell of a coincidence for beans to pop up in Eurasia.
cindle
Warlord
deleted
qoou
Emperor
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2007
- Messages
- 1,991
You don't understand. Beans originated in the Americas. The chance of a random stalk of beans flying over the Atlantic/Pacific are about the same as the odds of my brain staying on much longer, even though it's 3 PM here... I need to get some sleep... and do some work...
Abaddon
Deity
Seed pod floating across the ocean?
cindle
Warlord
Sorry for inconsistencies, but this is my first try at an NES, and I am still a noob. Unfortunately, due to my late start, it is too late for me to change it to papyrus, or masonry, for I do not wish to further inconvenionce, Masada.
qoou
Emperor
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2007
- Messages
- 1,991
Clearly done by swallows.
They could carry it on a string!
