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bleachbleachbleach · 11 months

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[Bleach e312]

Snake Wines and Beer Steins*: An Anthropology of West Rukongai

* I learned this morning that is not a stein, but I’m keeping it for the assonance!

Really down the rabbithole with this episode and cannot put it down, but this cap is such a completely fascinating glimpse at potential Rukongai cultures and trade routes!

The first thing that caught my eye, naturally, was the snake, which when this scene first came up I thought was just a completely undressed snake on a plate. But when I went to take the cap, no! It’s a snake in liquid! Which led me to believe it was a pickled snake.

But then my co-blogger brought up snake wine, which it definitely is. According to Wikipedia, the liquid part of habushu, snake sake from the Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa), is mixed with herbs and honey, which is why it has a yellow tint. The Habu snake is a pit viper viewed as both a menace (it can launch itself and bite you from pretty far away) and as a god, bestowing health and virility. (Contemporary Ryukyuan/Okinawan literature sometimes includes habu snakes as an anti-colonial metaphor, such as Medoruma Shun’s 1999 short story, “Hope.”)

1. Increased Importance of Medicinal Food vs. Sustenance Food in Rukongai

Makes all the sense in the world to me that Rukongai would have virility wine. If you don’t need to eat to survive, I imagine the value of virility wine is quite high. ...I mean, what else is there to do out there?

2. Climate Profiles Suggest Far-Reaching Trade Networks

Because the Gate Guardian who shows up in this episode is Jidanbou, this means the village Oomaeda encounters is in West Rukongai somewhere—probably close to the gates, since Soi Fon expected him back after a day trip. (But per the Bount arc, Renji can apparently run to the ass-end of Rukongai to the Seireitei and back in a few hours, so there’s some wiggle room here.)

Nothing we’ve seen from West Rukongai suggests it’s climatologically similar to the Ryukyu Islands (or to southeast Asia, where similar pit vipers live), which are subtropical. Soul Society always gives the impression of being fairly temperate. At least, it snows in the Seireitei without mountain elevations being involved (Winter Fireworks chapter). West Rukongai is where Hokutan is, the mountains where Kaien and Rukia trained, which gave the impression of being pretty temperate. West Rukongai is also where Junrinan is—where Hitsugaya and Hinamori are from. Judging by Hitsugaya’s behavior in the Beach Episode, if Junrinan was anything like the Ryukyu Islands, he’d have perished long ago.

So… DID THEY TRADE FOR IT. DID THEY GET THE SNAKE WINE FROM ELSEWHERE. How far away is that elsewhere? How many different owners’ hands did it pass through to make it to this village, to this feast? Snake wine is intended to age fairly substantially, which in Rukongai could mean quite a bit of time. How old is this snake wine? What is its provenance?? Potential evidence of complex and far-reaching patterns of trade and shared ascriptions of value, is what I’m saying. snake wine snake wine snake wine

In my mind, I’ve mostly transposed Japan over Soul Society and imagine North Rukongai as northern Japan, West Rukongai as western Japan, etc. Except in my mind sometimes south is southern Japan and sometimes it’s northern New Mexico lol. East Rukongai in my mind is "idk, New Jersey?" Maybe the snake wine is from the version of southern Rukongai where Pirate AU Soi Fon lives, dominating the high seas…

3. Evidence of Glassworking and Alcohol Production Characteristic of the late 19th/early 20th Centuries

[For reference, Soul Society is typically described as being similar to the Edo Period of Japanese history, which spanned the 17th-19th centuries.]

The second standout beverage here is the beer stein, which I called a stein and then learned that the original beer steins came from the Bubonic Plague era and had tops, for plague reasons, and were made out of wood and leather and then pewter. What do I know, I don’t drink, LOL.

That is more technically a ten-sided handled glass pint, which became popular in the early half of the 20th century in England, though some sources place it in Austria a few decades earlier. Drinking beer out of various forms of glass predates that, and there was a whole period of ceramic drinkware and trade with China and Japan thrown in the centuries between, blah blah. But two things are probably true if there’s a glass beer mug:

1. Glassworking has developed enough to make this workable/not a holy pain, production-wise. But again, this is Rukongai—maybe this is the one mug in all existence in West Rukongai and not something intended for mass production. They’re toasting the once-in-a-lifetime event of a Gotei captain slumming it with them, after all. Heck, maybe they got it from the Seireitei, which definitely has more than one of these, though after a cursory look at two places I thought they’d appear, neither does. LOL. Welp.

2. Beer production has developed enough that it’s filtered and there’s not unseemly gunk floating around in it (made obvious by the fact that you’re drinking it out of a clear glass mug). This could mean Rukongai is pretty with the times with is alcohol production.

Not that that begins to touch why ten-sided handled glass pints from late 19th/early 20th century England and/or Austria are in West Rukongai, a place less likely to have them than the Seireitei, where weird anachronistic stuff seems like it would come into circulation with more regularity.

I love the idea that even if souls don’t remember their previous lives, there’s still imprints and rogue dreams and strange images floating around in their heads, their muscle memories. But like, specifically the version where sometimes the rogue dream is just a gigantic, bomb-ass cup that Some Guy then proceeds to spend his entire afterlife re-developing. He is a VISIONARY. A GENIUS. A rare mind inventing something the likes of which have never been seen is this world but that exist in his mind so clearly it is as though he has seen it in his hands before!!

#shinigamiology #this isn't even shinigamiology because it's not about shinigami but same vibe (i'm sure rukongai LOVES that attitude lololol)#rukongai #bleach worldbuilding #bleach anime #bleach filler #no brain just bleach

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rrasado · 2 years

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Interactions for my beloved retired archons<3

“Zhongli, do you mind taking a look at this pearl necklace I brought near the port? I’ve never seen anything quite like it, I’d like to know what you think.”

“Hey, Venti, you said you know every song from the past and future? If so, can you sing and Bibingka by Ben&Ben on your lyre?”

Happy 800 followers! You deserve more tbh😭

"A pearl necklace you say, sure then. May I take a closer look...?" Gloved hand brushed against yours, allowing himself to carefully take the precious jewelry with utmost care.

"In this day and age, it's rare to see perfectly cultivated pearls. That's the case for Liyue at least..." Zhongli's smile was laced with a melancholic feel but he looked to you with genuine attention.

"The pearls used here may have well-been remnants of a long gone island southeast to Liyue. Inazuma may have... Watatsumi Island to flaunt, but traveler, would you believe me if I told you there was a place that rivaled its natural majesty?" He hoped the word 'was' didn't overwrite the honor he wished to convey. Zhongli can only sigh before leaning back into his seat.

"The pearl of the orient seas... Its truly a shame how it couldn't withstand the test of time, and yet... I'm certain that its legacy lives on through treasures like these" He caressed each pearl before returning it to you. "If you'd like to know more, I'd be happy to tell their tale sometime."

"As a bard, I'm more than honored to receive a song request!" His lyre apparated within the comforts of his hands the moment it swayed into position.

"Hehe I'm pretty sure I could use some acoustic assistance though~ maybe Master Diluc has a guitar to spare? It'd sound better the more the merrier!" Venti simply shot you a close eyed grin, swerving from your comment about him knowing songs of the past, present and future.

A bard is only a bard after all.

"Traveler I think you'd have to forgive me in advance though, I don't fully understand the lyrics but I can project the melody just fine! Care to sing it with me on that note~?" Fits of laughter echoed before his fingers brushed over the strings.

"While waiting for that guitar we should run over some parts, what was it again? Nag see owit ang manga—"

⸢𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐒 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐓 ➽ 𝐒𝐄𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄⸥

#THREW IN A LIL REFERENCE WITH ZHONGLI WINK WINK #genshin impact #genshin zhongli #genshin venti #zhongli #venti #genshin impact interactions

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parkscorbett66 · 1 month

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Pingyao Travel & Pingyao Tours - China Tour Information

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oqmemphis · 2 months

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Levelling Up: A Brief Journey Through the Depths of Purgatory

Recently I did something unthinkable. I clicked on a Reddit ad.

More specifically, I clicked on this advert, produced by the UK government:

As someone who is frequently in the West Midlands, I approached these exciting and novel claims with cautious optimism, and clicked on "Learn More" in the hopes that I might, potentially, learn some more.

I was immediately greeted with a promotional video which was -- one presumes -- produced in a single afternoon using a stock footage library and a pirated copy of After Effects. There is no voiceover; merely a soundtrack resembling a classic rock song with the vocals stripped out and the remaining instrumental dumped in a blender and homogenised into 66 seconds' worth of unfailingly cheerful but otherwise nondescript audio, which plays in a constant drone while the words "TO HELP SMALL AND MEDIUM BUSINESSES GROW" and other similarly orphaned sentence fragments scroll across the screen, all typeset in block capitals in a shade of green that I can best describe as "Kermit the Frog viewed through a dirty window". Whatever authority these vague promises might once have possessed is stripped away entirely upon clicking "Video transcript" and finding only the exact same phrases, alone and without context, written in inadvisably-applied sentence case in a completely unformatted list:

Perhaps scrolling down the page will be a more illuminating experience. Doing this reveals links to four pages, all of which are promoted with a slogan proclaiming that its respective project will help businesses to succeed and expand. That the West Midlands contains people as well as businesses is seemingly an afterthought, judging by the blurbs. Nonetheless, let us march ahead in defiance of our better judgement and read some details pertaining to these marvellous new projects.

Here is the first entry:

This is not a selected excerpt; these 143 words constitute the entire content of the page. It contains the phrase "the West Midlands and East and Southeast Midlands", implying that even reaching these dizzying heights was a significant ordeal for whichever poor copywriter was saddled with this mess. (Incidentally, if you click the link to the British Business Bank, you are taken to another landing page containing roughly the same information and number of words, as well as an invitation to sign up to some form of newsletter. I must respectfully decline this gracious offer, as I worry that my accepting it would drastically overwhelm the number of inboxes their mailing list was expected to handle, and potentially crash their site, and I do not wish to be prosecuted under the Computer Misuse Act for inadvertently Denial-of-Servicing what may or may not be a government entity with my laptop.)

As we continue to move through this disorienting informational void, we find: a paragraph about skills bootcamps proclaiming that people will be able to take "courses in digital" (this phrase is lifted verbatim, absence of noun included), a section about a nationwide employment scheme with no specific connection to the West Midlands whatsoever, and a PDF about town centre redevelopment written by a man who has not been in charge of urban development or housing since 2021 (two prime ministers ago, it should be noted), and yet whose policies are apparently still relevant enough to be included on this site.

Finally, after much of this hedging and fudging, we reach the content promised in the advert: road improvements. This page, naturally, does not burden us with any details of what is being improved, only rough explanations as to where:

81 words, of which six are title, and another three are a broken link. (Staffordshire County Council, presumably, is so ashamed of whatever drivel used to be available through that link that they opted to replace it with their 404 page.) I intend to analyse the remaining 72 words for multiple paragraphs, which is almost certainly longer than anyone responsible for this page expected.

It is impossible to know, given the broken link cited above, what in the name of hell this page is referring to by "greener travel options". Were this not under a section about road improvements, I would assume it refers to trains or other public transit -- especially given that the West Midlands contains the UK's busiest train station outside of London.

And yet.

Perhaps now is a good time to mention that the West Midlands is also one of the most car-dependent regions of the country, and that citing non-specific road-related "infrastructure" as a "greener travel option" relative to the current norm and then outright refusing to elaborate in any way whatsoever -- all while the UK's railways are regularly going on strike amidst the Prime Minister's abandonment of meaningful negotiations with anyone he perceives as furthering the "anti-motorist agenda" that apparently pervades the entire country -- is at best outrageously cynical, and at worst an attempt to strip the UK for parts and sell it to the highest bidder, with all the grace and respect of a scrap dealer getting revenge on the guy who keeps parking in front of his driveway.

But at last, we emerge from this idiotic tunnel. We reach the end of this misguided tour of broken dreams, having taken in passing glances of promises as insane as they are utterly empty. At the time of writing, this government's most significant accomplishment has been to waste vast amounts of money on fruitless legal fees and abandoned logistics operations, all with the goal of deporting half a percent of the last year's intake of refugees 4000 miles away to Rwanda for no readily apparent reason beyond gleeful cruelty. Nobody seriously believes they're going to achieve so much as fixing a junction in Staffordshire, if for no other reason than that they'll be out of power before anyone even touches a shovel. The sole upside for Mr. Sunak is that half of the local authorities he's allegedly working with on these projects are bankrupt anyway, so he has something convenient to blame all the inevitable problems on whilst simultaneously clamouring for ever more consolidation of power in Westminster. The only thing anyone has learned from this exercise in mental omniflagellation is that you should still never, ever, click on ads you see on Reddit.

#politics #uk politics #long post

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moringajuicex · 2 years

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21 Health Benefits You Will Get From A Moringa Juice Recipe

Moringa leaf and seeds are POSSIBLY SAFE when taken by mouth as medication, short term. Products containing moringa leaf have been used with apparent security for up to ninety days. Products containing moringa seed have been used with obvious security for up to 3 weeks. Moringa root and root extracts are POSSIBLY UNSAFE when taken by mouth.

Moringa has earned reputation because of its excellent dietary value. It has become a staple food and drinks particularly amongst Southeast Asian nations. In truth, there are several moringa juice recipe that do not only delight the mouth but helps hold the physique robust and healthy as well. A second animal research printed in Environmental toxicology and Pharmacology discovered that moringa seed powder exhibited therapeutic effects on rats affected by arsenic poisoning. The moringa capsules helped to revive healthy glutathione levels an reactive oxygen species within the rat's blood . Moringa tea and moringa powder contain inflammation-fighting brokers often identified as isothiocyanates.

Individuals and notably ladies taking Moringa leaf extract and leaf powder usually report weight loss. This beneficial effect might be due to many components due to the natural detoxing effect Moringa has, which will eliminate extra water weight, feces, plaque and fats. To be extra specific, it's the anti-inflammatory and diuretic impact helps cut back water retention. Furthermore, high fiber content in Moringa reduces fat absorption in the gut. It can also be discovered that the discount in insulin resistance might forestall excess fat accumulation around the physique. Last, Glutamic acid, an amino acid in Moringa’s protein, helps in curbing sugar cravings.

Assuming you’re not pregnant or breastfeeding, or taking medication for blood stress, diabetes, or thyroid conditions, moringa powder is mostly protected. That is, as long as you persist with the beneficial doses listed on the package deal or bottle of moringa powder. “Too a lot of it may truly disrupt your digestive system,” Foroutan says. Mainly, moringa (Moringa oleifera, or M. oleifera) is touted for its high focus of antioxidants, in addition to its capability to decrease blood sugar, enhance coronary heart well being, and scale back irritation.

Moringa is that one magic ingredient that has helped girls through centuries with their weight reduction issues. Here, we'll talk about the fragrant moringa, its benefits, tips on how to use moringa leaves, tips on how to use moringa powder. Freshly Moms Organic Moringa Leaf Powder is the purest raw moringa powder made by drying moringa leaves in shade to retain the most nutritional content.

The food plan of individuals in growing nations typically lacks vitamins, minerals and protein. In these countries, Moringa oleifera could be an essential source of many essential vitamins. Women, who breastfeed may suffer from insufficiency of milk throughout time. In these times, drumstick leaves can help you to a really nice extent. It helps in increasing breast milk and since these leaves has high calcium content material; it enhances the calcium content in breast milk.

While it is getting used for weight loss, it can be used for weight achieve in children. Due to the antioxidants, vitamins, calcium and mineral content material of these leaves, it is an ideal food for kids. Fry the moringa oleifera leaves in ghee is the most effective food for teenagers affected by bronchial asthma and allergies too. And an older study published in the International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition discovered that taking 50 g of moringa powder with a single meal decreased blood sugar ranges by 21 p.c. One principle is it boosts insulin manufacturing, as a small clinical trial printed in 2016 suggests. In the examine of healthy volunteers, a single 4-gram dose of moringa leaf powder was shown to increase circulating insulin and decrease blood sugar.

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fapangel · 2 years

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D+6 Update @4PM

google docs

Northern Front

Summary: Little information to go on; likely a regrouping in effect, assume prior dynamics in play.

* The much-reported massive convoy from Belarus seems to be stalled. Given the amount of equipment and personnel present this is no surprise; cat-herding will be required before a new assault can be conducted. With Russian attempts to encircle the city still apparently struggling to fight their way south – and with prior precedent regarding their vulnerability to flanking attacks in this area and its terrain – it’s likely that the major roads into Kiev will remain open as defenders move materiel into the city in preparation for the likely encirclement and very hard fighting to come.

* Information on this front seems sparse overall today and late yesterday. Only statements I can find regarding the fighting in the countryside east of Kiev are from Ukranian military/government officials who indicate their forces are fighting for towns at Pryluky and Nizhyn – naturally, crossroads. Given that the Kharkiv area/region has seen more videos of abandoned or captured supply trucks than any other – and considering how conducive the woodier, more varied terrain is to ambushes – we can presume that if the Russians bypass these towns, as they have preferred to do in the past, that they will continue to suffer the same supply interdiction issues. Their utility in the assault on Kiev is questionable, past being able to encircle the town to easy passage from the east.

Southern Front

Summary: Getting worse, but still, incredibly, holding.

* Kherson area: Better than has been reported. Seeing a lot of doomerism about this on the discord, for understandable reasons. Resistance in Kherson is, incredibly, still active. Russian troops apperently bypassed Mykolaiv and moved north along the N11 highway but were promptly ambushed and destroyed in the town of Bashtanka. I was not expecting such ambushes in this area, as the terrain is incredibly flat, level, and open – ideal tank country; that should play to Russian materiel advantages in artillery and armor. Judging by the truck with the towed field gun, this was not a recon element, either.

* Ukrainian officials claim they are committing their MI-24 Hinds to this area; continuing the trend of aggressive deployment of their limited air assets on this front. Given the incredible importance of the area, and the unfavorable defensive terrain outside of major cities and the Dnieper river itself, this makes sense.

* Reported artillery duel at Severodonetsk with “rockets lighting up the sky” last night and a video claiming to be Russians entering Starobilsk 45km north-east of there seems to indicate high mobility fights (counterbattery employment and the simple speed of advance from Dontesk.). More recently video of civilians blocking Russian troops (a recon element) in Kupiansk have been seen – which is 100km north-west of the aforementioned towns and only 100km east-southeast of Kharkiv. Those troops are likely from the north-eastern forces probing south to find a way around Kharkiv, but the speed with which towns well north-west of the old Donbas line have apparently fallen indicate to me that Ukranian eastern forces (on the Donbas line) are making a fighting retreat – or at least falling back in good order – likely to anchor a new line around the southeastern flank of Kharkiv.

* Combat reported in the vicinity of Vasilievka, 40km south of Zaporizhzhia. Russians at least this far north here. (This has not been geolocated.)

* Russians confirmed to be assaulting Poltava; in the form of two videos of abandoned tanks – whether out of fuel or simply deserting crews crews is unclear. (These have not been geolocated but preponderance of reports favors this. Multiple pictures of civilians in Poltava organizing support services; food etc. have been seen as well.)

* In addition, Russians in Kherson have been seenlooting stores for food.

* These events together indicate that supply exhaustion is affecting the southern push out of Crimea. This is of vital importance, given the criticality of defending crossings over the Dneiper river, the Russian army’s dependence on rail transport for logistics, and the intact rail line into the south via the Kerch strait bridge through Crimea. Regarding this, the widely reported TB-2 drone strike on a large Russian fuel tanker trainwas, incredibly, localized to a railway in Crimea by commercial satellite photography. This would mean the aircraft is operating in an area where an S-400 battery is almost certainly active. Barring more info the TB-2 should be suspected to have LO properties from certain angles at this point in time. The importance of this strike cannot be over-stated; it shows that Russian logistics in territory they solidly control is not beyond reach of Ukranian strikes. While Ukraine only had six TB-2s at beginning of hostilities, the fact that airframes are already being delivered by NATO means that Turkey may be willing to (quietly) deliver more.

* Maruipol is now under proper assault but defending forces seem well equipped with artillery and are making use of small, likely commercial drones to spot their attacks. Given the Russian’s have mostly not deployed their storied ground EW capability (more on this later) we can expect to see more low-cost, high effectiveness tactics like this. (More on this below.) If fanatic resistance in other Ukrainian cities are anything to go by Mauripol will hold for quite a while yet.

Analysis – state of Russian forces now and future performance

(Skip to “conclusions” if you’re lazy or an officer)

It is a fool’s errand to try and link every sighting of completely abandoned tanks and even high-end SAMs, butthis incident deserves note as the vehicle is fully functional – the Ukranians start the engine and drive it away without problem. Videos of farmers hauling away abandoned IFVs with their tractors are already making the rounds, but thisshows civilians with heavy equipment (cranes and flatbed tractor-trailers) removing a pair of SA-8 Gekos (one of the better and more sophisticated mobile SHORAD units with a limited capability for missile interception!). Not only are vehicles like this lighter than tanks and thus possible to move with lighter and more common civilian equipment, but they make a larger difference than a single tank does given the problems a persistent SAM threat causes for airpower and the relative shortage of such systems in the Ukranian OOB. Furthermore, the units being abandoned include Tor (SA-15) and Pantsir (SA-22) systems, among the most useful, sophisticated and brand-new surface to air systems in the Russian inventory. Additionally, all but the SA-22 are already present in Ukrainian stocks. For example, while only six SA-15/Tor systems were re-activated before the war, Ukraine has many more of them in storage that they did not have money to re-activate; thus there should be no shortage of spare parts and ammunition reloads, and there’s even operators trained to use the systems. Examples of deliberate recovery efforts being made on Russian vehicles, mostly SAMs, often by farmers with tractors are now so common I have lost count.

In addition, supply convoys are being intercepted and not only destroyed, but outright captured, esp. in the Kharkiv region where Russian efforts seem to be coming to grief quite frequently, for instance this truckload of280mm Smerch rockets. With the long range of this system and the relative low ammo stockpiles Ukraine has for it’s small number of launchers, captures like this weaken the Russians while strengthening the Ukrainians. This fuel truck reportedly ran into a tree after swerving to avoid civilians in the road, and this convoy was apparently ambushed, with one truck destroyed and another loaded with MLRS rockets captured.

The troubles of Russian forces go significantly deeper than ammunition supply, as well: early reports that Russian frontline troops were using cheap, civilian radios without encryption is now confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt; thousands of people are listening in to unsecured Russian field communications using web-linked radio receivers and crowd-sourcing the intelligence collection from it. One unit in particular, Buran-30, has become famous for the frequency with which he gets lost and has to call for help from other units who are also lost. This is the likely reason why Russia has almost completely neglected to deploy its formidable ground EW systems (one was spotted yesterday moving towards Kherson, likely as a counter TB-2 drone measure.) Worse, POWs are reporting that they have no long-range radios to contact their headquarters whatsoever. Radios are not a logistical concern like ammunition, fuel, food, and other consumables that must be channeled into a fight by a constant (sometimes literal) pipeline; they are basic and vital pieces of common kit. To constantly be broadcasting unit movements in the clear, with United States ELINT assets hovering all around the nation, feeding that data to Ukrainian ground troops, is staggeringly incompetent and ill-prepared.

NextI wish to draw attention to something I’ve dubbed terrain attrition; i.e. the losses incurred by accidents crossing terrain. These happen in any military and are a major reason training with armored vehicles is important, but Russia seems to be having more problems than normal. Multiple videos of Russian tanks that drove off small (or over destroyed) bridges have been seen. More vehicles have been seen abandoned by the side of the road for unclear reasons. A video showing two abandoned T-80s that collided had a tow chain hooked between them; likely one had broken down. Multiple sightings of mud-bogged and abandoned vehicles have been seen as well; the S-22 above being one good example.

Due to good OPSEC by both sides’ uniformed military most OSINT so far has been civilian sightings of combat from (usually) a safe distance, and almost all of it has been of combat’s aftermath. Videos of the Russian advance into Kherson yesterday gave a rare look at Russian infantry actually maneuvering, and displaying incredibly lackadaisical attitudes about it. I initially took this as indication that UA had withdrawn from Kherson to the crossroads; we now know that is incorrect and that the city was still occupied at the time. Given overall performance of the entire Russian Federation Armed Forces over the past several days and persistent evidence of outright desertion, not just of individual vehicles but of entire OPs, vehicles included, the quality of regular Russian troops, including infantry,should no longer receive the benefit of the doubt.

One last data point: commercial imagery is now available of Ozerne Airbase in Zhytomr Oblast, showing the impacts of what were probably opening-day salvos by Iskanders. Incredibly, it shows the majority of the seven weapons deployed missed their targets. Tellingly, every impact seems offset from their likely intended target by the same distance, and in the same direction. This is highly reminiscent of the 2019 Indian Air Force strike on a terrorist camp in southern Pakistan which apparently missed the mark becausestrike planners misunderstood the intricacies of coordinate systems and as a result, missed their intended targets because the elevation data was not correct.

Conclusions

Let me paint you a picture. You have a military force that is suffering from high rates of desertion and abysmal morale, having persistent supply problems even in areas where intact railheads are not far to the rear, and have poorly trained troops who cannot conduct proper bounding overwatch movement in uncleared and suspected hostile cities, nor, apparently, can drive or service their vehicles properly, neither when negotiating tricky terrain or dealing with bogged-down machines. On an operational level this force is relying heavily on completely unsecured comms that are easily jammed by enterprising civilians broadcasting with their own radios and is feeding a constant stream of troop movement ELINT to enemy allies, giving hostile forces both indications of your maneuvering and easy artillery targets. Worse, your lower level maneuver elements often lack longer-range radios, leaving them unable to contact HQ. Your troops are engaging in repeated “thunder runs” with just one or two vehicles, likely for scouting, as your air force is loath to sortie and when it finally does on D+5 it’s flying strike jets around in the SHORAD/MANPAD envelope due to a likely shortage of PGMs. If this is not enough, your own air defenses are evidently unable to protect even your most important rear areas, using your best, most powerful long-range air defenses, given possible LO capabilities of a cheap drone that your intelligence agencies had years to study due to employment in nearby conflicts. If this is not enough, your operational-level strike planners cannot effectively utilize division-level long range precision fires because they apparently have a shortage of competent, trained and practiced personnel. On a force structure level, you have reportedly committed 80% of forces massed for the operation but still cannot muster enough infantry or mechanized forces to adequately secure your own lines of communication/supply from partisan/SOF activity and cannot commit to clearing tenacious defenders in towns that occupy key crossroads; forcing wheeled vehicles to deviate over side-roads where ambushes are much easier, or go overland and risk bogging down. Worse, you cannot utilize rail at all on two out of three fronts due to these same occupied cities, and in the third those lines are proven vulnerable to enemy airpower. Your enemy is extremely highly motivated, receiving top-tier SIGINT/ELINT support and very significant quantities of materiel aid down interior lines of communication that your air force will not or cannot perform deep interdiction against due to poor SEAD capability and the persistent mobile SAM threat against even higher altitudes that the enemy clearly retains. Your enemy has incredible support from the civilian populace, with passive resistance to your forces common, and materiel aid being supplied constantly. Enemy forces – with said civilian aid – are recovering your abandoned vehicles wherever possible, and where those vehicles were bogged down too much to easily recover, or in an area you are likely to retake,they destroy them in-situ to deny you their use.

Furthermore, this enemy has demonstrated a willingness to boldly use armor and mechanized infantry assets to conduct deep raids and attack your flank to cut your lines of communication, not afraid to parcel them out in small units and maneuver aggressively instead of trying to retain them for decisive massed action due to their moderate qualitative inferiority and significantly smaller numbers.

Right now, many analysts are saying that the Russian Federation’s early setbacks and mistakes were born of terrible restrictions in ROE and a worse operational concept that has hamstrung their forces by forcing them to fight in a manner contravening their doctrine; without significant use of combined arms and not enough reliance on their long-range fires. These analysts allege that a shift is now underway, and when the Russians resume their all-out push it will be in accord with their doctrine, and thus they will perform much better and inflict much higher casualties.

My conclusion: Given the above points, which call into question the basic quality of the troops, their ability to maintain supply flow mandatory for the doctrinal heavy use of artillery fires, and above all the absolutely atrocious state of their C2, I highly fucking doubt that the BTGs will suddenly start performing more like we expected them to. Furthermore, the Ukrainians have demonstrated real competence in the use of their armor assets; to the point where I would not rule out their ability to fight a tank battle in the South, if one should be required to advance on the southern Dneiper bridgeheads to retake them.

#ukraine #russo ukrainian crisis #russo ukrainian war

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nettlestonenell · 3 years

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image from: Korea JoongAng Daily article

The King: Eternal Monarch Catches Plenty of Hate Online Why That Is, And Why You Should [in this case] Educate Yourself About It - - and Love the Show Anyway

(presented in parts for @dumbassdictionarysds)

Part VI: Cultural Missteps that Influenced my initial ignorant-of-them Westerner’s viewing Not One Bit

According to Wikipedia, there are several black eyes on the production (though things average viewers outside of Korea/Southeast Asia are unlikely to notice). I’ll touch lightly on them here, but you can Google “Controversy The King Eternal Monarch” if you’re wanting to deep dive.

Well, to a point PM Koo, to a point.

+ The actress that played PM Koo had a problematic-to-Korean-morays past affair dredged up and re-aired in public as attention from her being on the show ignited, though it had already been hashed out prior publicly years ago, and frankly, would have been less than a blip on a Hollywood scandal sheet.

+ CGI mistakes were made wrt to Navy ships and temple architecture (the production blamed Covid lockdowns and an inability to properly source material, or travel, for fresh B-roll) that strongly resembled Japanese ships and temples (and Korea is Never. Having. That. [see also Japan/Korea history]) *This was so upsetting to Koreans that the PD (director/producer-type folk) on the production had to release written mea culpas to appease the public.

Essentially, in attempting to craft a non-existent Kingdom of Corea for Lee Gon to exist in and rule, multiple cultures in that part of the world were drawn from [makes sense]. The dragon as represented on Lee Gon’s Imperial robe, for example—it apparently didn’t look Korean enough to local viewers.

*Korea is very intense about this (from an ignorant Westerner’s POV) and about such things. For example, any children’s show aired in Korea but originally Japanese has a long list of things in it that will be censored or that must be changed before it airs (so, a cartoon set in ancient times must show characters in traditional Korea clothing, such as hanbok for the ladies, and not Japanese clothing, names of characters must be Korean, etc.).

Check the history link above, Japan had Korea as an Imperial Colony of theirs as recently as the 1940s, so asserting Korean heritage as strongly and as often as possible is more reasonable than it might seem at first glance. After all, Koreans are still alive from that time of colonization.

[also feel free to watch TKEM with this Japan/Korea conflict in mind–and not just the scenes out on the water, but the fact the whole show is about a Kingdom of Corea that never underwent colonization and the subsequent oppression–there’s a lot going on here, and the aspirational nature of Lee Gon’s Corea is at once a fairytale and an “if only”]

These are issues that may have turned local viewers off to the show [and quite possibly the intensity of their beefs are wholly valid], but for a viewer like myself, went entirely unnoticed.

[and now, after having been somewhat educated on them, just makes the show more interesting to me in its Korean-ness]

Part VII: Ladies Just Bein’ Ladies…Hating on Ladies?

#tkem #tkem meta #the king eternal monarch #the king: eternal monarch #lee minho #lee min ho #kim go eun #lee gon #kdrama netflix #netflix kdrama #more like okay: drama!#dumbassdictionaryds #corea #the kingom of corea #tkem controversy

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kate-river · 3 years

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Proud to present you “Toussaint’s Finest” - my witcher fic written for the Eskel Big Bang, featuring incredible art from the wonderful @justhereforeskel Enjoy! ;)

Relationship: Eskel/Geralt

Rating: M

Word Count: 9K

Summary:

Eskel is still roaming the Continent. But in recent years the Path has become harder and harder. Eskel has made it a habit to come by Corvo Bianco around vintage and this year's events might change a few things in his life forever.

Read the first chapter below and or the completed fic on AO3.

Check out @justhereforeskel‘s artwork!

Eskel knelt down beside the riverbank. The gravel scrunched under his boots and for a second, his cat-like eyes flashed in the sun. He sighed when he reached into the water and watched as the stream carried away a tiny trail of blood.

The wind rustled in the nearby trees and the witcher, still rubbing his hands clean, turned his gaze southeast. In the distance shimmered the familiar vineyards of the Sansretour valley and the sight of their natural beauty stirred something in his heart.

Behind him though, the monstrous cadaver of a bear lay on the blood-soaked ground. The beast had a ferocious wound on its shoulder and the once so powerful creature seemed shrunken now that its body was lifeless. The most apparent feature of the corpse however, was its missing head. The very same that dangled from Scorpion’s saddle.

When Eskel got up, he was disgusted and sick at the sight. As a witcher he was supposed to kill beasts. But a bear? It had just been another curiosity that had suffered from coming too close to a village.

Eskel sighed as he mounted Scorpion. He strongly felt the need to leave this place; to move on. To get away from a task that he had only been compelled to accept in order not to arrive at Corvo Bianco empty handed.

As Scorpion fell into a powerful gallop, Eskel relaxed into the movement and his thoughts wandered off. A sensation of freedom pulsated through his veins and for a moment his doubts vanished.

A few hours earlier…

“Hey Master witcher, over here!”

A young man dressed in a worn-out leather jerkin waved in Eskel’s direction. His eyes were blown wide and his straightforwardness suggested an urgent matter. Eskel reigned in Scorpion, left the dusty path and took a halt next to the man.

“Master witcher, an evil spirit is roaming the woods.! Two days ago, one of our men was killed – I beg your help! We’re poor country folk, but we will pay!”

You better do, Eskel thought to himself. Although empty, his purse weighed heavy on his conscience. Arriving at Corvo Bianco without money would embarrassing – tolerable still - but heading for a winter at Kaer Morhen penniless would even be dangerous.

Eskel immediately recognized the hostile reactions when they entered a small woodworker’s settlement. Children were hushed and hastily dragged into their homes by their parents. Doors were hurriedly shut and if Eskel would have wanted to see, he would have noticed the people starring and pointing at him behind drawn curtains.

But he had no other choice. For weeks there weren’t any good contracts and a mysterious monster in the woods sounded like something profitable for once.

The young man led Eskel to the biggest hut of the settlement and a sturdy, yet bald man standing underneath the nearby oak tree suddenly stopped his wood carvings. Eskel noticed that the man’s left hand was missing a finger and his expression was anything but welcoming. He gave the younger man a sharp look and then turned to Eskel.

“Master witcher, how can I be of service?”, with a feigned smile he added, “I’m afraid but… we can’t offer children.”

Eskel, already used to this kind of reaction, sighed and looked him straight in the eye, making a dirty brown iris meet his shiny amber one.

“I was told there was a contract.”, he stated slowly, distinctly.

“I fear there must have been a mistake.”

Suddenly the door behind the man opened and a dangerously beautiful mage entered the place. She was dressed in luxurious fabrics and her long black hair nearly reached her waist. The two men bowed before her. But Eskel, weary of the hostile welcome, denied the courtesy.

“What do we have here?” she mockingly asked. “A mutant –created by the most senseless representatives of my guild. You’re a rarity these days, witcher.”

“With all due respect, your guild indeed comprises some senseless individuals, sorceress.”

“Witcher, you have a wicked tongue too. What a pleasure!”

She smiled slyly and gestured him to follow into the hut. He did, but with sharpened senses. Surprisingly the mage, as rude as she had appeared, was straight forward about the monster – beast to be more accurate - and sincerely promised Eskel a reasonable reward.

But when Eskel returned to the woodworker’s settlement with his trophy his doubts returned as well. The village seemed abandoned. Nobody tried to hide and nobody pointed at him. Alarmed he scanned the few huts and carefully pushed Scorpion to move on. Something was wrong and he wasn’t eager to find out what or why.

At a twitch of his medallion Eskel tensed up. The vibration grew stronger while he neared the main hut, but as he was close enough, the sickness he had already felt once today returned. From the old oak tree hang the lifeless body of a young man dressed in a worn-out leather jerkin.

Anger welled up in the witcher’s chest. He tied Scorpion to the old tree and suppressed the need to let out a furious roar. Eskel soundlessly drew his sword – the steal one, as it befitted the monsters he was going to fight. But before he could come any closer, the door of the hut opened. The mage shielded by the poorly armed woodworkers emerged.

She gestured the men to let her through, but the moment she left their shielding ring Eskel’s blade touched her throat.

“One step closer and you’ll be next. What happened to him?”, he barked.

The mage laughed hysterically and answered “Sawyer? He brought a mutant to our village, the poor lad. In these parts people get killed for less.”

At this exact moment, she tried to conjure up a portal, but Eskel was faster. He stunned her hand and instead of a portal a wobbly structure appeared behind him. She screamed angrily and used the few seconds to pull a simple dagger from her boots. In the meantime, her ever so brave protectors advanced, coming for Eskel with raised axes and pitchforks. The witcher growled and parried the blows easily, but the distraction was enough. The mage leapt at him, missing his throat by the fraction of an inch. Eskel roared and suddenly he couldn’t contain his anger. He was a monster? A mutant? Well, then they should have their mutant!

Taking his left hand from the grip of his sword Eskel felt the tingle of magic flow through his hand. His powerful Igni struck the line of woodworkers and chaos broke loose. They screamed trying to shield their burned faces, dropping their weapons in order to stifle the fire on their cloths. The fire caught hold of the hut too and the less wounded men tried to keep it under control.

Meanwhile the mage had prepared to conjure up another portal. But Eskel wouldn’t let her go through with it. With a swift movement he left behind the inexperienced fighters and blocked the mage’s way.

“Go to hell, witcher!”, she gasped out as Eskel launched into an attack. But before his sword could come close to her again the bald man with the missing finger threw himself between them raising a rusty pitchfork. But the witcher’s sword pierced his lung and his last words drowned in a pained gurgling.

Hysterically laughing the mage cried out “A monster slayer! Look around you witcher –are these men monsters to you?”

“Why did you hang the boy?” he panted. He knew he wouldn’t have long until the shock of killing innocent people would settle in. He had to finish this quickly.

The mage’s insane laughter didn’t help. She managed to open the portal and just before she slipped away a precise blow separated her torso from her lower body.

In his rage Eskel turned around and roared. He grabbed the pitchfork of the dying man and went over to the old oak tree. He rammed the pitchfork into the earth just below the hanged man’s corpse.

Scorpion whinnied and Eskel, still half in fight mode, took down the bear’s head from his horse’s saddle.

Wordlessly he impaled it on the pitchfork – leaving an unmistakable sign.

#eskel #geralt of rivia #eskel x geralt #justhereforeskel #ebb

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derinthescarletpescatarian · 3 years

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Yard update one: The Yardening

The kiddo is returning on Monday but I’m squeezing in some yard work this week. Here’s how it’s gone so far, for anyone interested.

And yes we’re already planning to get a cover for the sandpit, because of the cats. That’s something his mother can pay for though.

In the meantime I’ve weeded it and reseated the uneven bricks. This involved a lot more sand shovelling than I anticipated.

Declared war on the ivy and rescued the palets. The lower ones have collapsed completely and chosen to become one with the earth and I have respected their decision. The others seem usable though.

I think I might take the bricks out of here and plant some kind of non-building-murdering ground cover. Something chickens won’t destroy because this is right next to their enclosure and very much within their free range area.

My rescued babies. With some minor repairs I think they’re in good enough nick for a herb wall or something.

Started weeding this thing and gave up because I don’t like the rocks. When I eventually get round to it I might replace this with a little garden bed. The little man insists on walking on this thing barefoot so I giving him soft surface is probably best anyway. I don’t need to decide yet; it’s autumn.

Also finding a LOT of snails in this place. That’s another point in the ‘get chickens’ column.

Went through and removed everything thorny or poisonous or otherwise toddler-annihilating that I could find in our little forest. Found six billion more tons of FUCKING IVY back here but I have made the executive decision not to care about it. The southeast corner can be the Official Ivy Sanctuary until I have the time, energy and willpower to deal with it.

Have the urge to put potatoes here, for some reason. Probably won’t -- it’s shady and the toddler-proofed vegetation here is doing fine without my interference. The soil in this place needs a lot of work so it makes sense to start soil improving and planting in the actual good spots and leave stuff like this as it is.

Definitely going to make use of all this leaf litter, though.

Next job is probably cleaning up this thing. I’ll have to evict the entire spider population of South Australia from the roof first, which sounds fun.

There’s a whole bunch of ivy and spiky weeds and shit in the cramped space between the cage and the fence, too, which I need to clear out before the cage can be repaired.

This little compost bin that a friend gave us is already full, and about twice its volume is sitting behind it. I’ve barely started cleaning this place up -- I’m going to have to build a properly sized compost bin. At least in 12 months we’ll have some great compost.

This is all just ivy and weeds and shit right now, I have to mix in a bunch of leaf litter and the bad apples and lemons.

This is our front garden by the way. I have no plans for it right now, other than weeding.

This single goldfish has been living in this unaerated and unfiltered pond for so long that neither the previous owners nor the owners before them know who put him in here. Apparently the plants in the pond are giving him enough food, oxygen, and cover from the many neighourhood cats who like to drink here. The previous owners say they went on holidays for a while and the weather was unexpectedly hot, and when they got back the pond was almost completely dry, but he was hibernating in the mud at the bottom and when they filled it he got right back up. He’s well coloured, has no obvious injuries or rashes that I can see, swims well and spends enough time deep in the pond that I’m convinced he has sufficient oxygen. I’m starting to think he’s one of those mythical immortal Chinese fish that grants wishes.

I want to get him some proper fish accommodation, or at least clean the water, but I’m a bit scared that the shock of change might do what nature clearly cannot, and kill him.

We also have this bar. I have nothing to say about it, except that we’re a bunch of unsocial nerds with absolutely no use for it. Those red windows open out so that drinks can be served to the large volume of guests outside during the raucous parties that we never have. I might put a kettle down here so I don’t have to go upstairs to make tea when I’m watching the kiddo in the backyard. Open to ideas for this. Or the garden. Or anything. I’ve got a lot of space here and six full months before spring.

#the yardening #derin's yard

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tealin · 4 years

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Castle Rock

As always, if the images aren't showing up on Tumblr, I invite you to visit the post at its original location on http://twirlynoodle.com/blog

There are a number of hiking and skiing trails around McMurdo Station. Some, like the Arrival Heights track, one can do alone and without giving notice; others, like the Castle Rock Loop, go far enough from the station and through questionable enough terrain that one has to check out, travel with a partner, and take radios in case of emergency.

I have become a great fan of the country walk in the UK. You dive into a beautiful morning on a promising footpath, refuel at a pub, keep walking all afternoon, maybe a quick half at another pub, then fall into bed all topped up on nature and exercise endorphins. Having been shuttled nearly everywhere in Antarctica via a motor vehicle of some sort, I was desperate to stretch my legs and cover some of Antarctica myself. I wanted to visit Castle Rock anyway, and the trip there and back was about the length of a leisurely country walk back home, so it was a natural thing to do once all my planned trips were over. My coordinator's opposite number is an avid hiker so he and I set out one sunny morning to put some miles on our sturdy boots.

The track is scenic and adventurous without being too arduous, so the Castle Rock Loop is a popular hike for the locals, as you can tell by the well-trammelled path in the photo above. Its full extent loops down to Scott Base and around back to McMurdo, but the shoreline down there didn't hold much interest and I'd done the route between Scott Base and McMurdo loads of times, so we just walked to Castle Rock and back.

It was a beautiful day. Much like the day I went up to Arrival Heights, it was calm, sunny, and hovering around freezing, the sort of conditions I insisted on calling 'picnic weather' long after the joke wore off. We also had an amazing low layer of thin cloud, which I unromantically call 'pond scum clouds' in my head, rather an unfair name as not only are they sometimes iridescent but they create wonderful light effects on the ground beneath them. On this day they were penned against Ross Island and cast their dappled shadows over Windless Bight, thereby showing up the perspective and giving everything the suggestion of being underwater.

Away from Ross Island the sky was clear, and from up here on the spine of the peninsula you could see pretty much everything, including Williams Field, where I'd spent so much time recently:

There's nothing like a pure white background to show you how much pollution our internal combustion engines spew out – that smoke plume is, I believe, from a C-130 which was warming up to take off that day. It's a lot better than coal, but we've got a long way to go yet.

Humans' rudimentary flying machines are not the only thing to have emitted noxious gases into the Antarctic atmosphere. Mt Erebus still puffs away with the occasional mild eruption, but the Hut Point Peninsula is an artefact of a more active volcanic past. Much of the rock is obviously igneous, black or grey and spongy with bubbles, and most of the hills that stand up from the body of the peninsula are old volcanic craters, which spewed that aerated rock in ages past. Castle Rock is similar in origin, but gets its distinctive shape from having been an sub-glacial volcano, rather than a surface cinder cone. It's not exactly a volcanic plug, like the Devil's Tower in Wyoming, where the central chamber of a volcano solidified into a tower of basalt and the softer layers on the outside eroded away. Rather it is the volcano, having melted its way up through thick ice, which held its sides almost vertical while new layers of lava were deposited on top. This stratification, as well as the way the igneous rock has weathered orange-brown, makes it look more like sandstone than basalt to the casual observer, especially one who's spent so much time in the parks of southern Utah.

It feels enormous when you're standing under it – the name 'Castle Rock' is well-deserved – but when compared to other sub-glacial volcanoes (for instance Tuya Butte) it is but a teeny tiny fairy volcano.

This southeast face is the most precipitous; the north side slopes more and there is a climbing trail up it, should one wish to scramble a bit. It was just on the verge of opening for use when we visited, so we didn't climb. We did take as many pictures as we could, staying on marked paths, but before long it was time to turn around and head back again.

We stopped at a small shelter we'd passed on the way up, which you can just see as a little red blob in the photo above. It is officially known as an Apple , but some refer to it as a Tomato, which it more closely resembles if you ask me. It's an emergency shelter, in case you happen to be doing the Castle Rock Loop when a blizzard blows up, and it is actually rather cosy inside.

Further along the trail, the familiar landmarks of McMurdo rose into view.

That's Observation Hill on the left, and Arrival Heights on the right, with the "Golf Ball" under Mt Discovery in the middle.

As you may be able to guess from the above photo, the slope dips more steeply as we approach the base, and because of this it catches the afternoon and evening sun, and gets very icy. We both had good hiking boots but not crampons, so on the way up had tried to climb by the snowier sections. I was looking forward to sliding down on my coat on the return journey but alas it wasn't quite steep or slippery enough for that – the best I could manage was a slow bum-scoot, which was fun but not exactly efficient. However, it got me close to some funny features I'd noticed on the way up.

My guide explained that they form when a rock gets blown onto the slope. Being dark, it absorbs a lot more heat from the sun than the surrounding ice does, and so melts its way down through the ice, and keeps going as long as it the sunlight can reach it. When the ice refreezes to fill the hole, it reorganises its crystalline structure from the chaotic granules left over from when it was snow, to something that reflects the container in which it was formed. You can sometimes see this radial pattern in your ice cube tray – this is exactly the same thing.

We had been walking on ice and snow all day, which made for a surprise when I stepped back onto the familiar gravel of McMurdo. I have walked on a lot of snow in my life but I suppose I always went from frozen water to frozen ground or pavement. I have not, apparently, stepped from ice to fine gravel so dry that the pebbles haven't frozen together, and my first impression on doing so was that I had stepped onto cake. It was a very strange sensation that took some minutes to shake, but I can remember it even now.

It had been a very good thing to stretch my legs, and getting out in the fresh(er) air with a walking partner who could make good conversation but also didn't mind silence did me some good, to process the whirlwind of trips I'd made in such a short time. In that sense, my own walk to Castle Rock was much in keeping with those who made the hike when waiting for the sea ice to freeze over in 1911 – it was somewhere to go that was well away from the madding crowd in the Discovery Hut, where one could have a private conversation or just catch a bit of peace and quiet. On its busier days, the route is well-enough travelled that one stands the risk of encountering as many people out there as anywhere else, but we got a quiet weekday when everyone else was working. Being a bright day in midsummer, my imagination will have to add the richer hues of the dying light of autumn, but I'm glad I got to stand there in person at least.

If you want more detailed, expert analysis of the geology of Castle Rock, this is the PDF for you.

#antarctica #castle rock #travel #hiking #photos #ross island #mcmurdo station #mcmurdo sound #mcmurdo #views

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an-apocalypse-of-magpies · 3 years

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On the world of Mortal Engines, class, and the metaphors of consumption

This is less an essay and more a collection of thoughts. Basically I just saw a video on the Mortal Engines film and its being a civilisation too stupid to exist. I got fed up, mainly because so many of the criticisms amounted to ‘the book did it better’ with little elaboration but also the arrogantly grating voice of the presenter got on my nerves, but I cannot deny the points made and in fact wanted to elaborate further on the worldbuilding of this series and, while unrealistic, look at why the books were so engaging.

Some background to start off - Mortal Engines is a four-book series (and three-book prequel sub-series) written by English author Phillip Reeve, and depicts a bleak post-apocalyptic world. North America is uninhabitable and lost to the sands of time, irradiated, poisoned, and flattened by war. Eurasia is mostly barren plains. And, of course, the central premise - towns and cities have raised themselves onto mobile platforms and trundle about. Well, mostly. A major antagonist to this system is the Anti-Traction League, a collective of nations hiding out in old east China, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia and some of Africa. They are seen as barbarians and heathens by much of the world for refusing to mobilise, instead hiding in stationary citadels behind their mountains. The Traction Cities near-universally engage in a philosophy of Municipal Darwinism, a savage system of bastardised pseudo-biology where cities literally predate each other and ‘consume’ each other for resources. Cities eat towns, towns eat smaller towns. Some towns and cities deliberately adapt to cheat the system and make themselves a less appetising target, or for that matter a more aggressive and efficient hunter.

THE TRACTION CITIES

The first three books tend to focus their action on one or two cities, whereas the last is a bit more of a road trip. The other consistent thread is multiple characters’ stories running concurrently, usually reconnecting near the end. This allows the books maintain an open, almost global scale - you’ll nearly never not be moving, even sitting still on a city, which reinforces the theme of unnatural life. The first book focuses on London, which has been sulking in what was once Britain (by sheer happenstance on their part and pure irony on ours), and is suddenly running at full pelt back into Europe and eastward as fast as her engines can carry her. Why? London’s not the biggest city around, and the vast expanse of Eurasia is now the Great Hunting Ground - it’s where the big boys play, and by play I mean ‘savagely predate each other’. It’s dangerous territory for a little city. But over the first book, it becomes increasingly apparent that Traction Cities are increasingly non-viable option for existence. Fuel is scarce, prey moreso, and what morsels London can confidently snap up will not sustain it for long. There is an ecosystem at play here - static settlements can farm resources, but are universally seen as food, either by small bandit settlements to raid for supplies or for larger towns to just straight-up eat. Small towns too small to hunt tend to be miners or gatherers, either mining minerals to use or trade, or gathering resources like wood from natural deposits or sifting through the waste heaps left by bigger cities. Most cities bigger than that are ‘urbivores’, or hunter towns, that hunt and eat smaller prey or opportunistically scavenge the ‘carcasses’ of dead cities. I mentioned specialisation earlier, and like in nature, species and cities can occupy a niche that gives them an advantage and thus increased chance at survival. Airhaven, for example, is a politically-neutral city in the air that floats around Eurasia seasonally and serves as a rest stop, fuelling station and trading exchange for airship pilots the world over, Tractionist or no. Tunbridge Wheels is a pirate-run town that has a lightweight wooden chassis and flotation devices to hunt amphibiously in a world where many small towns escape threat by setting up on islands. Panzerstadt-Bayreuth is a conurbation of four massive cities, too big to survive long without prey, they banded together to take down the biggest of prey (it’s unclear whether they achieve this through sheer size or whether they decouple and become a pack hunter). Anchorage, the last American city, neutered its own jaws to increase mobility, skating around the frozen north too fast for threats to catch up with, and survives on trade. Brighton is a pleasure city that paddles around the warm Mediterranean, technically still a predator but with no real agenda and about the only city left that can be called a tourist city (it’s run on the back of brutal slave labour). And these are just the major ones. Throughout the books, cities are treated like living things ... like mortal engines.

And like living things, they need resources to survive.

A DYING WAY OF LIFE

The books are inconsistent on the origins of Traction Cities, as it turns out deliberately - history is written by the winners, after all. But it’s all closely tied to the ‘apocalypse’ part of the post-apocalytic I mentioned earlier. Long ago in-universe, long into our future, was a terrible event known as the Sixty Minute War. This war tore the world asunder with nuclear and quantum energy weaponry. America, the epicentre, is simply no more (it turns out there are some fertile areas in Nova Scotia, but for the most part America is dead). Entire new mountain ranges were born, notably the Tannhäusers in East Asia that shield the heartland of the Anti-Traction League. There was a long period of geological and tectonic instability. According to legend, Traction Cities arose to escape these instabilities. In other words, like animals will flee a volcanic eruption, cities first became mobile to escape and survive. Trade was likely facilitated by towns literally being able to park next to each other. Ironically, London was also where everything changed. After Nikola Quercus conquered (static) London with his mobile fortresses, he decided to upgrade and raise London onto wheels to become the first fully-mobile city. And he did it for war. After all, there’s no better comeback to ‘you and what army’ then literally rolling up with your entire city. By the series present, the idea had caught on and grown into the ideology described above. But herein lies the problem. Early Traction London was a tiny little thing. Now it’s not even the biggest fish in the pond, but it’s still HUGE. And, as we all know, big things need lots of energy to go. London is described as having a top speed of about sixty miles per hour at the height of a hunt. So, you need fuel. There is still oil in this world, mainly because they now have no qualms about mining Antarctica, but if you think there’s nearly enough crude oil to run a world full of cities like London you are sorely mistaken. Wood’s not much better off. And, of course, Traction Cities tend to run on some form of internal combustion engine - it’s only at the very end of the traction era that science has advanced enough for a town to experiment with magnetic levitation. So what do they burn? Well, bits of other prey towns. Do you see the problem? Use fuel to hunt towns, burn those towns for fuel. What next? And it’s not just fuel. London captures a little salt-mining town called Salthook at the beginning of the first book to introduce us to the concepts at play, and we see what goes on in the Dismantling Yards - part of a system literally called the Gut, in case the metaphor wasn’t clear yet. Everything is recycled. Bricks, mortar, steel, wood, everything. Because the state of technology is so weird in this world, Old-Tech (technology from before the SMW) can be incredibly valuable to history and/or science, and London is keen to snaffle that up too. The people are interred into refugee camps, though if you know anything about how real-life Britain treats refugees you can probably see where that is going. And it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Food is an even more pressing concern. Unless you’re very rich (more on that in a mo), food is mostly algae-based, then hardy vegetables that grow quickly like cabbage. And it’s running out fast. And London’s a big city with a lot of resources at its disposal. Most cities don’t even have that. A lot of cities are starving on the wheels, city and populace alike. A lot of cities run on slave labour, and feed those slaves as little as they can get away with. Shan Guo, home of the Anti-Traction League, is a green and vibrant land only because it doesn’t have cities running over or eating its farmlands every other day (and, again, city folk generally don’t know this - they’re given endless propaganda that Anti-Tractionists are barbarian warbands a la Mad Max). A lot of the A story is told from the point of view of Tom Natsworthy, who until the events of the book had never left London. He’s never seen bare earth or walked on mud before. He’s never seen a horse. The idea that you can survive, much less thrive, outside of a Traction City is alien to him. But on the city he came from, everything is rapidly running out, and some cities are turning to desperate measures to survive, including Arkangel openly bribing pilots to sell out the locations and courses of nearby cities. A chilling scene in the first book even has Tom see, from the safety of the air, the corpse of Motoropolis, a city not unlike London that literally just starved to death, running out of fuel and helpless as the scavengers closed in. It’s been weeks since the city stopped, and the narrative description evokes the grotesqueness and sadness of a whale carcass. Sheer Jingoism is about the only thing keeping Municipal Darwinism alive - Traction good, stationary bad.

CLASS, CLASSISM, AND OTHER SOCIAL OPPRESSIONS

In a world so starved as this, compassion is hard to come by. Cities still exist mainly by virtue of rigid social stratification, and often that stratification is literal - most medium-to-large cities have tiers, and will generally arrange those tiers based on social class. London, for example, has seven tiers. The bottom two tiers are dominated by the Gut, the engines, and homes and communities of the workers who keep them running. Tiers 4 and 3 are miscellaneous proles of increasing social standing. Tier 2 is mostly what I’d call ‘tourist London’ - lots of the nice bits and the establishments that London likes to be proud of. Because of his work at the London Museum, this is the quality of life Tom Natsworthy was most used to. Tier 1 is High London, where all the rich live and have their amenities and nice parks (and even that doesn’t last - London’s food shortage means even the High London parks are eventually, begrudgingly, turned over for food production). Katherine Valentine, the hero of the first book’s B plot, lives here. Finally there’s Top Tier, which is purely administrative. The only buildings are the Guildhall (the seat of government), St Paul’s Cathedral (which the Engineers’ Guild have secretly been installing a deadly superweapon in under the guise of ‘restoration’ work) and the headquarters of the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of London’s Guilds. Social stratification is nearly non-existant, and people are shown to get very uncomfortable when out of ‘their space’. Tom is sent to work in the Gut during the capture of Salthook as a punishment before the plot ejects him from London, and he notes being actively intimidated by the claustrophobia, the dirt, the rough and burly labourers, and the noise. But despite Tom’s relatively privileged life - he lives near High London, above the heat and noise and smoke of the engines, in the care of one of the top four Guilds of London - he is of very low social status. Tom Natsworthy is an orphan; his parents were Historians, but were killed when an accident occurred and part of Tier 3 collapsed, crushing anything on Tier 4 beneath. Even before that, the Natsworthys were middle class at best, but being orphaned meant being left to the care of an orphanage run by the Guild of his parents, the Historians. The Historians were Tom’s only source of education, and eventually they would employ him, but with no parents or money, Tom can only afford a Third-Class apprenticeship. He has no upwards mobility within the Guild, and with no money he can’t leave and train with another. His dream of being a pilot trader, or better yet adventurer, will never come true under normal circumstances. The rich live in a completely different world yet. Katherine Valentine, daughter of the Head Historian and the Lord Mayor’s ‘right-hand man’ Thaddeus Valentine, has a positively bougie lifestyle with not a care in the world. Ironically, though, it is through Katherine’s eyes that the horrors of London’s class system are revealed. Trying to find information about her father’s would-be killer, Katherine finds herself regularly travelling to the Gut, eventually befriending an apprentice Engineer who witnessed the attack. But in the Gut, life is very different. It’s not just a life of hard labour and smoke - petty criminals and the aforementioned ‘refugees’ are tasked with working dangerous and sickening jobs like managing the city’s sewage. And by that, I mean ‘harvesting literal faeces to be converted into food and fuel’. The foreman overseeing their work admits they feed such criminals nothing else. And he has the gall to be annoyed that they keep dying of diseases like cholera and typhoid! These people are denied medical care, denied treatment, denied even basic food other than being told to literally eat sh*t. And when they inevitably die? They get sent to the Engineerium to be turned into robotic zombies that can never get sick, tired or unhappy. And, eventually, they’ll be put right back to work. The crimes these criminals did to deserve this, remember, include petty theft, criticising the Lord Mayor, and living aboard a town that got eaten. The foreman literally cannot fathom why Katherine would care about these people’s wellbeing - after all, they’re just criminals. The Engineerium’s end goal in all this is, again, to staff the entire lower tiers with robot zombie workers who will never grow tired, get sick, complain or protest their lot in life, and will never disobey orders, and just enough human overseers to keep things running smoothly ... because that’s what these people are worth to London, cheap, unending labour. Katherine can’t even bring herself to tell her high-class peers about what she learned down there, because it’s such a different world that they would never empathise, much less care. Again, slave labour is common in this world, especially child slavery - Brighton runs on it to maintain its image as a floating Caligula’s Palace, and in Arkangel slavery is so normal that we watch a rich man beat a slave nearly to death for the crime of bumping into him. In the second book, we see the logical end-point of this. Anchorage’s social structure has completely fallen apart due to a plague in recent years that turned to once-proud ice city into a ghost town manned only by a skeleton crew. The margravine, Freya, is only 14, but with her parents dead, she finds herself in charge of the whole city. She has no household staff, apart from Smew, who finds himself constantly juggling outfits to adopts the roles of steward, chamberlain and so on. His official role before the plague was ... erm ... the Dwarf. He was there in a manner similar to a court jester, for the amusement of the margrave due to being a little person. But the head navigator is just ... the woman who kept the maps. The head engineer is going half-mad, seeing his dead son staring at him from the shadows, and the only reason the town’s still going is because his systems are the best on the ice and can mostly run on automatic. They have no doctor. The only other people of consequence in Anchorage are the Aakiuqs, the Inuit couple who run the air-harbour. The common workers of Anchorage number in the mere dozens. And yet, because they’re so fixated on their traditions, nobody will drop the formalities and just admits that they’re trying to uphold a class system that doesn’t work anymore. No, that’s not quite right - everybody realises it’s pointless to maintain the artifice of Anchorage’s social heirarchy, but nobody wants to be the first one to say it out loud. Much like Municipal Darwinism, nobody want to address the elephant in the room, that the system is broken and that people hold onto it because it’s comfortable in the face of uncertainty. Only in Anchorage’s darkest hour, when everything has been turned upside down and the conquerors are on their doorsteps, do the agree to drop the formalities, drop the artifice of class, and address each other as people, say what they think, and work to save what they have left. And of course, there’s the racism in the world. Life on mobile cities has made cultures smaller and more insular, considering we mainly see this series from the point of view of culturally-English towns. Throughout the first book there is a clear west vs east divide - the Traction Cities are generally English-speaking or multicultural enough that English will get you by. The Anti-Tractionist League, meanwhile, are south or east Asian, or else African, and are commonly understood to be ‘those brown people’. The only ethnically white Anti-Tractionists are from ‘Spitzbergen’ (likely Scandinavia/Finland and northwest Russia) and Hester Shaw’s family, and the latter lived on a town that floated out to an island and gave up running from predators forever. The way Tom reacts to this attitude calls to mind the way racists might refer to ‘race traitors’. There’s even an in-universe slur for people who live in static settlements; ‘Mossies’, because ‘a rolling town gathers no moss’. However, when Tom is taken to Shan Guo itself, he realises that all the propaganda he’d been fed his whole like is exactly that - propaganda. Shan Guo is described as beautiful - an endless patchwork of rolling fields and farms, colourful, bright, vibrant, heaving with life and energy. The Anti-Tractionists aren’t vicious savages, they’re just ... people. Tom can’t understand it at first. He wonders how people can live without the hum of engines or the vibrations of deckplates - he subconsciously equates city life with, well, life, and the absence of that makes him uneasy. But he can also see this culture before him, thousands of years old, outlasting even the end of the world, and he realises there is another way. The next time he sees London, he sees it from outside, from the side of the hunted, and he realises it’s not beautiful or efficient, just dirty, and huge, wrapped in its own waste smoke and driven only by destruction. For the rest of the series, even with the rise of the radicalised Green Storm (Anti-Tractionists Lv2), large Traction Cities are consistently the enemy. Tractionism as a culture is understood to only represent imperialism, destruction, and consumption, literally and figuratively.

SCIENCES SANS FRONTIERES

It should be noted that science and technology are not universally reviled by the series. As a dieselpunk series, a certain degree of technology is fundamental to the series existence. But this is a very different world than the one we know. On the one hand, engines exist that can drive entire cities. On the other, computers basically do not exist. The rare few that still exist are not in working condition, and nobody knows how to restore them. Heavier-than-aircraft don’t really exist - the third book introduces some, but they’re small, experimental ... barely more than short-range toys designed for flashy air shows but not real travel. The main form of personal locomotion in this world is by airship, and this world’s airships are far beyond anything we’ve made in our time. But lost technologies are heavily associated with the hubris and destructiveness of the Ancients. Until now. Like I said, the most powerful Guild in London is the Engineers’ Guild. And they got that way under the leadership of now-Lord Mayor Magnus Crome. It should be noted that Crome genuinely loves his city and wants it to survive no matter the cost. But under Crome, the Engineers began to dabble in sciences considered unethical to downright taboo. Most notable is the MEDUSA Project. Through Thaddeus Valentine, London came into possession of an energy weapon from the SMW ... and, more importantly, the working computer that runs the thing. In terms of Darwinist Evolution, this is like giving a monkey a gun and teaching it how to use it. MEDUSA exhibits a level of power no other force on Earth can match, and London is forced to deploy it early in a crisis. Originally, the plan was to march up to Batmunkh Gompa, the Shield-Wall that represents the only break in the mountains around Shan Guo big enough to permit a city, and blast it to cinders. Unfortunately, London attracts the attention of a bigger, hungrier city about halfway there, and is forced to fire MEDUSA at it to save its own skin. The sheer terror of what that weapon represents is revealed then. Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was the fusion of four massive cities, each one bigger and more powerful than London. MEDUSA killed it dead in one stroke - the energy beam set the entire city ablaze and ignited its fuel stores. Her engines nearly immediately exploded. When the fires go down enough for an Engineer scout ship to investigate, the people had been almost flashed into glass. The flash of light from the attack is so bright that, hundreds of miles to the south, Tom and Hester see the sky light up like a new dawn. The people of London are relieved, of course, that they didn’t all die that night, but more than that the entire city become suffused with the excitement of just how easy it would be to kill ... well, anyone they like, really. London doesn’t even stop to devour Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, as the Engineers can’t afford for the Shield-Wall to prepare for their arrival. Appropriately, and karmically, the finale has an accident lock down the computer lock down, with MEDUSA unable to fire but unable to stop gathering energy, and London melts under the heat of MEDUSA’s glare. But that wasn’t the only scientific sin committed by London’s engineers. I’ve already mentioned London trying to repurpose faeces as food, but we need to talk more about the Stalkers. Stalkers are kinda like discount Cybermen from Doctor Who - dead bodies, threaded with weird old machines and coated in armour, their brains hooked up to simple computers. Originally conceived as soldiers, they were believed long dead. However, one survived to the modern by sheer survivor instinct - Shrike. Through negotiations that are not the purview of this essay, he allowed the Engineers of London to take him apart and figure out how he worked, and hoo boy they did. The Engineers figured out how to manufacture their own Stalkers. The first batch are used as law enforcement like the Worst Robocops, but, again, the plan was to have Stalker workers all over Low London. Katherine, learning this, likens it to London ‘being a city of the dead’ (Apprentice Engineer Pod, to whom she is talking, grimly notes that the Deep Gut Prison is so awful, so callous with human life, that it already feels like that). Logically, the end-point of this idea is to have all workers in London be the resurrected dead, with just enough living to keep things in order ... oh, and they’d all be loyal to the Engineers, because remember, no Freedom of Speech here, and you can be sent to do the worst form of prison labour for dissenting against the Lord Mayor. With Crome being both Lord Mayor and Head Engineer at once, the Engineers’ creed is as good as law - traditionally, London Lord Mayors forsook their former Guild allegiances to show their representation of all of London, and Crome’s refusal to do that caused a bit of a stir. The Engineers are also keen to arm their security teams with some form of energy pistols, despite guns being outlawed in London and the police are only allowed crossbows. Crome’s rationale is the same as every two-bit mad scientist villain, of course - that science should not be held back by moral restrictions, and that progress for progress’ sake is essential for London’s survival. Really, it’s the Engineer’s survival, as they’re rather loathe to share these advancements except to exert power on those around. London isn’t the only example of technology being used to leverage control and benefit the ruling classes. Grimsby is a sunken wreck of a city somewhere in the north Atlantic, yet due to a complex series of airlocks the interior of the city is a secret hideaway of the Lost Boys, a society of children stolen from aquatic towns and trained to be thieves under the watchful eye of the mysterious Uncle. They will then take submarine walkers, attach to passing towns, steal whatever tools, fuel, food and riches they can carry, and vanish back into the depths. Uncle, naturally, takes the lion’s share of the haul. But Uncle maintains his power by careful access to technology, only letting the Boys have what they need and juggling the power structure by choosing team leaders, and punishing insubordination harshly and publicly. Uncle sees and hears everything in Grimsby with his surveillance network, and can address any give Boy in a heartbeat, training the Boys to never expect privacy from him, so that when he demands a progress update from a mission, they never question him. He rewards Boys who do well on burglaries, but more importantly than that, he chooses team leaders according to apparently inscrutable whims. The Boys believe it’s a mark of favour from Uncle, and thus social status, to be trusted with the limpet command and all the tech that comes with. Really, Uncle carefully give command to people he can trust to remain loyal to him, even if that means passing over a more talented Boy who might get a bit uppity. Even in a more mundane way, higher status in the Lost Boys means you can move closer to the heart of Grimsby, where you’re less likely to wake up and find your bedroom wasn’t as watertight as you thought and flooded in the night. Uncle, naturally, doesn’t care if a few Boys drown, so long as he doesn’t lose anything useful. Technology, and in particular access to unusual technology, is the dimension on which power is really decided.

THE END OF AN ERA

We’ve already established that this world is not a sustainable one. There are only so many cities. The inherent entropy of Municipal Darwinism is really showing. Once upon a time, big cities could ‘reproduce’, creating little satellite towns that could grow and become independent - even London had some - but those are no more. In a greedy desperation to keep moving, the predators are not reproducing, and static settlements can’t spread and grow fast enough to count there. The attack of London, and MEDUSA, turned staunch opposition into outright war, with the Green Storm being willing to doublethink their way into using the weapons of the Traction Cities in their fight to stop the Traction Cities, even recruiting ex-London Engineers to make weapons and stalkers for them, and eventually even seeking out another ancient superweapon - an orbital laser called ODIN - without a hint of irony. The Green Storm eventually face internal resistance, from Anti-Tractionists who disagree with the outright terrorism angle, and eventually crumbles. The last great Traction Cities stop. The last mobile city is New London, no longer a hunter but a trade platform, and even that probably stopped hovering about at some point. The ending is told by the great survivor, Shrike, who has cheated Death again and again, who outlived Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, Valentine, Magnus Crome, and a thousand other heroes and villains. When he awakes, long in the future, Traction Cities are not even ancient history. They’re a dream, a fantasy, too incredible to be true. But Shrike remembers, and he teaches people the story of London and Anchorage, Arkangel and Airhaven, Brighton and Harrowbarrow. Did they learn the right message from Shrike’s story? Did they learn that ruthless imperialism is like hunting faster than the food can come back, and that you will starve before you have everything you ever wanted? Did they learn that hoarding resources, gatekeeping knowledge, will lead to ruin? Did they learn, or will the repeat the same mistakes of the greed and gluttony of the Traction Era? Well, who knows.

#mortal engines #wow that was a ramble and a half

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itsbenedict · 3 years

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Two-Faced Jewel: Session 5

A half-elf conwoman (and the moth tasked with keeping her out of trouble) travel the Jewel in search of, uh, whatever a fashionable accessory is pointing them at. [Campaign log]

Caught up in a blood feud between the villages of Wheat and Barley, Saelhen and Looseleaf are tasked with investigating a recent death. Their investigation takes them to a spooky tower owned by the local crazy torture wizard, which- hey, why was this guy not considered a suspect, huh? He's a crazy torture wizard!

Last time, the group was introduced to Malath Kanthalga, matron cleric of the village of Barley. She has no trust for outsiders- but she was willing to let Looseleaf lend a hand in proving once and for all that the scoundrels of Wheat were responsible for the recent murders.

To that end, the party is led a ways down the road to the farmstead of Roos and Gera Nicksickle, an elderly halfling couple which was recently slain.

En route, Looseleaf sizes up the farmers Malath has been arming, to see if any of them seem to have combat experience. There's one lizardfolk farmer who seems more comfortable with the armor, and holds his pitchfork like a spear. She makes a note of that.

They arrive, and are met by Lester Jawhold, a doughy-looking human man who's standing guard over the body out in the field, accompanied by a number of vicious-looking hounds. With permission to search the crime scene, some investigationing occurs.

Saelhen gets some basic details- the body was pierced through the chest with a four-pronged weapon, as described. Plus, there are the remains of hastily-erased footprints in the dusty soil- bootprints, it seems.

Looseleaf uses her animism magic to get a more direct picture of the incident. The corpse, recently dead, has a dead-corpse spirit that retains some information thanks to the emotionally volatile nature of recent events. The cause of death... being suddenly pierced through the heart, from the front, by a strange four-pointed weapon that induced extreme pain. It appeared to strike from out of thin air. Nothing about the corpse indicates a memory of seeing an assailant.

Indoors, the other victim, Gera, is found dead on the floor of the kitchen. It seems like the cause of death is the same, but... Looseleaf's animism reveals that her vital organs are intact, and she appears to have died of shock from the extreme pain.

All Saelhen finds from searching the house is... an empty cupboard with a recently-unlocked lock, and a mattress removed from its bed. Plus some of the same bootprints from outside.

Looseleaf has the idea to search the house for the victims' boots, to compare with the prints found outside. And what the search reveals is... there are no boots. They didn't own any. They were halflings. So their house being covered in dusty bootprints... well, it implies someone else was here and murdered them, which rules out the "a weird knife sort of inexplicably teleported into their chests" theory, at least.

The only real clue they have to go on is the extreme pain experienced by the victims. This suggests...

Malath gives a little exposition on the torture wizard- apparently he considers himself a savior, who through his experiments intends to vanquish pain itself- and surely torturing a few unwilling test subjects will be worth it, if he succeeds. Malath doesn't seem to consider it likely that Lumiere is the culprit, for the same reasons as Thalath- but jokingly suggests that perhaps Lumiere might have some information on who stole his torture tools to commit murder with.

Looseleaf: "So," Looseleaf asks, "if we're going to the tower wherein dwells a torture wizard, what can you tell us about what we might expect to face there? Ravenous horrific alchemical experiments ready to eat our faces? Traps? Magical servitors? A portal to another realm full of horrors?" Benedict I. (GM): She looks briefly surprised. "No, I... though I haven't been victim to him myself, I would warn strongly against confronting Lumiere, unless you're all much more seasoned than you look. None from our village have been able to resist him when he decided our consent was no longer worth trying to wrest from us." "Those who have been inside the tower might have more information for you, if you're fool enough to try." Looseleaf: "Well, team, you've heard the mission dossier, I guess. Do we think we're fool enough to try?" Saelhen du Fishercrown: Saelhen Fishercrown is not fool enough to try. Unfortunately, Saelhen isn't getting to be Saelhen right now. "...I imagine that we have no other recourse." Benedict I. (GM): Vayen looks... almost gleeful, insofar as his face betrays any expression. Looseleaf: Thanks for the vote of creepiness, edgelord.

Saelhen opts to kill annoying helicopters with one stone, and suggests that the team split up to gather information on the tower from the townspeople. She also suggests that Malath personally keep an eye on Vayen, as the least-trustworthy-seeming member of the group. Good persuasion means it works, and Vayen goes off to interrogate Lester Jawhold while the rest of the team heads into town to ask around about Lumiere's past victims.

First, on the way back to town, they speak with Chitch Ssarzar, the lizardfolk with the apparent military background. He's got one hell of a sob story for them!

Saelhen du Fishercrown: 24 PERSUASION (8) all i do is win Benedict I. (GM): That'll do it- Chitch is pretty horrified at the implication that you're actually trying this, but with sufficient reassurance, he'll spill his guts. He came to Grain back when it was just Grain, twenty-odd years ago, hoping to raise his infant daughter somewhere less dangerous than the Cutthroat Islands. Then, during the fire, his daughter was kidnapped by the wizard, and he tried storming the tower to get her back. He got captured, strapped to a rack, and had his flesh flensed and healed and flensed and healed repeatedly. At one point he thought he'd get a reprieve, when the wizard's teakettle went off and he went downstairs to get some tea- but the flensing knives just kept going, by themselves, without stopping. He never saw his daughter again. He was eventually released, and thanked for his service, and by that point he was too traumatized to ask Lumiere what happened to his daughter, in case it provoked him to torture him more. He's pretty wracked with guilt over the situation.

They get a rough description of the first few floors of the tower, up to the torture room. Plus, some exposition on the town's history:

Looseleaf: Okay. More questions: this time, asking about the town. It was called Grain, once? It split into two towns and now Barley hates Wheat? There was a fire? How did this all come to happen such that a single town turned in on itself? Benedict I. (GM): Yes- either 28 or 29 years ago, he forgets exactly, there was some feuding between farmers growing different crops. The ones with less fertile soil, sandier towards the southeast and closer to the mountains, had some kind of grudge against the landowners with more fertile soil, and it was this whole political infighting nightmare he didn't understand, as he was new in town. Then the dragon attacked, and... he's not entirely sure what happened, because accusations were flying left and right, but apparently some people tried to use the dragon attack as cover to commit arson against their enemies? Saelhen du Fishercrown: DRAGON Looseleaf: A FUCKING DRAGON Benedict I. (GM): And most of the town burned down, and when it came time to rebuild, nobody wanted to build near each other- and there was some sort of weird religious split between Family and Harmony so that most of the Harmony people decided to go grow wheat on the worse land, and the Family people went to go grow barley on the better land. He'd never been super involved with the split, as a newcomer, and spent the early rebuilding period being tortured- Barley was just the closest civilization after he was set free. Looseleaf: Mmmmm. A tragedy, all around, gods-damn. Saelhen du Fishercrown: caused by a dragon. a dragedy, if you will.

Then it's off to visit the innkeeper, Cassie Zeishus.

Benedict I. (GM): When you reach the inn, you meet Cassie Zeishus, the innkeeper. She tells you about the time she visited the torture wizard to see if her husband was there. Looseleaf: Oh, yeah, you know. Just, a conjugal visit. To the torture tower. Benedict I. (GM): Apparently her husband, kind of a good-for-nothing out-of-towner she married largely as a charity case, kept on gambling and trying to sleep around and doing general sleazy vice stuff, and was miserable in a town that didn't want to indulge him- and she's pretty sure he faked getting kidnapped by the torture wizard to escape it. Saelhen du Fishercrown: as one does definitely not victim-blaming Benedict I. (GM): This was corroborated by Lumiere quite pleasantly answering the door and telling her no, he hadn't seen hide nor hair of this Arnie fellow, and would she like to come in for tea? And her saying no, no thank you, and walking away. Looseleaf: Huh. Benedict I. (GM): She doesn't know why the guy let her leave, despite a propensity for forcing people inside and torturing them in the past. She chalks it up to having been very intimidating towards him.

Saelhen also tries to inquire about Kensa, Thalath's sister, who's apparently in some sort of dire straits here. She doesn't want to give away that she's asking about Kensa deliberately, so she takes something of a garden path of conversation, about Malath and why the townsfolk call her "Mother". Eventually she gets to Kensa, who apparently weaves cloth and sells it to the general store, where she can be found around this time of day. (She's apparently got something going on with the shopkeep's son.)

Looseleaf: these affairs might not be something we can intervene constructively in. Saelhen du Fishercrown: I mean, Saelhen's definitely abducting this child Looseleaf: gosh, well, when you put it that way, how could we not. Saelhen du Fishercrown: let's visit the general store! saelhen enjoys cloth.

At the general store, they find... not really any evidence that anything bad is going on with Kensa. She seems... fine? Also six feet tall and jacked as hell, because she's a goliath and their twelve-year-olds are just like that?

Kensa notices Lady Noeru de la Surplus' fancy silk dress, and fangirls over it immediately.

Benedict I. (GM): "Whoa, is that silk?" "I don't know if we have any silk in the back, but-" "Silk?" the girl by the window asks. "Ohmigosh, you have a silk dress? Ohmigosh, how much did it cost?" Saelhen du Fishercrown: "Ah." Saelhen expected a little more resistance than this! "15 gold, when I bought it." Benedict I. (GM): "Whooooaaaa..." She's looking the dress up and down with obvious envy. "Nnnnngh, but I don't have... fifteen gold..." Looseleaf: oh my gosh she wants to buy it

Benedict I. (GM): "It's- hang on, if I get ten, will you sell it?" "I can probably get ten! And I'll throw in a replacement!" "Not silk, but-" "Uh, Mr. Teller, do you still have last week's stuff in the back?" Looseleaf: this kid's great Benedict I. (GM):"It's good, I promise!"

Saelhen, being a con artist and kind of a jerk, turns down the offer, but skillfully reframes the issue by exploiting Kensa's love of textiles to get it repaired on the cheap in exchange for a swatch or two of the fabric. Great... job...?

After interrogating the townsfolk, Looseleaf has a bright idea- she wants to buy a climbing pack to scale the tower from the outside. It costs her extra, since new stuff has to be custom-forged overnight (a remote farming village like this doesn't have much call for climbing packs), but she gets it.

Vayen comes back, with testimony from Lester. It's not much they didn't get from Chitch- just a note that apparently vegetables were chopping themselves in Lumiere's kitchen.

Looseleaf: i should get some food too maybe! anyways all this is really pointing hard to 'the four-pronged stabby painblades move on their OWN'. it's not clear who's BEHIND it, but it's pretty obvious now that all the clues point towards the stabbies being the culprit.

The next morning, they head out to the tower. They notice a couple things: one is a sign that reads: " KEEP SHOUTING",

and the other is a bunch of broken glass and rubble strewn across the ground. Looking up, they notice the sixth floor seems to have had a large window smashed open. Weirdly, less glass on the ground than you'd expect if it'd been smashed open from the inside.

Looseleaf's Animist class can Detect Magic, sorta, and it's pretty clear to her that the front door is magic- so rather than fall for an obvious trap, she puts her plan into action. She can jump 30 feet up with the aid of her wings, so she's able to jump straight to the third floor and try to drive a piton into the stone to drop a rope for the rest of the party.

Here is a list of problems with that plan:

Looseleaf has tiny little sticklike moth arms, which exert insufficient force to drive pitons into stone with no leverage.

Breaking a window to attach the rope to instead results in a broken window.

Inside the broken window is a spindly suit of armor covered in nasty spikes, which immediately springs to life and turns to face whoever just broke a window next to it.

Also an alarm goes off.

Looseleaf is able to get the rope secured before the living armor attacks her, and jumps back out the window- as a moth, she essentially has Feather Fall on at all times. Still, going in through that window presents a problem.

They've noticed something, though- the automaton doesn't seem to be chasing them out the window. It's just standing there, staring down at them. This... gives Looseleaf a bright idea.

Orluthe has to make his grapple check with disadvantage, given that he's trying to snag this thing with his halberd with one hand while clinging to the side of a building by a rope, but luckily this thing botches its own roll thanks to its patented "stand perfectly still because there are no intruders in the building" maneuver.

It takes a bunch of fall damage from hitting the ground, is knocked prone, and the remainder of the party immediately unloads on it on a surprise round with crits for a bazillion damage, killing it before it can move.

This was a really good idea!

Too bad there was another one just inside, which Orluthe is now alone with!

...Wait, no, he's a giant wolfman in football armor and he suplexes the other one out the window, where the exact same thing proceeds to happen to it. Okay. Cool.

With that, the party makes their way inside. Whatever the alarm was, it seems to have died down, physically- whatever was powering it petered out. Plus, Looseleaf's magic detection means there's no way they could get caught in any traps!

Any magic traps!

Saelhen fails her perception check while walking across the room to a treasure chest and hits a tripwire and a net falls from the ceiling, trapping her and Oyobi! I bet this would be a really dangerous trap if there were, say, two menacing spiky robots bearing down on them trying to kill them while they were defenseless. As is, though... it's a minor inconvenience.

After this snafu, Saelhen tries to pick open the chest, only to find that the lock is a) quite well-made, and b) itself trapped, with a poison needle in the locking mechanism designed to go off if a lockpicking attempt fails. She just barely gets her fingers away in time, and opts to leave this treasure chest to loot later, after they're done here.

The stairs up from floor 3 seem to be blocked off by a translucent red magic barrier, so Looseleaf resumes the original plan. She stands on the windowsill of the third floor, and just flaps up to the fourth floor, looking inside and this time unlocking the window telekinetically from the inside, rather than breaking it and setting off an alarm.

When she opens the window (to the torture laboratory), some more very scary torture robots immediately go after her, as do a variety of flying knives that have quite a bit of movement speed and stab her repeatedly.

Maybe this idea had some flaws.

Next time: Looseleaf hopefully doesn't get turned into moth sashimi by animated torture implements! More dungeon is crawled! Some jerk falls down the stairs and it's hilarious!

#tfj log #twofaced jewel #d&d 5e

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f107group2 · 3 years

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Spiny Lobster: Spiny and Clawless but Colorful Nonetheless

Photo from: Florent’s Guide to the Tropical Reefs

Yes, you read it right! Apparently there exists a lobster (Family Palinuridae) without claws. It may not be the one you’ve exactly imagined when you see those crustaceans whose claws are clamped in an aquarium outside a seafood restaurant but we’re pretty sure these lobsters saved the chef from some pinches. To some punctures? That we don’t know. It is named spiny lobster afterall!

I. Classification

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Arthropoda

Subphylum: Crustacea

Class: Malacostraca

Subclass: Eumalacostraca

Superorder: Eucarida

Order: Decapoda

Suborder: Pleocyemata

Infraorder: Achelata

Family: Panuliridae

Genus: Panulirus

Species: versicolor (Fofonoff et. al. 2018)

II. Distribution: Hi! So my address is just right here..

Photo from: Lavery et. al. 2014

Known as the Painted Spiny Lobster, they are native to the Indo-Pacific waters and are distributed in the Red Sea, South Africa, Southern Japan, Northern Australia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. However, the first non-native occurrence is reported in the Brunswick River, Georgia (Fofonoff et. al. 2018).

III. Anatomy: Pinching for that Body Plan

Extenal Anatomy

The external anatomy of a true lobster (Family Nephropidae) is composed of two parts: The Cephalothorax and the Abdomen as depicted above. The same is true for spiny lobsters but the Paniluridae traversed a different way in the path called evolution.

Photo from: Charles Derby 2011 (up) and Nemesis Database Species Summary (down)

So what do true lobsters have that spiny lobsters don’t? Or better yet what makes spiny lobsters unique from other lobsters?

Spiny lobsters lack the prominent claws and rostrum associated with true lobsters and instead have two frontal horns and prominent dorsal spines (Fofonoff et. al. 2018). Its body is tubular in shape with all of its legs not possessing true pincers and the first pair is not enlarged (Tavares). The antennae are cylindrical, enlarged, and longer than its body. The total body length reaches up to 400mm, but the average maximum size is around 300mm. The male spiny lobster tends to be larger than females (Fofonoff et. al. 2018).

Panulirus versicolor’s carapace has a whitish background, with large areas of bluish-black. The abdomen, on the other hand, is predominantly green in color and the telson is a mix of bluish-black and green. The legs are lined with black and blue stripes. The antenna is pinkish-red in the thicker and lower segments and becomes white ringed with black rings in the upper segment (Sutton 2017).

Photo by: Sutton 2017

The following are brief functions of the spiny lobster’s general external anatomy:

Shell: This part is the lobster’s exoskeleton, made from chitin, which serves as a protection for the internal anatomy. However, for the lobster to grow, it sheds its shell in the process called molting.

Antennae and Antennules: The antennae and antennules of the lobster are used as chemoreceptors, which detect odors and chemical signals to help them in locating food, mate, and avoid danger. In spiny lobsters, the antenna is longer than the antennules.

Stalks: For their vision, lobsters have long and stalked compound eyes. Although stalked, their vision is not that excellent, and can only see images in dim light.

Legs: Since they are under Decapoda, they have 10 legs that are used by the animal to navigate its way on the seafloor.

Tail fan: This is the last segment of the lobster. It has a telson as the center tail fin and pairs of uropods at both sides and is used for backward propulsion.

Internal Anatomy

These creatures as a member of the Decapod group have internal organs that are the same as the other species. Its circulatory system is open, unlike humans. They have a single-chambered heart that is composed of muscles and ostia, or openings. Usually, the heart of an adult lobster beats for 50-136 beats per minute.

IV. Reproduction and Life Cycle

Photo from: Shiran Weerathunga, 2014

A day in a lobster’s life, they reach sexual maturity at the age of 5 to 6 years. The male’s task is to mate with as many female lobsters there is. Usually, they mate to a depth of 50 to 100 feet of water. As they mate, the male will deposit its spermatophore or known as the plaster in the female’s belly. After a while, the female will move to waters less than 30 feet deep, and when she is ready to spawn, she will use the pincers on her fifth walking leg to cut the plaster and fertilize her 80,000 to 800,000 eggs.

These eggs will be deposited under her tail, where she will perform parental duties until they hatch 9 to 10 weeks later. Usually, the larvae are transparent, large, pigmented eyes with long legs, and have little resemblance to adult lobsters. After 7 to 9 months they drift with the currents and eat plankton, after which they go to shallow water and settle at the bottom. Their lifespan is estimated to be 15 years (Cardone 2008; NOAA Fisheries 2020).

Check out this video of spiny lobsters mating!

youtube

and these cute baby lobsters!

youtube

V. Ecology

Habitat

They are found living singly or in groups in shallow water ranging from the low-tide marks up to 15 m depth and often reside in rocky areas, coral reefs, and overhangs that provide them protection (Fofonoff et. al. 2018; Mortiz 2010).

Photo by: Aquapix

Feeding Habit and Predators

Spiny lobsters are nocturnal and carnivore feeders. They even exhibit cannibalism at some point in their lives.They remain hidden in their reef or rock shelters called dens during the day and hunt during night for a variety of mollusks, shrimp, crabs, worms, and sea urchins (Sutton 2017). They use their strong legs to pry open their prey. Meanwhile, spiny lobsters are a delicacy not only to humans but octopus, groupers, and trigger fishes as well.

Be fascintaed with this video on how spiny lobsters protect themselves from a trigger fish.

youtube

VI. Relationship with Humans

Ornamental organisms

The juvenile painted spiny lobster displays a vibrant and attractive coloration of blue and purple body with white antennae which has attracted the market of tropical marine aquarium trade (Fofonoff et. al. 2018).

Photo by: Rokus Groeneveld & Sanne Rejis

For consumption

Spiny lobsters in general are eaten and are regarded as a delicacy. The meat located at the lobster’s abdomen proved to be very tasty and chewy.

youtube

While the lobster is a rich source of copper and selenium, it contains very high cholesterol, thus, it should be eaten in a regulated manner. Additionally, lobster contains zinc, phosphorus, vitamin B12, magnesium, vitamin E, and a small amount of omega-3 fatty acids (Ware 2018).

For livelihood

As of 2011, Panulirus spp. farming has not been reported in the last years to FAO but the species are cultured in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Philippines (Clive and Shanks 2009). Philippine waters are a natural resource of seeds for lobster farming and so there is a regional trade in peuruli and juveniles to establish spiny lobster farming.

Photo from: Mercator Media Ltd 2020

However, an article published in 2018 says that BFAR will bring the lucrative lobster culture to poor communities in Eastern Visayas by providing the cages and feeds to the beneficiaries (Meniano 2018). According to BFAR, the lobster culture is very ideal not only because of the strong demand from China and Taiwan but also because it is very expensive (4,000 per kilogram) (Meniano 2018).

VII. Did you know?

1. Lobsters pee out of their heads. While their anus is located posteriorly, their bladder is found under its brain and the opening is located at the base of their antennae, or just under their eyes!

2. The female lobster takes "her clothes off" to mate. Female lobsters “take off” their shells during molting and it is in this process that they decide to mate as well.

3. Lobsters have two stomachs. To make things even more weird, the first stomach located on its head has teeth! It functions to crush food and the second aids in digestion and is located at the abdomen.

4. Lobsters can detach one of their limbs in an emergency. Don’t worry, they are able to regrow it during the molting process.(Yes, the organism in the video is a crayfish but the mechanism is the same with their lobster cousins!)

youtube

5. In the 17th century, lobster was anything but a delicacy. In fact, a field guide by Motoh from Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center in 1980 said that the spiny lobster sells for about ₱55/kg in Manila and ₱40/kg in local areas! Now, as stated above, it costs ₱4,000/kg!

Photo from: Creative Tourist (Courtesy of Barnsley Museum)

6. The blood is known as the hemolymph and is color blue due to the presence of Copper.

Photo from: @WhatTheFFacts on twitter

VIII. References

American Lobster. (2020). Overview of Homarus americanus: The American Lobster. Retrieved November 9, 2020, from, http://www.parl.ns.ca/lobster/overview.htm

Cardone, B. (2008). The Lifecycle of Spiny Lobsters - California Diving News. Retrieved November 10, 2020, from https://cadivingnews.com/the-lifecycle-of-spiny-lobsters/

Clive, J., Shanks, S. (2009). Requirements for the aquaculture of Panulirus ornatus in Australia. Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, 98-109

Fofonoff PW, Ruiz GM, Steves B, Simkanin C, & Carlton JT. (2018). National Exotic Marine and Estuarine Species Information System. Retrieved November 9, 2020, from, http://invasions.si.edu/nemesis/

Lavery S.D., Farhadi A., Farhamand H., Chan T.Y., Azhdehakoshpour A., Thakur V., Jeffs, A. (2014). Evolutionary Divergence of Geographic Subspecies within the Scalloped Spiny Lobster

Panulirus homarus (Linnaeus 1758). Retrieved November 9, 2020, from,DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0097247

Meniano, S. (2018). BFAR eyes lobster farms in 3 Eastern Visayas provinces. Retrieved from Philippine News Agency: https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1042610#:~:text=Lobster%20culture%20is%20very%20ideal,high%20preference%20for%20live%20lobsters.&text=A%20fishermen%20can%20raise%20up%20to%20100%20lobster%20juveniles%20in%20a%20cage.

Mortiz. (2010). Family Palinuridae - spiny lobsters. Retrieved from SealifeBase: https://www.sealifebase.ca/Summary/FamilySummary.php?ID=13

Motoh, H. (1980). FIELD GUIDE FOR THE EDIBLE CRUSTACEA OF THE PHILIPPINES. Iloilo, Philippines: SOUTHEAST ASIAN FISHERIES DEVELOPMENT CENTER (SEAFDEC) .

NOAA fisheries. (2020). Caribbean Spiny Lobster. Retrieved November 10, 2020, from https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/species/caribbean-spiny-lobster#:~:text=Spiny%20lobsters%20may%20live%2015,3.6%20inches%20in%20the%20Caribbean.

Sutton, A. (2017). Painted Spiny Lobster – Facts and Photographs. Retrieved from Seaunseaan: https://seaunseen.com/painted-spiny-lobster-facts-and-photographs-clone/

Tavares, M. (2002). The living marine resources of the western central Atlantic. FAO Species Identification Guide for Fishery Purposes Area 51 and American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, 294-325.

Ware, M. (2018). Everything you need to know about lobster. Retrieved from Medical News Today: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/303332

#lobster #spinylobster #paintedspinylobster #Panulirus #Panulirisversicolor #Panuliridae #invertebrates aquaticinvertebrates

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littlewhitemice-blog · 3 years

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The Voyage of the Thursday Princess

Up to three hundred years ago Europe was a happening place. Culture. Literature. Knowledge. Soaring cathedrals. Kingdoms bristling with warriors and weapons. But then something happened. Like a candle being snuffed out. The llamapox hit, along with polio, chagas fever, and the mould. Within a few years 98% of the population had died. The forests reclaimed the farms, the villages, even the cities. Skeletons were left scattered over the earth.

About the same time dozens of new foodstuffs appeared. Hot peppers. Chocolate. Corn. Potatoes. And potent medicines, rumoured to have come from Atlantis. Coincidence? Who could tell? Everyone was dead, and civilization had evaporated.

Africa wasn't hit as hard. It expanded to fill the vacuum. Within two hundred years all of Europe was split into colonies of Morocco, Ethiopia, and the Bantu Nation. Wales was now a wholly owned property of the Western European Trading Association. A company archaeologist who had been digging in Portugal found documents which suggested that Atlantis was real, it had been the source of hot peppers, and it had also been the source of the mould. The records of Atlantis were sketchy and fantasmic. Something about golden cities, living lights, and visions. Which brings us to the present day: I, David, a lowly Welsh slave, shoveling coal aboard an iron trading ship of the WETA flying the Bantu flag, setting off across the Atlantic to rediscover Atlantis.

Atlantis was a mythical evil we'd been taught since childhood. The laws against venturing West were still rigorously enforced. We set sail from Oko aboard the Thursday Princess with little fanfare. The cover story was that we were headed to Ireland. But where we should have hugged the coast of Africa and turned north, we took down the sails, fired up the boilers, and we continued due west. The iron ships had evolved naturally from the making and the defense from cannons. My iron boiler was a recent novelty from my own country. Messy, temperamental, often fatally explosive. But, combined with a screw, with the power to cross unheard of distances quickly. Our ship doctor had another forbidden preparation: a stash of malaria mosquitoes, tsetse flies, guinea worms, plague rats, smallpox blankets, and all the other nasties the company had been able to gather covertly on short notice.

The Atlantic knocked us about with its usual violence, but we plowed straight through it. What we didn't know, exactly, was how far Atlantis WAS. We knew the earth was round. About 25,000 miles in circumference. And we could account for about 10,000 miles of that. We had enough coal to drive us three months at 10 knots. If we were lucky, we could get there and back no trouble. Unlucky, we could just get there. Our crew was heavy on skilled slaves; our cargo heavy on war supplies and cannons.

To our great surprise, we made land after only three weeks. How could we be this close without there already being active trade routes? We hoisted sails and turned off the boilers. The land was low, sandy, with palm trees. To the south the land stretched east, so we'd actually sailed further than we needed to. We sent a landing party in, but they found no inhabitants. Campfires, paths, yes. Inhabitants, no. No wildlife larger than a squirrel, either. On the beach there was a pole with a board with squares of squiggles, and a cartoon of a campfire with a blue slash through it. The landing party planted the Bantu flag, claiming Atlantis in the name of the WEPA. The doctor let loose some of his nasties. They gathered some of the local plants. Then returned to the ship in hopes of finding a town. We followed the land southeast.

At dusk we saw more signs of habitation. Some huts, docks, boats and rafts. But no people. Suddenly, a thin glowing beam came from the shore, twisting slightly in the wind. It cut through our mast, which fell burning to the deck. People covered head to toe in white suits appeared from hiding, mounted rafts, and started paddling towards us. Our captain, a big black bald headed fellow, was yelling to the crew to fire the cannons. As soon as the gunports opened though, the beam appeared again, along with cries and awful noises from the cannon crew. It smelled like steak. A cannon let loose aimlessly, punching a hole in the dock. They closed the gunports, but the beam cut through the iron siding like paper. There was an explosion belowdecks. The captain issued new orders: retreat! We found, though, that our ship had been anchored. Crewmen started dropping like flies. I felt a prick, saw a dart sticking out of my arm, then everything went dark.

When I came to, I was tied up in a stone cell with a thick wooden door on iron hinges. A black-haired swarthy fellow with a wide mouth was squatting on a stool next to me, dressed in a white tunic and skirt with a rope around his waist. "You're being held as an accomplice to attempted murder," he said, in passable Bantu. "I expect it to be as an accomplice to actual murder shortly. You are NOT going back home, ever. Or at least until we've conquered you Aztecs. Now, do you have any questions? We've got all the time in the world."

I asked what Aztecs were. He said it was a general term for senselessly violent, but backwards, people.

After talking awhile they untied me and let me go. I was in a city like none I'd ever seen. Streets of yellow brick. Main thoroughfares with steps right in the middle of them. Houses crafted from living trees. Occasionally, a giant sloth, bigger than a house, that they'd bred for hauling. And their fruit! Their food! Indescribably good, and varied. And some food made you happy, or relaxed, or energetic, or sweaty, or have strange dreams. Whatever you wanted.

Pretty soon I had a smiling girl, Akna, hanging on my elbow, too. They even gave me apprentices to learn how to build and operate boilers. Good ones, too. Apparently, gears and engines had never occurred to them! Even though they had wheels and complicated manual devices. They'd always used manual power. I was able to give them a bunch of metal making tips too, since boilers are finicky that way. They'd never taken ships seriously either. Or carts. Or pulleys.

They had apparently tamed lightning, for that death ray we'd seen (it was lightning and metal shavings), and to make machines that could reason and remember, and to talk at great distances. Just the other day one of my apprentices brought in a lightning-driven engine they'd just put together. They were simultaneously proud, and apologetic they hadn't done it ages ago. This lightning craft is beyond me.

And they'd tamed life. They'd been expecting the doctor's nasties and could actually cure most of them. But what is more, they were able to breed new things almost at will. They were going on about cells and atoms, with pictures drawn by lightning, but so far I haven't followed. When the Portuguese first visited Atlantis, the visitors had seen fungus on rags that had been bred to glow bright enough to read for hours when the rag was soaked in sugar water. That was three hundred years ago. It would be child's play for them now.

It's been several years, and true to their word, they never let me go back. I don't know what happened to the rest of the crew. But why WOULD I go back? Back there, I was a cog in their machine. Here, they tell me to tell them stories and eat their roasted sloth. And I've got my Akna.

#bantu #sloth #ship #alternative #history #inca #welsh #atlantis #short story

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