The Age of Discovery
- Location
- Outwards
[X]This is fine. No further Interventions.
The tide has passed and you are left alone in your world once more. Alone save for the spirits and the Lek-kego but they scarcely count. So now, with certainly nothing better to do, you let yourself slip back to dormancy and gaze upon the changing World. If they could just invent a weapon already, that'd be brilliant.
But they will not do so yet. Not in...
Things are finally starting to heat up! The Lek-kego are discovering the world and each other. Soon enough you won't be able to keep up!
You have 5 Miracle Points left.
[ ]Do nothing. Let the next Age pass.
[ ]Intervene! Specify the Intervention and the point in time.
The tide has passed and you are left alone in your world once more. Alone save for the spirits and the Lek-kego but they scarcely count. So now, with certainly nothing better to do, you let yourself slip back to dormancy and gaze upon the changing World. If they could just invent a weapon already, that'd be brilliant.
But they will not do so yet. Not in...
The Age Of Discovery
- Even as the Spur Clan ponders the question of the Void Seekers, new advances are made due to their expanding use of stainless steel. Having already gained a sort of immortality thanks to shells that no longer corrode or crack anywhere near as easily, the first successful moult is carried out in the depths of the Spur itself. The first moult had always been a hard limit on the Lek-kego lifespan before this. Once you outgrow your shell, you're done. Their delicate internal bodies can't survive the traumatic process of shell-shedding nor the vulnerable period before another is grown, not without taking some sort of permanent damage or corrosion to their induction coils. But with the invention of fake shells, anti-trauma cocoon of stainless steel, the first moulter has both shelter provided to it and something to digest and forge while they do. With this there's no longer any limit to the potential lifespan of a Lek-kego!
- The Web Nomads have found several Shards by now and while they lose a few people to each one in the sense that a few always settle down and make a home, the majority of them keep on trekking in search of a better promised land. In a sense, they are seeding small Lek-kego families all across Spun Apart. The Nomads themselves have split into several groups, their frankly massive rate of reproduction aided by the fact that the filaments of the Web are almost exclusively steel. They are not a single polity but rather several small wandering nations, many of which are guided by those who wear the remaining suits of tungsten platemail. Their tradition of spiritual distrust, inherited from their homeland and strengthened through surviving the calamitous rise of the spiritmongers, mostly continues as well. They do not interact with corporeal spirits at all, averting their eyes and stepping aside. Anyone who does otherwise is part of the Great Enemy, a theological construct comprised mostly of mythologised memories of the spiritmongers and a vague recollection of the Earthsplitter. But the Earthsplitter isn't directly named and the Enemy is just a semi-coherent term for Lek-kego and spirits who don't ignore the other. Only through complete isolation and segregation from the spiritual can peace be kept along the Web. They have found multiple Precursor monuments and in doing so, know the World to be a created thing. The knowledge that creatures came before them and made the world slips into their culture and taints what they remember of their people's survival. The idea that Lek-kego made the world and that spirits are just invasive interlopers that came along later proves popular, as does the idea that the promised land they search for was gifted to them by the Precursors. The histories of the Web Nomads are, by this point, mostly fictional.
- Some of the Nomad clans come into contact with the Spur Clan's Shard or, that is to say, they come into contact with the cloud of Void Seeker communities around the filaments leading to the Shard. With neither having any need or desire to hurt the other, this marks the first instance of genuine inter-Polity trade between two vastly different Lek-kego cultures, not just between two Nomad clans or two of the Kingdoms. With this, the Void Seekers are able to gain the resources to live out beyond the reach of the Spur Clan.
- The Plateau becomes the 'capital' of the Spur Clan, its hollowed out form now holding a massive city. The original Spur itself is now holy ground, to be trod only by priests and the beasts of the marsh. The Clan has not expanded beyond the Shard due to the inherent range of its spiritual peace but increasing communities of Void Seekers now throng along the near edges of the three filaments. But then the rocks start falling. Boulders several times the size of an individual Lek-kego begin to rain down haphazardly upon the Shard, usually at a rate of a dozen or so per day. Some of them miss entirely but due to the population density of the Spur Clan, just as many take lives or punch holes in roads or buildings. Closer inspection of the 'rocks' reveals them to be made of a demagnetised alloy that closely resembles...a Lek-kego waste slurry. In addition, many of them are clearly shaped. Some of them even have spikes! Seeking answers, spirits of air and sight are sent flying upward to try and trace the attacks and eventually, when they return, they bring tales of other Lek-kego. Namely that of the Spear Tradition and the Steel Ferrocracy who have both constructed a number of small forts at the very edge of their filaments. Forts built around a single massive steel trebuchet. Using the fact that their home upon the filament is substantially higher up than the Spur Clan Shard, they have taken to using their engineering, telescopes and grasp of physics to begin pelting the Spur Clan's Shard with projectiles whenever they pass beneath them. The Tradition and the Ferrocracy themselves have both expanded into the filament itself (on opposite ends of the beach) by this point and still occasionally send soldiers to kill each other for the sake of doing so than any real imperialist intent.
- It takes over a generation of this sporadic pelting for the Spur Clan to be able to respond. They can't simply send a horde of spirits after all. Instead they construct air-boats, large vessels of stainless steel borne aloft by air-spirits bound into the shell and with a rudimentary propulsive system based around fire spirits and powdered aluminium. The first of these boats is sent aloft up towards the Web with the goal of speaking to these strange foreigners (Neither of them have memory of the other) and making them stop. And if that is not to work, the boat carries a dangerous payload. A pact-binding obelisk lashed to the side is ready to be dropped and it bears upon it the same spiritual binding that the Spur Clan uses to enforce peace. It will be given to the attackers and lock them into happy unity. The Steel Ferrocracy, after capturing the air-boat and enslaving the crew, accepts the obelisk as a gift and refuses to stop throwing things. But now it should do its work and prevent any further incidents. They don't yet know it but through the sacrifice of that boat and its crew, they have been pacified. They will trouble the people of the Spur no more.
- Unfortunately for the Spur Clan, they used inhuman spirits for intel and thus had no idea of the culture or psychology of the Spear Clan descendants. Conflict is baked into their society at a fundamental level, an alien idea to anyone who has spent countless generations in an enforced peace. To them, 'unity' means 'outside enemy'. So artificially giving them a sense of peace, happiness and togetherness? Not a great idea. The Chieftain of the Steel Ferrocracy and the Chieftain of the Spear Tradition do make peace with another, a process that was close to happening anyway. Thanks to the obelisk, the long-boiling internal strife between the various castes simmers down and, over the course of a few generations, the two polities reconnect back into the Steel Empire. The title of Chieftain having been supplanted by Empress, a sort of Chief-of-Chiefs that nobody dares argue against due to the unification aura, the Empire represents a fusion of the best and worst of both polities. Their slave economy will not collapse because now even the slaves are happy. But the imperialistic, supremacist, militaristic, almost proto-fascist idealogy of both the Ferrocracy and the Tradition shine through and shape the enforced peace and it is not long before their gaze turns back down towards the jewelled land that shines bright within their siege-telescopes.
- The Tungsten Kingdom's petty squabbles are interrupted by the arrival of an enemy that they have long since forgotten. Finding the no longer moving plain abundant with water to be an attractive nesting spot, several colonies of migrant-birds settle down and begin using the spot as a stopping point. This is initially disastrous but the Lek-kego of today are not the easy targets they were in prehistory. It is not long before many of the birds are cut down by tungsten spears and, having seized their nests, many of the Kingdoms begin taming them as weapons or war to be ridden almost exclusively by spiritmongers. And with their new bird-riders, they no longer need to continually fight over the single filament to expand! Now possessed with a sudden fervor of colonial intent, they stop squabbling so much over their own land and instead every nation begins sending out riders to find and colonise other Shards. The first Shard they find is another migrant-bird nesting point and so is the second and the third, following their steeds migratory instincts to quickly conquer and control a number of their nests and thus even more birds.
- The Steel Empire, having finished its unification throes, resumes throwing shit at the Spur Clan. It's got to be something to do while they continue to expand across the filament, right? And even though their expansion along both ends of their filament is much slower than that of the Web Nomads since they aren't travelling as much reshaping and colonising the filament itself, it still takes parts of the Empire outside of the obelisk's range. But this does not cause Void Seekers, merely the occasional rebellion. They know how to deal with those. For the Spur Clan's part, their own attempts to marshal a navy has ended in failure. None of them can pilot an air-boat that doesn't itself bear an extremely costly obelisk, not without falling into existentialist throes. Unlike the Empire, they have no strict regime that can enforce itself outside of the aura's range. The next plan is to attempt to abuse the spiritual self-defence clause but it is hard to use this to marshal anything bigger than a few minor spirits who were physically damaged by one of their attacks and, to make things worse, the Empire is also no stranger to fighting off spirits. So instead they settle on using the Void Seekers, taking the nihilist ideologues and promising them material rewards to sail air-boats up towards the Empire. And this time they won't be dropping obelisks but bombs. Yes, for the first time, the smithing of the Spur Clan is turned towards weapons of war and, knowing some of the secrets of ignition, they have devised rudimentary explosives for the crew of air-boats to toss over the side. These bombing runs are incredibly effective and the Empire lacks the initial means to answer them, leading to several of their forts being toppled and shrapnel bombs designed to pierce steel shells being dropped into town centres by the shadows of air-boats flying well overhead. The Empire, seemingly helpless, capitulates to the Spur Clan's demands and dismantles the trebuchets lining the edge of the filament.
- One of the Web Nomad clans catches sight of the Central Face spinning beneath them along a strand of far filament and immediately declares it to be the promised land. Other clans are quickly told and soon, a great deal of Nomads are taking their first steps along the bountiful savannahs of the Central Face's continental plates. Here is their paradise, the true land meant for them by the Precursors. They immediately set to fighting about it.
- Another Nomad clan accidentally travels up the Imperial Filament and bumps into the edge of the Steel Empire. They are immediately taken prisoner and several of their more interesting treasures confiscated. The Chieftain of that particular part of the Empire has both the prisoners and their treasures sent to the Empress in an attempt to curry their favour. The Empress is greatly interested in the single suit of antique tungsten platemail that the Nomads had, allowing the Imperial smiths to replicate the feat but with steel instead, but even more so interested in their maps which are carved steel plates mapping out large segments of the Web. Piecing this together with their tales of trading with 'jewelled' Lek-kego (the Void Seekers), it is not particularly hard for the Empress and their advisers to map out an expansion route along the filaments that will eventually take them right towards the homeland of the Spur Clan. The surviving Nomads are thanked and then enslaved.
Things are finally starting to heat up! The Lek-kego are discovering the world and each other. Soon enough you won't be able to keep up!
You have 5 Miracle Points left.
[ ]Do nothing. Let the next Age pass.
[ ]Intervene! Specify the Intervention and the point in time.
