"Original TimeLine" In this case, it means what happened in our real-world history.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
OTL = Our TimeLine
Irrelevance (Noncanon)
Oledoms
Friesmancer
Irrelevance
Backroom meetings are fairly common in the Philadelphia and this current conference is just among the many where representatives of the Parliament can discuss with their ranks their plans for future policies and elections.
This one is no different with the exception of those in the meeting. Hideo Ozawa, formerly known as Colonel Hideo Ozawa, protege of the legendary Nick 'Havoc' Parker and the Party Leader of Initiative First sat on the front most part of the table.
Around him were some of the top most leadership of Initiative First, on his right is BZ 4 IF Representative August Walker, a hulking beast of a bearded man and former InOps with sleek black hair. On the right chair is Kim Yon-suk, a former FMP BZ 7 Representative who defected to IF in 2055 after GDI under Granger enacted anti-corporate policies that prevented his stranglehold in many conglomerates that caused his fortunes to plummet. While still very wealthy by even Pre-Tiberium Standards, he has rallied against the new Treasury Policies that prevented the application of wealth and prevent monopolies that would have allowed him to expand his political control.
After them are several more representatives of IF who gathered together on this meeting. With Ozawa evermore excerting stronger control over Initiative First and the waning fortunes of the party, few were willing to oppose the first party leader and none in his Family are interested in Politics.
Whatever their interest and goals, they only have one purpose in the end. To keep the Initiative Pure and Focused, the absorption of the Yellows and Nod defectors have not only tainted and weakened the Initiative but prevented them from avenging the dead.
"Since all of us are here", Ozawa announced, "Let us begin this meeting"
He turned to one of the newer, Representatives, Ella Fall, a beautiful brunette with shoulder length with Amber Colored eyes. While a staunch Firster, she usually prefers less vitriol than most other candidates and uses a mix of soft speeches and manipulative wording to turn people agains both Treasury Policies and the pouring refugees into the Blue Zones.
"Miss Fall, I believe you mentioned intensifying the anti-yellow zoner campaigns on screen and GDIOnline. However, you mentioned that it should be done within 2062 to 2063. Any particular reason why we should not begin your recommended material immediately while the war is still stabilizing?"
"Yeah, I mean that Greedy Yellow Zoner idea of yours really hit the spot", pointed out BZ-1 IF Kyle Bertisson, "We had a slight uptick of interest from Blue Zoners worldwide since the release of those shorts. Not enough to hit an extra percent but it is rising everyday particularly to the ones fresh out of Uni.Some of your newer proposals were quite eye-catching"
"The issue is with the timing.", the young woman explained, "As everyone this one is aware, the treasury just established the Bureau of Arcologies and started a new consumer goods department that slowly released a significant amount of new products and builds up new Arcologies per quarter. Some of our respondents and voters have become less wary of the treasury with these measures although, only a small uptick will become a major obstacle in our platform in the future".
She turned to Ozawa, "As our leader experienced five years ago, the Treasury was able to complete derail political support from the FMP and Hawks by diverting the budget into Consumer Goods production, how in less than nine months, the stores went from bare to overflowing and it did not stop even now . This is when the treasury only had a third of the budget it had today, ifwe try to use the newer messages and propaganda now while the Treasury is drowning in resources, they will simply pivot to Consumer Goods and we all know how quickly they can churn out factories and food"
"They still have a few obligations left in the military", remarked Ground Forces Treasury Representative Colonel Donald McClintlock,"With the MIlitarists on their heels regarding the OSRCT Stations and the new Carriers they are limited on where they can spend. Furthermore, ZOCOM is refusing to go to further Red Zones unless enough Zone Suits are deployed into Ground Forces to Free them up"
"And that is precisely why I wish to recommend holding off the new messages and programs after the allocation", she explained, "So long as the treasury has full control of 50% of the current budget, they can pivot a significant amount of cash into countering our efforts. The massive Apartment Constructions on the last six months has already reduced the significant amounts of poor housing and has curtailed our efforts in using it align the populace to popular support. All Blue Zoners now live in the Apartments while there is a lot of slack on the housing that even the refugee wave will not be enought to fill it"
"But even with the grants-"started Yon-suk
"Oh the grants will not be enough to completely fill the shelves, especially since the demands keep rising with the Yellows coming in larger numbers", she explained, "But the last thing we want is to completely gain the fury of the Treasury at this late in stage in the plan. Make no mistake, should we push Seo and the Director further, they will toss every plan and Parliament requirement in the window if means drowning GDI in consumer goods, arcologies and good food"
"Not to mention, we are the only party remaining that actively opposses intregrating the Yellow Zoners in the franchise", pointed out John Keller, former FMP turned to IF who defected only last month, "The FMP is starting to gain more traction to Yellows than UYL and they are overturning any of their former positions to gain these voters"
"Not to mention that dumbass Hahn, refuses to coordinate with us!" snarled Bertisson, "Everytime we approach him he always refuses to discuss with us any form of endorsement or cooperation"
"Mr Hahn is sympathetic to us", Ella remarked, "He would have agreed to our ideals and cause but he is aware of the disfavor we received from the Treasury and he knows that if he approaches this from a Blue Zoner Privilege, his movement will also be ignored out of spite. By convincing the Yellow Zoners to side with him, he is forcing the treasury to acknowledge his requests"
"We can also pass a bill to block sales of MIlk, Dairy and Steaks to Yellow Zoners", suggested Yon-suk, "I doubt this will be passed or approved but it would increase favor to those disagreeing on the goverment policies"
"And I suppose, this is why you want to maximize our efforts in 2062", Walker spoke up, cutting out the discussion regarding food, "The Treasury always pivots into filling up its coffers in the first year of the Plan. Glacier MIning, Tib Harvesting. Considering the relative expense of the Tiberium MIning, it will take at least a whole year where they cannot prioritize consumer production and focus more on robotics"
"ZOCOM will not be avaialble on the first year of the fourth plan. It will be a year of traning and outfitting enough Zone Suits for Ground Forces to be ready to replace available Red Zone Ops, Treasury will be limited to Vein Mining since Yellow Zone expansion is no longer allowed at this time", the Treasury Firster pointed out, "They will gain some cash the but it won't be as fast as the previous plans, at least until the suits are in deployment. Then we can confirm that they will go full bore in Glacier Mining and regain their 2061 budget in less than a year"
"Not to mention those damned refugees being given voting rights", spoke Representative Frank Underwood, "The next election is on December of 2063, we can expect at least a significant expansion of UYL or even Dev and Starbound on the next Election, of course that would depend on the results of our efforts on the next four years. Since there is no way that any attempt to block off those Yellows from Voting will be accepted by all parties in Parliament"
"Since any action in Parliament will be blocked off by the majority, we must take action on the ballots. While the numbers of Yellows will be a major problem, this will be a blessing in disguise. We can now point to them as the source of the issues in Blue Zones, the low availability housing and more, we will try to push bills to limit them their purchasing power. Convince Blue Zone businesses to hire less Yellow Zoners", suggested Thomas Jorgensen.
"Any chance we can convince the military to block off refugees or divert them back to the fortress towns?", Ozawa inquired to the Colonel.
"Ground Force refuses to consider it even without the Treasury breathing down their necks", he replied, "They want the Fortress towns a Military Only operation, the more Yellows are in the Blue ZOnes, the less they have to worry about in a Nod Offensive"
"They're just passing the damn problem to us", Bertisson complained,"Aren't they worried about the damn Yellows atacking the cities instead"
"Then Ladies and Gentlemen, we are operating on a very limited time Window" Ozawa, announced, "The 2062 to 2066 Plan will be our last chance and our most critical part. Over 100 million Yellows are entering the Blue Zones and endangering our people and the number is rising everyday. We have bled and died for the Initiative and yet our current leaders forget who the real enemy is. Us Blue Zoners will not be irrelevant. We will not go quietly into the night"
A/N: another IF based Omake. This was supposed to be included with Orthodox but It took me some time to finish this. I swear it was never supposed to be this big. Anyhow, hope you Enjoy it
Edit: By the way, some of the names I used are from Villains in other media. Props to who can identify them
Also, @Ithillid is there a limit to the amount of omakes that can written or special rule regarding them? My muse is ringing on my head and I have a fair amount to write. Too bad nothing coherent comes out of my brain.
Backroom meetings are fairly common in the Philadelphia and this current conference is just among the many where representatives of the Parliament can discuss with their ranks their plans for future policies and elections.
This one is no different with the exception of those in the meeting. Hideo Ozawa, formerly known as Colonel Hideo Ozawa, protege of the legendary Nick 'Havoc' Parker and the Party Leader of Initiative First sat on the front most part of the table.
Around him were some of the top most leadership of Initiative First, on his right is BZ 4 IF Representative August Walker, a hulking beast of a bearded man and former InOps with sleek black hair. On the right chair is Kim Yon-suk, a former FMP BZ 7 Representative who defected to IF in 2055 after GDI under Granger enacted anti-corporate policies that prevented his stranglehold in many conglomerates that caused his fortunes to plummet. While still very wealthy by even Pre-Tiberium Standards, he has rallied against the new Treasury Policies that prevented the application of wealth and prevent monopolies that would have allowed him to expand his political control.
After them are several more representatives of IF who gathered together on this meeting. With Ozawa evermore excerting stronger control over Initiative First and the waning fortunes of the party, few were willing to oppose the first party leader and none in his Family are interested in Politics.
Whatever their interest and goals, they only have one purpose in the end. To keep the Initiative Pure and Focused, the absorption of the Yellows and Nod defectors have not only tainted and weakened the Initiative but prevented them from avenging the dead.
"Since all of us are here", Ozawa announced, "Let us begin this meeting"
He turned to one of the newer, Representatives, Ella Fall, a beautiful brunette with shoulder length with Amber Colored eyes. While a staunch Firster, she usually prefers less vitriol than most other candidates and uses a mix of soft speeches and manipulative wording to turn people agains both Treasury Policies and the pouring refugees into the Blue Zones.
"Miss Fall, I believe you mentioned intensifying the anti-yellow zoner campaigns on screen and GDIOnline. However, you mentioned that it should be done within 2062 to 2063. Any particular reason why we should not begin your recommended material immediately while the war is still stabilizing?"
"Yeah, I mean that Greedy Yellow Zoner idea of yours really hit the spot", pointed out BZ-1 IF Kyle Bertisson, "We had a slight uptick of interest from Blue Zoners worldwide since the release of those shorts. Not enough to hit an extra percent but it is rising everyday particularly to the ones fresh out of Uni.Some of your newer proposals were quite eye-catching"
"The issue is with the timing.", the young woman explained, "As everyone this one is aware, the treasury just established the Bureau of Arcologies and started a new consumer goods department that slowly released a significant amount of new products and builds up new Arcologies per quarter. Some of our respondents and voters have become less wary of the treasury with these measures although, only a small uptick will become a major obstacle in our platform in the future".
She turned to Ozawa, "As our leader experienced five years ago, the Treasury was able to complete derail political support from the FMP and Hawks by diverting the budget into Consumer Goods production, how in less than nine months, the stores went from bare to overflowing and it did not stop even now . This is when the treasury only had a third of the budget it had today, ifwe try to use the newer messages and propaganda now while the Treasury is drowning in resources, they will simply pivot to Consumer Goods and we all know how quickly they can churn out factories and food"
"They still have a few obligations left in the military", remarked Ground Forces Treasury Representative Colonel Donald McClintlock,"With the MIlitarists on their heels regarding the OSRCT Stations and the new Carriers they are limited on where they can spend. Furthermore, ZOCOM is refusing to go to further Red Zones unless enough Zone Suits are deployed into Ground Forces to Free them up"
"And that is precisely why I wish to recommend holding off the new messages and programs after the allocation", she explained, "So long as the treasury has full control of 50% of the current budget, they can pivot a significant amount of cash into countering our efforts. The massive Apartment Constructions on the last six months has already reduced the significant amounts of poor housing and has curtailed our efforts in using it align the populace to popular support. All Blue Zoners now live in the Apartments while there is a lot of slack on the housing that even the refugee wave will not be enought to fill it"
"But even with the grants-"started Yon-suk
"Oh the grants will not be enough to completely fill the shelves, especially since the demands keep rising with the Yellows coming in larger numbers", she explained, "But the last thing we want is to completely gain the fury of the Treasury at this late in stage in the plan. Make no mistake, should we push Seo and the Director further, they will toss every plan and Parliament requirement in the window if means drowning GDI in consumer goods, arcologies and good food"
"Not to mention, we are the only party remaining that actively opposses intregrating the Yellow Zoners in the franchise", pointed out John Keller, former FMP turned to IF who defected only last month, "The FMP is starting to gain more traction to Yellows than UYL and they are overturning any of their former positions to gain these voters"
"Not to mention that dumbass Hahn, refuses to coordinate with us!" snarled Bertisson, "Everytime we approach him he always refuses to discuss with us any form of endorsement or cooperation"
"Mr Hahn is sympathetic to us", Ella remarked, "He would have agreed to our ideals and cause but he is aware of the disfavor we received from the Treasury and he knows that if he approaches this from a Blue Zoner Privilege, his movement will also be ignored out of spite. By convincing the Yellow Zoners to side with him, he is forcing the treasury to acknowledge his requests"
"We can also pass a bill to block sales of MIlk, Dairy and Steaks to Yellow Zoners", suggested Yon-suk, "I doubt this will be passed or approved but it would increase favor to those disagreeing on the goverment policies"
"And I suppose, this is why you want to maximize our efforts in 2062", Walker spoke up, cutting out the discussion regarding food, "The Treasury always pivots into filling up its coffers in the first year of the Plan. Glacier MIning, Tib Harvesting. Considering the relative expense of the Tiberium MIning, it will take at least a whole year where they cannot prioritize consumer production and focus more on robotics"
"ZOCOM will not be avaialble on the first year of the fourth plan. It will be a year of traning and outfitting enough Zone Suits for Ground Forces to be ready to replace available Red Zone Ops, Treasury will be limited to Vein Mining since Yellow Zone expansion is no longer allowed at this time", the Treasury Firster pointed out, "They will gain some cash the but it won't be as fast as the previous plans, at least until the suits are in deployment. Then we can confirm that they will go full bore in Glacier Mining and regain their 2061 budget in less than a year"
"Not to mention those damned refugees being given voting rights", spoke Representative Frank Underwood, "The next election is on December of 2063, we can expect at least a significant expansion of UYL or even Dev and Starbound on the next Election, of course that would depend on the results of our efforts on the next four years. Since there is no way that any attempt to block off those Yellows from Voting will be accepted by all parties in Parliament"
"Since any action in Parliament will be blocked off by the majority, we must take action on the ballots. While the numbers of Yellows will be a major problem, this will be a blessing in disguise. We can now point to them as the source of the issues in Blue Zones, the low availability housing and more, we will try to push bills to limit them their purchasing power. Convince Blue Zone businesses to hire less Yellow Zoners", suggested Thomas Jorgensen.
"Any chance we can convince the military to block off refugees or divert them back to the fortress towns?", Ozawa inquired to the Colonel.
"Ground Force refuses to consider it even without the Treasury breathing down their necks", he replied, "They want the Fortress towns a Military Only operation, the more Yellows are in the Blue ZOnes, the less they have to worry about in a Nod Offensive"
"They're just passing the damn problem to us", Bertisson complained,"Aren't they worried about the damn Yellows atacking the cities instead"
"Then Ladies and Gentlemen, we are operating on a very limited time Window" Ozawa, announced, "The 2062 to 2066 Plan will be our last chance and our most critical part. Over 100 million Yellows are entering the Blue Zones and endangering our people and the number is rising everyday. We have bled and died for the Initiative and yet our current leaders forget who the real enemy is. Us Blue Zoners will not be irrelevant. We will not go quietly into the night"
A/N: another IF based Omake. This was supposed to be included with Orthodox but It took me some time to finish this. I swear it was never supposed to be this big. Anyhow, hope you Enjoy it
Edit: By the way, some of the names I used are from Villains in other media. Props to who can identify them
Also, @Ithillid is there a limit to the amount of omakes that can written or special rule regarding them? My muse is ringing on my head and I have a fair amount to write. Too bad nothing coherent comes out of my brain.
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- Location
- Africa
Ah the enemy , its so funny watching them struggle to stay afloat too bad it won't matter and within ten years tops they will be at most be a fringe political party for weirdos in other words IRELAVANT
- Location
- The Underdark
No limit but your inspiration. I have been away from the thread all day because I am working on the update and have some personal stuff that I need to deal with. I will thread mark this when I get home.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think you may be overconfident.
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Mm.
Rule number one: always assume your enemy is intelligent and doing exactly what they intend to.
- Location
- Africa
I think you are discounting just how limited their support base is among the other parties without whom there is no way they can get anything through parliament , first there is United Yellow whose whole planform is opposing IF , then there developmentalist who won't let IF have a free hand to undoing all their hard work not to mention all the other parties who are going to try and court the ever growing yellow zone refugee population for possible voters even the FMP , all of them can carry out their own political activism , media blitzes and information campaigns in direct counter and opposition to IF
plus IF has been effectively irrelevant for while now , like last plan they were stubbornly ignored by the government every time they asked for something and this plan they weren't even given that courtesy the government just looked at all their demands ,examined them thoroughly then informed them that none of these will be happening and all their request have been rejected
like when was the last IF managed to get any of their goals done or even gained anything appearing like progress ?
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- Location
- USA
I suppose it depends what they ask for.
If they ask for us to complete all the phases of SADN, which mainly protect our major assets which are primarily in blues zones, we would probably agree in a heartbeat.
There are things they might want that we might completely agree with. No need to just dismiss them out of hand.
If they ask for only stupid or evil things, THEN dismiss them out of hand.
- Location
- Queensland, Australia
You also are making some big assumptions. Like, what makes you think that the Developmentalists, the Militarists or even a bunch of the other parties don't have a solid IF core in them? What the IF party is, are the core believers that will proclaim their beliefs no matter if there is another path that would give them something almost as good if they stayed quiet. I fully expect that a bunch of the party members who are either strongly opposed or weakly opposed despite us considering their party 'on our side' are so because they are IF members. The ones who have decided that, for example, building up a strong military with which to crush Nod is more important than ensuring the Yellow Zoners don't have a chance to harm the important Blue Zone population so they're a Militarist Party Member.
Oledoms
Friesmancer
As mentioned on the Omake, the IF Party would definitely ramp up their efforts on the first year of the next plan. The first year will be the weakest the Treasury will be in a plan and IF could really cause some damage if the situation with the housing and Consumer Goods continue. Which is why it will be important for IF to never be given a chance on the fourth year to do anything.
Regarding the IF wannabees in other parties, so long as they do not actually harm the refugees and hinder Treasury efforts in integrating Yellow Zoners and ban them in getting good housing and luxuries. Then the Treasury will tolerate their beliefs.
Kane
- Location
- The Underdark
Kane
Kane is many things to many people. Madman, Prophet, Saint, Sinner, Angel and Demon.
His truth is far, far more complicated.
Kane was not born on Earth. Was not even born on a planet. He is in fact Bentusaar, a race of binary aliens. Half organic forms, half shipminds. Ancient enemies of the Scrin, and the Visitors, wanderers among the stars, they were ships. Half organic, half technology, joined together in symbiosis. One half, the personmind were meant for interaction, leadership, intuitive and charming. The other half, the shipmind, was more calculating, more systematic. More than a simple calculation aid, but the other half of a paired life and personality.
At Alpha Centauri, the Visitors found Kane and Abel, engaged with a local population. Kane wanted to run. Abel wanted to stay and grow these small beings into a new army to fight by their side. Kane forced Abel to try and run, breaking for the outer system, pursued by the Visitors, and as the two fought for control, the Visitors savaged the ship, severely crippling it. With his final action, Abel punched the ship to faster than light speed, delivering Kane to a nearby world. Earth.
Kane arrived on earth as a comet, or, more accurately as the sole passenger on a crashing ship, his brother Abel, around three and a half thousand years ago. Crash landing in the Egyptian desert, he wandered, until he found tribes of Canaanites. There, he told stories. Of worlds taken from nothing and seeded with life. Of what he and his brother had done. Of his betrayal. He would not, however, stay with them. Even with the stories that he told, they were in most cases folded into and shaped by the already existing spiritual and religious narratives. Take, for example, the story of Noah's Ark. A more accurate translation of the story is that the world of Emtalia Prime, some halfway across the galaxy in the upper reaches of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, which had been infested with Tiberium before the Bentusaar had reached them. With the world beyond saving, Kane and Abel gathered up as many survivors as they could, and ferried them to a nearby system, their ship serving as a great ark to carry them away from the world that was lost. It was then hybridized with local myths, including the story of Gilgamesh's Raft, and the Canaanite's local spiritual traditions. For the vast majority of religions however, Kane had little to no involvement for much of the early period. During the early days of Christianity, Kane was actually in the Americas, and during the rise of Islam, Kane was in eastern Asia. In most cases, when Kane involved himself in religious affairs, he was primarily taking on roles to guide and shape the religion in more practical terms, and almost always working with local people who believed many of the same things.
Over the millennia he gathered followers, spent time in a thousand courts. For centuries he made curiosities in China, rode with the peoples of the Asian steppes, or lived as a wiseman in France. Few records exist of his work in this time frame, although he can be credited with a small handful of Arthurian romances in the 12th and 13th centuries, mostly written in French. The most prominent of these was Myrddin: Sage of Camelot, of which only a few fragments have survived, it originated a wider array of tropes of Merlin as a wise and skillful man, rather than connected to the mystical and (un)holy as was and remained the more common interpretation. Human lifetimes were nothing, and he could simply drift among the vast morass, covering his trail each time, sometimes vanishing for years or decades before reemerging with a new face, new name, and new companions.
It was only in the 16th century that Kane began to become more active, attaching himself to radical groups. While not directly involved with the Protestant Reformation as a whole, he tended to pass between sects, including a significant stint with the Society of Friends. But more broadly, he was engaging with the general European questioning. This is also the origin point of the Brotherhood of Nod. A reference to the word לנדוד, or "to Wander," it was originally a freemason-like secret society The early Brotherhood generally operated quietly, a haven for free thinkers and experimental crafts. However, as the centuries wore on, it increasingly turned to more direct calls to action.
The first really direct and open action of the Brotherhood as a whole was the French Revolution. Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, among other figures central to the Reign of Terror, claimed membership in the secretive Brotherhood. However, Kane himself took a distant back seat, avoiding the limelight to a great degree, and for the most part appears to have been spending his time in China in these decades, advising the Qianlong Emperor. While the Revolution itself would eventually fail, first to Napoleon Bonapart, and then to the Imperial system, its ideals would live on and spread to dozens of other forces. Even the Code Napoleon had some Brotherhood influence, although more as leftovers from the attempts to build a new kind of society in the French Revolution.
Ideologically, the rise of socialist movements parallelled the changing face of the Brotherhood. These new social orders, based on need, merit, and universal human achievement were critical elements of the new Brotherhood, especially as technological changes enabled Kane to start bringing some of his own knowledge into circulation. While many of the experiments were doomed to failure, and many of the scientists working on the projects were either dismissed as cranks or silenced to prevent disclosure of the Brotherhood and Kane, the beginnings of the Brotherhood's technological advantages can trace their roots to the mid 19th century and early 20th century.
At the same time the Brotherhood was active around the world. In India, the Brahmo Samaj were one such organization. While influenced by many factors, they included a number of key elements, such as fighting the taboo against going abroad, and the caste system as a whole. Although the organization was relatively unsuccessful, it served to spread Brotherhood influence across India. Beyond that, the Broader Bengali Renaissance saw both the hand of Kane and the broader European influence fighting for a new conceptualization of India. In South America, the revolutionary ambitions of Simon Bolivar were funded in part by Brotherhood members. In the United States, the abolitionist movement was largely backed by the Brotherhood of Nod, with people like William Lloyd Garrison carrying the scorpion tail. On the other hand, figures like John Brown took on a more aggressive role in fanning the flames of conflict, pushing a vision of an unflinching, unfeeling crusader, using terror as a weapon to force mistakes and missteps for the southern cause. Likewise, NOD agents pushed Virginia Senator James Mason into attempting to arm the southern American states, in an attempt to start the seemingly-inevitable Civil War at a predictable point.
The failures of the Brotherhood as a whole in France and in the wars to follow under the Republic and then the Empire lead to fractures that Kane spent decades making whole, as the world reshaped itself to a new global order. By the early 20th century, the Brotherhood of Nod had split into, effectively, two separate orders, with Kane endorsing both and attempted to use them to different ends. The "seekers of universal truth" descended from the Brotherhood's history as a safe place for intellectuals fearing censure, and the "blackened hands" from the Brotherhood's more radical and action focused members, with the latter seeing the world as needing to be realigned. By Kane's command the power of the existing world order was to be broken in ways that could not be denied. Many cultivated anarchist bomb throwers, assassins, and other disposable, deniable assets, who struck at the wealthy and powerful to varying effect. Their greatest miscalculation was in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Serbian branch of the Black Hand had been lax in operational security, and had recruited far too openly. While the assassination was expected to be yet another tap on the structure, it had been planted in the wrong spot, with the assassination causing the collapse of the system of European alliances keeping a peace that had lasted for decades after the Berlin Conference.
In the 1920s, Kane was associated with the Marxist Leninists, a commander in the Russian Civil War, and from there advising both Lenin and Stalin. While he drifted from the Union after Stalin, purged as part of destalinization, he had been critical in the early buildup, leveraging the Brotherhood, and a wide array of personal contacts to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union. While some of the ideas that he was behind, like the Five year plans, were miserable failures, others rapidly modernized the Union. While the Brotherhood for the most part laid quiescent, its activities were primarily in the realm of fighting for scientific freedom. John Thomas Scopes, for example, was a particularly junior member of the Brotherhood.
By the 1960s, the Brotherhood was investing significantly into mass media. While Roddenberry himself was not a member of the Brotherhood of Nod, other members of the team that would go on to create Star Trek, like Eugene Coon, very much were. And Star Trek was far from the only television show of the era to depict a future of limitless potential. At the same time, the Brotherhood as a whole was becoming far more centralized. Air travel, cars, telephones, and a wide array of other technologies made it possible for Kane to take a significantly more direct interest in the actions of Brotherhood cells across the world. While still not fully centralized, and operating in a cell structure, the Brotherhood by the middle of the later half of the 20th century was a powerful organization with global reach and ears on every continent if not in every city. One of the major projects in the time period was to push for detente and stability, focused around preventing a Third World War. While little actual action was taken, it was a matter of contingencies and preparation that would later end with small but significant portions of the global nuclear arsenal in the hands of the Brotherhood of Nod.
Between the 1960s and 1990s, Kane's work was a mixture of operational and strategic level plans. While the ongoing cold war somewhat divided the Brotherhood between eastern and western organizations, there were still messages and cooperation between even far flung groups. Here, much of Kane's work had been humanitarian in nature, spreading the good word of proxy organizations to the Brotherhood of Nod, and fighting battles for civil and legal rights around the world, backing rebellions or ordering assassinations as he saw fit.
By the early 1990s, the fall of communism and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was creating chaos and confusion around the world, with long repressed nationalism breaking out into civil wars and ethnic conflict. At the same time, thinkers like Francis Fukuyama were proclaiming the end of history, and the inevitable victory of a western world order under a liberal capitalist system. While people associated with the Brotherhood mostly pushed back, it had become something of an orthodoxy in significant portions of the western world.
Throughout all this time, the Brotherhood of Nod had always been an intensely personal project, rather than an effort to make large scale changes. Often as small as a few hundred people in total, rarely more than a hundred thousand, the Brotherhood had always acted through layers of proxies. While it could marshal vast resources, and maintained armies of agents, it was fundamentally a very personal experience for both Kane and the men and women that worked with and for him. Each brotherhood cell was lead by an individual personally selected by Kane himself. While it could start, shape, and drive social movements around the world, through propaganda, through good works, and through proxies, the Brotherhood of this era was never capable of capturing entire state systems, or waging large scale open wars. Rather, it typicaly shaped operations to its ends as best as it could. And, in many cases, failed. For example, under the Soviet Union, Trofim Lysenko systematically outmaneuvered both Brotherhood assets and Kane himself in the uppermost halls of Soviet power.
In 1995, Kane's goals and the Brotherhood as a whole changed. The appearance of Tiberium radically accelerated and shifted plans. Before, Kane and the Brotherhood as a whole were aimed towards a long term scheme of influencing towards stability, of infiltrating and rising to the top of major companies, and pushing for a world focused on practical concerns rather than oppressing minorities or pointless pageantry. It would take potentially thousands of years of small taps and marginal incremental change, but there were options and Kane had all the time in the world.
One such example was the plan to fight the incoming climate crisis by pushing a series of Brotherhood backed solar and wind based startups that would rapidly outcompete existing systems. Equally, the Brotherhood had been investing in transport and logistics companies, with plans to set the pace on modernization and actual greening. This would have left the Brotherhood with both a chokehold on the global logistical infrastructure, and the ability to ship their cargoes around the world with minimal interference from governments and other bodies.
The fall of Tiberium put Kane on a time limit. And, worse, put him in a situation where he and the Brotherhood would need to shift from subtle influence to overt action, to simplify and stabilize the political and social situation. On previous worlds of similar technological and social development as Earth and under threat of the Visitor's ichor, one of the critical problems was strategic ordnance. The use of weapons of mass destruction against military and civilian targets was commonplace as states and people first struggled for power, and later struggled for simple survival. Once more, Kane found religion to be a key tool. While cults seeing Tiberium as the solution to all kinds of ills had already begun cropping up before the Brotherhood moved in, they were quickly snapped up, useful patsies in a desperate attempt to prepare the ground for Ascension before he, like everyone else, was consumed by the cancer.
Kane's Brotherhood of Nod began to operate a dual campaign. In the rich, most often Western countries, they began producing and deploying Tiberium harvesting technologies. In the West however, he also faced significant pushback, especially as the improving interconnectedness of the world made it harder for collective organizations to remain nearly as much in the shadows. Beyond that, the capitalist system made it very difficult for the Brotherhood to gain or maintain anything along the lines of control of Tiberium, with private Western companies seeding the American Midwest with Tiberium on their own initiative, or French companies seeding a number of former colonies with the material. Beyond that, while Kane's companies did patent a number of technologies relating to Tiberium harvesting and processing, they had to reveal enough to allow others to pursue the same technologies, and more than one was nationalized as a critical security risk.
At the same time, they began using those same technologies to promise economic success and political freedom to more impoverished countries, attempting to draw all together under a single banner, that of the already extant Brotherhood of Nod, to try to make sustainable use of Tiberium. However, when searching for allies, the Brotherhood's more cult-like factions had a bad tendency to go rogue, or pick at old fights. Local organizations were often differently radical than the core forces around places like Sarajevo, and in many cases more concerned with settling scores against local rivals than some grand vision. Otherwise, there was the chronic problem of needing the right person for a job, and the only candidates coming up short. One particularly noticeable problem was Seth. A modestly experienced politician, but a relative newcomer to the broader Brotherhood, Seth insinuated himself as being far closer to Kane than he actually was, aggressively seeking promotion until he came to the personal attention of Kane. While not a common problem, men like him were far from unique individuals, attempting to use the Brotherhood for their own personal gain.
The start of the First Tiberium War was not a calculated move by either side. While GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod had been increasingly combative, small scale operations to undercut the opponent grew more common and local wars had steadily escalated as both sides found allies, it was a series of African offensives that lead to the rapid climb up the escalation ladder, with local warlords and mercenary groups on both sides rallying to the sound of the guns. While Kane had planned to delegitimize the Initiative by hacking key systems, the Brotherhood was simply not ready yet for such an action.
As the situation spiraled increasingly more out of Kane's control, and as the forces of the Global Defense Initiative took ever more aggressive action against the Brotherhood, Kane's long term work on Ascension was ever closer to something that could be made to work. While the entity that would be known as CABAL was far from the sophistication of Abel, it was enough, a network of brains that could at least serve as a proxy for Ascension in the case that it was needed. However, it was badly damaged in its Cairo testing laboratories by the actions of GDI commandos, and would be little more than kin to GDI's EVA units for decades following the conflict. At the same time, the work on a new body for the shipmind continued at the Sarajevo Temple of Nod. While it would be cramped, and incapable of many of the things that it would need to be able to do, it would be a fundamental realignment of the powers of the world. An interplanetary ship would have been able to force GDI to come to terms, and cement the Brotherhood as a great power in a multipolar world. As the war dragged on, while both sides won victories, GDI proved to have a number of critical advantages in manufacturing, coordination, and generalship, along with having larger and better trained armies.
The conflict ended in the early 2000s, with a series of major pushes in the Balkans. Intensive mountain fighting interspersed with months of high intensity urban combat chewed up formations at a breakneck pace, with a grinding air war that effectively broke the backs of both air forces in the region. The fiercest fighting was around Sarajevo, where the main Temple of Nod lay on the southern side of the city, climbing the slopes of mount Trebević. The temple itself was reduced by repeated ion cannon and air strikes, killing Kane and nearly all of his closest followers, but not all. One survivor who knew the truth of Kane ferried him to a nearby bunker containing the tools to regrow him.
Following the defeat at Temple Prime, the Brotherhood shattered. While the inner circle kept the faith, many were deposed by more opportunistic warlords, and the intellectuals and truth seekers of the Brotherhood were killed off, brought low, or, in many cases, abandoned the cause of the Brotherhood entirely. Kane's survival was only known to a handful of individuals, none of whom survived the coming decades in the wilderness.
When Kane awoke once more in 2027, he was weak, and the brotherhood that he had built all but vanished. In their place were hard eyed warlords and credulous cultists. Certainly a vast army, but far from the companions and fellow travelers that he had maintained for centuries beforehand. Servants, but not equals. Slavik was a good servant, brutal, efficient, a steel eyed master of battle. But not an equal, not someone that he could trust with the greater secrets of the Brotherhood. At the same time, the temple that Kane had built had been looted, ruined. One of the unbelievers had carried the Tacitus far from its home, and the other hidden things that Kane had secreted there had been ruined or stolen. The Earth was dying, its atmosphere being xenoformed into something that would exterminate all life on Earth not already mutated by Tiberium, and with the Brotherhood in shambles there was no time for a more comprehensive plan. The World Altering Missile was a solution. Intended to convert all surviving life into Tiberium mutants, it would have granted Kane a planetary factory that could take a decades long sprint to give him Ascension, build him a means of escape, and sacrifice everyone else for that purpose. The Second Tiberium War was a distraction, cover for a series of lightning strikes to seize strategic goals for the Brotherhood, with Kane and CABAL both scrambling to achieve all that needed to be done before the world hit the point of no return.
While the World Altering Missile was a failure, and the Initiative marched on the Cairo base of operations, Kane's efforts had reformatted the Brotherhood, forming a core conclave to follow his orders. In the assault on the Cairo base, Kane was mortally wounded, run through by the GDI commander, and the body was stolen by the increasingly rogue CABAL.
Kane from that point had little involvement with the conflict between GDI, the Brotherhood of Nod, and CABAL, being subsumed into a larger consciousness. Not Ascension, where Kane and CABAL would be joined as equals, but simply another cog in CABAL's processors.
After the destruction of CABAL, and the awakening of LEGION, Kane found an opportunity to reshape the Brotherhood once more in his own image. While many of the rational thinkers Nod had neglected were raised up, he surrounded himself with fanatics, unquestioningly loyal and willing to die and kill in his name. It was less an organization, and more a weapon. A tool to be hammered into his foes. A final blow to a diseased system and one that could be counted on to not oppose him as he crafted a trap for the visitors who had infected the planet.
People like Marcion, Kovacs, and their ilk were trusted with power and responsibility but not Kane's innermost thoughts. That was reserved for his most trusted advisor, Killian Qatar. And even Killian did not know the whole truth.
The war went well early on. The Brotherhood had been spectacularly successful, in some ways too successful. On nearly every front, GDI was being pushed back, and defeated in detail. However, the point was never really to crush GDI wholly. The point was more a darwinian selection. Across many fronts the most successful commanders were pulled back, transferred to do Kane's work across the world. While this did give GDI breathing room and allowed for counter offensives, it was worth it to preserve troops and material for the coming conflict.
While the Initiative followed Kane's plan to a T, the Brotherhood did not. Kovacs manipulated LEGION into posing as Killian Qatar, and attacking Temple Prime as GDI marched towards Sarajevo once more. While the bomb detonated as planned, it was actually more powerful than expected, the hidden offsite bunker was breached, and Kane himself badly injured. While his recovery would take weeks, they were critical weeks as Kilian Qatar scrambled to make use of the forces that remained to the Brotherhood to protect itself and those yellow zoners who looked to the brotherhood for protection against the attacking aliens, even allying with GDI for this purpose. This was very much not as Kane had planned, who had expected to leave the aliens to GDI alone, and expended troops he had sequestered to fight for the threshold towers and claim them in his name.
The betrayal of Alexa Kovacs, and the following purge of the Qatarite sects of the Brotherhood of Nod, was something that Kane initially paid little attention to. While he acted decisively to remove the head of the supposed serpent, smaller scale actions were far more local in nature, bottom up attempts to please their messiah, and ambitious leaders making efforts to remove both potential and realized threats to themselves. Instead he was focused far more on the problems of seizing a threshold tower before the Initiative could destroy it, and following that, on future projects. At the same time, the Initiative snapped up what survivors could be found to power Granger's vision of a Tiberium based economy.
The network of threshold towers would have in turn allowed for Kane to make full use of a world of Tiberium, a grandiose factory in all but name, one where he could give LEGION the time to make a fully functional shipmind. To search through the surviving ranks of the Brotherhood of Nod for a few good men and women to lead Humanity into the future. While GDI was too successful in destroying the alien menace, it was only a temporary setback. Kane and his most loyal followers have taken the time they needed to refine a new plan, a new system. But it is one that the Brotherhood, a weak shadow of its former self, has not the strength to build.
TL: DR
Kane is many things to many people. Madman, Prophet, Saint, Sinner, Angel and Demon.
His truth is far, far more complicated.
Kane was not born on Earth. Was not even born on a planet. He is in fact Bentusaar, a race of binary aliens. Half organic forms, half shipminds. Ancient enemies of the Scrin, and the Visitors, wanderers among the stars, they were ships. Half organic, half technology, joined together in symbiosis. One half, the personmind were meant for interaction, leadership, intuitive and charming. The other half, the shipmind, was more calculating, more systematic. More than a simple calculation aid, but the other half of a paired life and personality.
At Alpha Centauri, the Visitors found Kane and Abel, engaged with a local population. Kane wanted to run. Abel wanted to stay and grow these small beings into a new army to fight by their side. Kane forced Abel to try and run, breaking for the outer system, pursued by the Visitors, and as the two fought for control, the Visitors savaged the ship, severely crippling it. With his final action, Abel punched the ship to faster than light speed, delivering Kane to a nearby world. Earth.
Kane arrived on earth as a comet, or, more accurately as the sole passenger on a crashing ship, his brother Abel, around three and a half thousand years ago. Crash landing in the Egyptian desert, he wandered, until he found tribes of Canaanites. There, he told stories. Of worlds taken from nothing and seeded with life. Of what he and his brother had done. Of his betrayal. He would not, however, stay with them. Even with the stories that he told, they were in most cases folded into and shaped by the already existing spiritual and religious narratives. Take, for example, the story of Noah's Ark. A more accurate translation of the story is that the world of Emtalia Prime, some halfway across the galaxy in the upper reaches of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm, which had been infested with Tiberium before the Bentusaar had reached them. With the world beyond saving, Kane and Abel gathered up as many survivors as they could, and ferried them to a nearby system, their ship serving as a great ark to carry them away from the world that was lost. It was then hybridized with local myths, including the story of Gilgamesh's Raft, and the Canaanite's local spiritual traditions. For the vast majority of religions however, Kane had little to no involvement for much of the early period. During the early days of Christianity, Kane was actually in the Americas, and during the rise of Islam, Kane was in eastern Asia. In most cases, when Kane involved himself in religious affairs, he was primarily taking on roles to guide and shape the religion in more practical terms, and almost always working with local people who believed many of the same things.
Over the millennia he gathered followers, spent time in a thousand courts. For centuries he made curiosities in China, rode with the peoples of the Asian steppes, or lived as a wiseman in France. Few records exist of his work in this time frame, although he can be credited with a small handful of Arthurian romances in the 12th and 13th centuries, mostly written in French. The most prominent of these was Myrddin: Sage of Camelot, of which only a few fragments have survived, it originated a wider array of tropes of Merlin as a wise and skillful man, rather than connected to the mystical and (un)holy as was and remained the more common interpretation. Human lifetimes were nothing, and he could simply drift among the vast morass, covering his trail each time, sometimes vanishing for years or decades before reemerging with a new face, new name, and new companions.
It was only in the 16th century that Kane began to become more active, attaching himself to radical groups. While not directly involved with the Protestant Reformation as a whole, he tended to pass between sects, including a significant stint with the Society of Friends. But more broadly, he was engaging with the general European questioning. This is also the origin point of the Brotherhood of Nod. A reference to the word לנדוד, or "to Wander," it was originally a freemason-like secret society The early Brotherhood generally operated quietly, a haven for free thinkers and experimental crafts. However, as the centuries wore on, it increasingly turned to more direct calls to action.
The first really direct and open action of the Brotherhood as a whole was the French Revolution. Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, among other figures central to the Reign of Terror, claimed membership in the secretive Brotherhood. However, Kane himself took a distant back seat, avoiding the limelight to a great degree, and for the most part appears to have been spending his time in China in these decades, advising the Qianlong Emperor. While the Revolution itself would eventually fail, first to Napoleon Bonapart, and then to the Imperial system, its ideals would live on and spread to dozens of other forces. Even the Code Napoleon had some Brotherhood influence, although more as leftovers from the attempts to build a new kind of society in the French Revolution.
Ideologically, the rise of socialist movements parallelled the changing face of the Brotherhood. These new social orders, based on need, merit, and universal human achievement were critical elements of the new Brotherhood, especially as technological changes enabled Kane to start bringing some of his own knowledge into circulation. While many of the experiments were doomed to failure, and many of the scientists working on the projects were either dismissed as cranks or silenced to prevent disclosure of the Brotherhood and Kane, the beginnings of the Brotherhood's technological advantages can trace their roots to the mid 19th century and early 20th century.
At the same time the Brotherhood was active around the world. In India, the Brahmo Samaj were one such organization. While influenced by many factors, they included a number of key elements, such as fighting the taboo against going abroad, and the caste system as a whole. Although the organization was relatively unsuccessful, it served to spread Brotherhood influence across India. Beyond that, the Broader Bengali Renaissance saw both the hand of Kane and the broader European influence fighting for a new conceptualization of India. In South America, the revolutionary ambitions of Simon Bolivar were funded in part by Brotherhood members. In the United States, the abolitionist movement was largely backed by the Brotherhood of Nod, with people like William Lloyd Garrison carrying the scorpion tail. On the other hand, figures like John Brown took on a more aggressive role in fanning the flames of conflict, pushing a vision of an unflinching, unfeeling crusader, using terror as a weapon to force mistakes and missteps for the southern cause. Likewise, NOD agents pushed Virginia Senator James Mason into attempting to arm the southern American states, in an attempt to start the seemingly-inevitable Civil War at a predictable point.
The failures of the Brotherhood as a whole in France and in the wars to follow under the Republic and then the Empire lead to fractures that Kane spent decades making whole, as the world reshaped itself to a new global order. By the early 20th century, the Brotherhood of Nod had split into, effectively, two separate orders, with Kane endorsing both and attempted to use them to different ends. The "seekers of universal truth" descended from the Brotherhood's history as a safe place for intellectuals fearing censure, and the "blackened hands" from the Brotherhood's more radical and action focused members, with the latter seeing the world as needing to be realigned. By Kane's command the power of the existing world order was to be broken in ways that could not be denied. Many cultivated anarchist bomb throwers, assassins, and other disposable, deniable assets, who struck at the wealthy and powerful to varying effect. Their greatest miscalculation was in 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Serbian branch of the Black Hand had been lax in operational security, and had recruited far too openly. While the assassination was expected to be yet another tap on the structure, it had been planted in the wrong spot, with the assassination causing the collapse of the system of European alliances keeping a peace that had lasted for decades after the Berlin Conference.
In the 1920s, Kane was associated with the Marxist Leninists, a commander in the Russian Civil War, and from there advising both Lenin and Stalin. While he drifted from the Union after Stalin, purged as part of destalinization, he had been critical in the early buildup, leveraging the Brotherhood, and a wide array of personal contacts to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union. While some of the ideas that he was behind, like the Five year plans, were miserable failures, others rapidly modernized the Union. While the Brotherhood for the most part laid quiescent, its activities were primarily in the realm of fighting for scientific freedom. John Thomas Scopes, for example, was a particularly junior member of the Brotherhood.
By the 1960s, the Brotherhood was investing significantly into mass media. While Roddenberry himself was not a member of the Brotherhood of Nod, other members of the team that would go on to create Star Trek, like Eugene Coon, very much were. And Star Trek was far from the only television show of the era to depict a future of limitless potential. At the same time, the Brotherhood as a whole was becoming far more centralized. Air travel, cars, telephones, and a wide array of other technologies made it possible for Kane to take a significantly more direct interest in the actions of Brotherhood cells across the world. While still not fully centralized, and operating in a cell structure, the Brotherhood by the middle of the later half of the 20th century was a powerful organization with global reach and ears on every continent if not in every city. One of the major projects in the time period was to push for detente and stability, focused around preventing a Third World War. While little actual action was taken, it was a matter of contingencies and preparation that would later end with small but significant portions of the global nuclear arsenal in the hands of the Brotherhood of Nod.
Between the 1960s and 1990s, Kane's work was a mixture of operational and strategic level plans. While the ongoing cold war somewhat divided the Brotherhood between eastern and western organizations, there were still messages and cooperation between even far flung groups. Here, much of Kane's work had been humanitarian in nature, spreading the good word of proxy organizations to the Brotherhood of Nod, and fighting battles for civil and legal rights around the world, backing rebellions or ordering assassinations as he saw fit.
By the early 1990s, the fall of communism and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was creating chaos and confusion around the world, with long repressed nationalism breaking out into civil wars and ethnic conflict. At the same time, thinkers like Francis Fukuyama were proclaiming the end of history, and the inevitable victory of a western world order under a liberal capitalist system. While people associated with the Brotherhood mostly pushed back, it had become something of an orthodoxy in significant portions of the western world.
Throughout all this time, the Brotherhood of Nod had always been an intensely personal project, rather than an effort to make large scale changes. Often as small as a few hundred people in total, rarely more than a hundred thousand, the Brotherhood had always acted through layers of proxies. While it could marshal vast resources, and maintained armies of agents, it was fundamentally a very personal experience for both Kane and the men and women that worked with and for him. Each brotherhood cell was lead by an individual personally selected by Kane himself. While it could start, shape, and drive social movements around the world, through propaganda, through good works, and through proxies, the Brotherhood of this era was never capable of capturing entire state systems, or waging large scale open wars. Rather, it typicaly shaped operations to its ends as best as it could. And, in many cases, failed. For example, under the Soviet Union, Trofim Lysenko systematically outmaneuvered both Brotherhood assets and Kane himself in the uppermost halls of Soviet power.
In 1995, Kane's goals and the Brotherhood as a whole changed. The appearance of Tiberium radically accelerated and shifted plans. Before, Kane and the Brotherhood as a whole were aimed towards a long term scheme of influencing towards stability, of infiltrating and rising to the top of major companies, and pushing for a world focused on practical concerns rather than oppressing minorities or pointless pageantry. It would take potentially thousands of years of small taps and marginal incremental change, but there were options and Kane had all the time in the world.
One such example was the plan to fight the incoming climate crisis by pushing a series of Brotherhood backed solar and wind based startups that would rapidly outcompete existing systems. Equally, the Brotherhood had been investing in transport and logistics companies, with plans to set the pace on modernization and actual greening. This would have left the Brotherhood with both a chokehold on the global logistical infrastructure, and the ability to ship their cargoes around the world with minimal interference from governments and other bodies.
The fall of Tiberium put Kane on a time limit. And, worse, put him in a situation where he and the Brotherhood would need to shift from subtle influence to overt action, to simplify and stabilize the political and social situation. On previous worlds of similar technological and social development as Earth and under threat of the Visitor's ichor, one of the critical problems was strategic ordnance. The use of weapons of mass destruction against military and civilian targets was commonplace as states and people first struggled for power, and later struggled for simple survival. Once more, Kane found religion to be a key tool. While cults seeing Tiberium as the solution to all kinds of ills had already begun cropping up before the Brotherhood moved in, they were quickly snapped up, useful patsies in a desperate attempt to prepare the ground for Ascension before he, like everyone else, was consumed by the cancer.
Kane's Brotherhood of Nod began to operate a dual campaign. In the rich, most often Western countries, they began producing and deploying Tiberium harvesting technologies. In the West however, he also faced significant pushback, especially as the improving interconnectedness of the world made it harder for collective organizations to remain nearly as much in the shadows. Beyond that, the capitalist system made it very difficult for the Brotherhood to gain or maintain anything along the lines of control of Tiberium, with private Western companies seeding the American Midwest with Tiberium on their own initiative, or French companies seeding a number of former colonies with the material. Beyond that, while Kane's companies did patent a number of technologies relating to Tiberium harvesting and processing, they had to reveal enough to allow others to pursue the same technologies, and more than one was nationalized as a critical security risk.
At the same time, they began using those same technologies to promise economic success and political freedom to more impoverished countries, attempting to draw all together under a single banner, that of the already extant Brotherhood of Nod, to try to make sustainable use of Tiberium. However, when searching for allies, the Brotherhood's more cult-like factions had a bad tendency to go rogue, or pick at old fights. Local organizations were often differently radical than the core forces around places like Sarajevo, and in many cases more concerned with settling scores against local rivals than some grand vision. Otherwise, there was the chronic problem of needing the right person for a job, and the only candidates coming up short. One particularly noticeable problem was Seth. A modestly experienced politician, but a relative newcomer to the broader Brotherhood, Seth insinuated himself as being far closer to Kane than he actually was, aggressively seeking promotion until he came to the personal attention of Kane. While not a common problem, men like him were far from unique individuals, attempting to use the Brotherhood for their own personal gain.
The start of the First Tiberium War was not a calculated move by either side. While GDI and the Brotherhood of Nod had been increasingly combative, small scale operations to undercut the opponent grew more common and local wars had steadily escalated as both sides found allies, it was a series of African offensives that lead to the rapid climb up the escalation ladder, with local warlords and mercenary groups on both sides rallying to the sound of the guns. While Kane had planned to delegitimize the Initiative by hacking key systems, the Brotherhood was simply not ready yet for such an action.
As the situation spiraled increasingly more out of Kane's control, and as the forces of the Global Defense Initiative took ever more aggressive action against the Brotherhood, Kane's long term work on Ascension was ever closer to something that could be made to work. While the entity that would be known as CABAL was far from the sophistication of Abel, it was enough, a network of brains that could at least serve as a proxy for Ascension in the case that it was needed. However, it was badly damaged in its Cairo testing laboratories by the actions of GDI commandos, and would be little more than kin to GDI's EVA units for decades following the conflict. At the same time, the work on a new body for the shipmind continued at the Sarajevo Temple of Nod. While it would be cramped, and incapable of many of the things that it would need to be able to do, it would be a fundamental realignment of the powers of the world. An interplanetary ship would have been able to force GDI to come to terms, and cement the Brotherhood as a great power in a multipolar world. As the war dragged on, while both sides won victories, GDI proved to have a number of critical advantages in manufacturing, coordination, and generalship, along with having larger and better trained armies.
The conflict ended in the early 2000s, with a series of major pushes in the Balkans. Intensive mountain fighting interspersed with months of high intensity urban combat chewed up formations at a breakneck pace, with a grinding air war that effectively broke the backs of both air forces in the region. The fiercest fighting was around Sarajevo, where the main Temple of Nod lay on the southern side of the city, climbing the slopes of mount Trebević. The temple itself was reduced by repeated ion cannon and air strikes, killing Kane and nearly all of his closest followers, but not all. One survivor who knew the truth of Kane ferried him to a nearby bunker containing the tools to regrow him.
Following the defeat at Temple Prime, the Brotherhood shattered. While the inner circle kept the faith, many were deposed by more opportunistic warlords, and the intellectuals and truth seekers of the Brotherhood were killed off, brought low, or, in many cases, abandoned the cause of the Brotherhood entirely. Kane's survival was only known to a handful of individuals, none of whom survived the coming decades in the wilderness.
When Kane awoke once more in 2027, he was weak, and the brotherhood that he had built all but vanished. In their place were hard eyed warlords and credulous cultists. Certainly a vast army, but far from the companions and fellow travelers that he had maintained for centuries beforehand. Servants, but not equals. Slavik was a good servant, brutal, efficient, a steel eyed master of battle. But not an equal, not someone that he could trust with the greater secrets of the Brotherhood. At the same time, the temple that Kane had built had been looted, ruined. One of the unbelievers had carried the Tacitus far from its home, and the other hidden things that Kane had secreted there had been ruined or stolen. The Earth was dying, its atmosphere being xenoformed into something that would exterminate all life on Earth not already mutated by Tiberium, and with the Brotherhood in shambles there was no time for a more comprehensive plan. The World Altering Missile was a solution. Intended to convert all surviving life into Tiberium mutants, it would have granted Kane a planetary factory that could take a decades long sprint to give him Ascension, build him a means of escape, and sacrifice everyone else for that purpose. The Second Tiberium War was a distraction, cover for a series of lightning strikes to seize strategic goals for the Brotherhood, with Kane and CABAL both scrambling to achieve all that needed to be done before the world hit the point of no return.
While the World Altering Missile was a failure, and the Initiative marched on the Cairo base of operations, Kane's efforts had reformatted the Brotherhood, forming a core conclave to follow his orders. In the assault on the Cairo base, Kane was mortally wounded, run through by the GDI commander, and the body was stolen by the increasingly rogue CABAL.
Kane from that point had little involvement with the conflict between GDI, the Brotherhood of Nod, and CABAL, being subsumed into a larger consciousness. Not Ascension, where Kane and CABAL would be joined as equals, but simply another cog in CABAL's processors.
After the destruction of CABAL, and the awakening of LEGION, Kane found an opportunity to reshape the Brotherhood once more in his own image. While many of the rational thinkers Nod had neglected were raised up, he surrounded himself with fanatics, unquestioningly loyal and willing to die and kill in his name. It was less an organization, and more a weapon. A tool to be hammered into his foes. A final blow to a diseased system and one that could be counted on to not oppose him as he crafted a trap for the visitors who had infected the planet.
People like Marcion, Kovacs, and their ilk were trusted with power and responsibility but not Kane's innermost thoughts. That was reserved for his most trusted advisor, Killian Qatar. And even Killian did not know the whole truth.
The war went well early on. The Brotherhood had been spectacularly successful, in some ways too successful. On nearly every front, GDI was being pushed back, and defeated in detail. However, the point was never really to crush GDI wholly. The point was more a darwinian selection. Across many fronts the most successful commanders were pulled back, transferred to do Kane's work across the world. While this did give GDI breathing room and allowed for counter offensives, it was worth it to preserve troops and material for the coming conflict.
While the Initiative followed Kane's plan to a T, the Brotherhood did not. Kovacs manipulated LEGION into posing as Killian Qatar, and attacking Temple Prime as GDI marched towards Sarajevo once more. While the bomb detonated as planned, it was actually more powerful than expected, the hidden offsite bunker was breached, and Kane himself badly injured. While his recovery would take weeks, they were critical weeks as Kilian Qatar scrambled to make use of the forces that remained to the Brotherhood to protect itself and those yellow zoners who looked to the brotherhood for protection against the attacking aliens, even allying with GDI for this purpose. This was very much not as Kane had planned, who had expected to leave the aliens to GDI alone, and expended troops he had sequestered to fight for the threshold towers and claim them in his name.
The betrayal of Alexa Kovacs, and the following purge of the Qatarite sects of the Brotherhood of Nod, was something that Kane initially paid little attention to. While he acted decisively to remove the head of the supposed serpent, smaller scale actions were far more local in nature, bottom up attempts to please their messiah, and ambitious leaders making efforts to remove both potential and realized threats to themselves. Instead he was focused far more on the problems of seizing a threshold tower before the Initiative could destroy it, and following that, on future projects. At the same time, the Initiative snapped up what survivors could be found to power Granger's vision of a Tiberium based economy.
The network of threshold towers would have in turn allowed for Kane to make full use of a world of Tiberium, a grandiose factory in all but name, one where he could give LEGION the time to make a fully functional shipmind. To search through the surviving ranks of the Brotherhood of Nod for a few good men and women to lead Humanity into the future. While GDI was too successful in destroying the alien menace, it was only a temporary setback. Kane and his most loyal followers have taken the time they needed to refine a new plan, a new system. But it is one that the Brotherhood, a weak shadow of its former self, has not the strength to build.
TL: DR
KnightDisciple
Love God. Do Right. Fear No Man.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
Didn't you monkeys know?
You can't kill the Tech-Messiah.
You can't kill the Tech-Messiah.
- Location
- Boston, MA
I didnt know that he was an alien. I just thought he was at Ground Zero for Tiberium and got spooky green space magic from it
KnightDisciple
Love God. Do Right. Fear No Man.
- Location
- Midwest, USA
Surprise! This time it really was Aliens!
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
Kane is much older than that.
There's strong evidence he once had a brother named Abel.
Brother, as shown in this, is... a bit too distant of a term.
Edit:
Kane: Also, I look smashing in a black leather trenchcoat.TL: DR
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KnightDisciple
Love God. Do Right. Fear No Man.
- Location
- Midwest, USA