Cacophonous Interlude is NOT active
(the QMPC does NOT hear what you write right now)
Next story update : Sometime in July would be nice
Next vote closing : TBD
Progress toward next update : 3,146 words
Code:
Anything I post that's not in text blocks or in spoilers
may be understood to be said by the QMPC, with the
exception of the Collaboration Post
(see Collaboration Post for details on itself)
Code:
Players do not need to use code blocks or spoilers
outside of cacophonous interludes
If you use code blocks, please limit yourself to 32 lines
and your lines to 57 characters, so that people on mobile
can read them without scrolling within the code block
Code:
This is not meant to be Plagiarism Quest.
You're not discouraged from using outside reference
material or quoting other sources. When you do, please
cite your sources in spoilers or a code box.
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I have added some players who contributed a fair amount
the last two times as thread collaborators who can update
the collaboration post. If you'd like to update the
collaboration post too, contact me by PM and we'll talk
about it.
Check the Collaboration Post and read the latest story post in the Threadmarks to get a rough idea of where things are at.
If you're not already involved in the game, portions of either of these may be difficult to follow. But you can skip to the line that says "B R E A K" in the latest threadmarked story post and skim from there to get an idea of what's going on.
If there's no corresponding Closing The Vote post in the Informational threadmarks for the latest story post in (normal?) Threadmarks, then the game is in a cacophonous interlude and the QMPC will hear what you post, unless you do so with spoilers or code boxes. The NOTICES portion at the top of this post should also tell you if the game is in a cacophonous interlude.
So you can engage with other players, make suggestions, ask questions, and propose plans and you can compose a message to the QMPC all whether or not the game is in a cacophonous interlude. And once it is, you can vote and/or send a message to the QMPC by creating a post in the thread.
If you want to vote, simply do so as you would in other quests on this board. You may look at other players' votes to see how yours should be formatted. And you may check the tally to see that yours are counted as you intend them.
If you want to send a message to the QMPC, though, keep in mind that they are a creature of their time. They may not understand what you mean if you don't take the time to make it clear. This game rewards and demands work from its players. When a player wants to introduce a concept or tool or technology to the QMPC, that player will probably need to expend effort to explain it carefully, and take into consideration the limits of the QMPC's understanding of the world.
I think this is similar enough to Graeber's 'interpretive labor' that we can use the term colloquially to describe what is being asked of players. Put yourself in the mind of the QMPC and ask yourself how such a person can be made to understand what you want to tell them.
The QMPC has different values than we do. They have different assumptions about the world and objects and forces within it. Their goals may not align directly with number-go-up or color-get-big gaming agendas. But they want something, and will listen most attentively to players that tell them how to get more of or closer to what they want.
The Quest Master posts story updates that have 3 parts.
Quest Master Player Character responses to player posts made during the last cacophonous interlude
An update by the QMPC following a break of varying length but usually some number of years, covering what the character believes is worth mentioning
Requests by the QMPC for direction on a number of issues, which the players will provide in the form of votes
Following each story update, players posts are audible to the QMPC until voting is closed.
This is the cacophonous interlude.
Players may convey any information they can represent in text.
No images, sounds, or hyperlinks will get through (this is my limitation, not a limitation of the game, so please do not try to transcend it with clever protocol tricks).
Players may use spoilers or code blocks to communicate with each other without doing so in ways the QMPC can hear.
When votes are tallied, the QM collects player posts so that it may be known what the QMPC heard.
Votes are tallied in the conventional fashion. So only votes in the most recent post by each player are counted. [X] marks what the player is voting. And only identical write-ins accumulate.
Some votes are querying the players for their preference, in which case the only suboptimal answer is that which does not accurately reflect the preference of the players who nonetheless chose it (I don't think these kinds of misunderstandings can be helped).
Other votes are intended as puzzles where there is a choice the QM believes would best meet what they believe to be the goals of the players.
However, in these sorts of votes the QM has in mind a choice that would provide the players with what the QM thinks they most want, but which is not listed in the available votes.
In this way, clever write-ins are encouraged.
QM reads player posts, researches their suggestions, checks notes for precedent, determines what the QMPC thinks they already know on the topic, what they're right or wrong about, how likely they are to engage with the topic, how likely the QMPC's followers are to follow-through in the matter, and finally what the result is going to be later on.
QM composes QMPC's responses to player posts made during the cacophonous interlude and updates their notes.
When narrative benefits from uncertainty and chance, QM devises tests for QMPC or other characters and makes those tests using die rolls on a post made just for that purpose.
Skill or attribute tests will be made with a largely undocumented homebrew modification of the Burning Wheel system, mangled to suit the format of this game. (The Burning Wheelis a good system and I encourage you to check it out.)
Tests may be a contest between two characters or against a static target with tiered results.
The rules being used and followed will be described in each post in which tests are made by die rolls.
Normal mortals count 7s and better as successes.
Heroic characters and characters who are otherwise innately magical count 6s and better as successes.
Demigod characters and characters who otherwise possess some spark of divinity count 5s and better as successes.
New gods and characters who have otherwise stolen the power of Old Gods count 4s and better as successes.
Old Gods count 3s and better as successes.
Sorcery and other magic skills lower the threshold of success by 1 to a minimum of 3 only when they are the skill being tested, not when they provide a bonus to other skills. Players may note that Old Gods' threshold of success does not improve when they use magic.
Bonus dice provided by Kahl's Warhorses and any incendiary devices more complicated than a burning arrow reroll 9s & 10s and keeps successes. These same bonus dice cancels successes on 1s & 2s, rerolls those, and additional 1s & 2s cancel additional successes. More 1s, 2, 9, or 10s mean more rerolling and more successes or cancelations, but only in the manner of the original die. That is, a 1 or 2 that comes up when a 9 on a bonus die is rerolled don't cancel successes or lead to further rerolling.
Research project results are determined by percentile dice with results falling into 5 tiers.
Uh oh: something has gone horribly wrong
Nuh uh: failure, but the boring kind
Huh: partial success
Uh huh: full success
Whoa: superior special case success
When players expect a test to be coming up -- for example if they vote for an invasion or to send a diplomat to manipulate a foreign leader -- they can improve the odds of the test turning out the way they want by providing the QMPC with advice specific to that matter. If the advice is not mistaken or outright bad, there will be at least a chance it will help. That is, decent advice adds dice.
QM composes the QMPC's post-break update, player vote questions, and player vote options.
GOTO 1
The QMPC is intended to be the only character the players will interact with in this game. (It's kind of possible that the players could maneuver the QMPC to surrender control of the Astute Cacophony to another character, but unlikely.)
The QMPC is a small, evil woman who knows magic and has not died, despite looking like she probably should have at some point. She goes by the name Bianca the Undying. Her early life took place in the Paleolithic, in which she has said that she traveled around quite a bit and came to understand the malleable nature of populations of people and animals and even the land itself. At some point she was trapped underground, to her displeasure. She remained trapped for a very long time.
When Bianca got out, she found her way to a community of eight tribes living pastoral and agrarian lifestyles in the local Copper Age. She made these people hers and they relied on her for magically enriching their fields so that they did not need to slash, burn, and move around a bit, unlike their neighbors. Bianca and her followers formalized their relationships into the Eight Ways Pact. Later, another tribe joined Bianca's followers bringing small horses and the Bronze Age and their pact was updated with a ninth directive.
Bianca has an agenda that requires her to have more power than she does right now. She believes that achieving divinity will get her that power.
Curiosity is also an emotion the satisfaction of which is not intrinsically less important than your concerns. Satisfying curiosity and speaking about interesting parts of both the story and the game layer creates positive emotional valence, not just for the players but also very likely for the QM. And QM emotional satisfaction is paramount, since that is the only payment that said valued content creator is getting here.
English is not my first language. What do you mean when you say that verisimilitude is reduced?
Curiosity is also an emotion the satisfaction of which is not intrinsically less important than your concerns. Satisfying curiosity and speaking about interesting parts of both the story and the game layer creates positive emotional valance, not just for the players but also very likely for the QM. And QM emotional satisfaction is paramount, since that is the only payment that said valued content creator is getting here.
English is not my first language. What do you mean when you say that verisimilitude is reduced?
Is this case we're learning about negative consequences in the form of opportunity costs, in this case specifically clarification of an opportunity cost we sort of knew about. When I say reduced verisimilitude, I mean reduced quest realism. More info beforehand would definitely reduce it because we start making decisions based on concrete mechanics as opposed to what we think is the direction we want the story to go on in. More info afterwards can either let us reach a conclusion that a previous decision was either optimal or suboptimal. Give the large number of options, the conclusion that it was suboptimal is the more likely probability of the two, thus creating negative emotional valence.
Is this case we're learning about negative consequences in the form of opportunity costs, in this case specifically clarification of an opportunity cost we sort of knew about. When I say reduced verisimilitude, I mean reduced quest realism. More info beforehand would definitely reduce it because we start making decisions based on concrete mechanics as opposed to what we think is the direction we want the story to go on in. More info afterwards can either let us reach a conclusion that a previous decision was either optimal or suboptimal. Give the large number of options, the conclusion that it was suboptimal is the more likely probability of the two, thus creating negative emotional valence.
Again, I think that the emotional impact of said negative consequences and opportunity cost is easily dampened by the realization that we did the best with the information we had.
Now that you reminded me what verisimilitude means, my opinion on that is that the info we got after the fact was purely OOC and doesn't affect the story that's being told. It's no different from, say, seeing an interview with a game developer where they explain their thoughts behind the choice/reputation system they built into their game.
Also, you are again ignoring the positive emotional valence some of us get due to the satisfaction of our curiosity and the engagement with the QM regarding game mechanics (in a way that doesn't grant undue advantages in the game itself). That is positive valence that doesn't rely on chance. It might be smaller than the negative valence accrued in your case specifically, but, well, not everyone is like you that way.
@LoserThree If at any point our tangent gets too long and off topic in your opinion, please tell us to stop. Right now I am interpreting your silent presence as either interest or benevolent indifference and consider this discussion on QMing policy on topic enough to remain in the thread.
Shard's argument is that showing us what gameplay goodies we missed out on only after we lost them makes us feel bad and is therefore not a nice thing to do and might make you lose player engagement.
My counter-argument is that it's not so bad for me and might very likely also not be so bad for others, and that the info you gave us is cool and I enjoy it and I am worried about Shard discouraging you from giving similar info in the future.
@Shard Am I representing you correctly in essence, even if highly simplified?
Shard's argument is that showing us what gameplay goodies we missed out on only after we lost them makes us feel bad and is therefore not a nice thing to do and might make you lose player engagement.
My counter-argument is that it's not so bad for me and might very likely also not be so bad for others, and that the info you gave us is cool and I enjoy it and I am worried about Shard discouraging you from giving similar info in the future.
@Shard Am I representing you correctly in essence?
No. It being pointless means that there is no value in it and that any of us who feel it should do their best to get over it instead of blaming others (the QM) for our emotions.
All of this "should", and yet absolutely no advice on how, precisely, you intend for everybody to achieve enlightenment.
It is a historically difficult task to convince the brain it shouldn't want things.
Pointless it may be in terms of the quest's ability to affect it, but it still matters because of its emotional impact. And that emotional impact is "not good".
Enlightenment seems a bit extreme. I definitely haven't reached anywhere near that.
As for advice for the how, questioning your own thoughts and feelings when angry or upset helps a lot. Some times, after thinking about it, you get even more angry and upset and that can be for a good reason. But if you find yourself upset after gaining some knowledge about an online game then asking yourself why you are actually upset, how much the thing that happened actually hurt you and whether or not there's anything to blame yourself for can all make the "not good" emotions fade. And the more often you do this, the easier and faster it becomes, just like any other trained skill.
I want to determine how successful Bianca is at convincing the Tenners to resume sending tribute to her, which will in turn determine what sort of treasury she has for doing the kinds of things one does with a treasury.
Composition, marketing, something institutional like diplomacy, or even songwriting would probably work better here, but Bianca's will be going with something else. As long time readers may expect, this is going to be a test of Bianca's intimidation skill (5). Bianca is well-practiced at using sorcery in conjunction with her bullying ways (1). For reasons that may be obvious, it happens that Bianca is a very good fit for Historical Figure Bianca the Undying, who historically was consistently paid tribute (1). Peyuvo's experience with, if not mastery of the relatively primitive currency technology in use in most of the wealthier Tenner-ruled jurisdictions is a huge help (2). The ubiquity of table-rulers and the near-universality of their standards of record make arguments of debt clear and legible, if not any more intimidating than any other accountant (1). Doves, paper, and ciphers not only keep secrets, but may transmit messages with some weight of validation (1). Having her Singers largely back under her control is also a huge help (2). Visiting in person makes a big difference in the places Bianca visits (2). 'Graciously' forgiving the debt of tribute owed for centuries past helps, too (1).
Bianca will be rolling 5 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 1 = 16d10. Bianca is magical herself so she will count 6s and better as successes. She will be rolling against the will of her erstwhile subject rulers (5), exacerbated by the uncouth manner of her communication (1).
6 or fewer success = reliable tribute from Refuge of Grace, no tribute but what she personally berates from any others
7 successes = reliable ToG & Biancvint, circumstantial from Tennerlands, Unmarked, & Wreol (years that she visits, basically), none from others
8 successes = reliable ToG & 3 cities, Tennerlands senate will usually vote to send tribute, nearby cities send tribute circumstantially, distant cities send none
9 successes = reliable ToG, Tennerlands, & 3 cities, nearby cities will usually send tribute, distant cities send tribute circumstantially
10 or 11 successes = reliable ToG, tennerlands, 3 cities, & nearby cities, distant cities will usually send tribute, outsider cities send tribute in hopes of benefiting
12 or more successes = reliable ToG, tennerlands, 3 cities, & nearby cities, distant cities will usually send tribute, outsider cities send tribute in hopes of benefiting, Heroic Tax Collector!
Code:
7: Limited tribute & only when Bianca personally shows up
I want to determine how successful Bianca is at killing all followers of the new god Erweh from the places her influence reaches.
This isn't actually something Bianca will do herself. She's not going to take the time to travel around snuffing out lives. She has people for that. In particular, her singers will report back on where Erweh has followers and either import specialists from Tennerlands or employ local talent to get rid of them. The Singers Society doesn't actually have the wet work skill, so instead they'll be testing their treasury, which isn't great (1). What Bianca gets from tribute helps (3), if only because Bianca very recently personally visited the Tennerlands and the nearest cities. As ever, doves, paper, and ciphers are indispensable (1). When specialists can be imported, they'll sometimes include sorcerers, some of whom may have been entrusted with potent secret techniques (1). Once again, the network of script issuers that Peyuvo kind of sort of controls a little bit facilitates transfer of funds in ways that matter a lot for operations like this (2). Erweh and his followers are very unpopular among people affiliated with the Ten Nations, for obvious reasons (1).
Bianca will be rolling 1 + 3 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 1 = 9d10. The Singer Society is made of mortals who will count 7s and better as successes. They will be rolling against the security of the Cult of Erweh, which isn't really developed much because this isn't a problem they're prepared to face and doesn't extend much beyond theft prevention, which ain't nothin' (2). The further out the operation runs the more difficult it will be to coordinate, and Erweh's followers have doves, paper, and ciphers too.
1 or fewer success = Total bungle, the Cult of Erweh goes to ground within the Tennerlands and is largely unaffected beyond
2 successes = Cult of Erweh eliminated in Tennerlands, thinned in Conquered Cities
3 successes = Cult of Erweh eliminated in Tennerlands & nearby Conquered Cities, thinned in more distant Tenner-ruled lands
4, 5 or 6 successes = Cult of Erweh eliminated in all Tenner-ruled lands, thinned beyond
7 or more successes = Cult of Erweh eliminated in all Tenner-ruled lands, thinned beyond, Heroic Inquisitor!
Code:
6: No Erweh cult in 10N-ruled lands, much damage beyond
Peyuvo the Unaging Dancer, the Mistress of Bees and Devices, the Healing Hands, the Retainer and Issuer of Funds and Notes Thereof, the Leader of the Refuge of Grace, and the Herald of Bianca the Undying is attempting to develop tiny crunchy livestock. She doesn't have enough time to actually domesticate insects, really. But she might find a solution nonetheless.
Research tests like this will be decided by 2d10 dice rolled as percentile. The results will be measured against the following scale.
The sizes of the various result ranges are determined by the conditions in which the test is taking place, much of which is not known to the player, modified by the amount and quality of information the players have given Bianca on the matter and, when appropriate, by not failing catastrophically in past attempts at the same goal.
As ever, I realize I'm just obfuscating d20 rolls here right now. That's fine.
Code:
53: Good prospects found, no solid system of agriculture
Bianca has tried to put a stop to Oathbreaker agricultural diablery. That isn't happening, exactly, but she has put a sizable dent in it and I want to determine if famine ensues while she's still trying to solve the 'food' problem.
This is going to be a test of Bianca's sorcery, which readers may recall is very good (6). Bianca has taken the time to reconnect with the bureaucracy of the Tennerlands, plugging her in to essential administrative infrastructure so she knows a lot about the scope of the problem and can better organize the response (2). Similarly, Bianca has taken the time to reconnect with the administration of her city and has access to the sorcerous resources there (1). Likewise, she has taken the time to bring the Foresworn into her fold to at least some degree, and they have the best idea of anyone of what the problems with Oathbreaker fertility treatments are (1). Prioritizing food for people over livestock helps (1). It's not that hard to figure out which insects are good for eating, but they're not plentiful and it's really just stop-gap (1).
Bianca's efforts must overcome the will of the Stormwoods Host entities driving the agriculture of the Tennerlands toward ruin (3), weakened by the distance from their 'home.' The issue is worsened by damage already done to the land (1). Centuries of sacrifice have planted wells of demonic power in the area for the Stormwoods Host entities to call on (2).
Bianca will be rolling 6 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 12d10 and must roll 6 successes to keep things from rapidly getting worse. BIanca is magical herself and is using magic so she will count 5s and better as successes.
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6: Famine averted, for the moment
Next up from the Refuge of Grace is an attempt to design practical and reproducible steam engines. It might be more ideal for Peyuvo to keep hammering away at the insect agriculture problem, but 'food' things seem to be working out. And Bianca is after 'steam wheels.'
Research tests like this will be decided by 2d10 dice rolled as percentile. The results will be measured against the following scale.
The sizes of the various result ranges are determined by the conditions in which the test is taking place, much of which is not known to the players, modified by the amount and quality of information the players have given Bianca on the matter and, when appropriate, by not failing catastrophically in past attempts at the same goal.
As ever, I realize I'm just obfuscating d20 rolls here right now. That's fine.
Code:
39: Steam engine works, only if no one looks at it funny
I figured we would get something like the poor tribute collection, but I'm surprised other things seemed to go relatively fine. Cutting it a bit close to the wire on food though.
Insect agriculture might be worth pursuing given the famine, but I think we should not pursue simple steam engines at this time.
Some things we could talk about that could help advance insect agriculture:
Selective breeding
Breeding insects not as food but as a counter to pest insects that eat crops
Breeding sterile leaches & maggots for medical procedures
That bug in india that produces shellac
How to prevent locust swarms by destroying their spawning lands in the mountains.
"Your excellency, we've received a message marked 'urgent' from the Homelands."
"Ugh. What do those mossbacks want now?"
"It's, um. It's not from the Tennerland Senate, your excellency. It's from Bianca the Undying. She is demanding tribute."
"... What."
"The message includes an estimate of what we owe based on banking records and in accordance with historical tribute levels for, ahem, 'Cities Conquered by the Free People of the Ten Nations.'"
"What?!"
"If it would please your excellency to be more spe--"
"Is this some kind of joke?!"
"If it is, the Schools of Hosts, Forsworn, and the Palace are in on it, your excellency. The message was sent with nested seal-of-authority encoding of validation."
"Is this that pretender we had word of?"
"Pardon, your excellency, may I ask if there was more to the message."
"Yes, yes. You heard the Minister, is there anything more?"
"Um. There is no small amount of, uh, aggressive language I would not dare speak in front of your excellency or any other people of similar dignity. But in short 'Bianca' demands that tribute resume. She graciously forgives all past tribute owed and undelivered in the years of her absence. And she has set a deadline of the next sunstead for an updated estimate of your and the city's wealth and lands and annual gains for tabulation."
"Well, hand it-- No, no. Give it to the Minster. There. Now, Minister, what's all this?"
"Your pardon, your excellency, a moment. ... Hmm. Yes, these encipherings do seem to check out. Either the seal codes of all three schools are compromised or their leadership cooperated to send this message. We should assume that either this is, in fact, Bianca--"
"Impossible! 'Bianca the Undying,' as much as she ever existed, was slain by the new god Erweh hundreds of years ago!"
"Perhaps, your excellency. As I was saying, we should assume that either this is, in fact, Bianca the Undying, returned from whatever inconvenience Erweh afflicted on her, or that a pretender has usurped a great deal of power in the Homelands, or is a tool of some other Usurper."
"Huh. Well I am of the Ten Nations, Minister, as are you. We pay tribute to no one. Does the message even include an invoice of what she offers for this payment?"
"No, your excellency. It is utterly barbaric in its audacity. I could, at least, believe the author is a product of another time or place. And when your temper favors doing so, you should read these threats. They're very creative. I will have to inquire with the Ministry of Arts if it is known how some of these acts can be done."
"My proud city will not be mugged by dove and banker. In fact, perhaps the dove did not reach us in the first place. There have been hawks about..."
"The message was sent in triplicate and under the first seal-of-authority there was a request for response of acknowledgement. Response was sent promptly, in accordance with long-standing policy of the Ministry of Cotes and Codes."
"Bah. We have nearly three moons before the deadline. I want a courteous refusal with as much justification of record as a dove can carry sent ten days after the sunstead."
Several years later:
"No more waiting, Driver of Guards. I was awoken to alarms of attack within the city I rule. But there were no attacks on the House of Rule by dawn and we are halfway to zenith, now. I don't care for your concerns about misjudgments due to partial information any further. Tell me what is known."
"As you say, your excellency. What we know is that last night the alarm rang in the temple of Erweh, but only to two strikes, and only to the greatest tube. There was no code, only two strikes and then nothing. When the guard arrived -- which took a moment as that temple is, of course, is the Outsider District -- they found the doors barred from the inside. There was no answer or other noise from within. Not wishing to cross the new god Erweh, the guard sought intercession from priests of his brother, Yula the Godslayer. Shortly before dawn, a priest of Yula broke down the great door to the temple of Erweh with a steel prybar, newly consecrated to Yula and, after brief ministrations, permitted guards to enter.
"We found only corpses within, your excellency. As the morning has progressed, more dead have been found throughout the city. It seems that every person publicly known to venerate Erweh was killed in the night. Some others, besides, have also been slain. It is not clear if these were incidental or perhaps aligned with Erweh in some fashion not yet clear."
"Who would do this?"
"We know of no contention between the temples, your excellency. As I have earlier, I ask again that you please allow me to question the Singers' Society. They've been strange about that new pretender."
"You and your guards will leave the Singers alone, Driver of Guards. Your family connections won't protect you much further from the ire of the Society and I won't have this city drawn into your dispute with them. You questioned the Silent Servants with some kindness though, yes? What did they have to say?"
"Uh. Well, your excellency the Silent Servants indicated they had nothing to do with anything other than keeping the shines to Bianca. They ask only that we keep Erweh's people away from them and their shrines, as they always have."
"The Minister of Arts will inquire with the Singers, Driver of Guards. I expect you and those under you to behave."
Several days later:
"'My enmity is with Erweh,' surely you cannot let this stand, your excellency!"
"Drive of Guards, I remind you that all priests and followers of Erweh in the city died in one night. There is no one else here that with whom the pretender has enmity. And nearly all like them are said to have similarly died in the same night in every city of the Ten Nations, in every village, and in many places of Outsiders as well. 'This' does not need you or I to allow it to stand. It has stood on its own. It is complete. Responsibility is openly claimed and is not ours. It is no longer our concern."
"You cannot mean to allow those spies and strangers who call themselves 'Singers' to act this way in our city! This is outrageous and you are no true ruler! Guards, seize this man! Guards!"
"These are not your guards. And, in fact, in this moment our city has no Driver of Guards, and no guards. Leader of Hosts, have this man removed."
"Yes, your excellency. You two, take the former Driver of Guards to ...?"
"To the east tower, thank you."
"Yes, your excellency. To the east tower, then. Go on."
"You can't do this! I'll see you hang! My kin will have you thrown from the wall!"
"This is going to be trouble, your excellency."
"Minister, I would rather make trouble with the entire family of Garn than the Singers' Society. That fool would ruin us all. If his family or if half the Great Families object I will join the Silent Servants myself and hope for a quiet life."
"Your excellency may hope for a quiet life and what does the city get?"
"Less trouble from them than from the Singers' Society. 'Do not anger a wolf to please a cat.' Has the pretender taken any action against any other city which refused to pay tribute to her?"
"All we have heard of are more letters with more arguments of law, your excellency. In fact, it is said that even Unmarked and Wreol have only paid tribute in the years she visited them personally, and only for those years. Many if not all other rulers seem to feel safe doing the same. And there is no sign that she means to come all the way out here. Word is that the pretender is busy dealing with demonic powers staining the crops of the Homelands."
"Bah. Those backwards, rustic fools. Now, we will make a show of accusing the former Driver of Guards and every guard of any authority with betrayal of the city. Be swift about it and simple executions only, no sacrifices. This is no time for diablery. Let's have the roster. Can we exile all the rest? They're close enough to soldiers, right?"
Why exactly don't you want this to be canon? Is it just cause you don't want to have to read over and over as everyone tries to retell your little snip to Bianca?
Either way, I loved this and I want to see more things like this. Even at the expense of (slightly) longer times between updates.
Why exactly don't you want this to be canon? Is it just cause you don't want to have to read over and over as everyone tries to retell your little snip to Bianca?
Either way, I loved this and I want to see more things like this. Even at the expense of (slightly) longer times between updates.
Glad you liked it. I hope to have the update out in an hour or two.
And it's not canon because I don't want to take the time or put in the effort to reconcile it to canon or canon to it. I didn't even think about players tattling Out Of Character stuff to the QMPC. But you make a good point and I don't want to deal with that in this case.
You can think of this piece of apocrypha as part of a retelling from the future -- possibly far future -- of events that people believe to have taken place. They might have Tombstoned it, too, by pushing events more greatly separated by time or space close together for the sake of a better narrative.
The great purge of Erweh followers? Done by Bianca's agents (and at the same time bards, cultural influencers , "Singers")?
Erweh is the god that imprisoned Bianca.
Evidently leader of the local police force (Guard) was against tolerating this massacre, so King of the city (not wanting to act against Singers) decided to remove him.
My advise is that if you get the urge to write something like this again, keep it in your back pocket & try dropping around the half-way point between updates. Keep peoples interest up.
Yeah. Bianca started demanding tribute during her years of tour. The whole, "It's war, then," thing with Erweh isn't something she got going until later. It takes a while to move around the kind of resources it takes to hire killers in every major city and many other places over the better part of a bit of land that really shouldn't be called a continent but is anyway, even if you have a primitive banking network, sort of.
9 [X] [Backrent] No repayment: just start over
7 [X] [Return] Peyuvoists - research test every 5 years
in the manner Burgeck used to
6 [X] [Revisit] Leave it be. We've got bigger fish to fry
5 [X] [Reintegration] Write-in: Go on tour, visiting
everyone that is nearby enough to
be visited in reasonable time, use
for that less than two years.
Also, send messengers to more
distant authorities to inform them
about your return
"Hrmph.
"It will be an injury to my reputation among my people to not receive what tribute is rightfully owed me. But, fine. I will not demand any of the tribute owed to me over the years of my absence. I look forward to learning what wonders are produced from what is offered me.
"Speaking of wonders produced, I will make myself known first to Peyuvo herself. Do you suppose she sleeps with a knife?
"And yes, there are more important things to do now than reckoning with the so-called Family who plotted against me so many years ago.
"Among those more important things is making myself physically known to everyone I can reach in two years. The roads are quite fine and I move fast in any case. I should have no trouble visiting the all the Lands of the Ten Nations, my 'palace,' my city, the cities of Unmarked and Wreol, and the Schools of Hosts and Forsworn as well. I should even, I think, have time to reach some of the Conquered Cities and see how they fare before those two years are done. And all the while I will have messengers sent to all to announce myself and instruct them on resuming tribute."
[X] [Return] School of the Palace (actually located in Biancvint) - top sorcerous resources & spirit catalog
For the first one I am torn. It is less a matter of what is the best choice, they are all good, but what do we actually Want? I guess I will default to Palace just because they seem a good balance between giving us authority & access to magical lore that might lead to a defense against being sent to the underworld again.
I could definitely be argued to a different position on this one.
"I have more than a few surprises for Erweh if he tries to do that again. His tricks may have held me back for a very long time, but I learned a great deal from them. I had to, or they'd still be holding me back. Not only can I return from the underworld into the overworld wherever I choose. I can reach the underworld on my own. Surely if Erweh himself can do that, he would have followed before and done more to make things difficult for me.
"Yes, yes, Erweh is still a god and I am still not. He can surely make trouble for me. But this one thing is not so much of a concern."
[X] [Revisit] Send a host to kill them all, with witches for the spirit, or get started on it anyway.
More of a long term issue. The actual people who originally did it are all dead, but the spirit could still be a threat in the future. Also pretty peeved about the time skip.
[X] [Backrent] No repayment: just start over
They may not have been paying tribute to you during all that time, but they were certainly paying tribute to someone. Demanding some sort of repayment would be almost like demanding twice the effective tribute. Besides, consider for what purpose do you even collect tribute?
"I assure you they have not been paying tribute, voice. The Free People of the Ten Nations pay tribute to no one but me. Even now that is still true. Any of them that break this last vestige of the Ten Way Pact lose the respect of all other Free People of the Ten Nations."
[X] [Reintegration] Go on tour, visiting everyone until that gets old - WARNING: big time sink
Time is scarce an issue from our perspective, and I believe that Bianca has only barely begun to appreciate the changes that took place during her incarceration. It is likely that the ways people live has changed more in the last 500 years than in the previous 5000.
It is my hope that Bianca will spend some of this time traveling to gain some more detailed understanding of the new ways of doing things. Of how the system of paper money works, of the methods used by metalworkers, clocksmiths, and cobblers. And though I know it may be frustrating, I think Bianca would really benefit from a deeper study of mathematics & geometry.
"I asked after the three-legged, two-wheeled, bowl-topped sighting device and its use. It sounded much the same as was first described, but with more tables. There are codicies where every page is column after column of numbers. And knowing the use of these tables and taking great care with the devices allows fine maps to be made and better roads to be planned.
I am Mechanical Lizard of Metal. Before we, the Cacophony, were so rudely interrupted, I had been formulating some things to say about the creation and application of organized violence and the creation of writing implements.
Now, I will indulge myself by muttering some commentary on what you say. More the benefit of myself and my fellow members of the Cacophony than for you. When I say something especially significant, I will put emphasis on it like this.
So it seems that the making of steel has advanced - the Ten Nations know how to make more steel, and how to make it more cheaply without sacrificing quality, to the point that even common bandits living roughly in the woods make use of steel weapons. The making of textiles also, though I'm not sure in what way.
"I think there was little about those bandits that should be called, 'common.' Their weapons were steel, yes. And, yes, there are tools of steel or iron everywhere there are tools. But the clothing those bandits wore was finer than what the people in the villages wear, and the trinkets in their hoard were likewise gaudier than what I saw on display in the houses of villages or anywhere before I reached my own hoard.
"There is meaning there, I think. But I do not know what it is."
Excellent. It seems the Ten Nations have been learning the formalization of the art of organized violence. And they have learned the merits of professional soldiery. I would have advocated for the creation of such an institution if we as a whole had not been so rudely interrupted.
"I will be looking further into this, you may be sure. I am told on the one hand that many warriors work only as warriors their whole lives. But I am told on the other that the Lands of the Ten Nations have not known despoilment since Erweh himself passed through them long, long ago.
It was obvious that were going to be famines in the aftermath of your disappearance. I wasn't expecting pacts with malevolent corrupted spirits to be the solution, though.
Hopefully, with the return of you and your magic, the Ten Nations will need to rely less on these "demons" and will cannibalize each other significantly less often. That might actually be a good thing to mention when you are reintegrating the Ten Nations under yourself...
"I have seen the numberings of the fields of the Ten Nations and I know of their numberings before I was cast down and how I managed to visit them then. I think they are too many, now, and too exhausted. The revitalizations of the demons are needed more often than my own sorcerous works were. I have looked on fields recently 'blessed' in this way and tasted their soils. There will be more needed than simply a cessation of the one and initiation of the other."
And this has been going on for around two centuries?
Bizzarre. Why is this head of your deceased First Chieftain so incredibly important to this Sovereign? Or is he simply extremely talented at holding a grudge? Worth looking into.
"In his youth, Kartz of Lan first came to my attention when he stole a codex from the Sovereign of Azule. It was unfortunately useless to me because its language was unknown, apparently unknown to any but the Sovereign of Azule. I may ask after the copy of that work and if has been understood at any point in the years since then.
"Eventually, the Sovereign of Azule demanded the book returned along with the head of the one who stole it. But I spared Kartz of Lan, provided he made something of himself and devoted himself to me. And he did, and I found and still find his service worthwhile.
"I had, nonetheless, still considered that I might send his head to the Sovereign of Azule after his death. There might, I thought, be some value in it. And apparently Kartz of Lan thought similarly or was influenced by my Singers to think similar or whatever.
"However, some misadventure befel the group who carried the tarred head of Kartz of Lan to the east and that head did not reach the Sovereign of Azule. He has since been cross about that."
Probably a good thing - it seems that the people of the Ten Nations now think of themselves as of the "Ten Nations" as a whole rather than of any one tribe. The benefits of this should be obvious.
Well, except for Tashburgeck, I suppose. Fortunately, it seems their views have been relegated to angry little hold-outs.
It seems the Ten Nations have avoided the problems of hereditary rulership...
...and have set up government by a committee of representatives of villages and communities.
These representatives will want to know where they stand, now that you are back.
"Few things will please me more than to be unbothered by the pettiest shit that troubles my people. These representatives should stand to continue as they are, so long as they pay me tribute and obey me when their laws are not to my liking."
This can be useful. Whale flesh can be used to create oil that is useful for a variety of purposes, especially for oil lamps or as a lubricant for machinery such as water-wheels and time-keeping machines. You'll risk further angering Rorqual, though.
"Oh, the people have hunted whales for as long as they have made good enough boats. The difference is that these lesser giants do not watch only from the shore for whales. Though they surely must be also watching for whales or outsider boats which they then seek out.
"These people take their boats out onto the open sea, seeking whales.
"Also, jumping out of a boat onto a whale is not the normal manner of spearing them. Normal whale-hunters throw their spear or thrust it from their boat. Jumping on a whale is a kind of madness.
"And, yes, the oil of whales has been known for its burning and grease-making since before I escaped the cave I was trapped in so very long ago."
A philosophy of discovery of natural universal constants, which has yielded some results. Very, very good. I suggest congratulating Peyuvo when you see her.
Now, Bianca, please indulge me. Did you notice what manner of writing tool the table-ruler you interrogated was using to ink his pages of paper? I. Must. Know.
"He had a great many instruments of different sorts: reeds, quills, brushes, and sticks of charred coals. At his writing and counting table he also had a very small knife of hard-to-brittleness steel apparently for preparing and repairing reeds and quills."
[X] [Return] Singer Society - infiltration pretty much anywhere within reach (except Azule)
Assuring your control over the Ten Nations seems to be the first step here.
Other voices suggest approaching the Committee of Representatives who decide by shouting at each other. I suggest a different point of contact.
The Singers were your first first major institution. Before the soldiers, before the Table-Rulers, before the currently governing committee of representatives, before the inventors who make time-keeping machines, the healers who can now reattach limbs, the Singers carried your will to the people of the Ten Nations. And, in your absence, I strongly suspect they have been key in maintaining your myth and elevating it to the height of the monuments that now line the giant raised road you told us about.
While revealing yourself to the Committee first would entrench your returned rulership in name, I think approaching the Singers first would entrench it in fact. The Singers will announce your arrival with great drama and fanfare, they will legitimize your return in song, and with the Singers firmly under your sway, you will gain insight into the inner workings of anywhere under the sway of the Ten Nations. Consequentally, any attempts to usurp or undermine you will be reported to you before they properly begin. This I know beyond a doubt. The governing committee may give you the crown, but the Singers will give you the levers of power.
"My singers will know me whenever I make myself known to them. I have no doubt that they will resume their loyalty to me. How could they not? I made them. I wrote the songs. I taught them to sing. They are mine."
[X] [Revisit] Invite them to come to the Palace School under law of truce and with all hospitality, see what they're about
It's been two centuries since their ancestors wronged you. They don't seem to be of threatening intention, and it will cost little except perhaps time to see if we can come to a beneficial relationship with them.
You can always kill them later, if you really need to.
[X] [Backrent] No repayment: just start over
[X] [Reintegration] Go on tour, visiting everyone until that gets old - WARNING: big time sink
In addition to making it clear to Bianca how things have really changed (as @Ciber suggested), this is important for really making it clear to the 10N that Bianca is back. If they get a representative, they might be suspicious of some sort of soft-coup or a pretender. Bianca herself turning up on their doorstep with an awe-inspiring entourage will make sure they get the message.
"Ah, yes. The table-ruler I waylaid said this might be a problem. In the many years of my absence there would from time to time be some fool pretending to be me.
"Obviously those idiots died and I don't. So it should be clear to anyone who meets me or knows me to have kept the company of someone who would slay a pretender."
"Well, yes. There would be some difficulty for the irresponsible ones who did not safeguard what they should have saved as my tribute. But that difficulty would teach them to better take care if I should go missing again in the future."
Power, glory and prosperity to Bianca the Great, Bianca the Wise, Bianca the Undying and to all those that remain in her favor!
I am the voice Rafin and I have long waited to finally speak with you. Though I had thought that it would be under very different circumstances. Ten thousand curses upon the upstart godling Erweh, who abused his power so. May his Ichor one day be used by the more deserving.
My first advice to you is that, because things have changed so greatly, this is an opportunity to rethink how you used to rule over the Ten Nations. They have changed greatly and trying to change them back will only cost you.
Think about all the things that you actually want from the Ten Nations. The things that are truly important to you.
I believe that you should travel to the greatest places ruled by Ten Nation People and prove to them that you have indeed returned, but also flatter the powerful enough so that they do not feel the urge to "disbelieve" that you are truly who you say you are, because they fear of losing their power. You are revered enough among the people of the Ten Nations that they might well sacrifice their lives in an attempt to futilely combat an evil immortal sorceress due to their loyalty to you. Which means that a greedy liar could rally your own loyal people against you simply by abusing the fact that they don't recognize you.
"I think, Rafin, that if I 'give' them reasons to believe me, circumstances will conspire to arrange things such that I have to 'give' them reasons every time they want something from me.
"Instead, they should find their own reasons, like not wanting to die at the hands of the people they oversee -- or at my own hands if it comes to it -- to believe that I am who I say I am. And if it takes a few lives for those who call themselves rulers to learn that lesson, so be it."
[X] [Return] Elder Speakers of the 10 Nations - authority over TennerLand
[X] [Return] Singer Society - infiltration pretty much anywhere within reach (except Azule)
[X] [Reintegration] Go on tour, visiting everyone until that gets old - WARNING: big time sink
First visit those that consider themselves to rule your people. It is the fastest way to spread the news of your return far and wide. After that though, turn to your Singers and grant them the most of your favor.
Once established, continue by visiting each of the five Schools, proving to them who you are and congratulating them for keeping alive the traditions of table-ruling. Then call for a conference of the leaders of all five so that they may "convince" you and each other that they are the rightful table-rulers. Finally, stop them once they inevitably start fighting and wisely decide that a new School that rules above all five Schools should be founded and that the five of them should head it under your guidance.
"That is a good scheme, if it could be done without being obvious. Or perhaps if it were done obviously, too, so long as the result was satisfying.
"But I see no need to unite the schools. They teach. They may continue to teach. Surely there is something different about the way they now teach from the way the Grand Tabulation once governed. But that does not mean that the people who are now teaching would be worthwhile as rulers or some kind.
"Still, it certainly merits consideration. And it is a good scheme."
"What fold do you mean, Rafin? Each tribe looked after themselves when I left. And now Tashburgeck and Galugr look after themselves. It seems as though they are the ones that have remained in the fold. It is the other tribes who manage themselves differently.
"I suppose it is as if there are three tribes with one being very much larger than the other two, where once there were ten and only Bima Nolco was much larger than the others.
"But Tash and Burgeck and Galugr have not wandered off just because everyone else is now led in something of the manner Eppam once was.
"Wait a moment… Eppam was the tribe of Peyuvo. It may be that this is her doing."
Finally find the time to personally visit all cities and spend at least some time there.
[X] [Revisit] Leave it be. We've got bigger fish to fry.
[X] [Revisit] Invite them to come to the Palace School under law of truce and with all hospitality, see what they're about
Do not seek enemies when you do not yet fully grasp your own people and also already have two powerful enemies seeking your destruction, one of them the despicable godling Erweh.
[X] [Backrent] Write-in: Symbolic but meaningful and difficult repayment. Enough to make them feel it and require overcoming of reluctance, also enough to recreate some personal funds to draw on proportional to the size of the empire, but no more.
Let us be honest. Do you truly need all of that tribute? No. What you do need though is to remind them all that only you may receive tribute. So I say, do not ruin any rulers who just used resources instead of letting them lay around, but do make sure that all of them know that you and you alone have absolute power over them. Make them give you a meaningful and almost painful personal tribute to you and then declare after each such tribute that you approve of their judgement of how the rest of what should have been owed to you was used during your absence.
"There are many reasons to take tribute. One is for my own need, yes. I will have everything in my hoard to use as I see fit, you may be assured. But there will be a need for more soon enough.
"Another is to keep trinkets from the hands of those who will come to discord over the inequity of who has what. And it is far, far too late to do that, now. The Free People of the Ten Nations have had to work these matters out among themselves for a very long time. And as they did not destroy themselves, they may have managed well enough.
"Or perhaps it is not too late. I will learn what the state of things are in the coming months and years.
"Anyway, a third reason to take tribute is to remind people that you are greater than they are. And people do need to be reminded of that regularly. If there is not some memory in them of giving up something to me, they may come to forget that they are lesser than me. I think this is what you speak of. And it is something like what I mean to do, only starting from a blank ledger."
"I am led to understand that though there was already some division at the time, the final break-up of the Grand Tabulation was ultimately over who should occupy the highest position within the assembly. And from what is written, there was no reason a lesser giant table-ruler could not be the one to occupy that position. It's not clear that such a position was needed, as it did not exist for most of the time the Grand Tabulation existed. But that is how I was told it went."
This would mean that there are no places where lesser rulers of Ten Nation heritage submit to more powerful Outsider rulers. This alone provides an invaluable unity that will become even more invaluable if maintained into the future.
"No, no. Clearly, they submit. They only make terms of their submission and demand of those who subjugate them some accounting of what they are paying for.
"Still, you are right that this practice is valuable. The People of the Ten Nations, free or otherwise, know that they are something more than the outsiders under, around, or over them."
"I would be disappointed if some portion of the Ten Nations set about destroying another portion. I expect that correction could be had with measures far short of that kind of slaughter.
"But the rest of your question remains a riddle. I suppose I know only that Tashburgeck tried to extract tribute from other People of the Ten Nations. And now I would like to have questioned the table-ruler further on that matter. Eugh."
"Oh, it has not. How could it when outsiders have learned the words but do not honor the Ten Ways Pact?
"The Free People of the Ten Nations still share much of what they have. But the words, 'your family has so much while mine has so little and only you can right this wrong,' are an insult now. Those words call out one who has not shared enough. They are rarely spoken and never lightly. People will do a great deal to absolve themselves of shame. They will feel an urgency. They are rash, and foolish. And without regular practice, they take offense where before they would simply have shared.
"Most do not wish to make enemies. Many cannot afford to.
"I am told that within the Lands of the Ten Nations there is less inequality between families than there is among outsiders. And I am told this is something the people are proud of. But it is clear to me that they do not know they endanger the peace already by falling short of the Pact that kept the peace for so long."
I might explain to you the paper coin, if I find the time.
Do you see how this is a sign of beneficial trade? Bear's people do not have the manpower to crush the Ten Nations and the Ten Nations do not have the craftmanship to crush Bear's people, so neither has to truly fear the other as of now. Yet Fisher people can produce mules better than Bear's people can and can so get crafted goods that Bear's people have in abundance. Both are better off for it.
"Bah. The matter of the mules is temporary, I'm sure. The Galugr breed their Kahlian Warhorses greater and greater. One day, someone subjugated by Bear's People will breed horses that do not hate them.
"And the secrets and redewings that are traded to Bear's People are the finest that can be had. The Free People of the Ten Nations send to Bear's People the best they have for the lesser, cast-off works of Bear's People.
"Most of what is traded to them is material, in any case. They receive steel and copper and clay and sand and return the smallest portion of what they make with it. They are enriched and those who trade with them are impoverished.
"Trade is only a slow despoiling. If it is so slow that the lesser one not only recovers but prospers, it is no less a despoiling.
"I would have my people be the ones doing the despoiling. But Bear's people will never be mine and I don't yet know what I can do about them."
Within the culture the voices come from, fucking animals has become reviled and forbidden by most religions for centuries. Since most people do not naturally enjoy fucking animals and, within cities, many people don't even get the opportunity to do so, it is easy to hate any who continue the practice. Even among those who do not trust the laws and rules of religions without scrutiny anymore, the underlying logic that it brings diseases and the social mores around sex that make us hate rape enough so as to even hate it when it happens to animals are enough to make the vast majority of people look down upon anyone who fucks animals even without actively following any religion.
Drinking alcoholic beverages on the other hand, due to being healthier than water back when we didn't know to kill germs, has been a tradition among most of our cultures for thousands of years. There are a few religions that forbid it, but even there people frequently disobey. And when a great nation tried to forbid it without the backing of its major religion, the smuggling and secret consumption of alcohol and the massive cost in resources and lives trying to enforce the ban was so horrendous that the the law against it was removed again. In said country there is still a law banning it for anyone under the age of 21, but it is a law that is often broken without too much consequence.
"What is the point of a law if breaking it has no consequence? I think either you must misunderstand the circumstances you describe or I misunderstand what you mean by 'law.'
"And 'religion,' too. Are you from a world where gods walk among you? Or do you mean by 'religion' something that I do not rightly reckon?
"Ah. It has been too long since I spoke with you voices. I may have forgotten the scope of your madness."
I also have a question of personal curiosity. Your Singers came from the tribes and sometimes returned to them to found a family. But what would happen should a Singer that wishes to remain a Singer find herself pregnant? Especially if her lovers were also Singers who wished to remain Singers? How would the child be raised? And how frequent were such events? I cannot imagine that Singers would refrain from having sex. Did they know of a way to reliably prevent unwanted pregnancies?
This is all for now, Oh Great, Wise and Undying Bianca. My voice falters and falls tired. I may return, should I recuperate in time.
"There is herb lore for ending pregnancy, and sorcery as well.
"A Singer who finds herself with child faces the same questions as any unmarried person who finds themself with child. Some foolish few undertake raising the child alone themselves. And some of those don't end with a maddened or dead child, but many do. It is not a task suited to one parent alone, but some do manage it anyway. People are sometimes stubborn and capable of great things.
"The wiser choice is to find a marriage to join where the work of raising the child may be undertaken by all together. And that is if the mother-to-be does not wish to simply give the child up, in which case she should find a marriage that would like another child.
"It does not much matter who the other parent of the child is, singer or otherwise. Marriage is about living together. Raising children together is only one part of that.
"Or that is how it used to be. I should not say that it remains so. I do not know."
...Oh, goodness sakes, I don't remember what name I gave you except that it wasn't Fish. It has been...Perhaps a year, by our perception? Time passes strangely, for us. But I was talking about exactly this sort of mutually beneficial trade when last we spoke.
"Time, voice-who-is-not-named-Fish, is a very good example of how this trade is not mutually beneficial.
"Outside of perhaps Peyuvo herself, I am told there is no one outside of Bear's People who can make the smallest, fist-sized time-reckoners. These devices were first made by the Free People of the Ten Nations. But now there are none who can. Why? Because the time-reckoners made by Bear's People are so much better and, while costly, are still more easily acquired!
"But is there anything for which Bear's People must trade with the Ten Nations? No! If there were some use of these time-reckoners, some need for them, Bear's People would be able to hold that need over all the Ten Nations.
"But Bear's People can get mules from any other people. The same goes for the materials they take in trade and for which they give back only a small fraction of what they make from them. And they can do without the fine redewings traded to them. They can make their own. It is only that redewings, like any admixture, benefit not at all from Bear's gifts to people, so that even the lesser giants can make redewings of greater quality than their neighbors by redoubling efforts in that regard.
"Bear's gifts create inequity. So the lesser giants will always rely on other people for crafts. And so it seems that all other people will always rely on Bear's People for crafts.
"But I will not have my people fooled into thinking that there is sharing where there is truly shearing."
First and foremost, I am pleasantly surprised by just how far the study of medicine has advanced during your imprisonment. Reattaching limbs and performing organ transplants is far more than I ever thought they would achieve by this point in time, though I had already known it to be possible.
That said, there isn't actually all that much technical or medical knowledge I can provide at the present time? Not because I don't have access to information about useful inventions, but because so much about the Ten Nations has changed that I'm unsure what the current state of the various crafts is. As such I have little way to know whether something I would suggest is already in use, beyond the current reach of the tools and skills available, or within the range where implementing it would be feasible. If you could please talk with Peyuvo, some of the people running the steelworks, and the physicians about such before the next time we speak and relay the information it would be extremely helpful.
"Well, you may be sure, Just Write, that I will be talking to these people. I cannot say I understand what you would like to know from them. Is this about layers of technique, again? Is this about the steps by which a product is removed from the work of one person using only what is readily at hand? Nearly all the tools I have seen among other tools, in use, or discarded in refuse have been of metal and well-crafted wood. I have seen little in the way of stone, perhaps only tools of grinding.
[X] [Return] Peyuvoists - research test every 5 years in the manner Burgeck used to
Peyuvo and her followers now represent what is possibly the greatest accumulation of mechanical knowledge anywhere in the world (aside from Bear's People). They represent an invaluable resource that must not be squandered, especially since their talents will allow us to provide much more useful technical advice.
[X] [Revisit] Leave it be. We've got bigger fish to fry.
[X] [Backrent] No repayment: just start over
Old issues that will cause more trouble than it's worth if you try to do much with them. Leave them be.
[X] [Reintegration] Write-in: Go on tour, visiting everyone that is nearby enough to be visited in reasonable time, use for that less than two years. Also, send messengers to more distant authorities to inform them about your return
Much has clearly changed during your absence, and you need to re-familiarize yourself with the Ten Nations. In addition, this tour can serve as an opportunity to revitalize the fields, which will prove a major boon to your legitimacy. Indeed, this will also prove an opportunity to get rid of the Oathbreakers; with your superior agricultural magic they will no longer be necessary in any way shape or form, meaning that it will be much easier to muster support for crushing them. As for why you should get rid of the Oathbreakers, they're a subversive group. Letting them continue to operate will simply cause un-needed harm to the Ten Nations and undermine your authority.
"Ehgh. It is not simply a matter of supremacy. What the demons and Oathbreakers have done to the fields of the Ten Nations is a kind of damage. I will certainly begin the work of restoring the land. But it will not be swift or easy and I do not see how the land can be made to produce sufficiently in the meantime.
"And I have not even seen the vineyards which are said to be the worst."
The situation is both terrible and better than expected.
It's terrible that you were imprisoned. I wanted to share advice, and instead of talking with us, you were forced to waste so much time. Terrible.
Still. It's better than expected, because DESPITE this defeat, people still remember about your authority and mostly prosper. Even if they prosper with less unity that could be desirable, it's still good, very good. Much better than could be expected after so many generations of mortal stupidity without divine guidance. Benefits of table-rulers-servants and writing, I must say.
One of the other voices is mistaken. I'm Black Cat, but I was never suggesting cat domestication. That was another voice a long time ago. Well, not important... It's useful that these cute evil cats were breed to be more useful. Enough time can be a wonder for breeding.
Demon wine out of people sacrificed annually, how lovely. I mean, sounds lovely, but to be honest, that sounds also pretty wasteful and dangrous from risks of discord. Murderers and other people "outlawed" by authorities could be used, perhaps without great discord, yes. But it sounds like wine production consume more people than numbers of serious criminals. Even if outsiders are used, it's still very troubling for disharmony.
"When the way a person is treated can be changed and there is any advantage to be had for others in that change, they will scheme and plot to see that change occur where it suits them. This is the reason for the Fourth Way of the Ten Ways Pact, that no one of the Ten Nations should be taken as a slave as outsiders are taken.
"As before, the people survive for now despite turning away from the Ten Ways Pact. But you may be sure that some who are given over to demons for the sake of a vineyard and their wrongdoings have done little wrong. It is more important that the vineyard and everyone who receives its wine benefit.
"So yes, Black Cat, this is very troubling for the discord it is sure to be causing, even before the times when things get out of hand."
So, only Bear People's use great machines of steam to move their devices and ships. Unfortunate, good that they are few, but still slightly unfortunate. It's something that should be possible also for the Fisher People's. If time-keeping devices were possible, I see no reason as to why steam devices shouldn't be possible after a decade or two with a group of people looking into them.
Steam powered enormous ships, and steam powered wagons moving on rails in between great mines and smelters, oh yes.
We tried to suggest such wonders even 600 years ago, but we were much too early, so early to sound like words of the mad. But now crafts are so enormously better.
"I'm not clear on what Bear's People use the steam wheels for. Do they not have enough wind and rivers and mules to drive their mills, pump their mines, blow their furnaces, and… well, what other need is there for such things?
"A boat with sails may travel as far as there are places along the coast to provision food, water, and materials of repair. A boat with a steam wheel needs wood aged for burning in addition to food and water. But the wind blows all along the coast.
"I suppose it makes more sense on rivers within the lands of Bear's People. And for war along a river, of course, an armored boat with cannon is a fine thing I'm sure. Perhaps I will set Peyuvo on this task."
Humph. Over five hundreds years ago you said, quote: "I'm certain, though, that some bad food is not the result of undercooking". End of quote. Yes, yes, you said that. I'm not sure that answer is in any way needed anymore after so much time... And given that healing arts developed enormously... But eh, I shall answer anyway because answer is simple. There are kinds of tiny life that produce poisons. These poisons can persist even after tiny life is killed by cooking. So this is one of reasons, beyond smell and taste, as to why you cannot salvage rotting meat by cooking it well. Sometimes smell is not yet noticeable... in some unfortunate cases meat still look rather fresh... and yet tiny life managed to do some damage already. So I have no advice beyond obvious "people should eat meat faster after killing the animal, or freeze meat faster, or preserve it better". People probably know this already, especially after additional five hundred years, but eh, no harm in saying it...
The greatest limitation on steam is good steel. The natural behavior of a heated gas is to expand. The greater the heat, the greater the desire to expand, and the stronger the container required. The bursting of a boiler can be just as dangerous as the bursting of a failed cannon. With the addition of flesh scalding steam.
"I cannot say I know Bear's People or steel as well as some do now. But as I knew it, proper steel is a matter of admixture. And admixture does not benefit from Bear's gift. The lesser giants are no worse at admixture and Bear's People are no better, or so I thought it was.
"So if proper steel is the key to steam wheels of one sort or another, the steam wheels of the Free People of the Ten Nations should be no worse than those of Bear's People.
"And so it should be with cannon, then?
"So why do Bear's People have hand cannon and the Free People of the Ten Nations do not?"
NO! Don't go right for the shiny bro. It's not the only thing that matters here. Three said it himself, there are consequences for the action we DONT take. Just this once I would like to head one off. And Peyuvo is already of proven loyalty & disposition. There is a very good chance IMO that we could get her bonus in the future just by shoving a bunch of resources her way. Beneath the light of the Thrice Lost are all falsehoods burned. That those of weak faith might be turned away!
[X] [Return] School of the Forsworn - top diableristry resources (enmity with Oathbreakers)
Upon reflection, the School of the Forsworn may expand Bianca's knowledge of the arcane just as much as the Palace, and perhaps more. Bianca tis already an accomplished arcanist, but this is practically a new field of spiritualism which did not exist before her imprisonment. Moreover, with the return of Bianca the need for daemon assisted agriculture will wane, and the Oathbreakers will naturally become aggressive when upset from their position of power. Thus it behooves Bianca to align herself with the faction most opposed to this potential threat. Also, people must be taught that one aught not lightly break an oath with Bianca.
[X] [Revisit] Send a host to kill them all, with witches for the spirit, or get started on it anyway
WE SHALL NOT BE SWAYED
Were it not for their guiding spirit, they might live. But I am quite certain that the spirit is the true mastermind, and that the murder of all its people will prevent it from regaining power in the future should it avoid our witchery. Also revenge.
[X] [Backrent] No repayment: just start over
No arguments have been fielded against this choice.
[X] [Reintegration] Send those messengers to the leaders of the schools, the Singers's Society, the Elder Speakers, and Peyuvo
In this matter I have been swayed. Perhaps contacting the levers of power first will smooth Bianca's ascension.
Have you no spine man! Bianca needs her skull throne!
As for the "Running Away" option. It completely ignores our goals. The Tenners may well be the greatest concentration of magical lore in the world right now. Lore that Bianca sorely needs for her actual long term goal of becoming a god.
Also, I really don't want to have to build an entire mining & metalworking industry from scratch again.
"Thighbones are better for furniture, as it happens. If you're going to build anything out of bones the treatment and cuts-to-fit are of greatest importance. Brittle chairs are an embarrassment."
So why aren't you speaking out loud then, oh Mechanical Lizard of Metal?
Ahem.
Power, glory and prosperity to Bianca the Great, Wise and Undying and to all those that remain in her favor!
Here is the Voice Rafin once again.
I have noticed that before the despicable godling Erweh ambushed you, you had already fallen into a pattern of having larger and larger periods of time in between each communion with the Cacophony of Voices. May I ask you why? Is there some cost or pattern that you noticed that made you less and less willing to subject yourself to our madness? Is there anything we can do to assuage your worries and get you to visit us more frequently?
"I will call on you voices when I feel that I need you, Rafin, and when the cost of connecting to you is affordable, and when less costly alternatives are not at hand.
"How does it benefit either of us for me to call on you voices more frequently?"
In the hope of hearing your voice more frequently, by the standards of time as they are measured on your side, I thought I could offer you something that no other seems to have done yet. And that is insight about the collective functioning of the very Voices themselves and of the kinds of insights into your world that we gain even without you explicitly telling us.
Here are a few select samples:
We Voices of the Cacophony do not truly fear you, for we are confident that your power will never reach our minds, even should you become a great goddess that wishes to destroy our minds. The item of power that you are using to hear us is too fragile and would break far before the Cacophony itself could come to any harm. Yet many of us Voices are still invested in your prosperity, for we much enjoy the powerful growing even more powerful by our hands.
You could threaten us by destroying our window to your world and we would be swayed by it to an extent, but ultimately even the Cacophony itself is just one of many paths that are open to us and allow us to influence many worlds. I myself have joined hundreds of other voices in the possession of a humble Wizard woman in a very different magic infused world who, without her knowing, we pushed to great heights of power and status. So while we would be saddened to lose you, we would not be condemned to drift in the ether until such time that another being of your magical ability manages to summon us to their aid.
"Many who have thought themselves beyond my reach have learned differently. But I do not find seeking out the mad in their own places to smite them to be the best use of my time. And I hope it never is. What a miserable life that would be. You voices sound bad enough. I'm sure you smell worse."
As for information we gleamed from your world that you might not even know, if you were to flee to the continent in the far west, beyond the home of Roqual, then it is guaranteed beyond all doubt that the despicable godling Erweh would require at least another five hundred years before he would find you.
As for Erweh himself, if he were not a godling then he would still outpace you in raw sorcerous ability by roughly one part in three. The Ichor in his blood increases any action he takes you by another one part in three in power. But the reason that he dominated you so thoroughly in your first bout was due to the aid he had from his priests and the zealots that they raised, with the information he pressed out of your assassins being a lesser factor. He managed to gather such a large amount of zealots in such a short time due to personally intervening to save many people from Enonl from the explosions that your assassins wrought, which, coupled with the lies of his priests, made them become more loyal than a brother with a life debt. You too had aid of course, but once again the Ichor in his blood allows him to make far better use even of mortal aid, all else being equal.
Feel free to ask me anything else that you wish. My loyalty is to you above anyone else, at least in the context of whatever world you find yourself walking in.
I retain the right to tell half truths and lies as I see fit.
"Should I ask you how to secure further gifts from the Old Gods which remain? Or how to best Bear's People in trade? Or how to break their fortifications, despoil their secured lands, and plunder their hoards? Should I ask you how to bend the spirits of the Forest People to my will, to make them mine as the Ten Nations are?
"No. I will ask you how to grow plentiful fruit at so far north of the fruit-growing places, how to read the messages concealed by the wheel of letters with codes I do not know, how to put cannons in the hands of all my warriors or 'soldiers' or whatever they are, and how to interpret the ever-changing face of the moon."
The talk of weak willed city folk has no hold upon me!
Let all hark to my words! For the one who calls themselves "Mechasaurian" tis a lilly livered city folk of weak constitution and feeble mind. I bid that all those voices which would advise mercy unto the Noarites should heed me now! To allow these people and their donkeys anus of a spirit to continue living would only invite future disaster.
"Among the many lessons of centuries is this one: some disasters must be endured in order to secure greater accomplishments. We shall see what comes of the so-called Family and their odd spirit or spirits. You may be sure I will not lightly leave them fully unattended."
That said, perhaps now is the time for something a bit more informative.
Tis my recollection that we left off some centuries ago with the discussion of bearing manufacture. Now the fruits of Peyuvo's labor imply that she may have solved some of the issues you were facing when last we spoke. Certainly the construction of such a wide variety of timepieces means that she has discovered quite a catalog of bearing designs & refined the technique of their manufacture. That in mind, I have a few rough ideas that might be worth investigating.
How about custom custom hammer and anvil to create the rough shape of your bearing. This seems a bit obvious, but if you want to create a ball shape then it would be helpful if your anvil and hammer have matching ball shaped holes. Of course the holes would be challenging to line up while using a hand held hammer, so what you really want is some sort of water powered hammer set to a track so you can know it will come down in the same way every time. And if you are making a water powered hammer then you might as well make it far heavier than any man could wield so that you only need a few hits to get your rough shape.
Hopefully Peyuvo's work on building sized timekeeping machines can also be applied to creating large water hammers. It is really a very similar idea when you get down to basics. The escapement mechanism of the timepiece which transforms the continuous force of a wound spring or suspended weight into sudden bursts of movement could clearly also be used to accumulate the force of a water wheel and release it in quick bursts to lift up the hammer. Larger hammers let you shape the metal with but a few powerful hits, but its greater heft can make it slower to lift, so there is definitely some room for experimentation to discover the best balance.
With a large enough hammer and small workpieces, it is even possible that you could bring many pieces to shape with but a single blow. This is not just applicable to bearings. With clever design of hammer and anvil shapes, It may allow you to rough out many nails, screws, or what-have-you in a single blow! I have even seen great forges that work white hot chunks of metal, as large as a horse, and suspended by a clever system of chains while being precisely maneuvered about the anvil by ten men wielding long pushbars. The hammer itself needed special foundations to prevent shaking apart the buildings around it when in operation.
"Is it the shaping that is the only purpose of the hammer and anvil? If steel can be made into shapes by a single blow of one half of a cast against the other, why not simply cast that steel in the first place?
"I feel like something is missing here. But I did not shape either iron or steel myself. And it has been a very long time since last I spoke with someone about how it is done."
I feel like elaborating on this point. While we have easy access to a great many worlds and gain access to more all the time, the only thing capable of being moved by the methods available to us is information, and our end of this link is being operated by our methods, meaning that information is all that can reach us. Further, since these worlds often operate on vastly different rules from both themselves and each other, what we know is possible in one world often isn't applicable to another. However, aside from a distinctly odd subset, most worlds share an underlying reality framework that allows a great many non-magical techniques to work throughout them, and these are what we have been sharing. Your form of magic cannot work in our world regardless of godly status or other such things, and therefore we need not fear it.
Hello rainbow heart here to answer questions you asked of me. First i was not asking you to try things on random people if you need to test something out on a living thing. Use rats, they are small and their genes are easy to change to suit your needs.
By better mednice i ment stronger the stronger the effect the more likely there is to be other effects you do not want.
When it comes to the herbs i only talk about .effects that i know for sure are there or have strong reason to if you think there are other effects make sure to test them to make sure. When I said bell i meant bee i just misspoke i get very excited when i get to share knowage and trip over my words.
For physical addiction happen when you are taking something in to your body this is when it happens as the body wraps around it so it can withstand it better. That why stopping all of a sudden can kill the body has replaced one of its functions to need it even if it is harmful in the long run.
"This was about the poppy-stuff, right? The waylaid table-ruler had something of the sort. I suppose I'll learn more about that when I get the chance."
With this out of the way I want to say welcome to the age of iron. I have no real ability to plan so with that said i would check around for anything new and what the aragon person's life and knowledge is after you have nothing else that's pressing. In this new age of iron doors that where closed are now open for everyone. Here I will step away from herbs and try to give you devices and more refined medicines that are now within your reach. That is all for now but i will be back soon
"The fins were not easily made. And poorly made steam wheels might break down, or turn only weakly, or burst with violence. And in any case there were free people and bond captives and mules and wind and water wheels and other things enough to do the work. A steam wheel makes poor sense and I do not know why Bear's People bother with them, either."
I can suggest that the first sensible use of moving steam devices is powering great pumps in mines. Especially coal mines, as there is plentiful fuel in such a mine. Movement of ships, as in the case of these mysterious ships of the Bear's People, is reasonable later. Then great steam-powered wagons on special tracks between coal mines and metal smelters.
I think that these few simple sentences may be even more useful than trying to explain yet again how to build the best steam device. Let's try to understand what unique prototypes and ideas they may already have, and provide the best uses. Humph.
When looking at the list I have made it is mostly know age that is easy with a few big projects that need a lot of time to bear any fruit there is a pun in there. But this round there is unlikely to be any big tech projects unless i think of an easy one to grab. looking at my list it is mostly food and medicne as they are things that everyone needs.
"You voices seem to take it as a given that the steam wheel is better than what is in use now, but have not explained why that is so. Can you do so or would that only be further madness?
"And yes, food and medicine are important and nearly any improvements in that regard are meritorious."
I don't want to discourage anyone, but given that Bianca was absent for over five hundred years, I honestly think that this one time, very general advice can be more useful than our usual technical details. Bianca needs to better understand this changed world, we need to better understand...
What I can advise about this changed world, what I already understood... Well. Tashburgeck and the city of Unnamed, that's an ugly situation. They need to recognize not only your authority, but also that no, they are not the only people of the Ten Nations under the sun.
Wars in between your people should be unacceptable. I know that you distrust even trade, but let them trade between themselves, numbers of people increased greatly and trading and paper coins seems to be working. But war is too much.
"There should be no wars between my people. And I have not heard that there have been, exactly. But what I have heard of the view Tashburgeck takes on the other Free People of the Ten Nation is a bit troubling. I will set them straight in that regard when I visit with them.
"To the degree that they still follow the Ten Ways Pact and the others do not, there is division. But I do not want to have only Tashburgeck and perhaps Galugr as my people. So I will need to find what can unite them and bind them to it if I have to haul them kicking and screaming.
"And, of course, out in the Conquered Cities where the Free People of the Ten Nations rule in some fashion but do not live all together, there is surely a great deal more fighting. And there, yes, my people make war on my people. I would think the revolts of those they've subjugated would be enough to occupy their spears and axes, but this is apparently not the way of things."
Especially Tashburgeck and others like them, people deluded to falsely believe that they are only free people... These deluded fools need to be prevented, with force if needed, from engaging in warfare against other Ten Nations people. And from raiding, or taking as bond captives other people of Ten Nations. If they refuse, then their leaders are no better than Gazark. And justice was well done to Gazark.
"Tashburgeck has one city and the land around it. The Lands of the Ten Nations are far greater than that, especially since they apparently include the original lands of the Tash and Burgeck Tribes. I do not expect any meaningful warfare to be taking place between these two at this time.
"Now, Wreol is not bound to the Council that rules the Lands of the Ten Nations and is right beside Unmarked. So it may be, I am thinking, that there was conflict between these two. And the Giants' Bridge at Unmarked remains, so perhaps Unmarked raided or raids the people of the Conquered Cities beyond the river Buraghm, which is called a different name now, of course."
Exceptions can be made against these called "outlaws", sacrificing murderers and bandits sounds reasonable even if these murderers or bandits were once from the Ten Nations. Population of strangers and number of good homes are so great that throwing troublemakers into winter ceased to work properly and reliably, I think. So this custom, to treat outlawed worse than even outsiders, this custom may be reasonable. But such "outlaws", criminals, bandits, they are exeptions.
"Always there is benefit in taking. So people will find ways to take from others. And because mortals live short lives they are often not wise enough to find ways to benefit that do not bring about their own harm. This was the beauty of the Ten Ways Pact: so long as I was the only one taking from my inferiors, peace was largely preserved.
"Certainly, some took power from others by arranging that they be beaten by their family or cast out in winter. But so long as every person's power was kept small, there wasn't so much to gain and peace was largely preserved.
"Now all these things have passed away. And you may be sure that throughout the Lands of the Ten Nations the powerful take from the weak and the bold take from the meek. And there is trouble because of it, you may be sure.
"What matters to me is to find a place to work, a people to gather riches and wisdom for me, and time with as little interruption as possible. So I now wonder if I should not have instead traveled far away and spent a few decade beating the Ten Ways Pact into the heads of a new group of people, so that I might have my time and materials and peace.
"No, no. I would, at least, need to take a large number of books with me. There is too much known to turn my back on this land."
And you could remind people that you hundreds of years ago invented iron, steel, glass for the Fisher's People, and better numbers than outsiders had. And many other things. Your people developed details. Yes, they developed many details. Yes. But the most important part started in your thoughts, Bianca. Without you they would be nothing.
"Yes, I suppose that even if they have tainted the land I tended and turned their backs on the Ten Ways Pact, the Free People of the Ten Nations still rely heavily on boons I have granted to them.
"But do not think I do not notice, voice, that you are claiming that what you and others like you have provided is what binds my people to me. Do not mistake your place or think yourself indispensable. I am Bianca the Undying and my power is my own."
I would also consider creating a new Grand Tabulation, without dissolving any existing Schools, but over all. They could deal with things and papers that you deem too boring.
"There are already people and practices that deal with things and paper right now. I may cast some aside as wasteful or add some more to cover what is missed. But I have no need to replace everything that is already doing the work I want done right now.
It's me again and I still can't remember what name I gave for you to use except that it wasn't Fish. ...Fuck it, I'll go by Nobody from this point on. ...Mostly because it's funny, and on your end of the line I don't have a body. ...Not that I'm particularly enamored of mine, either, because truthfully it's entirely the wrong sort. Huh. I wonder how, or if, that works, in the Ten Nations. But I do not wish to cause consternation to the forces ruling over the world as they have to dig into thorny social issues of ours, so I will just...leave that be.
....Huh, our unique insight into the mechanics of your world is actually proving to have some small niche benefits.
...Most of this is honestly going to sound like common sense. But I want to point out that there are numbers to it and in it.
Specifically, the numbers are a pool of chances-in-10 of getting a success, which is then compared against either a static target or the results of the pool of the opponent's own chances-in-10.
Magic, or great heroism, or divinity, is one of the very few ways to increase the range of chances-in-10 that grant successes, generally.
Otherwise, your average mortal has three chances-in-10 of getting a point towards their task.
The other factor improving one's chances of succeeding on a - narratively contested, perhaps? - task, is having support. Going it alone leaves you with a sizeable pool of chances-in-10 to work with, but you had perhaps a third again boost to your pool of chances from your mortal support when you fought Erweh.
...Erweh had a whole fucking lot of chances-in-10, generally. I think the highest we've ever seen, for that matter, at 15 chances in 10 and a success on 5 of them.
The other thing is: The things you ask us about at the end of your talks, the stuff driven by your decisions, are most likely to be affected by these mechanics, especially when they're - broad questions.
...I swear I recognize these mechanics from somewhere, but then, chances-in-10 are pretty dang common as a way of systematizing chance.
groan. Nobody, that is an utterly pointless and backwards way of describing what snippets we get when Bianca is not speaking with us. The dice are not the sole arbiters of what happens in Bianca's world, they are how our perception of events is filtered. Focusing overmuch on that is utterly stupid and counterproductive, since it will distract from actually effective measures.
Yes, yes, we fell that some things are like dice, but these things are not dice, that's a great simplification of...
Ugh. Nevermind, talking about this matter feels like stepping into madness, and I'm one of these voices that try to be less mad and more useful. Nevermind.
The chances in ten thing is a ramblings of someone who got extra mad today. But they aren't always mad. I think they just had an off day. Anyway, the general idea that events have probabilities and sometimes these probabilities can be determined, and that this can help you make reasonable decisions and predictions of limited, specific aspects of the world around you using mathematical models..
THAT is useful.
It's not an "off day". I am precisely as sane as the rest of you. Probably. ...Though given that we're told you hear more voices than we do in the Cacaphony, Bianca, that's not a comment meant for you.
But this is a unique tool Bianca has, that only someone within the Cacaphony's field of concern will, and I wanted to poke it.
Certainly, statistics in general has much broader applications! But I never took that math class. So I'm going to focus my efforts on things I can explain.
"What in all of the over- and underworld are you talking about, Nobody and other voices?
"Of course assistance increases the likelihood of success. It's right there in the word! That is a... statement of definition? Erh. I don't have a word for this. But I know what the word 'assist' means, thank you.
"I know even less of what to make of the rest. I have met Erweh three times now. I know his power.
"And, yes, magic is powerful and divinity is far more powerful and mortals are, generally, not.
"I do not know if there is anything else in the madness presently. But do keep at it."
Hello rainbow heart here With you being gone for so long many might have forgotten why you are the best choice to follow A great way to remind them of that is though things that make there lives better like luxuries so with that in mind my main focus for this time is going to be giving some advice for techices on how to decrease the amount of sickness and things most enjoy .
Growing hops better They need plenty of climbing space in a sunny location (south facing is ideal), with well-draining soil.
, try to find a place that provides some shade during the hotter hours of the afternoon. Hops climb clockwise up a support system by using tiny hairs. To support the hop bines, you'll need to use string (e.g. hemp, wire, fencing and netting) that will allow the hop to shoot upwards
"If I passed by hops I did not take note of them. But before my second captivity -- and third and fourth, I suppose -- I knew them to be grown on trees or on wooden frames. It seems strange that you suggest they could be grown on rope instead. That does sound as though it would make harvest easier, as well. Instead of walking or even climbing across the frame, the hops could be lowered into piles on their ropes.
"The question might be how tall the poles should be that the ropes would be strung between, and if there's any tricks to doing so."
Scientific method is a way to do science and slove problems Step one Ask a question or find a problem .Step two look for information that is relevant to step one. Step three make a guess on the right answer of the question or how to solve the problem.Step four test your solution on a small scale.Comaper to your control group which you have left alone. Step five record your data. Step six bassed off of your date confirm or reject your anwer. Step seven repeat a few times and have others go over your data By doing this you make sure it was not a fuke
"I think this is about what is going on at the schools of medicine where new medicine work is made and perhaps evil things are done to people. I will know more in the coming years, I am sure."
Cloth masks now may be a good time to put mask wearing in to your culture as it slows down the spread of sickness Social disating by getting peplo to stand farther away from each other you can reduce the amount of person to person sickness spreading.
"I will see what can be learned of how much difference this makes. I expect it will not be so much as the placement of wells. And that is… perhaps not discouraging but less interesting. It is important for the people to see and know each other's faces, and to touch."
Teaching techniques some good ways to teach include. With younger students those who are still kids try using games any example is when trying to teach kids how to keep beat in music the teacher could play a song with a smooth part where they run around and then a part where the beat is easy to hear where they should then stop and try and swing there arms to the beat this makes learning fun.Project based learning an exmalpe is students try and build a device to keep a small ball of fired clay from breaking when dropped from a height where it would shatter with out one.
Try to relate the lesson to something they do everyday or very often. Try to have the students find out the lesson them selfs or at least give them a shot at trying it before being told the anwer. Try and be positive when they get thing worng this makes the task of leaning less stressfull and they will be more willing to try again. When students can not make the jump to knowage alone be straight forward. Try not to use repation this makes it harder to be invest is harded to rember and dose not account for social and conivated learning.Give them things that relate to the lesson at hand to look at and mess around for the duration of the lesson. Test them often to make sure they are learning
"But surely the students who make their way through the repetitions of learning are the ones worthy of the role of table-ruler. Teaching does not only impart knowledge, each greater step of teaching also winnows out the people who are not worth the trouble of being taught the next greater step. Only the studious will be effective table-rulers, so it is best that those who are not are found as early as possible. Not only does that save the resources of teaching table-rulers, but it allows that person who would never be a good table-ruler to get started on the lessons for the life they will actually lead. And just as surely, it is the same with my singers and with those who would learn the ways of spirits and with those who would make the most of their Talent."
Making sugar with the climate you are in the best choice would have to be sugar beets. Which need to be made it will not be easy but it will be worth it in the end. But before that you should know what sugar is. At its most basic level it is something the body finds very easy to turn in to energy. It taste sweet and only sweet. Now beets turn out to have a good amount it with in them. Beet is very red and when boiled with dye things red. You can get some sugar out of these but you are going to want to breed them for more. As you breed for them to have more sugar they should turn white. Once you have your beets here is what you do to get sugar
Clean your beets.Shred your beets and in to a pot they go.Add just enough water to cover the beets.Boil them and then simmer until they become soft .Remove the heat and strain the beet pulp out of the pot using cheesecloth.t.Hold the cheesecloth full of pulp over the pot and squeeze as much water as possible out.Simmer until it becomes thick, honey-like syrup, stirring frequently, then remove from heat.Place in sheet that can handle the heat. As it cools sugar crystals will from you can crush them to make them smaller. Store the sugar. The pulp can be fed to animals. With the beets you should have naturally you will only get one to two percent of beets weight in sugar but in time you can make better beets that give higher amounts.
"I know this plant. It is grown for its leaves and the rest is fodder, usually for hogs. I do not know it to be red or a good dye, though. Do we have an issue with a name or an issue with a plant, then?"
Another type of sugar this one has a diffren taste but still sweet and still good,
Find a maple tree it has five pointed leaves and the sap tastes sweet. you can harvest its sap the same way one dose a pine tree. Heat that sap for a while. When it is very hot take from heat a stir for five minutes pour in to something that can hand the heat wait for the crystal to from and there you go you have sugar
A simple thing you can do with sugar is throw together two parts sugar one part water ⅔ part light syrup how to make that is very soon.boil this for a long bit then take off heat add food safe dye beet root that has been dryed and powder could work for this or some flavoring oil Mint is a good choice for this. Both also works. Mix them in and then pour on to a sheet. When the edges are hard enough to hold there shape cut in to parts. Note sugar is really close to eat able glass and a lot things you can do to shape glass you can do with sugar.
Canning goods Step one choose food in good contion wash for hands to keep them clean the whole time Peel and cut up fruits or vegetables remove any parts you do not want to eat. Make the canning liquid For light syrup boil 6 parts water 2 parts sugar. For medium add another part sugar for heavy syrup add another part on top of that. Syrup is for fruits. The next thing is for veggables Place 5 parts vinegar, 1 part water, 1/12 parts salt, 1/24parts sugar. Bring it to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.
Your next step is to strelize any thing you will be using boil them for 10 minutes after that you want the lids to be put in water that had just stoped boiling on the part of the lid that will be meeting the jar you want wax that is very soft but not liquid. Put the fruits or the veggies in the just strelized jar leave some space at the top pour in you just stoped boiling syrup or brine. Still leaving space at the top get rid of any air bubbles now put on the lid with the wax seal.
If all is done right you have now made a place where there is none of the little life that makes food rot because they are eating it and none can get it. This will make the food last for far longer than it would even frozen. Canned goods can last up to five years before they spoil but be carful breaking the seal will make them no longer free of the little life.
"This is more clear and straightforward than the process given before: no pot-within-pot, no bursting of steams, and no lid fittings. So that is good.
"But if there is meant to be room left at the top of the jar, how is all air removed? It sounds as though that space at the top will have air in it. So what air bubbles do you mean? How can it be known if there are air bubbles among the fruit or vegetables in the jar? I suppose one might simple give it a few shakes and assume that the brine or 'drink' has settled into all gaps. That's better than nothing, certainly."
How to refine the painkiller in willow . Short anwer it is out of your reach. But good news the willow bark tea is just as good as the pill from the pill form is just far more compact.
"It is quicker and more sure to raise a frame of wood than to grow a tree to a certain shape. What about growing on trees is better for vines? Once I know, I might see a way to make something similar for the frames, or might know why preparing an orchard for vines is worthwhile.
You can take the cats further to the levels of dogs by just taking the ones that are the easiest to train and breed them.
There will likely be more later but for now i am tired and with that being said goodbye
"I don't know that 'better' cats are needed any further. They gather around the graineries. They kill the grain pests.
"Ah. Do you mean that they should be trained to not kill the fowl? And that those who take best to the training should be bred and the others removed? I suppose that would proceed on its own if the people knew how to train cats so that they do not kill fowl. Those that do not take to the training would be killed for the sake of the fowl they might kill.
"But cats are bold hunters. It is said that the greatest of cats might pluck a newly farrowed pig from its pen if the sow is not mindful. How can they be trained to spare the fowl kept by people but still slay all the grain pests?"
I believe that it is more that those simplified chances-in-10 are an artefact of how we see the world when not listening to Bianca and less about how the battles truly happen. Narrative support is what we see increase the numbers, but trying to purposefully engineer narrative support is likely to lead to less numbers instead.
Or maybe this is all just madness talk.
1. Going to the School of Hosts, School of Forsworn, or the Oathbreakers first. Mercifully allow them to form your royal guard as you survey the lands you missed for 500 years. (If you want, here would be where you could replace this with the Refuge of Grace, but that comes with other complications I'm sure)
"You voices have talked before about gathering warriors to myself as personal guards. But if you ever made clear how that would help, I do not recall. Any threat to me is a greater threat to mortal warriors.
"But perhaps the Forsworn or Oathbreakers have some abilities or capacities that might allow them to stand against such great foes. And perhaps having some of those and some with the Talent with me at all times might be better than traveling alone. They will need to keep up."
2. You're going to need transportation, and it seems like water-ways are wiser than land-based travel, so time to appropriate a suitably sturdy boat.
3. Then go for the whale-hunting giants next. Mercy, again I must stress it, mercy should be applied to allow these savants the opportunity to integrate into your plans. If they survive the ordeal, perhaps their adept and nimble building prowess would come in handy.
"Those lesser giants on far away islands who hunt whales are unlikely to have much to contribute at this time. They are illiterate. Their craft is as poor as that of all lesser giants. And I may have to kill some number of them, surely including their greatest and most bold, before they will understand that they cannot kill me.
4. Lastly, go for the gold: Rorqual is just predictable enough that there's a novel way to tell of her presence. By this time some sort of plan should have emerged, so strike true and redeem yourself for getting caught slacking so hard.
"Ah. I see. You mean that I should straight away assemble a band of dangerous people and experienced hunters of whales and go questing against Rorqual.
"For all that I am Undying and cannot be killed, I do not intend to find out what might be required to escape Rorqual and her rage. It is better, I think, that Rorqual remain as ignorant of me as she might be now. If she is the Old God I should slay for power, then I should not seek her until I have a much better plan than this.
"Though perhaps Rorqual is the Old God I should make plans against. I know how Rorqual may be met, unlike Wolf or Hawk or certainly Bear. And I know Rorqual will stand and fight, unlike Hare or Fish. And, of course, Rorqual still lives, unlike Crocodile and Deer and possibly Leopard.
"Ugh. Of course the Old God most most readily fought would be the Old God least easily fought."
Yeah....at this point I feel like I'm going to need another chunk of Bianca doing stuff to get enough of a feel for where tech and society even stand to suggest anything further.
"What specific techniques do you voices generally mean when you speak of technique in general?
"The company of people stand in wide farmlands and pastures and villages in the Lands of the Ten Nations. Outside it, there are things like villages, but larger and more greatly peopled and surrounded by walls. They call these cities, and they tend to stink of the admixtures of tanning and of people and of shit. A city must be able to force the people of the farms and pastures around it to provide it with food or else it dies. So cities have 'soldiers' for when there are objections. Most cities have rulers. Some have councils of rulers. Some are ruled by a Great School. Among the people there are many smaller companies in which people of like craft gather to learn and conspire. Some of these have their own rulers. Some of these, like Great Schools, might rule.
"Beyond that, I do not know what you are want to know."
That is not something that we know for sure, not at all. Tech is her hobby, not main thing.
There was a lost tree with words very wise...
My apologies, Bianca, for previous words that are like madness. It was an answer in dispute with another voice and we used weird words. Anyways, let's return to more sanity.
Rainbow Heart, warning, overuse of sugar can damage human teeth, bacause the same tiny life that eats teeth also loves sugar.
It can taste good, yes, a very sweet taste, and eating something with sugar once or twice per week is fine. Nice trade good I suppose.
And Rainbow Heart, so much time passed that their best specialists can do blood transfusions and organ transplants. Sure, such wonders of healing crafts are probably very, very, very rare. But I'm not sure that they still need information about medicinal plants.
"I am, in fact, unsure I believe that organs may be swapped about between people. It's a bit much, really. I will test the claims, though, and learn more.
"But do tell me your best medicine, voices. I will not run out of interest in medicine easily."
Mask wearing is not, is not at all wise outside of times when air-spreading disease spreads rapidly. Masks are uncomfortable. Even when cloth is cheap, many people hate them for good reasons.
Masks might be uncomfortable, but apparently there are cultures that manage to completely mummify half of their adult population while in public, for reasons of religion and modesty. If masks were to become a religious proscription for the whole populace (or at least the adults that are not currently at battle or doing heavy physical work) then there might be some use.
Though I guess that in the former case the face veiling tradition is often enforced by people who do not need to wear the veils themselves.
I don't think it would be that hard for our Singers to spread the advice "If you are feeling a little sick, then cover your mouth and nose to prevent spreading sickness".
It helps quite a bit (eventually negated if your population is also resistant to vaccines and other measures though, in which case it only slows down societal onset if the illness is vurelent enough...)
"I believe the people know that cloth masks may block tiny life, in both directions. If cloth is so plentiful that bandits dress like kings, I imagine there is enough for masks for their sick and those who tend to them. But it is true that all regard a person in a mask differently than they do a person of bare face. And the latter is generally preferred.
10 Nations had soap even when they were 9 Nations. Soapmaking was one of first things that I decided to teach Bianca.
Now, if you have some ideas about massive and easy production of enormous amounts of soap, perhaps with help of great devices, then that's perhaps a different matter.
"There had never been enough soap for the most rigorous use. And the sharing of soap was not equal, since some people use it a great deal more than others. Some are wasteful, even. And that did not go well for them.
"I do not expect it to be too different now. And I expect that very regular slaughter of whales would be needed to produce the amount of soap I believe the people should have. But who knows. Perhaps the hogs are fatter now, and in large enough numbers that everyone has enough soap, even the soap-troubled. The waylaid table-ruler had soaps that smelled of strange flowers."
"Rorqual cannot be watching all the whales of the world from where she is. There is another ocean, I have been told, to the far south and east. And boats move about there with only the normal troubles of storms and other things that break boats but are not Old Gods. I do not have other reasons to believe that Rorqual looks after the whales of the ocean she is in, either. And there are islands between the seashore of the Lands of the Ten Nations and the open ocean, I am told. First there are islands nearby. Then there are greater islands further to the west. And Rorqual is not known to travel in the seas between those different clusterings of islands, or between the nearer islands and the seashore of the Lands of the Ten Nations.
"Rorqual also did not look after that First Person to whom she gifted greatness and she does not look after Giants to which she gave a similar gift. Wolf does not look after wolves, either. Though it is possible to give offense to her by declaring with sufficient volume your disdain for her while also wasting the lives and meat and pelts of some number of wolves. It's the effort, not the wolves, that angers her. Or so it is said. I have not tried to rouse her anger in this way and have no need of such trouble yet.
"Rorqual, it is said, does not even care about the end of the world. An act must be personal in some way in order to win her ire."
Which brings up an interesting question. Now that Bianca has had her first fight with a god, does she think that more developed mortal arms would be worth pursuing? From the brief description we got, it seems like her sorcerous might proved more useful than simple martial ability.
Depending on what she thinks is most worth pursuing, we could move towards more potent replacements for bursting dust, or perhaps some exotic poisons? How does magic fare against metal? Could some sort of armor be devised through binding of spirits which would counter Erweh's underworld trap? Are gods vulnerable to overloading of the senses that would not affect Bianca? Incredibly bright flashes of light, thunderous noise, or a stench so terrible that when it was first created, and entire town spontaneously fled for the hills.
"Yes, I would like to light a hand cannon directly into the belly of Erweh. Hah! Or into his face! Better!
"Or perhaps the two-cannon-chain device described by some voice or another? I doubt that such a thing could have been ready when Erweh came to me before, but the world is full of wonders. And I would like Old Gods and new alike to know that they should not come to me seeking trouble.
"So, yes to poisons. Yes to more potent bursting dusts. Yes to devices of rending and piercing. Yes to battering and bashing and anything else.
"Magic fares well enough against metal. Magic that breaks does not break metal as easily as it breaks pottery. Magic that heats may heat metal faster than it would stone. Magic that draws one into the underworld doesn't bring metal with it, or pottery, or stones. But these may be destroyed or simply left behind. I did not notice.
"I do not think binding spirits as armor is a good idea for facing anyone of great will. And surely the gods must have great will. It may be that he cannot, but I would expect Erweh to have the trick of compelling spirits by will.
"Or perhaps you mean the armor of spirits to keep him busy? Yes, it is possible he could not simply will all of the protecting spirits away at once. Perhaps that would take his time. Or perhaps not.
"I will have to think on what spirits, bound how, and to what end. In the broadest terms this sounds like folly. But that also means Erweh is less likely to expect it.
"If I create a blinding flash of light while I cover my own eyes, that might well trouble Erweh for at least a moment. I do not think it can be known without trying. Do you have some trick beyond bursting dust for creating a great flash of light?"
I have reached the point where i am no longer going to suggest herbs but insede more refined medications and treatments and also the sugar was just supost to be a thing that people like to act as a remder that listening to Bianca only leads to good things.
"I am all for giving the people more reasons to mind my words. Please do provide techniques for refining the stuff of medicine, or techniques for techniques or however it should work."
"In most of Biancvint, builders can dig into the ground without seepage. So there are some buildings with deep foundations.
"I do know of one where doors faced out in all directions from rooms that did not all connect inside and where different, small families lived. This building had two levels in the ground. The first opened into pits with stairs leading to the street, the second was rooms reached by doors in the floor. Above this were three levels of rooms of stone which were all reached by stairs outside the building. And atop that where two levels of wood. The first of these was used for living only in the summer, otherwise dry storage. The second I believe was meant to be the same, but was really only used for storage ever. And these were reached by ladders of wood, again on the outside.
"No other building was so great in size. Some had three level of stone and one of more careless wood, more two floors of stone, with or without a wooden level on top. And entrance by pits is troublesome for rain, and splashings from the streets, and waste, so that pits must be walled off and still need cleaning. The air sours more easily in such places."
"No, no. It was known that the cities in the south are greater. And they grew greater the further south my far-ranging hunters and false traders traveled."
Also. Would it be possible to buy or capture hand cannon or steam device of the Bear's People for study and understanding? Though, humph, knowing Bear's People... their designs are probably overcomplicated and overdepended on perfect craftmanship...
There was mistake in my explanation of hand cannon production, these 500 years ago. It's one piece of good metal that should be hammered red hot into pipe shape on a metal form and around a stick, not two pieces. It should joint into itself.
"Hmm. Yes. It should be possible to take from Bear's People some small portion of that which they refuse to share or 'trade.' There are, as I see it, two problems in this most meriting consideration.
"The first is, of course, obtaining the items. Bear's People have always guarded their goods with care. And the craft of their tools of this guarding is as fine as all the rest of their craft. Further, while Bear's Gift does not extend to any part of arts which require the Talent that do not involve crafts of the hands and tools, there are apparently no fewer of Bear's People with the Talent than live among other folk. And Bear's People live much longer than Fisher People, so many of those with the Talent do grow more skillful in the arts. It will, I think, be a task of many attempts for few successes, from which follows the second problem.
"It is important that such attempts at theft not be connected to the Free People of the Ten Nations. I do not mean to lightly make conflict with Bear's People. That will come, surely, and when it does I mean to win. But it should not happen yet, or over something like this. ThHere will need to be layers of deception, I think. The thieves will need to be outsiders. And the ones who hire the thieves will need to be another group of outsiders. And these should not know that the ones they will deliver the items to are my people, so perhaps another layer will be needed. And all of that, of course, will require time to prepare.
And I'm telling you, the spirit is probably tied to the bloodline. The only way to be sure is to scatter their bones before us like chaff unto a storm! I want to kill the Noarites.
Why?
They may become a threat.
But they are not currently a threat?
They may become a threat.
But that's evil!
Bianca is Evil
We assist Bianca
I want to kill the Noarites.
Such is antithetical to commonly accepted ethics.
I don't care.
It is a game.
I want to kill the Noarites.
All other players will surely vote against this action
By that logic blasting apart every single star in the sky is a sensible course of action, to prevent other worlds from developing life that could one day pose an issue.
Well, ugh, we have bigger fish to fry? I mean, we don't even know yet if all Conquered Cities will accept Bianca's supreme authority properly, as they should? Why waste time for a spirit and people that no longer rule anything?
"As time allows, I suppose I will look into the matter. But the 'Family' was waned in power and is far away. As you voices have said, there is other meat to prepare and which will feed more people."
I agree about stars and long-term goals. Many stars are enormously far-away suns, others are worlds. In the very, very far future, it may be a decent idea to conquer other worlds and disassemble at least some for resources.
But that is very far away.
In regards to the present situation and much closer future... Bianca's free people still cannot make even steel wagons, or steel ships, or steel bridges. And I heard that the Bear's People can, well at least ships. Though perhaps these ships have only steel armor plates on wood, and not everything out of steel? Humph... Regardless. Bear's people superiority is irritating and needs to be solved.
On another note, now I feel like talking about how stars work.
First, it must be made clear that the sun and stars are by and large the same type of object; the only difference of note is that the sun is much closer.
Second, it needs to be made clear that while under most circumstances that rule of elements not turning into each other holds true, there are some situations in which that is not the case. For the rules about how this works to make sense, we need to explain the internals of atoms. Within the scope of conventional matter, there are three components of note, the electron, the proton, and the neutron. The electron has a negative electric charge, the proton a positive charge, and the neutron no charge. The proton and neutron are also vastly heavier than the electron, with the neutron being ever so slightly heavier than the proton. The electron is by all accounts indivisible, while the proton and neutron are each composed of a trio of particles called quarks, though said particles aren't important to talk about right now.
The protons and neutrons are all clumped together in the center of the atom in an impossibly dense lump known as the nucleus, while the electrons occupy a much wider region around said nucleus; their location within that region is by and large impossible to pin down for extremely complicated reasons, but know that electrons being detached, added, or interacting with the electrons of other atoms defines the structure of matter, the nature of electric current, and chemical reactions. However, what we are talking about right now are nuclear reactions, which involve doing things with the nucleus of an atom.
Broadly, different types of atomic nucleus are more stable than others, with iron being the single most stable atom in existence. Elements lighter than that will yield great amounts of energy when subject to nuclear fusion, in which they are forced together to make heavier nuclei. By contrast, elements heavier than that will yield great amounts of energy when subject to nuclear fission, in which the nucleus is blasted apart into smaller fragments. Of these two operations, fission is vastly easier, but considerably more dangerous and suitable fuel much rarer.
Stars generally speaking run on nuclear fusion; they are primarily composed of Hydrogen and Helium, the two lightest elements in the universe. Their sheer size produces the gravitational field needed to crush their cores to the point of initiating nuclear fusion, the energy released from which prevents the star from collapsing further. There are other means of igniting nuclear fusion, but aside from setting off an extremely destructive fission device in close proximity we have not mastered any in our own world. Anyway, this nuclear fusion process will gradually get hotter as time goes on, heavier elements needing hotter temperatures to sustain fusion, and that makes the star get brighter over time. In addition, the heavier a star is, the faster it will burn its fuel, and the less time it will last; the smallest stars can burn so long that if you lit one at the dawn of time (roughly 13.7 billion years ago, assuming no deviations in the origin of reality from our homeworld) it would barely be a percent through its lifespan, while the largest stars can be more accurately be compared to a massive pile of bursting dust in the process of actively exploding. Due to the confluence of these factors, we can estimate that your world has roughly five hundred million years before the sun heats it to the point of being inhospitable to life, assuming it remains at its current distance.
You may also be wondering what happens when a star begins making iron and where heavier elements come from, and to explain the answer we must now speak about the death of stars.
Relatively light stars such as your sun are incapable of making iron in the first place; they simply do not have the mass required to crush their cores further after producing Carbon, Oxygen, and Neon, meaning fusion will cease after making them. Prior to this point the immense temperatures of such processes will cause the star's outer layers to swell and engulf nearby objects, the star swelling into something we know as a red giant. Eventually the star's outer layers will drift away, leaving a lump of incredibly dense and incredibly hot Carbon, Neon, and Oxygen behind. This lump weighs almost as much as the star had to begin with, and will shine with a faint light from its stored heat for an extremely long time. We know this sort of star corpse as a white dwarf. They don't usually result in heavier elements, unless enough additional mass is added to ignite a runaway fusion reaction in their core, spurring both an extremely large explosion casting vast amounts of mass into the cosmos, and the White Dwarf's conversion into a Neutron Star.
Heavier stars than that fuse all the way up to Iron, and then they are stuck. At this point a core collapse supernova will ensue, the sheer gravity of the star pulling its outer layers in at extreme speeds, producing one last blast of fusion when they slam into the core. This will blast off significant amounts of matter in one of the most destructive explosions it's possible to produce, and collapse the core into either a Neutron Star or a Black Hole depending on specifics.
Black Holes are bizarre objects that represent a rather extreme hazard to anyone nearby; their gravity has reached such an extreme level as to sunder space and time; this produces a point of no return known as an event horizon, at which point time grinds to a halt; we know very little of what goes on below the event horizon, but we are fairly certain that within all trajectories towards escape lead into the past, and all possible futures lead to whatever unpleasantness lurks at the center of the black hole. Outside the event horizon, this extreme level of gravity combined with a just as extreme level of rotation produces something known as the ergosphere, in which all mass and energy is forced to circle the black hole at absurd speeds in the same direction as it spins while also being stretched apart at the atomic level. It's possible to get some use out of the ergosphere, but that's a matter for the extremely distant future. Black holes seldom play any major role in the formation of heavy elements, at least on their own.
Slightly less extreme are Neutron Stars, in which their gravity has crushed them into one gigantic atomic nucleus wrapped in a thin crust of iron. These are the source of truly heavy elements, but they only give up their bounty when forcefully broken open. Barring weapons of truly extreme magnitude that you will not be able to produce for a very long time, this usually occurs as the result of a collision between two neutron stars, or when a neutron star has an uncomfortably close encounter with a black hole. The energies involved in such are truly apocalyptic, as the degenerate matter cores of the neutron stars involved fly apart into smaller pieces with extreme violence.
Anyway, for imparting a basic understanding of the workings of stars, I do believe that this will do for now.
"Have voices spoken these strange words before? I think so, but perhaps not to any use, and likely not to much greater use than here, I think.
"So there are three parts to substance. One which is called 'first goer' or perhaps 'first gone.' The second is the 'castrated goer,' for whatever reason. And the third is named for the clear stones which burn, I suppose? Madness, surely. But let's see where this goes.
"So for reasons that have not be stated, the first and castrated goers stick to each other at the center of every tiniest bit of substance. And somewhere around them are the stone goers. But if these have the opposite load, should they not fall into the center where the first goers are like magnets clinging to each other? And if the first and castrated goers in the middle of each speck of stuff cling to each other, why do the first and castrated goers in the middle of the next speck need so much violent force to be made to cling to them?
"Violence for breaking apart, violence for bringing together, and heat from either in some measure but growing less as some aspect of the substance approaches iron or recedes from it, is that right? And just what do you propose I might do with this information, Just Write?
"If great force is required to change the configuration of the first and castrated goers, I suppose admixture and fire will not bring about that change. What can I do with the ranking of substances by their clumps?"
Just Write, you mention gravitational field, but I'm not sure that Bianca knows what gravity is?
Gravity is another sort of non-magical but rather weird force. Thanks to gravity, worlds and suns keep their shape as spheres. Thanks to gravity world moves around the sun, though these forces work in such a way that you cannot feel this movement.
Worlds move in the great airless void - when there is air on a world, as on your world, then such air is only around surface and not all way to the sun.
I think that Bianca then disbelieved us, Just Write, these hundreds of years ago. But our weird predictions about cheap paper or steel or devices had come to pass, so maybe she can now believe in moving worlds.
Black Cat here. Sometimes I tend to forget saying my name.
"Yes, my table-rulers who took measure of the travels of the wanderers came to believe what I had told them in secret: that the world and all the wanderers circle the sun, as do the scalped stars, but that the moon circles the world and the stars are still or close enough to still while the world turns. But 'circle' is not quite right, most notably for the scalped stars, but also for the world and the wanderers. They complained of measures which do not match circles, but in each case the loop respects the sun in some form.
"And once we had all seen the truth of the matter, that the world moves about the sun and spins as it does so, I freed them of their oaths of secrecy. And now this is taught to those who are taught. And even many who are not taught know that the world turns like the moon does, if the moon does in fact turn as it seems to.
"It was something for which the learned of outsiders were mocked for not believing, and may still be. I would like to know more of the nature of the loops of the world, the moon, the wanderers, and the scalped stars."
You are correct, a basic explanation of gravity would not be out of place. On a basic level, all mass produces a faint distortion in space and time, both slowing time slightly and curving trajectories towards itself. This effect is barely noticeable even at the scale of a mountain, but at the scale of planets, stars, stellar remnants, and especially black holes it can reach quite significant degrees. Broadly the intensity of a gravitational field at a given location is determined both by the amount of mass producing that field, and by the distance; the intensity of gravity at a distance drops off by the inverse square law, which can be simply approximated to twice the distance experiencing a quarter of the gravity.
"These are interesting rules, Just Write. But it is not clear what I can do with them.
"What does it mean for substance to 'bend motion toward it' that is not known from, 'things fall down?' Does a fully still object still come to fall? Or would it seem to fly off as the world moved away from it?
"Will the quartering-for-doubling matter for buildings of great height? It seems not. Surely the world is so thick that the greatest buildings are nothing compared to the distance to its center. Is this for casting an item out from the world? That some cursed item I wish to be rid off should pass far enough away that the quartering of heaviness will be too weak to pull it back?"
When one object is orbiting another, it is within that object's range of noticeable gravity and being pulled towards it. However, the orbiting body's sideways momentum prevents it from ever actually making contact, barring interference. Orbits can either be nearly circular as is the case with the moon orbiting the world and the world orbiting the sun, or they can be an extremely stretched oval, with a low end very close to the body they orbit, and the other being much much further away. We refer to this latter sort of object as eccentric.
"Ah. So the moon falls to the surface of the world, but it travels so quickly that it misses? And that it always misses by the same distance, or nearly enough?
"Why is it not slown down? And why do the moon and the wanderers and the world fall in such perfect or near-perfect circles? Why don't the scalped stars, which I know well enough are not really stars?"
Further, every single body has a speed at which an object flung away from it simply will not come back down, no matter how long you wait. We know this as the escape velocity, and whenever the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light an event horizon forms. As a rough guess, the escape velocity for your homeworld should be approximately the distance between Biancvint and the Palace School in the span of a few heartbeats.
"Ah. Yes, this. So to be entirely rid of an item, or I suppose a person, I should cast them so swiftly that the ever-quartered heaviness of the world does not pull it or them back faster than they double their distances from it. And that is… very fast indeed. Hmm. Still, it is a wonder that the divinities are still on the world and not cast off from it. Unless one or another is and that happened recently? When did I last know of each's place or passing?"
Humph. I still think, Just Write, that you may use words with meanings that may be rather unclear to Bianca. I usually try to greatly simplify things and words.
It's shocking enough to understand that worlds are moving spheres, and that there are many worlds, I think.
"It is an old shock, new only to each successive mortal inducted into the mysteries of the sky. But you are certainly right that the words are strange. 'Event horizon' especially seems arbitrary nonsense for… a threshold of excessive heaviness or whatever."
As exciting as Astrophysics are, I think we may be getting a biiiiiiiiit ahead of ourselves. Bianca's here-and-now concerns are reasserting herself over the Ten Nations.
We kind of need a better picture of the Ten Nations' current state before we can give practical advice. Stem engines should be doable, though.
For your benefit, Bianca: Steam engines are moderately complex machines that harness the energy of steam expanding within a confined space. This is useful for making machines that do...well, more or less what water wheels do: repetitive mechanical tasks with the strength of dozens of men, performed tirelessly aside from maintenance of the machine in question, greatly reducing the rigors of work. If we can get this up and running, it can outright replace water wheels by virtue of superior mechanical power and greater reliability.
It is even possible to create steam engines that harness this expanding steam to move themselves. And, potentially, to haul great masses of goods behind themselves. Superior to beast-pulled wagons in almost every way. Unfortunately, this requires the laying down of fairly extensive infrastructure known as "rail-ways" - a sort of specialized road that will require great masses of steel, possibly beyond even what the Ten Nations can produce as of right now.
...my, look who's getting ahead of themselves now.
This has been Mechanical Lizard of Metal speaking.
"We have built such a thing, Mechanical Lizard of Metal, even before Erweh locked me away the second time and more thoroughly. It was an iron tube of varying width in which spun a spindle of iron with fins that curved around it so that the force of the steam passing it turned it.
"Firstly, it did not turn very forcefully. Secondly, the steam does not care where it goes, and joyfully bursts out wherever it can and with destructive force. And thirdly, mules, bond captives, and the Free People of the Ten Nations are abundant enough even where rivers and wind are not. Back then there were better uses for iron. Now that bandits may use iron to fasten paper to trees, perhaps this may be revisited.
"And since Bear's People use such steam wheels for something or another, perhaps it would be better for me to find out what they are doing with it, rather than speaking with confusing voices about it. Hmm."
When steel is still not common enough for steel ships or bridges or other great things... you can have iron or even wooden tracks for the moving steam powered wagons. It's just that these solutions are less durable.
And, ym... Would it be possible to explain stainless steel, steel that will never rust?
Drawing copper into wires is not easy to do in great amounts, as you literally have to draw it through the drawplate by hand, but with craftsmanship and smithing having progressed by quite a bit we can probably try to put together a telegraph.
"The people draw wire of gold most easily, but also silver and copper. They can draw wire of iron and steel, but these rust even faster than copper tarnishes, so there is little point.
"Already we used copper wire in the preparation of lodestones and the protection of buildings from lightning. There are other idle fancies of copper wire and lodestones, some which the table-ruler I waylaid told me of that I believe were unknown to me before, though he may simply have described them poorly. Also, he was not always easy to understand, especially when at his most fearful, as is the nature of people.
"Fine wire may be used in the making of trifles. And since people do love their trifles, the people draw wire. If you knew of a better way than cutting and rolling or hammering flat and pulling through a plate, please do speak of it."
Bianca could perhaps encourage better worker safety? What is the main cause of death in mines? Metals are now more common, perhaps iron hats could help. Or even hard leather. Heads of mortals are so easy to damage.
And better movement of air, perhaps some sort of air pumps, to remove harmful air. Humph...
"Hmm. I don't know what protection miners wear on their heads. I think they just cover their hair.
"They're not much more likely to hurt their heads than anyone else who works where they might slip and fall, though. Being crushed in a slide may involve a crushed head, but I wouldn't expect an iron cap to save so many from being buried under rocks and mud. And I don't know whether being crushed or drowning or falling will kill more people who work in mines. There is also the poisons of minerals, which is hard to measure. And then bad food and water, also. And other miners, for certain. And now and then a mule.
"The wind blows across mines as much as it blows anywhere.
"Oh. You mean 'mines' where a narrow passage is dug into the ground? That is not often done. Or it was not as often done, anyway. Once the people knew where copper or iron were, they dug great pits to get at as much of the ore as possible. How would digging narrow passages into the ground work, anyway? The people have no way of knowing what is in the ground below them, so where to dig? And if a dig finds nothing and is filled back it, in remains loose so that digging near it is dangerous.
"If digging passages makes sense to you voices, tell me how it can be known where to dig and what will be found."
Also, as someone mentioned forge welding beforehand. You can indeed make iron cannons that way, though they'll almost certainly of less quality than bronze cannons by sheer virtue of not casting these so-called banded cannons.
Step one is that you make a wooden plug the size of the interior of the desired cannon. You then make several parts of iron, namely the backside you want to make out of a single piece and several slightly curved plates of iron that are as long as you desire the cannon to be long to form the barrel and several of the name giving iron bands you use to affix the plates to the plug, so they form the full barrel.
Next you simply forge weld the various pieces together by heating them up and hammering them until they are a solid piece. Once you have forge welded the various parts together you can simply burn out the wooden plug.
"Before my lengthy stays in the underworld, cannons were cast upright, in the ground. There were limits to the length of cannon that could be cast in this way. The process was not without issues, some of which would not be known until the cannon was fired a few times.
"This sounds better, or at least simpler in the casting stage. We did have consistent issues with cannons bursting where their seams where, though. And this way of cannon making does involve seams."
Psh. Gravity is easy (if you grossly simplify it so that it loses most of it's detail...). Imagine that spacetime is a spread bedsheet pulled tight. A ball is dropped on the sheet which makes an indent, the depth / severity of which depends on it's mass. Then ya toss another another ball on the sheet so it spirals around the drop. If it's moving at the right speed, it'll just keep on spinning around. If it moves too fast, it'll fly off, if it moves too slow it'll fall in and collide.
Now the sheet kinda stops being a good example here because that first object isn't static either, it's also rotating around another something, which is also probably rotating around another something. Just objects in divots rotating around other objects in divots (and the divots can also influence each other.)
Buut. This force is also super weak (compared to other forces in the universe) so it's generally only noticeable to a person when you're dealing with objects within a few orders of magnitude of a planetary body. I can't remember if you all had a moon, but if it's anything like ours it's a hell of a lot less massive than your planet, so if you stood on it and jumped, you'd jump way higher (and you'd "weigh" less) because it's "Spacetime divot" is much less steep.
Funfact. If your universe is like ours, there are points of mass so massive that their inclines are impossible to escape (via physics/natural means. Maybe magic is different though the sheer forces involved would tear most anything apart before it could bother). We call these points, with all the creativity we could muster, black holes because even light falls in and doesn't come back out. (this is also a gross simplification, though, because black holes themselves essentially evaporate on a galactic timescale incomprehensibly slow via hilariously complicated mechanics that probably won't be worth going into for you for a long, long time.)
I think that my explanation of gravity as mysterious force keeping world together as a sphere and other worlds and suns as a spheres, I think that was less accurate and gravely simplified, but also easier to understand for Bianca.
Not that any practical things can be done for now with this information. Unless there are living creatures on other worlds with their own magic, and unless magic can somehow cross enormous space in between worlds? I don't know...
[x] [Return] Singer Society - infiltration pretty much anywhere within reach (except Azule)
For whom to approach I recommend the Singer's so that you can quickly know those that believe in your return, those taking a wait and see approach likely the majority, and those that are actively hostile to your return.
[x] [Backrent] No repayment: just start over
For the rent I would advise forgetting it, and the world has changed and what people value has likely changed you may have to readjust it to new times.
[x] [Reintegration] Write in
-[x] Wait use the Singer to spread new that signs of your return is near. Maybe have them talk about a magical trick only you could do. Spend a year to 2 laying seeds before you formal return.
As for rebuilding your control over the land delay opening declaring yourself, instead have the singers, spread new that signs and portents say that your return is near. If you can coordinate with the singer to make a big magical display across the lands to announce yourself after your return has been built up for a few years.
Now I understand that their has been some issue with the standardization of measurements between us, for that I have some measurements that occur in nature that you have access to. That is the behavior of bee's and how the build their hives. Bee's natural hive building behavior is quite exact and should serve for you to derive some of our units of measurement. When faced with a gap in their hives the bee's have certain specific behaviors. To setup I will state these measurements are about millimeter, their are a 10 millimeters to one centimeter, and thousand millimeters to one meter, and a hundred centimeters to one meter. And a one thousand meters to one kilometer.
Now back to Bees, bees will when their hive have has a gap of less then 4 Millimeters will seek to fill it with propolis as this is to small for even worker bees to pass though. At 5.2 to 5.4 millimeters is a spacing that worker and queen bees can pass thou but drones cannot. 6 Millimeters is the smallest gap that bees will leave between adjacent comb surfaces. And bees will usual use 9 millimeters as the space they leave between capped brood as this allows 2 layers of bees to work back to back. And a gap of greater then 9 millimeters the bees will seek to full with wax comb.
"Thank you. I'm sure that will be meaningful to the apiarists. Is there something particular about these lengths of measurement?
"More often I am frustrated by steps that involve materials or substances I do not have or do not know. But if lengths become relevant, some standard will be helpful, yes."
Voices who say everythings fine should reread stuff. Demon sacrifices like WHAT FREE PEOPLE ARE DOING. Not fine.
Could you discourage meat consumption?For whatever reason really.People can eat some meat but too much pigs eat too much stuff.Its easier to feed greater numbers of people on grains less healthy sometimes but easier.Not even always less healthy because very diverse plant diet can in fact replace meats
"Now and then some person refuses meat for one reason or another. They weaken, which is not good. Some come to illness for their abstention and some of these die.
"Hogs are kept for turning waste into meat. Their milk and fleece are unwanted. They will not work. From time to time, hog-keeper keeps so many that they must be fed good food, food that would otherwise feed people or working animals or egg-laying fowl or whatever. And that is folly. And their family or others in their village will know it is folly. Hogs are more trouble than any other animal. And too many hogs is a problem beyond just the food they eat.
"If you know how people can live without fish or fowl or eggs or lamb or cattle, tell me more."
I don't remember what name I used to go by. Probably Fox? Not in the sense of any divinity though! Anyway! Let me respond to specific things you said!
So some parts of material culture are significantly more common and the arts have advanced and people are more wealthy than before! How wonderful! We told you to expect this, and you have even commented to us that your people weren't so wealthy yet. It's wonderful to see one's people prosper, don't you think? And yes, to you it looks frivolous, but it actually isn't, it's simply changing how resources are best used due to lifting of how scarce those resources are!
"I would like to know why it is not frivolous for a bandit in the woods to be wearing enough cloth to clothe four people, and at the end of Summer, too. I saw no other people wearing clothing made from so much cloth. I did see some which seemed a little… excessive. But not so much as that.
"And I do not think that was how bright cloth might be 'best used' when only a few dress so colorfully. When every child in every village is dressed in such bright color then, yes, perhaps that is the best use of whatever trouble is put to the dye and such. But those bandits or whoever they stole from and unlikely to have made use of those materials in a way that is 'best' for anything but contention. That is my thinking."
Hot damn! They finally figured out organized and disciplined soldiers rather than warriors. We have spoken on this topic before, several times and you mostly rejected the ideas, as perhaps premature. It's good to see that your people managed to get this working. It will become VERY important that this class of people be taken care of as time goes on! Also, you should spend some time learning their mindset and way of doing things as well as specifically how they fight, because there's a lot of core assumptions to being a soldier or an officer or a general (and their naval equivalents!) that you will need to learn.
"Just what do you think the 'mind set' of a solider is, Undivine Fox? What is a 'mind set' in any case?
"I will speak with the leaders of host, with the teachers of soldiers, and yes with some soldiers as well. But I do not expect any of them to tell me truthfully what the set of their mind is. It will take time, as it always does, to find people who will speak truthfully to the most powerful person they will ever meet. In recognition of power it is always the way of people to do their best to say what the powerful want to here to the best of their understanding.
"But, yes. The School of Hosts has valuable wisdom and practice in it. Probably."
Deals with demons to make the crops grow? We told you about legumes, plants with special root nodules that fix nitrogen in the soil, and specifically plants that do that and are also are useful agriculturally, like alfalfa, clover, lupins, peanuts, rooibos, and soybeans, right? You just couldn't find the right ones in time for a proper crop rotation, right? Well these people had five hundred years, haven't they been far-ranging, going further, and searching for plants that bring vitality back to the soil rather than take it away?! What happened to that search? Demon shenanigans should've been a temporary solution for a few years, UGH!
"I don't know if all of those were named, no. And in particular the only plant known to me that you listed just now is clover. As before, please describe the plant that should be used, and how it should be used, and perhaps what sort of place it might be found in.
"My far-ranging hunters and false traders gathered in many, many different grains and herbs and trees. That does not mean that the people who sowed them knew how to tell what order they should be planted, or in what soils, or even in what season.
"If you know how it can be known from the plant's own nature which draws what from or returns what to the soil, Fox or any other voice, please speak of it.
"In any case, the soil bargains do not seem to have been in place of the procession of crops, but either in place of my own work or to allow crops to prosper that would not otherwise in the Lands of the Ten Nations."
Well that's not concerning at all, ugh. Best figure out what that's about. Also, it's important to figure out where along the financial, monetary, and fiscal development path the civilization as a whole is. What's the situation of currencies? How about banking? Lending? Investment? We have, soooo many concepts related to increasing wealth and prosperity of individuals and groups and peoples that it's quite ludicrous, but we need to know exactly where your civilization is currently now that you aren't starting from nothing like you were before where you just said to people, 'I give you freedom see if there's something to this merchant lifestyle and accumulation of wealth over generations in new ways, and we'll see what comes of it'. Well now something has come to it, and we need to figure out what that is, and then what it will take to get whatever it is a.) better at doing the wealth-generating thing it wants to do more of in the first place, and b.) actually be of use for more than the direct and sole benefit of just a few greedy wealthy fucks.
"I can tell you already, nothing generates wealth as good as taking it from someone else does. 'Trade' is fine, so long as my people are getting the better end of the deal. Otherwise, there's no wealth like plundering a whole city.
"And no, I do not know what the bands of the greedy are doing with their little hoards and their paper coins. It's a wonder they aren't raided themselves."
Hey, whaling! Neat! Ya, whale oil is a great source of useful oil types and other useful products while you are still trying to get extracting and using ground oil figured out.
Awesome, therapeutic massage and the use of hot, cold, and electroshock for therapy applied to the muscles! A neat invention, to be sure.
Whaaaat, someone got Epistemology, Empiricism, and the more nuanced practice of Science figured out? HOT DAMN! Those people should get, like, all the praise and accolades! And in something as immediately obvious and useful as medicine, even? Rather than the study of the stars and planets as happened in my world (useful to be sure, but something we haven't talked about much due to other, more immediately practical concerns, as that science is not generally immediately as utilitarian as, say, medicine). Yes, those ways of thinking are the tools and practice by which a civilization conquers everything to do with reality. You really need to spend time wrapping your head around this philosophy and way of thinking (just like you do for soldiers rather than warriors), it will give you massive benefits in the long run!
"I am, in fact, interested in this 'study of knowledge by experience.' It is a problem for mortals that their lives are so short and the truly informative experiences may be rare. I understand that these schools of physicians create the experiences instead of waiting for them to come about on their own, which seems wise. But the same is some cause for complaint.
"And you should be more specific, as with the School of Hosts, about what in particular you think I should be trying to learn from these people and their ways. When I meet even the wisest mortal, most of what I see is someone fumbling at the problems of a short life, with only glimmers and glimpses of something exceptional showing through the muck of their ignorance."
They have handheld firearms and littoral zone steel ironclads? Presumably armed with naval cannon? Worrying. Yea, it's people directly loyal to you that should have a dominant technological lead in all things!
"Well I certainly agree. But wanting doesn't make it so.
"And yes, their steel ships have steel cannon, though small ones that may be outranged from greater cannon of iron on land, which in turn do not move about as swiftly or as well."
[X] [Return] Peyuvoists - research test every 5 years in the manner Burgeck used to
Remember this? That was awesome! You've always been about Progress! And the use of the search for truth to enable your dominance and mastery over ever-increasing aspects of reality, of course.
[X] [Revisit] Leave it be. We've got bigger fish to fry.
Gosh everyone seems bloodthirsty. Maybe we can do some fact finding and investigation and buildup of our power base first?
[X] [Backrent] No repayment: just start over
Yea, it's not in your best interests to worry overly much about this.
[X] [Reintegration] Go on tour, visiting everyone until that gets old - WARNING: big time sink
I don't care how long it takes, you need data! About the status of the world, the arts, the people in it, their goals and focuses and foibles, local and state-level politics! And they need to see you, out and about, present in people's lives!
That time sink, visiting everyone, would also cause nothing else to be done (like dealing with demons or possible Gazark-like traitors). I would suggest my compromise option, using two years to visit places reasonably close.
No no no. You don't blast apart the stars, the stars are useful! You get lots of matter and energy from stars! You use your nicoll-dyson beam from your own dyson swarm to blast apart all the planets orbiting those stars that might eventually contain life that could threaten your civilization, leaving their rocks in the solar system for later use, while sending 'seed' ships which are dragging negative-mass-based Intra-Universe Two Way Traversable Wormholes to every star in the galaxy as you build up to Kardashev Three! Sheesh. Blowing up stars like a punk!
(In case it isn't obvious, Bianca, this conversation is about incredibly hypothetical far future technology and infrastructure, and is positively dripping with sarcasm.)
Editing to add:
Also, yea, two years is not a long enough time to properly do this. Five at LEAST. Also also, this is a civilization that has been managing itself for 500 years, and there is no immediate dire civilization-ending crisis. Let her spend some time getting to know a people that are completely alien to her in almost all aspects, it's really okay to take a break for a while and see her lands and do a Grand Tour! Kings did that sort of thing all the time back in the day, and she gains massive second and third order benefits from doing it.
Erweh. Erweh would know about Bianca's return sooner or later. Bianca needs to prepare for this Greatest Evil instead of wasting too much time for travel, as sadly many voices suggest.
I fail to see how figuring out what resources are available to her, and spending time building rapport and support with myriad groups of her people, and learning the completely alien mindset, technological and industrial base, economic structure, political makeup, military structure, and culture of her people are anything but the most efficient use of her time right now! We are not talking about purposeless, undirected, random wandering, here!
"I did not travel the land to learn and be known before my lengthy absence. My singers told me about the world and told the world about me. They found the truths I wish to be found and they made my will known to those who knew better than to deny it. How likely should I find it that I would not have similar success with similar methods now?
"Oh, I will travel around for two years. It has been agreed. I will make myself known to whomever I meet in that time. And I will learn what can be known from meeting them. But if you voices mean to persuade me that carrying on in that way is important in the future or more effective than my singers, you will need to make some additional points."
She never said that, strictly speaking, inheriting riches of her traders was prohibited and they mostly ended in Bianca's treasure after deaths of owners. But yes, it would be nice to hear how exactly that works now.
"In this moment I know that their hoard is not added to my own. I know that the paper coins are involved in some way. And I know that some share of this is therefore the fault of Peyuvo the Formerly Blind Devicer."
Making slaked lime mix quicklime and water let the water evaporate away and you have
slaked lime.
Making chlorine gas add soda ash and lye to brine also know as sea water. This is to get out calcium and magnesium. They will fall to the bottom as calcium carbonate and magnesium hydroxide. Now after you have got them out you want to pour your brine in to two different containers. Now run some electric in to the brine one copper wire in to each. In one of the brines chlorine gas will bubble up and from the other will come hydrogen gas.
Pass the chlorine gas over the slaked lime and now you have chloride this is an better way to store the gas
Mix in 2 part chloride to 48 parts water and this makes a little something called Chlorine Bleach now bleach is really good at being really poisonous to all living things It is very good at geting out stains and other messes but it is very hard on these things. Don't put it on skin to clean. If there is an area that has been inhabited by someone who is sick with something horrible i would recommend spraying this in the area and on the body before touching much of anything
"I imagine that people are better at producing the ash salts and lye now than they were before I was kept from them for so long. And as much as I know about poisons, it is nice to learn of new ones. Also, it sounds like this stuff might be of use for fabrics and leathers, or perhaps for paper."
As to mentioned before moving steam devices, steam steel ships and great steam steel vehicles on special rail-roads, I think that these could also help with the food situation, at least when perfected. How, somebody could ask? Simple. Faster movement of goods could allow more movement of goods and even FOOD from places that have more to places that have less. Perhaps great moving steam devices could even be great enough to push cold wagons with ice, to preserve fish.
But that comes later, after use of such moving devices in mines and in between mines, where these could transport coal and iron ore and metals that make steel to make more devices.
Understand of course, that you may still have twenty years before steam devices are perfected, and one hundred years before such great feats of moving cheap steam devices are accomplished. It's hard to say and depends how hard your servants will work on such craft-wonders.
But many voices are displeased that Bear's People started to have some of these wonders and your people don't have them yet. Bear's People are cheating, it's too easy for them to make great wonders.
"Is it you especially, Black Cat, who never runs out of good things to say about the steam wheels, or is it many voices? If these are so valuable, you voices should do more to describe them to me. I did see the one steam wheel built, or the one sort. There was more than one build for the sake of burstings and also changes to the way of its making. If these devices are so important then I would like to know more about their making and more about the specifics of their uses.
"Why should the steam wheel move instead of sitting in one place and pulling carts by winch, as is done in mines already? Would it not need to also move all the charred coals it needs along with itself and whatever it is to haul? How is that better than a mule, who may at least travel some way without eating at every step?"
"So the slaked lime first captures the poison vapors, then when soaked in vinegar it releases them again? It seems very easy to build a trap with this by placing an easily upset tray of the trapped vapors over the vinegar. Then when a lever or line or whatever tips the tray into the vinegar, the poison emerges and whoever upset the tray dies!
"Hmm. Interesting, certainly. But this might not be better than other traps. How long does the trapped vapor keep?"
Encouraging people to eat less meat in some cases may be indeed worthwile in order to increase how many people a piece of land can feed.
You could either say some useful nonsense and lie that you like animals and dislike when too many are eaten, or truthfully say that use of grain to feed too many chickens is wasteful, or both.
But of course there are also hills or pieces of poorer land where animals may be more productive than sad attempts at farming. I think that year of animal grazing could be also used in some versions of the crop rotation, perhaps on clover.
And, indeed, health concerns. Purely plant-based meals are possible, but hard to do properly. So I'm not mad enough to suggest outlawing meat, that would be absolutely crazy, but I mean reducing consumption if it looks too wasteful.
I don't know whether current situation in regards to that looks wasteful, in your spare time you could look into this matter.
Don't you need lots of crop plants which produce lots of protein -- which incidentally, is peanuts, which solve the bad soil problem anyway -- to make only vegetable diets with limited to no egg, milk, fish, or cheese consumption not be horrifically unhealthy?
Yes. I mentioned concerns about health. All people, but especially growing children, need very diverse meals.
But health concerns must be balanced with risks of famines. So I suggest perhaps less animals, but not no animals. It also depends how many animals there are and how often free people eat meat. Perhaps eating meat could be limited to two days per week? I'm not sure how much they eat currently.
Medieval Japanese were fine with mostly fish, I think?
My concerns are NOT about chickens that forage for worms mostly on their own. I have concerns about too many chickens feed too much grain. I must also say that I don't know how meat consumption currently looks and whether it's excessive, Bianca needs to ask table-rulers and consider this matter carefully.
"I do not have a full counting yet. But I believe that more pasture land has been turned into fields for crops than fields for crops have been turned to pasture. And the woodlands have been removed for the sake of both of these.
"Chickens and other fowl do eat grain. But the people can well decide for themselves when the grain is more valuable than the eggs and meat they can instead get from those fowl. And chickens produce so very many eggs.
"And again, tell me more about these plants whose names are unknown to me. Tell me what it looks like, what sort of place it is found it, where it will grow.
"And if there are people who eat only fish, how do they avoid the sicknesses of missing substances? Is it particular to the fish they ate? Did they eat substantially more that you leave unmentioned?"
Might want to investigate the idea of farming the creatures of the sea. Fish of course, but pearl bearing oysters could be farmed for trade, and the bright blue blood of the horseshoe crab has some interesting medical applications.
And people can eat specially farmed insects and specific types of small rodents that can also be carefully farmed, and tend to require less agricultural feedstock.
I disagree, insects and rodents are unwise while growing these in normal farming practice full of tiny life. These things tend to be dirty and full od finy life without very special and complicated care. To grow insects and rodents safely you would need special places and techniques, that's not yet worth expense.
I was thinking of specially bred crickets, beetles (especially in larval form), and guinea pigs or hamsters for the rodentia. Do those require such specialized techniques?
"The people do keep rats for meat. They can be kept in whicker pens in and fed scraps, breed prolifically, and are a ready source of meat in the cities. They are, apparently, said to be like hogs for city-dwellers, where hogs are otherwise too much trouble.
"I found people to eat crickets and worms of this and that sort widely in the time before my first confinement. It is, in fact, odd that my people and the people around them don't, so much. I, of course, had my singers instruct the people on which they should eat when times were especially unkind, and how to find insect eggs or worms in winter. But it has rarely been the food of choice for people who are not otherwise notably odd. I am unsure why that is the case, or why I have not thought long on it before.
"Still, which insects to you voices know to be good for the people to eat, and what kind of hog are you talking about? Do you just mean rats? I know of hamsters, of course, and I assume the people do as well. But they do not live in the Lands of the Ten Nations, only some short way south. Their pelts are traded from where they are trapped. I do not know if the people of the Conquered Cities eat them much. Is there any special reason for keeping them for meat rather than rats?"
Ehh, the biggest advantage of soldiers VS warriors is that the soldiers stops being a soldier once his tour or campaign is over while a warrior will always be a warrior. And as the warriors are the one's with the weapons and the knowledge on how to use them, they sooner or later become the de facto leaders of the society - and often enough de jure as well.
"Warriors of the Free People of the Ten Nations, and before them of the Nine and Eight returned from raids or battle to farm and ranch. I am not sure what distinction you mean to make.
"And would not always the boldest of the people end up as leaders? If a person is bold and no warrior they will soon stop being bold or stop being alive. How is it, voice, that you expect such things to work differently?"
The price of grain doubles around every 30 kilometers it has to travel by wagon - be that horse-drawn or by person as the people and animals transporting it need sustenance as well. Transporting things via river is roughly five times more efficient and sea borne transport roughly twenty times (As river barges are usually rowed while even coastal hugging ships sail) and these numbers are pretty much hard limits to how you can efficiently reallocate food from the fields it was made to where it is needed. Steam engines and rail-roads completely remove them by virtue of decoupling the transport of food from the consumption of food and replacing the used resource with coal. Even Sailing ships often have crews in the hundreds while a train can do with three people, the one controlling it and two stockers - the people shoveling coal into the furnace.
I should probably introduce myself as well, even if it is a bit late. Either way, you may call me Legion.
"I don't understand your counting, Legion. The people who move the grain will need grain to live in any case. If they have to be fed, how much different is it if they are being fed while moving grain? I suppose the horse drawing the cart could be butchered instead. But a horse will travel a long distance before it has eaten a whole cart of grain. And if that horse is to be kept for other reasons in any case, like plowing the field or hauling anything else, then it might as well move grain.
"But, yes, I do note that moving along a river or the coast is preferable.
"I would like to hear more about the sort of ship that requires hundreds of people to operate it. How does that work?"
Before people develop wonders of moving steam-devices and rail-roads, before that...
Artifical water-ways can be sometimes made on more flat pieces of land, at first for barges and smaller ships, then even for bigger ones.
Differences in water level are challenging, but cunning gates can be developed for that. A place for slowly changing water level in between two gates. One gate can open, a barge can enter, gate is closed. Water can be slowly pumped out (out of this place-for-slowly-changing-water-level) to the level of the water downstream. Second gate opens, barge can leave to continue travel. Such devices can be also developed to cross around some dams or smaller waterfalls.
By the time canals are easy enough to make to be worth widescale use, we will only get about a generation of use out of them before steam comes fully into its own.
"So long as that point is still some way off, I would like to hear more about how channels for boats can be most easily made. I know there have been some built, somewhere, because the table-ruler I waylaid mentioned the three-legged, two-wheeled, bowl-topped device and it's sightings were used for planning them. I assumed people dug deep trenches, flooded them when doing so could not be helped, and then dredged that passage wider and deeper until boats could use it. What do you voices recommend?"
Oh, while we're talking about "reasonably precise locally-obtainable measurements" like bee space: For your purposes, at the moment the density of pure-enough water is 1 unit mass per unit length cubed ("cubed" in this case being both 'multiply the length by itself thrice' and 'literally a cube'), for any given unit length.
"If a pot contains a square one measure wide, long, and deep, then there is one measure of water in it. If a measure is half the side of that square pot, the pot does not contain two measures.
"Or is that not what you mean?
"I mean… If one pot is twice the size of another in length, width, and depth then the smaller pot must be emptied eight times to fill the larger pot. Is that what you mean?"
There are variances on this, because things expand when they get hot and contract when they get colder (as a general rule, but with at least one specific exception that ice melting actually means the resulting water will take up less space due to unique things about the molecular structure of water - imagine the difference between a honeycomb structure and the equivalent mass of hot wax, and that is the difference between ice and water, except that ice automatically organizes into that structure on a scale far too small to see directly with even the sharpest of eyes. If you have ever seen a snowflake in great enough detail, though, that is the reason they look hexagonal.)
"I have been shown the six-sidedness of thin frost in the lenses which view small things. I suppose it may be good to know this is because of shape of individual grains of water. But I do not know what good you mean me or anyone to make of this.
As a quick side note, there's another method for ensuring cannon shot flies tip-first, aside from making it spin. It's called fin stabilization; the basic idea is that by putting a set of vanes aligned with the desired orientation of the projectile aft of the bulk of its mass, the flow of air over the projectile can force it to remain properly aligned with the direction of travel.
On what Just Write said, he's correct, but I don't think the cannon you are working with are capable of firing that sort of shot. He's basically proposing fletching cannonballs.
Black Cat yet again with a minor question and suggestion.
Are there any of these marvelous healers, physicians, in the old tribelands and in your city, Biancvint? I know that they have the Palace School to create table-rulers, and I imagine that Peyuvo knows arts of physicians... But perhaps inviting one of minor schools of "physicians" to Biancvint, under supervision of the great Palace School perhaps... Maybe that could be of value.
I must say that I was pleasantly surprised how well their arts and methods were developed. To move a liver from one person to another, or to re-attach a hand, that is around limits of even our healing knowledge. I imagine that these famous wonders of healing were pretty unique, but simpler things like removal of infected appendix are probably pretty routine and usual for such great healers.
Of course, some mortals still suffer and die even under their care, but surely less often. Even in our wisdom I see no ways of making mortals into immortals, so it's normal than even with greatest healers imaginable some mortals still die.
It's a pity that nobody decided to create a "school" to slowly breed better plants, humph. Food and health depend on each other very much.
We have not mastered turning mortals into immortals. However the study of methods to do so is rapidly advancing and we know of a few plausible candidate methods.
Ehh, we are getting closer to the Longevity escape velocity, i.e the point in time in which we figure out life extending technology faster than people age.
I myself believe that it should be possible to turn somebody ageless without magic - do not mistake this with "immortal", as accidents happen.
I believe. I do not "know how to do it".
None among sane voices, or half-sane Voices at least... None among us knows anything about techniques needed, anything more than "it should be maybe possible".
Our limits on things that we truly know in healing arts are not much greater than techniques already mastered by "physicians".
Of course, physicians probably still lack many cunning devices that we could imagine. Probably they are up to our level "only" in skills with small knives and in precision of their hands, probably they still lack some imaginable devices and tools.
But even with all cunning devices imaginable to me, I see no way, no way beyond "we believe that it should be possible", of reliably extending mortal lives beyond around 80 winters.
Of course some few, very unusual mortals can live to be 100. But I know no reliable methods for that.
Depending on your definition of living, some form of uploading (that is roughly, Bianca, converting the information in the brain that makes up a person into a less finnicy form than a body) is almost certainly something we'll figure out before we can make fiddly and complicated biology last indefinitely.
"Indeed, if Hersaulf the Unaging is still around somewhere, or if he shared or was made to share his formula, then there is more than one person in this world who knows how to make mortals unaging. I will have to wait until I hear of other unaging people to know, I suppose.
"I have never heard before of any part of one person being placed in another person to their benefit like that. And to take what is severed and put it back? Perhaps a tooth, if done immediately and if fortune is very favorable. But even then not likely. A whole hand? That is some kind of art and I look forward to learning more of it.
"Breeding better plants, though, is not the work of a school because it is not the work of any mortal lifetime. In the centuries of my absence, how many new traits should have been found in grains or fruit or herbs or whatever? Three? Perhaps seven? Is it not enough that the people know from song that they should look, that they should carefully guard deviant plants when they find them, and that they should be shown to their village table-ruler to decide if the plant can grown more widely? Do you expect such changes to happen so rapidly that a mortal may be meaningfully schooled in their ways? Is there some means by which changes like that can be forced into being? And should they?"
"Feeding the people insects is sounding more and more like something that I want to look into further. Why aren't they eating insects more regularly?
"There are no scorpions in the Lands of the Ten Nations. Or there were none before my most recent confinement. Like hamsters, they don't seem to show up north of a certain point."
So should we aim for some sort of reprisal against Erweh? It is likely to come up in a turn or two. We could directly go to war against his worshipers. I'm not sure that would actually help us defeat him though. Maybe targeted assassinations against his allied mortal sorcerers? Of course then there is the risk that we will return to combat us sooner than he otherwise would. Heck, he may start tracking us down as soon as we reveal ourselves.
"There is clear enmity between Erweh and me. There can be no place within that which is mine for any of his. I will have the hearts of all followers of Erweh among them with my tribute from all of my people.
"And, yes, it does seem wise to begin to move against all that are his beyond those who are mine. Once my two years tour has passed, I will direct that killers are sent to harvest those mislain stalks wherever I can reach them.
"There is nothing to gain in waiting. We are already joined in battle. There can be no peace but a moment's breath before the next clash. And while he pauses to breathe, I will have his eyes put out and his hands lopped off."
I'm also not sure what to do with our great Erweh problem, humph.
Black Cat here. Yes, again. I speak rather often.
I wonder if Silent Servants still exist? They were never important, but it was a nice way to make some useless people more useful. It's a waste of table-ruler or singer skills to clean temples.
"I don't know if there are still shrines to me in the cities. There were monuments to me in the Lands of the Ten Nations, and I have seen one. But those were looked after by the villagers who lived near them, and I assume they still are, or the one I saw was. It was cleared of debris in any case and I saw no one dressed differently than other villagers around it."
And I think that in your Great Home you had also a few people who loved to paint and create pretty things, more than they loved their families. I wonder if such people improved their crafts: maybe after hundreds of years painted images of people finally look better? Oh, you mentioned face of that bandit inked on paper.
"Hmm. That is a good point. The image of the bandit on the pages pasted to trees, pasted to boards nailed to trees, and in that one first cast fixed to a tree with many nails were not greatly offensive. I suppose some art of painting faces has been found.
And how are big iron mines and smelters managed, who decide how these operate and who is leader of the mine? Are these matters managed by nearby village authorities? Or by the Palace School? Perhaps outside of the old tribelands iron mines are owned by the rich? I would gladly hear more about such matters, ask table-rulers please.
That was before the timeskip (and was already very, very respectable for the time period). 500 years is sufficient to double population five or six times, and this is conservative estimate. We can expect (obviously not inside of the homelands, to be clear) 20 - 40 millions, IMHO. Possibly more. We will see I suppose, because I already asked Bianca and she should ask table-rulers.
Perhaps it's not impressive in comparision with the modern world, but Roman Empire at it's height had only 65-120. Han Dynasty China, here records are pretty reliable: 57.6 million people in 12,366,470 households around year 2 AD.
And we are closer to 1000-500BC, surely. We are (disunited, yes) European China ^.^
(IF I'M NOT WRONG, that is)
"Before I met Erweh in combat, the people who wanted metal or stone would gather together at the mine or quarry and decide between themselves how it should be taken from the ground. Sometimes they would decide that one person should be in charge of most of the bond captives working there. And that person would assemble others as a warparty leader assembles chosen and warriors before dividing the bond captives among them. The arrangement would last as long as the people wanted it to."
I thought more about differences between warriors and soldiers.
Contrary to what one among Voices said, there were in fact times when soldiers assumed power over cities. But yes, a well-disciplined table-ruler-soldier is less likely to do that than a warrior, if well taught. Well taught to be bold enough for battles, but also to be disciplined enough to serve.
"I don't see why it would be a problem for warriors to end up in charge if anyone is going to end up in charge. If there will already be the disputes which come from some people being raised up over others, it only simplifies matters for those raised up to be the most capable in violence.
"I remain certain that everything would work better if all the people were of the same authority and all under me. But that ended when Warriors of the Free People of the Ten Nations made themselves rulers over outsiders. And I do not care to trouble myself with changing it back. I have better things to do with my time."
And there is of course the fact that moving 5000, or even 100 people... That moving more people than warparty to another city makes calculating numbers and reading written messages and understanding maps - it makes these a very important skills. This can be entirely different than raiding nearby outsiders as a small warparty!
We tried to explain these matters even 600 years ago, but eh, sometimes it's needed to see how something works in the real world, outside of words. And perhaps our explanations were never clear enough.
"Yes, yes. Warriors have always fought better under a good warparty leader. And warparties fight better under a good leader of hosts. Counting and table-ruling allow them to move about better. And surely all who know of them fear the Soldiers of the Ten Nations for their skill and that of their leaders.
"Fine. It does seem to have worked out well enough."
Oh, I could forgot. When there are people who serve in this manner always, not only sometimes; then they can guard great bridges or other very important points against surprise movements of enemies.
It's also easier to expand forces for war when leaders and some small forces are already ready. There is already disciplined structure that, in the case of major war, can be filled with much more people. Even if new people are much less disciplined, the whole should retain much more obedience.
And of course such forces can act like city guard but for everywhere and hunt for bandits in forests or anywhere.
"Black Cat, I do not know what soldiers get up to when they are not in battle or traveling to or from battle. But it does seem that something has been worked out to occupy their time. I will find out what I can find out. Perhaps they do stand by bridges and gates and busy themselves with nuisance."
It's also possible to cleverly persuade people that such armed servants of leader are not truly above others. Such way of thinking says that soldiers serve to enforce the will of majority, because the majority of people surely wants to enjoy lives free from dangers of bandits and evil troublemakers and outsiders.
"I will have to find out how they think they live now first. But it does seem to be that some greater effort could have been devoted to ridding the countryside of bandits, at least.
"What does the will of the majority matter, though? If the majority are meek their will is irrelevant. If the majority are bold they will make their will known. And if soldiers once bound to the will of the majority decide to put that majority under them, how well will non-soldiers confront them?"
You can do the latter with warriors as well. It's literally what a march is, as in a frontier area that is designated to protect against attacks. But doing so basically surrenders that area to be "Warrior Land" and can easily lead to a deeü schism as the "hard people of the frontier" are compared with the "soft people of the heartlands".
"I don't understand this distinction of 'Warrior Land.' Many of the Free People of the Ten Nations are warriors. Now some learn to be 'soldiers.' If the difference is soldiers learning to hold and move and turn and travel in order and rows, and perhaps to better obey their warparty leader, how does that make their home land different?"
Important strenght of cities is bigger production at lower costs. Adding 1000 workers to a city usually, if these people can be feed and well-organised, adds much more production than adding 1000 workers divided in between many small villages.
There are probably many reasons for that, like possibility to afford close presence of complicated metal tools and productive devices that would be harder to have in all villages, especially smaller villages.
Note, that such strenght can be also present in biggest villages and no walls are essential for this role.
"Even before, I did see that cloth in a city could be dyed in a greater diversity of colors than thread in a village. With the greater number of people in a city, a dyer could busy themselves with one dye to its end and move on to another, and another after that. Then they have various colors, where in a village with only a few looms -- in fact perhaps only one which stands, depending on the village -- there would not be enough cloth to exhaust sufficient dye so that the dyer moves on to another color in any haste.
"And I have seen many, many colors of cloth now. I have seen cloth woven of many colors of thread, even. Metal is good, yes. And you may well be right about the abundance of tools to work it. But the variety of colored cloth is obvious to anyone who has the cloth from a city and the cloth from a village.
"It is now a wonder to me that the Free People of the Ten Nations ever got anything great done in villages. How did they come to fashion glass? To build the great halls of Burgeck? To make any real amount of steel? I have been gone so long that it seems unreal"
I know observation that says: doubling production of devices in a city tends to noticeably decrease cost of making similar devices in that city, sometimes by 10% or 20%, if raw resources needed remain present.
Well-supplied with raw materials city or dense settlement can also continue intensive production, of things that are not food obviously, during winters.
"Of course. Neither the smiths nor the spinners need to stop for winter, not for any but the worst of it, anyway. Whittlers and others, too, continue their work in villages and cities as well."
If in the future your people develop and start to use coal-powered steam devices, then "waste heat" of such devices can even help with heating places of work and places nearby; as obviously not all heat is used by steam and movement of device.
If you master secrets of cheap rock-oil products, then lamps powered by these could allow workers to work even during night. People need to sleep and rest, but some people could then use the same metal tool or device during the day, and others during night.
"Bah. Some already work at night. There is already oil for lamps. Poor work is done by it, though. And if oil is so plentiful that the people may work at night with as much light as the sun gives, then why would they need to work at night? That sounds like intolerable plentitude."
"Ah, that. I haven't seen any of it. It was an odd novelty before I was held. It didn't seem any more useful than wood or clay, which are more familiar. I think someone was working on making attractive beads of it for trade with outsiders."
Anybody managed to master extracting sulfur from various ores? Not only in the fool's gold there is sulfur, other ores may have much less, but testing would be desirable. Note, that sulfur in air is poison for lungs, so be careful with health of experimenting mortals.
"Not greatly, not before I was locked away. But so many years and so much bursting dust and so many cannon, surely the question of sulfur must have been answered in some form."
Oh sweet, gravity has been covered. I have some practical applications:
If it can die, dropping it from high enough (terminal velocity explanation?) will kill or cripple it. If it can't die, shoving it inside a super dense network of gravitational force (black hole explanation) will either kill or trap it. The last one traps light and nothing else seems to be able to do so.
"If I could magic a person high into the sky I would not have needed the flying furnace bags.
"I mean, I can just throw someone pretty high up. And that does tend to hurt a mortal in both the tossing and the landing. But if I were to grasp Erweh in that fashion I don't think it would matter much to him.
"Although… perhaps snaring his foot to a flying furnace bag with great heat… Hmm. It would at least be a great laugh if it worked."
Not only that, but now you can create an elite corps of Meteorologists! With some sort of staff to use as a focus for gravity magics, I bet you could have them drag rocks and metals (maybe even stars) from the sky to besiege great walls, great foes, or even gods.
That being said, you tend to like to centralize power, so learning it yourself and teaching a "bodyguard" for the same thing wouldnt go amiss. Setting up contingencies in case you get locked away again only makes sense- can't be respected and feared if you're routinely picked up by the scruff and set out of reach 🙄
"I don't think I understand what you mean 'those who study things up high' to be doing with heavy staves. But you are right that my inevitable confrontation with Erweh will go more favorably for me if I have with me skilled magicians of war."
Oh yeah, if you remove air from an area it creates a vacuum, pocket of pure space, but air always seeks to fill it. Bigger the vacuum, bigger the sound and shockwave in the aftermath.
I give you: god hunting weapons inspired by astrophysics. Now don't be a coward and go whale hunting one of these days. I have absolutely no incentive except thinking that if you're going to talk God-level shit, you should actually be able to back it up. Nation building is fun but bullying children can only last so long before you're just another tyrant.
Ym, stars are often whole world and suns. There are also much smaller objects that can appear on the night sky like stars, but moving these rocks closer to Bianca's world is also usually, eeem, unwise.
Unless of course metal that has traveled through the cold of space for the last few billion years is somehow magically important. In which case setting out people to hunt for fallen meteoroids is going to be quite important.
Wonder if the gravitational interactions of their moon's orbit also controls their tides and thus the ocean spirit would be absolutely fucking livid if that was messed with.
I mean, worst case we can always pull the moon down into the earth and advise Bianca on how evolution works while life reconstructs itself from the cellular level.
Moon is big enough to make any life impossible for billions of years after collision, highly possibly forever. Surely a boring life for Bianca.
As to oceans, there is no ocean spirit, but Roqual is god of seas and whales. I would suggest developing methods to use rock oil instead of touching whales.
"If Rorqual has objections to hunting whales, she has been silent on the topic for a very long time. And, again, she has not been known to come past the far great islands, which are yet beyond the nearer, smaller islands between the land to the west and the land to the north. The Free People of the Ten Nations seem to need not fear Rorqual so long as they do not enter the wide open ocean.
Bianca cannot be killed. Gods are much more powerful than Bianca, BUT... Gods can be killed. So, is it at all wise to become a god? Gods are very hard to kill, but during the next billion of years probably something will manage to kill them.
Honestly, I am waiting for a more or less full accounting of what the people had managed to create before I start throwing ideas because it's hard to keep things straight over so long a time, especially with the time between her capture and now.
"'Barely superhuman.' Hah! I have what any mortal might desire with futility, but it is only 'barely superhuman.'
"I regret to inform you, voice, that I will not find the time to fully account for everything my people have gotten up to in the years since I was last free for any long time. It would be better if you ask after what you want to know, if you haven't already."
I strongly detest that everyone is voting for the Peyuvoists. Yet none have given any actual reasoning why it is better than the other options. It is the fun shiny option but also a massive waste compared to the other things we could get.
Which we already do.
Whatever option we choose we end up having more brain power, man power, and material wealth available than all the ten nations before the timeskip. And the bonus we get is the easiest one to otherwise replicate through other means. Not to mention the very clear hints from QM that failure to deal with problems like the diabolists will come back to bite us if we don't deal with them quickly.
We can give Bianca all the technical info she wants. But we can't even hope to give her access to the magical lore that she actually needs to prevent Eonil from throwing us right back into the underworld.
How did we get to discussing whether to crash the moon into the earth? I have trouble imagining anything that would make Bianca want to do that. Really sucks about the whole 'trapped in the underworld for hundreds of years' thing, but that's luck for you isn't it?
Anyway, how about one last hurrah.
There has been plenty of high minded talk about stellar dynamics these last few pages, but I'm gonna try to rein in the scale a bit.
[Ball and Stick Model]
We have of course covered the atomic makeup of matter, but the properties of a material are not merely the average of its' constituents. When talking about matter, structure matters. Although the atoms are in practice irreducible they do have an inner structure which constrains both the geometry and strength of interatomic bonds. To help learn to intuit these concepts, we like to use a little toy consisting of many painted balls with regularly spaced holes drilled shallowly into their surface so that you can connect them with sticks. As an example, to space the holes on a ball with 4 holes, imagine that there is a pyramid embedded in the ball and drill a hole where each point of the pyramid would be. For five holes you get a less even spacing, because you are trying to keep all the holes as far apart as possible, the best configuration is three evenly spaced holes about the equator and two opposing holes along the axis. It also helps to paint the balls according to their number of holes. Obviously this ball and stick model is a gross simplification, but it helps to to build intuition.
I think that you may mistake this world with our previous world. This time I cannot remember evaporative cooling, humph.
Yes, they know salting, smoking, and dehydrating. And they have magical freezers, but these must be big (spirits of people who died from cold are "domesticated" for cooling, but need/expect something house-sized).
Edit: Wait. Did we invert the pet development path which will result in Cats becoming truly domesticated by the modern age and dogs(domesticated wolfs) the somewhat still wild ones that just hang around people?
"I can tell you that nearly every animal kept by people is friendlier and less trouble now than it was before my first confinement. The greater fowl are still of terrible temperament. Or they were before my more recent confinement, anyway. I suppose if bears were made gentle then likely geese have been as well. Or perhaps like hogs they are only barely suited to human company, always ready to eat a child and run off into the woods.
"It may be no matter in any case. I will go see how Peyuvo sleeps."
Code:
B R E A K
"Well, voices, when last we spoke it was Autumn of Year Six Hundred Twenty-Four. And now it is Winter of Year Six Hundred Thirty-Five. And I have seen a steam wheel doing the work of many donkeys at an iron mine. By cables and winch it draws carts up from the pit. By swift and violent turning it pumps water from the pit. By cranking it grinds the ore for dry and wet sorting.
"But it does not work for long without the attention of Peyuvo the Graceful, and she is of greater use to me than a great number of donkeys.
"There are smiths at the mine who, along with students of Peyuvo, are trying to imitate her work. But the steam wheel is a work of art, not craft. And they are not capable of repairing it without her, let alone replacing it. Or not at scale anyway. Small models work… mostly. And they can be carried out to other mines, so that other smiths may try to imitate The Hot Screaming Wheel.
"Peyuvo, it turns out, does not sleep with a knife. She sleeps with three of them, an axe, a device of springs which launches irritant powders, a clever mace which extends from being very short to being of modest length, and a number of bells and other noisemakers of less obvious operation. She almost got the irritant in my eyes, too. The woman has not responded idly to threats to her person and I am pleased with her vigilance. I did not gift her with agelessness for her to die to the artless.
"Let's see… I have been made to know that there are some, some even among my Singers, who do not believe that I am the same person who brought the people of the Ten Ways Pact together and who governed them until Erweh cast me into the underworld. There are some even who say 'Bianca the Undying never existed!' The gall of some people!
"The story the self-important tell themselves is that the Free People of the Ten Nations alone in the world refused to give tribute to any god or mortal, but instead gave token tribute to the concept of this very refusal, personified in a wholly imagined version of me. They seem to believe that their ancestors made me up as an excuse to be unyielding, to turn away from other gods, and to keep their wealth for themselves.
"They still support the Silent Servants who keep small shrines to me in nearly every city where the People of the Ten Nations rule, and in many villages besides. I say, 'nearly' because the shrines in Biancvint, Unmarked, and Wreol are not small and are looked after by the schools in those places.
"Silent Servants eat, are clothed, and are sheltered on account of meager donations by the modest and powerful alike in all the places they work. It is not so much that people who give money to the keepers of my shrines are well regarded as it is a deep shame to the modestly wealthy and powerful alike if the Silent Servants go hungry, are in rags, or if the shrines to me are in disrepair. The Silent Servants still keep silent. They are still expected to have or seek no place in the gatherings of people who decide how cities should be run or what the laws should be. They are said to live simple lives of dedication to monuments to me, the buildings that house those monuments, and their own wellbeing.
"Unbelievers in my authority or even my person are everywhere, though they are or grow far fewer in number in any place I have myself been. And not just fewer for the ones I slew for their insolence in my very presence.
"Notably, I did not find this disbelief in anyone with authority with whom I have spoken, not after I ripped the beating heart from the first city ruler who called me a liar to my face. Many are persuaded simply by meeting me directly, or hearing from someone who has.
"But even among those Singers who do not deny my being and my role in their history, there are some who say that the Singers' Society has grown beyond any need of me!
"Even worse, among the number of the Singers' Society who acknowledge me there are no few who do not understand their role! These arrogant ingrates believe that they should tell me how the world ought to work and what my place in it should be!
"Consequently, there have been fractures within the Singers' Society. A 'scholar' of 'history' has told me that she believes the Singers' Society will break apart as the Great Tabulation did. Factions within that gathering were drawn away from each other by outside forces which meant the Great Tabulation for their own ends and by inside forces which similarly disputed what its purpose was. So it is, she tells me, that while the greater number of my Singers will surely obey me when I say that this should be done in a new way or that should return to an old way, some will diverge. And some divergences will be so great as to break Singers away from the Society as they have not before or since I was last among them.
"So that's angering. If you voices know how I may better bind these splinters to me, speak of it. Always there would be some few who broke off to go their own way. And it was rarely worth the trouble to do something about them. But these fool singers are leaving for the wrong reasons. I do not think I will like what my remaining singers become if I kill all the ones who leave, though. So it's a difficult problem.
"The people who have been called lesser giants for as long as I have known of them do not, it turns out, care for that name any longer. 'We are not lesser. We are our own people.' I do not know if this is true, for their making does seem to be a lessening of Giants. But in any case, they call themselves Galugal now, after the tribe they were mostly joined to. The Galugal of the Ten Nations are still of Galugr Tribe. And they are further divided into Wreolans and wardens, as in Wardens of the Stormwoods, depending on where their family comes from.
"Those Stormwoods have grown since their Host came to them. And the School of the Forsworn has been rebuilt several times as the Stormwoods grew too close. From the school's observation tower, I saw the three older observation towers which had not yet crumbled within the Stormwoods.
"The Schools of Hosts and Forsworn are not as great as cities, more like the largest villages ever. At times they stink like cities, though. The School of Forsworn has no wall. Or the walls it had were swallowed by the Stormwoods and builders eventually decided not to build a wall again and instead to put their efforts into buildings. The School of Hosts only has walls so that its students can learn their making and unmaking, how to raise them, how to undermine them, how to fight on or against them.
"Hmm, hmm, oh! Peyuvo claims she did not bind the Lands of the Ten Nations together in the manner of the tribe of her birth, Eppam. And there are written accounts of history which should reveal her as a liar if she had, but do not. Still, there was one immortal in the land and the governing of the land came to resemble that of the tribe that immortal grew up in. It seems likely there are connections. But for now I am willing to believe that if there are, Peyuvo honestly does not know of them.
"And these fools think themselves literally too good to give me tribute! Aurgh! Their insolence! And I do not have time to visit each city to persuade them. In fact, Wreol and Unmarked do not remain persuaded for long after I leave! Neither does the Council of the Ten Nations! Ugh!
"My city knows me rightly. And Peyuvo sends proper tribute from the lands she rules and the strange gains of her system of hoard and papers.
"Yes, about that, Some time after my disappearance, years or decades it is not clear, the traders who I had permitted to keep their personal hoards as extensions of my own began to keep those hoards for themselves, separate from mine. They may have done this in secret, or openly in a fashion that was unacknowledged in official records for reasons of personal interest or favor or by purchase.
"Officially, in Autumn of Year One Hundred Fifty-Eight, an accounting of wealth found that five such hoards existed. Four of those five belonged to cooperatives of traders who kept accounts of their hoards and worked together to secure them or pay for their security, and also cooperated in their trading with an eye for growing their hoards further. And among these the custom was that each would leave record of who should receive their share of the hoard when they died.
"Any trader freshly returned from travel for trade could request of any one of these partnerships of greed that they be allowed to join. Their merit, it is recorded, would be judged based on the wealth they returned with from that trip, the stories they told of their travels, and allegedly but unprovenly the amount they paid to the other trader members to be considered. Joining such a replacement family of greedy fucks, at that time, meant leaving marriage and family behind. These fools had only each other and whatever respect those around them paid to their 'ownership' of their hoard.
"The fifth hoard belonged to a single person, one Fahr of Lan. When his hoard became known, all the families around him, including the family of his former marriage and of his parents, came to him and said, 'You have so much and we have so little and only you can right this wrong.' Fahr of Lan claimed that he was exempt from responding to these words as I had decreed that traders keeping personal hoards as extensions of my own would be. But the table-rulers who interpreted my words for the Free People of the Ten Nations did not support his claim. And Fahr of Lan called on the other greedy fucks to support him, but they did not. So Fahr of Lan called on those he had been paying to guard his hoard to defend him from some violence he knew would be coming. But some of these turned on him. It is recorded that he made a good account of himself and slew three of his own guards when they turned on him. His remaining and loyal guards protected him and his hoard while he died of his wounds, for all that the best available medicine work was done to him.
"After the death of Fahr of Lan, his hoard -- almost certainly already raided by his guards while he died -- was distributed to the families of Lan around him, who further distributed their increased wealth to the families of Lan around them and so on.
"Over time the remaining trade hoards split or failed or fell to infighting. And in places some new trade hoards rose up. These cooperatives hire guards and table-rulers and other workers. And their members do with their wealth as they wish, and pass their wealth on as they wish at their death. Each owes some portion each year or season or moon after the custom of that cooperative to the expenses of the hoard itself.
"Now in this time, Peyuvo and her followers had accumulated a hoard of their own at the Refuge of Grace. And some time shortly after she had taught all who would listen how to make plentiful paper, the Refuge of Grace began paying others in papers promising wealth from that hoard rather than in goods from the hoard itself. I understand that there were many problems with this practice, and in fact that some problems persist. But eventually the trader hoards took up the practice.
"One who wishes to purchase any good from the Refuge of Grace, whether honey or wax or paper or a clock or time with a healer or attendance at their story shows will feel they get a better deal by handing over paper than they would if they handed over metal coins of the 'same' value. Similarly, when traders return to their hoard from a distant land and make to sell their goods to the people around their hoard or those who come there from elsewhere, their buyers will prefer to hand over paper coins and keep their metal.
"Between each trader hoard and the Refuge of Grace there are regularly doves with ciphered messages of ledgers and accounts. And each is held accountable for their hoard and their issue of paper coins. When one trader hoard is found to be cheating, all the others must publicly refuse the cheater's paper coins and post signs denouncing them. Most of the time such a hoard dissolves and, due to the manner of common cheats, most or all of its members are ruined. Some murder over this is not uncommon. But at times such a fallen hoard may pay the Refuge of Grace to make their ledgers right. Then table-rulers from the Refuge of Grace must travel to that hoard and see if its ledgers can be made right. When a cheater is found, they are cast out with no wealth, and their share is removed from that hoard and distributed to all the others, so that each greedy fuck benefits very little in the end.
"I am thinking to make my own hoard part of this paper-coin game as well, or parts of it, anyway. No amount of paper is going to draw out the cursed items that are left there. And I have some worry for the ones that are missing and unaccounted for. Normally, joining a hoard to the greater ledger kept by Peyuvo requires some portion being sent to the Refuge of Grace to be held there for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me. Something about covering for bad paper? Or for clumsy paper? And there are rules about how much of the hoard can be represented in paper not held by any hoard, and how much of other hoard's paper one hoard can hold, and how much one hoard must accept of another hoard's paper. I am unsure it is worth the bother or will allow me to use my hoard as I wish. Already, I have moved some of my hoard to the Refuge of Grace so that paper could be issued in many other places for the payment of killers. Or, in a fashion, I paid for those killers, but instead of paying them I paid Peyuvo? And she just moved some numbers around?
"I did meet some resistance when I claimed my hoard. The fools in the Council of the Ten Nations called it theirs! Or not 'theirs' exactly. I would have shed some blood for that. But they called it the shared heritage of the Ten Nations! 'No,' I told them. 'The Ten Nations are mine and my hoard is mine but neither belongs to the other.' So then we argued for some time about history, about the Ten Ways Pact, and about what it means to be 'Free.' I may have to kill some number of those old people just to shut them up. Unlike my singers, I find the possibility of them cowering in fear an acceptable price for their obedience.
"Do you know those old fucks claim to be following the Ten Ways Pact when they refuse or 'decline' to pay me tribute?! These shits point to a time when Tash and Burgeck in Unmarked together decided that all the other Free People of the Ten Nations were no longer covered by the Ten Ways Pact, including others of their tribe who lived in their ancestral tribelands, and sent warriors to demand tribute. Tash and Burgeck thought they would be able to defeat the others one-by-one. They thought, it is said, that since the others did not follow the Ten Ways Pact they would no longer rise to each other's defense. And it sounds like they hadn't in some way. Tash and Burgeck did not come to this conclusion for nothing.
"It's actually at least slightly in doubt whether Tash and Burgeck did not, in fact, defeat and extract tribute from one or more tribes before the others came together to chastise them with some bloodshed. No one wants to admit to being the ones who paid tribute. And Tashburgeck doesn't want to talk about how the matter turned out.
"The alignment of Galugr Tribe with the traditionalists in Tashburgeck seems to be a matter of the leadership of Galugr Tribe continually reacting to very non-traditionalist practices inherited from the outsiders they spent so long marrying-in. Even still, Tashburgeck accuses Galugr of failing to follow the old ways when Galugr at least appears to follow the old ways better than Tashburgeck. There are practices among the Galugal that differ from the way the Free People of the Ten Nations lived before my time in the underworld. But so it is with all the people. And so it was with the people back then, too. Things change with time. But the Wreolan portion of Galugr Tribe fights back against this change. And they fight that fight better than the others, perhaps because they have more practice at it.
"The Galugal Wardens of Stormwoods are perhaps a bit more open to compromise, except with regard to the Oathbreakers. But for all that the wardens are notorious for treating Oathbreaks most brutally harshly, it happens that a disproportionate number of Oathbreakers come from the wardens.
"So it is with proximity.
"And these cats, as it turns out, are more the result of my far-ranging hunters and false traders than they are of the decades of work by keepers of cats before I was taken away from my people, or more than a century afterward. These cats are from a far off place where they live mostly as they do here. They keep company with each other. They tolerate the presence of people to varying degrees. They look after each other's kits. And most importantly, they kill pests far beyond their own needs. It is not rare that one cat will be seen bringing a kill to some place where she will leave that carcass for other cats, or for people or hounds or even, I have been told, peoples' rats with whom the cat was made to keep friendly company.
"It was under the rule of the Great Tabulation that the outsider cats were found and brought to the Lands of the Ten Nations. And by the order of the Great Tabulation, they were brought here in batches of dozens and for years. The keepers of cats took to looking after them, and to mixing their breeding with cats of their villages.
"The new cats were much more easily kept, taking little looking-after at all, really. They were lost more often to wolves and martin and hawks and such than the old cats, of course. But so many were brought in every year that this was no great limit, except in certain unfortunate villages.
"The new cats were favored so greatly over the old that soon enough the old cats were gone. They'd been run off into the woods where they took back up with their fully wild cousins. Or otherwise they lost numbers due to keepers of cats ceasing the great labor of looking after them.
"There were, I have read, extensive attempts to breed the agreeableness of the new cats into the old. But always the more vile aspects of the old cats would win out at the first two steps of dilution. Still, those last keepers of cats did their best to leave the new cats with what traits of the old cats which had made them better suited to the Lands of the Ten Nations. So it is said that the cats currently around are more robust, thicker of coat, and more spirited of fight than the cats from the far south that they came from.
"The cat-keeping practices are, of course, not actually exclusive to cats. And by those methods there are now fowl and weasels and even rats made to live according to the needs of people. I have read of three attempts to make gentle wolves in this fashion, and twice boars. The thinking there was to breed a line of beasts as hardy as the wild ones but lacking their viciousness, which could then be bred with hounds and hogs. And there are hounds of this sort now, mixed with wolves already bred for agreeableness for a century. These hounds are said to be more clever and better hunters, though less capable with diverse commands. But hogs are vicious enough already, and no addition of their wild brethren was any improvement.
"There was also one such attempt to so gentle bears. By countings there were fewer deaths in that than either attempt with the boars. So for a time bears were raised in some numbers somewhere to the north for their pelts, but not anymore. And I did not find why.
"Herb lore is… improved in ways I am still coming to terms with. Relevant to my last contact with you voices, the medicine work I knew for ending pregnancies is advised against as a dangerous poison. And that is not new to these people. It was centuries ago that wise folk were recommending the preparations of herbs that I knew for ending pregnancies while the physicians told people that they should never use those preparations of those herbs because they are so very dangerous. I still don't know how much of the herb lore I know exists only in old records of things that people should not do.
"Stranger still is what is said to be true of tiny life. The people know more of such things. Clear glass, while still precious, is not so dearly rare. And the viewing of tiny life is much improved by clever arrangements of lenses and mirrors which direct a great deal of light through the subject to be viewed and into the tube where the lenses are. So they have seen more, and drawings abound of what has been seen, ink-stamped from cleverly-carved wood or similar.
"They say there is tiny life which may be shepherded, moved from pasturing on this portion of the skin or within this flesh over to some other place. They say tiny life must be cycled like crops. There is tiny life which will slay other tiny life, so it is set against those pests as cats are set against wild rats. Others say they have gentled the tiny pests as rats have been gentled, to be kept for the benefit of their keeper. And they say that a widow's tears nurture tiny life which darkens hair.
"And of the structures which enter tiny life to disrupt their devices and turn to them to the making of more structures such as themselves -- and which are not known to be seen -- these are divided into forty-seven circles, some over others, some within others. And by minerals and admixture it is said they may be combated. But many of the things the subjugating structures are said to do make little sense in terms of how you voices once described them. Can such things cause a person to hate their spouse? Can they make children disloyal? Can they cause a person to be hated by hounds or cats or owls? And how are the tiny structures to respond to the movements of the sky wanderers or scalped stars?
"And, oh yes, the substances that tiny life and the subjugating structures are said to make, there is so much said here, as well. And they say moonlight counters this poison but the company of gentled rats must be kept to break the subjugating structures. And they say singing a certain song will drive out that poison, made by tiny life, but that the tiny life responsible can only be cleared from the body by time and great exertion of the flesh.
"I am filled with great uncertainty about all of it. It is so like the lore I know, and often entirely different.
"Oh, the soldiers. It's a lot like raiding, it turns out, but with more traveling involved. People who learn to soldier at the School of Hosts sell their seasons to People of the Ten Nations who rule cities, some further away than we knew well before Erweh came for me. And they might also sell their seasons to rulers who are not of the Ten Nations.
"In the Autumn every few years, students complete their studies at the School of Hosts. And in these Autumns, there will be people from rulers far away who come to see the students and take their measure. These tempt them away to sell their seasons to this or that ruler. Some payment is made to the student's family, and the rest the student brings home with them, or does not.
"There have been cooperatives of soldiers, like those of traders. But perhaps they fall to complications of paper coins more often, or perhaps it only happens that there are none known now.
"The outsiders who come to buy soldiers seasons are ill-known for being doubters and cheats. But the School of Hosts teaches table-rulers well. So there are always many telling the newly-no-longer-students to be wary of those outsiders, of their lies, and of their cheapening ways.
"Some of the best teachers in the history of the School of Hosts, I am told, are those who sold many seasons to outsiders and who returned to teach not only what they learned in the School of Hosts but in the company of outsiders."
"One voice or another, or perhaps several, asked how Singers deal with having children. And that has not changed much, except that there are no easy means of being rid of pregnancy anymore. There are solutions in the arts, and others available to one wise in the ways of spirits. Oh, and another which involves a bargain with demons that the Forsworn will broker.
"But once a singer has decided to birth a child, none of that is the matter.
"There are singer marriages, now. And some of these raise children of singers in that marriage or of other singers. So that was a surprise. These marriages do not persist like the marriages of non-singers. And the singers say it is fooly or at least poor fortune to keep a non-singer in a singer marriage.
"More often a singer will leave their child with some marriage of their kin, sometimes with a marriage in which there is no kin of theirs. And sometimes, still and foolishly, a singer will raise their child alone.
"Hmm, hmm, hmm. Ah! Physicians. Yes, these are workers of wonder. And death, as it happens. 'Death is a lesson,' they say, 'One best learned.' And so surrendering one's flesh to the physicians is a hazard and a gamble. Some are healed, even of extraordinary illness or wounds. And some others are lessons.
"I have not seen a hand reattached. One school of physicians offered to demonstrate it by cutting off a youth's hand. But when pressed they admitted they had not successfully reattached a hand before. And I did not want to waste my time with someone else's lessons.
"The shared liver, it turns out, was between twins. One had taken a wound in their side, which had sickened their liver. So since study-by-slice had shown that livers are more like fields and less like buildings, the physicians offered to attempt to save her life by taking half from her twin. And that worked. The same thing has failed several times since, and is only known to have worked twice.
"But the sharing of blood is more common. One who is healthy, especially young, may offer to share theirs to someone who has lost a lot, especially to cutting by physicians. Unlike accidents, these cuttings take place by schedule, so blood sharing can be planned.
"So, yes, physicians cut at flesh and some number of those so cut do not die. And physicians prepare medicine of herbs -- including poppies which are grown in great numbers in a small number of places in the Land of the Ten Nations -- and minerals and redewings of various things.
"The medicine against frothing madness is especially well known, because it is so widely understood. When someone has been bitten by a person or beast with the frothing madness, they know that if they can reach a school of physicians soon enough, there will likely be medicine there for them. And if they are not too unfortunate, they will live for it.
"You know who doesn't get to live about it? Erweh's followers. I have had them killed everywhere they were found in any city ruled by People of the Ten Nations and in many more besides beyond. From the great islands in the west to the mountains of Azule in the east, from the frozen lands in the north to the seas in the south.
"He likely already knew I had returned, of course. I had told my people I would resume accepting their tributes years beforehand.
"And he will have his followers among my people again, in secret. But that will be more difficult for him. He will not know as much or as well. And he should not. He has made his intentions toward me clear enough and there will only be war between us.
"I suppose if he called for talking, I might listen. Or 'read,' rather. I don't mean to get close to him again until and unless I have a good plan to end him. Again? Again, I suppose. He's already dead in some sense, right? Hmm. It's a problem.
"In the meantime, I have begun purifying the Land of the Ten Nations of the blight of the Oathbreakers. The sickness in the land runs so deep in places there is power for the 'demons' to draw on there, especially vineyards.
"And those really are the worst of it. They don't raise food for people or for beasts, only grapes for wine. And the wine is no poison that I can tell, which is unfortunate. If it were poison then perhaps people would not drink it, then people would stop making it, then the blight would grow less. But it's just wine, and good win at that, apparently.
"The people in the Lands of the Ten Nations don't understand. They are no longer especially wise, not even in the ways of their own lands. There are fewer among them wise in the ways of spirits. But there are fewer problems with spirits, so they get on. The table-rulers look after their countings and they count less. The Oathbreakers look after… many different things, and the people do less and know less.
"There is a divide between the people at the schools within the Land of the Ten Nations and the people who work the farms and orchards, whoc keep herds and spin thread and work looms. Their lives are easier. They are not soft, exactly. But they are not as sharp as they were, I think.
"Or perhaps I have changed or recall them wrong. It was so long.
"Their ways are certainly not the ways of people in cities, no matter how large their villages are.
"I think the only reason the Free People of the Ten Nations did not previous make meals of insects very often was that the lean times of the year were winters, where insects are not plentiful. They had not been hungry when insects were around. And perhaps not as many insects are ultimately around as were around in places where I knew people to regularly eat insects before my first confinement.
"In any case, harvest has been poor. Peyuvo tried to make insects like hogs or I suppose like rats are now, but they don't keep well and don't winter at all. She has found the best wild insects for eating, and the People of the Ten Nations have relied on them as much as anything else for a few years, now. I have sorcerers from the School of the Palace and my singers and table-rulers that should be mine working together to clean the land, to make it fruitful, and to ensure food gets to all the people. But the best that can be said so far, I fear, is that the people are not starving, not really, and that we may be making progress against the blight.
"If only the food from the demon-touched lands were not just as good to eat, or nearly so.
"Hmm, let's see, what else? Oh. Peyuvo makes more devices for story shows than for any other end. There is a place with rings where people sit in front of a wooden platform with great drapes of thick fabric to either side. People stand on the place and sing or speak cleverly or speak as though they are people in a story. And then great shapes of painted wood are moved about with Peyuvo's devices to appear as spirits or demons or storms or divinities within the story. The old gods show up only as a single foot with its lower leg leading up into the drapes over the stage, except for Hawk who a person will pretend to be.
"Peyuvo has hidden from me the devices she used to represent me in their story shows while I was gone. I am taking her discretion as a sign of respect and allowing her to do so. I am sure that she understands any further representation of me will need to be fearsome, and to be treated with respect. She knows me, and values that I chose to show myself first to her, not counting a table-ruler who I think is still not believed.
"Hmm. Mines. Yes. In the Lands of the Ten Nations, the product of each mine is divided into shares which are distributed to families whose concern the mine is. Families which direct the operation of the mine or smelter get so many shares. Families which have done so in the past or are otherwise somehow concerned with the mine but do not operate it receive fewer shares.
"No ore is far removed from the vicinity of the mine. Near where it is broken from the ground there are the ovens for air and chimney's for ore and brick vats for pushing air through metal and all such things. The metal is poured into forms of clay or something like it, into which are pressed wooden counter-forms. And the representative of each family which will receive shares from that pouring must be present with a carved sign which they press into the forms for their share, so that each ingot bears the sign of the family which will receive the metal. Then the metal is stored in the open under hides and the family to which it belongs may collect it by presenting the same sign which was pressed into the forms, or by simply being known. These ingots are then removed by cart of donkey, as means are had.
"At each mine the arrangement of shares differs. Table-rulers keep the count, of course. And disputes which are not addressed by those table-rulers to the liking of those involved may be heard by the Elder Speakers of the Ten Nations.
"Outside the lands of the Ten Nations, I am told that most mines are owned by one ruler or another, but otherwise it is much the same, including the pressing of the ruler's mark into the forms.
"The People of the Ten Nations mostly believe that no other can make war against them. But that is not necessary for them to have problems with war. To the west, there is a ruler who is a son of a ruler -- which you may recall is not well regarded -- who leads hosts against other cities ruled by People of the Ten Nations. He has not lost a battle yet, and with each victory he has more soldiers than before. He calls himself King of Many Cities, or something like that in another language. Being of the People of the Ten Nations himself, and distantly of Zouchaud Tribe as it happens, he calls himself also the Second Kuwuzt. But others have claimed that before him. Still, he has been successful and is still young.
"In the east, it is said that the Sovereign of Azule prepares to make war against the People of the Ten Nations again. Or perhaps he is simply preparing for another push in what to him has been an unending war.
"And something stirs the distant south. The most southern cotes have all ceased to send doves north with messages in the past two years. In some places doves arrive with no messages, or only the tin ring which tells the cote where they were last kept.
"It seems likely that at least one of these is going to require my attention at some point. Should I take action about them preemptively?"
[ ] [Rumors] It's probably fine.
[ ] [Rumors] Just follow up with singers or whatever
[ ] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west
[ ] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to hit the Sovereign of Azule first
[ ] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them south just in case
[ ] [Rumors] Write in
"A messenger found me in one of the Conquered Cities and begged that his master be granted safe passage to meet me, as his master was called an Oathbreaker and there were many who wished him harm. I granted that safe passage and met with the Oathbreaker some moon or two later.
"'It is not just that we are called Oath-Breakers,' he told me. 'I never took any oath I have not kept, nor did my teacher, nor did hers.' And he asked, "What justice is there in punishing us for the sake of the Forsworn who have broken their oaths, especially those now long dead?'
"Of course I told him that I had plenty to punish the Oathbreakers about now, and talked about the trouble I found and the trouble I had with it in the fields and orchards and vineyards and pastures of the Ten Nations.
"He said, 'Many of us are not involved in that. We study the Stormwoods Host and we bargain for our own sake and for that of others. We make deals for people who can't make them for themselves. And we find new deals. There isn't a difference, really, between what we do and what the Forsworn do, except that they have to ask permission first and are only chastised for their errors, if at all. There is no good thing I can do, as I am called Oath-Breaker, that will not lead leaders and often even the people I help to call for me to be harmed or even killed. What justice is there in that?'
"I don't need justice, as you may know. But I have found that when the people expect that justice can be had their disputes are less troublesome. I feel like the Oathbreakers, or wherever they should be called if not that, are more trouble than they're worth just for the sake of the damage done to the Lands of the Ten Nations. But it may well be that there are individuals among them with no part in that problem. And it may be that some of these might be of use in solving the mess.
"One thing I am sure of, I need to force more compliance from the People of the Ten Nations. I cannot have them poisoning their lands while I try to restore them. Whether the Council of the Ten Nations or the Free People in their villages disobey me, I expect I must wrestle cooperation from them.
"How do you voices suggest I go about continuing to restore the Land of the Ten Nations?"
[ ] [Infertility] The Forsworn should duplicate the Oathbreakers' fertility demonology, but safer
[ ] [Infertility] Bianca cleans up while Oathbreaker fertility rites continue as they are, just stay ahead of famine
[ ] [Infertility] Every magic user pressed to clean up while Oathbreakers continue
[ ] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emegration
[ ] [Infertility] Enforce ban of Oathbreakers, forbid all food export from all Tenner-ruled lands to anywhere but the Tenner Homelands and import food from outsider rulers too until agriculture recovers
[ ] [Infertility] Write in
"The Sovereign of Azule was promised a head and I have half a mind to send him one without concern for authenticity. What do you think?"
[ ] [Relic] Yeah. Do it. He's already angry. How much worse could it get?
[ ] [Relic] Offer the heads of twenty living descendants of Kartz of Lan
[ ] [Relic] Offer the heads of one hundred already deceased descendants of Kartz of Lan (which aren't actually available because of cremation norms, but can be faked as well as the head of Kartz of Lan could)
[ ] [Relic] War with Azule until the shit stops
[ ] [Relic] Write in
"I am worried about the problems with paper coins. And at the same time I want to make more use of the power of paper coins. How should I join my hoard to the ledgers of the hoards of the REfuge of Grace and the trader cooperatives?"
[ ] [Banking] Demand they work with her on her terms
[ ] [Banking] Have Peyuvo send table-rulers to set Bianca's hoard up on the network in the same way others are (but not the cursed items)
[ ] [Banking] Just start issuing paper coins, people will accept them if they know what's good for them
[ ] [Banking] Disband the hoard network, seize those hoards and keep them under the original arrangement offered to traders
[ ] [Banking] Write in
[X] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west
I feel like poking things to the south will trigger something bad prematurely.
Azule has waited 500 years. They can wait a bit longer.
But the guy in the West might actually be turned to an ally...
[X] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emigration
Nothing we do will get me my Skull throne. So I guess this...
[X] [Relic] War with Azule until the shit stops
I don't think Azule is dumb enough to fall for any tricks, and 500 years of war means they have likely already claimed the heads of a hundred descendants of Kartz anyway.
[X] [Banking] Write in : Master Of Coin
It's a simple fact. Bianca is not an Economist, and has neither the time nor inclination to learn.
Meanwhile Peyuvo has a 500 year record of competence, loyalty, and limited ambition.
The perfect combination to take the reigns of this budding economic system.
Thus I think this is an excellent opportunity to organize a sort of central banking system, one which Peyuvo should head.
General goals should include:
Standardize coin weights & measures
Prevent counterfeiting of metal and paper coins
Prevent paper coins from loosing their value when a bank fails
Make paper coins from one bank be usable in another
Control how many paper coins a bank can issue
Bianca will of course give all the fungible (easily converted to coin via sale) parts of her hoard over to Peyuvo. Bianca will still be able to pull from Peyuvo's hoard for her projects, but it will be put to good use in the meantime facilitating trade. And Peyuvo will be able to use her greater control over lesser banks to ensure that dangerous magic makes its way back to Bianca.
One point I want to make clear is that the narrative should be that all hordes belong to Bianca, but the fact should be that any horde keepers who cooperate will still retain nominal control over their horde. I think that the Horde keepers will largely go along with this after the first couple who resist are messily killed by Bianca. Obviously try to coordinate some armed bands beforehand so that horde-keepers don't have a chance to flee with their hoard before they can be talked around...
There are actually some real benefits for the hoard keepers that aught be brought up during said diplomacy. The hoard they watch for Bianca would be made safer of course because who would be stupid enough to steal from Bianca's hoard! And since they are just an extension of Bianca's hoard, there would of course be a streamlined process to request temporary transfers from the central portions of Bianca's hoard overseen by Peyuvo.
If hoards do attempt to remain separate from Bianca, then we have some other tricks up our sleeve as well. The traders who would normally do business with independent hoards would of course preferentially do business with Bianca's hoards because their paper coins can be exchanged freely across the ten nations and have extra bloody protections against counterfitting.
There is of course lots of important detail left out in this plan, but the most important part is make Peyuvo deal with it.
It's Fox again. A few things, Bianca. When I say 'mindset', I mean, the core assumptions and patterns of thought and distinct perspective which allows an expert at a particular lifestyle be especially competent at the requirements of that lifestyle. Not just the specific skills, but more... the particular wisdom of how they go about using them, especial with regards to perspective and context and some of the things they don't even have to really actively think about. And the 'mindset' of Soldiers as distinct from Warriors is important, as is the mindset of Scientists as distinct from Philosophers. It has in part to do, in both cases, of existing within a larger conceptual structure and cultural context and methods of cooperation with others and the improvements in effectiveness which can be derived from such mutualism and methods of cooperation, mostly. Pay special attention to that when interacting with these sorts of people and contrast that with their more individual-acting predecessors!
Oh, and when I say, "Guinea Pig" and "Hamster", I mean, 'two specific varieties of animals which somewhat resemble rats or mice in their anatomy which are not precisely rats or mice.' I was using the more generic term 'rodentia' to mean, 'the broader category of animals within which mice and rats are included, that are characterized by having a single pair of continuously growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws'. "Guinea Pigs" and "Hamsters" are examples, as are Porcupines, Beavers, Chimpunks, Jerboas, Degus, Cavys, Gophers, Squirrels, Pacas, Rats, Mice, Groundhogs, Nutrias, and so on. And several of these names probably didn't translate correctly, because people from my world seem to reference swine in naming some of these things because of COURSE they do, but such is the nature of language and translation. Of course, only a few creatures of this type are suitable for raising in large groups as meat animals in a large scale agriculture context. And of that list, I have no idea which of those are local to you, and which correspond to some animals which must be native to some other, ludicriously far off land! Do your people categorize animals by particular anatomical similarities? It's a useful practice to encourage, to gradually tease out which animals are (very, very) distantly related (so distantly related they can no longer crossbreed, even, and are thus two different species by that point!) to which others by the evidence shown in their anatomy. And yes, the implication I made that all forms of life on your planet are related if you go back far enough in the family tree is intentional.
Anyway. We can talk more about evolution and genes and natural selection and artificial selection and the implications of that and the practice intentionally breeding things for specific features later. And it looks like your people crossbred foreign cats with the local ones to get useful genetic traits! So these concepts aren't foreign, entirely.
As far as which the best rodents for keeping for meat are... I can only say which ones are most popular in the world I come from, which is mostly 'Guinea Pigs', 'Agoutis', and 'Capybaras'. I would say the reasoning is mostly 'something big enough to have a reasonable amount of meat on it, which breeds quickly enough, which doesn't have a lot of defensive spines on it like a porcupine, is calm enough to not be utterly unmanageable in captivity, which is social enough with others of its kind so you can keep several of them together without too many problems, which isn't an amazing jumper or climber, and also which does not, itself, burrow, and can be kept easily enough in a relatively small pen.' Find whatever rodent you can which is best at as much of that as you can find which is reasonably nearby, and set clever people to selectively breed them for every sort of feature useful in a food animal!
Next, the other topic you've asked about earlier! Nitrogen-Fixing plants that are useful for agriculture. Plants which return vitality to soil! Okay. It's time to talk about a family of plants. Legumes, or the Pea, or the Bean family. They are a category of flowering plants, where the fruit or seed of the plant is often a 'dry' fruit that often opens on a seam in two sides. Some varieties of this category of plant have the fruit or nut or bean or pod of peas grow underground. Several of these plants grow with a particular type of small life that grows in their root systems which produces nitrogen -- a substance which contributes to soil vitality, especially if the plant is allowed to die (and the nitrogen then gets released!) in the soil during the appropriate part of the crop rotation. Most normal crops just take this substance OUT of the soil and do not place it back, making the ground less fertile over time. Note not all legumes have this specific type of small life, but many do!
All the ones I am about to mention do the nitrogen fixing thing. Also, touching the oils on these plants or eating them, even if very diluted, may cause a very very very very small percentage of your population to stop breathing due to their throat swelling shut and die due to extreme lethal allergy to even miniscule amounts of the oils. There's no real way to prevent this. Some extremely small amount of any human population is just horribly deathly allergic to legumes and that's pretty much that. Legumes are just too absurdly useful to NOT have growing around and being eaten and used as forage and fixing the soil and all that; these unwitting, often child sacrifices should probably be collectively honored somehow when you can figure out it was a legume that did such a child in.
Anyway, here's a few ideal ones. Alfalfa, also called Lucerne, is a plant which slightly resembles clover when it is young, which grows to about one meter, has a deep root system, and produces smallish purple flowers. Fruits spiral in two to three turns and have 10-20 seeds. It's a good feed for livestock (except overfeeding can cause bloating), the sprouts are edible by humans (though they have to be regularly rinsed while growing the sprouts in water in a jar for human consumption).
Lupinus, or Lupin, Lupine, Bluebonnet. A Perennial that grows up to 1.5 meters tall, with soft green leaves coated in silvery hairs. The bluish flower has a distinct set of upper and lower flowers that remind people of certain kind of head coverings, leading to people to often call them 'bluebonnet'. The pod contains several beans, and is a useful food.
Peanut, or Groundnut, or Goober, Pindar, or Monkey Nut, is mainly grown for its edible seeds. It is an annual herb which is one of the types where the nuts are specifically in pods of usually two or three in the ground, with small round yellow flowers. The seeds have a brown papery covering. They have a large amount of a substance called 'Protein' for a plant, which is usually found in animal muscle, so are useful for people who can't or won't have lots of animal products to have healthier muscles.
Rooibos, or Redbush, or Stekelthee, is used as an herbal tea, often called 'Bush Tea', and has thin, rigid, leafs and small yellowish flowers, and the seed pods often need to be weakened to germinate (by grinding or fire). Likely this plant isn't anywhere near you.
Clover, or Trefoil, is the common small three-leaf you see in grass, and it IS a legume that DOES fix nitrogen, and often has white flowers. It's used as fodder and bees, both honeybees and bumblebees, love it. The four and five and six leaf examples are rare and often considered lucky, though this is just superstition.
Soybean or Soya Bean is maybe a 1.5 meter tall plant with 20 or so growth nodes, and up to 100 pods per plant that seed. It has three to four leaflets per leaf. It goes through many distinct looks as it grows. It develops pods that contain up to three to five seeds each or so. The pods are hairy. It has small violet flowers. The beans are edible and useful in a wide variety of food products.
Let's see, what else have you mentioned of late?
As far as managing your Singers... all I can say is get together a bunch of people that are students of history, students of the sorts of arts that influence people, propagandists, confidence artists, influential playwrights, those who study politics, students of the mind and the ways people think, those who enjoy comparing and contrasting societies and ways of living and so on, loyal types, and encourage the study of the concept and techniques of 'social engineering' and 'propaganda'; that is, in this context, the specific use of scientific techniques in managing information and beliefs that other people have about you to encourage specific types of people to tend to behave in specific ways that are beneficial to you, not as much in the individual level (ie, by bribes or threats to individuals or whatnot), but in groups. Basically, I'm trying to introduce the concept that this is a specific discrete concept that can actually be studied scientifically, like anything else.
As far as this banking system and economics and the.. mindset of these people with their hoards, someone who is better than me at the history of finance and economics is going to have to walk you through what exactly is going on, what the things they are doing are formally called within economic theory, why it is useful, and give you some more context for how all the strangeness isn't madness. Or if it is a sort of madness, it is an incredibly useful madness that is so useful it might as well not be madness at all. And also the views of why they think it's okay to behave in ways that seem so strange to you when talking about declining to give tribute or the existing of shared heritage and how those things can be useful and so on, and why actions not immediately being motivated by violence and the threat thereof but instead the gaining or loss of wealth can be massively useful to the Ten Nations. But there IS system in what they are doing and it DOES have use to the Ten Nations beyond what first seems obvious to you, I can tell that right now from your descriptions.
As far as your people losing their 'edge'... That they are no longer 'as sharp'. This is... reasonably expected, at this level of develoment. My belief is that it has to do with the increasing level of specialization that people undergo, and how at the current level of social, economic, and technological development, people are more relying on these institutions which are developing to help people do one specific thing well enough, but that your society hasn't quite gotten as amazing as it could be with regards to things like information access, education, possibility for social and economic and physical mobility, obscure education techniques, the ways of thought and unity that bind different sorts of people together as a unified, dynamic 'Nation-State' (which in this context, refers to a type of government and way of thinking about a place and collection of people that hasn't quite been invented yet, and won't really become a thing for a while yet). This isn't bad it's just... a many, many little things, of many categories, need to be improved to allow the Ten Nations to scrape and claw its way out of these doldrums.
As far as the weird tiny life stuff... it seems like it's probably just lies, likely related to the social ills which also caused people at this level of development to lose their 'edge'. It happens. Education and related things will eventually fix this sort of thing. Though, it'd certainly be fun to see if there's weird magic that works on that scale or smaller scales! If you can find a magic that provably works at the scale of the very small, especially in LOTS of amounts of very small things, you could probably do some pretty amazing things!
Also!
[X] [Rumors] Hire soldiers, etc. and send them to make peace in the west
[X] [Infertility] Enforce ban on Oathbreaker fertility rites, encourage emigration
[X] [Relic] War with Azule until the shit stops
@Ciber I don't think the scientists should be the economist/financial type/central banker. There should maybe be a science of Economics and Finance and such encouraged as a subset of Math, to be sure, but maybe find another group to do the banking thing?
, "Singers")?
