[spoilers] Infinite Happiness, Commodore the Suryturk

[Commodore]

Eleven down, settler for twelfth (Lorn) on the way. Everyone else is making units.

REM is going to be attacking someone at this point, on;y question is whom.

[Commodore]

Player dispositions on our continent; I'm missing one or two more. I suspect Donovan is the nearer of the yellow mystery dudes, but not sure.

World news:
-Barteq and Gavagai ate Grimace, are fighting over the corpse.
-Mackotao landed MoM, ouch.
-Plako got a late GLH, good jorb.
-Dtay has the Great Wall (hur).

[Commodore]

A Grand Tour
Part One: Southwest Beast Nation
So you are one of this strange new breed seen upon the world; a civil servant, raised to the comforts of the bureaucracy by dint of hard work on exams. Or a merchant owner, who sits back and lets his hired men do all the hard labor of trade. Or perhaps just a wastrel scion of nobility. The Beast Nation has thoroughly pacified the their land from coast to coast, and wise investments in the new markets have enriched you beyond any possible need. Nevertheless, you feel oppressed by your neighbors and relations, their constant prying life keeps your horizons nakedly wide. You want to be seen as a man of the world, while at the same time shutting out all the noisome obnoxiousness that is being part of the world. Well lucky for you, you have an option afforded to only the richest in history:

You can become a tourist.

Starting off your grand tour of the Beast Nation you arrive in the balmy port of Jagan, a relatively rustic city smelling of fish and timber. The Jagan Peninsula is a warm spit of pastureland and woods, lacking relief but still well-favored by rainfall. Although Jagan is definitely the hub of the West Nation County, it is still a rough and young place, neglected by the government and much in need of improvement. It would be churlish to complain about the relatively few amenities of the remote burg, but fortunately you are just such a churl. When you head northwest out of the bustling town through the low and rolling foothills, you shake its dust off of your boots with disdain.

Wandering north over a fresh road you arrive in time to the South Fork of the geologically improbably Tine River; just across the ford is the newest city in the nation, Lorn. Settled in almost painfully fertile country, Lorn is still yet a little frontier city of fishermen, lumberjacks, and miners. Someday in the far future it will be a hub for numerous riverside towns, mines, and mills but for now it is a tenuous outpost huddled amidst ancient and thick forest and gnarled hills. You find the views refreshing and the citizens are so delightfully bucolic you need never think them people at all; it is almost a pity to go back down the road but if you weren't careful you would fall in actual love with the place, and that would utterly ruin its picturesque charm.

Larger, longer-settled, and more built up, nevertheless busy Bantanu and its surrounds are still astonishingly wooded and wild; touring the copper mines you still see honest-to-Confucius bears foraging nearby. The less said about the city itself the better, the poor uncultured boobs therein actually speak Russian at times; the salty Innerstok Sea is trafficked by the hairy militaristic barbarians throughout. You do take time to lecture the locals on the benefit of finishing their library; they seem more concerned about making spears and catapults so as not to be overrun, the fools. Ah well, as The Sage said, "I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood." Their loss, they could make their town so much less primitive that way...

[Ceiliazul]

Looks like a sierra nevada gold mine... Man those civil war engineers were stubborn or brilliant, not sure which.

[Commodore]

Looks like a sierra nevada gold mine... Man those civil war engineers were stubborn or brilliant, not sure which.

Why not both?

A Grand Tour
Part Two: Confucius' Heartland

Enough with the bumpkins for a while, now let us ride further northeast along the Nation's Road; the land again sinks from the hills. However, despite leaving the Innerstok Sea you note with distaste that the air grows ever more muggy and hot; this is the jungle bowel of the nation, the chief locus the civilized but feverish city of Carn Sul. The jungles around the city hide deposits of gems, but none dare brave the malarial morass yet to set up mines.

Carn Sul is a city that never sleeps, rife with hawkers of wares and sellers of pablum. You may spend yourself here for a while, until the disease and mundanity of dispossession wears you down. The gutters of the city are choked with failures, men who came to the crossroads seeking wealth but in the end find nothingness. The city leaders round these debtors up regularly and press them into work-gangs. Best to leave this place for healthier climes.

Indeed going on the less-used road to the northeast you find yourself feeling invigorated rather quickly; though the heat increases the muggy damp rot of Carn Sul is rather swiftly replaced with the bracing plains wind; you come soon upon the tumbledown outpost of Fortalle. Cowmen and ranchers make their dusty way into the spare comforts of the city; the place is as of yet so undeveloped as to lack even a civic granary. The dry and clean area serves as a refreshing palliative after the cloying jungle district, but soon the monotony of plains and cattle gets to you and you journey once again northeast.

There is no city at the Lake of Pilgrims, nor even proper hamlets, but it nonetheless is a cool green region to take a rest in. Boorish lumberjacks swarm south of the riverbanks but here in the lake country you feel quite alone. The lack of decent amenities does get to you after a while and so you set off once more, this time along the Pilgrim's Way.

The holy city of Turlock, high on a towering stony hill, gleams in the late afternoon sunlight as you merge with a greater stream of pilgrims. You care but little for the common men's fawning enthusiasm for the Great Sage, but a for other urbane sophisticates can be found in the sea-breeze-cooled shops and taverns of the city. Arguments about the Wisdom and the Teachings predominate; diverting for a while but the hilly land bathed in sunshine is what you really came to see; the Sage's home district is a beautiful country.

Still in time, the press of pilgrims and people does get tiresome, so off again you go, this time eastward and a little south. Your last stop in this county is the trading hub of Kempen and her famous waterfalls. It is only a brief stop, but it is a lovely one in this place where mountains spawn streams unto rivers. Many stopping (and many many do make the stop, for all roads in the northwest of the Nation meet here) at Kempen fall for the town but you are not about to sacrifice your cosmopolitanism for some mere pretty scenery. You must be off again soon for the urban core of the nation awaits.

[Rowain]

Indeed going on the less-used road to the northeast you find yourself feeling invigorated rather quickly; though the heat increases the muggy damp rot of Carn Sul is rather swiftly replaced with the bracing plains wind; you come soon upon the tumbledown outpost of Fortalle.

The holy city of Turlock,.....Still in time, the press of pilgrims and people does get tiresome, so off again you go, this time westward and a little south.

Baiting readers for comments?

But still lovely written

[Commodore]

The holy city of Turlock,.....Still in time, the press of pilgrims and people does get tiresome, so off again you go, this time westward and a little south.

Baiting readers for comments?

Eastwexia is a plague that afflicts dozens of RBers every day.

[Commodore]

A Grand Tour
Part Three: The Core
Leaving behind the homespun charms of Kempen you saunter ever eastward, coming to a very old and established country. Forests give way to carefully tended fields, a vast patchwork broken regularly by cots, hamlets, and villages. The roads here are wide and carefully graded, cobbled with grey stones quarried long ago. The farmers are friends and the villagers are talkative, but you press on swiftly now, because you are rapidly approaching the greatest city in the world. Rising up hills and down valleys, ahead mighty Saradash sprawls.

No city on Brick's Green Earth is so populous. Saradash is a place where you can lose yourself for days, nay, weeks and still have quarters yet unseen. Its markets are hectic bedlams where gems, furs, ivory, and countless lesser luxuries are bartered and traded. Its libraries are cool centers of debate and discovery. Its hannams are decadent and rich, full of sybaritic delights. The palace? Fairly humming with power as the Minotaur and Satyr Caste rulers of the nation throng there, all going about their business of governance. It's a heady place...a city so large you could almost settle here permanently and still live as a tourist; cosmopolitanism is easy within the swarms. But the city is expensive and nobody here is impressed with your urbane sophistication, so in the end, you leave by the river and head south.

The road to Amondon is long and winding; your slow barge's path is ironically much more direct. The lands south and east of the river are just as tame as before, but drier and more sparsely settled; you know it is only a matter of time before the scattered cots grow to their own riverside townships. Further upstream, low gem mines send their fruits down to the sea. Nearing Amondon, the mighty Pyramids rise first in your view; tombs of ancient kings, these mighty marvels' gold caps catch the dawn long before the shadowed river-plain sees its morning rays.

Amondon itself would be more impressive were it not for Saradash just before it; the city is another of the world's greatest. As it is, you depart within a week, having just enough time to admire to Temple of the Sage; the priest there promises you that a great prophet of Confucianism shall soon be born, but you would bet it more likely an engineer comes from this city in the looming shadow of those stone colossi. Along the road to little, abused Tetrehahn you pass through one of the last few wooded lands left within the nation's heartland. Only the furs of the dwellers protect this little wild outpost, and who knows how long that shall last?

[Commodore]

As an aside, just got this for my birthday:

John Keegan is awesome.

[TheHumanHydra]

Cool. I've read his First and Second World Wars.