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I feel like we're in for a shocking crossover with the goblin CYOA thread.
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Feb 22, 2015 06:59
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Sindai posted:I feel like we're in for a shocking crossover with the goblin CYOA thread. Hahah that's exactly what I was thinking, any minute now we're going to have people suggesting we find alcohol so we can breed
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Feb 22, 2015 07:01
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Bandage wound, run for the hills. Run for your life!
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Feb 22, 2015 07:01
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Sindai posted:I feel like we're in for a shocking crossover with the goblin CYOA thread. I was thinking it might be Ichiro's quantum leap stuff.
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Feb 22, 2015 07:25
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JT Jag posted:>Sit down and rest. Just for a second. You need to get your bearings. Constantinople is an old, old city— more than a thousand years of history all piled up on top of itself. It's easy to get lost in this constantly shifting cityscape in the best of times. And this certainly isn't the best of times. One wrong turn and you might get gunned down! The only constant is the Hagia Sophia. Lord Cyrahzax posted:>Tear off some of your clothes and make a quick bandage for your side, and then follow in the fleeing soldiers wake to Hagia Sophia! But no, you better get this show on the road. Tick, tock. You tear off a strip of cloth from the bottom of your dress and bind your wound. It's getting dark, and the sun is setting. At least, you hope that's why it's getting dark. You aren't entirely sure where you are, beyond the basics. Wall to the west, Hagia Sophia to the east. There are a lot fewer buildings than you remember there being in this neighborhood. The city feels oddly empty, like it's a village cowering beneath the Theodosian Walls like a turtle with its head in its shell. Church bells are ringing. You close your eyes for a second. Turkish soldiers are rushing through the breach in the walls, fighting under a banner you've never seen before in your life— red with a bifrucated sword in white. You try to remember a time when the Romans and Turks were enemies, but can't recall the Seljuks ever breaching the walls of Constantinople. Maybe these soldiers are the Romans, and the rabble of ill-equipped Greeks and Italian mercenaries attempting to hold them back are some doux's petty army? Then, amidst the Greeks, you see a man in a purple cloak. The Emperor of Rome himself. He is weeping. "The city is fallen and I am still alive," he says, tearing off his cloak and his golden regalia. He melts into the disintegrating Greek lines, just another anonymous soldier meeting his death in the fall of the Roman Empire. You leave the last emperor of Rome to his fate and start walking towards the Hagia Sophia. You have a harder and harder time identifying just what you're seeing as you make your way through the streets. The pain is getting worse and worse. You see Nicaean soldiers singing a Latin mass as they set the city afire and retreat, and their Mongol pursuers choking and dying in a city of ash. A child empress bundled off to a Balkans exile, the Sunni caliph's great jihad seizing the City of the World's Desire while Western Europe burned and Scandinavia schemed. Norman crusaders surge through the Golden Gate, putting the city to the torch and its people to the sword-- the revenge of a Bulgar emperor sent into ignominious exile by Greek nobles. A lengthy siege. The city hungers. But the walls stay standing, impervious to all attacks. In the end, treachery wins the day— d'Hauteville infiltrators sneak into the city in the dark of night and open the gates from within. The defenders are slaughtered, and the invaders keen to sack the city, restrained only by a king who dreams of imperial glories and a Catholic Rome. Red flags, socialist revolution, the Internationale, a communist Union-- familiar things in unfamiliar shapes, left behind in a happier past. It is a war to end all wars, and German troops are marching into the city. They call themselves a Holy Roman Empire, but they are cruel— reactionary— and, yes, there's something else about them, some hard edge to their politics, a kind of viciousness you can't quite put a name to. The dream of a better tomorrow is dead. The future is full of atomic fire. A dynasty schooled in the arts of governance in the green and pleasant land of Eire surges out across the world, laying waste to Byzantium to put their kinsman on the Roman throne. You move deeper and deeper into the city, desiring it as much as any of the ever-shifting cast of conquerers and defenders, Romans and barbarians, Byzantines and Latins, fighting around you. Terrible engines of war rumble down the street, scattering pikemen and cataphracts before them. Roman machine guns mow down Byzantine sipahi cavalry, both columns fighting under red flags of revolution. Buildings crumble, sigeworks appear and vanish like ocean tides along the Golden Horn, the Theodosian Walls contort horrifically as they rise and fall over and over again. You feel as if you can almost reach out touch the stones of Hagia Sophia— the shining crown jewel of the City of the World's Desire. Blood fills the Bosphorous. YOU HAVE DIED You bolt awake in bed, a shrill cry echoing through the city. It's just the whistle of a train pulling out of Sapountzakis Central Station, carrying passengers off to parts unknown in the west. You've never been so grateful to be woken up by the train— you can't believe you ever resented being stuck in a hotel so closed to the station. A train is such a normal thing to hear— the "all aboards", the whistle, the chug-chug-chugging of an engine rumbling to life— it's proof that somewhere, out there, life still exists. Blood still courses through the rail arteries tying Byzantium together. The city's alive! The Commune's alive! You're alive! You wonder how much Turkish coffee it will take to sit through whatever boring speech Tribune Exteberria is probably going to give to close the International. Probably a lot. Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 07:28
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That ending made me feel ill in the best possible way, this is rad as hell. What the gently caress is even going on anymore? Maybe we got the name wrong. Maybe Byzantium isn't the City of World's Desires, maybe its the City of Worlds' Desire. All the multiverse has come the conquer us, the only unconquered Byzantium.
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Feb 22, 2015 07:34
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You're a good writer and this is a cool-rear end LP, Rincewind
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Feb 22, 2015 07:39
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  Evgenia Exteberria, First Tribune of the Grand Secretariat of the Byzantine Commune Inaugurated October 28th, 1884  The Athens Commune  : Comrades! Once again, I am so proud of what we've accomplished here together! In just five days, we've... I... hm.Comrade Exteberria crumples up her prepared remarks and tosses them into a bin. : Can we speak frankly for a bit?: We've all been having those weird dreams, right?: I'm not just going crazy, am I?: Septimus Severus sacking old Byzantion? The Great Fire? The Fall of the Senate? And then... whatever it was that happened last night.: So, like, before we just get out of here, get on our trains to the four corners of the Commune, the boats to our home nations, or even just the streetcars to the other side of town to our new offices...: What happend? What was that? : What did it mean? It's a reminder that there's nothing for us in the past but war, death, and woe, Evgenia, love. We've been a nation obsessed with our past from the very start. Even when Rome barely existed, we were devising legendary pasts for ourselves— the voyages of Aeneas, Romulus and Remus, seven kings with improbably long reigns. What we saw was just the slightest fraction of our past, just a handful of the massacres, conquests, and horrors that haunt our long centuries. So there's no sense obsessing over it, chasing bygone glories. To the future, to the stars-- ad astra. ##Support Evgenia Exteberria's Girlfriend, Definitely  Sic itur ad astra. "Thus you shall go to the stars." Virgil, Aeneid book IX. I do not deny that the past is full of horrors— but that is precisely why we must keep it close to our hearts. If we forget Septimus Severus, we become Septiumus Severus. In many ways, we are building something never seen before in the world— but people are people, Byzantines are Byzantines. There is an unparalleled wealth of knowledge and experience to guide us. ##Support the Florentine Classicist  It... the dreams were a warning. We are headed for some disaster, something inconceivably horrific just over the horizon. A modern horror, making the Victorian Wars or the campaigns of Chang Yuchun look like local brushfires. My people have learned perhaps more than any other in the world that all nations now exist in a single community, and a half-hearted vote by bored parliamentarians can unleash hell on earth on the other side of the world. Eventually, the system will seize up and destroy itself in a great global conflagration. There is nothing we can do to avoid this fate— we are headed towards it like a locomotive on a track. But, perhaps, if we prepare for it, we can survive, and build a new world in the ruins of the old. ##Support the Union Planner  It means there's like an infinite number of ways we could have hosed everything up and blown up the world, and the fact that we're still alive today is a goddamned miracle. We're threading a delicate needle here, so above all we need to be realistic. Our fancy ideas won't do us any good if we don't have enough realpolitik to make it into the 20th century. Staying allied with Great Britain is a good example. We've done them a favor by not pressing the issue of the Pope, and they'll do us a favor by passing legislation that helps improve the situation of the British worker. The potential of the Commune means nothing if it's strangled in the cradle. Pragmatism above all else, lest we wind up like all those other Constantinoples. ##Support the Pragmatic Diplomat Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 10:32
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Support the Florentine Classicist We must never forget the tyrannies of the past, in all their forms - feudalism, monarchy, religion, capitalism - or else we will betray the Revolution and fall back into the old ways. Know thy enemy and all that.
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Feb 22, 2015 10:38
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##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 10:42
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A people, a Commune, a Nation forewarned of what is coming is better prepared for it. ##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 10:47
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The sins of the past still live with us, the empty spaces and the scars left by the dead and their killers. The Commune is the first step towards healing, but it is not enough. The world will seek to bury us to hide their own complicity in the needless slaughter of the innocent. Dark times lie ahead, and we must be ready for them. ##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 10:48
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##Support the Florentine Classicist
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Feb 22, 2015 10:53
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#Support the Florentine Classicist To know the past is to learn from the past. To fear the past is to stagnate the future.
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Feb 22, 2015 10:57
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#Support the Florentine Classicist.
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Feb 22, 2015 11:09
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Florentine Classicist posted:Sic itur ad astra. "Thus you shall go to the stars." Virgil, Aeneid book IX. I do not deny that the past is full of horrors— but that is precisely why we must keep it close to our hearts. If we forget Septimus Severus, we become Septiumus Severus. In many ways, we are building something never seen before in the world— but people are people, hypocrites are hypocrites. There is an unparalleled wealth of knowledge and experience to guide us. Finally, the basic truth. To forget the past is to relive it, to suppress the past as the Sjallaer regime and its progeny did is to invite it. Just as they overthrew their predecessors because they did not listen to the people, their suppression of everything 'Roman' and their whitewashing of the past to match their own twisted narrative meant that it was their fate to be overthrown by their successors because they did not listen to the people. Never again will we make such an error. Henceforth let Rome and Byzantium be accorded equal status as nomenclature, As the people choose. If they wish to call us Rome, let them! If they wish to call us Byzantium, let them! What matters is the will of the individual working Roman on whom our society is built. In the past, long ago, there was an edict of toleration for all faiths. Let us now, in the spirit of universal communal advancement, decree toleration for all, regardless if they are Romans or Byzantines, repudiating the follies of the previous regime but never forgetting them. ##Support the Florentine Classicist
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Feb 22, 2015 11:20
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##Support the Pragmatic Diplomat
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Feb 22, 2015 11:43
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##Support the Florentine Classicist
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Feb 22, 2015 11:49
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 Sylverster Mars, Patriarch of Rome. Ah, finally people are up and speaking about this, bravo! Always best to confront these things head on, I say. So it is, now that we've finally got some real plans and discussion up and going, I will... respectfully abstain I have my reasons of course. You're all a bit melodramatic about these things. Fearing the past, fearing the future, being filled with wild romantic notions of both, ah, to be young again- but I digress. You're a good crew, a good assembly, whatever path you choose here, you'll do good by me and by the man on the street. So don't get all over yourself with it, just vote what speaks to your heart, all roads lead to a tomorrow we're ready to face. NewMars fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 12:02
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##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 12:03
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#Support the Florentine Classicist
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Feb 22, 2015 12:04
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##Support the Union Planner Something bad is on the horizon...
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Feb 22, 2015 12:04
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##Support the Pragmatic Diplomat
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Feb 22, 2015 12:05
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So this whole series of dreams has been one long COMET SIGHTED, eh. ##Support Evgenia Exteberria's Girlfriend, Definitely Leave the past in the past.
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Feb 22, 2015 12:09
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##Support the Florentine Classicist
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Feb 22, 2015 12:16
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The multiverse, since undeniably now that exists, has seen our City of Worlds' Desire fall many many times, we must not let it fall again. Which ever divine urges you subscribe too are obviously on our side thats why they sent us those visions. Byzantion falls no more. ##Support the Florentine Classicist Rumda fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 12:16
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##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 12:17
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If we ever forget our past mistakes - Alexios the Black, Branas, the Usurper, Kaiseros Komnenos, the Storming of the Senate, all of it - we will forget why we do what we do, and why we must never let Rome rise. Not in words or names, nor in our hearts. For with Rome lies only pride, which as we all know goeth before the fall. ##Support the Florentine Classicist
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Feb 22, 2015 12:20
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The Black Emperor did nothing wrong  Rumda posted:The multiverse, since undeniably now that exists, has seen our City of Worlds' Desire fall many many times, we must not let it fall again. Which ever divine urges you subscribe too are obviously on our side thats why they sent us those visions. Well, it seems to fall about once every twenty years on average, but I like your optimism. ##Support Evgenia Exteberria's Girlfriend, Definitely
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Feb 22, 2015 12:21
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Ghetto Prince posted:The Black Emperor did nothing wrong Hence it being a declarative statment about a line in the sand.
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Feb 22, 2015 12:41
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We're still here, the rulers change but the people are eternal. It is of the utmost importance that we secure our rights and our future, by whatever means necessary. ##Support the Florentine Classicist Another Otter fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 13:20
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Yeah, we're about hosed. ##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 13:34
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##Support the Union Planner Iä! Iä!
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Feb 22, 2015 13:35
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##Support the Union Planner This guy clearly knows what's up.
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Feb 22, 2015 14:12
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##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 14:18
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##Support the Pragmatic Diplomat
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Feb 22, 2015 14:21
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Actually no. I'm editing my post. Chinese Worker's Party, Delegate Jianhu Nüxia Tóngzhìmen. Comrades. In studying history, one often feels a sense of tragedy, or at least of impermanence. No state, no empire, lasts forever. States can end from a spectacular blaze of violence like the past Romes, or from a slow internal decay as I fear will happen to my own China. Nor can the march of time bring with it continual progress. Only too well, we know that the almost magical improvements in technology in the past century do not accompany social change or political liberation. Ask any man or woman in those 'Anarcho-Capitalist' dictatorships working for pennies a day how fair the 'hand of the market' has been. But history can be a teacher. It does not teach directly, it does not work if you force yourself to memorize obscure dates and marriages. It teaches by example, by obscure insights, by analogies, and by studying and adapting these hidden lessons we can find ways to make our own part of the world peaceful and happy, if only for a while. Comrades. At a few rare moments, men and women are called to grapple with the immensity of history. It is up to us to really consider these vast impersonal forces which can make or destroy nations. I do not think any of us are so simplistic or naive to think that the foundation of this state somehow exempts us from the past rules of history or the inevitability of violence. But we must also recognize that not all revolutions will be made as peacefully as this. Our business will soon be concluded here, but that does not mean our lives in politics are over. We will face many terrible struggles in the coming years. In spite of everything, I still have faith in the capabilities of everyone here, and I place my trust for your support in the revolutions which lie ahead. She leaves the podium, visibly exhausted. ##Compromise between Yegenia's Girlfriend, the Florentine Scholar, the Diplomat, and I Don't Even loving Know Anymore Pass the Turkish Coffee tabris fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 14:53
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##Support the Union Planner
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Feb 22, 2015 15:13
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##Support the Florentine Classicist. Doomsaying doesn't seem helpful.
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Feb 22, 2015 15:20
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Now, I like to consider myself a rational man, and sure, the many fumes of our capital can cause quite the vivid dreams, but nothing like this. Concerted dreams like these do not happen, save for in religious texts and myth. Despite my own disbelief, I'll have to argue that someone or something has contacted us. The method is obnoxiously obtuse, but the message is clear. Destruction is coming for us. Or so it claims. This entity might be trying to fool us, to trick us into militarizing ourselves. Remember our geopolitical standing. We are at odds with almost everyone around us, and if we were to suddenly start gearing up for war, they'll conclude that we're planning to bring the revolution abroad. Of course we are, but not in this way. In fact, this very act could be what causes the destruction that we were warned of. So I find myself in the difficult position of having to choose between the Planner and the Diplomat, trust and distrust. Both are right, yet wrong. In time, we will learn the truth. For now, whatever we do, we need to maintain calm, and try to keep our international relations going. We may strengthen ourselves, just in case, but we'll need to be cautious about it. Peace is a very fragile thing. Let's ##Compromise. (Consider this a 0.5 vote for either of them, if that's allowed.) ThaumPenguin fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Feb 22, 2015 |
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Feb 22, 2015 15:25
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