Superliga: Rise of the Killer Clowns of Cardin
Note: Yes, its long, but I couldn't make lj-cut work.
Notable counter-cultures in Cardin's low socio-economic areas
Cardin's slums are the homes of many disparate groups: some few gypsies not made extinct by the encroachment of the metropolis on all that was green and natural, a smattering of the old men of the forest and thousands of men from a hundred annexed nations. All these and more huddle for warmth and sustenance in the shadow of the great culture their oppressors have formed. Rebellion breeds like scum on the bottom of a stagnant pool here and none of these firebrand revolutionaries are more irritating than the followers of the Fool King. These inane and bothersome creatures trace their history back to a former opponent of Imperial Cardin.
A common tavern-tale told to amuse drunkards is the most concise accepted history of Bo. It is included here more for preservation of an oral tradition than any other purpose and to paraphrase a history which any high school student should be familiar with. Many years ago, there ruled a man in Bo. The king of Bo willed it that his country be ever safeguarded from harm and so he turned to the creatures of the void-between-planes to negotiate some means of protection for his people. The creatures blessed him with a single seed in exchange for his soul. By chance his wife happened upon the seed as he nursed it one night and seized it from his hands. "You have forsaken your soul for this trifle? It profits a man nothing to sell his soul even for the world, but for a seed? And when you lose it, what then?". Historians reveal at the end of this (much-abridged) tirade, she took the seed and threw it into the moat beneath the castle. The king seized her in a fit of rage and made as if to defenestrate her also, but the seed had adapted quite pleasantly to it new environment. With a happy slurping noise it grew to encompass the entire moat and had dug its roots deep into the ground. The flowering that covered its putrescent vines was named for the queen who planted it - "acid-tongue".
The effects of the acid-tongue were long-reaching: no man could pass through the places where the tongue had touched without being seized upon and devoured by the vines, effectively cutting off the capital from the rest of the kingdom. With the king unable to co-ordinate his subject's defense plans, Cardin's Exploratory Forces subjugated the region over the course of three years. Fearful that the capital might house some deadly weapon to use against them but unable to penetrate the acid-tongue wall, Cardin established a token garrison at the front of the main entrance to the city and promptly forgot that Bo had ever existed.
Inside the city, strange happenings were afoot - the city's food and water supplies had not lasted even a month after the unveiling of the king's mad bargain and rioting had depleted the city to just half of its initial population. The corpses were piled high into the streets until there was nothing for it but unceremonious burial in the empty pits of the moat. The acid-tongue devoured this too, erupting in fruits all along its interior. The fruit of the acid-tongue resembled a coarse husk on the bottom layer, but the flesh of the fruit was a delicious ambrosia that resembled white algae in texture. The food nourished the survivors, although it came with its own troubling side-effects: the food covered the consumer in an irritable rash that if scratched or bruised caused purple welts that resembled scales. Attempts by devoted alcoholics to brew some form of drink from the fruit were all-too-successful, giving a first-time drinker the gin blossoms of a grizzled alcoholic. Long-term consumption caused gigantism and mouth ulcers as well as hair-loss or radical alterations of pigmentation. Yet, the fruit was clearly either addictive, or the people of Bo found the concept of living in a bizarre and twisted world less frightening than dying by starvation. To lessen the effect of having to look in the mirror each day, the people of Bo took to outlandish fashions - men and women indulged in heavy make-up and garish colours that incorporated and accentuated their strange deformities. Life continued both inside and outside the acid-tongue, much as normal.
In 1377 CD, an ambitious young arms dealer named J P Stalinger appeared at the boundaries of Bo with a half dozen mean and grizzled looking men, asking to be pointed in the direction of the commanding officer’s quarters and also to the boundary of Bo. He was apprehended slowly by the action-deprived guards and eventually Stalinger found his way to the general, where he made a modest proposal: he would supply the CO with a daring military victory that would propel him further up the ranks if the CO would remember him when Stalinger approached Cardin’s military council with his weapon designs. The CO tacitly agreed, realising that there was no other way to leave a posting at the very quiet Bo front without dying.
Within thirty seconds of the historic agreement, CO Jonathon Adersen and JP Stalinger launched themselves into the history books by means of a prototype flamethrower directed squarely at the acid-tongue. The plant shrieked and its limbs thrashed about as the fire consumed it, spouting acid in metre high gouts over the hapless soldiers and directly into the heart of Bo. When the smoke finally cleared there were less than a hundred on either side of the caustic moat. The natives of Bo were described as fierce tribal warriors, fighting with their bare fists as much as they did with torn-off sections of acid-tongue, using the flowers to squirt jets of acid into the eyes of their opponents or disfiguring them with a well-aimed section of the strange fruits. Each one of them had painted their entire bodies in greasepaint, marking their faces with horrific expressions and exposing their distorted bodies to their foes. They were fierce warriors, but no match for the expeditionary force. The last to fall was the King, his garish robes of state tainted black by the falling acid and bearing a maniacal grin, using his equally maddened wife as a mace against the oncoming hordes. He felled twenty men before he too fell, cursing them as he went down in a gibbering, high-pitched voice. His soul was carried instantly into the abyss as he had agreed, leaving only a bubbling corpse surrounded by the acrid smell of acid-tongue.
Adersen became a well-respected general for his part in the war, although he never advanced as far as Stalinger had hoped, dying in a routine patrol a year later. Stalinger himself faded into relative obscurity, becoming known as the first inventor of the flamethrower but his contributions to firearms development were obsolete by Sturgeon, the luminary of modern weaponry. Stalinger lived out the rest of his life in a small garden village near Bo, where it is unlikely he performed any other great acts of ingenuity with his talents.
In this modern day and age, the kingdom of Bo has been forgotten, replaced by the Kriegstahl slums and a portion of the Modesto industrial suburbs. A few anarchists and disaffected university students have taken up the culture of the “Bo Defenders” as a sort of figurative ‘up yours’ to the accepted establishments of our time. Though they occasionally use their relative anonymity and distinctive appearance to deface a public building or set fire to a mailbox, rumours that they are empowered by a resurrected “Fool King” or have been warped by some surviving strain of acid-tongue should be treated as apocryphal at best.
- Taken from “Cardin: A History of our Great Metropolis”, by K Normanby.
Notable counter-cultures in Cardin's low socio-economic areas
Cardin's slums are the homes of many disparate groups: some few gypsies not made extinct by the encroachment of the metropolis on all that was green and natural, a smattering of the old men of the forest and thousands of men from a hundred annexed nations. All these and more huddle for warmth and sustenance in the shadow of the great culture their oppressors have formed. Rebellion breeds like scum on the bottom of a stagnant pool here and none of these firebrand revolutionaries are more irritating than the followers of the Fool King. These inane and bothersome creatures trace their history back to a former opponent of Imperial Cardin.
A common tavern-tale told to amuse drunkards is the most concise accepted history of Bo. It is included here more for preservation of an oral tradition than any other purpose and to paraphrase a history which any high school student should be familiar with. Many years ago, there ruled a man in Bo. The king of Bo willed it that his country be ever safeguarded from harm and so he turned to the creatures of the void-between-planes to negotiate some means of protection for his people. The creatures blessed him with a single seed in exchange for his soul. By chance his wife happened upon the seed as he nursed it one night and seized it from his hands. "You have forsaken your soul for this trifle? It profits a man nothing to sell his soul even for the world, but for a seed? And when you lose it, what then?". Historians reveal at the end of this (much-abridged) tirade, she took the seed and threw it into the moat beneath the castle. The king seized her in a fit of rage and made as if to defenestrate her also, but the seed had adapted quite pleasantly to it new environment. With a happy slurping noise it grew to encompass the entire moat and had dug its roots deep into the ground. The flowering that covered its putrescent vines was named for the queen who planted it - "acid-tongue".
The effects of the acid-tongue were long-reaching: no man could pass through the places where the tongue had touched without being seized upon and devoured by the vines, effectively cutting off the capital from the rest of the kingdom. With the king unable to co-ordinate his subject's defense plans, Cardin's Exploratory Forces subjugated the region over the course of three years. Fearful that the capital might house some deadly weapon to use against them but unable to penetrate the acid-tongue wall, Cardin established a token garrison at the front of the main entrance to the city and promptly forgot that Bo had ever existed.
Inside the city, strange happenings were afoot - the city's food and water supplies had not lasted even a month after the unveiling of the king's mad bargain and rioting had depleted the city to just half of its initial population. The corpses were piled high into the streets until there was nothing for it but unceremonious burial in the empty pits of the moat. The acid-tongue devoured this too, erupting in fruits all along its interior. The fruit of the acid-tongue resembled a coarse husk on the bottom layer, but the flesh of the fruit was a delicious ambrosia that resembled white algae in texture. The food nourished the survivors, although it came with its own troubling side-effects: the food covered the consumer in an irritable rash that if scratched or bruised caused purple welts that resembled scales. Attempts by devoted alcoholics to brew some form of drink from the fruit were all-too-successful, giving a first-time drinker the gin blossoms of a grizzled alcoholic. Long-term consumption caused gigantism and mouth ulcers as well as hair-loss or radical alterations of pigmentation. Yet, the fruit was clearly either addictive, or the people of Bo found the concept of living in a bizarre and twisted world less frightening than dying by starvation. To lessen the effect of having to look in the mirror each day, the people of Bo took to outlandish fashions - men and women indulged in heavy make-up and garish colours that incorporated and accentuated their strange deformities. Life continued both inside and outside the acid-tongue, much as normal.
In 1377 CD, an ambitious young arms dealer named J P Stalinger appeared at the boundaries of Bo with a half dozen mean and grizzled looking men, asking to be pointed in the direction of the commanding officer’s quarters and also to the boundary of Bo. He was apprehended slowly by the action-deprived guards and eventually Stalinger found his way to the general, where he made a modest proposal: he would supply the CO with a daring military victory that would propel him further up the ranks if the CO would remember him when Stalinger approached Cardin’s military council with his weapon designs. The CO tacitly agreed, realising that there was no other way to leave a posting at the very quiet Bo front without dying.
Within thirty seconds of the historic agreement, CO Jonathon Adersen and JP Stalinger launched themselves into the history books by means of a prototype flamethrower directed squarely at the acid-tongue. The plant shrieked and its limbs thrashed about as the fire consumed it, spouting acid in metre high gouts over the hapless soldiers and directly into the heart of Bo. When the smoke finally cleared there were less than a hundred on either side of the caustic moat. The natives of Bo were described as fierce tribal warriors, fighting with their bare fists as much as they did with torn-off sections of acid-tongue, using the flowers to squirt jets of acid into the eyes of their opponents or disfiguring them with a well-aimed section of the strange fruits. Each one of them had painted their entire bodies in greasepaint, marking their faces with horrific expressions and exposing their distorted bodies to their foes. They were fierce warriors, but no match for the expeditionary force. The last to fall was the King, his garish robes of state tainted black by the falling acid and bearing a maniacal grin, using his equally maddened wife as a mace against the oncoming hordes. He felled twenty men before he too fell, cursing them as he went down in a gibbering, high-pitched voice. His soul was carried instantly into the abyss as he had agreed, leaving only a bubbling corpse surrounded by the acrid smell of acid-tongue.
Adersen became a well-respected general for his part in the war, although he never advanced as far as Stalinger had hoped, dying in a routine patrol a year later. Stalinger himself faded into relative obscurity, becoming known as the first inventor of the flamethrower but his contributions to firearms development were obsolete by Sturgeon, the luminary of modern weaponry. Stalinger lived out the rest of his life in a small garden village near Bo, where it is unlikely he performed any other great acts of ingenuity with his talents.
In this modern day and age, the kingdom of Bo has been forgotten, replaced by the Kriegstahl slums and a portion of the Modesto industrial suburbs. A few anarchists and disaffected university students have taken up the culture of the “Bo Defenders” as a sort of figurative ‘up yours’ to the accepted establishments of our time. Though they occasionally use their relative anonymity and distinctive appearance to deface a public building or set fire to a mailbox, rumours that they are empowered by a resurrected “Fool King” or have been warped by some surviving strain of acid-tongue should be treated as apocryphal at best.
- Taken from “Cardin: A History of our Great Metropolis”, by K Normanby.