After the Fall

[Mr. President]

I stood amid the scorched ruins of Tal Zach, and for the first time since I was a child, I wept.

You might argue I had little reason to weep. My Nationalist Party had just won the congressional election by forty percentage points. Here in Azan, the war was over. In a matter of minutes I would sign a cease-fire with Frankychanland's General and then the battered and bloodied young soldiers, young men, in the circle around me, could go home.

But still I wept.

The election meant nothing any more. Besides, the old adage that all politics is local is more true in Karakas than anywhere else in the world. Compared to now, I knew nothing about international politics - and no-one cared. Not my party, not the voters, not my wife, not me. That's why the war momentum, the League of Armed Neutrality, the Guardinian government, the communists, the Jew Secularists, or whoever the conspiracy theorists are blaming these days, could lead me - lead my young soldiers - into the ruins of Tal Zach.

It was my fault and no-one else's. I should have seen it coming. I should have known that this was the wrong war, at the wrong place and the wrong time, with the wrong allies.

Though technically Karakas was on the winning side, still we lost. For the moment the guns started to speak, the only possible outcome was devastation, strife, terror, and the Great Collapse.

I should have seen it coming, but there was too much to do. There would be time for regret after the fall.

[Mr. President]

OOC: These days, "will add content soon" seems to mean "will add content in two months, give or take six months". At least when it's me.

[Frankychan]

(OOC: The people demand more! Good stuff! Too much of a tease for my tastes though... )

[Mr. President]

OOC: I know. I've been really busy, but I'll try and do some more as soon as I can.

[Mr. President]

IC:

Did you know that Centralis became a hard-line communist country so gradually, no-one even realized until after the commercial interactions had already dried up?

Oh, it started harmlessly enough. When they re-wrote their constitution after the civil war, they put in a clause stating the government's obligation to "provide adequate housing, food, clean water, and clothing" and some other rot to all its citizens. It slid from there. I admit I almost wondered when General Marquez handed me a photo of Centralian troops in Azan waving red flags. But I didn't. After all, Chimerican barons were always wrapping themselves in "Ensigns of Blood" back in the '30s and I wouldn't have called them communists.

Our trade delegations and ministerial visits began to be turned away. The Centralian authorities were always polite, always civil. This was not a good time because the President was preparing to receive another large delegation from Kyren. That was not a good time because of an unnamed security issue. Speaking of the unnamed security issue, the highway on which massive convoys used to move both ways, the legendary "Maribor Straight" of folk song, was closed because of that. It never re-opened. Trade went, like Karakan politics, local, and above all, underground.

One day, the authorities in northeastern Centralis went to Pravda, or whatever they called their excuse for a national newspaper, with a major scoop. They had just intercepted, they crowed, a shipment of "subversive software programs" being clandestinely imported from Karakas. Two Centralian nationals went to prison over it. The "hard-core capitalist propaganda intended to subvert" was a carton of games - games! - manufactured in Maribor's so-called Silicon Valley. I think one of the titles was my personal favorite, Icewind Gate II.

Now, Maribor needs that computer game industry. It's a rocky little republic, nice to look at but not much land for grazing. If those games don't sell, Maribor doesn't eat. And the folk legends remember that Maribor was the first republic of the League to declare independence and that Centralis was the first country to recognize it. To the man on the street, it looked like a betrayal. And passions run deep in Maribor. The government was more level-headed, but there's only so much they can do once you reach critical mass.

There was nothing they could do to prevent Centralis' consulate in Ciudad Maribor from being burned by an angry mob. Andreas von Weiser, in his infinite wisdom, decided that "the reactionary, megalomaniacal, anti-progressive Jose Djordjevic" (me) was to blame. Notwithstanding the fact that I was ensconced in my office eight hundred miles away in Adailton. In fact, that seemed to be an indictment somehow, with the implication that I should have been there setting up a bucket chain repeated early and often in the Centralian press.

They also blamed me the week after they closed their embassy in protest, when an Apolytonian Champion's League soccer match between the Adailton Razorwings and Red Star Geelong was interrupted by crowd violence. Home fans in the south stand unveiled something they had been working on all week: a fifty-by-one hundred feet banner proclaiming "Burn In Hell, You Communist Pigs." The penmanship was quite good, actually. What happened next depends on who you ask. The home fans say that the away fans threw beer cans at them. The away fans claim that the home fans threw chairs at them and started chanting "Centralis will fall!" in Spanish and Numenorean, and then in English and Guardinian, and after that in Alecrast Kaijin, and finally in High Minnesotan. (At least our regional language proficiency initiatives were working.) Either way, the result was the first televised riot since the 1960s.

(The Razorwings won, by the way. I've always said communists can't play football.)

Two closed embassies and three hostile Senate resolutions later, a Chimerican warlord crossed the Pass of Moytura for the first time since 1896. Not only were his henchmen waving red flags, they were driving Centralian-made tanks.

The betrayal was complete.



OOC: The views expressed here are those of the fictional character Jose Djordjevic, and might not be the same as those of Mr. President.