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RYE - Shattered Tedium
🕑 Added 2024-03-09 23:51:05 +0000 UTCScry and Spy, The Northern Remnants - 5 slannpower (5 5th-gen)
Slann Construction Protocol - 95 slannpower (95 5th-gen) (2 Actions; toward constructing a city on the Northern Continent, see Stewardship)
Slann Spawning Service - 12 slannpower (12 5th-gen) (+4 Population; Northern Continent outpost)
Excavate the Ship - 15 slannpower (15 5th-gen)
Over the course of the last several centuries, the orks of the northern continent had gone from famine to feast and back again. Hindered by the near-constant blizzards, lack of food, and general lack of anything exciting to fight, their population had forever been slow to increase, with the average ork tribe during most times consisting of barely a hundred boyz, gretchin, and squigs combined, all thin and mangy and too weak to swing a proper choppa. They wandered the frozen wastelands, dying to frostbite and bad luck, and if they did encounter something to fight it was almost always other boyz who were also too tired and hungry to provide anything resembling a satisfying scrap. Thus deprived of excitement in battle, which was arguably a more important nutrient for an ork than actual food, the greenskin population grew by slow increments, settlements slowly increasing in size over the course of decades. Generations upon generations of boyz lived to a concerningly old age without being violently killed by something, and so it was something of a centennial event when the conditions were finally right for some enterprising git to get into enough fights to grow big enough that he could call himself Warboss and unite the tribes under his banner. By this point in the usual growth cycle of the north, there were a few hundred million boyz spread out across the continent, and their conquest provided a novice Warboss with enough fun to get started, but even the dumbest git could see that once the banner of the last tribe fell, there wasn’t anyone worth fighting anymore.
It was for this reason that every Warboss to unite the north had looked at the frozen pile of dirt that was their home, decided “zog dis,” and travelled south across the ocean with their boyz in search of something to fight. Some of them had been eaten by sea creatures, which meant a return to scrapping until a new Boss could be decided upon, but most ended up making it to a far bigger continent on the other side of the ocean, where the Boss and any boyz they could bring across would fight the sameboyz until eventually the Boss was never heard from again and the tribes who had been left behind splintered out of boredom. With a lack of worthy opponents to fight, ork population stabilized or even shrank for a good while, before beginning the long climb once more. Thus was the existence of being an ork in the north - a dismal hell of boredom punctuated by short stretches of things approaching interesting. Thus it was, and thus it had always been, as far as most living orks knew.
There were some, however, who remembered otherwise. The current state of the North was as dismal as ever, a paltry 21 million boyz spread out over the entirety of the continent, most of them skinny yoofs too young to have ever known anything different. Hidden among those pathetic masses, however, were a few exceptions - the leaders of a few of the biggest settlements, gargantuan behemoths by the standards of their lessers, occasionally spoke of what they remembered from the Times Before. These hardy Old Gits, not one of whom was under the unimaginable age of fifty, professed themselves to be the last survivors of a great Waaagh!!! that had once rattled the ground and reshaped the earth with its passage. They had been witness to a war of unimaginable scope and proportion, waged during a time of not one, but two competing Warbosses. Back then, the orks had been capable of crossing the sea whenever they liked, and were only drowned or eaten on the way [i]most[/i] of the time. They’d had better shootas, better boyz, better everything. The orks had been on the rise, and the battles had only been getting bigger.
The stories all ended there; none of the Old Gits ever elaborated on what exactly had brought those bygone times of plenty and strife to an end, instead muttering sulkily about how today’s yoofs just didn’t get it before returning to their fires. Sometimes an ork too bold for his own good would attempt to challenge an Old Git to a duel in exchange for the information, but despite the fact that none of them had been out for a serious fight in years, none of the Old Gits had lost whatever edge those bygone days of war had given them, and all such duels had thus far ended in an anticlimactic execution of their challengers. The vast majority of Old Gits instead vanished when they finally grew fed up beyond repair with the state of ork-kind around them, and simply walked out into the endless blizzards, never to return. Their numbers had dwindled slowly over the years, with only the most resilient among them hanging on, waiting through years and years of bleak boredom while the population of orks slowly, steadily grew to a height where proper war could be waged once more. Perhaps a dozen of them remained, when things finally changed.
It was during the time of Gork (or Mork)’s Squint, the rare and fleeting season where the sun showed itself in the sky for more than a few hours or so at a time, instead drifting higher and higher until it looked unceasingly upon the land for weeks on end. The light reflecting off the everpresent layers of snow made for a maddeningly bright glare that would block all vision unless one toughened their eyes by repeatedly staring directly into the sun, but it was also the one time when the wintry storms that tended to swathe the north in an inescapable blanket of frost receded for a time, allowing for an enterprising ork to go out and get into some trouble without worrying about freezing to death. Thus it came to be that Fraggrik, an enterprising young upstart in the growing shantytown of Nippytoof, set out with a band of fifty other yoofs he’d coerced into following him, heading towards the southern coast in search of fish to eat and other fishing bands to get into fights with. An ordinary enough expedition.
Fraggrik returned to Nippytoof six days later, missing an arm and an eye, with none of his compatriots in sight. As he was known to be a talkative git, the orks of the settlement harassed him for news, only to be universally rebuffed - whatever Fraggrik had seen had put him into an unusually focused mindset, and he didn’t even bother stopping in at the local squigbeer distillery before he headed directly to the dwelling of Kolkum Redbite, the Old Git who Nippytoof had effectively grown around. The wizened ork, who’d acquired his name due to the way his frostbitten lips frequently stretched and split around his tusks, had settled on the shore of a frozen lake some forty years back, and the young orks following him around due to his size were forced to make do. Kolkum himself was rarely seen, spending most of his time out on the icy lake, fishing. He hadn’t been in a proper brawl with another ork in living memory, and most of the younger greenskins of Nippytoof barely even knew he existed.
Fraggrik went out onto the ice and found Kolkum’s fire just before freezing solid. The Old Git would not speak to him at first, nor listen to what he had to say. Fraggrik was forced to tend the elderly ork’s fire for three days - after trying to fight him, which ended predictably - and accompany him on a fishing trip that involved battling a fish the size of a Colossal Squig before the Old Git would allow him to tell his tale. Once he had proven himself, Fraggrik shared what he had seen with Kolkum while the two of them ate their way into the monstrous fish’s guts, and the more that Fraggrik talked, the more of a spark came back into the Old Git’s eyes.
The time of Gork (or Mork)’s Squint faded, and the night returned again with a vengeance as a blizzard swept over Nippytoof. Ork and gretchen alike retreated to their squighide tents and dried dung huts for shelter as a wall of frost and icy winds piled snowbanks high enough to entomb an unwary wanderer. Midway through this first blistering night, Nippytoof’s inhabitants found their quietude suddenly and viciously interrupted. They looked up from the pitiful, smoldering fires they huddled around as the doors to their huts were kicked in and their tents ripped from the ground. Roused from their slumber and relative comfort, every ork in Nippytoof was dragged out into the snow, one by one, and beaten until they fell into line. Much to most of their surprise, they found that crazy git Fraggrik to be the one standing before them, doling out the beatings on behalf of Kolkum Redbite. The Old Git was possessed of a manic energy, all the excitement that had evaded him for the last several decades seeming to come back to him all at once. His fervor was so strong that it infected everyone around him, particularly Fraggrik, who seemed to have grown a noticeable amount overnight, enough to manhandle most other orks even without one arm.
Before long, the entire settlement was thus assembled, and Kolkum began barking orders. Buildings were torn down, what meagre supplies found were gathered, and every available weapon was taken to hand. “Due south, boyz,” the Redbite bawled, even his throaty exhalations struggling to make themselves heard over the gale force winds. “We’ze gonna rope together every git we can find from ‘ere to da shore! We find what Fraggrik found, da orkz is finally gonna ‘ave somefing worth making a proppa Waaagh!!! over again!”
Though the sub-zero temperatures had already given several orks frostbite, the Old Git’s words warmed a deep, orky part of the crowd they hadn’t realized was being neglected for a long time. An exultant warcry burst from their throats, and the whole band turned and charged south through the snowdrifts, heedless of the cold. Their gleeful minds dreamt up heretofore unknown images of what sort of thing Fraggrik must have run into on the coast to get Boss Redbite so worked up, ideas of excitement and bloodshed and war. The cold hardly touched them after that, for nothing was so joyous as an ork with an enemy to fight.
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To be an inhabitant of Hualtecalaquiani, the City of Triumph, was to understand that your life would be filled with cold, discomfort, and hard labor. It meant being interrupted frequently by combat and in all probability, dying at a far earlier date than one would in any other temple-city. It meant living without ever seeing Great Itza, to not know the jungles of the home the slann spoke of in nostalgic tones. Hualtecalaquiani existed at the furthest periphery of the lizardmen’s domain, separated from the other temple-cities by the breadth of an ocean so vast it could be measured in continental terms. To live there was a matter of working harder, for less reward, than the inhabitants of any other city.
It was a task that Hualtecalaquiani’s residents took on with exceeding levels of fervor, for the very fact of their hardship was a signal of prosperity. It meant that the lizardmen could once again afford to reach across the continental gaps and establish an outpost in the barren wasteland of the north, trusting they would succeed even with the difficulties of taming the cold landscape and dealing with the remaining Uax infestation. The lizardmen of Hualtecalaquiani knew this and took grim satisfaction from it. Every moment they existed was a declaration of triumph.
The city had not so much been built as willed into existence with speed that defied the ordinary norms of logistics and supply. The site chosen for its founding was a cold stretch of utterly barren rock on the southmost shore. Orks beyond counting had once congregated there, building great factories to house fleets of seagoing transports. Of that time, nothing remained, for the very earth had been stripped away by a long-forgotten cataclysm, scoured down to the very bedrock. Even the Uax avoided the shore, venturing there only on temporary expeditions. The slann observed their chosen location in astral form for two years, providing calculations and positional figures to their scribes while the base components of the city were painstakingly crafted - all that would be needed to construct a geomantic nexus, built beforehand so that the mystic web of energy could be set up as soon as was possible.
At the peak of the season of Chotec, when the sun glared down upon the northern continent for weeks on end, sixteen slann of the Fifth Spawning appeared on the barren shore with a crack of displaced air, bringing along with them ten thousand pylons of black stone, ranging from the length of an outstretched finger to the height of one hundred meters. Channeling the might of more than a hundred of their brethren who watched invisibly in astral form, the toad mages drove the obsinite spikes deep into the rocky shore, causing the spells folded into the pylons to activate, drawing skeins of geomantic energy towards them. It took mere hours for the putative Web to spool up to its full strength - a pale shadow of what larger cities could generate, but more than sufficient for the Communion’s purposes.
The slann stretched their delicate fingers out and reshaped the world like they were painting a canvas. The ground flattened beneath an unseen weight to a uniform, level surface, any crevices or mounds simply erased. The outlines of streets and buildings etched themselves into the rock as though they were being sketched by a cosmic observer, and from nothing but flat ground, the city began to grow. Walls grew upwards, hardening and condensing from grey to black as they were formed and shaped by invisible intent. Stone dissolved into powder and flowed upwards, reassembling itself into fully-realized buildings like a demolition happening in reverse. Great hills rose out of the ground, excess stone flowing off of them like water to reveal the blocky outlines of ziggurats and temples and barracks. Hualtecalaquiani emerged from the shore as if it had always been there, and the minstrations of the slann were only serving to excavate another part of the lizardmen’s ancient domain. And as its walls rose to meet the summer blizzards and tempestuous sea waves, the pools of water at its heart began to glow as the slann fed their power into multifaceted spell matrixes.
The first lizardmen of Hualtecalaquiani were spawned quickly, beginning mere days after the slann started constructing the city. They were nearly all Saurus, for the slann had foreseen that their window of uninterrupted time upon the shore would be vanishingly small. The first task of Hualtecalaquiani’s soldiers would be to ensure that their city was finished on schedule, and the slann not interrupted by the inevitable incursions of the Uax. The first such defensive engagement occurred eleven hours past [i]Mazitztlaztli[/i], the first spawning of the city, when a wayward gang of greenskins spotted the city’s temples on the horizon and came to investigate. They were summarily cut down with precise volleys of rifle fire as they approached the walls, with only one of the group of fifty escaping, and that due to the fact that Hualtecalaquiani’s first Cold One riders were spawned and equipped only as the skirmish was ending, giving the lone ork just enough time to slip the net.
It was not long before more orks came, in bigger, better organized groups each time, following the growing rumors of an exciting battle. Hualtecalaquiani repelled them all, for once the city had been founded in truth and the slann turned their attention towards filling out its ranks, it swiftly turned from a barely-manned outpost to a hardened bastion that could repel twenty times its number in assailants. Saurus patrolled the perimeter on Horned Ones, accompanied by flights of skink Terradon riders that wove through the icy currents of the sky, eyes peeled for signs of an incursion. Hardy Bastilodons, uninclined to complain even in worse conditions, hauled great blocks of stone bigger than themselves into the sea under the direction of freshly-spawned Kroxigor masons, crafting a harbor mirroring the ones across the sea. Shivering Skinks, their scales puffed up against the everpresent cold, carefully mounted and sighted Monument Cannons and Omen Launchers upon the city’s walls, ensuring that no approach to Hualtecalaquiani was unguarded. In addition to this, Glyph Bombs were crafted in great quantities and buried in a carefully-chosen layout around the city walls, turning the ground around Hualtecalaquiani into both a proverbial and literal minefield.
Time passed, and word of the strange city on the water spread further and further through the population of northern orks. Some disregarded these rumors, carrying on as they always had. Others, struck by boredom and curiosity, went south to see it, to, in their words, “Take a look at wot all da fuss is about.” These travellers rarely returned, if ever, which only stirred up yet more curiosity in the hearts of the violence-deprived population. More and more tribes began to make the journey, conglomerating into larger masses of greenskins marching together under a nominal purpose. While nowhere near approaching the size of proper warbands, these impromptu expeditions were a novel event in the lives of the northern orks, and began to draw the attention of the strongest among them. The last of the Old Gits began to congregate, leaving their ramshackle settlements and bringing their tribes on exploratory raids of this newly-appeared city, testing their might against its walls. The raids increased in size and frequency every season, until there was hardly a day where the lizardmen of Hualtecalaquiani were not cleaning up from one Uax attack or fighting off another.
Zhond'akowrd, the slann who had taken Hualtecalaquiani under its stewardship, received these reports from its scribes dispassionately. It had discussed the probabilities of the city’s defense extensively with it now-departed colleagues, and come to the conclusion that it would take several uninterrupted decades for the Uax to grow and organize itself into a force capable of imposing more than mild damage upon Hualtecalaquiani’s walls. Its assistance had not been required in repelling the fungoid raiders even once, freeing it instead for the task of contemplating the fragments of the Great Plan that the Communion had access to. The last century had been full of distractions, but it was well enough time to resume the task of attending to the directions of the Old Ones in its opinion, even if it had to relocate itself a continent away from the rest of the slann in order to find enough quiet to do it.
Of course, it did periodically reach out to psychically confer with the fifteen other slann it had come to the northern continent with. Rather than remain in Hualtecalaquiani, they had departed as soon as the city’s foundations were properly set, taking with them a hefty contingent of laborers, Temple Guard, and enough Solar Engines to cloak the whole party in steam due to the aura of heat given off by the artifacts generating condensation in the cold air. In a grandiose display of power, they had invoked geomancy to craft a temporary path of compressed dimensions and marched north along it, each step on their procession counting for fifty. Speeding past the impromptu blockade of orks that had begun to form around Hualtecalaquiani, they had reached the colossal ruin of the northern mountain in eight hours of travel, and even now were delving deep into the frost-bitten crevasses of that place to excavate the ancient ship that awaited them there. They spoke little to Zhond'akowrd about what they had found there thus far, only that they had a better idea of what amount of labor would be needed to complete their task.
Zhond'akowrd wished them well as it returned to its meditations - its own past experiences in the Relic Tombs had taught it that the bones of things that had long lain undisturbed often did not wish to be unduly roused.
Hualtecalaquiani, the City of Triumph has been founded at level 1 on the northern continent! It is afflicted by near-constant orkoid raids, though none are formidable enough to pose more than a minimal threat level. The city’s strategists estimate that it will take 3 uninterrupted decades for enough momentum to build among the Uax in order for them to require legitimate military action to stamp out.
The Uax population of the northern continent is estimated to number at roughly 20 million in total, with the vast majority of that number consisting of small, scattered tribes eking a living from off of the ice. Some larger factions do exist, headed by the last survivors from the time of Mekboss Orkfred, who have grown old enough to be referred to as Old Gits by their kin. These proto-Bosses have taken notice of Hualtecalaquiani’s appearance and taken to sending raiding parties at erratic intervals, gathering more of their kin to their side all the while. The slann estimate that at least one of them will likely attempt to conquer their fellows within 3 decades if no further action is taken. These orks are far less sophisticated than those who preceded them, with only the Old Gits and their personal forces even possessing mass-produced shootas at present.
The slann have begun excavating the northern ship! The pre-existing enclave has contributed 0.5 slannpower equivalent per turn since turn 8, which combined with the efforts of the slann this turn bring it to 18 out of a required 50. Progress has been updated.
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Glossary: Hualtecalaquiani - Translates semi-literally as ‘The Place Which Reveals Itself In Sudden Proclamation That Kills/Conquers/Flattens Unruly Territory Until It Is Tame/Small’. Referred to as ‘City of Triumph’ for reasons of brevity.
Mazitztlaztli - First making of minds from water; refers to the first occurrence of lizardmen spawning in a given city. An auspicious event, said to gift those who witness it with a revelation from the Old Ones. Access to Mazitztlaztli is almost always restricted to the slann lord of a city.
