2010-09-11: Saturday Filler Infodump: After The Barrier Fell

[The Comment Golem]

Discussion thread for Saturday Filler Infodump: After The Barrier Fell...

[SkArcher]

So the elves felt it would be better to use covert means to achieve their ends with regards to Veracia, but Tsuiraku are a lot better at spotting that sort of thing (largely due to having a massive population in a tiny area, I'd guess).

It's also worth noting that all of the directly elven or elven-influenced societies in ES are duplicitous to some degree. The Elves themselves are schemers of the highest order, with a truly long view. The Ensigerum is sneaky and (with Anita at the helm) power-hungry, while Tsuiraku was/is incredibly insular and isolationist and are scryers par excellence.

[ChunLing]

...

Okay, but I don't think that's because they're elven so much as because they are societies which have social distinctions between the rulers and the ruled, and thus there are possible reasons other than perfect altruism and clear fitness for public service that someone might want to be among the rulers rather than the ruled. As far as I know, the only kind of society immune to this disjunction between the nominal reasons the ruled should accept the activities of the ruled and the actual reasons the rulers want to rule are first-generation personality cults centered on an individual of pretty much superhuman benevolence and virtue. Which is one reason that so many people who want to rule try to imitate such cults...though why exactly that is a reason for it escapes me.

The Gewehr Wraiths apparently aren't above a little deception with their own, even at the level right over Jon's head. Of course, Jon may be higher in the Wraiths than he usually asserts, or (somewhat more likely) it's simply structured as an overlayer rather than a functionally independent society. I doubt that the various Farrellian factional interests or the members of the Northern Confederacy (about whom we know almost nothing except that their name strongly suggests they don't have a single, charismatic leader) are any less prone to deception.

[Graybeard]

One of the many interesting questions this little piece poses is: what "other parts of the outside world" ARE there for the elves to send ambassadors to? The only countries we know about are Tsuiraku, Farrel, Veracia, and the amorphous mass of things called the Northern Confederacy -- but there must be more, not just to make the geography work, but also to justify not only the elven ambassadors but also the Tsuirakuan warp-gate complex. The Tsuirakuans would hardly need something like "Warp Gate Twelve" in Tsuirakushiti (implying at least 11 other warp gates) if they were only gating to Kiyoka, Saus, and a few places in Farrel. So there must be more of the world out there, and this little dump sheds some additional light on it, but more would obviously be nice.

Also interesting that the bit about sending out the rangers seems to have started only when the barrier came down. I'd wondered about that. Might they have been surreptitiously prowling the world even with the barrier up? Apparently not. That might explain why the elves haven't figured out Santuariel yet, which has been a logical blip in the story for some time; 200 years is still a long time for a place like that to go undiscovered, but not nearly as long as 2000. Same with the Ensigerum village.

[Dallen Andair]

So the elves show up, and immediately get their murder machine rolling again. Screw restraint, I hope Ian/Meji smashes them into the stone age.

[ChunLing]

The elves seem constitutionally disposed to do a lot of things more slowly than humans would.

I thought that might be "Warp Gate Twelve" because there are at least eleven others in Tsuirakushiti alone. Given that warp gates can, as far as we know, connect freely to any other warp-gates on the same system, and only crossing to a different, nominally incompatible system is even a problem, this probably doesn't bear any direct relationship to there being twelve really important different destinations. There are probably warp gates to pretty much every large population center anywhere friendly to Tsuiraku, though, so I bet there are probably more like a hundred different destinations, probably most of them not very important.

The Veracians control most of the continent where the elves are currently holed up. There used to be several other political entities there they could have contacted instead, but obviously Veracia bordered the Elven Lands by the time they used Luminosita to knock on their door.

[mindstalk]

And warp gates are only so big, so even between any two locations you may want multiple gates active at once. Or 12+ gates to handle all the passengers -- and freight! -- going between Tsuirakushiti and everywhere else.

And a good transportation network doesn't go just to the biggest population centers; probably Tsuiraku's been working its way down in handing out Farrellian warp gates. Population centers, resource sources, tourist traps... eventually smallish towns.

An errant pseudo-Catholic priest lends itself to tasteless current-events-inspired jokes and possible triggers for elven resumption of culling.