NationStates Jolt Archive

Tarena, capital of the planet Parmisia

Parmisia was naturally a fairly modest planet when compared to some. A little smaller than earth, a little larger than mars, a lot drier than the former, a lot wetter than the latter. Rather dark with an awingly murky sky that hosted a thick and surprisingly warm atmosphere. Parmisia was quite far from its sun as went planets that could boast intelligent bipedal life of native stock.

The intelligent native bipeds called themselves the Parmisians. A touch uninspired of them one might think, but to the precious few Parmisians who lived today and stood in the ancient city of Tarena it was a significant title.

You see, until recently there had been tens of millions of bipeds on Parmisia and they stood in hundreds of ancient cities and called themselves Gorlons, Alaks, Thelaps, and any number of other names.

There was a time that each name had fielded an army, and each army had a list of names it wanted to keep from standing in one or other ancient city, or indeed anywhere else on Parmisia, without paying their city for the privilege.

The resulting wars had dragged on for generations and the Gorlons had quite forgotten about their colony on Gakloria, a tiny little tropical planet in the same star system. They had built a nice new city there, it was called Heinmal, and the residents of the Alak colony on Gakloria had sacked it. The Alaks had forgotten about their colony too, they were too busy watching their ancient city on Parmisia burn before the Thelaps’ army and busier still with counting out tribute to make it stop.

Things were different now. Some time ago a soldier named Molig had been made king of the Gorlons’ city, which was called Gorlon and was very close to Tarena. Molig was an exceptionally good soldier, as luck would have it, and he led his army to Tarena and routed the army there.

Usually one would have expected Molig to extract a tribute from the people of Tarena and to go home all full up on rape and pillage, but Molig had strange new ideas.

The Gorlons didn’t leave Tarena. They stayed and grew richer and their army grew larger and larger until such time as the Thelaps became worried and tried to destroy it. Of course Molig’s army was only too happy to add the Thelapur mountains to the list which recorded Gorlon’s dominions, and after a few years of this sort of thing the whole of the modest, dark planet had been put piece by piece onto the list of Gorlon’s dominions. The inteligent bipeds on Parmisia liked to make and to keep lists of things, even if nobody ever cared to read them.

Finally Molig had captured the last free city on Parmisia, which was Alak, and now all the bipeds on Parmisia had to do what he told them to.

He told them to come to Tarena for a grand celebration.

The Gorlons and Thelaps and Alaks and all the other intelligent bipeds had come to Tarena for a grand celebration because Molig had told them to, and because about ninety-six percent of the former population had been extinguished for not doing what a king told the constituents. Since Molig was the only king left it seemed to follow that doing what he said was the best way to stay alive. The intelligent bipeds on Parmisia were logical thinkers after that manner.

When they got to Tarena the intelligent bipeds stood about for a bit, as they were prone to do. Some of them compared loin-cloths and souvenirs from the wars- the intelligent bipeds on Parmisia liked to collect souvenirs by which to remember things, even bad things that no one wanted to talk about.

Eventually Molig arrived too, and he stood on a platform made of brilliant red stone cut from the Red Caves just to the north. He had on a crown and a robe, which seemed normal enough for a king on Parmisia. He told the bipeds that they were now called Parmisians. This went down well with the people of the city of Tóer at least, because no one could pronounce their old name and there were only seven of them left alive anyway. Best to get with the winning side, they thought.

That wasn’t all Molig had to say, certainly not! Since there had been many kings before and only one now it seemed to Molig that the position of king had changed somewhat. As such the title too should change and so from now on Molig was to be called Gian Molig. Gian, he explained, was a name given by the ancient ancestors of all Parmisians to a race of gods who once walked Parmisia, and who might still be sleeping in the Red Caves today. Some Parmisians remembered stories about the Gians, and they thought it was a good enough title for the only king on Parmisia today.

In the end the celebration wasn’t all that great. Molig had fo meat served. A fo was an animal that seemed in roughly equal measure cow, hippopotamus, and pig. It was standard fare in most Parmisian cooking pots. The Parmisians had hoped for some rif, which was about how a dolphin might be had it scales and a beak. Those were rare because Parmisia was mostly dusty earth and had only a few small seas and lakes.

Once the grand celebration was over and the Parmisians had gathered that its central theme was something about unity and rebuilding, the guests as Molig insisted on calling them, made their ways home.

There were many grand projects to be carried out, not least of them was in returning to the stars and remembering where the people now called Parmisians had left their colonies on Gakloria. Perhaps until then the Parmisians could at least fix their burned observatories and such things in the hopes of finding other intelligent bipeds or whatever there may be in space.

The people set about said projects and hoped that their greatness would not too closely mirror the greatness of the celebration at Tarena.

The city of Eal

Just below the Parmisian equator to the north west of Great Lake Tóer lay Eal, one of the most ancient cities on Parmisia. Here lived about fifty-five-thousand Parmisians, and from here would be launched their newest and least recently-deorbited-and-destroyed satellite. Most of the artificial satellites that once orbited Parmisia had recently deorbited and burned up thanks to neglect brought on by all the wars that had been going on.

Now Eal was to be the centre of the planet's reborn space programme, because one respected Parmisian had recently said that it would be cheaper to escape the planet's atmosphere from a start point near the equator. Cheap was good because there were a lot less tax-payers alive these days than there had been before the wars.

The Parmisians at Eal weren't launching just a satellite. They were also launching a probe. It was quite cheap and would probably break or get lost before it did any good -or any harm- but the Parmisians wanted to try it out anyway.

Thousands of Parmisians gathered around to watch the launch of the two devices aboard their huge and impressive rockets. There were two massive rockets strapped to one another with a complicated and fragile-looking rig between them.

On the rig were mounted pretty boring-looking crates, but inside the crates were..pretty boring looking probes. The first, which was to be a communications satellite, resembled a conker still in its spiky shell. It seemed to be wearing a hat. It wasn't much more than two feet across.

The second probe, which was destined for deep-space, was pretty much.. well, it was a cube. It had a little wire hoop on what would be the front, and at the back was barely evident a trace of the ion engine which would hopefully propel the probe. If a Parmisian child or maybe a female adult had curled up into a little ball they might have been able to squeeze inside the cube. Of course no one had done that, because there was an ion engine inside. The Parmisians thought that they were quite good at building efficient ion engines, and the spectators at Eal were chattering about how it would collect fuel as it went. "So they say!"

The second probe was called Gom, which meant head- Parmisian heads are generally a little more squared-off than was common of many other bipedal species. Gom carried information about the new Parmisia and its people, and told of how they wanted to reach out. The Parmisians hoped that somebody would meet Gom and listen to what it had to say, and decide to come by.

Gom told anyone who'd listen that the Parmisians had settled their differences, lost contact with their colonies on the next planet, begun to rebuild their world, and that they were intelligent bipeds with squared-off heads and impressive physical strength. Compared to those smelly, hairy Gaklorians at least. Gaklorians all smelled bad, were all pirates, and had hair all over the place. Gom didn't think that anyone should bother visiting the Gaklorians.

The crowds at Eal watched, oohd, and aahd as their rocket ship shot into the sky in two pieces, which was completely wrong and quite frankly spelled disaster. The crowds dispersed in some haste as burning rocket-fuel rained down.

The Parmisians tried again eight months later, and this time an almost identical mission started off much better, and soon Gom II was on its way through space, bleeping and flashing and trying to attract the right sort of attention.

Gom II was made of thelaron-alloy, which was comprised of rather useful Parmisian elements and which, as testimony to its properties, also served to armour Parmisian hover-tanks, which would be useless were thelaron-alloy not exceptionally strong and light.

"Hurrah for Gom II!" Shouted the Parmisians as they waved at the sky.

Then they got back to setting up a baby-boom next year.

Gom II probe stumbles blindly through space (http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=119096&highlight=)

"Hey- I'm getting wierd signals on the array-"

"Really?"

"Yeah-"

"Hmmm...file it under Misc and keep scanning"

"Will do."