NationStates Jolt Archive

KINDSLEY, ABARGRAPT

“...aaand mate.”
“..Damn. That’s three-one. What was it, a hundred and fifty? Here, I’ve only got hundreds.. no, keep it, I’ve-”

Ernest brandished a great wad of banknotes, indicating that he had rather a lot, really, and didn’t need the fifty change offered by his old friend.

“Well.” He said, rising from the upturned crate on which he sat, and stretching as he glanced up and down the dreary cobblestone lane. “This is hardly worth the sport, anymore. Perhaps we should play for bread.”

Alfred, Ernest’s leather-skinned friend, grunted in displeasure as an attempted hundred thousand kindsleymark plane fell foul of the gutter. Displeased not because the worthless scrap of paper was soaking in waste, but because it only flew two yards to get in that way. “It hardly is sport, you’ve not won two games all week!”

Ernest laughed a little though he’d already started away, evidently keen to be near the front of today’s breadline. Alfred wouldn’t follow for hours yet. It looked like rain again, and the old fellow was on orders from his wife not to catch his death. He instead creaked and cracked his way back into the ramshackle hovel that his family called home, almost tripping over a stray cat as he went.

BREADLINE, KINDSLEY CITY CENTRE

Almost four hours after losing two hundred thousand kindsleymarks in a chess dual with a decrepit half-Mauatu Eastgate War veteran, a hungry young man named Ernest Swann was on the verge of throwing a public fit. Not that anyone would have taken much notice, save perhaps to steal his place in the queue.

He’d already lost his place once today, a fairly mild result for one who’d been caught trying to cheat the Principality. Someone must have told on him, he thought, looking around with fire in his eyes. What were the chances of an officer of the City Guard picking him out from a crowd of hundreds on the one day he’d tried to sneak through in the wrong line?

“So I don’t have any hungry babes at home! I’m still hungry!” He cried, kicking the kerbstone with some force. “We’ll never get out of this if we let healthy young men waste away! OH!”

Ernest staggered across the street and sat down hard on the far side, pulling off his shoe as he realised that he’d split one of his last pair.

“Oh!” He exclaimed a second time. Falling back on the pavement he had time enough before fainting to realise that he’d again lost his place. Ernest still managed to curse the Prince as an Eastgater puppet while delirium won out in him.

The Principality of Abargrapt lay on the northeastern corner of the huge Pacific island often generally known as New Eastgate. Every locale seemed to have its own name for the landmass, but so far as most people in Abargrapt knew it was simply The Continent.
Abargrapt’s borders were pretty well defined- west were the foothills of the mighty Clades Mountains, Mt.Caligo visible from some of the Principality’s own, lesser, peaks. North and wast was the mightier Pacific, and south the impressive Gran Desavi, The Continent’s largest river.

This tidy arrangement hadn’t satisfied certain elements of Abargrapt’s exceptionally small oldest generation. The then republic, after a few years of seizing native land (in the course of which Alfred’s mother came to Abargrapt as a servant) Abargrapt had come to blows with New Eastgate, the nation that birthed Abargrapt out of civil war and mass emigration.

Abargrapt, economically and technologically its parent’s inferior, had done badly from the war. The Prince, Willard son of the King of Eastgate, had been imposed upon the shattered republic, and the backward state left to the care of the backward child.

Though not in direct control of ever detail of Abargraptian life, New Eastgate’s relatively mighty economy and intact industrial base had strangled the war weary Principality, imposing tariffs, enforcing treaties, policing borders, and harassing shipping.

Ernest Swann woke with the assumption that he’d been left to the rain. Not so, he gathered, straining to make out the manner of the room in which he was now laid. It was by the jug clasped in the powerful hand of this figure above him that Ernest was soaked, he supposed.

“Now look here!” Swann whispered, as much as he’d meant to yell it. “I’ll thank you not to-”
“You’ll thank me when you’re finished, I’d say!”

Ernest was put off further by this, and by the offering of bread and cheese, than by waking to a shower of icy water. He was too confused to give thanks, but too hungry to decline.

A second figure entered the room, which Ernest had by now surmised to constitute almost the entirety of an apartment little lived in.

His eyes widened a little as he happened to glimpse the legs of this newcomer...and of his benefactor, too! Bluesocks!

And so Ernest Swann came to join the banned Movement For Abargrapt after his latest public outburst, taken-in from the street by a couple of their brash blue-stockinged heavies.

(OOC: Bump/Tag/Note: Just for reference's sake, I mention for New Eastgate's part in this here; http://www.nationstates.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2988370#2988370 ; so Abargrapt's references to NE are justified and not just out of the blue.)

(I'll be back at this, soon. I meant to write more tonight, but got instead into the brandy. While I'm here though, Tersanctus, if you're reading, I wonder, did you get my telegram reply? I tried twice to send, but my browser crashed both times- I didn't want to send a third time in case they all got through and it looked like I was trying to flood you!)

"Abargrapt uver alls!"

Ernest Swann heard the call. He was relatively well fed, and felt fit of body and mind. He hadn't joined the bluesocks, but they had carried out a few raids at his suggestion. He was doing quite well for himself, getting results and all.

The Movement for Abargrapt was quite taken with this scrawny newcomer. Even the Bluesocks that'd taken him in from the street were beginning to forget the fact, and to treat him as some sort of visionary.

They still went out, beating cowards and Eastgater apologists. These were democrats, theists, capitalists, even communists!

Swann had other ideas. His frustration had borne a new ideal. He was begining to feature prominantly at ralleys. Ernest Swann highlights our Eastgater-imposed problems, explains the Abargrapt way, shows us what does and does not fit with the only way out of this horrid mess!

Do you want Eastgater bread queues, or Abargraptian factories? Banks? Shops?

And who was to blame? The victorious Eastgater? Vanquished Abargrapt? Or the third party? Had the leathery Mauatu minority cost Abargrapt the last war? This new fellow seemed to think so, much to Alfred's surprise!

ACRANUS-UVER-DESAVI, SOUTHERN ABARGRAPT
-Four months later.

“DROP THE PRINCE, AND PICK-UP THE MASSES!”

“Oh, that really is too much. Who are they talking to? The people are aimless!” Vice Chairman Swann shook his head as he and several fellow MFA officials marched by a small-scale demonstration-come-bread-riot in the nation’s second city.

“The poverty here is worse than at home!” Said Secretary Wesst. “Surely it is.” Added Swann, “But authority is lax. Look, here come the police, now. In Kindsley the gathering would have been impossible in the first place.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Asked Sergeant Shoemake, his blue-stockinged legs already beginning to quicken their step on an apparent intercept course with the eight or so baton-wielding lawmen.

Swann wasn’t, and the snivelling little Wesst certainly not, but the second Bluesock was quick to follow his superior, who just seconds later had swung hard, sending a passing constable sprawling into the path of his unsuspecting comrades. Suddenly the two Bluesocks were at the centre of a heavily unbalanced brawl with the authorities.

“Oh! Come ba.. Mr.Vice-Chairman!” Wesst’s feeble cries failed to make any impression upon Ernest as the undersized “troublemaker and rabble-rouser” (to Principality authorities) joined the fray, giving a loud shout as he went, fully intending to catch the attention of the nearby protestors...

“Ernest Swann, you are guilty of incitement to riot and of assaulting a constable of His Highness’ Acranus-Uver-Desavi Police Detachment. You will serve two years hard labour at East Clades penal quarry. Court dismissed!”

“I will go gladly! Gladly to escape all this hideousness! Gladly will I work my fingers to the bare bone for the many people of the great nation of Abargrapt!” Swann was dragged away without a thought for sparing his still bruised and already malnourished body, but his emphatic oration continued unabated as he went. “Gladly, as I will continue to work no less determinedly once released! Not until all Abargraptians work freely for themselves and their nation shall I think to pause for breath!”

Though the first weeks of his internment almost killed him, and though the second of those Bluesocks attending the brawl for which Swann now suffered had been wrongly hanged for the murder of the constable he cut, Ernest considered that fateful day’s work a great success. Enough had witnessed the fight to see that the Movement For Abargrapt was serious, a defender of the people, and one unafraid of the Principality. Enough to spread legend, and not too many for it to become an enhanced mythology. By now it was a widely known fact that Ernest Swann and two Bluesocks had beaten-up an entire station-full of the Principality’s police force, mounted constables and all. Swann was a hero for killing a constable and his comrade a martyr for his silence. The miscarriage of justice was on top of that an embarrassment to the Principality, which refused to admit its error by hanging Ernest, since it could not resurrect the Bluesock.

Since Ernest had been gaoled several dozen further constables had been slain. Their killers not only Bluesocks, but ordinary men as well.

Swann chipped slate by day, and wrote upon it by night, spotting many of his works red as his already worn body was taken by the frantic coughing fits associated with consumption.

KINDSLEY, ABARGRAPT
-Six months on.

“I still say any one of us who’d kilt’ a copper’d be hanged or still in t’ gaol. Boy’s not even done a year, and look at him, preaching t’ rest of us!”

“What’re you saying? He’s not a nobleman, he’s no friend to the Prince –he killed one of his constables, you said it yourself!- he’s a man like any of us!”

“Aye!” Said a third person, a toothless housewife with babe in arms. “By birth, anyway! I don’t see you making a difference, Fred!”

“Ehy! You told me I’d better not dare! Wood to chop here, bread to collect there! ‘Stay and make yourself useful here’ you said!”

“Not you, Arthur! Fred’s not got a family to look after, has he? Like Mr.Swann, only he’s made Abargrapt his family, hasn’ he?”

Fred didn’t seem impressed, but then the old hag raised a good point, he hadn’t anything else to live for but to wait in the breadline, and he hadn’t anything to wait for but to live so he might queue again. Arthur couldn’t wait for a chance to get away from the bitter woman and out of that dump of a workshop he was purported to be lucky for having.

Yes, Ernest Swann could have been saying just about anything so long as he sounded like the man who went to East Clades Penal Quarry for fighting the Prince’s Constabulary. As it happened, he was giving a fairly passionate oration, despite the obvious handicap of his consumption-wracked person. He was now undisputed head of the Movement For Abargrapt, and he was announcing before several thousand Abargraptians that the polls were open.

Yes, the Principality was going to vote, despite the fact that Prince Willard was head of both state and government, and that authorities would almost certainly interfere with the process and fail to recognise the results. Of course, that the MFA was the only party to have yet declared itself, that it was headed by Swann, and that Swann had been the one –the first man ever- to bring apparent democracy to Abarbrapt would have some bearing on the process, one supposed.

(ah! Good read! [/tag])

Sudbury, Goston, The Greater Federation of New Eastgate

"Well then we're agreed, this won't do at all."

Christ, it took an eternity for the impossibly ancient Senator General Horace Stark to force another sentence through his off coloured lips, perhaps weighed down by the moustache he'd barely trimmed in decades. How the idiot had survived the Federal Dispute, Second Mauatu Wars, and the war with Abargrapt was anyone's guess.

Still, free of insight though his words may have been, they were by enlarge correct, in this instance at least.

Word of the latest, "disturbance" in Abargrapt was zipping about the Federation by gossip and telegraph alike. Something would have to be done... to maintain the status quo, presumably, but the country seemed to have forgotten in its years of enjoying that same thing just exactly how to do anything that wasn't ordinarily done.

Most Senators didn't think it a job for the now tiny and underfunded military -nothing much was, since the pacification of Abargrapt- though Stark put it that no one would stop them, so why not just cut to the chase?

For now, a communiqué was sent to Kindsley of Sudbury's disapproval of the unusual happenings in Abargrapt, and King Paul V sent a similar note to his dimwitted son. Best that things be sorted out by the family, before...other forces get involved.

ABARGRAPT

Well, the vote had become all but compulsory. Everybody was talking about it. If one didn’t vote, he could be taken for a Principality puppet and by extension a tool of Eastgate oppression. The Constabulary had tried, of course, to disrupt polling stations, but the Bluesocks had met them at every turn. On more than one occasion traps had been set for the Bluesocks and for the MFA, but there’d almost always been someone willing to blow the whistle on such operations.

Though Prince Willard had written of his intention to see through his duty to Abargraptian affairs and his obligation to New Eastgate, it was clear that the boy had little to no hold over the restless masses or even over their traditional shiftless administrators.

On the 9th of April, Ernest Swann declared the Movement’s first stage a success.


ACRANUS-UVER-DESAVI

In his grandest rally yet, Ernest Swann spoke confidently and clearly, apparently enjoying a mild day so far as his consumptive illness was concerned. Over forty thousand turned out, though the MFA claimed closer to eighty thousand.

Samson DeVink, Swann’s deputy and the former Chairman of the Movement For Abargrapt, read the results of the nation’s first unofficial election. Well, he read one result.

“Movement For Abargrapt- 85%”

Well, there you had it. Swann, even as his former boss stepped down from the podium, his last useful duty behind him, now had a slip of paper that he would claim afforded him the authority he would henceforth wield.

Of course there were no other results. At least six hundred thousand Abargraptians had spoiled their single option ballots after being pressed to enter one hastily arranged poling station or other. The rest had, by intent or later assumption, signified their support for the MFA, for Swann’s MFA.

Before the week’s close, Party Chairman Ernest Swann had presented the Movement’s new name, claiming that as a representative political body it had now outgrown its old nomenclature. The Abargraptian Nation Movement Party –Abatov- was born (the ABargraptian nATion mOVement party).

The day of Abatov’s christening awarded the Party a bloody cliché of a baptism as the 2nd Kindsley Rifles clashed with one of few units still loyal to the Principality. Had the sheltered Conclave Guard fully realised the weight of popular opposition to their Prince, and the strength of feeling associated with the movement against it, they would have surrendered probably long before three city blocks were razed by one side or another.

The Guard's commanders had time for the least regret before being executed for crimes against the People, the Party, and the Republic.

Unrest in Abargrapt threatens Prince, CSS authorises action!

The headlines said about as much as anybody knew. The Abargraptians were making more trouble for New Eastgate, almost as if their wartime defeat hadn't been lesson enough.

Ask a man on the street and it was quite likely he'd say that it was time for the Federation to finish what it'd started with Grapto. That is, unless he was one of those old enough to have seen action last time and still young -and able bodied- enough to be elligible for the draft again to-day.

The more informed senators, what few politicians qualified for such a description, were less keen. Eastgate's armed forces had first shrunk and then stagnated with victory in the first Federation-Abargrapt conflict. Though the population had exploded to over twenty-four million, and borders had expanded through Mautu and other Polynesian lands, the army had dwindled to constitute just a few border guard formations and ceremonial outfits. Most of the fleet had been broken up or else mothballed or turned over to civilian use, and the first few all metal, sail-free, screw-driven smokies had never been joined by once planned sisters. Sir Charlton Arnold's last innovation, the Icarus I Skyman, had seen no development since his death from influenza all those years ago, despite his insistance that it would dominate any future battlefield around the planet.

Who cared? The Mauatu were a broken people, the lesser tribes capable of little more than wood and stone working, and Abargrapt treaty bound against exceeding 1/3rd of Eastgate's meagre military strength. Of coruse, this new fellow's band of blue-footed thugs probably constituded a more serious fighting force than the Waylu State Militia facing them across the Desavi.

There was no question then of storming in to administer a fresh whipping?

No, but Willard shouldn't be there until things calmed down. It made sense that people were upset in Abargrapt. Willard didn't know what he was doing. If he took an extended holiday in the Federation, the trouble would subside.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, someone decided that the Prince ought to be extracted by a regiment of the Goston State Militia, which was, by the time anyone sensible caught wind of the decision, on the rails and headed northeast.

KINDSLEY

"Your Highness, a cab awaits."

"Cab? What about my carriage? Wait! Bradley, where am I going? I was to bathe, tonight!"

The Prince's aide hesitated for a moment. Had Willard really failed to notice, or to understand the gunshots and chaos to be heard drawing ever closer to the palace over the last two hours? Even he couldn't have taken the red glow at his windows for a second sunset in one evening!

The royal household -even so not in its entirety- had scarcely minutes since left the palace grounds by one set of gates when Abatov supporters crashed through another. One of nearly a dozen horsedrawn buggies to flee the scene was soon intercepted by a small mob of civilians loosely affiliating themselves with the movement. Rumours would persist for years over the fate of the three royal servants on the buggy, at least one being supposed to have somehow escaped and lived forever in silence, though tonight it seemed hardly likely that anyone might be spared.

Certainly few survived the brief firefight and rolling brawl played out in futile defence of palace property, most of which was smashed, burned, or looted before Bluesocks arrived to confiscate the rest.

At the city's main railway station, the Prince and his courtiers were received surprisingly cordially by staff and a handfull of Bluesocks -now officially called the Abatov Protective Guard- and allowed to board the royal train. After some delay, the engine pulled out of the station and proceeded with great sloth to the south.

NEAR ACRANUS-UVER-DESAVI, THE GRAN DESAVI- ABARGRAPT BORDER

The tall trees just visible ahead concealed from view the continent’s mightiest river. The Gran Desavi, near Acranus-Uver-Desavi from where the last major artillery battle of the Abargrapt-Eastgate war had been lost for the then –and now perhaps again- republic. With the silencing of the city’s guns had come the Eastgater crossing of the formidable natural barrier and the final stages of the ill advised Abargraptian expansionist era.

Now the royal train waited to take the Eastgate-born Prince of Abargrapt back across the impressive landmark.

“I say, what is the meaning of this delay?” Asked Willard. “Perhaps we’re having a picnic on the riverbank, what?” He grinned.

That’s right, emphasise your inability to make a command of the least importance. Bradley was exceptionally agitated today. Perhaps that was because the entire country was out to kill him and every one of the idiots and the fawning little rodents around hi... “Oh, yes, your Highness, I’ll go forward and find out what might be the problem.”

___

“But the signals haven’t changed.” Protested Bradley. “Can’t you just go?”

“Oh no, look at that lot. There’s one on the bridge already, two more behind as I can see. We’ll ‘ave t’ let ‘em past.”

The Prince’s aide sighed after some squinting at the little snakes barring the last stages of his progress over the border. Massive trains coming across from Eastgate, probably freighters. Probably bring bread, now! He thought. Not that it’ll do us any good now!

Just at that moment a young boy servant burst into the engine, his frantic white face the absolute opposite of the bored, soot-covered face worn by the ethnic Mauatu driver. Bradley’s face dropped, too. Unless the Prince was choking on a napkin ring again they were all very much in trouble.

“It’s! They’re! There’s... attacking!” The boy was not quite sure how he should refer to the mob that was even now smashing windows in the rear carriages and over-powering those in the guard wagon at the back of the train.

Bradley glanced to the confused driver who caught on as the sound of fighting rose to audible levels. Seconds later the whistle was screaming and the wheels beginning to slip on their rails as the massive engine fought to move the train even the few more yards to the connection. Bradley brought his cane up and tapped its solid silver top against his palm. The Prince’s long suffering aide sighed heavily and pushed aside the small boy, taking his last few steps as he dutifully proceeded to the Prince’s assistance.

The Royal Train was over-run and its occupants slaughtered before the first of the Eastgater troop trains that’d blocked their escape was fully across the bridge.

(Woops, yeah, I'm awake.. where are we now? Right..)

Just across the Abargraptian border

Telegraphs were already being prepared -the Prince was under attack- the expedition required new instruction. Some ninety fusiliers had already disembarked from the forward train and dashed towards the stricken Royal Carriages, long muskets swinging off shoulders and bayonets awkwardly fixed (or dropped) on the run. The ill advised action saw many shots fired against the unidentified crowds storming Prince Willard's train, though it was of course already too late for the royal household.

The rear train was already shunting back to a point from which it might send to Sudbury of the apparent disaster.

The papers in New Eastgate -maybe in the wider world- might well talk of Prince Willard's killing, but Abatov Party Chairman Ernest Swann made sure the Abargrapt knew the real score. Eastgater fusiliers had gunned down more than thirty Abargraptian locals who came to catch a last glimpse of their departing prince.

"Eastgater Willard had to enjoy one last orgy of revenge on the people that rejected his corruption! In his bloody crossing of the Gran Desavi his fusilier dogs spat in the face of our republic in what was obviously a dastardly ploy staged by the Eastgaters!

"This will not stand!"

Swann was really beginning to get a handle on his consumption, making it through many of his vitriolic and rousing tirades without succumbing to so much as a single bloody coughing fit. When the still little understood illness (TB) did strike at the revolutionary leader it tended to incite sympathy amongst his downtrodden and often similarly afflicted countrymen. Indeed, the pale, exhaustion-wracked young man still managed to be perceived as something of a faint-inducing heartthrob!
There was certainly no openly voiced opposition to the party chairman’s announcement of his new rank and title: Ernest Swann, Chancellor of Abargrapt.

The Chancellor set about forming his new government (making borderline sociopath ex-Bluesock Sgt.Shoemake Chairman of the Abatov Party in his stead), declaring his republic’s enemy (New Eastgate), and picking the internal demon that’d excuse Abargrapt’s sloth in dealing with said enemy.

Needless to say, old Alfred was shocked when, while explaining to his Mauatu friends and family that he used to play chess with the Chancellor, someone brought to his attention Swann’s latest anti-native speech. And the applause it received from the European majority.

The economy was up and taxes were down, Swann could now feed the public liver and scapegoat and they’d clamour for seconds.

(look out, Pacific!)

The aftermath

Ernest Swann had risen from the streets of an Abargrapt crippled by hyper inflation that the stupid Eastgate-imposed prince was both unwilling and unable to tackle. He stood today as Chancellor of the Abargraptian Republic, a nation turning around recession and on the brink of war with its larger, richer, but long complacent neighbour. He'd picked up a difficult case of consumption along the way, but seemed to be bearing it remarkably well as he lead the nation's industrial drive. He was designing new cities and ripping apart old slums, war offices lay central in place of old principality constabularies, and palaces became government buildings, concert halls, and rally venues.

Abargrapt was preparing to break the treaties enforced at the end of the Eastgater war and to construct a navy, reintroduce conscription, and seek diplomatic contact off continent without Eastgate supervision.