NationStates Jolt Archive

The planet was called Castle.

It orbited the star Vrijstaar at about the distance the planet Cathedral once had. Cathedral orbited Castle at about half the distance Earth's moon orbits it. One had stood as the clusteral hub of civilization for centuries. The other had stood as a worthless nameless rock for centuries.

The Empire, when Thunderstraat (then the clusteral power, victor over many petty wars) tried to face it in open war, kicked the 'Straaters' butts. First they destroyed every single armed starship within a parsec of Cathedral. Including the Grand Fleet of Thunderstraat, which had been touted as the Thames Cluster's greatest single military force ever. And they lost one ship total. Then they circled Cathedral, then the capital of the Star Empire (not to be confused with the plain old boring Empire), with more than five hundred bombardment vessels and after thirty days' warning they pounded Cathedral to bits. When they left the surface was just cooling to its 90% reflective whiteness.

Then they named the planet the next orbit out Castle and dragged it to Prime Orbit. They set the lifeless former capital in orbit around it and resettled the survivors, numbering less than half of the old six hundred million population, on Castle. After they had terraformed it. To a jungle ecosystem. In two days.

When they set another huge fleet in permanent orbit, with a base on Cathedral looking down on the new world, colonists pouring from some exotic, overpopulated worlds to it, and a sizeable garrison in the major clearing city of Marenirong itself, you'd think anybody with a dream to break free of the Empire and start up the Star Empire once again was either very stupid or self-delusional.

Four men and two women who met at the Orc-made Butterspoon's Breakfast in Marenirong were not either. They did have a dream, though. And it was to break free of the Empire. And to start up the Star Empire once again. Not only that but to bust out to new heights of power that Old Thunderstraat had never dared to dream of.

They did it. And I'm not meaning to set up a "How To Build Your Own Massive Intergalactic Empire in JUST THREE DAYS!!!" story here. No, it took them a bit longer than that. But I am going to tell a story. Why? I want to.

Now just sit back and I'll do the talking.

The one who touched it off we'll call Jack. That wasn't what his mother called him. It was what Kiram Butterspoon called him. He didn't know anything about his mother. He knew less about his father. He was an ethnic Thunderstraater, made obvious by his slanted-to-the-right eyes, sunken cheeks, and sallow skin.

He walked into Butterspoon's when it was four months old catering to imported hard-labor grunts before they figured out it was easier to make Thunderstraater grunts than import Orcish ones and he was around three years old walking around in the rain bumping into walls. Jack walked into Butterspoon's by chance. It had to have been. With the .05% blood hexhol percentage in him there wasn't room for rational thought. Apparently his mother or whoever had been high when she decided it would do the kid good to be high too. Except toddlers don't take drugs like grownups do.

Jolly fat Kiram had taken him to the hospital immediately, getting treatment for Jack after three hours in line. They saved the drug-battered toddler's startling intellect but didn't manage to retain any memories past the habit level. When the authorities couldn't find a match for his parents - in those first few years the 'Straater unemployment rate was shooting past eighty percent and one in fifty committed suicide - they gave him to the breakfast shop proprietor.

Kiram had immediately started looking for a wife. Eventually he found a slim, pretty Orcish woman who fell deeply in love with him, and when someone falls deeply truly in love with you it's hard not to fall in love back, especially when she's what you've been looking for all your life and you need someone to be that poor kid's mother.

Jack was raised an Orc. He went to the public schools and played alley flipball with ghetto Orcs and 'Straaters. He worked for the breakfast shop free as a means to build character and along with character gained a premature understanding of the way people work. Most don't learn this until at least their eighth decade, except for bartenders and counselors, and some don't learn this ever. He had as many friends as he had contacts, he learned to hatchback at flipball like nothing else, eventually earning South Kongstraat Junior High School three straight wins against other ghetto schools, and he loved his adopted parents dearly.

When he was seventeed he finished thirteenth grade, that being the highest government-run education in the continent. He didn't have enough money to travel to the rich Orc and Andalite cities on the other side of the planet, and since the Empire had taken over there was no off-planet travel, ever. So he went to his parents and told them how he had loads of character now, loads of it, and how college would help him even better with his education maybe even getting him a really good job and maybe even getting him in the military, and how the scholarships they offered him didn't quite cover his education costs but with a paying job at Butterspoon's Breakfast he could even have a little left over and college.

By paying their son to work for them, Kiram and Mina Butterspoon started a course of events that would lead to the rebirth of an - well - I won't start going into wild promises about the story because I know some of you get pretty impatient. I will say they created a monster. I won't say if it's a good monster or not.

Jack habitually waited on a group of five people, three of whom shared classes with him at Castle University-Marenirong, and he talked with them. That's where this all begins, at a dusty corner booth in a low-budget morning eatery in the nasty part of a nasty city. It starts with Jack and the Society.

Stop fidgeting. I'll get to the good part soon.

There were six members, originally, in the Society. They were led by a man named Biiketa, who had lived on Scivarius in its glory days as a Thunderstraater protectorate and had been a veteran in the Bobarian War, the closest to true glory the Imperial Thunderstraat Navy ever came to. Biiketa was an eighty-year-old who lived on money donated by two of his grandchildren. The fact that neither were in any way related to him, and that one, indeed, was not even human, was overlooked in parsecs of the Empire's red tape.

The two grandchildren both attended the university. One, Jackson Goreblade, was a Sandstorm Tribe Orc whose parents had immigrated when the hierarchy had first been set up. The other was a shy child of the orphanage who called herself Marie, preferring to keep her full name and residence secret just in case.

The other female in the group was rich, pretty, vocally unashamed of her Thunderstraater patriotism, and very much along for the ride. Jana Kannenstraat supplied most of the group's funding, along with supplies from her father's munitions plant. Then there was a ten-year-old mathematical genius. He called himself Prime.

The Society was not unique in being united for a reborn Thunderstraat. Indeed, they were not even uniquely powerful among Thunderstraater renegade groups.

They were unique in their drive. They were unique in their skills. And as for their success...