NationStates Jolt Archive

Greetings. This thread is in declaration of a ressurection, specifically that of the People's Republic of Abargrapt.

I plan to repost [hopefully with one or two minor tweaks] a few pages of story from almost two years ago (real time, not NS) in hopes of reintroducing the Pacific state. It is essentially a story recounting the rise of a nationalist movement in a beaten state, and, once it is complete, the new authority shall launch Abargrapt back into the world.

Questions and comments are more than welcome, especially since Abargrapt will be needing other nations to interact with when it's all over: the former dominator that forced restrictive treaties upon us is also gone, so we've no existing ties despite being at over two billion population. There'll be quite a few posts coming up, and I'm not sure how much scope there'll be for IC reaction, but I don't plan for that to be the way in future threads.

!Loyaltae ets mei ára - Abargrapt vuer als!

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 duel 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 before 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 a mass emigration lead by one Senator Kindsley.

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 every 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.

ACRANUS-VUER-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...

Just a bump for views before the next piece.