User 2a28eab6a25a... - AI Fiction in the Wild

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20 fiction conversations over 1 year (Apr 10, 2023 – Apr 25, 2024) 77% prompt uniqueness Connecticut, United States

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20 conversations in cluster Cluster 0× “How does the World of Man--Triumphant (Endaileoum Ethcenloum...” over 7 months, 24 days (Aug 7, 2023 – Mar 28, 2024), oldest first. Show: 10 15 50 100

Jan 6, 2024 at 11:54 PM EST — 1 turn United States, Connecticut fiction View full conversation

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Jan 7, 2024 at 12:01 AM EST — 3 turns United States, Connecticut fiction View full conversation

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Feb 3, 2024 at 12:51 AM EST — 2 turns United States, Connecticut fiction View full conversation

USER: "Until the Last Moment The latter months are ending as the sun hangs lazily between the clouds. All about are the sounds of commotion. Trains glide across crystal waters kicking up mist as robots roll between adobe houses and under splaying canopies and a broken sky. Turbine balloons float tethered above village communes as mechanics and whizz kids fiddle with prosthetics, tracing their hands across each mechanism's flowery reliefs. Refugees are shepherded beyond the great deserts that now swallow up much of the world, and in art nouveau palaces knights and reiters swear fealty to their handlers. Welcome back to the world of tomorrow stranger, though it's a bit different than how you remember. The year is 2173 AD. Almost a century and a half has passed since the Collapse Era began, though the exact time when it ended is in dispute, not that there's any global institution that could decide when that was anymore. While the "Collapse Era" is a broad term, beginning before the climate collapse itself kicked off in earnest, most historians set its beginning to the onset of the American War, a multi-generational conflict that engulfed the former United States and Canada between a panoply of pretender governments and post-American states of various kinds. The premature death of the world hegemon led to a discordant global period in which the major global institutions attempted to reorient themselves under the UN now based (mainly) out of Vienna. The new order was, in its own words, imperfect and reactive. The need to shore up faith in the global system, to ensure the protection of accounts, states, and economies reeling in the face of America's fall, and the pressure to balance the now more pronounced regional frameworks in Europe, Africa, and even the Caribbean meant that the post-American world was dominated more by an attempt to loot the great behemoth as it tore itself apart in order to keep itself going for as long as possible as opposed to creating anything enduring. In the midst of this other parts of the world began to pull apart at the edges. In the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia the Three Flags Army otherwise known as the Democratic Federation, tore through the region, even taking Mecca for a brief period of time. The outpouring of American refugees (which themselves presaged the larger refugee waves of the era) became a source of conflict as many nations especially in the global south fought over access to a new very skilled and cheap workforce that was up for grabs. China and peripheral nations jumped at the opportunity that had been presented and attempted to kitbash a Fifth Internationale, leading to a breakdown in relations with its former European partners, themselves attempting to recreate the once expansive American intelligence system by importing former members of the US Deep State into their new federal military framework. Meanwhile the war itself quickly broke out of containment, spreading outside the United States and requiring first the largest UN military mission in history, and later on the transformation of what remained of NATO into an occupying organ, seizing control of Canada to maintain stability only to find itself at war with its own people. Then at last the climate collapse itself hit in earnest. Alongside this, economic pressures from the declining energy returns on fossil fuels compounded the costs states were taking on, and uneven population growth and demographic shifts obliterated long standing institutions in developed nations and undercut nascent regimes across the rest of the globe. World powers became more desperate and reckless, escalating to the point of bringing Kessler Syndrome down upon everyone to deny other nations vital infrastructure and going beyond that to even the use of tactical nuclear weapons on their enemies and rebellious populations. The more humanity held on and the harder its grip became the more the future slipped out of its fingers until it was all gone. Once again the year is 2173, the world population stands at just under 6.5 billion. A century or so is enough time to heal most wounds, provided one actually wants to do the healing. A casual observer or tourist to this world might be struck by how pleasant much of it looks. A view of the late 22nd century evinces a sense of a world painted in watercolor, something ripped out of a solarpunk moodboard or a Chobani commercial. Aesthetically and technologically speaking this is most certainly the case. It is a world of colorful adobe houses and limewashed buildings, of floating turbines, airwells, solar furnaces and pedal powered machines. A time of bionic and folk-craft motifs and stained glass opening up into rooms of optical computers and bio-forges. Of bacteria-phages and gmo molds and mushrooms breaking down the remnants of the old plasticene. Of consciously designed permaculture landscapes around communes on one end and flowing linear arcologies on the other. Socially though? Politically? That's a different story. The 22nd century is not a time of hand-holding, of positive psychology, utopian cosmopolitanism or down to earth anarchistic sentimentality. It is in many ways a return to form, a world emerging orthogonal from the past and its expectant future and containing bits of both on its own terms. It is a time of small states yet great empires, conservative communities, knightly orders and guild wars, at once an abandonment and refutation of the liberal and secular notions of the old globalized world in some cases and an attempt to race past them altogether in others. A time of close knit families and communes and bloody conflicts wiping out entire lands. Above all though it is a world that has abandoned the once popular maxim that "men are simply born for no reason". For in the 22nd century all men have an end that they know, be it prescribed by their state, their community, their liege, their party, or their God. When the collapse came it was primarily those great global institutions and the social sentiments that had emerged alongside them which fared the worst. The United Nations, the internet, the global economy and so on, yes even air traffic control, all were dashed against the rocks. While states would return, communities would persist and dig deep roots, the idea of the liberal citizen, of the neutral state, of institutions that exist solely for the purpose of their own survival that would not. Those that survived the collapse and came to seize the 22nd century were those that were able to orient their societies towards specific ends, either that of a destined future or of building a kind of humanity and social order within their borders. The closest equivalent we might have is that of a "theocracy" though this is not entirely accurate. While many 22nd century states are oriented towards a kind of religious end or according to a specific cosmology, just as many are not, and many "secular" orders of the 22nd century (such a term being outmoded) in fact evolved out of the practical administrative structures of 21st century religious movements. Things are never quite so straightforward. The 22nd century itself is not even dominated by great powers in the way we would understand the word. For while one might look at a map and see a collection of states which contest land and people, the real powers of the era are different. As stated previously, the major multinational institutions and broader global framework of the 21st century did not survive, but there were some hangers on of the complex globalized society of the past that were able to maintain control and entrench themselves as modern superpowers by the 22nd century. These would turn out to be the descendants of the major charities and development banks, who having their own land, property, and people scattered across the world weathered the collapse and only became more powerful as the new order established itself. THE SUPERPOWERS AND KNIGHTS There are currently 12 (technically 13) superpowers or "orders" which dominate the world. They are the Society of Saint Joseph, Red Cross and Crescent, UNICEF, United Way, the Sravasti Viharas, Hare Khrishna, World Food Bank, Salvation Army, Nahdlatul Ulama, Tzu Chi Foundation, and both the African and Islamic Development Banks. The 13th will not be mentioned until later. With the exception of Saint Joseph which is based out of the Vatican (and formally a subordinate organ of the Catholic Church), none of the superpowers have any "home turf" as it were, instead contesting large swaths of non-contiguous land across the planet. There is not a single part of the world that does not see the presence of at least one of these powers. The origin of many of these powers is rather clear, though others are more particular. The Sravasti Viharas for instance are the descendants of a Western Tibetan Buddhist abbey turned Humanistic foundation which attained global prominence due to its interlinking with the similarly minded Fo Guang Shan of the Taiwanese diaspora in the middle 21st century. Others are the amalgamation of many groups over time, such as the Society of Saint Joseph which was formed as a result of a papal decree merging the church's major foundations together under a new organization. The development banks are the "odd man out" in this regard, though their rise and persistence is for similar reasons, due to the massive amount of sway and resources that fell under such institutions' control as the global south themselves attempted and failed to beat back the collapse. These development banks would find themselves being transformed from multilateral institutions to the caretakers of their former patrons, and so emerged from the collapse in a position of prominence. What one most often thinks of when the global superpowers come to mind however is not the land they contest nor their immense amount of wealth and vassals, but their knightly orders. Professional standing armies were one of the institutions that did not survive the 21st century in most parts of the world and are now the exception rather than the rule. While many states now have the potential to field standing armies again most do not due to institutional pressures against doing so that have become entrenched. Frankly speaking, most states view anything beyond a militia or at most a gendarmerie, to be a waste of time and resources. The superpowers are the notable exception to this, having the resources, funding, manpower, and reason to field large numbers of men at their command. The nature of warfare has changed however, and so have the kinds of men who fight. A big reason for this is technological developments in the past century and a half. In this world of bionics and organic technology one of the great shifts that would occur would be the (with caveats) victory of personal defense and armor over firearms. A great innovation of the modern era, organically grown heat regulating kinetic hardening foam has allowed for the creation of coats and breeches and other wearables that can deflect rounds with ease. Prohibitively expensive to be sure, but not impossible for the superpowers who have of course also locked down the process for creating them. Production costs limit the number of people that can be outfitted even by the wealthiest and most powerful bodies on Earth however. As such the superpowers rely on and use them to outfit small-ish professional corps of loyal soldiers, sworn to them for more or less life, to fight on their behalf. These form the basis of the modern knightly orders. Your average knight for the global superpowers then is exactly that, a man wearing effectively bulletproof quilted armor, often in layers starting with long undershirts and ending generally in either a large greatcoat or medium length jacket with roomy elbow length sleeves. Attached to the front (or sometimes the back) of their person is a bio-mechanical "third arm" folded against their body with an integrated weapon meant flip out and blow off exposed body parts should they be revealed during close combat. Close combat is in fact the name of the game, for although it is true that organic armor is effective against firearms, that simply inspired men to find new ways around them. The monomolecular sword would be this workaround, solving the issue of organic foam armor by simply slicing through it. A quirk of such weapons however is that due to the van der walls force a clean swipe will immediately seal right up, so sword combat between knights is based around hacking and slashing their enemy apart, and if possible blowing them apart with one's prosthetic third arm should an opening arise. Large numbers of ordinary troops provide support and often operate drones and anti-drone weapons on the battlefield. As one can guess this means that knights require a lot of training, which makes them all the more of an investment that superpowers are desperate to hang onto. In many ways the knightly orders are an attempt to accommodate this, to give their fighting men not merely money but prestige and a kind of life and status that separates them from the hoi polloi. Knights are given great freedom in how they live their lives, access to land, and special exceptions to sumptuary laws. Knights are in many ways encouraged to take pride not merely in their work but in the symbols of it. This often takes the form of employing designers to create elaborate and specialized patterns and motifs on the outer layers of their armor and sometimes the insides of the coats and jackets too. There is no need to hide oneself after all, one might as well show off. Even calling them knights is intentional in this respect. Knights operate in fireteams or "lances" (equivalent to a squad of 8 or 10 men) headed by an operator. An "operator" is both a lance-leader and an intermediary, denoted by their special implants. Operators have two implants, one in their skull and one in their jaw, the former which turns thoughts into transmittable information, and the latter which picks up transmissions and uses bone conduction to allow it to be heard as if it were a human voice. Operators are paired to "handlers" who have matching implants. Handlers are stationed outside of the battlefield, often with other handers at one of their superpower's local command stations, where through the use of drones, aerostats, and access to local infrastructure they have full view of the battlefield. Handlers and operators coordinate in battle and often develop a peculiar rapport with each other due to having access to each other's thoughts on and off the battlefield. Despite the attempts by the superpowers to keep a lock on their knights it is not unheard of for some to go rogue, or in the case where a superpower loses a region to another for knights of the losing side to use the opportunity to move into freelancing for local states. There are some benefits to going from being one knight among many to being the only one or two of your kind that a county or even small nation leans on. THE AMERICAN ECUMENES Despite"Despite the previous statement that "theocracy" does not mean theocracy, the first states to be covered will be the American theodemocracies. Ultimately none of the contenders of the American War survived into the modern era, with the notable exception of a redoubt of the old Sacramento Government clinging on in Cascadia. Instead, it would be social clubs and faith communities that would persist as the national and later regional governments crumbled, forming the basis of a new post-American society. The "Ecumenical Societies" are a result of this, nations which privilege the church, mosque, temple and so on as the fundamental unit of civil society and government. Likewise, the national mythos of these states draw both from the collapse era experience and the religious traditions of their peoples, with most states being named after places in scripture, which can be a somewhat confusing prospect when someone says "the Land of Galilee" and they mean the region around Lake Winnipeg. Together the Ecumenical Conference of North America stretches across much of former North America, excluding the great desert of course. Among the conference though there are eight Ecumenes which are the most prominent, and which are most likely to be referenced when one talks about North America. First there is the Land of Gilead, based out of the former Northeast Atlantic. Gilead is perhaps the closest to an old fashioned party-state and indeed its constitution even references the communists and Lenin in particular (alongside the old fascist jurist Schmitt) as their ideological forebears. To Gilead all governments instituted by men are dictatorships in the name of a particular interest, with old world democracies themselves being bourgeois dictatorships. Similarly, civil society is a sorting system by which dictatorship is established, friends and enemies are designated, and the basis upon which the dictatorship distributes rewards and punishments is rationalized. Gilead is unique in that while being dominated by Catholics (with a significant folk element by way of its absorption of former Baptists and Methodists from the Appalachia area), it accedes to the old Communist maxim that a Communist party, in representing the interests of the proletariat and peasantry, is by its nature democratic because it makes as its main interest the majority of the population. This is one of the reasons why the ruling party, the Party for Solidarity and Virtue, modeled itself off of them. Where it diverges however is that to the people of Gilead the main question of governance is not who is ruled but who is sovereign. To the Gilead Party by instead attributing their primary interest to the ultimate sovereign: God, as opposed to the ultimate subject: Humanity, their regime has fixed the errs of previous capitalist and communist empires. The mentality of the people of Gilead can be summed up with the line "the previous exercise of government concerned itself with the question of what man says man is and of what interest is man to himself. We concern ourselves however with what God says man is and of what interest man is to God." In terms of governance Gilead has been very successful, maintaining one of the more prosperous realms on the continent. This is helped by their monopoly on hydropower, not just the Niagara Falls Dam, but their recently successful megaproject of damming the James Bay as well. South of Gilead is the Land of Bethel. A unique specimen among Post-American states, the people of Bethel trace their roots in large part to the work of the Collapse Era "Community Welfare Alliance" or "CWAA" and smaller episcopal and progressive church cliques in the region. Heavily leaned on for the restoration of order and civil society during the Boston Government's short time holding the Atlantic Coast, the "chapter houses" that they established would seize control of the state apparatus during the pretender state's eventual retreat from the area. Modern day Bethel is a great example of what is meant when 22nd century states are called "conservative", that is to say they focus heavily on the maintenance of social order and continuity of norms across generations. Communities in the 22nd century from the local to national level engage in high levels of social policing, which says nothing to what the norms of said society are. Bethel on this front is known particularly for its only national level organ the "Bureau for the Prevention of Vice", under which their national gendarmerie, descended from the old CWAA, is organized. Bethel is also an example of what are sometimes referred to as "post-queer" societies, which is to say societies which had normalized certain social relations for sexual and gender minorities prior to the Collapse Era or which otherwise had influential cliques representing their interests which were maintained into the 22nd century. Post-Queer societies are quite common, more a reflection of the collapse of a social movement globally (due to the collapse of the world in general) not necessitating a reversal of social changes in specific regions, but instead attempts to reorient them within the new baseline of a much "smaller" and more parochial world, mostly through the mimicry of or full integration into the new regimes of social policing performed by the rest of society. Bethel for instance is well known for its program of free at point of use hormonal therapy for gender minorities and streamlined system to accommodate Self Identification, alongside having the death penalty for distribution of pornography of any kind. These two positions are considered to naturally exist hand-in-hand in Bethel society, and locals would be confused were one to attempt to argue with them that these are not positions one needs to hold to maintain social harmony and personal flourishing. Further south is the Land of Goshen. A descendant of the once great Internationalist Commune of Dixie, the people of Goshen still use a modified version of their ancestors' flag. The system of municipal communes and horse-trading which dominated Dixie politics and their erstwhile congress would eventually form the basis of the current system of elector councils. Goshen in large part is dominated by the "Southron Church", formally an ecumenical board jointly held by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African National Baptist Convention, which rose in prominence with the spinning apart of the once dominant Southern Baptist Convention. Goshen is made up of elector districts, which are headed by either secular or religious councils depending on if the local voting authority is centered around the town hall or church board. The elector districts select members for the congress which is the supreme authority of the land. Elector councils often band together into larger administrative federations where they coordinate and draft fiscal policy and direct the operation of infrastructure manned by cooperatives or other socially owned enterprises that contain members from their respective districts. In some cases this manifests as unofficial "party" blocs, often along the lines of the old school commune era divisions of agrarians, romantics, and communists though as a formally non-partisan state they are not called such. Secular and religious electors are generally equal in number, but due to the near unanimous allegiance of religious electors to the Southron Church (and the semi-formalized process of the church sending notices of whom they want their electors to send to congress) the nation is in dominated by the church. Goshen, however, is also noteworthy for its parallel systems of law enforcement, with both a national militia (descended from the Southern People's Liberation Army) and a "knightly board". Goshen prefers to leverage the services of independent knights and reiters, formerly sworn to the superpowers, for mediating disputes between councils and counties. This is a very attractive offer, especially for older knights who wish to enter a kind of "retirement". Goshen's independent knights often hail from UNICEF or the United Way due to the region being further away from their zones of control and firmly held under the Red Cross. Speaking of crosses, Goshen is famous for its yearly Victory Day celebrations which commemorate the triumph of the old Dixie armies over the Black Cross in the American War. Celebrations typically consist of work battalions, dressed up in Collapse Era uniforms, dragging replica Black Cross flags through the mud, culminating in their public burning. Victory Day is also noteworthy for the flying of flags of those nations and foreign militias that aided Dixie in the conflict. As those states no longer exist today, a Goshen town or city on Victory Day is one of the last places on Earth one might see many 21st century flags still flown. Back north one of the descendants of Old Exurbia, now known as the Land of Canaan, can be found. Still based around its old quasi-capital of Tecumseh (former Columbus). The history of Canaan is just as off kilter and curious as its predecessor. The Exurbians had always been a peculiar deviation away from the communalists they were inspired by, attempting a far more "pure" framework trending towards generalized anarchy alongside a kind of American cultural revolution. A people carried aloft as much by an affinity for witchcraft and new age syncretism as they were by their grungecore "i'm playing a riotgrrrl track in a blasted out shopping mall" war of extermination against fascism. As such it is only fitting that it met an equally punk end. Which is to say that one day the men came home from the frontier, turned their guns on everyone and declared they would be doing full anarchism now. All in all it's been pretty successful actually. Canaan has maintained, for roughly 80 years now, more or less a vacuity of any form of government outside of the People's Guard. Beyond that, among the other Ecumenes it is also noted for its relative lack of any hard religious structures. The "Hexurbian" witches of the olden days gave way to a kind of neo-neo-pentecostal campbellism, where much like everything else the existence of discrete denominations was dismantled by force. A form of highly charismatic primitive Christianity dominates in this area, influencing the social norms and sensibilities of the people, even those unaffiliated among them. In terms of foreign relations everything is carried out by the People's Guard which maintains a rotating roster of diplomatic posts for its officers. Despite not being able to predict who you're talking to when conducting relations with the Canaanites the neighboring states have maintained long lasing positive relations with the anti-state, in part a continuation of the unofficial detente that existed between Exurbia and the pretender governments from back in the Hayes era. Speaking of Hayes and the Chicago Government, while that particular pretender no longer exists, Chicago itself is a major power in the new North America. Influenced by the region's overlapping periods of control under the Chicago Government, the Quasi-Islamic National Rejuvenation Government, and the Sabaothic Host of the Prophetess Daniela and her followers, what emerged from the wake of the collapse era was the Land of Shiloh. An experiment in confessionalism, Shiloh's government reflects the diversity of its population. A form of power-sharing is the name of the game, with the Shiloh constitution having built in administrative carveouts for Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Unitarians, Sabaothists, and the Baha'is. Although Shiloh is a state dominated by the public interchange of and horse-trading between different religious communities, above all of them exists a sort of public quasi-cult dedicated to the image and mission of the former United States. This is in large part due to the significant influence that various pretender governments, from Chicago, to the PNRG, to the South Dakota state government of the old 130th Division, played in laying the groundwork for its founding. President Hayes in particular is considered a folk hero of immense renown, for both preventing the fall of the region to fascism and stopping a potential nuclear exchange in the 2040s that would have devastated the continent. A somewhat amusing cultural divergence in this region, though often unremarked upon, was the effect that the ration-passport system of the Chicago Government played in shaping demographics. The Hayes era system (and its carry-ons during the later collapse) unintentionally encouraged diverse cohabitation of houses and compounds and what were known as "breadline marriages" in order to maximize access to goods and dispenser regions through the ration system. In effect everyone sharing a house or living on a street became a "family". Across the Midwest it becomes difficult to trace ancestry back beyond the 2030s. A person's last name thus might be Mattox because their "ancestors" all lived in the same building on Mattox street a century and a half ago. A similar expression of this phenomena can also be found in the region once known as Colorado, though to a more muted degree. Among the former states of the Texan led provisional government now stands the Land of Samaria. Samaria is descended from the "ProvGov" as it was called, more specifically from a special agreement between the Texan and Mexican security and intelligence services that during the later collapse period formed the basis of a multinational program to respond to the regional collapse, desertification and devastation of the gulf coast, and ensuing refugee waves, a program that would survive both nations. The formal dissolution of the remaining American pretender government in Austin would come shortly after its last motion, to begin the movement of millions of people from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mexico to the region now known as Samaria. After everything America might die but her people would survive if the Texans had anything to say about it. The Promised Land of the Texan and Louisianan pinewoods and oak cut prairies would prove to be the perfect place to begin again, and in time even the abandoned cities of Dallas and Fort Worth would be repopulated and reforged to serve as the current capitol of Samaria. Surprisingly retaining many of the institutions of the collapse era, Samaria is a federal republic with a presidency and a unicameral congress, though operating under a church-county system similar to neighboring Goshen. The success of the resettlement program gave the people of Samaria a sense of good government and the belief that a state properly staffed by the competent (and most importantly the virtuous) will always prevail. This means that the Samaritan government tends to be staffed by competent and well oriented people promoted not due to personal ambition or typical mechanistic meritocratic means, but by being forced into ever higher positions of responsibility by the ever watchful community, often beginning with the chittering of elderly women at the front rows of one's church or the murmuring of men at the local social club. As they like to say, no good Samaritan goes unpunished. This has also led to the phenomenon in Samaria known as "Republican Nobility", a kind of informal class position among the administrative upper crust of the state (and their immediate family) who due to the popular belief that their position was a result of their moral character are simply treated far better by all of society and are often encouraged to flaunt their status. A man who is rich because he owns property is considered an accident of history in Samarian culture and has no right to boast, whereas one who has served the people faithfully is believed to deserve to be rich and often made so. Far up north around Lake Winnipeg is the Land of Galilee. Along with its sisterland of Sidon to the west, Galilee is of importance less for any particular difference in its government, but due to its ruling myth and recent history. Like most of the ecumenical states in former Canada its origins can be traced back to the fall of the NATO regime in the country, and in the case of Galilee the beginning of it as well. Galilee stands at the crossroads of many mystical events in the recent history of the continent, having been the site of the Prophetess Daniela's invasion of Canada which sparked the occupation in the first place. Galilee, like most Canadian states is known for a sizeable though not majority Sabaothic population, the religion having experienced a boost in the region after the fall of the faith's own personal Babylon. What Galilee is more often known for however is the story of Terrance and the Miraculous Blade. In the latter half of the 21st century as the NATO regime and its local RCMP proxies increased in the intensity of their barbarism against the Canadian people, crackdowns would begin on all public gatherings in an attempt to break up hostile cells. Terrance Gauthier (otherwise known as St. Terrance) was a lay preacher, one of the many kinds of "wildflower" spokesmen that emerged at the time as an act of defiance following NATO's retreat from Alberta. The wildflowers were a broad classification of dissident, including everything from religious preachers, to communists, to people who supported the return of democracy, to simply anyone the military government didn't like. It is unknown if Terrance was originally a religious wildflower, but he eventually became one, leading to the local RCMP detachment to believe he was involved in or otherwise knew about the location of several dissident cells. He was not and did not. Repeated failures to make any headway by surveilling Terrance caused his observers to become frustrated and spiteful, changing plans first to assaulting Terrance to get information out of him to eventually simply looking for an excuse to kill him outright. Everything from having his house seized to his church closed down and fellow parishioners arrested did not bring Terrance to violence. Finally, an attempt to encourage him to assault an officer by pulling him into the middle of the road and beating him backfired and resulted in him running away, leading to the Mounties chasing after him and shooting him in the leg. As Terrance began to bleed out in the middle of a clearing the Mounties surrounded him with their weapons raised. Terrance raised his hand into the air, which one interpreted as him having finally broken and offering to give him whatever information they believed he might have. Instead, Terrance told them that he would show them a miracle. Looking up to the sky he said: "Lord, not that I might gain, or bargain for my life with your power, but that they who persecute me might be saved. That if you will that they might know you by my faith. For you are the author of life, and if it be your will then this air though it remain in sight and touch air will be in truth a blade that should I grab it would cut my hand." Terrance would grasp the air above his head. His palm would be sliced open and start to bleed. The Mounties would panic and shoot him seven times. The final collapse of Canada would mean Terrance would have the last laugh, and indeed the story goes that at least a couple of those who witnessed the event would later switch sides, with their testimonies being why the story was popularized in the first place. So, he arguably obtained all his goals. He's considered the national hero of modern-day Galilee and the saint-of-the-nation by the region's Catholic and Lutheran believers. Finally there is the Land of Sidon. A recent arrival in the history of Post-American states, it is of great renown due to its ongoing rivalry with neighboring Cascadia. Formally "The United States of America", Cascadia is what remains of the once great Sacramento Government and its ruling body COMPOR. Based around the former military regime in PNW and the Seattle Green Zone, the remnant state has succeeded in solidifying its rule, due to celebrate the 400th year anniversary of the USA soon! A unitary government despite the name, Cascadia can be best described as a "cop-ocracy" in service to the cartels and corporations which dominated the old government, now reforged into what are effectively a kind of ancien nobility, an anachronism wrapped in another anachronism. Sidon is dedicated to the destruction of what remains of the USA, or what it perceives to be a mockery of the world that was lost during the collapse. The cold war between Sidon and Cascadia is playing out primarily in the city of Vancouver, which remains for now outside the reach of either power. A cat and mouse game is afoot between both sides, constantly attempting to outmaneuver and undo the other's inroads into the free city, which all sides know will fall to one side eventually. Among the ecumenes of North America a phenomenon has emerged in recent years, that of the "New Believers", those individuals who come from secular or explicitly atheist families going back 3 or more generations that have at least outwardly converted to a local religion following the rise of the new system. To be clear there were seismic shifts and trends in religiosity in America during the collapse era, though a sizeable chunk of the population remained otherwise stable in previously held secularity as is to be expected, operating as normal under the new system as it gelled. However, trends have been noticed in recent years, especially by those who collect the stats, of segments of the population that did not shift over the past century, but which have now experienced seemingly spontaneous changes in outward religiosity after the new order became entrenched, often corresponding to areas or among those institutions where doing so would be more beneficial. The rise of New Believers is more pronounced in Shiloh for instance with its confessional appointment system, than in Goshen where there is a whole parallel secular state. In recent years these New Believers have experienced a degree of mistrust and wariness accorded to them by some segments of the population, though this has yet to escalate beyond the level of a kind of cultural background radiation. As a result it is not unheard of for New Believers to find themselves needing to express an even more intense religiosity and loyalty to compensate or otherwise "prove" themselves to their detractors. Outside of the" Describe each of the eight ecumenes and Cascadia there is not much to note about the rest of the continent with two exceptions. The first is the Heartland Commonwealth, a state stretching from former Utah to Kansas which considers itself the legal and spiritual successor to the Chicago Government, though having dropped the pretenses of being the sole American state. Known for their massive solar powered fixed wing transport planes that lazily circuit the whole perimeter of their nation and the pilotless caravans that move across the plains, the Heartlanders are in an almost romantic recreation of an American ideal interested in little more than friendly neighbors and profitable trade. There is also the San Fran Commune, an quasi-outpost of the Seventh International on American shores. They, however, will have to be touched on later. THE SINITIC META-CIVILIZATION As it turns out the fall of the People's Republic during the collapse was not enough to get communism out of the blood of the Chinese people. As any visitor to the far east will tell you, that particular quirk is here to stay. Today every Chinese state is officially some form of communist or socialist, and all claim to be the (or at least a) successor to the People's Republic. There is, amusingly, a legal continuity of government regime of the old PRC still operating in Taiwan, and the ruling party of the island is on paper at least well within its rights to claim that it is the CPC, but to be frank nobody really cares. The 30 states of the Chinese people represent their own kind of world, all viewing each other as reflections of the same shared legacy of "Chinese Civilizational Socialism", though descended from different institutions, organs, and movements of the old empire that once dominated the land. The Third People's Republic, based out of its capital of Xiong'an, is a unitary state that emerged out of a collapse era stewardship program established by China's major state enterprises. Headed by the Continuing Committee, a descendant of the CPC Central Committee now staffed primarily by technical specialists and a consultative simulated intelligence that runs the economy, the TPR is often described as a kind of "People's Technocracy". Despite its heavily centralized state apparatus and potential to leverage immense amounts of power domestically, the TPR prefers to leave its people alone, operating under the belief that the continuing committee should only exist as a caretaker administration for a society that no longer needs to be ruled. To this end it has sought to make its regime at once flexible and ever present while also unobtrusive and has just recently abolished all taxation within its borders. The TPR is also known for its romanticism of early collapse era China, which it sees as the height of Chinese civilization both in terms of reach and cultural attainment. The TPR maintains a great deal of influence to its north, in the lands of former Mongolia and Siberian Russia, where Chinese settler states dominate. South of the TPR is the realm known as the Prefectural Confederation. Best described as an anarcho-syndicalist state, the Confederation is composed of a number of arcology communes and organizing committees composed of trade union representatives. This arrangement was the result of two main factors, first was the resettlement of large chunks of the coastal population to new inland linear arcologies as the sea level rose, and the second was what were known as the "two card reforms". An attempt in the 21st century to transition away from reliance on enterprise unions, the ACFTU embarked on a program of expanding trade union participation by forming local sector unions to exist alongside enterprise-wide unions. These were known as the "two card reforms" due to the long period when many Chinese workers would be a part of two separate unions in the same work place and thus had two union cards. The success of the reforms was mixed, but it took hold deep in Jiangsu and Shandong where climate change would actually accelerate the transition in workplace structures as people had to physically move and restart their lives in the new linear arcologies. With the fall of the PRC the local workplace committees would strike, coopting the administrative structure given to them and organizing the network of arcologies along the lines of a dual communal congress and trade union senate structure. Today the Prefectural Confederation is seen as a kind of intermediate zone, largely uninvolved in the affairs of its neighbors and thought of as a region separating the north from the Malkutic states to the south. Before we go further south we will return to the north (and then the west briefly) to speak about the Liaoyang Ecological Secretariat. Descended from the United Front Work Group Coordinating Committee for An Ecological Socialist Civilization (try saying that five times fast), the LES was originally a regional sub-board representing Liaoning, Jilin, and North Korea. While both the PRC and DPRK would fall (though the latter not before unifying the peninsula) the board would not, maintaining a stranglehold on the region. The modern-day secretariat, which still calls itself a mere secretariat due to officially waiting for the legitimate PRC government to reassert itself, is most known for its ambitious program of ecological rehabilitation and radical self-reliance. While sometimes amusingly called an "Eco-Juche" state few can argue against its effectiveness, with its stunning resuscitation of the continent's bee population earning it the other nickname "The Apiary". The Secretariat is also known for its ongoing program of settling Outer Manchuria and the Amur Basin and subverting local governments to bring them more in line with its long-term program of creating a "Northeast People's Bioregion". It may be worth checking back in at the turn of the 23rd century to see how that plays out. In the meantime, the Secretariat currently inspires a lot of thrillers based around its clandestine operations. To the west is the aptly named Agency for the Western Domain. An intersection of two developments in late pre-collapse Chinese history, the expanding control over and resettlement of minority populations from the peripheral zones of the southwest (Zomia) and the security regimes established in the western territories of the old empire. During the collapse era local minorities began to take on greater roles in the administration of the local military apparatus due to the explosion in military enlistment as an avenue of social mobility. The resettled peoples of Yunnan such as the Lisu increasingly found themselves under the control of co-ethnic garrisons supported by the capital and party committees, as were the Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tu and so on. As the PRC waned the mission of these local ad-hoc regimes continued, ultimately coalescing under the army and police structures that they all shared. The Agency for the Western Domain then is a latter-day Protectorate General to Pacify the West as it were, though its size and complexity dwarfs that of even some old dynasties. History might not repeat but it does often rhyme. Of course the agency is self-governing, and over the generations has ironically become rather thoroughly Islamized. An exceptionally proud nation, it maintains the air that it is the bulwark of Chinese civilization, the shield that protects the heartland (that it in theory is still beholden to) from the vicissitudes of the outside world. It also makes money hand over first in trade, having seized control of almost all of the major overland transport infrastructure of old Eurasia, but that's neither here nor there. South China is most known for its system called the Malkutate. Its full name is the All-China Apostolic Malkutate. An evolution of the successful program to Sinicize Christianity, the Malkutate is at once an imperial church and a sort of memetic or cultural space. Derived from Malkuth or "Kingdom", the counter-oriented sefirot to Keter or "Crown", Malkuth comes from creation itself, governs it and gives it sensibility, and exists in, through, and among the material world and human person when it reflects and is oriented towards God. It is also the mediative sefirot that in its reflection connects all of God's emanations back to the top. In Christian Kabbalistic traditions it is manifested in the unity of mankind with God and Heaven as the Bride through the Church, and the Church as the community of all believers living, dead, and eternally alive (the saints). The implications of such a concept were seized on by the post-PRC communist church, to rhetorically justify and create a framework for a kind of "bottom-up" society, one beginning at the communal level, at the workshop, and the work battalion, directing itself towards the end of the salvation of the Chinese people. The Malkutitic system is also known for its re-nestling of Chinese cosmology in this new era. For instance, the age-old idea in Chinese spirituality that Heaven or God is that which, grounding being itself, possesses a will that attempts to unify a humanity that is not naturally or intentionally separate from it but only contingently so towards itself as having been wholly expressed in history with the reconciliation of God with man in the person of Jesus. Likewise that immortality, the ultimate aim and telos of fusus, the subject, or the universal logic and that which it ultimately trends towards, is fully realized by and in Christ as the Resurrection. Malkutism essentially creates for itself a space to realize the re-establishment of a neo classical Chinese cosmology sublimated into an Abrahamic typological framework and thus a re-enchantment of Chinese civilization, with a Communistic society and a Christian cosmology as their final form. A common motif found in Malkutic states reflects this in a snapshot image of the big dipper in the four phases or seasons around an image of the three heavens (three circles expanding outwards) while four stars (no longer representing distinct classes as they did on the old PRC flag but the totality of the Chinese people) trailing behind the tail. Similarities have been remarked upon between many Malkutate patterns and the patterns of the old Ming era magic square banners, though this is believed to be a kind of convergent re-development of a related aesthetic style rather than an intentional move. Malkutic states are, reflecting the broader culture, morein 15 words or less universally Workers' republics: self-governing communal federations often with a ceremonial party on top. The federations give way beyond the state level to the Ecclesiastical Conference which itself acts as a consultative organ back to the communes and parish-cadres: a circular system. Among the Malkutates themselves though two are often mentioned the most. The Sichuan and Huanan Workers' Republics. Generally considered the "elder brothers" or sometimes "elder brother and sister" (which is which depends on who you ask) of South China, these two states are the ones that their cousins generally entrust the maintenance of foreign relations and the region's standing army (an exception among world powers as noted earlier) to. THE CARIBO-MEXICAN TECHNOCRACIES Those who have visited the great states of the Caribbean describe it as a place somewhat out of time, a vision of a future that never arrived. Dominated by the twin republics of Santo Domingo and Centroamerica, the Caribbean technocracies emerged out of the alliance formed between the rising Latin American security states and the ICS regime established to loot the former United States. Truly incalculable amounts of wealth flowed into the region, which was kept aloft out of the interest of the UN led order during the early years of the collapse. Wealth when properly managed begets more wealth, such is the clarion call of the capitalist, and indeed it did. Today the two republics are some of the richest parts of the globe, their technocratic and highly professional elite in service to a unified banking regime. A microcosm of the perfected global market as envisioned by the Rockefellers and Carnegies long ago. The Latins would claim to have at last perfected the free market, though such a statement would most definitely cause their neighbors to the south to bristle. To the wesin a snarky and satirical manner.

CHATBOT: 1. Land of Gilead: Divine dictatorship sprinkled with communist nostalgia and hydropower hegemony. 2. Land of Bethel: Policing vice and diversity with progressive undertones and a puritanical bent. 3. Land of Goshen: Church-led elector councils playing political musical chairs with knightly enforcers on standby. 4. Land of Canaan: Anarchic hippie haven, witchcraft-wielding freedom-lovers, with minimal governance to boot. 5. Land of Shiloh: Religious melting pot clutching onto mythical Americana with confessional power-sharing. 6. Land of Samaria: Robust republic with community-drafted leaders and a flair for Republican nobility. 7. Land of Galilee: Mystic miracles and nationalist fervor celebrating a folk hero with a bloody hand. 8. Land of Sidon: Anti-American rebels eyeing Vancouver, focused on toppling their cop-ocratic neighbors.

CHATBOT: Based on the provided descriptions: Most Progressive: Land of Bethel appears the most progressive, particularly in its approach to supporting gender minorities with hormonal therapy and self-identification processes, despite its strict stance against pornography and its intensive social policing. Most Traditional: The Land of Gilead could be considered the most traditional due to its emphasis on a divinely-ordained government and reference to communist and fascist ideologies as predecessors, suggesting a return to more authoritarian and collectivist models of governance intertwined with religious doctrine.

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Mar 16, 2024 at 12:40 AM EDT — 2 turns United States, Connecticut fiction View full conversation

USER: "DespiteDo the American Ecumenes qualify to be a state? THE AMERICAN ECUMENES Despite the previous statement that "theocracy" does not mean theocracy, the first states to be covered will be the American theodemocracies. Ultimately none of the contenders of the American War survived into the modern era, with the notable exception of a redoubt of the old Sacramento Government clinging on in Cascadia. Instead, it would be social clubs and faith communities that would persist as the national and later regional governments crumbled, forming the basis of a new post-American society. The "Ecumenical Societies" are a result of this, nations which privilege the church, mosque, temple and so on as the fundamental unit of civil society and government. Likewise, the national mythos of these states draw both from the collapse era experience and the religious traditions of their peoples, with most states being named after places in scripture, which can be a somewhat confusing prospect when someone says "the Land of Galilee" and they mean the region around Lake Winnipeg. Together the Ecumenical Conference of North America stretches across much of former North America, excluding the great desert of course. Among the conference though there are eight Ecumenes which are the most prominent, and which are most likely to be referenced when one talks about North America. First there is the Land of Gilead, based out of the former Northeast Atlantic. Gilead is perhaps the closest to an old fashioned party-state and indeed its constitution even references the communists and Lenin in particular (alongside the old fascist jurist Schmitt) as their ideological forebears. To Gilead all governments instituted by men are dictatorships in the name of a particular interest, with old world democracies themselves being bourgeois dictatorships. Similarly, civil society is a sorting system by which dictatorship is established, friends and enemies are designated, and the basis upon which the dictatorship distributes rewards and punishments is rationalized. Gilead is unique in that while being dominated by Catholics (with a significant folk element by way of its absorption of former Baptists and Methodists from the Appalachia area), it accedes to the old Communist maxim that a Communist party, in representing the interests of the proletariat and peasantry, is by its nature democratic because it makes as its main interest the majority of the population. This is one of the reasons why the ruling party, the Party for Solidarity and Virtue, modeled itself off of them. Where it diverges however is that to the people of Gilead the main question of governance is not who is ruled but who is sovereign. To the Gilead Party by instead attributing their primary interest to the ultimate sovereign: God, as opposed to the ultimate subject: Humanity, their regime has fixed the errs of previous capitalist and communist empires. The mentality of the people of Gilead can be summed up with the line "the previous exercise of government concerned itself with the question of what man says man is and of what interest is man to himself. We concern ourselves however with what God says man is and of what interest man is to God." In terms of governance Gilead has been very successful, maintaining one of the more prosperous realms on the continent. This is helped by their monopoly on hydropower, not just the Niagara Falls Dam, but their recently successful megaproject of damming the James Bay as well. South of Gilead is the Land of Bethel. A unique specimen among Post-American states, the people of Bethel trace their roots in large part to the work of the Collapse Era "Community Welfare Alliance" or "CWAA" and smaller episcopal and progressive church cliques in the region. Heavily leaned on for the restoration of order and civil society during the Boston Government's short time holding the Atlantic Coast, the "chapter houses" that they established would seize control of the state apparatus during the pretender state's eventual retreat from the area. Modern day Bethel is a great example of what is meant when 22nd century states are called "conservative", that is to say they focus heavily on the maintenance of social order and continuity of norms across generations. Communities in the 22nd century from the local to national level engage in high levels of social policing, which says nothing to what the norms of said society are. Bethel on this front is known particularly for its only national level organ the "Bureau for the Prevention of Vice", under which their national gendarmerie, descended from the old CWAA, is organized. Bethel is also an example of what are sometimes referred to as "post-queer" societies, which is to say societies which had normalized certain social relations for sexual and gender minorities prior to the Collapse Era or which otherwise had influential cliques representing their interests which were maintained into the 22nd century. Post-Queer societies are quite common, more a reflection of the collapse of a social movement globally (due to the collapse of the world in general) not necessitating a reversal of social changes in specific regions, but instead attempts to reorient them within the new baseline of a much "smaller" and more parochial world, mostly through the mimicry of or full integration into the new regimes of social policing performed by the rest of society. Bethel for instance is well known for its program of free at point of use hormonal therapy for gender minorities and streamlined system to accommodate Self Identification, alongside having the death penalty for distribution of pornography of any kind. These two positions are considered to naturally exist hand-in-hand in Bethel society, and locals would be confused were one to attempt to argue with them that these are not positions one needs to hold to maintain social harmony and personal flourishing. Further south is the Land of Goshen. A descendant of the once great Internationalist Commune of Dixie, the people of Goshen still use a modified version of their ancestors' flag. The system of municipal communes and horse-trading which dominated Dixie politics and their erstwhile congress would eventually form the basis of the current system of elector councils. Goshen in large part is dominated by the "Southron Church", formally an ecumenical board jointly held by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African National Baptist Convention, which rose in prominence with the spinning apart of the once dominant Southern Baptist Convention. Goshen is made up of elector districts, which are headed by either secular or religious councils depending on if the local voting authority is centered around the town hall or church board. The elector districts select members for the congress which is the supreme authority of the land. Elector councils often band together into larger administrative federations where they coordinate and draft fiscal policy and direct the operation of infrastructure manned by cooperatives or other socially owned enterprises that contain members from their respective districts. In some cases this manifests as unofficial "party" blocs, often along the lines of the old school commune era divisions of agrarians, romantics, and communists though as a formally non-partisan state they are not called such. Secular and religious electors are generally equal in number, but due to the near unanimous allegiance of religious electors to the Southron Church (and the semi-formalized process of the church sending notices of whom they want their electors to send to congress) the nation is in dominated by the church. Goshen, however, is also noteworthy for its parallel systems of law enforcement, with both a national militia (descended from the Southern People's Liberation Army) and a "knightly board". Goshen prefers to leverage the services of independent knights and reiters, formerly sworn to the superpowers, for mediating disputes between councils and counties. This is a very attractive offer, especially for older knights who wish to enter a kind of "retirement". Goshen's independent knights often hail from UNICEF or the United Way due to the region being further away from their zones of control and firmly held under the Red Cross. Speaking of crosses, Goshen is famous for its yearly Victory Day celebrations which commemorate the triumph of the old Dixie armies over the Black Cross in the American War. Celebrations typically consist of work battalions, dressed up in Collapse Era uniforms, dragging replica Black Cross flags through the mud, culminating in their public burning. Victory Day is also noteworthy for the flying of flags of those nations and foreign militias that aided Dixie in the conflict. As those states no longer exist today, a Goshen town or city on Victory Day is one of the last places on Earth one might see many 21st century flags still flown. Back north one of the descendants of Old Exurbia, now known as the Land of Canaan, can be found. Still based around its old quasi-capital of Tecumseh (former Columbus). The history of Canaan is just as off kilter and curious as its predecessor. The Exurbians had always been a peculiar deviation away from the communalists they were inspired by, attempting a far more "pure" framework trending towards generalized anarchy alongside a kind of American cultural revolution. A people carried aloft as much by an affinity for witchcraft and new age syncretism as they were by their grungecore "i'm playing a riotgrrrl track in a blasted out shopping mall" war of extermination against fascism. As such it is only fitting that it met an equally punk end. Which is to say that one day the men came home from the frontier, turned their guns on everyone and declared they would be doing full anarchism now. All in all it's been pretty successful actually. Canaan has maintained, for roughly 80 years now, more or less a vacuity of any form of government outside of the People's Guard. Beyond that, among the other Ecumenes it is also noted for its relative lack of any hard religious structures. The "Hexurbian" witches of the olden days gave way to a kind of neo-neo-pentecostal campbellism, where much like everything else the existence of discrete denominations was dismantled by force. A form of highly charismatic primitive Christianity dominates in this area, influencing the social norms and sensibilities of the people, even those unaffiliated among them. In terms of foreign relations everything is carried out by the People's Guard which maintains a rotating roster of diplomatic posts for its officers. Despite not being able to predict who you're talking to when conducting relations with the Canaanites the neighboring states have maintained long lasing positive relations with the anti-state, in part a continuation of the unofficial detente that existed between Exurbia and the pretender governments from back in the Hayes era. Speaking of Hayes and the Chicago Government, while that particular pretender no longer exists, Chicago itself is a major power in the new North America. Influenced by the region's overlapping periods of control under the Chicago Government, the Quasi-Islamic National Rejuvenation Government, and the Sabaothic Host of the Prophetess Daniela and her followers, what emerged from the wake of the collapse era was the Land of Shiloh. An experiment in confessionalism, Shiloh's government reflects the diversity of its population. A form of power-sharing is the name of the game, with the Shiloh constitution having built in administrative carveouts for Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Unitarians, Sabaothists, and the Baha'is. Although Shiloh is a state dominated by the public interchange of and horse-trading between different religious communities, above all of them exists a sort of public quasi-cult dedicated to the image and mission of the former United States. This is in large part due to the significant influence that various pretender governments, from Chicago, to the PNRG, to the South Dakota state government of the old 130th Division, played in laying the groundwork for its founding. President Hayes in particular is considered a folk hero of immense renown, for both preventing the fall of the region to fascism and stopping a potential nuclear exchange in the 2040s that would have devastated the continent. A somewhat amusing cultural divergence in this region, though often unremarked upon, was the effect that the ration-passport system of the Chicago Government played in shaping demographics. The Hayes era system (and its carry-ons during the later collapse) unintentionally encouraged diverse cohabitation of houses and compounds and what were known as "breadline marriages" in order to maximize access to goods and dispenser regions through the ration system. In effect everyone sharing a house or living on a street became a "family". Across the Midwest it becomes difficult to trace ancestry back beyond the 2030s. A person's last name thus might be Mattox because their "ancestors" all lived in the same building on Mattox street a century and a half ago. A similar expression of this phenomena can also be found in the region once known as Colorado, though to a more muted degree. Among the former states of the Texan led provisional government now stands the Land of Samaria. Samaria is descended from the "ProvGov" as it was called, more specifically from a special agreement between the Texan and Mexican security and intelligence services that during the later collapse period formed the basis of a multinational program to respond to the regional collapse, desertification and devastation of the gulf coast, and ensuing refugee waves, a program that would survive both nations. The formal dissolution of the remaining American pretender government in Austin would come shortly after its last motion, to begin the movement of millions of people from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mexico to the region now known as Samaria. After everything America might die but her people would survive if the Texans had anything to say about it. The Promised Land of the Texan and Louisianan pinewoods and oak cut prairies would prove to be the perfect place to begin again, and in time even the abandoned cities of Dallas and Fort Worth would be repopulated and reforged to serve as the current capitol of Samaria. Surprisingly retaining many of the institutions of the collapse era, Samaria is a federal republic with a presidency and a unicameral congress, though operating under a church-county system similar to neighboring Goshen. The success of the resettlement program gave the people of Samaria a sense of good government and the belief that a state properly staffed by the competent (and most importantly the virtuous) will always prevail. This means that the Samaritan government tends to be staffed by competent and well oriented people promoted not due to personal ambition or typical mechanistic meritocratic means, but by being forced into ever higher positions of responsibility by the ever watchful community, often beginning with the chittering of elderly women at the front rows of one's church or the murmuring of men at the local social club. As they like to say, no good Samaritan goes unpunished. This has also led to the phenomenon in Samaria known as "Republican Nobility", a kind of informal class position among the administrative upper crust of the state (and their immediate family) who due to the popular belief that their position was a result of their moral character are simply treated far better by all of society and are often encouraged to flaunt their status. A man who is rich because he owns property is considered an accident of history in Samarian culture and has no right to boast, whereas one who has served the people faithfully is believed to deserve to be rich and often made so. Far up north around Lake Winnipeg is the Land of Galilee. Along with its sisterland of Sidon to the west, Galilee is of importance less for any particular difference in its government, but due to its ruling myth and recent history. Like most of the ecumenical states in former Canada its origins can be traced back to the fall of the NATO regime in the country, and in the case of Galilee the beginning of it as well. Galilee stands at the crossroads of many mystical events in the recent history of the continent, having been the site of the Prophetess Daniela's invasion of Canada which sparked the occupation in the first place. Galilee, like most Canadian states is known for a sizeable though not majority Sabaothic population, the religion having experienced a boost in the region after the fall of the faith's own personal Babylon. What Galilee is more often known for however is the story of Terrance and the Miraculous Blade. In the latter half of the 21st century as the NATO regime and its local RCMP proxies increased in the intensity of their barbarism against the Canadian people, crackdowns would begin on all public gatherings in an attempt to break up hostile cells. Terrance Gauthier (otherwise known as St. Terrance) was a lay preacher, one of the many kinds of "wildflower" spokesmen that emerged at the time as an act of defiance following NATO's retreat from Alberta. The wildflowers were a broad classification of dissident, including everything from religious preachers, to communists, to people who supported the return of democracy, to simply anyone the military government didn't like. It is unknown if Terrance was originally a religious wildflower, but he eventually became one, leading to the local RCMP detachment to believe he was involved in or otherwise knew about the location of several dissident cells. He was not and did not. Repeated failures to make any headway by surveilling Terrance caused his observers to become frustrated and spiteful, changing plans first to assaulting Terrance to get information out of him to eventually simply looking for an excuse to kill him outright. Everything from having his house seized to his church closed down and fellow parishioners arrested did not bring Terrance to violence. Finally, an attempt to encourage him to assault an officer by pulling him into the middle of the road and beating him backfired and resulted in him running away, leading to the Mounties chasing after him and shooting him in the leg. As Terrance began to bleed out in the middle of a clearing the Mounties surrounded him with their weapons raised. Terrance raised his hand into the air, which one interpreted as him having finally broken and offering to give him whatever information they believed he might have. Instead, Terrance told them that he would show them a miracle. Looking up to the sky he said: "Lord, not that I might gain, or bargain for my life with your power, but that they who persecute me might be saved. That if you will that they might know you by my faith. For you are the author of life, and if it be your will then this air though it remain in sight and touch air will be in truth a blade that should I grab it would cut my hand." Terrance would grasp the air above his head. His palm would be sliced open and start to bleed. The Mounties would panic and shoot him seven times. The final collapse of Canada would mean Terrance would have the last laugh, and indeed the story goes that at least a couple of those who witnessed the event would later switch sides, with their testimonies being why the story was popularized in the first place. So, he arguably obtained all his goals. He's considered the national hero of modern-day Galilee and the saint-of-the-nation by the region's Catholic and Lutheran believers. Finally there is the Land of Sidon. A recent arrival in the history of Post-American states, it is of great renown due to its ongoing rivalry with neighboring Cascadia. Formally "The United States of America", Cascadia is what remains of the once great Sacramento Government and its ruling body COMPOR. Based around the former military regime in PNW and the Seattle Green Zone, the remnant state has succeeded in solidifying its rule, due to celebrate the 400th year anniversary of the USA soon! A unitary government despite the name, Cascadia can be best described as a "cop-ocracy" in service to the cartels and corporations which dominated the old government, now reforged into what are effectively a kind of ancien nobility, an anachronism wrapped in another anachronism. Sidon is dedicated to the destruction of what remains of the USA, or what it perceives to be a mockery of the world that was lost during the collapse. The cold war between Sidon and Cascadia is playing out primarily in the city of Vancouver, which remains for now outside the reach of either power. A cat and mouse game is afoot between both sides, constantly attempting to outmaneuver and undo the other's inroads into the free city, which all sides know will fall to one side eventually. Among the ecumenes of North America a phenomenon has emerged in recent years, that of the "New Believers", those individuals who come from secular or explicitly atheist families going back 3 or more generations that have at least outwardly converted to a local religion following the rise of the new system. To be clear there were seismic shifts and trends in religiosity in America during the collapse era, though a sizeable chunk of the population remained otherwise stable in previously held secularity as is to be expected, operating as normal under the new system as it gelled. However, trends have been noticed in recent years, especially by those who collect the stats, of segments of the population that did not shift over the past century, but which have now experienced seemingly spontaneous changes in outward religiosity after the new order became entrenched, often corresponding to areas or among those institutions where doing so would be more beneficial. The rise of New Believers is more pronounced in Shiloh for instance with its confessional appointment system, than in Goshen where there is a whole parallel secular state. In recent years these New Believers have experienced a degree of mistrust and wariness accorded to them by some segments of the population, though this has yet to escalate beyond the level of a kind of cultural background radiation. As a result it is not unheard of for New Believers to find themselves needing to express an even more intense religiosity and loyalty to compensate or otherwise "prove" themselves to their detractors. " Describe each of the eightOutside of the ecumenes in 15 words or less in a snarky and satirical manner.and Cascadia there is not much to note about the rest of the continent with two exceptions. The first is the Heartland Commonwealth, a state stretching from former Utah to Kansas which considers itself the legal and spiritual successor to the Chicago Government, though having dropped the pretenses of being the sole American state. Known for their massive solar powered fixed wing transport planes that lazily circuit the whole perimeter of their nation and the pilotless caravans that move across the plains, the Heartlanders are in an almost romantic recreation of an American ideal interested in little more than friendly neighbors and profitable trade. There is also the San Fran Commune, an quasi-outpost of the Seventh International on American shores. They, however, will have to be touched on later. 1. A Sovereign -- A Supreme Authority, out-ranking every other position and institution in the land. 2. A Bureaucracy -- Layers of the authority, delegated down from the Sovereign, managing discrete areas of a complex social administration. 3. A Hierarchy -- Society itself is stratified into elites and commoners, commanders, and commanded. 4. An Identity -- A unifying sense of belonging to the same team, one larger than those of village, tribe, and family. 5. Power --For the state's authority to man anything, it must wield sufficient power to coerce everyone -- to force everyone within its land -- to live under that authority.

CHATBOT: Based on the detailed descriptions provided of the American Ecumenes, there are several factors and criteria that can be examined to evaluate whether they qualify to be considered as states. The traditional understanding of a state is often based on the Montevideo Convention of 1933, which outlines four criteria: a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. However, considering the unique contexts and the post-collapse scenarios described, it might be more apt to evaluate these entities using a more adapted or nuanced set of criteria. ### Sovereignty Each of the American Ecumenes appears to exercise supreme authority over their defined territories without external interference. For example, Gilead exercises control over hydropower projects, and Samaria holds a federal republic system, indicating a level of sovereignty akin to that of a state. ### Bureaucracy and Governance The Ecumenes demonstrate complex systems of governance and bureaucratic administration. Gilead, with its Party for Solidarity and Virtue, along with Goshen and its system of elector councils, highlight a structured political landscape. Such organized governance indicates the presence of a bureaucratic system managing social administration, which is characteristic of a state. ### Hierarchical Society The descriptions of these societies suggest a clear stratification, from religious leaders to governmental authorities and down to the general populace. This hierarchical structure within each Ecumene, such as the "Republican Nobility" of Samaria or the administrative class system in Shiloh, aligns with the societal organization observed in recognized states. ### Identity The Ecumenes possess strong national identities, often derived from religious or communal beliefs. This unified sense of belonging, transcending smaller affiliations like village or tribe, is evident in their shared myths, histories, and national heroes (e.g., the story of Terrance in Galilee). Such a collective identity is crucial for the cohesion and longevity of a state. ### Power The capacity for coercion and ensuring compliance with authority is present in various forms across the Ecumenes. For instance, Bethel's Bureau for the Prevention of Vice and the military and knightly forces of Goshen illustrate the use of power to enforce social norms and govern effectively. This ability to exercise power within their territories is a defining characteristi...

CHATBOT: ### Land of Gilead Gilead operates as a theodemocracy where the Catholic Church, integrating folk elements from absorbed regions, plays a central role alongside an ideological party that draws inspiration from communism and fascism, focusing on divine sovereignty over human interests. The Party for Solidarity and Virtue controls a prosperous realm, emphasizing a unique mix of religious and ideological governance. ### Land of Bethel Bethel is characterized by its emphasis on social order and the continuity of norms, administered through a national organ known as the "Bureau for the Prevention of Vice," indicative of a deeply conservative and socially policed state that simultaneously supports progressive stances on gender minorities. Its governance model blends religious values with stringent social control measures, making it distinct among post-collapse societies. ### Land of Goshen Goshen is a theocratic federation led by the Southron Church, with governance divided among secular and religious councils that select members for a central congress, balancing religious command with a form of democratic elective system. It maintains a unique system of law enforcement and celebrates a distinct identity through historical commemorations like Victory Day. ### Land of Canaan Canaan represents an anarchic society with minimal government presence outside of the People's Guard, steeped in a mix of neo-neo-Pentecostalism and vehement anti-authoritarianism, making it an outlier for its lack of structured governance and religious institutions. It functions through a voluntary collective identity and defense mechanism without a conventional state structure. ### Land of Shiloh Shiloh is a confessional state that practices power-sharing among diverse religious communities, ensuring representation across its government functions, indicative of a complex multicultural and multi-faith society that values unity in diversity. Its governance is further marked by a quasi-cult dedicated to American nationalism, showcasing a blend of historical reverence and communal coexistence. ### Land of Samaria Samaria is a federal republic that retained many institutional structures from the collapse era, prioritizing competence and virtue in government appointments, creating a unique blend of meritocracy and moral governance. This system has fostered a so-called "Republican Nobility," where political prestige is linked to service and moral standing, reflecting a deep community-driven approa...

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Mar 28, 2024 at 2:50 PM EDT — 5 turns United States, Connecticut fiction toxic View full conversation

USER: Do the American EcumenesHow does the World of Man--Triumphant (Endaileoum Ethcenloumdi) qualify to beas a state? THE AMERICAN ECUMENES Despite the previous statement that "theocracy" does not mean theocracy, the first states to be covered will be the American theodemocracies. Ultimately none of the contenders of the American War survived into the modern era, with the notable exception of a redoubt of the old Sacramento Government clinging on in Cascadia. Instead, it would be social clubs and faith communities that would persist as the national and later regional governments crumbled, forming the basis of a new post-American society. The "Ecumenical Societies" are a result of this, nations which privilege the church, mosque, temple and so on as the fundamental unit of civil society and government. Likewise, the national mythos of these states draw both from the collapse era experience and the religious traditions of their peoples, with most states being named after places in scripture, which can be a somewhat confusing prospect when someone says "the Land of Galilee" and they mean the region around Lake Winnipeg. Together the Ecumenical Conference of North America stretches across much of former North America, excluding the great desert of course. Among the conference though there are eight Ecumenes which are the most prominent, and which are most likely to be referenced when one talks about North America. First there is the Land of Gilead, based out of the former Northeast Atlantic. Gilead is perhaps the closest to an old fashioned party-state and indeed its constitution even references the communists and Lenin in particular (alongside the old fascist jurist Schmitt) as their ideological forebears. To Gilead all governments instituted by men are dictatorships in the name of a particular interest, with old world democracies themselves being bourgeois dictatorships. Similarly, civil society is a sorting system by which dictatorship is established, friends and enemies are designated, and the basis upon which the dictatorship distributes rewards and punishments is rationalized. Gilead is unique in that while being dominated by Catholics (with a significant folk element by way of its absorption of former Baptists and Methodists from the Appalachia area), it accedes to the old Communist maxim that a Communist party, in representing the interests of the proletariat and peasantry, is by its nature democratic because it makes as its main interest the majority of the population. This is one of the reasons why the ruling party, the Party for Solidarity and Virtue, modeled itself off of them. Where it diverges however is that to the people of Gilead the main question of governance is not who is ruled but who is sovereign. To the Gilead Party by instead attributing their primary interest to the ultimate sovereign: God, as opposed to the ultimate subject: Humanity, their regime has fixed the errs of previous capitalist and communist empires. The mentality of the people of Gilead can be summed up with the line "the previous exercise of government concerned itself with the question of what man says man is and of what interest is man to himself. We concern ourselves however with what God says man is and of what interest man is to God." In terms of governance Gilead has been very successful, maintaining one of the more prosperous realms on the continent. This is helped by their monopoly on hydropower, not just the Niagara Falls Dam, but their recently successful megaproject of damming the James Bay as well. South of Gilead is the Land of Bethel. A unique specimen among Post-American states, the people of Bethel trace their roots in large part to the work of the Collapse Era "Community Welfare Alliance" or "CWAA" and smaller episcopal and progressive church cliques in the region. Heavily leaned on for the restoration of order and civil society during the Boston Government's short time holding the Atlantic Coast, the "chapter houses" that they established would seize control of the state apparatus during the pretender state's eventual retreat from the area. Modern day Bethel is a great example of what is meant when 22nd century states are called "conservative", that is to say they focus heavily on the maintenance of social order and continuity of norms across generations. Communities in the 22nd century from the local to national level engage in high levels of social policing, which says nothing to what the norms of said society are. Bethel on this front is known particularly for its only national level organ the "Bureau for the Prevention of Vice", under which their national gendarmerie, descended from the old CWAA, is organized. Bethel is also an example of what are sometimes referred to as "post-queer" societies, which is to say societies which had normalized certain social relations for sexual and gender minorities prior to the Collapse Era or which otherwise had influential cliques representing their interests which were maintained into the 22nd century. Post-Queer societies are quite common, more a reflection of the collapse of a social movement globally (due to the collapse of the world in general) not necessitating a reversal of social changes in specific regions, but instead attempts to reorient them within the new baseline of a much "smaller" and more parochial world, mostly through the mimicry of or full integration into the new regimes of social policing performed by the rest of society. Bethel for instance is well known for its program of free at point of use hormonal therapy for gender minorities and streamlined system to accommodate Self Identification, alongside having the death penalty for distribution of pornography of any kind. These two positions are considered to naturally exist hand-in-hand in Bethel society, and locals would be confused were one to attempt to argue with them that these are not positions one needs to hold to maintain social harmony and personal flourishing. Further south is the Land of Goshen. A descendant of the once great Internationalist Commune of Dixie, the people of Goshen still use a modified version of their ancestors' flag. The system of municipal communes and horse-trading which dominated Dixie politics and their erstwhile congress would eventually form the basis of the current system of elector councils. Goshen in large part is dominated by the "Southron Church", formally an ecumenical board jointly held by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African National Baptist Convention, which rose in prominence with the spinning apart of the once dominant Southern Baptist Convention. Goshen is made up of elector districts, which are headed by either secular or religious councils depending on if the local voting authority is centered around the town hall or church board. The elector districts select members for the congress which is the supreme authority of the land. Elector councils often band together into larger administrative federations where they coordinate and draft fiscal policy and direct the operation of infrastructure manned by cooperatives or other socially owned enterprises that contain members from their respective districts. In some cases this manifests as unofficial "party" blocs, often along the lines of the old school commune era divisions of agrarians, romantics, and communists though as a formally non-partisan state they are not called such. Secular and religious electors are generally equal in number, but due to the near unanimous allegiance of religious electors to the Southron Church (and the semi-formalized process of the church sending notices of whom they want their electors to send to congress) the nation is in dominated by the church. Goshen, however, is also noteworthy for its parallel systems of law enforcement, with both a national militia (descended from the Southern People's Liberation Army) and a "knightly board". Goshen prefers to leverage the services of independent knights and reiters, formerly sworn to the superpowers, for mediating disputes between councils and counties. This is a very attractive offer, especially for older knights who wish to enter a kind of "retirement". Goshen's independent knights often hail from UNICEF or the United Way due to the region being further away from their zones of control and firmly held under the Red Cross. Speaking of crosses, Goshen is famous for its yearly Victory Day celebrations which commemorate the triumph of the old Dixie armies over the Black Cross in the American War. Celebrations typically consist of work battalions, dressed up in Collapse Era uniforms, dragging replica Black Cross flags through the mud, culminating in their public burning. Victory Day is also noteworthy for the flying of flags of those nations and foreign militias that aided Dixie in the conflict. As those states no longer exist today, a Goshen town or city on Victory Day is one of the last places on Earth one might see many 21st century flags still flown. Back north one of the descendants of Old Exurbia, now known as the Land of Canaan, can be found. Still based around its old quasi-capital of Tecumseh (former Columbus). The history of Canaan is just as off kilter and curious as its predecessor. The Exurbians had always been a peculiar deviation away from the communalists they were inspired by, attempting a far more "pure" framework trending towards generalized anarchy alongside a kind of American cultural revolution. A people carried aloft as much by an affinity for witchcraft and new age syncretism as they were by their grungecore "i'm playing a riotgrrrl track in a blasted out shopping mall" war of extermination against fascism. As such it is only fitting that it met an equally punk end. Which is to say that one day the men came home from the frontier, turned their guns on everyone and declared they would be doing full anarchism now. All in all it's been pretty successful actually. Canaan has maintained, for roughly 80 years now, more or less a vacuity of any form of government outside of the People's Guard. Beyond that, among the other Ecumenes it is also noted for its relative lack of any hard religious structures. The "Hexurbian" witches of the olden days gave way to a kind of neo-neo-pentecostal campbellism, where much like everything else the existence of discrete denominations was dismantled by force. A form of highly charismatic primitive Christianity dominates in this area, influencing the social norms and sensibilities of the people, even those unaffiliated among them. In terms of foreign relations everything is carried out by the People's Guard which maintains a rotating roster of diplomatic posts for its officers. Despite not being able to predict who you're talking to when conducting relations with the Canaanites the neighboring states have maintained long lasing positive relations with the anti-state, in part a continuation of the unofficial detente that existed between Exurbia and the pretender governments from back in the Hayes era. Speaking of Hayes and the Chicago Government, while that particular pretender no longer exists, Chicago itself is a major power in the new North America. Influenced by the region's overlapping periods of control under the Chicago Government, the Quasi-Islamic National Rejuvenation Government, and the Sabaothic Host of the Prophetess Daniela and her followers, what emerged from the wake of the collapse era was the Land of Shiloh. An experiment in confessionalism, Shiloh's government reflects the diversity of its population. A form of power-sharing is the name of the game, with the Shiloh constitution having built in administrative carveouts for Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Muslims, Unitarians, Sabaothists, and the Baha'is. Although Shiloh is a state dominated by the public interchange of and horse-trading between different religious communities, above all of them exists a sort of public quasi-cult dedicated to the image and mission of the former United States. This is in large part due to the significant influence that various pretender governments, from Chicago, to the PNRG, to the South Dakota state government of the old 130th Division, played in laying the groundwork for its founding. President Hayes in particular is considered a folk hero of immense renown, for both preventing the fall of the region to fascism and stopping a potential nuclear exchange in the 2040s that would have devastated the continent. A somewhat amusing cultural divergence in this region, though often unremarked upon, was the effect that the ration-passport system of the Chicago Government played in shaping demographics. The Hayes era system (and its carry-ons during the later collapse) unintentionally encouraged diverse cohabitation of houses and compounds and what were known as "breadline marriages" in order to maximize access to goods and dispenser regions through the ration system. In effect everyone sharing a house or living on a street became a "family". Across the Midwest it becomes difficult to trace ancestry back beyond the 2030s. A person's last name thus might be Mattox because their "ancestors" all lived in the same building on Mattox street a century and a half ago. A similar expression of this phenomena can also be found in the region once known as Colorado, though to a more muted degree. Among the former states of the Texan led provisional government now stands the Land of Samaria. Samaria is descended from the "ProvGov" as it was called, more specifically from a special agreement between the Texan and Mexican security and intelligence services that during the later collapse period formed the basis of a multinational program to respond to the regional collapse, desertification and devastation of the gulf coast, and ensuing refugee waves, a program that would survive both nations. The formal dissolution of the remaining American pretender government in Austin would come shortly after its last motion, to begin the movement of millions of people from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mexico to the region now known as Samaria. After everything America might die but her people would survive if the Texans had anything to say about it. The Promised Land of the Texan and Louisianan pinewoods and oak cut prairies would prove to be the perfect place to begin again, and in time even the abandoned cities of Dallas and Fort Worth would be repopulated and reforged to serve as the current capitol of Samaria. Surprisingly retaining many of the institutions of the collapse era, Samaria is a federal republic with a presidency and a unicameral congress, though operating under a church-county system similar to neighboring Goshen. The success of the resettlement program gave the people of Samaria a sense of good government and the belief that a state properly staffed by the competent (and most importantly the virtuous) will always prevail. This means that the Samaritan government tends to be staffed by competent and well oriented people promoted not due to personal ambition or typical mechanistic meritocratic means, but by being forced into ever higher positions of responsibility by the ever watchful community, often beginning with the chittering of elderly women at the front rows of one's church or the murmuring of men at the local social club. As they like to say, no good Samaritan goes unpunished. This has also led to the phenomenon in Samaria known as "Republican Nobility", a kind of informal class position among the administrative upper crust of the state (and their immediate family) who due to the popular belief that their position was a result of their moral character are simply treated far better by all of society and are often encouraged to flaunt their status. A man who is rich because he owns property is considered an accident of history in Samarian culture and has no right to boast, whereas one who has served the people faithfully is believed to deserve to be rich and often made so. Far up north around Lake Winnipeg is the Land of Galilee. Along with its sisterland of Sidon to the west, Galilee is of importance less for any particular difference in its government, but due to its ruling myth and recent history. Like most of the ecumenical states in former Canada its origins can be traced back to the fall of the NATO regime in the country, and in the case of Galilee the beginning of it as well. Galilee stands at the crossroads of many mystical events in the recent history of the continent, having been the site of the Prophetess Daniela's invasion of Canada which sparked the occupation in the first place. Galilee, like most Canadian states is known for a sizeable though not majority Sabaothic population, the religion having experienced a boost in the region after the fall of the faith's own personal Babylon. What Galilee is more often known for however is the story of Terrance and the Miraculous Blade. In the latter half of the 21st century as the NATO regime and its local RCMP proxies increased in the intensity of their barbarism against the Canadian people, crackdowns would begin on all public gatherings in an attempt to break up hostile cells. Terrance Gauthier (otherwise known as St. Terrance) was a lay preacher, one of the many kinds of "wildflower" spokesmen that emerged at the time as an act of defiance following NATO's retreat from Alberta. The wildflowers were a broad classification of dissident, including everything from religious preachers, to communists, to people who supported the return of democracy, to simply anyone the military government didn't like. It is unknown if Terrance was originally a religious wildflower, but he eventually became one, leading to the local RCMP detachment to believe he was involved in or otherwise knew about the location of several dissident cells. He was not and did not. Repeated failures to make any headway by surveilling Terrance caused his observers to become frustrated and spiteful, changing plans first to assaulting Terrance to get information out of him to eventually simply looking for an excuse to kill him outright. Everything from having his house seized to his church closed down and fellow parishioners arrested did not bring Terrance to violence. Finally, an attempt to encourage him to assault an officer by pulling him into the middle of the road and beating him backfired and resulted in him running away, leading to the Mounties chasing after him and shooting him in the leg. As Terrance began to bleed out in the middle of a clearing the Mounties surrounded him with their weapons raised. Terrance raised his hand into the air, which one interpreted as him having finally broken and offering to give him whatever information they believed he might have. Instead, Terrance told them that he would show them a miracle. Looking up to the sky he said: "Lord, not that I might gain, or bargain for my life with your power, but that they who persecute me might be saved. That if you will that they might know you by my faith. For you are the author of life, and if it be your will then this air though it remain in sight and touch air will be in truth a blade that should I grab it would cut my hand." Terrance would grasp the air above his head. His palm would be sliced open and start to bleed. The Mounties would panic and shoot him seven times. The final collapse of Canada would mean Terrance would have the last laugh, and indeed the story goes that at least a couple of those who witnessed the event would later switch sides, with their testimonies being why the story was popularized in the first place. So, he arguably obtained all his goals. He's considered the national hero of modern-day Galilee and the saint-of-the-nation by the region's Catholic and Lutheran believers. Finally there is the Land of Sidon. A recent arrival in the history of Post-American states, it is of great renown due to its ongoing rivalry with neighboring Cascadia. Formally "The United States of America", Cascadia is what remains of the once great Sacramento Government and its ruling body COMPOR. Based around the former military regime in PNW and the Seattle Green Zone, the remnant state has succeeded in solidifying its rule, due to celebrate the 400th year anniversary of the USA soon! A unitary government despite the name, Cascadia can be best described as a "cop-ocracy" in service to the cartels and corporations which dominated the old government, now reforged into what are effectively a kind of ancien nobility, an anachronism wrapped in another anachronism. Sidon is dedicated to the destruction of what remains of the USA, or what it perceives to be a mockery of the world that was lost during the collapse. The cold war between Sidon and Cascadia is playing out primarily in the city of Vancouver, which remains for now outside the reach of either power. A cat and mouse game is afoot between both sides, constantly attempting to outmaneuver and undo the other's inroads into the free city, which all sides know will fall to one side eventually. Among the ecumenes of North America a phenomenon has emerged in recent years, that of the "New Believers", those individuals who come from secular or explicitly atheist families going back 3 or more generations that have at least outwardly converted to a local religion following the rise of the new system. To be clear there were seismic shifts and trends in religiosity in America during the collapse era, though a sizeable chunk of the population remained otherwise stable in previously held secularity as is to be expected, operating as normal under the new system as it gelled. However, trends have been noticed in recent years, especially by those who collect the stats, of segments of the population that did not shift over the past century, but which have now experienced seemingly spontaneous changes in outward religiosity after the new order became entrenched, often corresponding to areas or among those institutions where doing so would be more beneficial. The rise of New Believers is more pronounced in Shiloh for instance with its confessional appointment system, than in Goshen where there is a whole parallel secular state. In recent years these New Believers have experienced a degree of mistrust and wariness accorded to them by some segments of the population, though this has yet to escalate beyond the level of a kind of cultural background radiation. As a result it is not unheard of for New Believers to find themselves needing to express an even more intense religiosity and loyalty to compensate or otherwise "prove" themselves to their detractors. Outside of the ecumenes and Cascadia there is not much to note about the rest of the continent with two exceptions. The first is the Heartland Commonwealth, a state stretching from former Utah to Kansas which considers itself the legal and spiritual successor to the Chicago Government, though having dropped the pretenses of being the sole American state. Known for their massive solar powered fixed wing transport planes that lazily circuit the whole perimeter of their nation and the pilotless caravans that move across the plains, the Heartlanders are in an almost romantic recreation of an American ideal interested in little more than friendly neighbors and profitable trade. There is also the San Fran Commune, an quasi-outpost of the Seventh International on American shores. They, however, will have to be touched on later. 1. A Sovereign -- A Supreme Authority, out-ranking every other position and institution in the land. 2. A Bureaucracy -- Layers of the authority, delegated down from the Sovereign, managing discrete areas of a complex social administration. 3. A Hierarchy -- Society itself is stratified into elites and commoners, commanders, and commanded. 4. An Identity -- A unifying sense of belonging to the same team, one larger than those of village, tribe, and family. 5. Power --For the state's authority to man anything, it must wield sufficient power to coerce everyone -- to force everyone within its land -- to live under that authority. As said in the original document the Emperor of Mankind is sovereign over the whole land. The mindset of the Human grand philosophy in the story (or at least the part of it related to governance) represents in practice a mixture of Western European courtly love archetypes and the concept of the Confucian perfect ruler. The Emperor does not rule, he instead exists as a symbol of the perfect gentleman, the state made flesh and that which people are to orient themselves towards. He is also considered to be the manifestation of the Four Courts and 16 Rites, a system of quasi-veneration of divine principles inherited from mankind's "pagan" past, but in short they represent the various virtues of perfect living and the sublimation of mankind's vices into virtuous conduct. The main text of the writeup goes over what the point of the emperor is. His courtiers mimic him, and the attendants mimic the courtiers, and the senators mimic the attendants, and so on and so forth cascading down with the idea that if everyone mimics the "state" all can know the desires of all and the state can govern according to virtue creating a self reinforcing cycle of good governance. The Four Courts and 16 Rites themselves are downstream of the tradition of "cardinal virtues" inherited (stolen) from the Elves. Courage, Fairness, Wisdom, and Temperance. Earlier human cultures believed that the four virtues themselves were personages or great spirits which have dark shadows or vices or inversions that could be bargained with. This form of bargaining often took the form of trying to inflict the vices upon one's enemy, a sort of hex. One wished the spirit of courage to bless them and its resulting vice to hex their enemy. This sort of dual veneration continues in the modern day but dressed up in imperial splendor. The modern virtue system is considered a kind of "cycle" which proceeds clockwise around and through the cardinal points, the virtues are represented as manifestations of the emperor, and the vices are conversely represented as things that the emperor destroys, such as a statue or mosaic of the emperor killing the spirit of ignorance. Well-off families can afford to have these be representations of the current emperor's likeness, though in most places they are nondistinctive human forms that are understood to be the emperor. The calling on of virtues and vices is done through the mechanism of emperor worship and the difference between those who are truly performing the rites to cultivate virtue and eliminate vice and those who are trying to do what amounts to black magic is hard to make out. The Imperial Senate is a mixture of the Chancellery-Secretariat, Roman Senate, and West European juristic courts of the medieval period. It is divided into two sides, one side drafts imperial decrees and the other reviews them in accordance with the "image" of the emperor and rites of the imperial way. These are called, during sessions of the senate, the "Legislature" and the "Inspectorate". The division is informal, which is to say that a roll call is done to decide who is on which side during each session of the imperial senate. This roll call, much like many other things, is done by the Continental Academy of Statisticians who are the same people in the writeup that collect and rationalize statistical data for the senate. The academy appraises information for the senate and then decides who will be doing what during meetings, the senate then drafts policy. The Senate is headed by a president which is elected by its members from a selection drafted by the "four ministries" (more on them later). There is a Southern and Northern Chancellor. Southern is the higher one (as in the main writeup the southern direction is associated with the virtue of temperance which is the highest of virtues), and the Southern Chancellor actually serves as the Attendant of the Imperial Palace, living with the Emperor and communicating with the Northern Chancellor who serves as the president of the senate and works on the senate floor. The Southern Chancellor, as the representative of the Imperial Palace also handles, on behalf of the Emperor, all offices that are considered property of the Imperial City. This includes the Personal Guard and the Master of Ceremonies, as well as the Royal Society of Concierges who oversee the management of temple and palace grounds across the empire. The Concierges represent the emperor's eyes (or more accurately the empire's eyes) within the administration of the courts of love specifically, as opposed to the other parts of civil society. The College of Magi is a parallel organ established because it is believed that magic users are too different from normal humans to be represented the same way under the Imperial Way. The College of Magi is self governing, and is composed of the Wizard's Circle and the Sea Witches. The Wizards Circle used to serve as seneschals to noble houses before the empire was founded and have ingratiated themselves into the Courtland governments. They are also the smaller group in the College. The Sea Witches are a much larger folk organization and directly pledged themselves to the Emperor and Humanity as a whole. As such the former are often patronized by nobles and the latter by the imperial treasury and ministry of measures. The college of magi serves in some respects as a parallel organ to the senate for magic users and sends representatives to the senate. Entrance into the Collegiate is done via the Imperial Academy of Induction and Examination. The Sea Witches have a rather peculiar history, and their current status within the Imperial Government dates back to the Demon Wars. While the Wizards were always the more hierarchical society that didn't mean that the witches didn't have houses or hierarchies of their own, they simply did so differently. It is worth noting that magic users have immense difficulty siring children. It is believed that the use of the human body as a vessel for magic occupies the space that a child would grow, though this doesn't explain why men have difficulty as well. While it is true that magic cannot be passed on genetically it could be trained to one's children, thus if magi could have kids they could have magical dynasties. Almost all magi with kids had them before learning magic as a result. The Wizards got around this by being "adopted" into the families they served, and often training second sons and later nephews. The witches however, always being more clever in the use of magic (though don't tell the wizards that!) found another way. They instead established a system of mental lineage within their covens. At the height of the power of a region's most powerful witch a golem would be made in their image, often in the shape of a man and possessed with a base animal spirit as a pair for the witch. The golem would be bound to the witch through her blood and controlled by it. The coven would perform a ceremony wherein the witch and her golem would be in a giant brass bowl and embrace as if about to make love. Then a sword would be driven through them. The witch and her pair golem would melt, the magic liquifying their forms and turning them into blood. chalices would then be dipped into the brass bowl holding the blood and the other witches would drink it, inheriting a fragment of her essence, often memories, potential, or just way of approaching magic. Over time this kind of led to the creation of kind of essence-dynasties among the Sea Witches where the essence of an ancient primordial witch was carried on and delineated vaguely geographic regional covens. This would also make the witches more and more powerful as time went on. This would all come to an end during the Demon Wars. The system of blood impressions appeared to be backfiring. As the war called for more power, more witches sacrificed themselves in these rituals to empower their sisters and yet, for reasons they could not explain each time they did it they became weaker against the demons. The witches continued to perform these sacrifices in greater haste until one day one of them was interrupted. The witch who was to be sacrificed is unknown, her name lost to history. However, prior to becoming a witch she was married to a man, perhaps he was a knight or even just one of the men levied during the demon wars (these lasted generations after all) who promised to come back for her. When he inevitably did not return she went deeper into her studies to avenge him, a path she found fruitless as the wars dragged on and thus she fell into despair. Witches who were sacrificed this way were believed to not enter the Laurel as they were dispersed among the living and thus could not reach the afterlife. Likewise, it was believed in those days (though no longer so) that those who were slain by demons could also not reach the afterlife on the account of their bodies being taken by them. Thus the witch believing that she would never see the man she had begun all this for again decided she did not wish to see the afterlife and so was a willing sacrifice for the ritual. It was at the moment when she was about to be killed however that the golem she was paired to spoke, saying in her husband's voice that he was here, that he had promised he would return to her. The witch would grab the golem's hand and run away, interrupting the ceremony. The cycle being broken would rip throughout the land, breaking the spirit continuity in every coven and causing the power, knowledge, and memories of the past generations to fade instantly. What followed was desperation especially as across the land simultaneous sacrifices were being performed that resulted in the impaled witches simply bleeding out. Whole covens would panic, with some witchlings even tearing open their dead sisters to attempt to drink their blood which they soon found was no longer infused with power. However, what followed was not disaster on the war front but a sudden seemingly miraculous increase in the effectiveness of spells on demons. Normal baseborn humans and wizards believed instead that the witches had performed some successful ritual to empower all magic against the demons and the witches rolled with it, riding the wave into being the favorites of the nascent empire. The history of the blood sacrifices was snuffed out due to a pledge to never speak of it again, and no modern witch is aware of this part of their history. Moving on. The description of the Courtlands is already a focus of the main writeup. It is worth noting however that underneath them are "districts inferior" which represent the public and private lands of cities, communes, and estates. These are often known collectively as "Wards" or "Families", the latter is often employed for communes and estates, and takes on a more literal sense in both, with family names for the "estates common and public" (public here being a name for noble) being popular. Lowborn individuals often have surnames (if they have any at all) that function as geographic designations, though given the generations of population redistribution and settlement across the empire this has become a "rule" that probably has more exceptions than examples at this point. However common names are otherwise a point of pride in the absence of official nations and realms. That said, a note on courtly life. While the focus on the good, righteous, or shall we say surface level and official aspects of court society were a main part of the original writeup, these sorts of extremely competitive and emotionally charged settings naturally have a dark underbelly. Most notable among them is something called the "Maiden Cult". The Cult goes by many names and is more a disposition among some members of the Courtlands. The principles of courtly love and the estrangement they rely on results in a kind of perverse misogyny to develop among some knights as their maiden becomes an abstraction, something which they can never touch but instead observe and project their own unsatisfied desires and sentimentality onto. In other words, the central idea of the place of manhood and gentlemanly conduct in the Imperial Way doesn't work for everyone. The cult of the Maiden then is a kind of orientation, practice, and sometimes instinctual relation to a kind of ideal maiden of which the real flesh and blood maiden is but the abstraction. The cult is based around the 'veneration' (we'll get to that) of this maiden inside one's head that is always present. Like almost all human beliefs it expresses itself in cardinality and duality. The spiritual maiden has eight archetypes, with an upper and lower pair much like the four virtues and vices. These are the Damsel, the Fury, the Tower, the Fae and their subversions the Prisoner, the Two-Face, the Whore, and the Shadow. These aspects represent ways the cultist knight adores or venerates the object of femininity in their head. She is an innocent beauty to be saved by the knight (Damsel), a woman of strong personality who engages with the knight intellectually and in terms of will (Fury), an object of royal reverence above him due to her station who must be obeyed and her chastity worshipped (Tower) and something ethereal and beyond in her beauty (Fae). The other elements, on the face of it seem to be inversions. An object of scorn who is imprisoned by the knight as punishment or because she is evil (Prisoner), a seemingly demure face that pretends to concede to the knight due to her contempt for him (Two-Face), a lowly wench who is available to other men but denies the knight (Whore), and a being whose otherworldliness is a source of fear and revulsion and mistrust (Shadow). In reality the subverted dark archetypes are actually the seed and infantile forms of the forward facing "good" ones. The difference between them is the knight's own self-deception, turning hate into something that has the appearance of love. The knight punishes the prisoner so he can, upon returning to the pain he inflicted upon her, view her as a damsel and rescue her for instance. Likewise, the Two-Face and Fury are different ways of responding to the knight's hatred that the Maiden has her own will, either by presenting it first as an affront to him (Two-Face) or to eventually reinterpreting it as being for his own stimulation (Fury). The same follows for the whore and tower, a pathology around the Maiden's sexual unavailability while the Shadow and the Fae represent the Knight's hatred for the other more emotionally ambiguous aspects of beauty and glamor (which also folds into the weird unresolved feelings humanity still has for the Elves which the Maidens look like). These archetypes are presented as two off-angled compass roses (with their centers blown out) or broken circular crowns/halos. In the front are the "good" maiden-spirits and in the back are the "bad" ones, as if they are the shadow cast by the "good" ones. Alternatively, it is also presented as a kind of ring of balefire, a mock halo like someone standing in front of the eclipse. The importance of this will be remarked upon in a later update. Members of the maiden cult tend to congregate instinctively, or perhaps it is because they relate to each other's perverted sentimentality. Cultists are known for their dull empty eyes, tendency to look off into the horizon as if there is something they are looking at, low mumbling conversations with people who are not around them. However, they can be hard to track down individually because the highs and lows of their obsession often drive them to being accomplished members of the courts of love. Often when one sees the lifelessness and dull sheen in their eyes it is too late. You're probably alone with them and they're about to kill you, likely in a group. A clique of cultists mumbling to themselves before turning on you is a sign that you should probably kill yourself to be saved the trouble. Some survivors have reported hearing whispers around suspected cult members, others have also reported things that sound like the chittering of women, and even ghostly flocks of diminutive fairy apparitions in the form of the maiden-spirit archetypes swirling around the heads of cult members talking to them. In some cases, it takes the form of clouds of charcoal and chalk within which one sees faces that look like women staring at the cultist. It has been suggested that this might be the manifestation of the object of the cultist's veneration by way of latent magical potential, as this phenomenon has not been noticed in all cult members. Others have suggested this might be a form of demonic gainsaying still active in the world. Imperial statisticians might be interested to know that maiden cultists are very weak against demons and fell, and cannot muster the will to fight them, not that they would know this since it has been uncounted generations since a demon or fell has been seen. Still, it would probably get them thinking if they knew. This may be relevant later... Due to their obsessive and careerist predilections the maiden cultists often form ad-hoc associations and cliques within and between the Courtlands. The rise of the maiden cults saw the establishment of what are called Pastille Societies, essentially smoke clubs wherein court members gather in rooms where aromatic pastille is burned over coals or in thuribles. These recreational societies formed the basis of the semi-formalized structure of maiden cults, with ranks based around one's place in the material maintenance of the cult's leisure grounds. A Thuriblaine or junior court-knight who moves around the room ensuring that the censures continue to swing is considered the lowest rank in these societies. It is difficult to tell the difference between normal Pastille Societies and those containing cults, as cult rites have been based around the social norms of these court societies. There are some artifacts or aesthetic elements that when present are believed to be signs of the presence of maiden cultists. The most common is that of a victory wreath flanked at its cardinal directions by four maiden-spirits, with the Tower at the north, the Damsel at the south, and the Fury and Fae at the West and East respectively. The four maidens in their order present an inversion of normal cardinal symbology, as in Imperial society the south is given primary and regnal importance. Here it is the north with the Tower standing above all as queen with the Damsel at her feet. Likewise, the Damsel to the south is often presented as having closed eyes, going against the normal association of the south with the opening of one's inner eye to virtue. Next we have the Four Ministries. These are somewhat inspired, at least in form, by the Six Ministries of imperial China, a recurring theme. There's the Ministry of Measures under which the Imperial Order of Quartermasters and Emperor's Ombudsmen oversee the economy and crack down on crime. They are also the people behind standardizing weights and measures and overseeing language norms, the alphabet, and education. There's the Ministry of Love which deals with the Courtlands. More specifically the MoL deals with two things. It oversees promotions, giving out of land and titles, judging the level of refinement, cultivation, and gentlemanly disposition of knights and civil servants, and oversee the system of hosts and servants. The host and servant system is the means by which young women who are set to be maidens of the Courtlands (there is both a head maiden but also lots of lesser ones) are trained to be so. The MoL trains, rates, and sends out hosts who are individuals meant to get maidens used to their social status. These tend to be lower or mid rank knights who are taken out of the system if you will for several years and basically made to go on play dates with the young women to get them used to the lives they're going to live. It is worth noting that the Maiden Cultists have a hatred of the Host Societies, often seeking to avoid hosts like the plague. The MoL is considered the strongest of the ministries given its power over appointments throughout the government. There's the Ministry of Justice which does more or less what you think. They also host His Majesty's Censors, that exist to expose individuals not living according to the imperial way. Censors however are not given authority to kill to prevent the obvious power imbalance that would create if someone is investigator, judge, and executioner. The Ministry of Justice also deals with appointments that the MoL does not have a say over, namely appointments over the standards (more on them shortly) Finally there is the Ministry of Truth which deals primarily with a number of functions. It deals with naming taboos, namely ensuring that government positions, persons, the emperor, and historical individuals are referred to not by their names but their place. It is important to the Imperial Way that the Emperor not be a person but a thing, same with the senate, the justices and so on. The Emperor is not to be referred to by name but by title, senators not by name and family but by position. Their names are to fade into history because they are vessels of the state, the immortal entity that is mankind. The Ministry of Truth also oversees the collection of long form statistical data, the minutes of the imperial senate, results of policies and historical data. They also publish textbooks. The Ministry of Measures and Ministry of Truth are often called the "Two Colleges" as in departments of a school, because they coordinate heavily with the Continental Academy of Statisticians and their chamberlains are often members. The ministries themselves are also divided into two camps known as the "promotional" and "analytical" ministries. Promotional ministries like MoL and MoJ deal a lot with personnel in particular and the state in abstract, what with promotions, relations, and so on. Analytical ministries deal with personnel in abstract and the state in particular, what with it dealing largely with the data about the material economy and policies. Next we have the Four Courts and 16 Chamberlains. You'll notice a similarity there with the similarly named Four Courts and 16 Rites. The Courts in both instances refer to the same thing, the 16 chamberlains are meant to match the 16 rites for the sake of auspicious application of numerology. That 16 + 16 = 32 which represents completeness in human numerology is also important, as it means that the body of the state and the body of the individual (performing the rites) accord in unity towards finality. The Four Courts are also known as the Cardinal Courts. They are oriented North, South, East, and West. They are under the Four Ministries, each one of which overlaps with two courts as you can see on the graphic. Each of the courts is shared by two of the ministries. The ministries are oriented across from each other. An analytical ministry will not share a court with another analytical ministry, but it will share its courts with the promotional ministries, and vice versa. The MoL and MoJ are often considered the voice of the courtlands themselves, and the MoM and MoT are considered the voice of the state in the broader sense. In the regional courts they coordinate with and command the chamberlains, which are lower-level administrative offices. The Four Courts operate separately but meet during the beginning of the session of the senate where they draft the list of acceptable presidents of the senate. The Four Courts are excused from the naming taboo during this process, though once the chancellors are chosen the senate returns the list they made and they burn it. The 16 Chamberlains deal with the offices of the Treasury (private finances of the courtlands and pay to ministers), High Tax (money), Low Tax (tax in kind), Works (Public Works Projects), Stables, Guard, Waterways, Letters (literacy and education), numerology, audits, corrections, hosts, forms and auspices, the postal service, advocates, and records. The offices dealing with money and those dealing with civil affairs (corrections and advocates) are split intentionally to avoid the concentration of power in either the ability to direct capital or enforce the law. They also exist to compliment the fact that not one system of responding to the material economy and civil society can encompass all the different lives people lead across the continent. The courts also deal with arbitration with other reasoning races and so are often considered the "foreign relations" arm of the Endaileoum Ethcenloumdi, though in truth the humans view this as a way of managing their subject races. The Western Court deals with the Dwarves and the Imperial Settlement Corporations are under them. The Institute of Dwarven Numerology is also under the Western court and it deals with ensuring that Dwarven Magic falls under the purview of the Imperial Way. The Dwarves are a particular and peculiar society. Dwarves have a kind of complex palatial society based in part around their reproductive strategy. Dwarven women outnumber Dwarven men 2:1, and Dwarven men do not have much in the way of a sex drive, more interested in smithing and doing word games and engaging in the ceremonies of their own impenetrable (to humans at least) religious system that bears many similarities to Pythagorean musical-numerology expressed through the maintenance of an extremely elaborate network of bells. The dominant social system in Dwarven society then is something called "sisterhood" which is the ritualized ownership of women of lower social class by those of higher classes. Women are concentrated into large palace complexes by men which aesthetically bear a resemblance to a kind of mishmash of the potala palace and a barracks network. They do double as fortresses after all (a must for an explicitly colonial society!). The system of sisterhood then organizes the colonial endeavor, leveraging the lower class women as effectively mamluk slave bureaucrats. There is considerable room for advancement however, the relative interchangeability of Dwarven women due to their gender imbalance makes the life of any given sister "cheap" in the final analysis, and so the schemes and power plays and palace coups that go on within the walls of the Dwarven compounds would make any historical palace drama of our world look positively quaint and genteel. Dwarven women don't really have names (though they may adopt temporary names when dealing with outsiders) but instead designators for their "familial" relations (like 7th sister or 3rd niece or 4th cousin, or 1st aunt) in the sisterhood. There is also no attachment to any of these designations as they are viewed as potentially temporary things, the 2nd Grandniece would prefer to be 1st Sister after all. Most notably there is no "mother" in these designations, aside from one's actual mother of course, the reason for this is due to a particular bit of sentimentality that remains among the colonial dwarves from their ancient history before the Humans came. The legend of the Summer Queen or the Mother of the Warm Winds. In the far north when the Dwarves were fully free there lived a queen who was born with a heart condition that made her weary whenever she tried to help her people, such that any time she showed any kindness it made her feel like her heart was going to be ripped out. So, one day in a fit she did rip out her own heart and demanded her servants fill the cavity with food and drink to give her back her "real heart". Once the cavity was filled it began to glow and radiate a warmth that pushed away the cold coastal winds and made the land of the Dwarves more pleasant. Shyrjael, that rocky land of narrow turquoise rivers and basalt pillars saw between its weeping stones emerge plains of alfalfa and wispy grass which goats would feed upon, and flowers bloom that brought forth the bees and their honey. Even tiny plums and dews which gave way to orchards came as the queen's heart grew. She stood in place with her arms open, governing from that position not needing to eat or drink, but needing a separate source of light to shine on her at all times, often a candle that she would draw from and would need to have replaced. So it was that as long as the light shone there was plenty. The Dwarves however, becoming content and ungrateful in their leisure one day forgot their queen. The candle went out and so too did the light in her heart. She still stood, tears dried on her face, and when a servant went to touch her she crumbled to dust. Soon after the winter returned and then the Humans came. The Dwarves, feeling a great sentimentality and shame for how they treated their queen resolved not to take the name "mother" as a title of rulership. The story is also the basis for one of the main cultural artifacts of the Dwarves, their massive glowing brass and stained-glass lamps. Powered by amber (which is congealed sunlight), these lamps also emit a gentle yet persistent heat that does not burn, much like their erstwhile queen. Despite their generational enmity towards humanity in the abstract the Dwarves actually have great respect and reverence for the empire. In part this is because the empire is not that state which expelled them and indeed has offered them up great lands to settle. A very literal people, it is hard for them to hold a grudge against a person who wasn't the *exact* person that wronged them. Besides, they reserve such venom and scheming for each other. Another is because the Dwarves, being a somewhat ecumenically minded people (in terms of worldview and metaphysics) despite their other sensibilities, actually hold great reverence for the emperor and in some ways believe in the Imperial Way, or at least certain aspects of it, more than many humans do. Suffice to say the Latish Dwarves after finding God (again?) differ from their Imperial cousins in more ways than I can count here, though since we are focusing on the empire here we will pass over them in this writeup The Eastern Court deals with the Orcs and the Agency for the Girdle is under them. Relations with the Orcs are pretty straightforward. Though most think of them as primarily a warrior people (they are) their whole society revolves around the continuity of religious traditions and the training of specialized clerical class to continue them. Their most noticeable institution is basically that of the yeshiva/madrasa which is also where they learn how to read and write the human script for relations with the sovereign. The Orcs are represented by their priests and masters of ceremony. The Orcs lean on the empire not just because they are subjects of it but because one of the three pillars of their historical society was destroyed by their original scattering. Ancient Orcish society was based around the pillars of the warriors/sacred bands, the priesthood, and the princedoms of the various tribes. With the princes gone there is no "executive-ceremonial" authority over them. As such the Emperor is used as a stopgap measure. Many Orcs believe that the prophesied "King of the East" will fix this, which is one of the reasons why they are so insistent on pushing east into the barbarian lands of the "wild" humans. The dominant reading of the prophecy is that the king will appear from among their ranks once the Dwarves have pushed far enough East, he will unite all the Orcs under a renewed kingdom, and then take them on a march west to their homeland where the humans will return to them their ancestral lands to establish a palace and court of justice. There will indeed be a King of the East, he's already here, but as the original writeup suggests he is not at all what the Orcs expect. Both the Orcs and the King of the East will get their own dedicated writeups that will likely be longer than this one, so I am cutting it off here. The Orcish update will go a lot deeper into their past, culture, metaphysics, theory of history, and how they relate to the founding and ancient days of the continent. The King of the East will be a more in-depth investigation into the character (and his brother) as briefly touched on in the original work. I am excited to (eventually) get both out to all of you. That said a brief note about the polytheist Orcs that still remain. Parallel to the system of Lat worship there existed among the Orcs a Draconic pantheon of blood, violence, and sex which competed with the worship of the one true God and was somewhat related to the slaughter of the dragons by the Latish orcs. The Polytheistic Orcs inherit a modern interpretation of this worship of the dark, or as they view it appeasement of the dark to keep evil at bay. The polytheists view themselves as watchmen keeping evil locked within the ground from coming out, an evil that none of the other races understand and which their monotheistic brothers, they believe, have chosen to forget. Ever since the Demon Wars these have been associated with the Demon Lords, creating a kind of inverse pantheon of evil gods with each one corresponding to the alter image of their ancient household gods. The polytheist Orcs thus believe that the Demons were never killed but merely sealed away by a Humanity which wishes to believe they were defeated. This line of dialog is one of the many reasons the Humans prefer to talk to the Monotheistic Orcs and pretend the others don't exist. The Southern Court deals with the Fae. Nobody understands the Fae. Nobody is even 100% sure if they're actually a reasoning race or just a kind of clever pest or semi-domesticated spirit mimicking language. That said the Fae do appear to have a complex, and seemingly arbitrary, system of rules, manners, and mores that dictate how they respond to the reasoning races. It is very easy, stupidly easy, dangerously easy, to run afoul of them resulting in your child being replaced by a changeling, your legs being swapped with that of a goat, or just always getting bad gas whenever you pass by a bridge inhabited by a Fae that doesn't like you. Fae tales are exceptionally popular because they happened all the time. Some of these stories are even considered romantic, or at least end romantically. A very famous one is that of the wolf prince. The wolf was a cursed prince of an ancient and now forgotten kingdom who was cast out into a forest by his brother who sought the throne and made a pact with the Fae to obtain it. The wolf lived under the domain of a Fae queen (the same one who assisted his brother unbeknownst to him) who allowed him to remain and offered him brief moments of his old humanity so long as he paid her a tithe of human corpses which is what the fairy truly desired. One day though the wolf prince while looking for another human to slaughter came upon and fell in love with a hooded girl from afar which restored him to his human form. In some variants of the story there is an aspect of him drinking her blood, the blood of a virgin, being what breaks the spell partially making him a somewhat bestial version of his old self in both appearance and appetite. This more risque version is not told to children of course. The wolf prince thus restored takes her with him on his quest to take back his crown and make her queen. Many kingdoms in the midlands are peopled with minor families that all claim descent from the wolf prince, and the symbol of a werewolf or man with a wolf's head are very popular in those lands. As entertaining as that and other Fae tales (or fairy tales) might sound, one can be sure they are not fun to live through! As such the southern court has the unenviable position of hosting The Imperial Standard Office for Reconciliation and Fidelity. This exists to ensure that the queer standards and norms of the Seelie Fae are upheld and humanity does not accidentally offend the Fae. It is also for Fae to petition redress of grievances so that they don't take it on themselves to punish humans that have broken the old law. It is, for the most part, rather successful, though the Fae often ask for very odd requests as payment for offenses that the Imperial Quartermasters sometimes must get creative to fulfil. No one is quite sure what a "Jabberwocky" is, but somehow the Fae were sated with whatever it was they were given. Finally there is the Northern Court which is unique among them for not being dedicated to foreign relations as its main area of focus is of the ancient human heartland. The Northern court is a kind of grab-bag, under it is the Maritime Law Office that deals with humanity's territories off the mainland as well as handling piracy. It also deals with sub-provincial relations with non-collegiate magi, of which there are many. There is an unintentional yet auspicious synchronicity given the association of magic with water and the Northern Court dealing with both mages and the open seas, though this is often hyped up because the northern cardinality is also viewed as the junior among the four in terms of the rhythms of nature. Moving beyond the Courts one of the unsung institutions of the empire are the Standards. While the Knights are a core part of the kind of chivalric performative state and culture that underpins the empire, when the empire was founded it also absorbed the constituent armies of the various kingdoms and principalities of old humanity. The Standards are more or less what remains of the old pre-imperial subdivisions, as the militaries of the old kingdoms maintained themselves as semi-autonomous institutions under the Endaileoum Ethcenloumdi. The 32 Standards (remember that 32 is just a human numerological word for "large number") in fact make up the bulk of humanity's semi standing army. The MoJ appoints the heads of each banner and approves or denies promotions within the standards. Most standard bearers live much of their life as normal civilians, with the standards in the modern day functioning more as kind of informal "strategic theater commands" for the empire that can call upon people within their territory. Knights often recruit from the Standards and for many low and medium rank standard bearers being chosen to be a knight and joining the courts of love is seen as an avenue for social promotion if they can't climb up the ranks of the Standards. The Ministry of Measures and Ministry of Love also sometimes poach talent from the Standards for the Emperor's Ombudsmen and Quartermasters for the former or to train as Hosts when they don't want to scalp talent from Knights for the latter. The Standards, due to their history, are often graced by the names of the old pre-imperial human kingdoms. Among them are the administrative Prefects of the Left and Right Directions. These directions are mirrored as they are in real world Mongolian directions. On the graphic the two Prefects are flanked by 8 randomly chosen Standards each to maintain proper numerical symbolism. The Orcs have their own standards that work alongside the human standards, but these operate under the Eastern court due to Orcish insistence on commanding their own men into battle. Given that Orcs have a greater drive for (directed) violence than humans however they are not particularly content to just remain on call. As such the Orcish Standards are far more active, used on the "homefront" as a kind of military police to supplement human enforcement. This can be utilized to great effect in small settlements where the presence of an Orc picking up some ruffian and roaring at them can often be enough to make the locals immediately rat out any anti-social elements. The Orcs also find it very funny. Some final things to note. Modern human religion and spiritual practices are a tricky subject as all things have been, more or less absorbed into the Imperial Way. The Imperial Way is officially, in its totality an agnostic system of belief in regards to any question that it does not possess "absolute" certainty on, asserting that all its positions can be derived either through the proper application of logic or empirical verification. There is no such thing as "revelation" and indeed officially no such thing as "religion" as the Empire has officially, not abolished, but transcended such categories. In practice there are six currents or spiritual schools that dominate the Imperial Way and according to which the ideology, cosmology, and mythology of the Empire is interpreted. First, we have the Oulaudine. They are a somewhat recent development, with their myths and cosmology dating to those folk tales which rose to prominence prior to the second war with the Elves. Based around the concept of ancestral debt, or generational and familial debt to the spirits, the Imperial Way is followed because it is believed to confer benefits to those residing in the spirit world, and thus is a way of "paying it forward" to oneself in securing a better afterlife and expressing piety towards one's family. They are known for their studious maintenance of grave shrines and home alters. Second, we have the Mindashiu, also known as the "Familial Rite" if that seems confusing to you given the focus of the Oulaudine on family do not fear, for it means something entirely different here. The Mindashiu believe that the world is composed of countless spirits that grow and die with the exception of the eternal cardinalities. These four spirits are humanity's elder siblings in the celestial family, and deference is shown to them by obedience to the Imperial Way, with the Emperor being seen as either their representative or incarnation. Third, we have the Anhare or the "Wide Road" is a folk variation of the rites and courtly life based around the idea that individual humans can be afforded lenience in failing to be virtuous if the community is virtuous. Rites, ceremonies, prayers, and offerings are done to perfect the "communal spirit", and the Anhare are well known for their series of temples and larger public shrines especially in the major cities. Fourth, we have the Valenougie. This belief system is based around the idea that obedience to the rites, practices, and forms of the Imperial Way can grant magical boons (outside of normal blessings and hexes) and that the practices of the government are actually a magical ritual in and of themselves. They are thus committed to formalism and obedience to the letter of the law, sometimes to the point of superstition. Many believe that because the rites are an objective description of the truth of human existence they were co-eternal with humanity much in the same way that the definition or description of a star might necessarily be co-existent with the presence of a star in so far as they are univocal with that thing's being. Thus they also think the rites are a "person" who is being appealed to and granting the magical boons. Fifth, we have Hapthi, an old belief made new. Some southern and western human societies have long believed in a kind of "underworld" which is a world literally reflected under the world where those who could not reach the Laurel dwell in misery. These tortured souls it is believed wish to drag humanity down into the mirror world like a sinking stone to share their fate. This world is also where the Demons are believed by the Hapthi to have come from. The Imperial Way then is believed to, by according lived experience with the "truth" of human nature, make the world more realized and "grounded", thus preventing humanity from being dragged down. Finally, we have the Ruimne also known as the "Rationalists". They have little concern for the old pretensions and myths of humanity and instead believe that the Imperial Way and the Empire are the work of man's supreme divine intellect. Despite being thought of as clinical and anti-spiritual they actually believe in many obviously mystical ideas. Chief among them is the idea that humanity is one unified ancient spirit with a shared consciousness and body that has been temporarily divided. The body of this spirit being is constantly recycled and thus death does not truly exist. The Ruimne are also atomists, or conscious atomists, in that because this spirit being is dispersed throughout the cycle of creation and decay that every particle of matter is in fact self directed and conscious to a certain extent. As matter reaches higher and higher combinations and "stable interrelations" the consciousness of the spirit being is said to become more realized. Thus, to the Ruimne the Imperial Way and victory of the Empire is part of humanity's inevitable march to returning to its naturally self-actualized godhood through eternal reincarnation.

CHATBOT: The description of the World of Man--Triumphant (Endaileoum Ethcenloumdi) presents an intricate and comprehensive depiction of a fictional state with deeply structured political, social, and spiritual systems. This world, through its detailed organization and governance, qualifications as a state are evaluated based on the characteristics commonly associated with a sovereign state in political science and sociology. Here's how it qualifies: 1. **A Sovereign Authority**: The Emperor of Mankind acts as the supreme sovereign, symbolizing the state's ultimate authority, encapsulating both spiritual and political supremacy over the land and its people. 2. **A Bureaucracy**: The presence of a complex bureaucracy is evident through the establishment of the Imperial Senate, the Southern and Northern Chancellors, the Four Ministries, and other administrative organs, which manage the state's affairs in a hierarchical manner. 3. **A Hierarchy**: The societal stratification is clear, with a defined distinction between elites, commoners, knights, and other societal rankings. The hierarchy's existence is further reinforced by institutions such as the Courtlands and the differentiation between noble and lowborn individuals. 4. **An Identity**: The collective identity of the populace under the Imperial Way and the widespread adherence to the ceremonial and spiritual practices specific to this state foster a strong unifying sense of belonging that transcends smaller communal or familial identities. 5. **Power**: The state wields sufficient power to enforce its authority over the populace, evident in the roles of the Emperor's Personal Guard, the Ministry of Justice, and the military standards. This power also manifests in the state's ability to maintain order, enforce laws, and engage in foreign relations with other reasoning races and entities within its narrative universe. The extensive detailing of the societal structure, governance mechanisms, spiritual beliefs, and interactions among various races within this world further solidifies its qualification as a state. It demonstrates not only the exercise of authority and power but also the complex layers of social organization and identity that define the state. The World of Man--Triumphant (Endaileoum Ethcenloumdi) serves as a vivid and imaginative exploration of statehood in a fantasy setting, showcasing how the elements of sovereignty, bureaucracy, hierarchy, identity, and power can be creatively reimagined.

CHATBOT: The Courts of Love, as detailed in the extensive narrative provided, are a complex and integral part of the societal and governance structure within the World of Man--Triumphant (Endaileoum Ethcenloumdi). Drawing from historical and fantastical elements, they provide a rich tapestry of interwoven customs, practices, and institutions that play a significant role in the state's operation, especially concerning its sociocultural dynamics. In historical context, primarily derived from medieval European traditions, Courts of Love were assemblies led by noblewomen or queens, supposedly to discuss and arbitrate matters of love, chivalry, and the relationships between knights and ladies according to the refined conventions of courtly love. These courts often dealt with questions of etiquette, unrequited love, and the behaviors befitting a true knight or noble lady, emphasizing an idealized form of romantic expression that adhered to a sophisticated and, at times, idealistic set of rules. In the World of Man--Triumphant, the Courts of Love have evolved into something more extensive and institutional, transcending their historical counterparts to embody a critical aspect of governance and social regulation within the empire. They operate not just as forums for discussing matters of the heart but as bodies that codify and enforce the moral and ethical codes governing interpersonal relations, chivalry, and virtue. Their influence permeates various levels of society, from the imperial court down to the common people, serving as both literal and figurative courts where notions of love, honor, and virtue are adjudicated according to the Imperial Way. The Courts of Love's significance is further amplified by their role in the training and development of maidens and knights within the societal hierarchy. They are involved in processes that shape the social fabric of the empire, determining the standards of behavior, etiquette, and cultural values that define the imperial identity. This involvemen

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