The Powers That Be (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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synodiporia_ooc2015-09-05 05:42 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2015-09-05 05:42 pm
Entry tags:
The Lightning Age: (The Next Jaunt).
It is the Hijra year 1314, the 12th day of Rabi Al-Akhir, and in the Flying Market of Nova Venezia, there is trouble. That is not new. Nova Venezia is a balloon city, tethered above the neutral city-state of Venice, a Vatican protectorate. At first, the balloons were meant only to keep the buildings below from sinking, but the people who maintained them began to build settlements on their platforms, and eventually it became a small but thriving sky-port.
Northern Italy lies at the border of three of the Great Imperial Powers. To the north and east, the Prusso-Zaporizhian Empire, a warrior-state of aerialists whose superiority in the skies is unquestionable. To the south and east, the Golden Khanate, a pan-asian pluralist kingdom who have done things with gunpowder no other nation has dreamed of. To the west, both north and south, the Ummah Caliphate, careful mercantile masters of steam science whose rule circles the Mediterranean.
To all three of the Powers, no resource is more valuable, or weapon more dangerous, than the innovations of the human mind. And the Prussians and Caliphate have both dispatched forces to the Flying Market now seeking weapons of mass destruction.
Captain Phoenix, a pyromaniacal pirate, used to be a servant of the Caliph, may he live forever, before the Captain’s impetuous ways and destructive urges became simply too much. The greatest pyrotechnician in the world, the Captain is a human time-bomb in every sense but the literal, and is hiding in a city held up by vast envelopes of hydrogen gas.
Herr Doktor Kilroy Schweizerkaze Von Blitzkopf was once the greatest aeronautical engineer in the Prussian arsenal, designer of airships which could survive thunderstorms unscathed, until the good Doktor raided designs, arsenal, and fleet, and vanished utterly for causes unknown. Blitzkopf, along with the Masked Senseis of Uchinaa, is a master of electricity, deviser of devices which can run on this strange force and not mere hydraulic power or combustion. The nation who owns the Doktor can harness the lightning. But again, not the most comfortable personage to share a balloon with, really.
Into this morass of espionage, manhunt, and international trade; sky pirates, smugglers, and innovators from around the world, a new element has come into the mix. Foreigners not only to the nation, but to the world itself. Paranoids and conspiracy theorists have whispered of their existence for a year, and some in Venezia remember them, and know a few signs and tricks that may be used to identify and get the better of these strange invaders… because knowledge is power, power is money, money is opportunity - and opportunity is about to strike like lightning.
The question is what it will leave behind.
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