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Save Point: Family Secrets

"What_are_ you doing?"

"I'm gaming the Battle of the Apotheosis, obviously."

"I didn't know anyone did that tabletop stuff anymore."

"Oh, there are like, about ten different weave simulation versions and everyone has their favorite, but for that you need to suspend your disbelief, and here I need to disbelieve it."

Riegal has manufactured a vast scale model of the Srenen River Valley Plain that takes up most of the room, with some protruding sections overhanging the two tables that support it. The realistic looking river is made of reflective smart mirror, with all the hills and valleys, main waterways and significant roads accurately represented through some form of materials printing, using a type of muddy clay that uncannily resembles earth. He's coated it with fine sprays of something that dries looking like grass, and populated the map with tiny reproductions of buildings and the significant locations that feature in the battle, as well as various copses of miniscule silva trees. Overrunning the whole thing are massed units of larger models which represent units of troops, simply since it would be impossible to fit everyone on the board.

The mirror-glass reflects from all angles an unseen but technically correct sky, with the sun at the correct angle for the time of day and weather conditions of the battle.

It's one of those acts of creatively inspired madness you hardly ever see any more, as a brilliant mind attempts to to extract some hidden meaning from a mass of unrelated facts, by compulsively seeking a physical expression for the known details. This sort of thing used to be common before they cleaned up the more definite neurological defects in the sethura genome, stuff that was all of a downside and no up, but Riegel's quite strange by any standards and it's probably mostly genius rather than crazy. Or so Sethkill hopes.

"Okay, so the Battle of the Apotheosis is quite probably the most anomalous event in almost all of sethura history," Riegel talks him through it, making sweepingly divine gestures. "Not that it came out the way it did, but that the whole battle is, for lack of a better word, optimized. It's very nearly impossible to win as the Blackside, in fact the sooner they surrender, the lower the casualties."

He presses a button and a palely glowing ring appears hanging just above the model.

"Right, so here you have the location of the 'peace negotiation' in the middle. Note the way that it is much closer to the Blackside troops, just as per Kith-Rhiannon's instructions, against the advice of his commanders and a concession eagerly accepted by his enemies. Our guys have fewer troops and are spread out further away, whereas the Blackside have a huge number of guys and they are all closely packed up where they've come down from the hills. They are just waiting for an excuse to secure the cities along the Srenen River, roll up the whole coast and rule everything.

"So, peace negotiation, betrayal, romantic mutual murder-suicide, boom. The resulting explosion isn't really an explosion at all, more like some sort of retroactive probabilistic anomaly that does strange things to the local landscape, changing parts of it in a perfect circle so they've always been that way, instead of however they were before. This is after, in case you're wondering.

"Even though it wasn't a real explosion, it had lethal effects within a specific radius. From medical supply usage lists, casualty reports, the number of survivors and so forth you can generate a fairly reliable mathematical expression for damage as a function of the cube of the radius, like a sound or an electromagnetic field - no, don't look at me like that, someone else calculated it more than a hundred years ago for one of the weave games. Glowing blue line is the point after which damage is low enough to not immediately put you out on a stretcher. Note that a significant proportion of the Blackside troops are inside the radius, although almost all of Kith-Rhiannon's guys are outside of it. I guess he considered what might happen, but the Blackside leader didn't care."

Riegel begins pointing out specific units. The common troops are represented by several types of generic model, but the special units with an inspirational or heroic leader get their own figure of the individual in question, considered to be equal to one troop plus some special bonus.

Many of the little statuettes are widely available and are well known historical characters, even the Blackside warriors retrospectively made famous by historical revisionists decades later. Some are more popular than the good guys, which is the hallmark of a real quality war. There are model riding jackals in mid-lunge, supply trains and wheeled vehicles that act as defense lines or points of regrouping, small rows of sethuresses carrying the sling-mounted blast shotguns that were the most advanced sethura-portable weapon of the era, and longer rows of sethura wearing standard armour for the first time ever, war-steel from the massive forges Kith-Rhiannon masterminded to begin mobilization for the first industrial conflict ever.

Down at the mouth of the Srenen, or as close as the scaled terrain gets to it, there are even a few small model vessels resembling windsurfing boards, representing the late arriving backup troops who, according to legend, made up time by using sailboards and an upstream wind to travel light, reaching the battlefield with almost no gear or supplies, but then immediately outfitted from the mass-produced equipment to reinforce their fellows. Over on the far hills, three tiny hang-gliders are hidden under canvas tents, ready (or maybe not) to become part of the famous surprise attack that will secure the Blackside leadership and force them to terms.

A multitude of other units carry basic single-shot musket style guns, or more commonly arbalest crossbows, as these are still quicker to reload. Everyone still has a sword and knives to cover their reloading gaps, because mostly guns aren't quite reliable enough yet to set up an organized volley technique. The simple but effective blast shotguns wielded by Kith-Rhiannon's sethuresses, which require far less training to use, and allow civilian wives and daughters to act as additional troops in a manner specifically calculated to outrage the Blackside, substitute brute-force engineering as a solution to technical problems that haven't been solved yet. Combined with a better powder mix that creates less smoke, they are an effective reply to any territorial ambitions.

Riegel does not seem to have been satisfied with some of the more commonly available versions of a number of the hero units, however, and has manufactured his own, although why that would be necessary is something of a question. There is no need to include Kith-Rhiannon himself or the Blackside leader, as they never factored in the battle itself - they're a point without dimension or width, the burst of the starting pistol, bodies never recovered. But Riegel has customized the Lady Hornbreast, with his own little meticulous clay sculpture that doesn't quite match the otherwise exact scale, as well as the husband of the sculptress Jiargnei, who only achieved historical notice by having been her husband and then getting himself killed.

There are also several very individualistic-looking sethura and sethuresses, flamboyantly dressed in strange combinations of expensive brightly-dyed clothing and mismatched armours, some of it not very practical. These appear to be the combat magicians drawn to the causes of either side, in their last appearance at an open battle. A tradition started somewhere back in time immemorial, with tribal shamans screaming and capering and rallying their sides to victory, this is the last time that magic was taken seriously as a military force, and it was anachronistic even then.

Though Kith-Rhiannon was the most powerful magic-user of all time, he showed that applying a talent to researching how to make something possible for everyone was far more effective. Whole volumes have been written on the subject, and Sethkill disagrees with most of them.

Riegel notices Sethkill looking at his miniature Lady Hornbreast, which is perhaps a little overly passionate in the cleavage and hip department, and her famous Flying Jackals wing of mercenary cavalry, depicted as stock riding jackal models repainted to match her colors. Should they reach the end of the battle, they will become a literal flying wing using the hang-gliders and secure their name in legend. "She's especially interesting, you know," he explains. "They all disappeared right after the battle, every single one of them. There was a rumor about some sort of epic final mission that they went on and never came back, but there isn't even a trace of the paperwork. Most of the weave games implement something imaginatively insane drawn from the historical contexts, sort of heroic failure scenarios where you and preferred number of friends can die gloriously in battle against an ever-increasing horde of monsters that just keeps on spawning. Often in ancient ruins forgotten to sethura-kind, the plot being that if you can kill enough of them before you go down it will keep the world safe for some unspecified time longer, maybe even up until today... well, you get the idea. There are usually Rainbow Tyranny lichs everywhere."

Nothing else really needs to be said about this, and they share a slight involuntary head-shake of mutual disparagement. Those things are the worst, all those long narrow claws and teeth.

Presumably it gives the programmers a chance to do something fun and escapist after all of that stringent historical authenticity, but there's really no need to involve religion and politics.

"So uh," asks Sethkill to change the subject, "what exactly are you hoping to learn by replaying the battle? You know, whilst in a state of existential skepticism, on a table-top?"

"I have no idea," smiles Riegel happily. "I was hoping you could tell me. There's something going on there but I just can't spot what it is. It's like when I take a shortcut and somehow wind up in all sorts of unexpected places. I don't notice it, it just happens."

"Well, it's a magnificent model. I mean I'm really not sure what it means, but it looks like fun. And we should maybe, oh I don't know, get some drinks and possibly run a porné flick or something to distract you from this for a while."

"You may be right. I have kind of been obsessing over it a bit, haven't I?"

~*~

"I told you about the Kith-Rhianon war, and how it ended explosively when peace negotiations on the field ended with the female Blackside leader and Kith-Rhianon simultaneously killing one another.

"Well, the secret is that the negotiation wasn't the first time they met. Historians have scoured the records for any prior meeting and come up completely dry, so the official position is that they never did, much as conspiracy enthusiasts would like them to have. But the historians are wrong. They met long before the start of the war, in the disputed border territories between the Blackside and the Free Nation, only the details were suppressed because they were equally damning to both sides. And it's my family who did the suppressing, because we're all the living descendants of both of them.

"There are two versions of the story, you see, each acquired from a different branch of the family as information secretly revealed to them by the respective parties before their final and fatal encounter. Version one, as reported by Kith-Rhiannon to his father, was that he had been travelling through the disputed territory when he encountered an attractive sethuress near a local stream, where she'd been bathing and taken her ceremonial garb off. Without the outfit on she looked just like anyone else and so he, for lack of a better word, pressed his suit rather forcefully upon her. The Blackside had a peculiar belief system that included a range of rather complicated hangups about sexual relations, which was what gave them their name. Rising in rank within their culture required one to wear ever more complicated and concealing outfits, regardless of whether you were male or female, designed to obscure the tempting lures of the body. The reasoning was something to the order that as you became more holy and unworldly, and thus rose in rank, you would be in ever more danger from the attractions of the world and it was essential to take suitable precautions.

"They were actually very beautiful clothing, oddly enough. Although they were entirely black, they used all sorts of different types of fabrics, that were more and less reflective, had a higher or lower thread count, or more and less nap and pile, to create very complex designs full of cosmological symbols relating to their beliefs. They're really difficult to reproduce in any sort of virtual simulation, you really have to see them in person at a museum.

"What I'm trying to get at, though, is that the girl had little to no sexual experience and didn't even really understand what she was being pressured into, or how to fend him off without in fact actually fighting or running away. So there was an encounter between them that was, well, partially non-consensual however you look at it. Some time later she discovered she'd gotten pregnant, concealed it in the course of her travels and then handed off the child to a relative living in the disputed territories where its mixed ancestry wouldn't be noticed. Kith-Rhiannon never knew that he'd inadvertently become the final pressure that started the war, in fact he claimed he maintained fond memories of the sethuress he'd initiated right up until it became apparent that she was the one who'd risen to power and was baying for blood.

"That's only the first version though. The second is even weirder and far more strange, and it actually makes Kith-Rhiannon look far more innocent, which might in fact explain why he told the first version of the story and took more blame. See, version two was supposedly revealed by the Blackside leader to her sister one night after the sister experienced some sort of crisis in her beliefs after killing her first 'enemy of the single true way' just after hostilities began.

"In version two, she is travelling through disputed territory and stops to bathe. She spots an enemy of the one true way who is perverted enough to want to watch her naked body as she bathes, and is totally outraged and completely overwhelmed by her sacred zeal for revenge. So she draws her dagger, which is of course strapped around her thigh, as any righteous daughter of the Blackside would carry such a weapon in case of defilement, and charges him, catching him so much by surprise that she is able to knock him down, perch on his chest and hold her blade to his throat, possibly helped by the fact that it is a stream bank and there's a slope right behind him.

"However, she is so infuriated by what has happened, and of course is being led on by his evil and wicked good looks, that instead of killing him out of hand like a righteous daughter of the Blackside she succumbs to worldly temptation and decides that a much more telling lesson is required. Knife to his throat, she pulls Kith-Rhiannons loincloth aside and literally rapes him. She's all desperately panting, he's letting her do it because she she has a dagger to his throat, even though she definitely doesn't actually need the dagger and he'd be quite happy to let her, and so on and so forth.

"In her rather messed-up version, getting knocked up from the encounter is her punishment for her moral failing and unwillingness to kill her enemy, one which she must remember and atone for every day by being the most righteous follower of the single true way that she can possibly be. So the sister should not feel guilty about the killing, because the enemy are evil and might corrupt her by their very presence, and killing them is a sure sign of righteousness and general moral virtue.

"If the second version is true, then it's easy to see why Kith-Rhiannon would go with version one instead, because 'I pressured a sethuress into sex and I probably shouldn't have' is still so much less damning to ones reputation than 'I let a crazy sethuress nail me at knife-point and she totally owned me and made me her bitch'. Both versions are equally bad under the social systems which obtained at the time.

"Personally I think it was probably actually a little of both. A moment of morally questionable but intense passion in a remote place with no witnesses, which was never supposed to catch up with either of them but inevitably did. So the story about the battle isn't some sad romantic twist or a fervently held delusion, it was just business as usual all over again. She was angry about having been tempted and knocked up, he was angry that she'd made him her bitch even though it was really hot, and no sooner had they stabbed each other than they both felt awful about it and went for one last kiss when it was far too late. I consider it to be a practical lesson in what not to do when you're in love.

"The irony is that these were two of the most talented sethura of all time. They named the war after Kith-Rhiannon, and there's still a thing about never mentioning the actual given name of the Blackside leader. That's all anyone ever calls her, although she did have a name and I know what it was. It's in all the history books and in the upper left corner of my family tree.

"It led my family to constantly expect great things of its various descendants, most of whom didn't even know why they were being pushed that way until much later on, after they'd been told the family secret and they were the ones doing the pushing in their turn. I'm just glad that I had the talent to live up to what they wanted because, hey, engineer on an actual starship, right here. Well, I personally maintain that it is a starship, no matter what anyone says. There are different planets in different places in many of the possible alternates, even different stars, and we have to be fully ready to fly between them whenever we make a new transit.

"One of the minor things associated with knowing the secret is a secondary obligation to help suppress the secret itself, not just because of the trouble and expectations it would create if we revealed it, or the reputations of our ancestors, but because it is widely believed to this day that Kith-Rhiannon made some sort of breakthrough just before he died and then decided not to reveal it, or maybe even to actively conceal it. Should any copies of his personal journals or other research work come to light, we're supposed to destroy them, not just acquire them or lock them away.

"The reason I'm telling you this, entirely aside from the fact that you deserve to know and that someone else should, is that my father shared this with me after I married Keselt, but we both agreed, as did my mother, that Kilseth should not be told. He represents exactly the sort of self-aggrandizing behaviour that is the very worst our bloodline has to offer, and given his talents in various fields including political scheming, he definitely shouldn't be allowed to know. Just the claim of descent would give him considerable pull with several hard-line political factions that still discreetly revere either ancestor and are all extremist crazies in a range of excitingly different ways. If he somehow rediscovered the mysterious breakthrough as well, Wolfmother only knows what he'd do with it.

"So as far as I know, he doesn't know, but I could be wrong. He could have already found out all by himself and be waiting for the perfect moment to spring the big reveal. He might even have obtained a copy of the journals and somehow figured out what it means, although so far his actions have mostly been within the known limits of sethura science. Everything he's done so far has been extreme, but not outright inexplicable, if you follow my meaning. Most of it's just stuff he shouldn't be able to do all by himself because it requires too much power, or more control than one sethura should have. But on the off chance that I'm wrong, we definitely need to shut him down."