Content:Percusa/VIII

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This is the Eighth Chapter of the Percusa's story.

With all this new time of peace, the reigning Loklow comission the construction of a great bridge to be built connecting Clewis Island to the mainland. The wonder will be built with slabs of granite, which is highly abundant in the canyons in nearby Percusopolis and created by the finest stoneworkers the Loklow Empire has to offer. For this immense project, reathlers are brought in to haul rocks from the mines to the work site. At this point, the Loklow did not feel like alloting any more land to the reathler hives, so force was used to abduct a couple hundred females from various reathler reservations.

The work takes over 150 years of non-stop labor, resulting in the deaths of over 1000 percusa and nearly 250 reathlers. But the structure is finally ready for travel and looks magnificent. The Clewis Bridge, it is dubed, is nearly 20 miles long and lies about 60 ft above sea level, allowing all boats of the current day and all ships even concievable to pass with ease under the mass of granite and mortar.

Percusa travel for hundreds of miles to see Clewis Bridge and leave tribute to the Loklow on the other end of it. This, by far, is the most impressive thing ever accomplished by the Loklow Empire.

In other news, the City of Xal'Chala has deminished greatly in population due semi-recent migrations toward the east. The Xal'Chala Loklist has just died, giving the Loklow a perfect opportunity to not have the position open at the next Ksotso for a town with a population of less than 100. The Loklow now numbers 52 Loklists.

The Loklow decide to make a movement in this time of peace and bliss to improve on land trade routes using a method that creates cobblestone-like roads. This gives a huge boom in the stonework industry comparable to the building of Clewis Bridge. This public works project provides jobs for many percusa throughout the entire LE. In fifty years, the project has been completed, leaving all villages, towns, and cities in the Loklow Empire interconnected and vastly increasing trade traffic and profit.

In Walucaville, around the time the road system was commisioned for construction, a crazy lone inventor named Kib'Ri created the most magnificent machine in his work to invent a new flavor of chewing rock. The water pump. Kib'ri is insanely proud about his invention and wastes no time in hiring a team of workers to help mass produce the pump. The design spreads rapidly and is soon the most effective way of gathering water from rivers. The Loklow headquarters and some of the greater castles in the empire even have gravity powered plumbing installed in them.

Disease runs rampant, juviniles commonly die from inhaling simple metal spurs lying in the streets, and everything smells like ****. This has commonly been accepted as the way things have always been and the way things will always be. But some bright eyed Loklist, Kaaj, connects the spread of disease to the filth throughout the empire. Kaaj makes the suggestion to the rest of the Loklow that the government should establish a public waste disposal service. The Loklow are at first apprehensive, but once Kaaj reveals that the Spirits told him this plan in a dream, the Loklow have no problem establishing the program.

This is the first real example of government employees in the Lokow government. Sanitation workers are hired to basically keep crap out of the streets. In return, each worker is granted a rather large parcel of land. The sanitation workers spend their days filling carts with refuse and hauling it off to the nearest forest or ocean. The system works remarkably well and, in about 50 years, streets are relatively clean throughout the empire and the sanitation workers' jobs are turned into mostly upkeep. The project is a huge success and even resulted in the extinction of a rather annoying fish species that broke many fishing lines...

For thousands of years, percusa have been using precious metals as a form of currency in trade. Now that most of the continent is ruled by the Loklow Empire, this system has become increasingly inconvenient to work with. Usually, goods are exchanged for small chunks of, let's call it salver and glod, some of it in coin form and the rest as it came out of the mines. This system, of course, comes with many squabbles and fights over scale accuracy, pureness of metals, and value of coins in addition to etc.

The revolutionary idea of a standardized, government endorsed coinage system comes to a Loklist in a dream one night. It goes over extremely well with the rest of the Loklow and pretty soon the system is being planned out srtists and sculptors are submiting ideas for the monetary system. The final product is two coins, one salver, the other gald. Each coin is small, about 1" square, and has four even sides. One one side of the coins, the raised letters LE are set into the metal. On the other side of the coins, 46 raised dimples represent the original 46 towns of the Loklow Empire. The gald coins are named Gald and the salver coins are called Salver. One Gald is worth 5 Salver.

The treasury in Percusopolis produces a limited amount of the coins each year. The exact number of coins produced will range for a few years until the market stabalizes itself, but until then it is a rocky road to mass acceptance of the currency.

In other news, recently, two very strange structures have appeared deep in reathler territory. From eyewitnesses who fly overhead, the structures seem to be legitimate buildings of reathler construction. From what the witnesses could tell, the buildings where nothing more than watch towers. Huge, massive, woodem, intimidating watch towers. These are the first known buldings ever built by the reathler race, known to the percusa. The only other 'structures' have been crude lumber walls that seemed to be more of a by-product than anything surrounding reathler hives. Two towers are in the woods just west of Yukata and between Rimbulan Ridge and the eastern hills. Both lie within reathler reservations given to them. The use or purpose of the towers is yet unknown...

As the months go by, the towers progressively grow taller, never seeming to develope an architectural style or any obvious sense of purpose. No physical work is ever witnessed being performed, the structures just expand. No matter when or how the scouts approach the structures, they never see any reathler contact with them. The reathlers in the rest of the hives merely function as if there is nothing there at all, going on about theri daily lives.

In about a year, smaller structures begin to appear around the tower in the south. These structures, too, do not seem to have any particualr use other than to disturb the LE percusa. The 'huts' are hollow, as far as the frequent scouts can tell and do not seem to be hiding anything. The Loklow figure that the reathlers are too primitive to be capable of concealment successfully. In two years the work ceases with the tower in the east standing alone while the western one is surrounded by dozens of smaller huts.

In other news: Poluz is begining the preliminary steps to constructing a wonder of their own. The President Lashir V is thinking of a bridge much like the Clewis Bridge, connecting Poluz to the City of Pulu. She has requested if the construction of Lashir Bridge may begin.

The Loklow collectively decide that the amount of percusa-power being expended on keeping watch on the reathlers could be better put to use. For the past year or so a rather eccentric inventor and health nut has been coming to the Loklow's Camp David and ceaceslessly annoying them with his new plans of mass produced plumbing supplies and how to implement them in everyday life. What with the recent wave of Pacfish Fever killing over 250 percusa throughout the nation, this crackpot's ideas are seeming all the more attractive.

This experiment will give the newly installed currency system a much needed test in acceptance. The Loklow order 1,000,000 Gald to be minted in order to pay every metalurgest throughout the land to assist in the construction of the first ever plumbing project in percusa history.

The whole plumbing projcet takes about 20 years to complete, as vast aqueducts must be built over great stretches of land and mountains.

The project is a huge success and general percusa health everywhere improves within the next few years. The plumbins systems are cleverly routed to empty out into nearby creaks or the ocean, making the waste produced from this clever invention a problem not to be delt with by the Loklow Empire.

The extra Gald that was ordered to be minted causes a huge shift in wealth in the empire. The various blacksmiths and metalurgests benefit directly from the money the government payed them. But it is the mineworkers who make the real killing over this great public works project. In order to produce all the new coin, miners where hired to work long hours eight days a week at and offered much more mony to do it, since the bill was being sent to the Loklow. Thanks to plumbing, any percusa to do with the process of coinage is the new aristocracy in the LE.

In other news: Reathler hives all over their alloted territories have sprung up with giant towers surrounded by huts. The spread seemed to be outward from the two, already existing, towers. The rise in towers also correlated with the diminishing square footage of the hives. In the past 20 years, the encroaching forests have worked their way up to the huts in every reathler hive, making observation much more difficult.

Poluz was given permission to build their Lashir Bridge and it was built in about a year. It is a magnificent bridge that rivals even Clewis Bridge in beauty. Trade between Poluz and the City of Pulu flourishes.

The new plumbing system has produced a new art form, fountain sculpting! Now great woter fountains are found in nearly every city.

The Loklow have had it with the reathlers' smug sense of secrecy over their intimidating towers. The local percusa are starting to freak out too. So representatives are sent to some of the towers to aks for an audience with the Queens. The representatives are let in without incident, as if there where any other choice for the reathlers, and the purpose of the mysterious towers is discovered.

It turns out, actually, that towers are much less omniscent than previously thought. The reathlers have taken their lates step in evolution, long overdue by Valera standards, and built their first artificial hives. The females of the species have developed a new use for their poison gas releasing glands. From centuries of disuse, the glands have shrunken, allowing them to be aimed more presicely. The gaseous venom has become less volitile and been transformed into a liquid. This green substance acts as a natural glue, a very, very effective glue. The reathlers must be getting smarter too because they realised they could use this natural glue gun to immitate structures they have seen the percusa build for the past millenia or so.

The bottom line with the towers is that they are just vertical hives. The reathlers figured out that they could cut down on walking time between larvae by simply stacking them vertically in insulated walls. The Loklow representatives where each given a personal tour of the towers, the insides of which go below ground level about 20 feet and rise to over 150 feet above the ground, depending on which tower is being examined. The internal structure is genius by percusa standards. A central spiral wooden ramp rises up to the top of each tower. Each level of the tower, of which there range from 8-11, contains rows and rows of larvae, pushed into the external walls. The ramps allow the female gaurds to tend to the young until they hatch and entrances every few levels allow access by hunters to deliver food. The Queens of each hive are kept below ground. The huts surrounding each tower contain anything from reserve food to extra wood to overproduced larvae. All of these structures where built by simply piling wood on top of more wood and coating it all in glue. When asked why no percusa ever saw any construction work being done on any towers, the reathlers simply replied, "Why would we want to give away our construction secrets before we where finished?" All cunstruction had been done under a lookout system of hunters to make sure no percusa witnessed the reathler construction methods.

With the invention of artificial hives, the reathlers have had surpluss food and time to concentrate on other matters, such as forming a national reathler alliance(NRA).

The rest of reathler life has remained unaltered.

Percusa have been boiling water for centuries to soften up the bones of their kills, and using air tight lids for as long as there have been expert craftsmen to make them. Well, one day an ordinary Fwel'Witian percusa, Bill, is softening up some bones from last night's dinner to have a snack. Well, Bill winds up falling asleep on his perch and forgets about his snack. Bill is woken up about an hour latter by a loud "bang" and a successive clatter. The lid to his high quality ceramic pot has flown accross the room and exploded into tiny shards. Upon further inspection, Bill discovers that all the water in his pot has dissapeared. After eating the most delicious bone he had ever had, Bill decides to repeat the incident and see if he can reproduce it. In a few day's time, Bill has boiling water down to an exact science and decides to take his discovery to one of the local inventors.

After a few months in his worshop, the inventor has built a prototype steam powered device consisting of a shaft open at one end, a piston, two valves, a lever and a counter-weight, and two water chambers. The whole contraption is placed over a fire pit and lit. Bill and the inventor have invented the steam engine.

It turns out the steam engine can be modified very easily into a carnival ride. A simple perch is added to the top and soon child percusa from miles around are coming to see and ride the "Iron Giant". Up and down the children go, at a neckbreaking 5 miles an hour.

In other news: Recently, some disagreement has sprung up among religious scholars. The current view of spirits is that all plants, animals, and other percusa have them. Well, with the recent reathler invention of vertical hives, religious leaders throughout the empire are at a crossroads of thought. Do the reathlers have spirits? Animals have spirits but it has never been cleared up about other species of sentient creatures. Does the reathlers' evident recent step in evolution make them animals no more? Are they, even, equal to the percusa in spirituality? This problem has never been posed before.

The installation of steam powered automatic pumps largely increases the effectivity of the aqueduct system throughout the Loklow Empire. Soon above ground structures are being rerouted underground, making them much more resistance to natural wear and tear and other natural disasters. This also spawns much more jobs throughout the empire. The Loklow easily fix the problem of pay by having more coins minted.

Speaking of natural disasters, 50 years later, a massive earthquake hit Eastonia(ees-TONE-ee-uh). The epicenter, at the limited scholars' best knowlege, is at the Jediosudo Pass, splitting a massive visible fault along the river running up Eastonia, from the southern ocean all the way to Lake Lo'Telam.

The only populated areas seemingly uneffected by the quake are the reathler hives and almost every structure in Poluz.

All this in the middle of an economic depression the likes of which has never been seen before. The amount of Gald and Salver the Loklow had coined for the construction an inprovement of the waterway systems have crashed the market. Not only are government minted coins worthless, but all gald and salver ore has become useless when compared to steel or a fine cut of Angerford steak.

Things are bad.

[edit] See Also

Percusa: Percusa background, Percusa: IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX