Diptych
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12/16/2013
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As of 2010, Alexandria was a convincing theory for the identity of the Second City - I was an adherent of it myself! But since then, we've had more-or-less explicit refutation of that theory, and the prevailing wisdom is that it was Amarna. (And, I can't presume to speak for Alexis and co., but I believe that so long as we don't copy/paste chunks of text or spoil Fate-locked content, we're okay!)
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Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
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Diptych
Administrator
Posts: 3493
12/16/2013
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Blackleaf wrote:
Updated the thread a bit. Personaly i still believe Alexandria seems likely but im horrible at egyptian history.
Frederick, Can you give me a list or well something comparing the likelyhood between Alexandria and Amarna?
A rare success when trading Salts for Memories of Distant Shores gives us the line "The Second City didn't have nearly enough temples to be Alexandria." As Mr Wells describes, this is almost certainly a reference to the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaten and tried to dismantle the established institution of Egyptian polytheism in favour of worship of the sun-god Aten. In doing so, he built a new city as his capital, Akhetaten, which is now called Amarna. This would be the city with few temples - because it was the centre of the monotheist cult, and only had temples to Aten.
In real-world history, the Amarna Period ended with the ascension of Arkhenaten's son, Tutankhaten, who changed his name to Tutankhamun, returned the capital to Thebes, and restored the traditional temples and priests. Mr Wells' highly convincing theory that in Neathy history, Akhenaten's third daughter Ankhesenamun became the Duchess, meaning that Tutankhamun may be the Cantigaster. Unlike Alexandria's Antony and Cleopatra, Ankhesenamun and Tutankhamun's story is not associated with serpents - but, where the Neath is concerned, serpents might appear unexpectedly wherever there's a mirror!
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Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
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Nathanael S. Wells
Posts: 80
12/16/2013
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Blackleaf wrote:
Also. Ive been needing to post this somewhere for a long time. (( Note: No i do not support the revolutinaries in ANY way. The liberation of night is RIDICULUS. The pure ammount of collateral damage just for a lost cause is foolish. I hope we get to side with the bazaar against those bastards. Altough, I whouldnt mind fighting against the bazaar if the masters take a turn for the tyranical. If they start fighting the PEOPLE rather then the FIGHTERS ))
- snip -
edited by Blackleaf on 12/16/2013
On the Bazaar vs. the Fallen Cities
[spoiler]Personally, I think the Bazaar to some extent is always vulnerable to the cities it takes. The very same city we are discussing in this thread seems to have done something to it and the Masters that they are, to this day, still significantly cross about, and which may ultimately lead to ramifications unforeseen by the Masters. After all, a reckoning will not be postponed (except for by a hiatus).
But the Bazaar and the Masters don't deal in superior firepower. They rule by dividing and conquering, by making it appealing to be on their side and horribly unappealing to be against them. I reckon that, in close combat, a Master might make quick work of any given amount of regular Londoners, and only in the case of a hyper-powered player character with intricate knowledge of a Masters workings (and the Master at disadvantage) were we able to see the potential slaying of a Master during Hallowmas.
That said, February, being a woman of considerable enthusiasm for blood and learned in the ways of how to oppose the Masters, was able to draw blood from one (her Nemesis, Irons?) - but only that. Perhaps the Masters really are to some degree sustained or fortified by Light, and only during the Liberation of Night they grow weak enough to be killed.
As for the "conventional firepower" of the Bazaar: the Bazaar itself seems to have Correspondent properties that go beyond anything Londoners could do - being not only a native speaker of the language, but also able to project its sigils on its own skin - and it seems to have also extremely rigid personal defences. Not even during the Liberation of Night does it fall right away, there's only an assurance that "those spires will fall". But when? Besides, my own theory is that the Bazaar has access to the alternate/Neath/Parabola colour specrum and has planted it among the brightest and most capable of Londoners for a reason. After all, it was said to be "plotting something" regarding the new professions. I think it is likely that, the higher we ascend in the professional tiers, the more we'll end up realizing how much our work is helping the Bazaar keep the status quo.[/spoiler]
Now, someone with more populist politics than mine would ask whether Mr Fires needs to press-gang every able-bodied man and woman in London into the docks, or Mr Sacks needs to steal away parliament or what other relatively arbitrary measure must happen before you recognize the Bazaars "tyranny". Certainly not me, though.
edited by Nathanael S. Wells on 12/16/2013
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Nathanael S. Wells, the Epicurean Polymath.
Founder and Patron of the Damnation Army, a philanthropic society devoted towards bringing food and clothes to the destitute and impoverished Seekers! Consider donating food (no Rubbery Lumps, please!) or clothes (no Veils-Velvet, please! We don't need another incident.)
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theodor_gylden
Posts: 117
12/16/2013
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I must say I'm pleased that Amarna is gaining more popularity -- I was around when Alexandria was the theory of the day, but Amarna has made the most sense to me.
Spoilers for Christmas and Exceptional Rose content to follow.
[spoiler]As others have noted, Akhenaten was the Heretic Pharaoh and tore down the gods of old to set up his own: Aten, who was portrayed as the disc of sun, with rays outreaching and ending in hands. The city Amarna -- known then as Akhetaten -- was meant to be the seat of Aten. Knowing this, it's hard to imagine the turn of events that would bring the Pharaoh's sun-blessed city underground.
But remember the Bazaar itself was a celestial entity, and was once 'between stars.' If you consume lacre and are lucky, you 'dream, feverishly, of a bright light in a long lone empty place; of a gift given and a gift rejected; of the one you love moving away, inevitably as the motions of an orrery, distant as childhood.' If you are unlucky, you see 'see things written on your skin: letters of fire, letters of shame.' The writing on skin suggests the sigils on the spires of the Bazaar, the rest the Bazaar's memories. If you examine an Elemental Secret, it says the Neath -- the Bazaar's current residence -- is 'the place where the Earth places the memories that shame her.' On the last day of the Feast of the Exceptional Rose, at the summit the Bazaar there shone a warm and golden light, which for a moment resembled sunlight. A voice spoke to say '[t]his is the Sun whose commands run below, and the Feast of it all is the way we must go.' It pled with its love for forgiveness and a crown of flames. It asked us -- its 'delicious ones' -- for our tales. It promised all shall be well and the Fifth will live in the heart of the Sun. Finally, tellingly, if you dreamed of the Mountain on Hallow's Eve, you had a chance to destroy it and 'put an end to the Sun's experiment.'
This is all admittedly vague, but evocative. To me it suggests there was a time when the Bazaar loved and courted the Sun. It ended badly. The Bazaar bears the scars of it, the first love story written on its body, and it hid in the Neath to hide its shame. But it still wants to reunite with the Sun. The Feast, a time to encourage love and stories of love, is 'the way we must go' and during it the Bazaar can summon and speak to the Sun 'whose commands run below.' That's why it needs more stories, so that one day it and the city it fostered can live in the heart of the Sun. The Sun, too, is reaching for the Bazaar and does so through the Mountain of Light, from which death flees.
Now. That's all out of the way. It's possible that the Pharaoh knew, if not all of this, enough of this. He worshiped the Sun, and if he wanted the Sun to sit in his city, what better way than to deal with the Bazaar? But their goals might not have aligned exactly. Somehow the Pharaoh learned the Correspondence and in it spoke an 'invocation' to the Bazaar. Perhaps he sought to thwart the reunion of the Bazaar and the Sun so the Sun would be free to grace his city. Perhaps he wanted to bind the Bazaar to the city so the Sun would come to it and to him. Whatever his plan, it was foolish. He may have been in over his head. And in the storylet referenced by the OP, the Princess's cunning puts the Pharaoh's folly to an end. The Sun was gone, immortality was in reach, the heralds of night were bound.
That's an interesting word, 'bound.' I do not think the heralds of night -- the Masters of the Bazaar -- were keen on it. They are certainly not keen on the Duchess now, or on the Second City. And during the Feast when the voice of the Bazaar speaks, it says 'the second betrayed. The betrayal may have been the Pharaoh's, when he made his invocation, or the Princess's, when she foiled him, or both.
Mr Eaten, on the other hand, was quite fond of the Pharaoh's daughters.
TL;DR The Bazaar loves the Sun, the Pharaoh worships the Sun, the Pharaoh invokes the Bazaar, the Princess puts a stop to things, the heralds of night are bound, and the Second City is remembered as the betrayer.[/spoiler]
edited by theodor_gylden on 1/11/2014
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Nathanael S. Wells
Posts: 80
12/16/2013
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IHNIWTR wrote:
Wren - I doubt it. I don't think cloths were as big an industry in the First City to necessitate a Master.
[spoiler]after all, the first time they even saw Silk was when the King Of A Hundred Hearts came from china; and not long after that, the city fell.[/spoiler]
I'd hazard fabrics probably fell under different Masters - Apples, who also deals in woods and crops in addition fruits and vegetables, and Hearts, who also deals in the byproducts of meat: leather and fleece.
edited by IHNIWTR on 12/16/2013
True about that particular kind of fabric. But in Mesopotamia, the "land of reeds and clay", there was little that rivalled the economic importance of cloth, as other resources were either lacking (wood, stone and ores) or unsuited to the climate. One of my professors actually pointed out that, during much of the Bronze Age up until the Seleucid times, cloth was the trade good of the Mesopotamian polities, as flax could be grown by creating a micro-climate controlled by date trees, and textile-spinning was a domestic cottage industry that both women and domestic slaves (the wardim of Akkad and the ur of Sumer) could do in their "spare time". Plus, much like pottery (the other big market, in a land of clay) clothes need to be replaced often and are competitive in the way of fashion.
Sorry for the rant! But take it as a case for why the First City ought to have had a Mr Veils, even in case it didn't.
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Nathanael S. Wells, the Epicurean Polymath.
Founder and Patron of the Damnation Army, a philanthropic society devoted towards bringing food and clothes to the destitute and impoverished Seekers! Consider donating food (no Rubbery Lumps, please!) or clothes (no Veils-Velvet, please! We don't need another incident.)
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Nathanael S. Wells
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12/16/2013
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Blackleaf:
[spoiler]Honestly, I would love to do some concrete research in the direction of speleoptics, and for instance, gather the actual approximations of the Neath/Parabola colours as seen in the in-game artwork. After all irrigo seems to be similar to purple or indigo, cosmogone seems to be reddish or somewhat orange, gant has a pretty colourless but, IIRC, slighty yellowish-green tinge, and peligin seems to be the colour of the zee, while apocyan might be teal-ish (as seen from the Crooked-Cross).
You sorting those colours in "light" and "dark" is therefore (while impossible to do with Surface colours) quite interesting given you back them up with text connotations. I wonder whether that is the range of those colours; not "warm" or "cold" but rather "light" and "dark". Given that, you'd think they'd be hues of each other, but no!
And as for the "scheme" - I'm afraid it wouldn't work. The Bazaar, jumped-up former celestial bell-turned-knife that it is, still is very picky about its love stories and doesn't accept "manufactured" love stories. It didn't work when the Provost of Summerset tried to make a tragic romance of the Senior Speaker and the Consumptive Cryptozoologist, and it didn't work when Mr Spices turned a tragic love story into Jack-of-Smiles.
Tough times, it is. But it does so like our stories! And if it thinks it's got it bad, he might join the Lorn-Flukes for a swim and see if it returns with the same opinion.[/spoiler]
--
Nathanael S. Wells, the Epicurean Polymath.
Founder and Patron of the Damnation Army, a philanthropic society devoted towards bringing food and clothes to the destitute and impoverished Seekers! Consider donating food (no Rubbery Lumps, please!) or clothes (no Veils-Velvet, please! We don't need another incident.)
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Sackville
Posts: 295
12/17/2013
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Apocalyptic, apocryphal? Apocopic?
Apocryphal actually seems to make sense for a Crooked Cross. Is apocyan the color of doubt and falsehood?
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Nathanael S. Wells
Posts: 80
12/17/2013
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I wonder about the daughter of the Bazaar.
[spoiler]I put some stock in the theory that the Lorn-Flukes are failed Bazaars, and this is why they have such a jealous hate towards it; this, the lacre, the Dark-Carapaced and Gilded Crustaceans, as well as the Bazaar having a dark carapace itself, all leads me to believe that the Baazarine lifeform as it occurs between stars is something reminiscent of marine biology - its spires perhaps similar to the spines we see on the artwork of the Flukes.
How would its offspring be a mountain? Perhaps in coupling with the Sun, it bore a -- no, that doesn't make any sense. I'm probably thinking in the wrong direction.[/spoiler]
Apocyanic being associated with doubt makes the most sense for now, I believe.
--
Nathanael S. Wells, the Epicurean Polymath.
Founder and Patron of the Damnation Army, a philanthropic society devoted towards bringing food and clothes to the destitute and impoverished Seekers! Consider donating food (no Rubbery Lumps, please!) or clothes (no Veils-Velvet, please! We don't need another incident.)
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John Vazquez
Posts: 108
4/1/2014
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I just found a pice of information regarding this issue when researching a bit of history at Polythreme. The whole entry is here
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/John~Vazquez?fromEchoId=3412956
[spoiler] Apparently, the first ship to arrive there was carrying the Pharaoh's daughter.
Come to think about it, this raises more questions that it answers... is this daughter the Duchess or one of her sisters? Did the King come in the same ship or before that?
What is really interesting is that a character we thought as secondary might in the future be a source of more information that we expected. I am looking forward to come back to London and deepen my relationship to Lyme!! (if he is the one they are talking about) [/spoiler]
edited by John Vazquez on 4/1/2014
edited by John Vazquez on 4/1/2014
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Blackleaf
Posts: 552
12/16/2013
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Just a fair bit of warning. You can only have one spoiler per post. Thus if you quote something someone has spoilered you cant add your own spoiler to your own post.
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No cats or investigations of photographers please.
Same goes for Sparring,Loitering,Suppers and Games of chess! Sure I'll accept them occasionaly but I wont help you grind them most of the time.
But calling cards are highly welcome! (Got too much influence for cards at the moment. Sorry!)
Character profile can be found here: http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Blackleaf
Ware serpents and know spires.
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Diptych
Administrator
Posts: 3493
12/16/2013
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Wren wrote:
Mr Veils spoilers
[spoiler]That would make sense, but the story of Uncle Archibald's legacy more or less explicitly states that the present Mr Veils is the Vake, and that the Vake is the present Mr Veils.[/spoiler]
Personally, I suspect that it's a simple case of the Masters' ever-changing names and roles - that, indeed, the one who would later become Apples (for instance) held dominion over farmers and all of their goods, including the fibres they wove. (It strikes me that, in the pottery trade of the time, Mr Cups must have held considerable sway, while now he's responsible for little more visible than rubbish-collection and knick-knacks.)
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Sir Frederick, the Libertarian Esotericist. Lord Hubris, the Bloody Baron.
Juniper Brown, the Ill-Fated Orphan. Esther Ellis-Hall, the Fashionable Fabian.
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Nathanael S. Wells
Posts: 80
12/16/2013
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Yup. One NPC mentions the Duchess' father "tearing down the gods", and the honey dream refers to some regretful business with the Sun and a crisis averted with the pharaohs death. Therefore we must assume the pharaoh is Akhenaten, and the Second City his holy city of Akhetaten, the modern day Tell el-Amarna.
Plus IIRC someone mentions that the Second City didn't have enough temples to be Alexandria. And another NPC says that the Duchess was long before Marc Anthony's (i.e. Cleopatras, by association) time. This in turn means that the Second City must predate the Ptolemaic dynasty, and therefore the point in history when Alexandria became the prominent city in Egypt.
I am not sure whether Mr Veils is from Egypt - at least, I don't think he's the Pharaoh. But he seems to be entangled with the sorry business that occurred between the Masters and the Second City and eventuall called for the betrayal of another. But how exactly, I do not know. Maybe he IS from Egypt after all, and I'm just being skeptical for no good reason.
(Strange, though, that the times of the First City would see no Master allotted to textiles, when Mesopotamia has always been a land of spinners, weavers and cloth merchants.)
--
Nathanael S. Wells, the Epicurean Polymath.
Founder and Patron of the Damnation Army, a philanthropic society devoted towards bringing food and clothes to the destitute and impoverished Seekers! Consider donating food (no Rubbery Lumps, please!) or clothes (no Veils-Velvet, please! We don't need another incident.)
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IHNIWTR
Posts: 346
12/16/2013
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a question regarding Eaten and the Second City:
[spoiler]During its quest, is it made absolutely clear that its drowning (not the betrayal!) was at the hand of other Masters? Reading varinn's post made me think - how did the Pharaoh learn the Correspondence?
A possible scenario is that several Masters vied for the city - the lure to them is not simply the potency of the love story which enables the initial sale, but the potential of a city entire to produce love stories of sufficient quantity and quality - they always seem to go for the capitals of empires. In any case, the Pharaoh, a Sun worshiper, sees these "harbingers of night" approach, and designs to trap one of them and extract knowledge from it - drowning it in a well (perhaps of sour beer to make it drunk, and thus obedient and confused?) beneath a temple.
Afterwards, the sale of the city is arranged; perhaps he even orchestrated the tragedy which brought about the final deal. Then, in-between stars, he moves. His daughter stops him and the city falls, but it seems The Masters, at least, are severely hampered. This necessitates a new Master brought up: Veils, who uses his unique unbound position to ensure the fall of the third city and possibly the release of the other Masters through the sacrifice of Eaten.
this would mean Eaten was betrayed not only by the Bazaar of its fellow Masters, but even by humans who it designed to deal with.[/spoiler]
edited by IHNIWTR on 12/16/2013
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Wren
Posts: 30
12/16/2013
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I believe the question of why Mr. Veils only appeared during the 2nd city might be relatively simple.
Our Mr. Veils is actually the second being to hold that title. The first one abandoned his position in order to ....
[spoiler]
never stop hunting. In other words he became the vake. (Perhaps the move from furs and wool to agricultural based textiles was too boring for such an aggressive individual)
[/spoiler]
It would also explain why Sinning Jenny and her order are working closely with/ keeping an eye on the current Mr Veils
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IHNIWTR
Posts: 346
12/16/2013
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Wren - I doubt it. I don't think cloths were as big an industry in the First City to necessitate a Master.
[spoiler]after all, the first time they even saw Silk was when the King Of A Hundred Hearts came from china; and not long after that, the city fell.[/spoiler]
I'd hazard fabrics probably fell under different Masters - Apples, who also deals in woods and crops in addition fruits and vegetables, and Hearts, who also deals in the byproducts of meat: leather and fleece.
edited by IHNIWTR on 12/16/2013
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