The Smoker Revolution

[-Bretonia-]

you honestly beilive what is iilegal to the people would be ilegal to the military!!! haha what fools tyou are, truely!

(( OOC: With no modern industry of any kind whatsoever in Niur - essentially what you are proposing with your various restrictions on the people - it would be difficult for them to even afford a military at all, and if they did, they'd be on horseback with wooden spears and bows. The development of hydrogen fuel technology, without an existing industry to back it up, would seem somewhat futile. It's the same reason why Mongolia isn't considered a major power these days. In fact, when was the last time you heard anything about Mongolia, like, at all? ))

[Niur]

we do have modern industry, we just happen to be a somewhat marxist state, so we don't have private industry. That does not mean we don't have small buisnesses, we do, however, conglarates are illegal. we have many industry leads. we are an exporter of boats, 3d mapping technology, pearls, natural gas, sails, stone, fish and many others. to say we don't have industry would be like sayoing china doesnt have industry.

[Romandeos]

we do have modern industry, we just happen to be a somewhat marxist state, so we don't have private industry. That does not mean we don't have small buisnesses, we do, however, conglarates are illegal. we have many industry leads. we are an exporter of boats, 3d mapping technology, pearls, natural gas, sails, stone, fish and many others. to say we don't have industry would be like sayoing china doesnt have industry.

OOC:

China also has a dangerous economic condition, in which the remaining State and Party-run enterprises are consistently failing to compete effectively with a growing private industry.

By the way, do you use a spell checking program at all? I am just curious.

IC:

Imperial Diplomatic Proclamation

We are given to understand smoking is once again illegal in Naretion. We are disgusted at this choice of actions, and all previous statements made by this Government stand.

~ Imperial Diplomatic Representative Richard Warden

[Niur]

By the way, do you use a spell checking program at all? I am just curious.

unfortunetlly i don't have one, you see i have Microsoft word, but my computer is so slow that when i open it it freezes it,

China also has a dangerous economic condition, in which the remaining State and Party-run enterprises are consistently failing to compete effectively with a growing private industry.

Well from my point of view (i live in the US) China is doing great! we owe them so much money, infact we could give everybody in china 50 bucks and we still wouldn't have paid off our debt. right now their a world leader in industry, and thanks to the tiny effact the economic crisis had on them, their economy is one of the strogest in the world.

[Narodna Odbrana]

OOC: Less chatter and more role-play might save this thread.

---

"Naretion has restored its smoking ban," Hourame said, looking at the file in front of her.

"Excellent," laughed the Grandmaster. "That should bring prices back to where they were, and eliminate the legal competition. Legalization can be hard on our profit margins, not to mention making it difficult for us to inculcate the proper attitude towards the consumption of other illegal goods and services in the younger generation. Now, I see that Niur is still intent on meddling."

"Yes," Hourame replied. "They seem to made an effort to acquire some hydrogen-powered vessels for use by their military. Of course, they still have no aircraft, as the small storage volume of hydrogen systems makes them useless for aviation. But that means they are not entirely dependent on wind any more."

"They also have some natural gas resources?" asked the old man as he withdrew another cigarette from its silver case.

"Apparently so, although they will be limited in productive capacity due to their inability to use proper burn-off techniques in processing," the Yekruti woman replied.

"And there is no private transport for individuals in Niur," observed the Grandmaster. He lit his cigarette and paused for a moment. "You know," he said with a bitter ring in his voice, "I really hate Communists. They're just so bad for business."

"We'll deal with the Niurans at home later. For now, their patrols still don't bother me," he said dismissively. "They'll need to do a lot more than buy some hydrogen-powered patrol boats if they want to play in our league."

---

OOC: Can we progress beyond single sentences and paragraphs, people? Honestly, you'll never be any good at this game until you learn to actually write something interesting.

This is a story. Make it entertaining.

[Naretion]

OOC: Less chatter and more role-play might save this thread.

---

"Naretion has restored its smoking ban," Hourame said, looking at the file in front of her.

"Excellent," laughed the Grandmaster. "That should bring prices back to where they were, and eliminate the legal competition. Legalization can be hard on our profit margins, not to mention making it difficult for us to inculcate the proper attitude towards the consumption of other illegal goods and services in the younger generation. Now, I see that Niur is still intent on meddling."

"Yes," Hourame replied. "They seem to made an effort to acquire some hydrogen-powered vessels for use by their military. Of course, they still have no aircraft, as the small storage volume of hydrogen systems makes them useless for aviation. But that means they are not entirely dependent on wind any more."

"They also have some natural gas resources?" asked the old man as he withdrew another cigarette from its silver case.

"Apparently so, although they will be limited in productive capacity due to their inability to use proper burn-off techniques in processing," the Yekruti woman replied.

"And there is no private transport for individuals in Niur," observed the Grandmaster. He lit his cigarette and paused for a moment. "You know," he said with a bitter ring in his voice, "I really hate Communists. They're just so bad for business."

"We'll deal with the Niurans at home later. For now, their patrols still don't bother me," he said dismissively. "They'll need to do a lot more than buy some hydrogen-powered patrol boats if they want to play in our league."

---

OOC: Can we progress beyond single sentences and paragraphs, people? Honestly, you'll never be any good at this game until you learn to actually write something interesting.

This is a story. Make it entertaining.

We have transport. Everyone is allowed cars that make no or little pollution like Hybrid cars.

[Narodna Odbrana]

OOC: Please note that comments on Niur are about Niur and comments about Naretion are about Naretion.

Naretion is a modern country. Niur is a joke.

Now, can we start role-playing, please?

[Niur]

OOC: Please note that comments on Niur are about Niur and comments about Naretion are about Naretion.

Naretion is a modern country. Niur is a joke.

Now, can we start role-playing, please?

OOC: stop insulting me! so far the only thing ive seen of your gov. is a crime snydicate!
SOOC: besides as i pointed out, petroleum based vehicles are only iilegal to the people, the military still uses them. And jet fuel isnt ordinary petrol anyway. The people may be tree huggers but the military isnt.

[Romandeos]

OOC: Please note that comments on Niur are about Niur and comments about Naretion are about Naretion.

Naretion is a modern country. Niur is a joke.

Now, can we start role-playing, please?

OOC:Oh go to hell
SOOC: besides as i pointed out, petroleum based vehicles are only iilegal to the people, the military still uses them. And jet fuel isnt ordinary petrol anyway. The people may be tree huggers but the military isnt.

OOC:

That was a flame just there, which can and should get you in it bad with the Moderators.

[Niur]

OOC:but i would say he's the one flaming, people go to war over insults like that.

[Naretion]

Naretion would like to announce the reason they banned smoking again and took the smokers in to bad company. Is because of Rosoana.

[Romandeos]

OOC:but i would say he's the one flaming, people go to war over insults like that.

OOC:

Telling somebody to go to hell in an OOC statement is unacceptable. Do it again, and I will call in the Moderators.

EDIT: Thanks for editing it out.

IC:

Imperial Diplomatic Statement

We would ask the leaders of Naretion to elaborate on the most recent statement they have made.

~ Imperial Diplomatic Representative Richard Warden

[Naretion]

Rasoana also hated my ban smoking act and later on he Friendly fired 2,000 of my men. When we were working together. Now we are at war.

[Niur]

the Niuri elite council had this to say about all Narodna Odbrana nationals: do too the fact that they can no longer be trusted, they will now be brought into custody. this statement was very unpopular with the people, and many threatend to impeach the supporting members of the high council. It was not because of the fact that the people liked Narodna Odbrana, instaed at that time they hated it, but instead they felt that it was inappropriate to detain anyone of their nationality. the main three supporting members of the bill were impeached the following weak, their replacements being elected a week later. although the Niuri people were now content, the Narodna Odbrana nationals still remained in custody.

[Narodna Odbrana]

OOC: Please note that comments on Niur are about Niur and comments about Naretion are about Naretion.

Naretion is a modern country. Niur is a joke.

Now, can we start role-playing, please?

OOC: stop insulting me! so far the only thing ive seen of your gov. is a crime snydicate!

"My dear man," laughed the Grandmaster, drawing yet again on one of his beloved cigarettes. "That is precisely what Narodna Odbrana is: A crime syndicate."

the Niuri elite council had this to say about all Narodna Odbrana nationals: do too the fact that they can no longer be trusted, they will now be brought into custody. this statement was very unpopular with the people, and many threatend to impeach the supporting members of the high council. It was not because of the fact that the people liked Narodna Odbrana, instaed at that time they hated it, but instead they felt that it was inappropriate to detain anyone of their nationality. the main three supporting members of the bill were impeached the following weak, their replacements being elected a week later. although the Niuri people were now content, the Narodna Odbrana nationals still remained in custody.

OOC: Ignoring that last line; you have no one in custody because, frankly speaking, there is no one you can take into custody, as you shall soon see.

---

Unfortunately, this public outcry over the bill to arrest individuals hailing from Narodna Odbrana and the subsequent removal of the three principal backers of such legislation proved to be only the beginning of the People's Republic of Niur's embarrassment on the issue.

Once passed, the new law requiring the arrest of individuals from Narodna Odbrana meant that police and customs officials had to find such individuals to begin with. As weeks passed without a single arrest, people in law enforcement began to get suspicious. Finally, someone had the brilliant idea of pulling out an atlas and trying to find out where Narodna Odbrana was, not to mention how many people lived there and of what nature these people might be.

That was when it was discovered that no such nation existed; "Narodna Odbrana" simply wasn't on the map. Anywhere.

Eventually, a trip to the library and some historical research revealed that "Narodna Odbrana" was the name of an obscure Serbian nationalist organization that existed for a few short years immediately before the so-called Great War, a struggle more commonly known as "World War I".

The group's existence had apparently been a brief one. As its name - "The People's Defense" - suggested, it was devoted to the idea of Serbian irridentism as a moral and political necessity in the face of Hapsburg political ambitions in the Balkans. These views eventually led a small coterie of its members to conduct one of history's most notorious crimes: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Countess Sophie, in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo on July 28th, 1914. That act - the killing of a married couple and their unborn child - had been the catalyst that had sparked four long years of brutal warfare across the whole of Europe, with side actions on two other continents and most of the world's oceans. When the dust finally settled in 1918, more than 15 million people had died and the political landscape had been irrevocably changed: The institution of European monarchy had been mortally wounded, creating a power vacuum within which the forces of Fascism and Communism would in time grow to wreak even greater havoc on a hapless world.

But as for Narodna Odbrana, it seemed to simply disappear. If anyone had been willing to invest the time and energy in tracking it down, they would have discovered that, even before the end of the Great War, the group split into two warring factions - "Bijela Ruka" ("The White Hand") and "Crna Ruka" ("The Black Hand"). The former group became the principal force supporting the rise to power of Prince Alexandar Karadordevic, who was eventually crowned King Alexandar I of Yugoslavia; Alexandar would, in the course of his brief career, go on to overthrow his own government in a coup de etat, establishing himself as a dictator, and then be assassinated by Macedonian nationalists in Marseilles, France on October 9th, 1934. His followers remained active in Yugoslav politics for a number of years beyond the death of their royal patron, eventually staging the March 27th, 1941 coup that led Yugoslavia into war with Hitler's German Reich, ending the existence of the Yugoslav Kingdom once and for all.

The latter group enjoyed a much shorter, and yet considerably more enigmatic history: Hunted down by the Serbian government even as the Great War still raged, it was allegedly broken with the trial and execution of its principal leader, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, who bore the intelligence code name of "Apis" ("The Bee"). According to the history books, the Black Hand ceased to exist with the execution of Dimitrijevic and three of his henchmen by a firing squad at dawn on June 24th, 1917.

And that, it seemed, was that.

It would have taken far more work than anyone in Niur was prepared to put into the investigation to actually send people to the former Yugoslav Republic - now shattered into half a dozen independent nations - and began tracing the matter further to determine if, indeed, the Black Hand was broken by the Solunski Proces ("Salonika Trial") of 1917, or whether some root of the organization survived in the underground to continue its struggle against the White Hand; certainly the endless series of calamities and setbacks endured by the "winners" in that long-dead power struggle might suggest, at least to those of a more conspiratorial bent, that some covert force continued to work at cross-purposes to their plans. Further digging might have led to the discovery of names, places, and dates; a pattern suggestive of a shadowy group whose existence continued, not only through the remainder of the short life of the ill-fated Yugoslav Kingdom, but through the bloody civil war that tore the nation apart as Chetniks, Ustashe, and Partisans gleefully slaughtered each others families under the flimsy excuse that another world war happened to be going on at the time; indeed, not only through the awful internecine carnage of the Second World War, but on through the entire history of Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as a barely noticed anti-communist front, seldom in direct struggle with the State and yet always undermining it; and not only through that, but through the second, less horrifying but no less means-spirited "ethnic cleansing" that followed the Republic's demise.

Of course, they would have discovered that, with each passing decade, this shadowy organization, whatever it might be called, was steadily becoming less and less nationalistic, but rather more and more mercenary until - at last - it was nothing more than an offshoot of the Serbian Mob.

Or, perhaps, the opposite.

But long before anyone in Niur would have gotten that far, someone would have stopped and asked why Niur's ruling council had been so thick as to bother to order the incarceration of "citizens" of a "nation" that didn't exist, and of one whose "citizens" - if they could be called that - would almost certainly be living under false documentation anyway. All on the pretext that "they couldn't be trusted".

Or maybe they wouldn't, considering the consistent pattern of foolishness Niur's government had displayed in the handling of all of its other public affairs, since the inception of the People's Republic. In any event, when the story finally made it back to the press, it ended up playing as the government's version of the media's infamous "cottage cheese mining" debacle of earlier years - a complete public affairs fiasco.

---

tl&dr: There is no nation called "Narodna Odbrana"; it's an international terrorist/criminal organization whose "population" is distributed worldwide among the "hard-working" citizenry of other countries, and whose "GDP" is part (but by no means all) of these nations' "shadow economy". But then if you'd looked at the name ("The Secret Society of Narodna Odbrana"), you might have figured that out.

And please start role-playing. When you don't RP properly, you make Baby Jesus cry.

[New Olwe]

Grand Duke Jason Frost sat patiently and waited for the man he had summoned. Finally, a knock came at the door to his private chambers. "Enter," he said.

The man who came in through the door was tall, imposing, and shaven bald. His intense, piercing blue eyes regarded his national leader and commander-in-chief without fear, and only betrayed a small amount of the curiosity he must be feeling. "You wanted to see me, sir?" he asked, his tone and expression neutral.

Jason nodded. "How much do you know about the current events in Naretion, Captain Zimmer?" he asked.

"They've outlawed smoking, which caused a small and rather disorganized revolution," Zimmer said. "We have spies there keeping track of the situation."

Jason didn't bother to ask how Zimmer knew that last part. The commanding officer of the Blood Knights, New Olwe's most feared (yet also, strangely enough, smallest in number) military unit, had his methods and knowledge of them was usually better left to people with stronger stomachs. "Our spies have uncovered some startling things in the past couple of days," he said. "I have two videos to show you. You may want to sit down."

Zimmer nodded, but remained standing. Jason turned on the television in the corner and watched the disturbing crime scene footage with Zimmer. At the end, the camera zoomed in on the note -- Snitches, put a sock in it.

"Looks like something we would do," Zimmer grunted. The Blood Knights' mandate was to be as ruthless, brutal and sadistic as they could get away with being under the guidelines of international law, and sometimes to go outside those guidelines if they were reasonably certain they wouldn't be caught.

"Exactly," Jason replied. "And as you already said, the Smoker's Revolution isn't organized enough to pull something like this off. This is interference from another entity. I want you to find out who, and I want you to extract the information as slowly and painfully as possible."

"Torture, sir? I don't think the WA will like that very much," Zimmer observed.

"The enemy threw the Geneva Convention out the window first," Jason replied. "I'm taking off your leash. Now, this video will give you a lead to go on."

Zimmer watched the next video, which unlike the first one had sound. A parabolic mike had been used to pick up what the young man offering cigarettes to some younger children was saying, and it also picked up his South Slavic accent.

"We're assuming a Slavic country sent these people into Naretion, I take it?" Zimmer asked.

Jason nodded. "Find out which one," he said. "As I told you before, your leash is off. Tell your men that once you know who your enemies are, you're to start taking trophies. The Blood Knight who brings home the most scalps gets a promotion."

Zimmer chuckled. "Morvanya will be a General soon if you keep offering promotions for activities she finds arousing," he said. Morvanya was the Blood Knights' resident Elf, and a bit of a nightmare fetishist.

Jason chose not to respond to this, instead saying, "Get your people ready. You move out tomorrow." He checked the clock -- 12:01 AM -- and amended, "Well, later today."