[center][h2] [color=ed1c24]The Xian Clique [/color][/h2][/center]
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[center][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvo-u5pU6jY][b]The Revolution is successful[/b][/url][/center]

[center][b]Upright and Equal[/b][/center]

Even though the war had begun in full in Sarelia and Serrathia, the battle had yet to begin in Faresia. Thus, life continued in the same tense way it had for weeks upon the Soroyan-Xianese border in the North and South. Each morning, Xianese regiments would rise from their barracks and continue drilling in how to properly enter, exit, and re-enter trenches, hand to hand combat within the close-quarters of the trenches, and finally firing and reloading. Command called this 'the three basics' and they were strictly drilled for the inevitable day that these tasks would cease being training and become reality. It was drilled into the minds of the Xianese soldier that soon their sparing partner would be a Soroyan soldier and the target dummies would be living, breathing, and moving enemies to the Xianese revolution. 

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[i]Xianese soldiers practicing firing and reloading as quickly as possible, this drill would eventually become a sort of game within Xianese regiments in the calm days before the war.[/i][/center]

While the men trained, the general staff panicked as the issue of logistics and supply became the debated argument from the moment the sun rose to the moment the sun fell in the west. A heavy rationing on munitions and food-stuffs would become the norm in the first months of Xian's entry into the war. Some blamed the General Staff's lack of foresight, and some blamed the droughts in the south-east as the source of the rationing. Regardless of who was to blame, morale suffered as the portions became smaller and smaller and their gifted rounds fewer and fewer. 

Civilian life also faced change with the coming war and the subsequent rationing. While ordinary life remained the same as it did a year prior in Beiqling, in the southern cities such as Changtan the price of grain skyrocketed and many Xianese civilians began resorting to other means to get food-stuffs such as bread and rice. Thus, the civilian and the soldier began to become equal in their fears for Xian's entry into the war...

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[i]A Xianese child-farmer scrounges for surviving, edible, crops during the drought of 1907.[/i][/center]

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[center][b]Flulin Jazz[/b][/center]

While morale already faced a crisis in Xian itself, in the Soroyan colonial capital of Flulin a new age of culture had begun. For those living the high life of the Flulin elite, the new music craze of Varian-influenced 'jazz' flooded night clubs and bars with it's new sound. The forerunner of this new '[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SY_iZMpVII]Shidaiqu[/url]' music was Li Shiyun, known anti-nationalist activist and leader of a group of musicians and artists who wished to harmonize Varian and Faresian styles into a new golden age for both cultures. The regime in Beiqling viewed this differently however. Known nationalist and White Tiger sympathizer Jang Winghau decried the movement as the beginning of an 'age of decadence' in Xianese culture and that for Xian to survive she would have to 'stay the course against the Varian whale'.

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[i]Flulin, circa 1905[/i][/center]

While the music was decried by the more hardliners in the Liberation Council, the populace embraced Shidaiqu and the sound of traditional Xianese folk music mixed with Deltoran saxophones or Kalpian trumpets filled the streets of Changtan and other southern cities even with the war drawing near. It was even suspected the President-General had grown a soft-spot for the music, though largely due to the Madame Ye Liu's rather open sympathy for Varian art and culture.