[color=007236][b]A view from above – The New California Republic[/b][/color]

It sweeps down from the arctic, or perhaps just below there, cold rising winds underneath tawny brown wings. Tracing down a fading summer clime further and further. Over cascading peaks and over tall treed slopes verdant and browning with the unceasing cycle of the seasons, summer is going, autumn coming in. Hello, how do you do? My turn now? See you next year. On and on they go in a spinning dance from one partner to the other. And with them come the tell-tale signs to the world they shape beneath their claying fingers. Buds might bloom in spring, the young in the fields dancing from the wombs into the world, the summer might raise high the corn and fatten the brahmin ready for harvest, or dry and thin them out.

Such is the way of the world, such is the way of this travelling soul from a place it does not know by name, but knows is north, is cold and knows to head south by the motion of the sun above and with the sweeping winds ruffling its feathers to help guide it to safe havens by the warmer crashing waves of a coastal shore. So today it will soar over a land it sees beneath it, turned and turned and changed evermore by the tall-walking figures that live under a fluttering cloth embroidered with a two headed bear. A wilder land in the north, a meandering river, bordered and marked by the constant riders up and down with cracking sticks that keep it to the mists away from the sudden blooms of death that took its father before it and a mate long ago. 

More and more tall-walking figures pour into this land, too many even for a land as large as this, felling old friends that once seemed to stretch up with green fingers and wooden arms to bid it rest and sit and tell them of the world a while. They pull them down into squat boxes that spout smoke and the smells of burning flesh. In the higher places, metal burrowing figures hide among the mountains here and there, seeking to not draw the attention of the tall walkers. Who are these metal monsters it wonders? That fear those who might burn the flesh within the metal? The world is changing, and perhaps even the burrowers know this and seek to just survive if they cannot live as they once did.

And then it is past the changing land into a changed one. Here the tall-walkers talk and cry at each other with singular figures on wooden hills harking high and low for a strange reason. And for a moment on a stone skeleton, it waits and listens to the hackling beneath it.

“Is the new republican party even capable of governing anymore? What have you done but fattened the purses of the agricultural barons at the expense of good honest smallholders? Your party is driving this great nation into their hands! We in the democratic alliance party believe that it is time to put the voices of the smallholders back at the heart of our republic! New land for old soldiers! Fresh, organic, unchanged and healthy food is what we need, not these new-fangled geno-modified crops that depress wages and-”

“-Now that is a lie right there and my opponent should know better than to resort to slander! The new crops are a boon to us all! Cheaper food means more on the kitchen table for our children, no more famine! No more lean hungers and hard choices! That is what the New Republican party has brought to this nation, and more change will be brought in a second term! The new crops will open up new lands in sandy Baja and the mountains of Oregon previously unfarmable for our old veterans!”

It does not understand the words spoken therein, but it hears and listens and sees that much ado about something is occupying the minds of the tall-walkers. And then a young tall-walker spots it, throws a pebble and it moves up and away to a place beyond the arm of the ones below. Up and up and south and downwind it keeps on its path once more. O'er fields of golding corn and grassed plains of munching brahmin soon to be harvested and butchered in the fall. O'er a bustling scene of cars, cabs, cycles and tycoons that talk of opportunities in a land it will never see. It sweeps west to the coast and follows the tracks of tall masted ships sailing south to those promised lands of humid heat and perilous jungles that bring fortune to those brave enough to risk the risks. For now though, such plans are in the early stages of motion, a casus belli has yet to emerge from the moving pieces on the board that will secure either the salvation or damnation of the land of the two-headed bear.

And then it is back east. Over a host of red and white marching among a scene of marbled halls and statues and political capital calling and calling for something, echoing the calls of another host from another road. On and on the two hosts go, closer and closer and then through a thin cordon of peacekeeping figures into each other and there is blood on the asphalt and crying and screaming as a ghoul and wolf bray against each other and move the tired republic closer and closer to a darker illness than already afflicts the nation.

Leaving behind the scene of a bloodbath that will convulse the soul of a nation, it continues south and east and east and south. Over the neck of the long peninsula and to the mouth and marshes of the great river. Whereon either side of the banks of the watercourse workers move among the brush, weakening and strengthening constructs and setting about to foil each other’s designs on the other. But it does not care no longer about such things, as it glides gently down, feet in the warm waters of the bay, setting down after a long journey that where a sun rose up on one side, at its terminus it sets down on the other. And for the New Californian Republic, so passes a day, much the same in some places as the last day, much different in other places, and for each of them, all looking to seeing what the next day brought to them.