(I’m posting this extremely unfinished post here just to force myself to write the rest sooner. I’m not bothering to space it out yet. Pretend this isn’t here) [b]Remgrad, City of the World Revolution[/b] Things hadn’t aged here since the Great War. Their Aerowagon looked like something from the past and future had been fused together and hurled back in time - the product of insular thought and necessity, it had the appearance of a princely Victorian carriage, with rear, spoked wheels bigger than a man, and smaller front wheels like that of a bicycle. An aircraft engine powered a large rear-mounted propeller used for on-rail, high-speed propulsion. Louverture watched the blur of buildings pass by the windows as the Aerowagon sped over the tracks. The old dwellings became more deteriorated the closer they got to the outskirts of the city, where heavy bombardment rendered every construction an aging ruin. It felt like he had boarded a time-traveling machine to when the fires of Revolution raged most fiercely. First there had been buildings weathered by time but otherwise intact, with asymmetrical additions and repairs that clung to the old Tsarist structures like time-warped growths, rising vertically and outward one on top of the other, utilizing every bit of space available to the revolutionary inhabitants of this place lost in time. That was the present. Then came the crumbling remains of edifices long-ago destroyed by artillery barrages, slumped against one another and riddled with the markings of slaughter. This no-man’s-land was a glimpse of thirty years prior, in stasis, both destroyed and preserved by the war. Here the ruins were prowled by Communists and Queensmen shooting at one another from behind the rubble in sporadic skirmishes fought endlessly through a fog-of-war so thick it obscured everything physical and not. Louverture knew of men who fought here every day having long-forgotten why, their minds twisted and fixed only on the need to kill; the buildings were like desiccated trees too stubborn to die, and those who prowled the concrete jungle like man-hunters, lying in wait behind the ruins for men-prey to cross their rifle scopes. This was where the present and the past clashed without a future in sight. Louverture hoped the men he led would turn out different. That the war would not sway them to their baser instincts and that they would instead carry on with grace and a good purpose. He had christened himself and them with the names of good men, of liberators, and men of moral character. He travelled with a John Brown and Shields Green; with Nat Turner and Robert Shaw; Rainsford Jayhawker, Douglass and Quaker Comet among them too. The Russians had done the same with theirs. Every man and woman here had rid themselves of their old name and taken up a new one in a ceremony awash with the color red. There were Revmiras, Ideyas, and Engelsinas here; Marlens, Barrikads, and Vilenors named that way after fallen revolutionaries, theorists, and simple concepts. As far as Louverture could tell, these were the names of people and things smashed together to create something new that was neither Christian nor Tsarist; it was a complete renouncement of the old Russian tradition. Something built on the ruins of the past, like all things in Remgrad.