Explaining The New Era

I was becoming increasingly bored with the Dishon story, and after Jistap’s coup, I was very excited about “The Watchers” storyline, so I decided to combine the two stories, or rather, have “The Watchers” story take over.

In the early 90s you may remember the phrase “New World Order” was in the news a lot. I was trying to imitate that when I had Jistap talk about creating a new Era for Fabulae, and so I decided to name the new series after that phrase.

Chapter 2
In Chapter 2, Jistap reveals his plan to end all wars and bring peace to the planet of Fabulae. He decides that war will only end when all nations are united behind one government. And so, paradoxically, war can only end after one last huge war to conquer all the nations under one government.

This sounds like a child’s idea, and of course it is. As an elementary school student, this was something that often seemed like a good idea to me. I thought we Americans should just conquer the whole world. It would be really bloody at first, but in the long run it would stop all future wars. None of the adults I mentioned it too thought it was a good idea, but I could never see exactly what the problem was.

By the time I was 14, I guess I had evolved enough in my thinking to realize it was a terrible idea, but I still thought the idea had enough potential that it might appeal to someone else. And so I put it into the mind of Jistap.

Jistap decides to conquer all of Fabulae and place it under one government. The most obvious choice might be Marram, the most powerful nation at the time. However Jistap decides that Marram is too evil to be the basis of the new world order, so he orders Sulla, one of his team, to destroy it.

Meanwhile Hans, still flying around looking for Rodens, encounters Sulla’s ship and flies towards it thinking it to be Rodens. When Hans finds out what Sulla is doing, and what has happened during his absence, he flies back to confront Jistap. When Hans refuses to join Jistap’s new government, he is exiled with all the rest of the Watchers who oppose Jistap. Sulla returns to finish destroying Marram.

The destruction of Marram meant that the whole story about the war between Dishon and Marram now comes to a sudden end. There is a very lazy tagline at the end announcing as much. I was too sick of that story line to write any more than that.

There is also a subplot about Julius, the brother of Pericula (one of Jistap’s team), who plans to assassinate Jistap. This is another example of my starting another plot line, just complicating the plot for complications sake, without having a clear idea of where I was going with it.

Chapter 3
Jistap decides to bring about his plan by reconstituting the empire of Calet. This allowed me to combine the Watchers storyline with the civil war in Calet, which interested more than what was happening in Dishon. The historian of the group, Livius, gives a short update on the current situation in Calet. Since I never got around to fleshing out the intrigues within the opposing camps in Calet, I wrap up these plot points by having Livius give a short summary.

Jistap sends Sulla and Gaius to kill the current leaders of both opposing sides, and take over the armies in Calet.

Gaius is modeled on Gaius Caligula, and like his namesake, is portrayed as insane and power hungry with absolutely no respect of life and someone who even regards death as a source of entertainment. It seemed reasonably enough at the time because I was basing the character off a real historical figure, so I thought all these characteristics had a historical precedent. But in retrospect I think there is a difference between the characteristics of someone born into a position of power, and someone raised in a democratic society. The historical Gaius Caligula from the moment of birth believed himself to be superior to ordinary men, and their lives to be worthless. I’m not sure someone raised in a democracy would develop those same traits, and so in retrospect the character of Gaius now seems slightly ridiculous to me.

Chapter 4
At the end of Chapter 4 we find out that Azom has actually survived the assault on Marram, and that he is probably immortal and cannot be killed.

I guess I was feeling a little bit guilty about the lazy writing I had used to just suddenly end the whole Dishon plot. I thought I would resurrect Azom and start a new story line by having Azom attack Dishon single handedly. Instead of a war story, it would turn into a monster story, with Azom as a bloodthirsty creature who wandered the streets of Dishon killing innocent people, or something like that.

Again, this was to a certain extent just complicating the plot for the sake of complicating it. The big problem was that, unlike a lot of the other plot threads, this had absolutely no relation to the rest of the story. I soon regretted I had even began the whole thing. If this was a novel, I would have just gone back and edited the whole thing out. But I thought I was writing a comic book. So I couldn’t go back and touch an issue that was already finished. I had to leave the plot as it was, and find a way to deal with the Azom storyline that didn’t distract me too much from the main part of the story.

Chapter 5
Because Gaius turns out to be a terrible leader, Jistap sends Pericula to replace him. Pericula is reluctant to go, but Jistap threatens the life of her younger brother, who was caught planning an assassination attempt on Jistap’s life. This allowed me to wrap up one of the wandering plot threads about Julius and his assassination attempt. 
(In my continuing attempts to introduce subplots just for the sake of introducing subplots, I had earlier introduced the subplot that Pericula's younger brother Julius was planning the assassination of Jistap.)

"My name is Kile but I prefer to be called Kai."--This is, as far as I can remember, the only inside joke in this whole series of stories.
My little brother, at about the time I was writing this, went through a stage where he began introducing himself by saying "My name is Kyle, but I prefer to be called Kai."

Chapter 7
I was a bit delayed in doing it, but I finally wrapped up the Rodens story line in this chapter. My interests had moved on to other storylines, and the whole Rodens story now seemed very stale. So, I got lazy again and wrapped the whole thing up in a very quick, sloppy way, as I did with the Dishon story line.

Chapter 8

I had been hinting for several chapters previous that Jistap’s right hand man, Bakes, was actually plotting against him. Again, this was complicating the plot just for the sake of complicating it. I hadn’t thought about why Bakes would turn against Jistap, or where the whole thing was going.

And again, this illustrates a couple problems with the structure that were brought up previously. For one, because I hadn’t planned out where things were going, the sub-plot with Bakes ended up canceling out the Jistap story line instead of supplementing it. Bakes kills Jistap and takes over, and all of a sudden the Jistap’s New World Order and the whole story line associated with it comes to an end.

Also, the discrepancy between the time it took me to write this, and the time it takes someone to read it, are very evident here. Because I’m such a slow writer, averaging usually at best one chapter a week, it seemed to me that Jistap’s rule had been continuing for months. But if you’re reading this story in one sitting, than Jistap is just barely getting started when Bakes suddenly takes over and the plot line does a complete 180.

I did try and justify Bakes betrayal though. In my mind I compared Bakes overthrow of Jistap to the trial of the gang of four in China, or Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in the USSR. The party is recoiling from the bloody excesses of the former dictator, but still not willing to give up its authoritarian control.

Bakes ends Jistap’s New World Order, and brings all the exiles back into the city, but still, for the moment refuses to relinquish the control of the gang of 13.

As one plot line comes to an end, in this chapter I also continued many others. In Calet, Gaius has a meeting with a man named Blanka, who offers to restore him to control of the army, and overthrow Pericula. The embarrassingly bad storyline about Azom’s one-man assault on Dishon is also continued. And there is another meeting of the mysterious, unidentified group that has been watching the whole situation unfold.

In the last group, there is a brief mention of the situation in Fera. This refers to another project I started, but never finished.

I hadn’t given up completely on the idea of keeping several different “series” going at once, like a comic book company. After the failure of my first attempt, I should have learned how hard it was to keep one story going, yet alone several. But I was thinking I would write a series about the country of Fera, which I could do in my free time at study hall in school or in between classes.

It didn’t work out so well. The stories I did write about Fera were so horrible that I ended up literally throwing them away, and I never referenced Fera again in “The New Era.” For more on this, see "Contra Deka."

At the very end of this chapter there’s a cheesy little blurb that is literally just filler. Again, a consequence of myself being chained rigidly to my own format. I had determined that each “issue” should be no less than four pages. I was just short of that with this chapter, so I threw in some filler at the end.

Actually there is a lot of filler in this series. A lot of pointless conversations going nowhere occurring at the tail end of chapters are just pure filler to make my quota of four pages.

Chapter 9
Some mysterious force shuts the doors to the city, trapping all the Watchers inside, and leaving Gaius and Pericula stuck out in Calet. Gaius, once he realizes what has happened, tries to regain control of the Caletian army with the help of his new ally Blanka. The next 3 chapters are one long battle between Gaius and Blanka on one side, and Pericula, Drusus, and the rest of the Caletian officers on the other side. It ends more or less a draw, with Pericula and Drusus escaping to find aid for their wounded friend Kile.

Chapter 12
Chapter 12 introduces a love interest for Hans; a woman called Kyoko.

I had never written anything involving romance before, and as you may observe it doesn’t seem to be my forte. Especially at 14 when I didn’t really know anything about girls or romances or how these things progress at all.

It was now the summer before I entered 10th grade. A friend of mine, somewhat less shy than I was about this stuff, had written a whole series of short stories involving romantic fantasies between him and female classmates of his. Nothing dirty or anything, just common adolescent wish fulfillment. He saves the girl from terrorists, and she falls in love with him, or something like that.

When I had begun this whole thing as a simple war epic, I thought maybe if I stuck with it I would have a decent story finished that I could one day show to other people. Now, I was realizing I had a long wandering story that was going nowhere, and I was probably never showing this to anyone.

I had long ago started using profanity in this story, which itself limited the people I would be comfortable showing it to. I hadn’t originally planned on swearing so much, but there are just a lot of angry confrontations in the story where “gosh darn” didn’t seem to express the emotions I wanted.

So, deciding that I was never going to show this story to anyone anyway, I decided to experiment with a love story element. It’s absolutely horrible of course. It’s the most embarrassing part of the whole damn thing. I’m still somewhat embarrassed reading over it, but it was so long ago now that I almost feel that it was written by a different person.

It could only have been written by a 14 year old how had no knowledge of girls, never talked to girls, and was addicted to comic books and Star Trek. There’s only the barest hint of romance between Hans and Kyoko. She was just a beautiful girl that he could talk to, which I guess is all I ever wanted at 14.

A quick word about the names. Most of the names in this story are either based on historical figures, or variations on the names of people I know. For instance Jistap was Jim Stapert, the principle of my high school. Not that I thought Jim Stapert had dictatorial or mad tendencies like Jistap, it was just the first name that came to mind when I thought about a leader. Bakes, the scientist, was based off my science teacher Mr. Bakker. The advisors to Miktesh, Jole, Kile and Kirtten, were based off of the names of me and my siblings Joel, Kyle, and Kirstin. I decided it would be chivalrous to make myself the bad guy out of those 3, and so had the Jole character be the traitor. (My youngest sister, Jess, was so young at the time I guess I didn’t consider her part of the gang.) Hans was based off the last name of my best friend, but, like the rest of these characters, didn’t really resemble the person he was based off of. He sort of became an alter ego for me. An idealized, fantasy alter ego of course, but setting up Hans with a beautiful girl became wish fulfillment for me, at the time I was to afraid to even talk to girls.

Kyoko wasn’t based off of any girl specifically, but all the same I wanted to disguise the name by coming up with something as foreign sounding as possible. I was interested in Godzilla at the time, so I just took the name of one of the actresses from a Godzilla movie I saw. I never dreamed I’d someday be living in Japan and surrounded by girls named Kyoko.

Chapter 13-16
The next few chapters get even more confusing, and take the story line to an even new level of bizarre.

One thing that I always thought didn’t make a lot of sense is, why, after a period of 1000 years of peaceful, quiet, non-eventful history, did all hell suddenly break loose in Watcher civilization now? Why were mad men like Rodens and Gaius crawling out of the wood-work, and why did the democratic system, which had lasted so long, suddenly find itself under attack by Jistap and his private army? I always thought this was one of the biggest plot holes in the story, and the next few chapters address that.

It also addresses the long awaited question of: where did the whole city come from anyway? Who built the city before the Watchers inhabited it, and why is this enclave of super futuristic technology hidden away in the mountains of an otherwise primitive planet?

The people who built the city long ago, who have long been hiding in the shadows of the story having mysterious conversations, at last identify themselves, and tell the Watchers that they must evacuate the city. Bakes and the Watchers refuse.

The mysterious newcomers cannot be killed by laser guns, but the Watchers discover that they can be temporarily knocked down by them. Therefore when the newcomers reappear, they shoot them repeatedly to keep them disabled. Even though the newcomers can withstand one laser gunshot, the repeated shots threaten to kill them, until Hans intervenes to save their lives. In gratitude, the creatures take Hans and Kyoko up to their spaceship to explain everything to them.

In Chapter 15, the whole history of Fabulae is explained. This gets a bit confusing, but basically the idea is that long ago gods created life on Fabulae. Over time the humans gradually acquire more and more technology until they can discover the home of the gods. (Actually in this mythical world, all mythical creatures and animals are part of human society, but for the sake of simplicity I’ll just say humans).

The gods, enraged about being intruded upon, attack and destroy the humans. A small group of humans manage to escape into space. They call themselves “The Renegades”.

The city beneath the mountains is all that remains of the old world of human technology. It was presumed that the gods did not destroy it because they could not find it underneath the mountains. This is the city that Haket and his friends stumbled unto a hundred years ago, and began The Watcher civilization.

In the many years since, “The Renegades” and their descendents continued to advance in technology, while the gods made sure that the humans on Fabulae were constantly warring against each other so that no progress could be made in the arts or sciences. “The Renegades” have advanced in technology so much that they now have powers to rival the gods, and have returned to reclaim Fabulae.

However, the recent chaos which has been occurring in “The Watcher” city indicates to “The Renegades” that, contrary to what they had prior believed, the gods do in fact know about the city hidden beneath the mountains. And what is worse, the gods have been using the city to keep an eye on the Renegades through the inter-connected computers. So know the Renegades must expel the Watchers and shut down the city.

As bizarre as this whole section is, many of these story threads were a long time coming. From the minute I created the Watcher city, I knew I would someday have to explain what it is and how exactly this one anachronism came into being in the midst of a primitive planet.

Also, since much of the world of Fabulae was based off of Greek mythology, I always had it in the back of my mind to add gods similar to those that inhabit Greek myths.

Therefore because both of these plot threads were in the back of my mind for a long time, this is one of the few plot twists that I actually planned ahead on and laid the ground work for in advance. The mysterious voices that had been frequently appearing to comment on events were those of the renegades. I had also introduced the concept of Deka, and his counterpart Aked, early on as well.

The gods are heavily based off of Greek mythology. In Greek mythology all of the gods emerged from a being called Chaos, but Chaos itself was not fully alive. This was the basis for “the quasi-life form” from which the gods of Fabulae sprung. The “super god” is a based off of the idea of Titans from Greek mythology, and Conditor is similar to Cronus.

In my literature classes at school, we had been talking about writers creating their own mythology. Although I knew this was supposed to be taken figuratively, I was excited about the idea of trying to do it literally. But I was still fairly orthodox in my thinking at the time, and tried to do this without being too sacrilegious. I made a point of stating that the gods of Fabulae were not ultimate supreme beings, and that their power was limited to Fabulae only. I left the possibility open that a more supreme god was in control of the universe.

However, in the problem of divine plan versus free will, Fabulae operates much the same way as Christian theology. The gods can implant ideas into people’s heads, but they cannot force anyone to take an action. Thus Rodens is no less at fault for the massacre of the Icelers, but at the same time it was the gods who caused him to do it.

The name “Deka” has appeared since the very first chapters of “Dishon”, usually as an expletive the characters shout out. The use of Deka in the story is another example of an evolution in my thinking.

In my younger days I had acquired the habit of using four letter words after trying to imitate the movies I had seen. I thought this was a sin and felt guilty about it, but it is hard to stop once you’ve started. When you hit your head on the door, or accidentally do the wrong page of math homework, it takes an incredible amount of will power not to swear if the words are in your vocabulary and you’ve gotten into the habit of doing so.

So, I created a word: “Deka”. It was just a made up word. I liked it because it had two hard consonant sounds so it came off the tongue with a certain amount of forcefulness.

Then my 6th grade teacher, while giving a lecture to the class on swearing, mentioned that using substitute words were just as bad because in our heads we were still thinking of the original word. After that I just gave up on trying to stop swearing.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that words were only words and were neither inherently sinful nor good. Rather it was the usage of them. I made a distinction between four letter words, which I regarded as morally neutral, and taking God’s name in vain, which I tried to avoid. At first I tried to use Deka as a substitution for all swear words, but as the story progressed I decided to use Deka only as a substitution for using God’s name. I decided that Deka must be some sort of ancient deity of Fabulae.

On last note of explanation for this chapter: the power of “The Renegades” is based on the assumption that if technology is allowed to progress infinitely, eventually everything is possible. Therefore “The Renegades” have god-like powers. By hiding technology on their clothing, they have the power to do things like wave their hands and make objects disappear into thin air. Like the rest of the story, I suppose this isn’t so much true science fiction as it is just fantasy posing as science fiction.

Chapters 17-18
The gods begin the war by sending aid to Gaius, namely two Titos.

Throughout the rest of the story, the gods and the Renegades are too busy fighting with each other, so The Watchers must fight against a host of lesser deities. Titos are divine beings, but ranked below the gods. They have similar powers, but they cannot do anything by pure thought alone. They need some sort of gesture in order to create their miracles. Therefore the way to defeat a Titos is to keep him down so that he cannot gesture.

In the earlier chapters we saw that The Renegades couldn’t be killed by a laser gun, only knocked down. Only repeated hits from a laser gun could be lethal. The Titos were the same way. And Gaius, under the protection of the Titos, was the same as well. Hans and Kyoko were given an injection by The Renegades that temporarily protected them from laser gunfire as well.

Thus the action sequence in chapter 18 is perhaps the most bizarre one yet. Everybody is getting hit by laser gunfire, but no one is dying, just being knocked down, and occasionally knocked backwards. Hans and Kyoko successfully manage to keep the Titos down on the ground, while trading blows with Gaius, and eventually the Titos disappear, and Gaius surrenders.

Chapter 19
Hans, Kyoko, and Pericula return to the city bringing with them Kile and Drusus, and escorting Gaius to prison. Bakes is there to greet them as they disembark. Hans and Bakes have a heated exchange after Bakes indicates his intention not to revert to democracy.

Since Kile and Drusus are not Watchers, Bakes makes plans to have them escorted out of the Watcher city, and have Hans and Kyoko killed at the same time.

Chapter 20-23
Okay, this is the worst part of the whole story. I was trying to do a couple things. One, I felt like I was building up to a climax with an ultimate battle between the gods and The Renegades, and I felt it was coming a bit too soon and I needed something to pad the story out a bit so that the climax didn’t come too soon. After all, the Renegades and the gods were just introduced; I couldn’t have the climax happen too soon.

Also, I had left the part about Azom and Dishon hanging again, so I wanted to see if I could pick that up without diverting too much from the main part of the story.

But the result was a pretty pointless diversion from the main story that appears to go in one direction, than jerks back in another without any of the plot elements really being satisfactory resolved.

Pericula, Hans and Kyoko are all sent out to escort Drusus and Kile back to Calet, with Livius and Lauto riding along. Livius and Lauto were instructed by Bakes to kill Hans and Kyoko outside of the Watcher city.

The gods, in an attempt to stop Hans and Kyoko from informing the rest of The Watchers about the upcoming battle, shoot down the ship. Everyone finds themselves abandoned in Dishon. They eventually meet up with Ishod, a character from the Dishon series, who relates the stories about how the country of Dishon has been battling a monster. This monster is of course Azom, the former king of Marram.

Meanwhile back in the Watcher city, Bakes has to defend himself against the rest of “The Team” who are very critical of his recent actions. Once they find out about his plans to kill Hans and Kyoko, Akristh decides to go out and rescue them.

As I mentioned before, I had been too lazy to introduce all of Jistap’s team at once. Chapter 23 introduces the last of the unidentified team members, and they are a very feisty and opinionated lot. It’s perhaps a bit of a plot hole that they never voiced their opinions before, and now can’t seem to shut up. I like to think that perhaps they were just gradually losing their patience and moving from sycophant to disgruntled gradually.

Chapter 24-End
In another very clumsy handling of the Dishon story line, Ishod is sent off to continue his fight against Azom, whilst the rest of the gang are rescued by Akristh and brought back to the city. Halfway into this, I decided I didn’t want to get re-involved in the Dishon story line after all, so it is another sloppy transition.

As Hans and Kyoko head back to the City, they are informed by The Renegades that the city is under attack by the gods. The gods themselves are too busy fighting The Renegades, so they send their servants the Veletti. The Veletti are less powerful than the Titos (who are also needed for the fight against The Renegades). The Veletti have the power to transport themselves anywhere, and to shoot razor sharp discs from their hands.

Hans, Kyoko, and the rest re-enter The Watcher city and attempt to warn The Watchers about the coming invasion. The invasion soon begins, and all of The Watcher city is turned into a battleground against the Veletti. Eventually The Veletti are defeated.

As mentioned before, I was doing my best to write in the comic book style of a continuous story that avoided obvious climaxes. But, once The Renegades and the gods were introduced, this set up for a climax seemed pretty natural. And, I became excited by the idea of one big huge all out battle in The Watcher city.

I’ll admit the violence did enthrall me. As did the “God complex” I had when I sat down and made a list of which characters I would allow to survive the battle, and which characters would not.

But more than that, there was a sense that each character was someone I had grown to care about. They may come off pretty flat on the page, but in my head they were a lot more vibrant. Therefore I got a certain emotional thrill by forcing myself to kill off many of the characters. I guess when you’re primarily writing for yourself (which I was by this stage) you tend to do things just because they excite or enthrall you. And you want to do things which will make yourself react emotional to your writing. And killing off a lot of my favorite characters seemed a good way to get a cheap thrill.

For example, Bakes was a character I really liked, because his moral ambiguity fascinated me. He wasn’t pure evil like Gaius. He had a lot of good in him. But because he had refused to revert to democratic control, he was one of the main antagonists of the story.

Near the end Bakes had gotten worse and worse, with his final plan to kill Hans and Kyoko being about the lowest point he sunk to. So I tried to raise him up a bit just before the end. Bakes puts his own life in danger by taking on Gaius, and is eventually killed by Gaius. Of course much of this is because of Bakes’ own ego. He can’t stand to be defied by Gaius. But I also tried to make clear that Bakes was also upset by Gaius’ evil actions as well. Towards this end, I have Bakes say a lot of very cheesy phrases like “Gaius will pay for his evil.”

The same was true for Lauto. In the end I decided not to kill her. She only loses an arm. But Lauto also was someone who had both good and bad sides, and in the concluding battle her noble side came to the front, and she put her self in danger to fight Gaius.

I deliberately left Gaius alive at the end of the story because I wanted to get away from the comic book morality story telling in which everyone gets their just desserts in the end. I figured in the real world sometimes the good guys die and the bad guys live.

While planning the end scenes, I had a fleeting thought pass through my head about killing of Kyoko. The though horrified me because I liked Kyoko’s character very much. And because I reacted so strongly against the idea, I knew I had to do it. It would give the story that extra level of emotional involvement for me.

But I didn’t have the heart to leave Kyoko dead. I had Hans sacrifice his life to revive her. This seemed like a fair trade to me, because I was beginning to grow tired with Hans. As my writing evolved, Hans seemed more and more boring as a protagonist. He could always be counted on to do the right thing, so there were no flaws about him. Characters like Bakes, who had both a good side and bad side, interested me much more. In the next story, there would be no moral hero like Hans, only flawed characters.
(Oh, final note, I suppose it goes without saying that my lame attempt to weasel out of finishing the Dishon story with the brief epilogue is the laziest writing ever.)