Govern Nancy

UVG • VotBO • Mythos • Culture

Isolated by the High Drifts from the surrounding Vast, the Vusil Jupanies preserve their archaic cultures within limpid spheres of glimmering oldtech interfields. The thirteen surviving Jupanies claim to have stood there, nigh timeless, for over 700 generations.

Over those millennia, these rustic villagers have withstood, while around them, great republics fell and rose and fell again. Scholars have tried to puzzle out the source of their longevity, sometimes at the tip of a solar lance, but the limpid spheres have foiled their endeavours.

Consensus has coalesced that this longue durée of the Vusil bucolics has much to do with their inhuman rulers, those things they call the Govern Nancies.

Govern Nancy Theories and Rumours

1. They are daemonic creatures from ‘yond time and space.
2. Bloodthirsty vampirics that keep the Vusil as their kine.
3. Machines created to administer the Vusil through time.
4. Algorithms implanted in the Vusil collective, which govern them as an emergent hive mind.
5. Fungi serve as a bio-computer, managing the Jupanies for the greater good.
6. Divine engines, which generate the interfields protecting the Vusil.
7. Second-order spirit creatures that pilot the Vusil, ghost parasites if one will.
8. Undead agglomerations of Vusil ancestors.

Gossip About the People of the Vusil

1. Their brains are small and simple from such prolonged domestication.
2. They are vulnerable to diseases, which is why they never leave their bubbles without their bulky dress and masks.
3. Their lack of warfare has left their bodies frail.
4. They practice brutal internecine gladiatorial combat to maintain their numbers.
5. They change form and shape over the centuries, their biology putty in the hands of their rulers.
6. They are empathetically dominated by their Govern Nancies.
7. Mental blocks and surgeries prevent them from talking about the state of life within their jupanies.
8. They are so surprisingly accurate with their projectile weapons that it seems likely their weapons somehow plug into their very neural networks.
9. The only time in recorded history any Vusil have invaded a foreign territory was in the year ———, when the Travat Jupanie invaded the neighbouring republic of Yalayet, taking the valley of Geld for their own and sealing it in a new bubble wall over a period of several months. Shortly thereafter, their old realm was swept away by a megaflood when the Dyaus Glitterdam disappeared and the inland Sea of Constance swiftly drained into the Cerule.
10. They refer to their most revered ancestors as though these were still alive.

Letters on the Govern Nancies

par Embasciator Karul ’d Voz

The Peoples of the Vusil praise their Nancies and adore them.

“No lyud can rule as lucid as a Govern Nancy,” they proclaim, houseproud in their pasteel fancies.

Walls of glimmer protect the pastoral bubbles of the Peoples of the Vusil. Within, all is labour and tended orchards-gardens and wilderling eco-forests. Without, might be waste burn or salt reek.

“We trade when the Govern Nancy instructs,” they declaim, self-assured in their inhuman rulers.

Sometimes a telescope can pick them up through the glimmer, the Govern Nancies. Grand machines, big as temples, with treads of creamy steal and hides of burnished chrome and domes of gilded glaze.

“Not machines, but the best of us, the minds of us. Together in eternity, protected in the Govern Nancy!” they laugh, convinced they are the feedstock of their lords.

The scope adjusts and beholds the ritual. The Vusil priests in robes of chartreuse, the flash of saw. There must be a smell of burning bone as the brain is shelled like a nut. Another mind to feed into the sloshing dome of the Govern Nancy. A child, a mother, a grandfather. A new someone they give each day.

“Begone with these accusations. Will you have the product of our yards? Or will you sling mud?” they huff, upset now that their iron lords should tarnish.

The Polyarchs of Vusil

Long ago, the Peoples of the Vusil worshipped death and chaos without knowing they did so. Three worlds they destroyed in the signs of life and order.

They professed love for their worlds, even as their own minds lied to them. They were deluded by a veil of illusion, cut off in their brains from their own existence.

At their last, they stood alone on a purified world, a sterile wasteland of ash-fine biocorpses. They hoped to live free of all plagues and all impurities in a perfect world, as ordained in their most fondly imagined scriptures.

Instead, they faced doom.

Their kine would offer no calves.

Their soils would succour no crops.

Their waters would slake no thirsts.

They lived in their palaces of pastel glazes and creamy steels and watched the minds of children and elders wither like herbs disrooted.

Their stocks of nutritive troches and pilules dwindled. Their magazines grew empty.

Their middens filled with hollow cans and gathering dusts. Their sumps compacted in sedimentary layers.

Strife strode among the Peoples of the Vusil.

Their polyarchs tried platitudes. Promises. Procrastinations. Penalties.

To no avail.

Pastel and cream became sootened rust.

The polyarchs fought one another, and the Peoples of the Vusil fought alongside them.

At last, only seventeen polyarchs remained, alike in power and driving ambition to preserve the Vusil.

Facing doom, they sacrificed themselves to the desperate ploy of the omnipomp, the great quantum brains they had built to oversee the fruition of their scriptural empire.

The polyarchs minds were sheared from their bodies, their souls synthesized in great administration engines. Each polyarch merged, part and parcel, with the others in seventeen instanced machines. These pooled the desires and abilities of the Vusil with a single goal: to navigate their way out of their dead-end and create communities to last beyond the end of time.

With this single-minded goal, the new machines set forth, reforging the Vusil with a clear-eyed brilliance only matched by their utter ruthlessness.

Like seeds upon an endless ocean, they voyaged, to anchor as the communities now known as the Vusil Jupanies.

Enjoy the forever.
It goes on and on.
•

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