Say Tasmani - Main

[InsanityStrickenWriter]

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Walk through any of Say Tasmani's various small, peaceful villages, each surrounded by rice paddies as far as the eye can see, and you could be forgiven for making the mistaken assumption that it is a land of tiresome peace without any worries or cares... indeed, two of its three nations like nothing more than to go for eachother's throats whenever they believe that the third might not be looking.

 

[InsanityStrickenWriter]

The Countries of Say Tasmani:

Takshari-

Ruled by the Telis family, Takshari is the eastern kingdom of Say Tasmani. It is smaller than its counterpart in the west, Talan, but has richer deposits of minerals and more fertile farmland. Some say the farmland is only so fertile because the Taksharis bury their dead beneath it, but that is neither here nor there.

The current monarch is Queen Telesi, a woman much loved by her male subjects and treated with a mixture of contempt, envy, and idolism by her female ones. Over the course of her reign, apart from stealing many of her subject’s husbands, she has embarked on a huge defensive-building programme, springing up watchtowers and walls around coastlines and settlements. The programme caused quite the stir to the west in Talan, who claimed the programme had sewn seeds of distrust. The wisemen of Say Taru never got around to making clear what they thought of it, as by the time they had written a draft basis of their thoughts on the issue, the walls and watchtowers had already been standing for fifteen years.

Talan-

Unlike Takshari, Talan still retains its original ruling family, the Talani. The Talani were fortunate enough to be the ones issuing assassinations rather than on the receiving end of them. Talan is the biggest kingdom of Say Tasmani, but its power is arguable.

Many regions of Talan, such as the Tisi Heights, are regions that couldn’t care less about the kingdom, clinging to their own cultures and beliefs. It is sometimes whispered in the courts of King Tasis that such regions don’t even pay tax or provide soldiers, and that they only get away with it because the aging king can’t be bothered to travel up the mountains or through the forests to raze their towns. And in Talan, the moment the army ever marches off out of the king’s sight, it can be wagered with certainty that they won’t bother with the hassle of actually reaching wherever their destination was supposed to be. And if they do, they’d probably only join the opposing side anyway.

Attempts had been made over Tasis’ reign to strike some loyalty into the troops, but in the end the old monarch resigned to the fact that the kingdom’s army was always cursed to be a bunch of disloyal, opportunistic bastards.

Say Taru-

Say Taru is a country absolutely exploding at the seams with laws, laws, and more laws. An entire tower is dedicated to their storage by the Wise House in Say Taru’s capital, Taru, (which gives the country its namesake). It is said that even if the wisemen of Taru had all of the paper and ink in the world, they still wouldn’t have enough. Often, walking through the corridors of power, you will find madmen darting back and forth shouting, ‘Ink, my sons and daughters for ink!” And trying to use any of Taru’s toilets is likely to bring you to the realisation that all the toilet paper is absent; nicked by bureaucrats in the midst of late-night law-making frenzies.

At the helm of this bureaucratic nightmare of a ship is a council of five wisemen, elected once every twenty years from the Chamber of the Wise. Theoretically, the council-members are each of equal status, but in reality, one has developed the memory of a sieve and calls everybody Chris, (no one has a clue where such a word hails from), one has had a string of affairs which the entire country but his wife is aware of, (making for rich blackmailing possibilities), and one can’t ever be let anywhere near the law-making process because he can’t ever stop stuffing his face and spitting bits of food all over them, (rendering the laws invalid). This leaves but two members of council who are at all competent, Councillor Tei and Councillor Tal. But then, they’re both at absolute opposite ends of the ideological scale, and only exasperate the problem of never-ending law-making with their tendency to scrap half of each other’s laws on a whim and replace them with laws of their own.