History of Kalgachia
The History of Kalgachia extends from the dying days of its predecessor state, the Empire of Minarboria, to the present day. It charts the geographical, social, and ultimately genetic coalescence of various central Benacian populations who withstood the privations of late-Minarborian anarchy and, with the help of a spiritually motivated and technologically competent leadership, were able to marshal disparate scraps of their cultural and material inheritance into a functioning sovereign state of their own.
The 140s
The Arduous Schlep (aka the Third Great Replanting) (140-143 AL)
With the thinning of the necromantic ley lines which kept its undead ruling caste animated, the Empire of Minarboria entered a state of progressive collapse from around 124 Anno Libertatis (early December 2016). by 140 AL (mid-May 2017) this process of aesthenic degeneration was largely complete. In the absence of central direction from the Minarborian capital Sansabury, whose leadership had succumbed to a crisis of faith (the ruling Regent was last seen slumped sullenly against the bar of the city's elite Ouroboros Club, swigging Tellian amaretto straight from the bottle and looking across the adjacent dance floor as the Deep Singer in charge of the Church of Minarbor swayed endlessly to a slow disco number while lost in the memory of better days), those inhabitants of the surrounding Imperial Shrublands who had not succumbed to energetic torpor looked to the one authority which offered some continuity of governance, namely the junior clergy of the Minarborian church whose jollity and common charity had instinctively moved on a local level to fill the gap left by the collapse of the lich state. Their previous authority was, however, undermined by the despair of their congregations that the all-loving shrub Minarbor whom they had assumed an infallible god had quite evidently forsaken his faithful followers and abandoned his well-tended Garden to the vicissitudes of common wilderness. In many places, Minarbor's clergy were set upon and lynched by their previously-loyal bands of armed partisans who subsequently fell under the control of their own emerging warlords and were set to interminable and bloody feuding with similar groups as they competed for the unguarded spoils of the collapsing empire. In time this state of affairs enveloped the once-gleaming condo districts of Sansabury itself and annihilated the last shreds of civil authority, although the soundtrack remained eerily consistent to the point that the entire corpus of 4/4 signature dance music persisted in folk memory for generations as a distasteful reminder of that fraught and desperate time.
Many Minarborian clergy, however, succeeded in demonstrating humility to their congregations with frank admissions that perhaps the shrub Minarbor was not as godly as he seemed, this denial of his omnipotence allowing them to explain that circumstances had developed beyond his control and that his gentle rustling countenance would never have meant for things to end up as they had. This precious re-consecrated fragment of the old worldview, along with the more enterprising clergy visibly throwing themselves into the material assistance of their upset congregations, offered a rare filament of hope among the general chaos of the time although these pious bands found themselves beset on all sides by other groups who had long since kicked the bloodied corpses of their own priesthood into innumerable ravines and were now only interested in territorial scrapping and oppurtunistic plunder. This imperative of self-defence, not only against against roving bandits but also the ferocious Tee-al which no longer had a Minarborian army to contain its range, gave the first breath of life to what would become the Kalgachi state as the gentler groups of benighted Minarborians networked together and gravitated toward the safe heights of the Octavian mountains whose dearth of lootable goods or population kept it from the attentions of the predatorially-inclined and offered a safe retreat, albeit one which introduced the new perils of cold and starvation in lieu of beast or bandit.
Those arriving in the southern Octavian mountains met with a group from the north, a band of mendicant clergymen and disgraced arcanists originally exiled there by the Minarborian church as penance and rehabilitation for their affiliation with the Argophylacterists - revolutionary insurrectionists from &zeter whose uprising, although suppressed, had heralded the beginning of Minarboria's demise. This animated band of upstarts is believed to have been led by one Xantus A.Z. Yastreb, the son of the uprising's chief agitator who had been born in a penal colony with his undead father and subsequently paroled after a period of intensive 're-cultivation' at the hands of the Broodmother. Xantus' group soon came to corral the incoming refugee groups into a single polity - more critically they offered a new theological insight based on old, quasi-heretical strands of belief among &zeter's academic community which held that the loss of Minarboria's shrub-god and the post-human master races around him was a divinely-ordained act of transcendence from the material world and an invitation for those who remained to follow in their path and assume their powers. The proponents of the new belief ultimately arranged for the construction of, and retreat into, a deep bunker beneath Mount Octavian itself where they could further meditate on their revelations and offer further guidance to those on the surface who clung perilously onto life. In time these renegade clergymen came to be known as the Perfecti, not so much for what they were as for what they aspired to be, and the surviving elements of what was the University of &zeter Arcane Society now became known as the Troglodyti due to their sub-surface location. For want of any wiser authority at the time, the old Minarborealist priests on the surface deferred to the guidance of their enterprising counterparts below as their congregations struggled to cultivate strips of sparse farmland in mountain valleys, breed sheep and goats on its upland pastures and convince themselves that theirs was a worthy enterprise ordained by the chthonic divinity they had known and loved but now seemed horribly distant. Where spiritual cause failed to sustain, the day-to-day imperatives of simple survival inevitably came to the fore, especially among those caring for children who endured literal starvation so their young could remain fed and have the strength to enjoy the occasional moment of play.
The affair might have been hopeless in the long term, were it not for the reactivation of a series of old Minarborian gold mines whose shining bounty was quickly directed to turn the neutrally-aligned bands of roving Laqi cossacks in the east, and Siyacho-Ashkenatzi kossars in the west, to return to the lawless lower country whence the mountain refugees had fled and liberate the profusion of accumulated goods they had left behind in their haste to get away. While much of this went into the possession of the rampaging horsemen themselves, the delivery of reliable payment in gold persuaded them to give up a sizeable portion of their acquired bounty to the custody of the Perfecti and their nascent government, where it was turned immediately to the sustenance of the population. As time progressed these raids became more elaborate - what began as lightning attacks on bandit emcampments progressed to the assault of fortified ruins by horse-drawn artillery and the seizure of huge stocks of military hardware and industrial plant, conveyed in wagon trains through treacherous mountain passes on rudimentary gravel roads. The incoming stocks of organic fertiliser and heavy weapons allowed those living in the blasted heights to withstand periods of famine and renewed attack by brigands, who had inevitably become attracted to the concentrated flow of goods and attempted to follow the refugee hordes into the mountains. The precariously-settled population were assisted with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the cowering brains of Minarborian academia, sprung from the locked cellars and secluded lodges around &zeter and other crumbling cities by raids specially tasked with hunting them down. Their combined expertise in agronomy and medicine were later considered to have spared so many lives from disease and starvation that the two fields are treated as a single discipline to this day. With the presence of this intermediate professional class enhancing the link between the occluded underground leadership and the early droves of refugees above, and with all three populations having trod the same course of tumult and hardship toward a precarious survival in the mountains, their social identity began to transgress ethnic boundaries and acquire the first filaments of a distinct national character. Their nation, colloquially named Kalgachia through some nebulous fusion of Laqi-Ashkenatzi patois, was officially proclaimed into existence in 143 AL.
The events of the Arduous Schlep would subsequently be immortalised in a number of epic films.
The Auspicious Occasion (149 AL)
The rapacity of Shireroth in seeking to encircle Kalgachia with territorial claims in the lawless ex-Minarborian wastes, in the earliest days of Kalgachia's life, caused much concern in Oktavyan and was ascribed to the land-hungry lobbying of the Froyalanish King of Elwynn, whose territorial excesses were causing just as many problems inside Shireroth. His attempt to eradicate the Soviet society of Shirerithian Mishalan and obtain more living space for his own Froyalanish race, despite already holding more land than they seemed able to utilise, caused a level of upset in Shireroth which aroused much sympathy in Kalgachia, perilously close as it was to the frontier of Froyalanish lands and having to fight off border incursions by their wandering Vanic priesthood on a daily basis. At the highest level, the decision was taken to support the budding rebellion in Mishalan with the faint hope that it might be the first step in the rollback and eventual expulsion of the Froyalanish juggernaut from the Benacian contient, many lifetimes hence. In 149 AL, a cossack officer of the Kalgachi Defence Force, one colonel Vitaly Shumyanov, was duly detailed to raise a force of partisans and bear cavalry from the Mishalanski refugees who had fled the King of Elwynn's purges in Mishalan and sought sanctuary in Kalgachia. These he held in preparation until the Shirerithian government, on the back of overwhelming support from its legislature and executive, decreed the expulsion of Mishalan's Froyalanish administration. In concert with sympathetic elements of Shireroth's army and Mishalan's provisional government who did not wish to be associated directly with any resulting atrocities, Shumyanov's force - known as the Konkordskaya Bratva - were released into Mishalan near the city of Niü Veña where they set the pace for their Mishalanski brethren by ejecting the newly-arrived Froyalansh landlords from their homes and herding them into their equally-new Vanic temples where the whole lot could be burned to ashes, with any escapees promptly hunted down and devoured by cavalry bears which were specially trained to seek out the Froyalanites' characteristic scent of excited genitalia and Storish mead. These acts of vigorous ethnic restitution, and the many others which it inspired, would reach their climax in 150 AL when the Froyalanish King of Elwynn himself was deposed in a manner more rapid and comprehensive than most of his detractors ever dared to dream, spelling the effective end of Froyalanish dominion over Benacia.
The subsequent punitive demotion of Shireroth's immense Froyalanish population, from citizens into Community Service Workers, combined with the willingness of Shireroth to offer them for open sale, ultimately proved a boon for Kalgachia whose agricultural, industrial and public works projects had an almost insatiable demand for cheap labour at that moment, finding in the droves of captive Froyalaners a convenient replacement for the legions of undead 'zombots' relied upon for menial labour in the Minarborian era - indeed the timing of their arrival was praised in Kalgachia's budding constellation of Ketherist churches as the wilful gift of Kalgachia's chthonic benefactors.
The Enclosure of the Limitrophes (149 AL)
The auspicious year of 149 AL also saw the territories around Jollity, Schlepogora, Abrek, Bergburg and Lithead be annexed into Kalgachia. These territories had become so infused with Minarborian refugee camps and prowling Kalgachi military patrols that Kalgachia's annexation of the territory was, in the end, a formality - albeit a badly needed one to improve the situation of the hopeless migrants by providing them with food, accomodation and work in an organised fashion. The labour force for the development of these territories being already in situ, the improvement of both the new territories and the Kalgachi core was as rapid as might be expected from an overnight doubling of the the country's population. However the event did present obstacles to the Perfecti's ideal of homogenising Kalgachia's different ethnic groups into a single miscegenerate race in order to prevent any one of them being leveraged against them by foreign powers - the newer half of the population, enjoying a sudden freedom of movement in Kalgachia, gravitated naturally to their own kind and gave each of the new Lieutenancies a distinct ethnic identity.
The 150s
War Abroad and Peace at Home (157 AL)
Abroad, the War of Lost Brothers had crept from its regional beginnings in easten Apollonia and escalated to involve most of Micras' great powers, eventually re-igniting the Sxiro-Jingdaoese Confrontation to an unprecedentedly bloody level. For Kalgachia this presented the difficulty of cultivating the interests of Jingdao, whose role in a multipolar Benacia it wished to cultivate, while avoiding the wrath of Shireroth which until the reversals of Operation Bait Harvest had been engaged in an unapologetic crusade for dominion of the entire continent. In 157 AL, to prevent any overtures to Jingdao being misinterpreted as an act of war against Shireroth, the Kalgachi Directorate of the Tumultuous Wastes negotiated with Shireroth the Slavegate Treaty of Peace and Civility, whose provisions enabled a tacit understanding whereby Kalgachi assistance to the Jingdaoese would be limited to humanitarian aid and economic co-operation in return for the territorial integrity of Kalgachia remaining unmolested by Shireroth. Ironically, rather than being regarded as a tight-fisted coward and a continental traitor by Jingdao and Shireroth respectively, Kalgachia was instead called upon by both warring empires as a useful intermediary, being one of the few nations on Micras whose non-alignment with established power blocs gave it cordial relations with both at the same time.
The Gold Standard (157 AL)
In 157 the Kalgachi economy enjoyed the benefits of a rationalisation in the gold mining sector, providing a ready supply of reliable standardised currency to purchase imports from abroad. This stockpiling of bullion, and the Kalgarrand into which it was minted, was profuse at first - but in the interests of maintaining a stable exchange rate the Reserve Bank of Kalgachia, a subsidiary of the Directorate of Labour and Economic Planning, would reduce gold production after 160 AL toward the minimum level required to maintain existing stockpiles and service foreign debt.
The Ascent of the Urchagintsy (158 AL)
Beginning around 158 AL, the first generation of young adults too young to remember the pre-Kalgachi era reached the age of majority. Compared to their ancestors, this generation - dubbed the Urchagintsy due to their initiation in the state-sponsored Urchagin youth camps - showed a greater readiness to engage in inter-ethnic relationships and marriages, with some already being of mixed heritage themselves. To the quiet concern of the Nezeni who had been Kalgachia's most socially venerated race since the late Minarborian era, this new generation of truly native Kalgachi began to fill the lower echelons of church and state, bringing with them many subtle changes of custom and doctrine which began to dilute the social and political influence of their their ex-Minarborian immigrant elders and finalise the emergence of Kalgachia from the leafy shade of its Minarborian predecessor, allowing it to stand as a self-respecting nation in its own right with its own history and its own priorities.
The 160s
The Nova English Missile Crisis (161 AL)
In 159 AL, with the Brettish Isles suffering from the disastrous effects of a major volcanic eruption, the Steward of Shireroth - the notorious Waldemar Zinkgraven - had decided to exploit the resulting humanitarian disaster and goverment collapse by commissioning privateers to set upon and plunder the maritime aid shipments of various USSO nations attempting to assist the stricken Brettish - as well as enslaving individuals captured in the process, stripping Brettish waters of fish stocks and making a direct foray into the territorial waters of Nova England. This lunge at Eastern Keltia, culminating in the Cruise of the Medusa, marked an drastic shift in the perception of Shireroth by the Kalgachi government which had hitherto tolerated the antics of its bloated neighbour as a necessary moderator of Jingdaoese and Storish excesses on the global stage. Now, however, Shireroth appeared to dispense with any pretext of moral mission - beyond the contentious assertion that conflict with a single USSO state made all USSO assets a legitimate prize of war - and indulge in an orgy of rank savagery upon the high seas in the assured confidence that it was too powerful incur anything in the way of negative consequences from such behaviour.
In Kalgachia, this bold escalation in Shirerithian swagger was seen as a regression to the untrammeled rapacity of the previous Froyalanish administration; differing only in the fact that Shireroth's ruling Kalirion dynasty, unlike the Froyalanish whom they had overthrown, went about its business with an honest and unadorned thuggery without recourse to a duplicitous veil of dumb amiability that had characterised the high tide mark of Froyalanish dominion. Nonetheless in 161 AL Kalgachia's ruling Council of Perfecti, seeing in Nova England a nation of kindred spirit whose existence was greatly endangered, decided to intervene.
This intervention - an offer of anti-gravtank missiles and high-end air defence systems to the Nova English Armed Forces to counter an expected Shirerithian invasion - instantly drew the ire of the Shirerithian government which accused Kalgachia of using Nova England as an intermediary to provide the weapons to Jingdao, against its obligations under the Slavegate Treaty to refrain from militarily supporting nations at war with Shireroth. While Kalgachia was quick to contest this assertion and the diplomatic premise on which it was built, the fact that Shireroth's argument - regardless of its merits - was backed by a threat of war against Nova England if the Kalgachi weapons were delivered, compelled the latter two governments to reconfigure their budding mutual aid programme in terms of doctrinal training and civil defence, albeit kicked into a greatly accelerated pace by Shireroth's readiness to address the matter by military means (the postponed weapon delivery was later resumed and completed immediately prior to the War of the Casks, when a Shirerithian invasion of Nova England was evidently imminent regardless of Kalgachi restraint). These intial contacts eventually blossomed into a full trade relationship, underpinned by the mutual foundation of the Kalgachi and Nova English currencies upon the gold standard. This relationship was nonetheless a logistically challenging one, being entirely reliant upon Kalgachia's fleet of Jingdaoese-purchased transport aircraft operating at the limit of their range over an active war zone under the close scrutiny of Shirerithian warplanes, having to displace so much cargo in favour of fuel that most if not all Kalgachi imports by this route ran at a net financial loss. These losses were stoically absorbed by the Directorate of Labour and Economic Planning for the sake of maintaining commercial confidence in its Nova English intermediary body, the Octavian Import-Export Corporation, as well as fulfilling the political brief imposed directly from the Council of Perfecti to maintain a trade link independent of Shirerithian influence regardless of the cost.
The 'Emancipation' of the Froyalanish (161 AL)
As part of Kalgachia's scramble to distance itself from the Zinkgraven administration which appeared to be dragging Shireroth up an ever-steepening exponent of militaristic bloodlust, the Council of Perfecti returned once more to the Froyalanish Question. It resolved that Kalgachia's resident population of captive Froyalanish labourers were sufficiently integrated with Kalgachi society that they could be released from bondage and granted Kalgachi citizenship, such that the end of their status as a tradeable commodity would render moribund the majority of Kalgachia's trade links with Shireroth and perhaps be a first step in rehabilitating Kalgachia's name in the eyes of the Froyalaners' progenitors in Stormark. Some resistance to the plan was forthcoming from the Prefects, Kalgachia's internal security service, who pointed out that the memetic virulence of the Froyalaners' original Vanic religion and their tendency to outbreed and displace other races had not gone away and represented an existential hazard of the first order. The release of the Froyalanish was, therefore, accompanied by an absolute prohibition on the practice of the Vanic religion (for which one could be detained or even executed by any Kalgachi citizen) and a continuation of the programme whereby all Froyalaners within Kalgachi borders were sterilised upon arrival. Over time this would ironically render Kalgachia's Froyalanish population into a distinct subculture of freewheeling libertines, severed as they were from all obligation to revere ancestors or create descendants. A desire to live comfortably, make the most of one's time in the world and be at peace with one's fellows - similar to that found among the Bergburgers but further moderated by a deep sense of historical fatalism - prevailed among this newly-freed segment of society whose induction into the Kalgachi citizenry caused the country's official population to jump by two million, requiring the hurried minting of fresh Kalgarrand to pay their wages and avert a deflationary crash. Although Froyalaners remained ineligible to serve as church partisans, sufficient numbers of other ethnicities were freed up from menial, long-hours occupations by wage-earning Froyalanish replacements that the amount of people undergoing partisan training in their free time swelled by some 500,000.
Lapivril and Project Newrad (165 AL)
In the mid 160s AL Kalgachia's immense programme of military fortress construction was nearing its conclusion, ensuring that no part of the country was more than 75 kilometres away from a heavily equipped battery of assorted guns, hypersonic and surface-to-air missiles. Simultaneously the full weight of the Great Enterpise of Keltia was being brought to bear against Nova England among other escalations in that continent's polar region, offering the world yet another ripple in the interminable flexion of Shirerithian military muscle. In Kalgachia the events inspired renewed doubts in the ability of even its newly-fortified military to repel such an onslaught, given the seemingly psychotic determination of Shireroth's rogue steward to pursue his military ambitions without regard to the cost and the apparently helpless inability of moderates within Shireroth to restrain him. Such concerns were tempered only by a general relief that Shireroth's adventures in faraway Keltia had bought Kalgachia added time to enhance its own defences before the Shirerithian hordes were, inevitably as Kalgachi security organs felt, directed against them. After the much-delayed and over-budgeted completion of the KDF fortress network, however, there was little appetite within the Council of Perfecti to divert yet more of Kalgachia's assets into the front end of national defence, especially during the marginal stagnation in Kalgachia's standard of living caused by the war in Nova England and its effect on imports. Instead the Council looked to the Troglodyti, Kalgachia's hidden but well-connected esoteric order whose initiates within the country's academia had recently embarked upon a holistic initiative intended to have positive implications for national defence, socio-economic strength and ultimately spiritual salvation. Named Project Newrad, it envisaged the creation of a new national redoubt located deep underground to restore the safety of sovereign tenure which had previously been conferred by Kalgachia's mountain topography but was now almost completely vulnerable to the Shirerithian spectre of mass-produced gravimetric transport and full-spectrum aerial/space surveillance. On a spiritual level it was also hoped that the sub-surface lifestyle of the new territory's inhabitants would resonate with the spirits of their ancestors' chthonic Benefactors and bring Kalgachia as a whole into a deeper state of grace with the Garden Ketheric. Heavily reliant upon geothermal power and nuclear transmutation for its intended function as a closed system, the territory was codified into existence as the Lieutenancy of Lapivril and granted the full resources of the Kalgachi state - inspiring some irritation within the Directorate of Public Works, whose masses of overworked navvies and foremen had anticipated a period of rest in which they could finally spend the considerable pay and bonuses they had accrued during the preceding decade of fortress-building. Ultimately many of them were in fact able to so do, including the Directorate's entire contingent of ageing Froyalanish navvies, on account of the Troglodyti's strict conditions for entry into Lapivril which were restricted to mixed Kalgachi and Nezeni ethnicities alone.
The Emergence of Kasterburg (167-169 AL)
Meanwhile in 167 AL, to Kalgachia's southwest, a new sovereign state emerged in the old Minarborian territory previously known as Poroly. The Kasterburg Republic, founded by exiles from Shirerithian Batavia, was quick to assert its neutral credentials by denouncing both Shireroth and Kalgachia; the former for mistreating Kasterburg's emissaries and violating its territory, and the latter for harbouring a 'political inspired pseudo-religion' and being tardy in opening diplomatic channels, which were belatedly established through a formation of KDF cossacks who happened to be in the area. Ultimately, however, Kasterburg's attitude appeared refreshingly non-ideological and it began to engage cordially with both its neighbours, accepting a donation of Kalgachi anti-tank guns for the nominal purpose of resisting the marauding Tee-als which had beset its early development, although the utility of the weapons in deterring further uninvited territorial incursions by Shireroth was left conspicuously un-denied. Kalgachia in addition launched Operation Beefsteak, a military anti-bandit sweep along the ungoverned limitrophes of the Kasterburg border to assist in Tee-al rollback and disperse groups of itinerant raiders who had inevitably become attracted to the new republic's concentration of wealth.
Due in part to this assistance, Kasterburg was able to expand its territory in 168 AL - although this did have the effect of closing the ungoverned territory between the Lywall Protectorate and Shirerithian Batavia (known as the Poroly Gap after the area's Ashkenatzi-Minarborian name), which had been Kalgachia's only open trade route with nations outside the Benacian continent. Under pressure from the Oktavyan Import-Export Corporation, whose business had already been crippled by the war scare in Nova England, Kalgachi diplomats descended on Kasterburg to negotiate right of passage for Kalgachia's long-range cargo aircraft. In 169 AL The result of these negotiations, in the form of the Sterklucht Agreement on Airspace Security, succeeded in re-opening Kasterburg's airspace to Kalgachi flights in exchange for an annual fee and the delivery of a hundred Kalgachi surface-to-air missile systems to Kasterburg's nascent military, which had hitherto lacked any air defence capability.
The speed with which Kalgachia defied its own reputation as a paranoid hermit state and pumped military aid into a new, unknown and occasionally critical neighbour was surprising to casual observers who were taken aback by the negotiating skill required - the tendency of the Kalgachi diplomatic corps toward flippantly informal discourse had only recently caused a stir at a summit on geopolitical non-alignment in Caputia where the Kalgachi delegation had notoriously torpedoed the summit's central mission statement and cast the Raspurid representatives, among others, into a state of bewilderment. To the straight-talking Batavian elite of Kasterburg, however, Kalgachi directness was a refreshing break from the pomp, pageantry and nebulous affectations seen elsewhere on the Micran diplomatic stage. This allowed Kalgachia to secure vital understandings with Kasterburg while Shireroth's efforts to pre-empt them with its own more grandiose overtures became bogged down in logistical minutiae.
The 170s
The Cinematic Egregore (171 AL)
In 171 AL, for reasons unknown to the layperson but held by Kalgachi arcanists to be a new memetic front in the chthonic/archonic war for the soul of humanity, a sudden craze for the cinematic arts swept across Micras. It began in Caputia, a nation which had already established fearsome esoteric credentials with a direct invocation of the ascendant but historically-hazardous Siren archetype, and now launched forth with a metareferential production so brazenly drenched in themes of blood sacrifice that its seminal role in what followed is considered, from certain viewpoints, entirely understandable. Like a tornado of leaves rising to the mage's staff, a wave of celluloid creations was soon drawn forth from Kasterburg, from Nova England, from the Florian Republic and from Shireroth. The small-time cinematographers of Kalgachia were no less immune to the legion of muses unleashed by the unlikely warlocks of Zalae and were soon compelled to band together in creative groups of their own, the largest of these forming the 'Schlepfilm' studio of Schlepogora and producing a series of epic screen tales in which the scenery of Kalgachia itself proved to be as much a star as the leading actors. However the hazard and expense of indulging ambitious scriptwriters, and filming on location in the Tee-al-infested wastes beyond Kalgachia's borders, soon caught up with the studio which eventually required a bailout from the Directorate of Education and Outreach to prevent its promising repertoire being kept from the silver screen by financial ruin.
The Octavian Thaw (172 AL)
The change in the Stewardship of Shireroth in 168 AL - from the overbearing Waldemar Zinkgraven to the erudite Mira Octavius-Aryani - entailed not only a slackening of the iron grip on Shirerithian government enjoyed by the outgoing Steward's chief sponsors, the Nationalist & Humanist Party, but also a moderation of the party's own platform in an attempt to disassociate itself from the excesses of their erstwhile figurehead who was now a figure of disgrace in Shirekeep since the full extent of his overseas rampages had come to light. In terms of foreign relations this entailed a notable reduction in Nationalist-Humanist dogma - which had consistently characterised Kalgachia as a nest of heretical schismatics and inferred that civilisation would benefit from the wholesale extermination of certain sections of its population - amid a more general shift in the public conduct of the Shirerithian government from ideological frontloading to technocratic transparency.
To reward the tenor of the new administration, the Directorate of the Tumultuous Wastes authorised Kalgachia's principal STEM establshment, the University of Bergburg, to invite a delegation from its Shirerithian equivalent, the University of Our Lady the Ergane in the ex-Antican island territory of Kezan, to visit Kalgachia and inspect the progress of Project Newrad - an unprecedented honour denied to most Kalgachi citizens, let alone foreigners. In return, Kalgachi journalists found themselves accredited to attend press conferences of the Shirerithian Ministry of the Exterior and Shireroth was the first to extend its condolences upon the event which would soon cast Kalgachia into mourning.
The Death of the Pedagogue General (172 AL)
Ilessa Aerit, the Pedagogue General of Kalgachia and architect of the Urchagin system, died in 172 AL from complications in the birth of her third child, who survived. The official and public reaction to her demise far outweighed that normally appropriate for a government technocrat - effectively confirming Aerit's long-suspected marriage to the rumoured Kalgachi head of state, Xantus Yastreb, as well as the high regard in which she was held within Kalgachi government service, by pupils she had taught in her days as an elementary school teacher, and by the many thousands of badged graduates from her Urchagin camps who appreciated the programme's 'character building' role in their lives. She received a state funeral in Oktavyan which was notable for its unusually-large masses of wailing mourners along the processional route and its entirely a capella musical selection delivered by the Kalgachi National Youth Choir. It was also the first official appearance of Xantus Yastreb, albeit in no admitted capacity other than the husband of the deceased, who was visibly distressed to a degree which shocked most observers - not least the invited foreign dignitaries. After choking his way through a glowing eulogy and expressing half-attentive thanks to selected mourners for attending, he departed with his daughter Rubina - who carried his newborn son Falcifer - for Ilessa's private burial in the playground of the school where she had once taught.
Whether by editorial whim or outside command, Kalgachi news media that evening made much of the closing remarks in Xantus' eulogy, that the departure of Kalgachia's first and greatest pedagogue was a sign from the Garden that Kalgachia was "all grown up now". In the days following, government organs which routinely referred documents down for the Council of Perfecti's signature began to experience unusually long delays in obtaining them back.
The Enclosure of Lepidopterum (174 AL)
In 174 AL a leaked comment from the boardroom of Kasterburger Spoorwegen, revealing the company's desire to connect its rail network to Kalgachia, met with much enthusiasm at the Directorate of the Tumultuous Wastes. The prospect of a solid transport link with Kasterburg, and the territorial adjustments needed to make it possible, aligned with three important aspects of Kalgachi foreign policy: the aggressive promotion of Kasterburg's autarkic development, the prevention of a Shirerithian monopoly over the Kalgachi frontier, and the protection of the Nezeni population in Benacia's ungoverned territories against bands of racial supremacists from the social elite of both Shireroth and Kasterburg, who had often ventured into Nezeni areas and engaged in dubious pursuits resembling something between private game hunting and state-sanctioned genocide. To justify a Kalgachi intervention to other organs of state which were vehemently critical about any extension of their homeland beyond the safety of the Octavian mountains, The DTW tapped up its enterprising Rezidentura in Shirekeep and Kasterburg to acquire incriminating photo reels of pasty-faced bluebloods in sun hats and safari shorts, posing with high-calibre rifles atop heaps of dead Nezeni - in one memorable case depicting a well-provisioned picnic where the wife and children of the 'hunter' were accompanied by bullet-ridden corpses held up by the family servants and dressed in safari attire with the handwritten caption "Extra guests :-D". After the photos' wide exposition in the Kalgachi media, popular demand for some kind of action swelled - most notably in the Nezeni heartlands of Lithead whose military units took the lead in proposing, planning and ultimately executing a military drive to the ruined city of Lepidopterum which held notable cultural value as the last known residence of their progenitorial Broodmother. Until that point, KDF expeditionary operations had been limited to cossack raids and covert reconnaissance with little capability for large-scale extended operations on potentially-unfriendly ground - ultimately the force's Whirdlebirb helicopter squadrons bore the brunt of troop transport and supply duties as they proved the only expeditious method of traversing the area's immense forests and thickets of engineered, often predatory flora with pockets of Tee-al infested heathland. The predominantly-Nezeni units were kept back from the final contact line with Kasterburg to avoid aggravating the latter's ethnic prejudices and were substituted by more presentable units from the Kalgachi interior, although the latter's relative inexperience with the local biome did cause their casualties to mount disproportionately over time.
Faced with the theoretical indefensibility of Lepidopterum's flat topography, military planners lobbied heavily for that part of the newly-gained area behind the city of Lepidopterum and the Kasterburg contact line to be depopulated and converted to a 'biomic minefield' of the Minarborian style, wherein dangerous species would be actively encouraged to flourish and where those Tee-als driven from other parts of Kalgachia could be herded and contained. In the end it was realised that two such reserves would be required, bisected with a sanitary cordon through which Lepidopterum and Kasterburg could be linked to the Kalgachi interior by road and rail. As the effectiveness of such containment efforts had been less than absolute, even in Minarborian times, the DTW entertained the proposal of a delegation of Euran businessmen who had approached Kalgachia's Shirekeep diplomatic mission with a promise to provide armoured trains, inspired by Bassarid designs which they claimed would be coming imminently into their possession following an adjustment in Constancian foreign policy.
Tumult at the Frontiers (175 AL)
Ultimately the Enclosure of Lepidopterum obtained more geopolitical initiative for Kalgachia than its government was willing to exploit, content as it was with banishing the spectre of total Shirerithian envelopment for as many generations as it took for the latter to subdue Kasterburg into servile clienthood and/or annexation - but having disrupted the spell of impending Shirerithian hegemony which had hitherto been seen as inevitable, Kalgachia's example inspired a number of other groups contesting the ungoverned territory beyond its frontiers and most recently distressed by Shireroth's own reaction to the situation in the form of Fall Schwartz-Tilman, the latest in a long line of heavy-handed military sweeps through the lawless Benacian interior. From these battered but newly-emboldened populations, two polities eventually coalesced into some recognisable form - the Transbatavian Free State in the land north of Nackholm and the Republic of Inner Benacia (RIB) along most of Kalgachia's remaining frontier, centred upon the erstwhile Deep Singer stronghold of Stonetree which had been largely evacuated or else liquidated during a recent Shirerithian sweep of the area.
International reaction to these nascent states was sceptical in the extreme, an attitude mirrored in Kalgachia after it simultaneously received two RIB emissaries - one tasked with negotiating the delineation of the already well-established Kalgachi frontier, and the other to attack said frontier with the inexplicable but apparently symbolic throw of a spear into Kalgachi territory. The latter envoy, his approach spotted from some distance by the Prefects' Border Guard Service on account of the dozen or so chanting ritualists accompanying him, was observed to throw his spear across the border whereupon he was immediately liquidated by two PBGS snipers concealed in the dense coniferous forest beyond. The other envoy, after a brief detention, was sent back to his masters with the message that the tenor of any future relationship between Kalgachia and the RIB would be determined by the willingness of the latter to adjust its attitude with regard to the deployment of combat weapons against Kalgachi territory.
