Saturday, September 17, 2016

Celestial Exiles

Whenever a large group of people interact, those with power will inevitably decide that certain individuals are inconvenient.  A time honored solution to this problem is exile to the provinces.  This solution is particularly attractive when it is nigh impossible to return without intervention from the exiling authority (sometimes you want them back).

The Celestial Empire is no different.  Where the Celestial Empire *is* different is that, being at the top of the g-well, they can drop their troubles off literally anywhere on the globe.  Or the moon, for that matter, but that's a whole separate set of anomalies.  You can do the orbital mechanics and such for how long it takes to lob an object upward from somewhere outward/down from the Celestial Palace (roughly 15,000 miles up, give or take a bit) and drop it onto terra firma in the equivalent of Saskatchewan if you like, but let's just assume that they can and that the transit time for a one-way trip is unimportant.  They can then decide if they feel like dropping supplies, reinforcements, etc.  - or not.  The thing about exiling nobles is that they don't go alone.  They have staff and bodyguards and obnoxious political supporters to accomplish whatever nominal task you sent them out for besides "not being here".  So the drop zone can get pretty big depending on the rank of the exile, or be fairly small for someone genuinely unpopular.

What all of this means for folks with a gravity habit is that the Celestial Empire is in the habit of dropping large groups of well-trained, well-armed, absurdly ignorant and incredibly desperate people literally out of the blue.  Have fun with that.

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