The Same Appetite

Kupfer Guild Inc. is founded in 2566, one year after the crossing, to mine the Wet Lands.

Ulius Händlberg and Rajesh Masala did not open that region. The Pioneers opened it, with an airship and a research base and a rescue. The guild is founded to mine it, and it is founded the following year, which is about as long as it takes to hear the news and raise the money.

This is the whole shape of the era, arriving on schedule. Somebody finds something. Somebody else works out what it is worth.

From 2568 the guild funds Camp 0.

It is a generous arrangement and it is not charity. Kupfer Guild Inc. builds The Citadel around 2575 as a hub and a port for the base, which means the base now depends on a company, and the company now has a say in a research programme aimed at the Curse of Ravana.

Nobody involved has read the last thousand years closely enough to find that alarming.

Meanwhile the north builds machines.

Blue Ice Industries is founded in 2578 by Bob Winters and makes military equipment. In 2600 it walks a giant military machine into the Arctic Semicircle, trying to force a heavy route south, and the machine stops there and does not move again.

The wreck is enormous and stays where it fell. People start calling it the Frozen Giant. Kyle Winters takes the company from his father in 2615 and inherits it, along with everything else.

On the Warzow Peninsula, Andreas Azulmandio runs drugs and uranium.

He was born in Cufefe in 2561, and by the 2620s Los Azules controls the trade and the mines both, and Cufefe has gone from an unstable logging town to a prosperous export hub on the proceeds. In 2623 he opens Hotel Azul, modelled on what his ancestors learned running a resort at the far end of the world.

The peninsula does well out of him. That is not a contradiction, and nobody there treats it as one.

He dies, and it is taken apart and shared out inside a few years.

Uran Inc. absorbs the uranium. NPW rises to run the peninsula. The two of them together build the WLC Arenal out of the proceeds: the Woodland Circuit, the Woodland Colosseum, the Woodland Airfield, the WLC Tower, with Cufefe paying toward the construction.

An empire built on a narcotic and a heavy metal becomes a racing venue. The money does not remember where it came from and neither does anyone spending it.

Around 2640 the research at Camp 0 finishes, and the site is left.

What it found is not written down anywhere. Seventy-five years of deliberate study of the Curse of Ravana by people with no stake in owning it, which is more than anyone managed in the previous thirteen centuries, and then the funding ends and the buildings empty.

Up north the same decade, Blue Ice Industries puts the Ice Berg Circuit beside the Frozen Giant in 2650 and opens the Blue Ice Bot Arena inside the wreck in 2654. A failed war machine becomes a venue too.

In 2656 NPW runs The Maglev across northern Jedersland.

It links the WLC Arenal to the Ice Berg Circuit, which is to say it links the two racetracks. In 2662 Kupfer Guild Inc. upgrades the old Pioneers Airstrip into Citadel Airport to commercialise the Wet Lands properly, and in 2666 the maglev is extended west through Pichon to Belucho.

Luxemburg was a trade route that became an empire. This is a rail network being laid between attractions.

In 2665 the laboratory at Camp 0 reopens as a nightclub.

Kupfer Guild Inc. converts the Camp 0 Old Laboratory, adds the Jungle Boat Circuit, and opens the whole site as Kupfer Arenal. Great Question is still there, a few streets from it, mostly empty, maintained by the same company.

People dance in the building where the thing was studied, next to the ruins where it was found, in the village it nearly killed. None of them are told, and there is no one who could tell them.

In 2668 Pimber Green and Ton Green found Pimber & Ton Real Estate in the Mountain Meadow Region, and start selling the view.