delight_in_wt | 5 Chirreb 4385: History Lesson!

delight-in.livejournal.com posting in

Four or five centuries ago, Lalastria was a prosperous city on Vrix. That's the same branch as Niestria, the city my mother came from. I heard Lalastria's story from a skyship first mate once when we were flying down for a visit.

Vrix had a large population of Taptet who'd been enslaved by Blee before the Primes came to colonize Vrix. Taptet are very short humanoids with hooved feet and cervine features. Blee are four-legged canines with four arms on their backs. Blee can be very dangerous people but Taptet are pretty weak both in terms of physique and magical power. Some Taptet have a gift for potion-making but the potions are so unpredictable in effect that they rarely use them.

When the Primes came, they killed or drove most all of the Blee off to the Verticals. The Taptet slaves didn't fight on behalf of their masters and so the Primes took lots of Taptets captive. They argued about what to do with them a lot. Some Primes wanted to use the Taptet as slave labor themselves, some of them wanted to drive the Taptet off to the Verticals like the Mewellicaps, or at least force them way outwards into territory the Primes weren't planning to settle yet. A few even thought they should give the Taptet small pockets of land and let the nonprimes live there in peaceful villages of their own.

There was so much dissension over it that the colonists split into two groups. One group left to found Niestria, and they didn't permit any nonprime slaves or settlements within their Mene. The other group was Lalastria, which kept the Taptet as slaves in the Mene. They still weren't allowed within city walls because it takes a while to work up to that kind of madness, I guess.

They'd been keeping and breeding Taptet as slaves for many decades before they started talking about allowing them in the city. Taptet made pretty good slaves, apparently. They weren't great at hard labor like plowing or digging or suchlike since they were so weak. But they were meek and obedient and smart enough to take direction. Lots of Primes kept some as servants and some craftsmen in the Mene used them to do apprentice-level work. Slavers really wanted to sell them to cityfolk, and country nobles didn't like having to leave their serving-slaves outside the city and basically have to hire a whole different servant set for the city. They pressured the city to revise the laws against doorwaying to make an exception just for Taptet slaves. "They're mild and sapient and harmless. It's not like loosing a wild Krango or bringing in a rebellious Cyarr or a free monster," they said. "There's no danger in these little folk who were bred and born to be slaves."

Some people thought it was a bad idea and warned that even the little Taptet were not to be trusted. They pointed to potion-fueled Taptet rebellions in other city-states as an example of the risks. "But these are domesticated Taptet. They've been slaves for generation upon generation, slaves to the Blee before we came. They have no culture of their own and they are banned from potion-craft. If any of them had ever had the talent for the craft, they've surely lost it by now. We have them under control."

The slaveholders got their way eventually. Taptet slaves were allowed to pass through the city walls. Some people were still concerned about the dangers monsters posed inside the city though, so there were very strict curbs to control their behavior. To prove that their Taptet slaves were completely under their control, treatment of the slaves got increasingly more strict. The Taptet were not allowed to marry or to choose their own mates. Their children were usually taken from them (often to be raised in creches run by other Taptet slaves) to ensure that no family bonds formed. Any disobedience against their masters, even unintentional, was met with harsh punishment. Any transgression against Prime law by a Taptet was a capital crime.

Despite their high use of slave labor, the standard of living for Lalastrian Primes lagged behind that of neighboring Niestria. Some Primes speculated that there was a secret movement among the Taptet to sabotage the Lalastrian economy. Even more draconian measures to prevent Taptet conspiracies were implemented: mandatory shift rotations and bi-annual swaps of individual slaves to break up any slave group that might be colluding to cause harm to their masters.

In the end, the worst the Primes could do was not enough to save Lalastria. As their economy worsened tax revenue fell. The nobles raised the levies and compliance fell. Guards went months without pay and grew increasingly corrupt as they took bribes to keep themselves fed. Enforcement of all laws became erratic. That's probably how the Taptet rebellion managed to get organized despite everything put into place to stop them. Either the slaves did have alchemists among them or they had allies among free Taptet elsewhere on the branch who smuggled potions of fire breath and berserker strength and iron skin to them. On one fateful night, it seems that every slave in the city or Mene drank one or more of these potions. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of Taptet died from dangerous side effects of their own brewing. But the rest devastated the city, burning much of it to the ground and killing or driving off everyPrime.

Then the Taptet took charge of what remained of Lalastria, including her city walls.

When Niestria's adventurers came to the aid of Lalastrian refugees, they found the nonprime ex-slaves holed up behind Lalastria's walls. There was simply no way short of Holocaust weaponry to get the Taptet out. The Taptet negotiated a truce with Niestria in time. The nonprimes ruled Lalastria for over a century. They were only driven out when the city walls finally failed due to age because the Taptet had no enchanters capable of repairing or maintaining them.

And that is why sensible Primes make doorwaying a capital crime! No exceptions. I like lots of nonprimes just fine and they're good people but they don't belong in cities!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

terrycloth.livejournal.com

So they let them *live* in the cities and build up a population, and then abused them until they rebelled. That's... a kind of careful. I guess.

Is this *literally* the textbook example of how not to treat taptet?

Edited Date: 2010-10-06 04:19 pm (UTC)

From:

zeeth_kyrah

I dunno, I would have felt safer if the Taptet were living free and peacefully in their own villages and trading with the city instead of being slaves. No matter how well you treat them, a slave is still enslaved, and many will fight because of that alone.

From:

5 Chirreb 4385: History Lesson!

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags