Competition: Caperion Legends: Nighttime in Nardash

Finished
Caperion Legends: Nighttime in Nardash

Evicted from their previous domain, Clan Scholae Palatinae has come to the Caperion System to find a new home. Worlds full of wonder and mystery, the Clan is immersed into the new culture and its history. Supernatural tales, or fables, have been woven into a beautiful tapestry of mythos and legend that has been handed down from generation to generation. Members of the Clan have been asked to seek out these grand tales to help discern what is true and what can be explained away by logical rationale. For the dark hours when you dare not close your eyes. Tales of horror to frighten and disturb; tales of majesty to embolden and inspire. These are the Legends of the Caperion System.


The ultimate goal of this competition series is to fill our new home - the Caperion System - with a sense of life. To deepen its history and bring it to life with the ideas of its own members. We are looking to go beyond basic facts, mere descriptions, and data sheets. Those things create a framework, we want you to use your imagination to fill the framework and create a vibrant culture within. They often share common elements: unknown authorship, a narrator who recounts the story, a desire to explain (a phenomena, creation, moral lessons, historical events, religious practices, hopes or fears), the presence of supernatural or magic, and a storyline with a conflict that comes to an interesting resolution.


This Month’s Episode: Nighttime in Nardash

Create a legend, story, rumor or fairy tale about the nights in our enemy’s capital, Nardash. The contents - and format - are completely up to you. This can be a scary or uplifting story, but it must be centered around the city of Nardash.

Minimum word count: 500 words

Submission Format: PDF, .doc, or site submission

Grading: Voice Fiction Rubric

Competition Information
Organized by
Jorm (The Jester) Na'trej
Running time
2017-12-08 until 2017-12-30 (23 days)
Target Unit
Clan Scholae Palatinae
Competition Type
Fiction
Awards
Third Level Crescents and Clusters of Ice as per VOICE guidelines
Participants
9 subscribers, of which 4 have participated.
Results
Member
Major Jon Silvon
Textual submission

No question Nardash is a big city. Some people might even call it huge. Those people had never been to Coruscant, or even Nar Shadaa. Those were huge cities. As it stood, Nardash was just big. Twenty million residents, a few hundred square miles of concrete and steel, and the heart of the Meraxis Empire, naturally they would have a massive and strict police force to maintain absolute order.

And without a doubt, the Nardash Police Department (on paper a civilian organization, in practice a subdivision of the Military) was the picture of discipline, ever ready to crack down on the first sign of a crime, felony, or minor misdemeanor (really, they were all pretty much the same under Meraxian law).

Disciplined, dedicated, unwavering. So, naturally, they were a major hotbed of corruption. That’s where the Wayward Officer Correction Tribunal, WOCT, (Watchers, as their nickname goes) sprung up a few decades back.

The whole group was founded just two years after the coup that put the previous emperor in power, and only lasted for about two more years after that. In the decade since, they’ve become a kind of a ghost story among the populace, mostly cause of the weird rumors surrounding them, and the increasingly more weird rumors that have been popping up since.

Officially, the Watchers were an internal affairs division. The MP’s kept the populace in line, the Watchers kept the MP’s in line. The weird stuff was in how. See, the Watchers, they didn’t have the authority to make arrests, or even to open investigations. If an officer was accused of breaking the rules they were supposed to keep, the Watchers would simply “ask” them to come in for an “interview”.

See, that was another weird thing, nobody knew where the Watcher operated out of. They had no official base of operations, at least not one that was listed on paper. They’d just show up, at your precinct if you were lucky, if you weren’t they’d be at your house. And you didn’t have the option to refuse either. No word on where those souls went, but when they came back…

Take this one guy I heard a story about, Jaxos Reed...or was it Reen? Sheen? No no, it was definitley Jason Reed. Yes I’m sure, stop interupting!

So, Jack, he’s you’re standard slimeball, right? Taking bribes, dealing spice on the side, than using that money to set his wife and kids up in the nicest penthouse he could afford. One day he comes home to find a Watcher in that penthouse, sitting at the table with his wife and kids.

Jaxos didn’t show up to work the next day. His kids didn’t show up to school. Not for a week. Then two. Then four.

When they showed up again, they were the picture of Meraxian propaganda, “Hail the Emperor” and all that stuff. Reed punched the next guy that tried to bribe, the spice dealing stopped cold, and a lot of his regulars weren’t heard from again. I even heard a rumor that one of his kids nearly killed a classmate who said some unkind things about the regime.
What happened to the Watchers? Got shut down. Official story was “budget cuts”. Course you still always got the rumors. That they went underground to do their work more “efficiently”, that bad seeds still disappear and come back changed, that they’re the ones really running the Empire, that they’re a Sith sect or a bunch of disguised Rakatans or some nonsense…

Me? Well I take the Empire at it’s word. Course they’re gone. Take my advice, you tell people the same if it comes up. Just, trust me on this one?

Placement
1st place
Member
Darth Aeternus
File submission
Nighttime_in_Nardash.doc
Textual submission

see attachment

Placement
2nd place
3rd place
Qor Kith
Member
Qor Kith
File submission
Midnight_in_Nardash.pdf
Placement
3rd place
4th place
Ala'ar Rinn
Member
Ala'ar Rinn
File submission
Unfinished_Fiction_Doc.pdf
Placement
4th place