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King
Local Time: 04:36
Local Date: November 1, 2010
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: A bleak and barren rock
Posts: 2,743
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The Strange Case of the Greco-Gallic Spice-Saltpeter Trade Gone Terribly Wrong!
Well, this came to me when playing as the Germans (French in the story), and Alexander kept coming up asking to trade his spices and some money per turn for my saltpeter. I refused. A few turns later, he offered the same deal again. I wondered, if he were to write a letter asking for this, what would he be saying...
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A Letter to Her Imperial Royal Highness, Saint Joan d’Arc, Queen of the French
On July the Nineteenth, the Year of Our Lord Sixteen-hundred and Fifty-five
May God preserve you, O Glorious Queen of the Franks,
My dear Queen, I trust I find you in the best of health. I have heard rumors that a second outbreak of the plague (ugh, nasty business, that plague) had arisen in Paris. I trust that these are merely rumors, after all. In fairest Greece as well there have been disappointing bits of news. Firstly, my latest wife died, mysteriously as it was…it seems a solid block of limestone fell on her head from our of seemingly nowhere…a bit of an Aesychulian death scene, don’t you think? Ah well. It matters little. I married again the next day, with tremendous fanfare, laughter, happiness, wine, women, song, and women. It is a happy thing too. This lady is not only much richer, but she has some good political backgrounds that I might want to have under my thumb. I do hope she doesn’t die mysteriously like everyone else I’ve married.
Another woeful piece of news that has reached my ears is, to be frank, the sole reason I’ve even taken up my quill to jot down this piece of correspondence in the first place. I want you to know first that this does cost me tremendously. Firstly, I had to have my secretary to run out to K-Mart to buy some paper, and then I had to grab my pet peacock and tear out a pen for myself, and then I had to mash up my pet squid into this black liquid in order to get ink. O! the torments of the ruler! Ah, and now I notice that I’ve stained my tunic, pantaloons, and best silver codpiece (cost me a pretty penny), by flinging the blasted (excuse my incredibly bad language) quill about to write this letter in the first place. And so, if my letter seems to you to be written overly hastily by an extremely incensed hothead Greek, you are entirely correct. (Though, I must note that I am only incensed due to a strange accident having to do with an incredibly athletic Chief Priest swinging an incredibly large thurabel at an incredible rate of speed near my head.)
To be frank (no pun intended), what upsets me really is the latest news from Mr. Paddy O’Loughlin, my Romanian Trade Secretary, who presented to me a small piece of parchment that read, and I quote: “We have lost our supply of saltpeter!” Horrified, I pulled out my monogrammed, lace-frilled hanky, and after a good sob, I began to go over the deals with your government that provided my…starving, shoe-less, job-less, penny-less people with saltpeter. Yes, it’s true; the only thing my government can afford to give the people to make them happy is saltpeter. Yes, they use saltpeter for most everything these days. They cook saltpeter loaf…they mint saltpeter coins…they start saltpeter mills…heck, even last year the fashion of buckled saltpeter shoes exploded (and I’m not making this up) onto the Athenian fashion scene. The carnage was terrible.
But please! Oh please! I beg of you, search your heart for mercies! Would you deny the common people of that which makes them happiest? When they cannot afford anything else, you seek to tear away from them the only thing that they can afford to keep themselves alive?! What fiend can ye be?! You…you…MOST CRUEL WOMAN!! How can you do this? How can you? Don’t you know that people are starving daily in Sparta because they cannot get adequate shipments of saltpeter in time? Don’t you? And now, with that going on, you seek to cut off their last vital supply of saltpeter, the one thing keeping most of the remainder of the 65-pound champs alive out there in the streets? Please, consult your conscience, think about what this means. I beg of you, do this. It is for them I cry…
So…not only to you seek to kill all my people from lack of gunpow…I mean, saltpeter, but, in the process, you seek to cut off my trade route for spices. I also cry for this…indeed, my frilly shirt needs to go to the wash now, thank you very much. It’s soaked through, and I need it for the Grand Agora Ball tonight. Now what am I to do? I suppose now you’ll want me to slather it up with all the spices we now have lying around thanks to your backup on the imperial roads to cut off trade. Yeah, sure, that’ll hide the stain. Even now, I hear some of my palace workers, Bob and Militiades, dragging huge sacks of the stuff into the attic. Now, I guess, we’ll have to deal with huge sacks of paprika sitting in our palace, without a destination to be shipped, all because our granary blew up inexplicably after being filled to the brim with saltpeter, ready to, um, please the people…
Is it cruelty, or simply mere ignorance that has made you chop this trade in half, so to speak? I wonder if it could not be the latter (not to imply that you are stupid, mind you, no sir…nope, uh-uh, no…). Could it be that you are simply unaware of what it means to stop the Paprika Company from trading in Parisian streets? I think that it is time to enlighten you…Imagine yourself in the middle of the African Serengeti…now, imagine that you are lounging around, parasol in hand, next to a waterhole, and watching a herd of heron grace the azure skies, and fly smack dab into the lumbering elephants nearby…imagine a herd of angry hippo suddenly appears in the bush just behind you, lumbering forward to get a drink, and in the process trampling you…good. Now, in a moment, I want you to imagine something completely different.
Let me tell you the tremendous story of how my people acquired this paprika, our prize spice, and how many thousands suffered and died to get it, and how their blood stained the earth in order to make paprika free to all people. It is 110 AD, the height of Greek imperial power. I, a bit younger (and a lot else), am looking eastward for expansion, easily brushing aside the barbarians of Anatolia, and driving heavily at the old, venerable Persian Empire of Xerxes (Latin: Jerxes). Yes, old Xerk has been expanded his empire for a few millennia by now, largely thanks to a bunch known as the Immortals, who were so incredibly good at fighting that they never won a battle in their lives. In those days, I was perfecting the phalanx with the help of my friendly neighborhood hoplites, and we decided that…it was time!
In ten minutes, we’d declared war, in eight, we’d entered Persian territory, and ten years later, we’d engaged the enemy. It was a long, hard fight, the immortals budging ever chance they got, but we finally whipped them. Yes, with our spears dangling forward (and our men tripping over them a lot), we drove the Persians up one hill, and down the next. In the mass of mangled corpses at the bottom of the hill, after they’d all fallen backward, we discovered one man with a heap of red powder. I was, at the time, cooking a chicken I’d taken off a dead comrade, and, in taking it off the fire, I tripped backward over the corpse. Removing the spit from the unfortunate, I found that the chicken had landed directly on top of the heap of paprika, and, tasting it, I found that it was actually pretty good.
Four minutes later, we were at the Persian capital, and in storming the palace we captured Xerxes himself in a daring midnight raid with lasted approximately 20 seconds. Confronted with the bitter knowledge that he was to be executed, he fell on his knees and began to cry. “Kill me!” he cried, “but for the love of Zarathustra, don’t destroy my paprika!” We soothed the old man’s soul by letting him rest in the confidence that we would not, after all, destroy the paprika, and then we mercifully flayed him alive. His last words were “Paprika…paprika…paprikaaaaaaaaaaaargh!” Then, I past a decree that no hair on the head of the paprika would be harmed, and immediately, the entire Greek army burst out laughing. Blushing, I sent orders for the immediate boiling of my speechwriter, and amended the speech. I never made another speech again, and Dr. Fraud tells me that this is the reason. Still, we kept our word to the lately skinned Xerxes, and I allowed the paprika to remain in bundles in the imperial palace, unmolested. A shrine was set up for the local people to all acknowledge their love of the national treasure of Persia, while we all looked on, laughingly, at these poor pitiful barbarian dolts. However, we shortly learned how wonderful the stuff is ourselves, and we confiscated it all, and made sure to move all paprika production up to Greece. And so, that is how we came to learn of the glories of this, the queen of spices. I don’t believe we ever found the king.
So, Joan, now that you are better edumacated about the history of the paprika trade, and the importance of the saltpeter trade, I think that you should probably do your best to relieve world suffering by renewing the trade, don’t you think? I mean, after all, what do you have to loose, other than one half of your saltpeter? I think that you know now the true importance of your decision, and the terrible impact that it would produce. Without saltpeter, the people starve, with the rebuttal of paprika Greece’s national treasure is snubbed. I think that if you really have a heart, as you purport, than you will seriously consider changing your decision, right now. This minute. OK?
Thanks, Joan, I knew you’d understand. Now, please excuse me. I simply have to send for the cleaners, and to remind the guy that I don’t want those little white things in my shirt. You will pay the fee for the shipping of this message, won’t you? Thanks, again.
Hugs and kisses,
Alexander the Great
(THIS has been an excerpt from Alexander the Great: A Biography of the World’s Greatest Political Figure, Period.)
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Empire growing,
Pleasures flowing,
Fortune smiles and so should you.
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I felt like one of those french people - I assume since saltpeter is everything the Greeks officially eat, paprika must be all the French consume 
