Overview of PPT
The PPT "Perpetuum Propheta Territorium" is a monastic order founded by heimin in order to govern over a harsh and unforgiving norhtern territory beset by schizo raids and roamed by pagan tribes. The modern heimin are descendants of the original wandering angel-idol worshippers of Kanatan and the converted native tribes of northmen. It is a territory characterized by it's vast tundra wilderness, the southern capital city of Archangel being the only major urban location. Archangel is a busy port city overseeing tons of trade every day, mainly food imports and precious metal exports. The city also being characterized by it's many churches and hospitals, scenic parks, statues of the Angel and the river Agape that runs through it.
Apart from the capital there are three major fort towns and many minor forts throughout the tundra keep watch over the north, the sea, and the mining operations. Major roads are the arteries that connect these forts to the capital and by decree must be proudly maintained and guarded. By decree the three tribes of the northmen still maintain their own villages and territories and are given responsibilities befitting of them. The crown jewel of the PPT is the Academy located farther to the north of the capital, a university town built above the ancient city of Isokoro. The academy is both a place of learning and worship, a giant walled keep that closely guards it's secrets and guards the world's only known deposit of Kanatonium, the rare material that produces heat and has strange effects on the human body.
The order is ruled by the grandmaster, elected to rule by the knights and priesthood. Treated as a first among equals, the grandmaster rules for life but is subject to veto power by a majority of votes belonging to the Academy headmaster, Saints, generals, merchant guildmaster and the civillian elected mayor of Archangel, who make up a conevntion which meet every year.
What characterizes the heimin are their dual deeply religious worldview and survivalist attitude. This duality imprints itself deeply on the everyday psyche of common heimin, those who visit PPT for an extended period of time are stricken by their great optimism and deep pessimism, sometimes
co-existing, sometimes clashing. Their Angel of Revelation Kanatan promises a one-day-future paradise on earth, while in the moment they deal with unabating warfar and food shortage. The beautiful music and song heard among the churches and the cynical busy clamor of the marketplace are the
symphony that composes the everyday mind of the heimin. The newfound wealth of the silvermines only adding a strange note on the old song of virtue in poverty. Yet the discordant tune of wealth on the religious can only last a second. For beyond all modern psychological stresses is the old man in the cave. Their shared history, the great struggle, wandering, and plague of the past binds their minds in place. Regardless of what happens, all know of the old stories and sigh: our ancestors made it through much worse.
A Three-headed Man
The PPT's focus is now split, a condition warned about many times by the old saints. If we were to imagine a healthy country as a man, then we could also imagine that man being afflicted by a curse not common amongst us, but among nations. The growth of many heads. One head wants to go left and the other right, and they never agree and never move anywhere. The ultimate fate of that man is to be devoured by the beasts. Our nation is growing three heads, the head of the knighthood, the head of the merchant and the head of the academy. The head of the knighthood grabs his sabre and charges blindly forward into the wild, the head of the merchant drags his heels and cowers before the beasts of the wild, finally the head of the academy snorts and goes back to his reading while he is devoured alive. We must return to one head, the head the angel gave us. It is a common parable amongst the people of today.
The Heimin Origin
Origin Myth, adapted in brief from the Angelic Scripture and oral histories
In the days of gold when men were upright, war was honorable, food was abundant and the empire grew golden apples upon their trees. Our people were wanderers, the men were mercenaries and the women were singers and medicine women. All had common belief in an Angel named Kanatan who sang through saints, and was worshipped through idols. The wandering peoples were named Heimin, or "commoner" in their tongue, as all were equal underneath their angel. They moved from battlefield to battlefield making a name for themselves as warriors and doctors who could always turn the tide with their zeal. In the 10th century word of their deeds reached the ears of Emperor Yagonus Maxiumus XV, who commissioned them to take control of a northern territory from which schizo attacks were staged. On that infamous day the aclaimed lord of Heimin scoffed at the little gold and cold land of no aclaim, he turned his back to the cold and led a great troop away from the empire, into the south, never to be heard from again. There were however, an aproximate half of the host who accepted the commision and headed north. They were led by the warrior St.Taso who is said to have heard a song of revelation from the angel telling her in cryptic phrases to go where they were told. In song of a tongue not known by any but the priesthood "The path of most resistance is the path of life, walk into the abyss and the city of lights will burn the rot of the curse".
The trek north was long and hard, and upon the road the Heimin were beset by great hardships as if a great curse had been placed upon them. The first hardship was silence, where once their camps were filled with happy songs, sad songs, proud music, they were now filled with the ominous
sound of silence, not unlike the still before battle. All had been made to forget music over a night. The second hardship struck the moment they joined with a support legion sent by the emperor. The moment they joined hands a great storm brewed and did not abate until the legion was forced into
retreat, and the Heimin watched in horror as the storm following their march south back to the capital, as if chasing them away. The final trial struck as they officially crossed the border into the northern territory. It started with one, a child of ten years, a plague that attacked with rot from the inside.
It spread to five people a day. After five days the aflicted would be bedridden, and after ten they would die a painful death. Quarantine would do nothing, burning bodies and hygiene enforcement, nothing would deflect the plague. Five deaths a day was not enough to destroy the host, but it served like a clock, an inevitable force of destruction that damned their people to destruction.
What greeted St.Taso's Heimin upon reaching the enemy territory was nothing like they had pictured. They were not schizo but tribes of pagan idol worshippers who had made pacts with them in their south-eastward marches to let them go unmolested into the empire. A mutual non-agression
for the purpose of self preservation. The tribe they met upon the southern shores of the territory were called the people of the sail and the Skipi, and the popular interpretation of a legend goes that St.Taso marched alone into their encampment, chastised their chief in that tongue unkonwn to most except saints and angels, and struck down a demon infesting the chief's throne. The demon's name was "heaven's regret" and he had the power to make cowards out of kings. Outside of that legend we know that a show of force and claim that they sought an "abyss" gained the trust of the Skipi tribe and let them hire a guide into the place known locally as the "great darkness".
The great darkness was in fact another tribe that had inhabited a giant cave farther north in the hills. They were not schizo either, but of sound mind. Yet all that returned of messengers attempting to make contact were their heads. St.Taso knew what her people's purpose was from there. Her men worked swiftly to set up a fort on the bank of the river Agape, and went to make contact with other tribes as well as make an alliance with the Skipi. It was found that all tribes were friendly, all worshipped idols in a similar fashion to the Heimin, but all were afraid of the dark dwellers. And the dark dwellers themselves were said to be closer to schizo than to man, although being man themselves, they cast away their idol and ruled all others by the strength of their friends and the depths of their despair. When the time came none came to aid the Heimin in battle, but all gave them what they could in knowledge of the north and of survival and hunting grounds. The battle of Isokoro is the greatest legend for warriors among Heimin. A month of plague weighed on the minds of St.Taso and her people, and on the 31st day in the midst of a spring thaw she led an army into the cave system where they would clash like madmen racing against time, against other madmen who had thrown away all their oaths to dark despairs.
Accounts of what follow are hotly debated amongst historians, priests and scientists. What can be said about the cataclysm? The final legend of the Heimin origin myth is what happened the day of the battle. Onlookers record the sight of all the women and children marching into the cave after
the warriors had cleared the way. The door sealed behind them, neither they nor the dark dwellers were seen again, and the doors could not be opened nor destroyed, not for 200 years. After the great cataclysm that shook our world, and stories of the warrior people marching into the cave
becoming legend, the doors unsealed. An army stepped out and all worshippped them as the lords of ancient legend. They laid claim to the lands, built a trade city and the academy, and converted all to Tenshism, the worship of their revelatory angel Kanatan.
The account of the people in the cave is what brings scientists and historians to tears of frustration. However as the grandmaster once said "Who cares what those fools think! Bah! We know what we saw and that's all" we can do nothing but take the people of the cave at their word. They say during the battle the angel appeared to the women and children, telling them to rush into the cave, and that their final trial had come. What they found inside there was indeed a "city of light". The people of the dark had resisted to the last man in order to keep them from seeing the miraculous sight. It was a city carved out of chuubanite that gave off the most beautiful yellow-gold glow. The loving warmth of the sun emenating from every stone. And what's more those afflicted by the plague halted the progress of the rot just by being near the stone. And the curse of the lost songs was reversed immediately at the sight of the light. A young girl named St.Kana was given a last revelation in the cave, a strange song that described the existence of radiation and the way to use radiation in a medicinal fashion to break curses. After two months of studying the revelation, a curse breaking ceremony was devised and the Heimin had foricbly removed the curse of their people from their bodies. At the end of those two months in the cave the gates opened up, and what greeted the Heimin was a world that had changed drastically, a post cataclysm world 200 years later.