Halcyon // Felonil

IMPORTANT NOTE!
There are like ten different pages on this wiki which all sort of cover this city in some way. This page is aiming to be a generalised, centralised, and self-standing one. To view more specific information, you can manually hop the redirects on pages like Halcyon, Felonil, Felonil City, Waterdeep, Halcyon Collapse, Fascist Politics, Transport, People, Positions, CPRFH and more.
One final thing to note - Before 2018ish, I used the name 'Waterdeep' for Felonil , when Indratera was little more than a glint in my eye. Whilst "Waterdeep" appears on this wiki in a lot of nooks and crannies,, replace it mentally with Felonil. Alright, that's all the primer you need for this page!
Halcyon, previously known as Felonil before 1561, was the world's largest, greatest, most populous, most important, most advanced, most visited, and most written-about city. Countless people lived and died, and had their stories told, in and around it. 
== Geography & Climate ==
The city was located on the western coast of the Danderillon, occupying a large and sheltered river delta where the Reiros & Reidos rivers met, flowing out among a collection of five major islands (those being Lukari, Xipio, Katiuÿx, Hjera, & Zeiviao). The delta had a constant supply of freshwater, forests to the north, access to the sea, TWO rivers, a sheltered harbour from storms, a warm location thanks to ocean currents, good hills surrounding it for defence, was rich in game, had east routes eastward inland, and extensive arable land to the east & south. It is little wonder such a great city sprung up there. It had chilly winters (the month of Helkoälda averaging just barely 0°C) and damp cool summers (the month of Ixte averaging about 21°C), with very high levels of rain all year round (Köppen climate classification Dfb). The prairie to its east was oil-rich and timber-rich, too - this formed part of the Western Danderillon Corridor region, which was a hotbed of early industry as well as the main farmland area contributing to the city's supplies. 
== Notable Historical Periods ==
=== Precolonial Era ===
Just after the turn of the ninth millennium before zero, the area was settled by the Anoquit tribe of Gildegrans, who fled the meteor shower that created the modern Anoq Basin of the Central Danderillon. This Bronze Age tribe named their settlement Y'rontaoq (Proto-Gildegran: /jəʔ.ʁon.tawqʰ/). It consisted of a small village on the headland, and a secondary smithing village by the mouth of the Reidos. The Anoquit also built extensive catacombs beneath the southern shore known as the Ławglasqaqquit (Proto-Gildegran: /ɬaʊ.ɣʟas.qaqʷː.ɨt/), which span most the south half of the modern city and have been used by countless thieves and rats. Y'rontaoq survived for quite some time, but became abandoned in the first few millennia, known to the local Vreigardt tribes as Yurontoq-Reimostek ('the meeting of two rivers at Y'rontaoq').
=== Imperial Age ===
In 299, the Euluskan Empire decided this area would make for the perfect base for their colonial conquest of the Danderillon. It was uninhabited when they arrived and set up their new fort, port, shipyard, camps, and towns spanning the islands, which in totality they named Adzë Falloïonul, meaning "New Fallo City". The colonial conquest of the continent lasted not more than a century or two from thereon. It blossomed from its constituents into one entire small city, and kept growing, over the subsequent centuries. Its name was officially chartered as Felonil in the sixth century. By the time of the late twelfth century, it overtook the Lyskeiön Capital Territory to become the most populous and most economically important city in the world, and the centre of burgeoning industrialisation. In the late fourteenth century, it became an autonomous special self-governing territory within the Euluskan Empire, known as the Felonil Special Economic Territory (or Felonil SET). Along with the other Euluskan capitals of Accipiter, Carmogan, and Datria, it controlled the majority of trade in and around the Indrateran continent.
=== Independence ===
In the late 15th and early 16th century, the Euluskan Empire was crumbling. The Wasting Blight (global plague) of 1490, the Pharox Thas Massacre losing the colony of the Volkotti Straits, the Lakayan Rebellion of 1513 losing Lakay, the Disforza Conspiracy, the Felonil Mercenary-Mage Riots of 1502-4, and much more contributed. Unwilling to be bogged down in a nasty impending succession crisis, Felonil declared independence under the statesman Count-Polemarch Amélio Athalanta (successor of di'Ayala). Felonil declared the formation of the nation of Scarossar in 1514. Under early Scarossar, the Industrial Revolution's groundwork was laid. The prototypes and infrastructure for the first trains, the adoption of steam power, the telegraph, and land-reclaim programs (from the sea) began. Folk heroes and emblematic social activists like Papa Warad or John Cadence showed up during this era.
=== Industrial Revolution ===
From 1514 and the following decades thereafter, Felonil entered an age of economic prosperity and rapid industralisation. The Empire fell in 1519, and Scarossar was only bolstered by an influx of labourers and intelligentsia. The 1520s were a period marked by the Moor Wars, a series of conflicts in the oil-rich Western Danderillon region with the Vreigardt-Anoq nation; social culture was shaped by the war. The Vortic Mercatorium, allied with Scarossar for the oil wars, was allowed to set up a sizeable colony on Zeiviao Island in Felonil (almost a tenth of the Inner City land area was technically Vortic, but just so they could garrison troops, repair ships, build businesses, and contribute to the economy, not to take over). A large Vortic diaspora formed during this time. Meanwhile, in the early 1520s, the Calinezzi noble family, prior polemarchs of the city, fragmented. Their old businesses, monopolies, and syndicates crumbled - several enterprises and gangs like the Loveridges, Moonstars, Rapscallions, the early communists, and the di'Lamendolios began feuding over territory, a squabble that would come to a head in the early 1550s. As industrialisation marched on, there came a dark and gritty period, full of economic and social deprivation as profits drove sky-high and technology outstripped the pace of mankind. During this era, the first underground trains, skyscrapers, airships, car prototypes, machine guns, and industrial power plants sprang up. The gangs became stronger than the police. A series of bombings, riots, and gang wars in 1552-3 threw the city into chaos, though the communist-anarchist agitators were subdued and order restored. Thus was created the Convocation of Scarossar, a republican council of merchants, oligarchs, gang leaders, and politicians, to regulate and protect the city. 1553 marked the start of Felonil's seven year period as a true democratic republic, and the machines marched on. However, in 1560, a shadow cabal of transhumanist technofascists infiltrated Felonil and installed Aresilia Decimus as their puppet head of the republic. A clandestine paramilitary group called the Night Watch uncovered their plot, though they were forced to flee after failing to stop the murders of several politicians nor to prevent the imprisonment of most of the democratic leaders. The following year, the Night Watch returned alongside Lord Governor Machavellio di'Sforza of the Lakayan Federation, who invaded and liberated the city in a bloody battle using a technological blackout. The Lakayan Federation annexed Felonil to help it get back on its feet and to acquire the most powerful means of production in the world; they made it their federal capital, causing mass migration of Lakayans here, further creating another diaspora. The city was renamed to Halcyon.
=== Golden Age Halcyon ===
In the years after the Federation's acquisition of the city, it underwent 'The Rejuvenation', as it came to be known. Historical sites and early industrial architecture were revamped (much of mid and southern Halcyon was soon full of beautiful city blocks with detailed facades, wide streets, and picturesque bridges), whilst skyscrapers and factories were mostly relegated to the northern districts of Lukari, Bygone, and Zeiliao. Several bureaus were set up for various specialist police forces - the DHA mage hunters, the DEAD monster hunting agency, the IDEA intelligence agency, and the Jackboot elite peacekeepers. Law and order were to be paramount. Mages, long since culturally an enemy of the Euluskan people, their fear instilled by the Empire and the churches, were highly regulated. Industrialisation grew, but the city was no longer as dirty and dangerous as late Felonil. No, this was the golden age. 
Several events were set in motion after the 1567 murders of the stage magician Henri Anžir and the chief of the secret police Luth Salmastrien, which led to the revelation that Professor Waldenstromm had discovered electricity in her self-imposed exile. Waldenstromm was offered a pardon and a post by Lord Governor di'Sforza, and began working for the university. By the 1572 World's Fair, she and di'Sforza together unveiled electricity to the city. Within months, the entirety of Halcyon was hooked up to power grids, with electric lights, factories, businesses, weapons of war, ironclad steam ships, motorcars, electric trains, planes, radios, telephones, and more. Industrialisation sped on and on, reaching dizzying heights. Halcyon was a city united under the light of a thousand stars. 
=== The God Wars ===
By the time of the outbreak of the God Wars at the turn of 1622, Halcyon was a city ten times more advanced than anywhere else on the planet. When the tensions present between it and the Datrian Empire exploded into war, it formed the Euluskan League united with southern powers, all ex-Empire states. It fought this modernised war against the Boreal Alliance (Datria + Rakkimar) and against the Vortai-Lakayan Union (Lakay, the Vortic Isles) for twenty years. This war was a modern one, won not by swords and spears but by machine guns, tanks, ironclads, and planes. Halcyon's power was immense, backed by the southern successor states, and its victory was almost guaranteed by 1642, striking right into the heart of the Rakkimarran homeland, its allies currently sieging Sedia and Datria and crushing Accipiter... However, then began the Everlasting Night. A global blizzard with no sun for decades. The geomagnetic aurora broke electric and even steam technology. Halcyon's Golden Age had crumbled. Trains broke, telegraph lines snapped, guns exploded, planes fell out of the sky. Technology regressed a thousand years. Shortages and hypothermia killed over half the world. The war continued, with soldiers dying more to frostbite than to one another's inert guns better used as sticks, until there were only thousands left fighting. Halcyon was put under siege and Sacked by a desperate coalition of the Boreal Alliance and the Vortai-Lakayan Union, effectively ending the war except for a few worldwide small desperate struggles to survive, not about ideology. The city lay in tattered snowy ruins until the first sunrise in 1694, and the world could breathe easy. Almost three-quarters of its population was gone, but a few million still survived in the inner city and undercity. They would rebuild.
=== Fascist Halcyon ===
The early Collapse Era (post-god-wars) beginning in 1694 TE (or zero C) was marked by every society on the planet generally rebuilding itself and becoming relatively insular after what had happened. It was like a complete reset for Indrateran geopolitics. Halcyon was no different. The city expanded over the course of the next two hundred years, refilling its borders again, attracting immigration, and growing even more rapidly than anyone could predict. The remnants of industrial power were there. Though electricity was rare because most of its systems had broke down during the Everlasting Night aurora, steam power still functioned. Factories, trains, and telegraphs were retrofitted, and life began anew. People in Halcyon, just as much as anywhere else, became very isolative and unwilling to expand or ally with other nations - they should all just get on and focus on picking up the pieces. But there was another thing. The Sack of Halcyon by the Alliance & Union, the God Wars, the Everlasting Night, they had all been the cause of the loss of its golden age. And who better to become a scapegoat for all of that than the inhumans (anyone who didn't look close to human, although there are countless sentient species in Indratera) and the mages? Mages were the shamans of the enemy armies and led their inhuman troops (the Euluskan League was the only God Wars power to NOT use magic troops because of their prejudices, and they were also only army that forbade inhumans from joining). Mages must have caused the sun to go out for a half century, they must have brought in the cold, they must have broken the technology, the wars must even have happened because of them.... so people were told - it's a good thing that 1622 was too long ago to remember for anyone alive. The noble rulership - which became an absolute monarchy masquerading as a bicameral constitutional one - and the sociopolitical climate of Collapse Era Halcyon could soon be described by one word only. Fascist. 
There was a powerful sense of nationalism and tradition as the once-greatest city ever; the vilification, incarceration, and execution of anyone deemed a mage (even without the ability to cast, being falsely labelled a 'latent magic risk'), the supremacy of the army and the peacekeepers as 'a social class above the peasantry', mass media censorship and historical revisionism; the intertwining of the church into politics to control the masses and the raising of the clergy 'above all other social classes'; the monopolisation of corporations; governmental nepotism; frequently fraudulent elections; the diminishment of labour power & peasant power; disrespect to the arts and to intellectuals and mage sympathisers. Halcyon was gripped by a powerful pestilence of fascism. Mages were stoned or hanged from the bridges to the city, the rich got richer, and the 99% were downtrodden. It was a very dark age.
=== Communist Republic of Halcyon ===
Fascist Halcyon came to a breaking point from the year 249 C onward, with some resistance to the hanging of mages, a Workers' Party government campaigning for better labour rights, and communist terrorist attacks on minor outlying garrisons. In 252 C, Queen Volterra suddenly and mysteriously died, appointing an unheard-of successor, Copper the Tyro King, who arrived a fortnight later in the city. They were in town for one day before a bombing at a hanging led to Jackboots firing on revellers which spiralled into the Winter Revolution. City wide riots broke out, and workers rose up, breaking their metaphorical chains. The Palace of Mirrors was stormed by a vanguard led by the hero Tamerlane, and the king taken into the snow and shot by firing squad. Then ensued a six-week bloody civil war between the communists and the loyalists / monarchists. The communists won; surviving monarchists fled to nearby nations. After this time, the revolutionary Provisional Government reformed the state into the amber-clad Communist Republic of Halcyon (ZEH - Zosavelkal Eveäverny kaHalxeiën). 
===== Utopia =====
Early communist Halcyon was equal parts utopian and Orwellian. There was a strong emphasis on community - the contëra was a democratic subunit consisting of a couple neighbourhoods or city blocks, headed by a representative who raised local concerns in the State Assembly under the state. These contëra focused on labour conditions, medicine, education, municipal services, infrastructure, agriculture, distribution of food and resources, etc. Every company - be that farm conglomerates, factories, communications, hospitals - was all part of the state, but people were given a sense of ownership over them. Violent crime and theft dropped, because of two reasons - first, to steal from a business was to steal from one's community - and secondly, lawbreakers were VERY harshly punished by the state, to ensure everyone else followed the rules and maintain the delicate equilibrium of society. Nobility was abolished, and inheritance was divided amongst a deceased person's comrades or coworkers. Almost all politicians and leaders were workers. Merchants, especially foreign ones, were heavily regulated to ensure they did not outgrow their place. The state paid for all housing; food, transport, and entertainment were all near-free, and excess wealth was funnelled back into one's local community. No workers 'owned' the means of production - there were no factory owners, CEOs, farm barons - the state owned these and appointed people beneath it. Everyone was given the feeling of being part of a collective - addressed as comrade (katov), referred to as 'revolutionaries' and members of The Party. The people were all reminded how glorious they were to be revolutionaries and for their fight in overthrowing the old regime - this gave a strong sense of pride in the state. People were encouraged to take part in the running of things locally. The arts and the intelligenstia were encouraged to flourish, and celebrated. People were paid for philosophy, for writing, for sculpture, painting, as they would be for jobs.
===== Control =====
Now for the Orwellian bits. Firstly, obviously, religion was banned. Religion was counter-revolutionary activity (ixekastheny) and was punishable. The state carried out numerous xtelrin ('purges') periodically to combat counter-revolutionary activity. One of the first xtelrin was to send the Jackboots to clear out the barrows, removing the underground fallback for criminals. The state also formed a brutal secret police called the HUSH. They did things like set up fake counter-revolutionary cells to entrap the curious. Their ranks were full of ex-Jackboots, but also of mages - how unusual in Indratera! These mages, known as Prognosticators (imverraniksi), were trained in incredibly potent psychic magic like mind-reading and telekinetics. They spied on everyone, using magic to retrieve information like their names, personality, likes, fears, tendencies, friends, wealth, links, and more. They were quite simply the thought police. Anyone found guilty of thinking counter-revolutionary thoughts was taken into custody (course, they could just say you thought it, with no proof needed). Some counter-revolutionaries were reprogrammed through 'non-contact psychic interrogation' (mental reconditioning); others were put to the firing squad. It worked out that still, the average Halcyian hated mages, but now instead of the fascist scapegoat, they were the tool of the oppressive state. Oh, and the Party also investigated its own members in secret to identify counter-revolutionary activity and stamp it out - Minister of Enlightenment Renya Eleutheria was killed by firing squad after being found guilty of this by the secret police. Well, it can't be all sunshine and rainbows. It's Indratera.
== Culture ==
Since its inception, Halcyon has been the core of the Danderillon-based Euluska ethnolinguistic diaspora. But through history, various groups have integrated into its society. There were sizeable communities of Vortai, Vrei, Vistu, Fallonese, Kaneeyi & other Lakayans, and even others like the Rakki and Gildegrans. It was a melting pot of the whole world. Halcyon Euluska was its own unique dialect too, peppered with loanwords.
For a list of notable landmarks and areas in the communist era, see this page
File:Lakayan Halcyon Flag.png|The flag of Lakayan Halcyon (1561-God Wars)
File:Fascist Halcyon Flag.png|The flag of Fascist Halcyon (God Wars-252 C)
File:Halcyon Flag Comm.png|The flag of Felonil under the Oracles (1560-1561)
File:Communist Halcyon's Flag.png|The flag of the Communist Republic of Halcyon, 252 C onwards.
File:Halcyon New Map.jpg|A political & landmark map of Halcyon in 252 C on the eve of the Winter Revolution.
File:Halcyon Trains v3.png|The train lines of antebellum Halcyon.
File:Halcyon Government Dynamics.png|The Fascist Halcyon model of government.
File:Halcyon Estates Five Classes.jpg|The 5 Estates in Fascist Halcyon.
File:Halcyon v5.jpg|An outdated map of the city in the late 16th century, not showing the islands.
File:Halcyon Flag 4.png|The flag of Independent Felonil (1514-1560)
File:Felonil Flag e.png|The Imperial Flag of Felonil (4th century to 1514)
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