Gilded Dispatch 03

The third dispatch from Springfield Autumns in the Gilded Sands campaign, proceeding GS05 – LUNAR CONJUNCTION. Originally posted as a Google Docs document.

## Dispatch

*Made a lot of money on some bets today, and I’m not fucking happy about it. Folks wagering on when open war between Dodona and the Dynasty would break out. Some had it pegged for months out; I was the closest guess, off by only three days.*

*Every screen in Tribunal territory showed the same reel of Iris propaganda: footage of red-robed scholars and religious terrorists kidnapping honest Dodonan scientists, of traitors harboring defectors and practices of illegal superstition, and finally of the Plains ablaze as Terrenon mechs cross the border, laying waste to the humble oasis-city of Bydos. A steady voice, engineered to command attention and instill confidence, tells the populace of the many threats who would drag Dodona down into the dust, to stop progress at any cost in their cruel ignorance. They are jealous, the voice assures you, and lost to their inferior traditions and crazed delusional beliefs. Dodona simultaneously is weak and wounded and the unstoppable ascendant homeland, the unfair victim of outside invasion who needs your help to survive and the inevitable march of empire and innovation who will easily trounce all foes.*

*I pray to the moons that none of them believe it. Even if they don’t, there’s already rumors of a draft incoming, and it’ll probably hit the poor Taimu hard. A lot of my Dodonan contacts are going missing, and those who can still get the word out say the Iris are disappearing people more and more these days, sometimes dragging them out of cafes in broad daylight. I don’t know what’s worse; that some people never come back, or that the ones that do have no dissent left in their heads.*

*The Dynasty fools in question are the Samara Templar, who I was pretty sure would be the spark that fucked everything up. Edelberen Uldrath declared that she would not rest until the Dodonan capital burned for their oppression of the faithful. I’ve got reason to believe the Iris directly worked to make it happen, but I bet that was a damn easy job to do. Selamis Hogen is furious, of course, but disavowing the Templar would reinforce their reputation as a coward, which might finally give Gerea Hogen that coup she wants so much. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at any of those private feasts in Korummerung; noble bullshit is so fascinating.*

*Lotta new faces in Vedro lately. Credit to Dunyasha, the damn thing* works*. They’ve got farms, out in the middle of the sea! You’d be so pleased to see it, mom, folks working together. The day for her big play’s gotta be soon - she beams whenever she sees that stupid rocket - so I’m trying to get everyone I can to pile in. It’s not just Pesok Line out here, either; some of the Scholars-Errant are out here, and they’re a lot of help, and that masked princeling has a whole posse of mercs at their back, and just a few days ago some Dodonan defectors dragged in a whole Satellist congregation. Our time window is closing, and I pray every night that we can pull this off.*

*Hope I’m making you proud.*

*-Dispatch-Captain Springfield Autumns of the Aureate Dispatch, the so-called “Lonely Banner”*

*[ATTACHED IMAGES: grainy photograph of the Grand Colosseum in Korummerung decorated with bright pennants blowing in the wind; shit-quality drone image of a charcoal-colored dome in the heart of an industrial district, somewhere in the Dodonan capital; picture of a freight barge carrying a number of damaged combat mechs, with a large group of people leaving a gross, organic, octopus-like machine’s internal pouch and stepping onto a deck in Vedro; a selfie of Captain Autumns with Dunyasha Sand, as the two ladle soup to a line of hungry people]*