Seredet

Flag of Seredet

**Seredet** is a country on the peninsula on the river between Lakes Tarea and Kuzyl. It is unique in being the only country to have a single-word official name, and is an absolute democracy, run by an elected president with absolute power. It was formed in 1964 out of one of the Ahtal Republics.

## History

### Founding

Ser'edets are a loose culture of nomadic peoples from the plains and deserts of the west, the tribes fought each other over precious stones (amber, emeralds, rubies). Until a plague killed all their livestock and horses. Multiple tribes banded together under the Seredet Khan a great leader who would lead them to new pastures and new way of life. The horde of Seredets set out on foot with all the precious stones they could carry, while leaving behind large deposits due to no live stock left alive to carry them. Elders write clues and made maps of the locations of these deposits. The horde lost a quarter of its population before it reached signs of another civilization. The Khan and his Warriors desperate hungry and with an appetite for war pillaged, raided and enslaved all they came across until they reached the great lakes.

### Wealth

Here the locals had set up fishing villages and began farming, the Seredets enslaved these people and learned how to farm and fish. The khan settled his horde around these lakes and established a Khanate. The Khanate became rich from all the excess foods it was producing and had a monopoly on fishing from the lakes. As well as growing in trade they still had a large deposit of precious stones.

### Fracture and Civil War

The great khan would pass and his 3 sons would govern each lake equally under the umbrella of a tribal Confederacy. Soon they made contact with foreigners who arrived with gunpowder, spices and other precious goods. The sons of the khans grew jealous of each others dealings with these foreigners and became distant. Once the foreigners had learnt of the large deposits of stones the khans had, they offered cannons and muskets in exchange for them. Ultimately the sons would go to war with each other for more stones in order to buy more guns. A civil war had begun in the confederacy, the foreigners exploited differences and also helps many slave tribes revolt to weaken the khans and also locate the plains from which the khans had migrated to find the source of these expensive stones. The Seredets continue to fight among themselves until starvation and the risk of going extinct made them stop.

### End of the Civil War

But the foreigners were long gone, if they found the old nomadic plains is still a mystery the Seredets cant afford to solve. The most important thing for the Seredets is survival as they number a few and are sporadically found around the lakes, as they wait for a new khan to unite all the tribes and retake them to former glory.

## Politics

The Absolute Democracy is a volatile system, and Seredet has had three civil wars in its 46-year history. After the most recent civil war in 2008, the constitution was rewritten, forbidding the president to make changes to election formats and introducing a nominal legislative branch whose job is to keep the president in check. In addition, the President's Guard, appointed by the legislature, are instructed to forcibly remove the president from office if they refuse to give up their office at the end of their two-year term. The president is also disallowed from declaring war at their own discretion, and forced removal by the legislature is mandated should the president supress the rights of the people.

*[Submitted by Chino]*