It is now what-the-hell-o’-clock in the morning
But I finally answered my question.
You remember that Arilterra worldbuilding crap I keep never explaining, right? Do you also remember how I told myself I needed to make “executive decisions” about it (and my other fics/projects in general) so that I could stop using my wishy-washiness as an excuse for never moving forward and actually make some progress on my stuff? One thing I’m trying to do this year is make one “executive decision” about Arilterra’s worldbuilding or one of my stories or some fakemon things or whatever every day. Doesn’t have to be immediately relevant to anything I’m actively working on, doesn’t have to be a big, story-changing decision about The Most Important Plot Point or anything like that, it just has to be something. Answer one little question I haven’t been answering. Remove one more tiny excuse for not having decided something else yet. That sort of thing. The actual decision can be, and usually is, like a sentence long, or perhaps a list of words if the executive decision is about many small things at once. “Yes, I’m changing this character’s name to Faustine.” “Let’s put Kilgore’s gym in Thistle Town near the Ghostmire.” "Raelfari > competitive; Raheshéyu > poison touch; Rasko > anticipation; ..." Sometimes they’re longer if it’s a bit more complicated or if I write stuff down as I think it through, but all that’s really needed is “The Tenreach Tales takes place in 1489.” and so on.
Well, today’s Saturday’s executive decision—really Friday’s, but I was busy that day and forgot to do it—was to figure out the year in which a certain potential-plotbunny event happened. It’s mostly just a side thing for now, but I want to know when some of those potential plotbunnies should be set in relation to the “present day”. Ten years before? Seventy years before? During the present day? Any of those would technically work, so I just had to pick a number and run with it.
Just pick a year. Just four little digits, just like that “Tenreach Tales” answer up above. Certain dates will be important and I'll have to make careful. thoughtful decisions about them, but this? Throw a friggin’ dart at a number, for all it matters. That’s all there was to it.
The entire good god damn day later, after only a few breaks to attend to only a few of the other things I was supposed to be doing today, and after hours of picking random years and second-guessing them because what if this DOES actually need to follow logically from some other stuff and deciding how long a generation was and checking dates I had chosen for other things that were now inaccurate because I recently changed the length of an Arilterran day from 30 hours back to 24 and digging through other notes and trying not to give some currently-nameless characters names because I want to redo most of the conlangs’ syllable rules to make the generator output some less samey-sounding results but then caving and giving them names anyway and going back and forth about how long it was reasonable for a badass to live and coming up with a bunch of fascinating history for the big empire country and a few tasty conspiracy theories and assassinations on the side and only realizing around 11pm that maybe it would help if I wrote all this bullshit down already instead of getting stuck in loops of answering the same questions again and again in my head and generally mumbling frantically to myself all the while, I made a bunch of decisions that had basically nothing to do with my original question before finally getting around to answering my original question. This is the executive decision for May 20, 2016, presented in its entirety (and without context):
052016: When did the meteor land outside of Ansatigg? How long ago was this compared to "today"? (Whether or not there are still active attempts being made to figure out what happened is a different question for now.)
Executive Decision: If the "present day" is circa 1489, we'll say...
Okay wait bear with me a minute I need to figure out a bunch of math. Let's talk it through, working backwards from Hilvarinn, and see where it goes:
-Hilvarinn is the empress of Tanvaeskall as of 1489. She is 34 years old. She was crowned Empress in 1477, during the Emerald Empire's tricentennial celebrations (see 052116); that means that she was 22 at the time of her coronation and has ruled the empire for 12 years so far.
-Hilvarinn succeeded her mother, Viggredi. Viggredi was still alive when her daughter took the throne, but she abdicated a few years before dying of cancer so that she'd have time to show Hilvarinn the ropes and so that Hilvarinn would be crowned during the tricentennial.
-Viggredi, in turn, succeeded her father, Daraetann VI. Specifically, she had her father assassinated because he was ruining everything. Daraetann VI was ambitious like his great-grandmother Eltari and his namesake, and also kind of a megalomaniac like his namesake, but he was waaaaay worse at actually conquering shit and winning wars and all that than his great-grandmother and namesake. He ended up costing the empire a bunch of money, getting soldiers killed in battles that were basically pointless, nearly losing the empire's grip on some of its territories, causing all kinds of unrest back home, etc., etc.. In a desperate attempt to save face he decided that if he couldn't be remembered as an ~Amazing Conquering Warlord~ then he'd be known as ~the second Godslayer Emperor~ instead. To that end he was gonna go harass some big scary legendary or other and kill it with the Jade Orb/his own self-proclaimed badassitude, and somehow spin it like the legendary was a problem (idk, maybe it was technically a minor problem, probably not actually a big problem though) and he'd saved the empire from it just like Great-Grandma. Which sounds great on paper but is of course a fucking terrible idea. Viggredi, well aware that it was a fucking terrible idea and that her dad was gonna get his ass handed to him and also probably send the legendary on a rampage, decided that it was her duty as future empress to, y'know, not let that happen. Thus, oops, assassination.
-Back to the numbers: I want to say that Hilvarinn was actually alive when her grandfather was assassinated, let's say about 5 years old. (In fact, I'm picturing her mother basically telling her that "jsyk sweetie Grandpa is ruining everything and as members of the imperial family it's our job to not let everything be ruined, so Grandpa's going to have to go away forever now, love you bye!") Then let's say that Viggredi ruled for 17 years before becoming ill letting Hilvarinn take over, and that Daraetann VI was, oh, maybe 56 when he was murdered. Aaaand Viggredi was… 30…? when she had her dad bumped off?
-Daraetann VI succeeded his father, Daraetann V. VI's name was originally Seltasa, but he assassinated his father for being a boring pushover unworthy of the name "Daraetann" and changed his own name when he became emperor.
-Daraetann IV, meanwhile, was Eltari's first child and disappeared after going off to investigate the strange incidents surrounding Ansatigg. Eltari ended up outliving all of her children, but since Daraetann IV was the eldest, when she finally passed away at 105 the throne went to his son, Daraetann V.
-Numbers again! I think I decided that Daraetann V succeeded his grandmother when he was 45, and when Seltasa was 20. Then I think I wanted Daraetann V to have ruled for about seven years before his son killed him for being a wuss. Daraetann IV was… hm… 28 when his son was born. Eltari would be 60 at that point, and thus she'd have been 32 when Daraetann IV was born.
-I figured earlier that I wanted Eltari's reign as empress to have lasted 87 years. (and hahaha oops when you convert Arilterran years to Earth years that works out to 95, so she actually beats the record for the longest-reigning real monarch, Pepi II, by a year… that was an accident but I'll take it, heh) She became empress when she was 23, then. So now the question is, how old was she when she slew the rayquaza, and how old was she when all that Ansatigg nonsense started happening? Based on the dates and ages I have so far, she doesn't have to be nearly as old as I first thought she would for the former, but I do want her to be relatively old for the latter so she's not physically strong enough to go storming up there when her son doesn't come back. Let's see… I also wanted the new, "baby" rayquaza the imperial family keeps as a "pet" to be no older than 160 or so if I could help it, but definitely over 100. The time between Eltari's birth and the present day is 170 years… so if we say that Eltari became the empress at such a relatively young age because the "omg evil" rayquaza killed her parent(s), then perhaps her first act as empress was to go out and kick that rayquaza's parent-murdering ass? (Or maybe it was before she officially became empress and there was a lovely, tasteful and not-at-all horrifying severed rayquaza head on display during the coronation, hm?) That would mean the new rayquaza was "born" when she was 23, so its age now would be… 147! Perfect! Right in the range I wanted!
-All that's left, then, is figuring out the answer to the original goddamn question. When did the Ansatigg shenanigans start? I said I wanted Eltari to be too old to physically go there herself, either to investigate in general or to figure out what the hell happened to Daraetann IV. But I also wanted her to have continued her reign for at least a few years after that… AND I also want the Ansatigg stuff to have carried on for over a hundred years, too, which means it'd have to have happened prior to 1389. Hm… okay, so if it happened when Daraetann IV was 34, then Eltari would've been 66. That's too old for the average person to be doing much marching and fighting, but Eltari was a BAMF and with the Jade Orb probably would've tried something even at that age… sooo let's say that maybe she had some old injuries that made that impossible, and that combined with whatever ~terrifying reports~ the survivors brought back scared her away from trying to retaliate against whatever had happened to her son. The numbers given earlier would put the year of Daraetann IV's disappearance at 1385, but I also think I want a few years of investigating to have happened before he marches off to take matters into his own hands. Sooo let's just bump the inciting incident back a few years to 1376! Huzzah!
-Incidentally, due to all of the disappearances and assassinations and miscellaneous horrible deaths that keep happening, there are probably rumors about the name "Daraetann" being cursed—at least for the imperial family, if not also for anyone else who might think it's cool to name their kid after an emperor/might just want to name their kid that because of whatever it means idk—so that's nice.
Since I did all that number-figurin', might as well slap a quick timeline together while I'm here:
1342: Eltari becomes empress; "evil" rayquaza slain, new rayquaza "born"
1376: Reports of funny stuff happening in Ansatigg reach the capital
1385: Daraetan IV disappears
1424: Eltari dies; Daraetann V becomes emperor
1431: Daraetann V assassinated; Seltasa becomes emperor and changes his name to Daraetann VI
1460: Daraetann VI assassinated; Viggredi becomes empress
1477: Hilvarinn becomes empress
tl;dr it happened in 1376 oh my god that took forever
(Yes, a lot of my notes are written as though I'm talking to someone else... I don't know why. I guess the pretense of carrying on a conversation helps me think?)
And, of course, the best part: Guess how much all this expended effort and unnecessary agonizing has to do with any of the Arilterra story ideas I’m actually supposed to be working on? :D :D :D
