The Great Planting and the Completely Accidental Massacre of Nobody Important
The Santa Mandioca lurched through the grey chop of the Cistian sea like a wounded mule, its patchwork sails snapping, its hull leaking something that definitely wasn’t water. On its prow, Dom Mandingo of Farofa stood like a prophet from a fever dream — short yet regal, and convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that destiny itself had dragged him here to liberate a continent.
“Today, brothers, we sow the sacred root!” he cried to the mass of mud-caked troops below. “Today, Cist kneels before the mighty Mandioca!”
The troops roared back with equal fervor — mostly because they thought he’d kill them if they didn’t. Matchlocks were hoisted. Bayonets clanged. Banners depicting sainted tubers flapped heroically in the fetid breeze.
And then they landed.
The problem — and it was a rather significant one — was that the “beachhead” Mandingo had chosen was not a fortress, nor a military garrison, nor even a village of strategic importance. It was, in fact, a sleepy coastal hamlet of about twelve people and several goats.
The first volley of the Mandioca Monkeys tore through a line of laundry hanging between two thatched cottages. A second volley blew apart a wicker fence and gravely injured a scarecrow, who had until then posed no immediate threat.
“Victory!” shouted Mandingo, raising his rapier high. “The first of their armies falls!”
The surviving villagers — mostly old men, two children, and a woman with a suspiciously angry goose — stared blankly as a thousand screaming soldiers in root-fiber coats charged into their cabbage patch.
“Why are they shooting at my barn?” asked one bewildered farmer, moments before said barn was heroically bayoneted by five screaming Monkeys.
“For Mandioca!” yelled another soldier, kicking over a butter churn and planting a cassava sprout in the churn’s remains. “This soil is liberated!”
Within an hour, the grand crusade had secured two outhouses, a chicken coop, and a half-drunk cow. Mandingo himself rode into the hamlet square atop a muddy mule (he had fallen off his horse earlier), proclaiming victory over “the first bastion of Cistian tyranny.”
A confused old woman tried to offer him bread. He solemnly anointed it with mashed mandioca pulp and declared her “Minister of Agriculture.”
By sunset, the Monkeys had raised their banners atop a ruined beehive, burned a suspiciously large number of haystacks, and taken zero casualties — unless one counted Sergeant Tavares, who accidentally shot himself while trying to reload upside-down for religious reasons.
But in Mandingo’s mind, it was the first great victory of his divine campaign.
“The tide of history turns here!” he declared from the roof of a cider mill. “Today a cabbage patch — tomorrow the world!”
The villagers, meanwhile, quietly packed their things and moved two miles inland, deciding they would very much prefer not to be part of history at all.
Art by joze_rizzal Writing by Baron Von Dorf