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Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
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Nov 16, 2021
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anonjohn20 said:
Are you roasting them?
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Once upon a time, there was a city near the mountains. It had everything a city in the middle of nowhere needed: narrow roads that knew more goats than men, dusty arteries that wound toward forgotten villages only bureaucrats remembered—because somebody had to count the livestock and pretend it mattered. And beyond those roads was the vast, empty steppe, so bumpy and silent it made oral philosophers weep and horses paranoid.


The city, if one could call it that before the 1800s, was not built in a place of strategic brilliance. No ports, no great rivers, unless you count two sisters called Big and Small rivers streaming down from the purple mountains. No precious metals, unless you want to climb those mountains, and even then it was stupid when the neighboring city 500 kilometers ago had everything metal wise. Just farming worthy dirt, breezy wind that mellows down the steppe sun, and a stubborn desire to live inconveniently far from everything useful. Naturally, people settled here.


At first, it was simple. Mud huts. Yurts. Wooden fortresses. A tavern that also served as a funeral parlor. A market square that doubled as a gossip pit and occasionally a dueling arena, depending on how poorly the sheep prices went. People bartered, bickered, and brought their livestock into places no livestock should ever be, including but not limited to the town council building.


But even then, the people understood one immutable truth: movement mattered. Whether you were hauling firewood, fermenting pickled cabbage, or dragging sacks of whatever the hell passed for currency before currency, you needed to get from Point A to Point B before the wolves got bored and came sniffing. And so was born the first form of public transport: a disgruntled mule named Viktor who charged extra if you talked too much.


This system—archaic as it was—functioned with a kind of grumpy brilliance. Roads were dirt and ambition. Wagons creaked like dying poets. Yet everything, somehow, arrived eventually, assuming it didn't freeze to death first.


Then came the 19th century, bringing with it "modernization," a word that here means "more taxes, more uniforms, and absolutely no consultation with the locals." Suddenly, maps were drawn. Official roads were declared, with signage so inconsistent even the goats gave up reading them. Bureaucracy slithered into the city like a particularly smug snake, and with it came the first true municipal disaster: planning.


It was around this time that the city received its first serious attention from a higher authority—a Tsar, a governor, or some other powdered buffoon in a distant palace who pointed at the map and declared, “Yes. This blob looks strategic against the Qing.” And so the blob was blessed. New buildings rose—grand, mismatched things designed by men who had never visited the city and probably couldn’t spell it. Roads were cobbled in ways that confused both horses and cartographers. The city began to grow, not like a tree, but like a tumor—uneven, occasionally aggressive, and hard to treat.


Then, like an ominous drumbeat in the distance, came the Soviets.



It wasn't as subtle. Russian Civil War happened, and the city was divided into three. Reds, occupying the city, Whites, occupying the steppes, and Locals, trying to become their own thing because frankly, both teams sucked. Eventually, Reds won, and the Locals, siding with Whites, seeing that Whites lost, eventually sided with the Reds.


But the city, with its crumbling charisma and knack for survival, barely noticed. It had survived wolves, winters, and whichever idiot who "will rule this land" eventually bringing starvation upon the locals. It would survive this too.


But oh, the Soviets were not here to simply be. They were here to transform. To elevate. To carve progress into the very bones of the earth—even if the bones objected.


Factories sprouted like tumors. Uniformity replaced charm. The tavern became a people’s canteen. The market square was redubbed Revolution Square and featured a statue of a man who had never set foot within 500 kilometers of the city, but whose stern bronze stare haunted generations of disillusioned children.


Transport, too, was revolutionized. No more mule named Viktor. No, now there were schedules. Routes. Maps that might even be accurate, provided they weren’t revised mid-week for ideological reasons. Roads were straightened like a chairman's posture. Trams were introduced—clunky, ironclad beasts that screeched like they were trying to sing the Internationale through an iron lung. And yes, buses eventually joined the ranks—mechanized boxes of collectivist mobility.


But like all centrally-planned utopias, this one came with fine print:


  • Buses may arrive at arbitrary times, as determined by the regional politburo or the whims of the gods.
  • Routes may be redirected to better align with Five-Year Plans, despite being six years behind.
  • If a bus driver defects, the replacement may or may not be literate.

Yet it functioned. Barely. Miraculously. Like everything else under the regime. People got to work. Bread arrived, occasionally. Sheep were transported, sometimes. Bureaucrats were shuffled from one identical office to another with the solemn air of chess pieces moved by a drunk player.


In time, the city became... significant. Not because of resources, or genius planning, but because it existed long enough and stubbornly enough to become too big to ignore. It was the urban equivalent of a mole you never liked, but which eventually started collecting rent.


By the late Soviet period, it had grown bloated with contradictions: public housing built on ancient farmland, ancient factories belching smoke near schools, statues of smiling workers in cities where no one smiled anymore. And through it all, the buses ran. Mostly. Occasionally. When they weren’t being cannibalized for parts or commandeered for parades.


But then, Soviet regime collapsed. Not a bang, but a bureaucratic wheeze. Locals had enough, and after violent winter protests, the red banners came down, and with them, the illusion of permanence. The central Russian government vanished, only to look upon down that city from far away as the Kremlin. State property became "privatized," a euphemism for looted. Everything—everything—was suddenly for sale: factories, buildings, dreams, transit routes.


And in that post-Soviet vacuum of logic and law, the true miracle happened: the city reinvented its transport system organically. Which, here, means “unregulated chaos driven by capitalism, desperation, and questionable engineering.”


Buses multiplied. Not because they were planned, but because they were profitable. Routes appeared where people walked, and vanished where no one paid. A strange dance of supply and demand emerged—unguided, feral, yet weirdly effective. Like a wolf pack that just so happened to run on diesel.


Thus, a city that began with mules and ended with megaprojects found itself in the 21st century—scratched, scarred, stubborn—and very much on the move.
 
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