Incendia

Incendia was and allegedly still is a prosperous city-state on the northern border of Lepazzia. In AES 972, in the face of increasing pressure from the Hegemony of Whales, Incendia massively scaled up efforts to harvest the country's rich oil deposits. This brought great prosperity to Incendia with a rapidity aided by a disregard for an accompanying Flandrean level of contingency planning. As a result, the entire country collapsed into a giant sinkhole during the 974 Open Flame Festival, the inauspicious timing of which ignited the gas deposits, creating the still-burning conflagration we know today.

At the time of the Festival, Incendia's president, Iyano Niir, was at a session of the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns. The Ulgravian sovereign motioned to have Niir dismissed from the Assembly, on the grounds that because Incendia no longer existed, he was no longer a sovereign; the motion was, as usual, seconded by Lepazzia. President Niir's subsequent defense of his continued presence is widely considered one of the greatest orations given in the Assembly this century. According to Niir, Incendia had only been mildly perturbed by the multiple-story drop into the sinkhole, and hadn't been destroyed in the slightest. The perpetual fire that now burned in the pit where his country once was, he scoffed, was not the burnoff of their gas deposits, but rather what their national festivals looked like from above. He exhorted those who sought to remove him from the Assembly to desist from their cultural myopia and recognize the heritage of Incendia and their peculiar means of celebration. To any who persisted, he challenged them to go to Incendia themselves and prove that there wasn't a country underneath the roiling curtain of flame, though he warned that the country was very welcoming and visitors might find themselves unable to leave. The subsequent vote to eject Incendia from the Assembly narrowly failed, thanks to the intervention of the Hegemon of Whales, though Niir was unable to stop the Assembly's notaries from subtracting the sinkhole's area from Incendia's officially recorded landmass.

Today, Incendia remains in somewhat of a precarious position. President Niir currently lives off of the complimentary snacks provided at Assembly breakout sessions and sleeps in the Butterfly Effect Advisory Committee's break room, because it has the softest couch. Every now and then the Committee chases him out, but I can hear him snoring in the air ducts from the basement, and he's always back by the end of the week. The Incendian military, Gregor Gregory, is currently stationed in their embassy in the Panark Fleet. The Incendian military being entirely stationed inside another country is the cause of some international tension, which Niir insists is "not a big deal, and besides, Gregor's very agreeable." The Incendian Tourism Bureau continues Niir's foreign policy by publishing pamphlets about how much Indencians love festivals that obscure the country from above, but its suggested travel destinations are all Incendian embassies in other countries, which have set up farms and become self-sufficient on their small plots of land.

Incendia was supposed to be safeguarding our land until we wanted it back. It's right there in the fucking lease agreements. But noooooo, the fuckers just had to go and set the whole damn thing on fire. Niir should have been kicked out of the assembly, and then he should have been tossed right back into the bonfire he made of our land. Fucking Sovereign went all soft on him.

Anyways, this is why I regularly "accidentally" spill my coffee on the fucker when he's sleeping in our break room.

For a country with an inordinate number of fire-based cultural traditions, Incendia ran a very tight ship as a safety and storage guarantor. All sorts of historical documents were stored in the Incendian vaults, including the original copies of the Ulgravian land lease documents. This, of course, came to an end with the 974 collapse. Incendia's remaining mad lawyer, Parvus the Litigator, attempted to use this to have the land lease contract nullified in order to ward off any future Ulgravian retribution. After a hurried consultation by President Niir, Parvus mad-lawed himself into being the defense lawyer and began arguing the official Incendian position that the homeland had not been destroyed, and therefore there was no breach of the contract. This resulted in a schizophrenic trial in which Parvus viciously argued at length with himself in front of a confused judge. When he began to lose the defending case, he resorted to personal attacks against the plaintiff (i.e. himself), until the trial degenerated into a fistfight in which he put himself in a headlock and choked himself out. The judge, unsure of what had just happened, threw the case out. This may have been the Litigator's plan all along, however, because the Assembly courts are now turned off from touching anything related to the legal status of Incendia.

Citations: Mad legal practice / The Ulgravian Diaspora