The Night of Storms
The Night of Storms is the reason why no one fucks with Ulgrav. In AES 946, the Theocracy of Rime's High Priest suddenly decided that because of stupid reasons their stupid little god suddenly had a problem with Ulgravian airships beautifying their stupid little skies. By AES 947, Mr. Suicidal down there declares holy war. So we taught the little punk a lesson.
The Night of Storms was a long time coming, for shitty reasons. Shit is something no one really thinks about when they think about airships. The custom, of course, had long been to dump it while flying over Lepazzia, but somewhere around the early 900's they invented guns big enough to reach zeppelin cruising altitude and started dropping hints every time we dropped shit. So next we started dumping it in the ocean, but within a couple years the Cetacean Wars came to an end and dropping shit on Hegemony territory was against the peace terms. So we were collectively like "fuck it, we'll drop it on Kingsland, it's not like they're not already neck-deep in shit."
Turns out Kingsland didn't work either, since zeppelins rely on the laws of physics to stay floating, and Barcu is kind of a lawless place. So the first ships that went there ended up turning around and just dumping their shit east of Barcu where the Hantu used to live.
'Course, if we'd bothered to check the map, we'd have realized the Theocracy of Rime had sprung up there recently. Nowadays we sell our shit to Shaster because they've got some device designed by the unquestionable Dr. Stafford, so really they should have thanked us for the gift. But instead the little shit went and had a "new and holy vision from Whats-his-face" and declared that we were enemies of the faith or whatever. Sovereign Jhatu didn't give a fuck, so he just ordered the whole fleet to cover the High Priest's palace in shit. That should have put him in his place, but he went and declared a holy war like the little twerp he was.
Ulgrav doesn't back down, you hear me? When we were horse-bound hordes we fucking ruled the plains, and the thunder of hooves was the only warning you got that we were about to fuck up your little prairie town. But today? Oh, you should have seen it. My buddy Yasser was just a little boy at the time, but he tells me the sound of a thousand propellers sounded like dubstep on God's jukebox. Rime didn't stand a chance. They didn't even have high-altitude artillery. We bombed the fuckers so far down into the earth that we dug up the ominous fixed-point cube the High Priest's palace had been using as a foundation. The light and the noise were so intense Flandre thought a fucking volcano was erupting and Kingsland thought it was Tuesday. We bombed them so hard the fucking weather was permanently altered.
Anyways, to make a long story short, no one's declared war on us since then.
Gwen Hanson, PhD
Citations: Barcuvian antiweather / Flandre / The Hegemony of Whales / High Illuminator Saint Doctor Heinrich Stafford / Lepazzia / Ominous fixed-point cubes / Shaster / The Ulgravian Diaspora / Yasser's Yells
Cited by: Concluding Recommendations: Dr. Gwen Hanson / Concluding Recommendations: M. Hon. Pierce Milton / Iurezza (continent) / The Ulgravian Diaspora