"What Madness Is This?" Volume III: The Pinnacle Future
- Thread starter Napoleon53
- Start date
If I recall correctly, wasn’t that just John Hammond from original Crichton novel?
We discussed this-Novel!Hammond would fit as evil but a WMIT equivalent would have to be more deranged given Novel!Hammond was too banally evil compared to what works in this timeline.
I often find myself wondering what alternate history is like in this timeline. Maybe there’s a Southron victory series about the Great American War or an Eagle In The Gold Nest about a French victory in the GWW. Maybe there’s a timeline called “Peace In Our Time” by Lincoln53.
I did an entry about an alternate history story in the expanded universe thread 🤔 In my conception the AH genre is called "contrafati fiction".
I’ve always had the same belief about alternate history in WMIT, that the AFC would find it a heretical genre which runs contrary to Jev’s vision.
The fact that that presents the opportunity to give the genre a cool different name is fun too
They could probably get away with it so long as it ends with every alternate timeline blowing up or whatever to show how Jev chose the one true path for his people or whatever.
You could probably get away with stuff that derails Illumism or the Bonapartes from existing or makes the war in South America go easier. Hell you might even be able to do a ‘US never collapses’ story as long as the AFC isn’t butterflied away.
That’s exactly what I was thinking, the greatest Unionwank fanfiction of all time.
The AFC would probably like that weird super-Christian apocalyptic fiction series where the libertarian Christian people conquered the world fighting demonic entities and their influenced minions (I don't remember the name but its had spin-off videogames, films, cartoons, its friggin' nuts!)
Edit: just imagine them enjoying this as a sadistic humor genre of literature, where they get schadenfreude from looking down on those 'left behind' because they presume they are the chosen people up in Heaven with their god.
Edit: just imagine them enjoying this as a sadistic humor genre of literature, where they get schadenfreude from looking down on those 'left behind' because they presume they are the chosen people up in Heaven with their god.
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Yes that one, now that I remember it the premise might make the AFC interpret it as a comedy because I assume they'd believe that they would all be watching this series occur from Heaven since they're the only correct belief and they'd certainly have been taken away and not 'left behind'.
I AM BACK.
I have been having excruciating carpal tunnel from years of typing to the point I couldn't feel my hands other when they feel like they are on fire. I have had them braced up for a week and I can once again further destroy my lil fingies. New content shortly, Lord willing.
I have been having excruciating carpal tunnel from years of typing to the point I couldn't feel my hands other when they feel like they are on fire. I have had them braced up for a week and I can once again further destroy my lil fingies. New content shortly, Lord willing.
It took me a while to get this joke, but only now I realized this is how Billy Sunday met his end.
I gotta get to bed and my lil fingers are numb from the 'tunnel, but here is something I worked on all day. It's one third complete and still in rough draft, but NEW CONTENT. We are almost done with Act One of the chapter, and there will be three in total. So this is about 30% of what the chapter will be. Also, a ton of fun pictures at the end of the post!
Skelly took a quiet breath of the chill autumn air. It was acrid and laced with the scents of gunpowder, rot, ash, and burning rubber. Long had he waited for his target to arrive-- target that now was directly in his crosshairs. The slightly overweight Austrian target lined up in his scope was wearing a simple gray woolen trenchcoat, a matching gray cap with blue trim, and a set of brass spectacles. Skelly had never seen the New Holy Roman Emperor Adolf in person before, but any fool could recognize the mustachioed despot, even dressed down as he was.
The elderly Adolf was stepping through piles of rubble and shell casings, greeting and shaking hands with his loyal soldiers. These men had been defending Budapest against the Slavic hordes for months, just as Adolf had done so long ago during the Great World War. Despite many of these men's helmets sporting wireless battlefield communication headsets, the tactics were still much the same. Most of them wore body armor to some extent, especially things like leather chest rigs with clips and pockets for grenades and gas mask canisters. This was because of the brutal and bloody hand-to-hand street-battles raging since the Illuminists' seemingly unstoppable advance since June had ground to a halt on the bloody parapets and barbed wire of Budapest.
While the sound of distant automatic gunfire and artillery echoed through the air, it was not by these modern weapons that most of this siege was fought. Almost every one of Adolf's men sported trench-clubs, nail-bats, short-swords, large knives, and handguns. Using their modern headsets to communicate on this battlefield turned the numerically vastly-inferior defenders of Prague into "lightning units" or "blitztrupen," capable of assaulting and raiding enemy positions under the cover of darkness and rubble, striking from tunnels and foxholes like swarms of Catholic wasps.
Skelly disliked Adolf, as much as he did any monarch. But he still took no pleasure in murder. But a job was a job, and he grimaced and placed his finger upon the trigger. With a single shot, he was about to change the direction of the war and the fate of Europe and, indeed, the world. He took some comfort in the fact that Adolf was childless. The man he was about to take the life of was a foolish old man stupidly visiting the front line of one of the most brutal wars in the history of Europe. That foolish old man was now serving communion to his men, a grail in his hand filled with red wine and a priest beside him carrying a tray of wafers.
The sky was ashen. The sun was fighting to peak through the smoke of battle and of burning homes and shops. Although it was noon, it looked to be dusk. Skelly had nested himself in the third-story window of a former hotel, of which half had collapsed into rubble. Behind him, near the once beautiful antique bed, were the rotting corpses of a Venetian shocktrooper and an Illuminist Polish infantryman. The Pole was underneath the Venetian and had a large knife run through his chest, still gripped tightly in death by the Venetian's hands. In the Pole's hand was a service revolver, his last breath used to blow a hole the size of a golf ball into the eyesocket of the shocktrooper's gas mask. Black blood had sprayed out the back of the man's head, decorating the bed's blankets that still waited for the next hotel patron. They smelled as good as they looked. Thankfully, the Hungarian next to Skelly on the floor didn't smell like anything yet, because he had only been dead a few hours. Skelly's wazikashi blade typically silenced anyone in an instant, and the Hungarian was practically beheaded in once slice.
Skelly's gloved finger twitched once, twitched twice, and then squeezed the trigger. A shot rang out, still far louder than he cared for despite the silencer he had equipped, and the Holy Roman Emperor's chest exploded in a geyser of crimson. The old man fell like a sack of bricks as his terrified men rushed to protect him. It was far too well-placed a shot to do anything but comfort Adolf in his last few ragged moments. As Skelly prepared to leave the room, he gazed at the scene below. He couldn't help but think of a painting he had seen in a museum in Keybeck as a child. It had depicted the death of General Wolfe at the Siege of Quebec during the French and Indian War. A bannerman leaned over the emperor, his yellow flag blowing gently in the breeze. The communion grail had clanged to the cobblestones, its dark red mixing with the Emperor's blood. Several officers cradled the dying Austrian in their laps as others began to frantically sweep their surroundings for the sniper.
The Black Orchestra assassin folded his specially-made rifle in half and slipped into a sleeve mounted to his back. He drew Moneymaker, his legendary pistol, from its leather holster strapped to his leg, stood up, and left the room. It wasn't difficult, and over the sounds of shouting and panicked gunfire aimed at no one in particular, he casually slipped down the rubble that had once been the southern wall of the room. Within moments, his rubber-soled combat boots slapped onto the pavement. As he had planned, and as he had done so many times before, he slipped into a manhole connected to Prague's ancient sewer system and disappeared into the darkness.
All around him the stench of untreated sewage was potent, as the water treatment plants hadn't run since August. Compounding the odor was the dozens of rotting corpses floating like fleshy buoys upon the River Stix. Men of a dozen nationalities and ethnicities all were decomposing in the fetid underground river. He hustled along the concrete and brick walkway, stepping over several Austrians who had seen better days, and scurried down a tunnel leading even deeper into the Prague catacombs. The sound of boots descending the metal rungs behind him sent a mild chill up his spine, as the Imperials were evidently getting better at situational awareness from their months of urban brawling. He crouched behind a pile of rusty, slimy pipes, his finger on Moneymaker's trigger, and watched as several Venetian shocktroopers scanned their surroundings. Their helmets bore large metal flashlights to one side, aiding them in their search for the man who had killed their Emperor.
After a few moments of bantering in Italian, the three men made the sign of the cross, formed up behind each other, and readied their weapons. Skelly breathed a sigh of relief as they headed in the opposite direction of his cover. He quietly picked himself up, muttered something about someone's mother, and made good his escape.
June 5, 1954, saw a combined Illuminist force of Poles and Russians relentlessly push across the Bohemian border, clashing with the New Holy Roman Imperial troops defending the region under Bohemian occupational dictator Generalfeldmarschall Andreas von Questenberg. Von Questenberg found himself facing an overwhelming Illuminist onslaught that seemed insurmountable. His force of around 150,000 men included many inexperienced recruits and drafted peasants, who were no match for the battle-hardened and better-equipped Illuminist forces. In addition, although he had brought up some armor to the border, Bohemian resistance to NHRE presence was still so entrenched and bitter that it forced him to make incredibly difficult decisions. Decisions, he feared, where there was no correct answer.
Von Questenberg, since the commencement of hostilities, had demanded the presence of Italian troops to bring up the rear. However, most of the Italian forces were headed far to the east to face the bulk of the Russians and Ukrainians pouring into Bessarabia. Bessarabia, a strongly reinforced and well-fortified Imperial region bordering Ukraine along the Dneister River, was under an incredible assault from Illuminist bombers and artillery, and Commander Gregor Minsky was preparing for a general infantry and armored incursion to plant his Minervan banner on Bessarabian soil. The orders from Vienna and Rome were simple: General von Questenberg was to hold the line at all costs in Bohemia while the eastern regions of the NHRE repelled the Russo-Ukrainian steamroller heading their way.
Many of the untested troops under von Questenberg's command had seen their only action against an unstable and overwhelmed Royal Bohemian Army and insurgent fighters, and they were terrified of the Illuminist onslaught hounding across the border with foaming maws and gnashing teeth. The NHR Imperial Luftfahrtruppen (Airforce) experienced crushing losses at both fronts in the opening weeks of the war, as the better-trained and better-equipped Illuminist planes regularly wiped them from the sky. It was clear that the Areopagus and Maximovich had long-prepared for this confrontation, and the one-sided slaughter in the air, combined with the failing Bohemian and dented Bessarabian borders, resulted in huge amounts of desertion and even treason from the NHRE forces. On June 25, most of a drafted Romanian regiment turned their coats and joined the Illuminists, massacring an Austrian unit. As Von Questenberg prayed that his remaining men would hold the line, he knew their only chance for victory depended on his remaining troopers' patriotism and his own ability and skill to coordinate those men and resources under his command.
June 27 saw the Bohemian border finally crumble. Despite a valiant effort by the troops loyal to the Empire, they were outnumbered six-to-one and were defending rubble and being harassed from behind by Illuminist Bohemian rebels. Von Questenberg's right hand, the elderly and old-fashioned "last hussar" General Ferenc "Batshit" Batsányi--as well as his 15,000 devout Catholic Hungarian conscripts--were the linchpin keeping the Illuminists at bay. Batsányi, riding on a warhorse in 1954, saw the tide of fleeing border guards and told them to continue their flight.
While Presov fell in the east of the occupied Kingdom, the Hungarians actually pushed back against a force many times their size and caused a near-complete halt to the Illuminist march to Prague. Von Questenberg communicated with Imperial High Command on July 10, telling them:
All through July, Prague resisted the sea of Illuminist invaders. Von Questenberg had made it his personal mission since the occupation of Bohemia began to assure the loyalty of the region's capitol, and resistance fighters were executed with great zeal. While many of the populace desperately tried to flee the war, von Questenberg made sure that most of them were forced to stay in place. With the Illuminist public image insisting they were a force for liberation, scores of slain Bohemian civilians blown to bits by Loomie shelling did not help their PR. Instead of mass-bombing, which no doubt could have caused the collapse of Prague in days, the Illuminist Commander Anton Osada was opting for the physical occupation and "liberation" of the historic city and all of its people and artifacts. This forced the two sides into a bitter series of street battles and stalemate assaults.
The antiquated mentality of Batsányi was offset by another Hungarian officer under his command, a colonel of the name Csonka Zsolt. Zsolt had been a promising engineering and telecommunications expert before the war, serving in the development board of Imperial WireWorks. His expertise in mobile communications lent itself to the design of his M53 Burghelm, a modern infantry helmet with a prominent neck guard and in-built wireless communication earphones, powered by a battery box attached to the belt. The design was a cross between the West Germanian stahlhelm, which was popularly knocked-off in the NHRE, and the Renaissance-era burgonet helmet. The design, especially for Imperial standards, was incredibly forward-thinking and impressive, and also frequently featured a modular system to attach sniper-visors, extendable antennas, and flashlights.
Thus, despite the antiquated state of the Imperial Army, the M53 and its variants became critical parts of their war machine. Without their ability to quickly and easily transmit orders and battle chatter, Prague would have no doubt fallen within weeks. While full versions of the helmet were considered deluxe and reserved for special units, Italian factories pumped out the headset components without the actual helmet for officers and more general usage. Communication and Hungarian dedication were the key elements of von Questenberg's defense of Prague in the opening months of the war.
Venetian shocktroops
Hungarian Heavy Infantry
General Ferenc "Batshit" Batsányi on the move with the Imperial Hungarian Cavalry
A young soldier of the Imperial Bohemian Conscripts
Skelly took a quiet breath of the chill autumn air. It was acrid and laced with the scents of gunpowder, rot, ash, and burning rubber. Long had he waited for his target to arrive-- target that now was directly in his crosshairs. The slightly overweight Austrian target lined up in his scope was wearing a simple gray woolen trenchcoat, a matching gray cap with blue trim, and a set of brass spectacles. Skelly had never seen the New Holy Roman Emperor Adolf in person before, but any fool could recognize the mustachioed despot, even dressed down as he was.
The elderly Adolf was stepping through piles of rubble and shell casings, greeting and shaking hands with his loyal soldiers. These men had been defending Budapest against the Slavic hordes for months, just as Adolf had done so long ago during the Great World War. Despite many of these men's helmets sporting wireless battlefield communication headsets, the tactics were still much the same. Most of them wore body armor to some extent, especially things like leather chest rigs with clips and pockets for grenades and gas mask canisters. This was because of the brutal and bloody hand-to-hand street-battles raging since the Illuminists' seemingly unstoppable advance since June had ground to a halt on the bloody parapets and barbed wire of Budapest.
While the sound of distant automatic gunfire and artillery echoed through the air, it was not by these modern weapons that most of this siege was fought. Almost every one of Adolf's men sported trench-clubs, nail-bats, short-swords, large knives, and handguns. Using their modern headsets to communicate on this battlefield turned the numerically vastly-inferior defenders of Prague into "lightning units" or "blitztrupen," capable of assaulting and raiding enemy positions under the cover of darkness and rubble, striking from tunnels and foxholes like swarms of Catholic wasps.
Skelly disliked Adolf, as much as he did any monarch. But he still took no pleasure in murder. But a job was a job, and he grimaced and placed his finger upon the trigger. With a single shot, he was about to change the direction of the war and the fate of Europe and, indeed, the world. He took some comfort in the fact that Adolf was childless. The man he was about to take the life of was a foolish old man stupidly visiting the front line of one of the most brutal wars in the history of Europe. That foolish old man was now serving communion to his men, a grail in his hand filled with red wine and a priest beside him carrying a tray of wafers.
The sky was ashen. The sun was fighting to peak through the smoke of battle and of burning homes and shops. Although it was noon, it looked to be dusk. Skelly had nested himself in the third-story window of a former hotel, of which half had collapsed into rubble. Behind him, near the once beautiful antique bed, were the rotting corpses of a Venetian shocktrooper and an Illuminist Polish infantryman. The Pole was underneath the Venetian and had a large knife run through his chest, still gripped tightly in death by the Venetian's hands. In the Pole's hand was a service revolver, his last breath used to blow a hole the size of a golf ball into the eyesocket of the shocktrooper's gas mask. Black blood had sprayed out the back of the man's head, decorating the bed's blankets that still waited for the next hotel patron. They smelled as good as they looked. Thankfully, the Hungarian next to Skelly on the floor didn't smell like anything yet, because he had only been dead a few hours. Skelly's wazikashi blade typically silenced anyone in an instant, and the Hungarian was practically beheaded in once slice.
Skelly's gloved finger twitched once, twitched twice, and then squeezed the trigger. A shot rang out, still far louder than he cared for despite the silencer he had equipped, and the Holy Roman Emperor's chest exploded in a geyser of crimson. The old man fell like a sack of bricks as his terrified men rushed to protect him. It was far too well-placed a shot to do anything but comfort Adolf in his last few ragged moments. As Skelly prepared to leave the room, he gazed at the scene below. He couldn't help but think of a painting he had seen in a museum in Keybeck as a child. It had depicted the death of General Wolfe at the Siege of Quebec during the French and Indian War. A bannerman leaned over the emperor, his yellow flag blowing gently in the breeze. The communion grail had clanged to the cobblestones, its dark red mixing with the Emperor's blood. Several officers cradled the dying Austrian in their laps as others began to frantically sweep their surroundings for the sniper.
The Black Orchestra assassin folded his specially-made rifle in half and slipped into a sleeve mounted to his back. He drew Moneymaker, his legendary pistol, from its leather holster strapped to his leg, stood up, and left the room. It wasn't difficult, and over the sounds of shouting and panicked gunfire aimed at no one in particular, he casually slipped down the rubble that had once been the southern wall of the room. Within moments, his rubber-soled combat boots slapped onto the pavement. As he had planned, and as he had done so many times before, he slipped into a manhole connected to Prague's ancient sewer system and disappeared into the darkness.
All around him the stench of untreated sewage was potent, as the water treatment plants hadn't run since August. Compounding the odor was the dozens of rotting corpses floating like fleshy buoys upon the River Stix. Men of a dozen nationalities and ethnicities all were decomposing in the fetid underground river. He hustled along the concrete and brick walkway, stepping over several Austrians who had seen better days, and scurried down a tunnel leading even deeper into the Prague catacombs. The sound of boots descending the metal rungs behind him sent a mild chill up his spine, as the Imperials were evidently getting better at situational awareness from their months of urban brawling. He crouched behind a pile of rusty, slimy pipes, his finger on Moneymaker's trigger, and watched as several Venetian shocktroopers scanned their surroundings. Their helmets bore large metal flashlights to one side, aiding them in their search for the man who had killed their Emperor.
After a few moments of bantering in Italian, the three men made the sign of the cross, formed up behind each other, and readied their weapons. Skelly breathed a sigh of relief as they headed in the opposite direction of his cover. He quietly picked himself up, muttered something about someone's mother, and made good his escape.
***
ACT ONE:
JUNE-AUGUST, '54
ACT ONE:
JUNE-AUGUST, '54
June 5, 1954, saw a combined Illuminist force of Poles and Russians relentlessly push across the Bohemian border, clashing with the New Holy Roman Imperial troops defending the region under Bohemian occupational dictator Generalfeldmarschall Andreas von Questenberg. Von Questenberg found himself facing an overwhelming Illuminist onslaught that seemed insurmountable. His force of around 150,000 men included many inexperienced recruits and drafted peasants, who were no match for the battle-hardened and better-equipped Illuminist forces. In addition, although he had brought up some armor to the border, Bohemian resistance to NHRE presence was still so entrenched and bitter that it forced him to make incredibly difficult decisions. Decisions, he feared, where there was no correct answer.
"Give me the Italians or give me death!"
- Generalfeldmarschall Andreas von Questenberg, June 15, 1954
- Generalfeldmarschall Andreas von Questenberg, June 15, 1954
Von Questenberg, since the commencement of hostilities, had demanded the presence of Italian troops to bring up the rear. However, most of the Italian forces were headed far to the east to face the bulk of the Russians and Ukrainians pouring into Bessarabia. Bessarabia, a strongly reinforced and well-fortified Imperial region bordering Ukraine along the Dneister River, was under an incredible assault from Illuminist bombers and artillery, and Commander Gregor Minsky was preparing for a general infantry and armored incursion to plant his Minervan banner on Bessarabian soil. The orders from Vienna and Rome were simple: General von Questenberg was to hold the line at all costs in Bohemia while the eastern regions of the NHRE repelled the Russo-Ukrainian steamroller heading their way.
Many of the untested troops under von Questenberg's command had seen their only action against an unstable and overwhelmed Royal Bohemian Army and insurgent fighters, and they were terrified of the Illuminist onslaught hounding across the border with foaming maws and gnashing teeth. The NHR Imperial Luftfahrtruppen (Airforce) experienced crushing losses at both fronts in the opening weeks of the war, as the better-trained and better-equipped Illuminist planes regularly wiped them from the sky. It was clear that the Areopagus and Maximovich had long-prepared for this confrontation, and the one-sided slaughter in the air, combined with the failing Bohemian and dented Bessarabian borders, resulted in huge amounts of desertion and even treason from the NHRE forces. On June 25, most of a drafted Romanian regiment turned their coats and joined the Illuminists, massacring an Austrian unit. As Von Questenberg prayed that his remaining men would hold the line, he knew their only chance for victory depended on his remaining troopers' patriotism and his own ability and skill to coordinate those men and resources under his command.
June 27 saw the Bohemian border finally crumble. Despite a valiant effort by the troops loyal to the Empire, they were outnumbered six-to-one and were defending rubble and being harassed from behind by Illuminist Bohemian rebels. Von Questenberg's right hand, the elderly and old-fashioned "last hussar" General Ferenc "Batshit" Batsányi--as well as his 15,000 devout Catholic Hungarian conscripts--were the linchpin keeping the Illuminists at bay. Batsányi, riding on a warhorse in 1954, saw the tide of fleeing border guards and told them to continue their flight.
"The Hungarian Crusaders will force them back, by God--with or without you homosexual horse thieves! We did it in the big war at Budapest, and now we will do it in Bohemia. Go! Flee, you brigands, and scurry back to your mothers' skirts!"
-General Ferenc "Batshit" Batsányi, June 29, 1954
-General Ferenc "Batshit" Batsányi, June 29, 1954
While Presov fell in the east of the occupied Kingdom, the Hungarians actually pushed back against a force many times their size and caused a near-complete halt to the Illuminist march to Prague. Von Questenberg communicated with Imperial High Command on July 10, telling them:
"With one hundred Hungarians I can do what I cannot with one hundred thousand of the rabble I have been sent. Prague will hold if Batsányi's bastards and I breathe. If the city is bombed to rubble, we will fight in the sewers. If the sewers are crushed, we will curse them from our graves. We will hold or die. Deus vult."
All through July, Prague resisted the sea of Illuminist invaders. Von Questenberg had made it his personal mission since the occupation of Bohemia began to assure the loyalty of the region's capitol, and resistance fighters were executed with great zeal. While many of the populace desperately tried to flee the war, von Questenberg made sure that most of them were forced to stay in place. With the Illuminist public image insisting they were a force for liberation, scores of slain Bohemian civilians blown to bits by Loomie shelling did not help their PR. Instead of mass-bombing, which no doubt could have caused the collapse of Prague in days, the Illuminist Commander Anton Osada was opting for the physical occupation and "liberation" of the historic city and all of its people and artifacts. This forced the two sides into a bitter series of street battles and stalemate assaults.
The antiquated mentality of Batsányi was offset by another Hungarian officer under his command, a colonel of the name Csonka Zsolt. Zsolt had been a promising engineering and telecommunications expert before the war, serving in the development board of Imperial WireWorks. His expertise in mobile communications lent itself to the design of his M53 Burghelm, a modern infantry helmet with a prominent neck guard and in-built wireless communication earphones, powered by a battery box attached to the belt. The design was a cross between the West Germanian stahlhelm, which was popularly knocked-off in the NHRE, and the Renaissance-era burgonet helmet. The design, especially for Imperial standards, was incredibly forward-thinking and impressive, and also frequently featured a modular system to attach sniper-visors, extendable antennas, and flashlights.
Thus, despite the antiquated state of the Imperial Army, the M53 and its variants became critical parts of their war machine. Without their ability to quickly and easily transmit orders and battle chatter, Prague would have no doubt fallen within weeks. While full versions of the helmet were considered deluxe and reserved for special units, Italian factories pumped out the headset components without the actual helmet for officers and more general usage. Communication and Hungarian dedication were the key elements of von Questenberg's defense of Prague in the opening months of the war.
Venetian shocktroops
Hungarian Heavy Infantry
General Ferenc "Batshit" Batsányi on the move with the Imperial Hungarian Cavalry
A young soldier of the Imperial Bohemian Conscripts
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We see Skelly again ! But where's Arthur ? Also who hired Skelly ? Is he a freelancer now since the Black Orchestra betrayed him in Britannia ?
Also, RIP Adolf. He's definitely going to be a martyr to the endangered NHRE.
Also, RIP Adolf. He's definitely going to be a martyr to the endangered NHRE.