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It's the 21 century and the culture and history of Mechanicsburg has been studied, debated, philosophised, exotisied and vilified by hundreds, if not thousands, of academics and authors.
When I told my professor for my Anthropology course that I wanted to write about Mechanicsburg he told me very bluntly that it had all been written before and I should pick somewhere else to write about.
I asked him to name one academic article, one study, one nonfiction book written by someone who, like myself, had been born and raised in Mechanicsburg. Five minutes later he was all but begging me to write the article because, as I had already known, there were none.
I was the first and with good reason and so this essay is not on any of the things he might have expected but it is important enough that having handed it in earlier today I have now published it online.
“The Dichotomy of a Europan Culture both Uncolonised and Closed to outsiders.”
Mechanicsburg has a fascinating vibrant millenia-old culture. We spent the first eight hundred of those years periodically pouring out of the walls of our mountain stronghold city as a massive raiding army. This army would sweep across the countryside raiding and killing until the Heterodyne in charge of said army had had enough, gotten bored, been called home by his wife, gotten himself killed, or of course lost badly enough to have to retreat right back behind those impregnable walls. Our community had been that way since the very first Heterodyne who founded Mechanicsburg on the site he chose as his home, having come at the head of an army from the east from a place that is beyond the knowledge of history. Of course that's not entirely true as most of the Mechanicsburg people have been, as with almost every culture city or country, civilians not soldiers. We were however a warlike culture, a raiding culture and we have never hidden that.
Other than that and what people inferred from the fact that we took home prisoners, never ransoming anyone back. To be honest we did almost everything that has been attributed to us on this matter from using these people as the base for constructs, to feeding them to our monsters, to human sacrifice. Though it has never been only these things, the public record shows the not quite multicultural so much as multi origin of the people of mechanicsburg and many of our bloodlines started in these same prisoners brought home. As well as the sheer love we had for bringing home other more typical loot, in the form of gold, jewels, art, clanks, constructs, food and anything else we had use for. Nothing much was known about what happened inside mechanicsburg during this time.
Those few occasions outsiders were brought into the city by those Heterodynes, who enjoyed some form of diplomacy strong enough to let people leave again, people were kept to the main thoroughfare, an intimidating and very calculated display. Traders and merchants were always set up outside the city itself unless they had been born and raised there themselves. This was in all honesty likely for the best as even these brave outsiders risking the wrath of their fellows to trade with us likely did not want to enter what was thought of as the Heterodyne lair. In fact much trade happened outside the gates of the mountain passes to the valley rather than outside the city itself. We were always fair to those traders who did business with us whether openly or in secret, even if the goods they received were often of odd or dubious nature. This sadly mostly came to a stop after the Storm King and with the slow start of the Long War.
While this is not the actual topic of my article I can not help but point out, though few academics may agree with me, that if those Andronicus Valois put in place to keep the Heterodynes mostly contained had not been as successful the Long War likely would not have become as wide spread and terrible as it did. The Heterodynes had always done a pretty good job of keeping most of Europa fairly civil with each other in their mutual Hatred for the Heterodynes. You don't use up all your troops fighting a neighbour when the Heterodyne might decide to come raiding next week.
Then everything drastically changed overnight the “Heterodyne Boys'', Bill and Barry were not raised in our culture, even though they grew up in the town, their mother refused to let them participate in the local customs, or to go to the Red Cathedral. In fact pretty much the only thing they were, so the stories go, allowed to join in was the snail race.When they came to power, they forced changeson the city, the fleshyards were razed, the open trade of theft robbery assault and murder was now illegal things changed in the way the town normally ran. Suddenly, Mechanicsburg was no longer viable. If we wanted anything other than the basic local food we would have to do something new since our export product had typically been goods we had raided, with a side of monster capture equipment though people then were not aware that came from Mechanicsburg.
The town reinvented itself and became a tourist town welcoming anyone who wanted to come see the birthplace of the Heterodyne Boys and the evil Heterodynes city. Mechanicsburg also gained the Hospital which quickly became famous with people coming from all around both to work and to be healed or helped, many other hospitals were not as accepting of Constructs either as professionals or as patients at the time. We were successful in our reinvention and Mechanigsburg prospered. Once again the people could buy anything they wished for and even the poorest amongst us was well off by the standards of other places. We have after all always looked after our own.
We were never colonised, even when nominally under the control of the Wulfenbach empire, we had a treaty. Our army was forced back to our gates many times, but the town was never taken. On the Europan continent we are the only town to have never bowed to outside forces. Even the great battle for Mechanigsburg itself, that everyone has heard of, against the might of the Wulfenbach army, which had won every battle up to that day, by the newly returned and recognised Lady Agatha Heterodyne ended with Mechanicsburg free, if frozen in time.
Except we did.
We survived by selling the world an image: a commercialised, reduced-version of our culture. In fact, we thrived by doing this. If we had not, well, I saw the forecast outcomes of our city not making this drastic shift in year six maths class. Things would not have gone well for us, we had done better in sieges than what would have happened if we had stayed within the rules set down by the Heterodyne Boys without so many drastic changes .
People don't seem to realise that this was not a choice of the people. We did not want to be a tourist town open to anyone who traipsed through. We were given orders and an order from The Heterodyne is Law. Nowadays, a hundred and seventy years later, we openly hate our tourists much as many cities around the world hate their tourists but we also still need them.
Some things we have been successful in over these years. For example, the initial influx of new people to the town got assimilated or left and, as is well known, it has been impossible to gain residency let alone citizenship other than by marriage, recent ancestry, or adoption in eighty years. We are our own sovereign nation and we close our borders for certain festivals around the year no matter how much tourists tell us they would love to participate.
There are however so many articles on our culture, many of them written in those last eighty years by people who have gone places they did not have permission to be or been in Mechanicsburg at times when only citizens are legally allowed. In all honesty most of these articles are absolute nonsense either wildy fleshed out or entirely fictional.
Yes, we are a town that has never been conquered, but we are also a closed culture. What we offer to the tourists we do so openly and of our own choice. We would like the academic world and every nosey writer who wants to talk about our culture and especially those parts of it we do not show the world to leave us alone.
Stop trying to find out our secret rituals.
We don't want you to know.
That's why they are called secret.
Robur Heliotrope