3-13: Dangerous Fools

The Holy Lord Phoenix's seat of government is right across the street from the inquisitor station, behind a line of towering statues of the man himself. The gang wonders idly if Holy Nation scripture has anything to say regarding vanity.

The Holy Lord Phoenix perches straight-backed on his wood and metal throne, the black and white of his breastplate and his stern glower embodying the unyielding starkness of Holy Nation authority. Muscular and trim despite his advanced age, he sports the fiercest combat stats the gang has seen yet: 78 Attack, 81 Defense, 85 Strength, 53 Dexterity, and 86 Toughness. He is no one to be trifled with.

Putting aside for the moment any fantasies the gang has regarding what they'd like to happen to the man, Cat approaches the Holy Lord Phoenix and attempts to say hello. He's cut off by the man standing beside the throne dais with his arms folded, a fellow even burlier than the Phoenix himself called the Protector Of The Flame.

The Phoenix himself doesn't dignify Cat with even a single word. While Cat doesn't truly want to be of service to the Holy Nation, this Protector seems at least to be willing to chat, so he strikes up a conversation.

Most of the human squad hasn't been with the gang long enough to know what the hell the Protector Of The Flame means by “devilish monstrosities” but Outlaw Hana has to turn and look at the wall so no one can see her roll her eyes. While there are plenty of things that will eat people in the northwest—namely, cannibals and beak things—the only things “a hundred times the size of a man” are the leviathans of the Leviathan Coast, gentle giants that pose no threat to humans unless attacked first or unless a large group of people gets practically underfoot.

Having exhausted the Protector's interest in conversation, Outlaw Hana, Keys, Cat, Shryke, and Pilaf leave the throne room and set out exploring the rest of Blister Hill. They get a bit of a fright leaving the government district when the gate guard shouts “Heretics will be purged by the will of Okran!” but it turns out he's not talking about the gang when he says that, he's just kinda doing his daily affirmations or whatever. Lovely atmosphere, this place.

Of all the things the Holy Nation decries as evil, they don't seem to mind drinking. Not enough to dissuade bars from opening anyway; the town boasts three. The human crew walks into the nearest—while not by any stretch willing to let their guard down around here, they could perhaps do with a singular stiff drink.

Aside from being populated solely by humans, it seems at first a Holy Nation bar is much the same as a bar anywhere. Shryke sidles up and asks the barman what he's got.

While the barman does show her a pretty varied menu, he also plonks a stack of books down on the table for her to buy. This strikes her as pretty odd behaviour for a bartender.

Holy Nation bars are all like this. They all carry a whole bunch of books for one to read as they drink their weak wheat grog. Far from signifying a love of knowledge and learning, though, every last one of these books is holy scripture or some sort manual on how to be a properly Okranite hateful little turd.

Most crassly offensive is the Guiding Light series of “self help handbooks”. One is titled “How to educate your wife”, which includes advice such as “Punish her when she tries to rebel; beat her so that she may remember the proper ways. But do not needlessly beat her; as for a dog, the training must be just in order to work.” Another is “The insect fiend: A lost cause?” which begins “The insect fiend is almost completely lost to the darkness, their obsidian, vacuous eyes devoid of any soul” and recommends murdering hivers as an act of compassion, putting them “out of the misery of their blackened existence”. There's one for shek too, of course, describing them as savages who “deserve no mercy” if they resist the word of Okran.

While Shryke walks away in barely-concealed disgust, Cat reluctantly buys a copy of the Holy Flame. After all, as the only human man in the gang, it's his job to act as the devout Okranite master all the others are following while they're in the holy lands. The Holy Flame is insurance against paladins calling his bluff.

Another bar in Blister Hill has a copy of the first edition of Guiding Light, a screed against skeletons so wildly ignorant and paranoid it ends up being a little funny.

These clowns clearly have no idea what a skeleton is. Cat almost buys it to show to Burn as a joke before he remembers this silly little book has probably helped inspire countless murders of skeletons and organic people alike.

The bars and shops here all carry a smattering of books, all similar fare. Between them, Cat peruses a couple volumes of the Scripture of Radiance that the Protector Of The Flame advised him to read. While they're official holy texts, their content on the whole is not that far off from the Guiding Light screeds.

Some are more cosmological but in nature but the Holy Nation really does like to bang on about the same few things. There is one volume, though, that find particularly interesting to look at and compare with the “heretical” Okranite writings Jam read in Flotsam Village some time ago. Specifically, the Book of Grace, which is similar enough to this scripture that one is clearly a modified version of the other.

The first sentence of the Book of Grace and Scripture of Radiance V are identical. In the second, the Scripture trades out “intoxication” for “orgies” and uses the phrase “Shadow's lures” instead of “self serving lures”. The Scripture's third sentence no longer exhorts the believer to “show kindness to our brothers and sisters”, trading kindness for honour and directing that honour at holy brothers only. Clearly, women are beneath honour. Finally, the last sentence is completely different, dropping the plea to “overcome our ego to find true paradise” in favour of more self-denial talk.

I think it's really neat that the game includes these two texts; comparing them side-by-side gives insight into the differences between Holy Nation dogma and other strains of Okranism deeper than just one being hateful and the other nice. It makes it clear that all the Narko stuff is, if not unique to the Holy Nation, at least much more emphasized by them than by other Okranites. Whichever text came first, comparing the two makes it clear the Scripture of Radiance's invitation to “honour our holy brothers” is deliberate about excluding women. It's also quite telling that the Book of Grace is banned in the Holy Nation—they exercise such rigid control over their state religion that even alternate interpretations of Okranism will get you thrown in prison and hauled off to the slave labour mines.