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Commodore-Captain Riverton Arrias enjoyed his cramped quarters. The captain of the Kingdom of Oren Naval Vessel ' 'Caractus' ' oft retired to these metallic confines to contemplate his next course of action in quiet.

"Captain Arrias, your proposal is foolhardy." He remembered his Admiral audibly scowling before he left port. "If you depart this port now, you will do so without my authorization. I will not move to stop you, but with the Gods as my witness, you will not hear a single response should you cry for assistance." Arrias grinned, he grinned in the way only a badger bursting with self-righteous vigor could. The Admiral, a stout meerkat of advanced age, was a fool. He was a fool fascinated with new toys that the new arrivals from Panthalassa had offered them. Surely he had to have known that this new equipment, these new weapons, would come at a steep cost. The Kingdom of Oren, and by extension, the Astorian League at large, would regret grasping for these shiny objects.

Captain Arrias was a Traditionalist, a title he wore with pride when most others considered it an insult or a slur at worst. His particular faction of the military abhorred the advancements that the newcomers of the Panthalassa Federation eagerly dangled in front of them, like glistening baubles to corvids. Other officers in the Kingdom of Oren and other Astorian League member domains shared similar objections with great candor, threatening to put their careers and experience on the line to make a point. A handwritten message from a lord in the Duchy of West Cascara, a prominent Astorian League member, sat front and center on his desk, one that was addressed to all of the League's officers, land and naval alike.

"If you accept the devil's gifts" the missive warned. "You will be wholeheartedly responsible for unleashing a hell of your own creation." This too was Arrias's view. To him, the cramped metal corridors of the Fletcher-class destroyer he commanded were the pinnacle of technology in Aurentel, and to him, that's where technological advancement should stay: Metal-crafted vessels, oil-fired power plants, an all-seeing eye that could detect vessels a horizon away, explosive artillery... All of this was atrocious, but a necessary atrocity, Arrias deflected.

It was necessary because they were the one thing that had saved the Kingdom and its allies in the last great war with the Imperium. Arrias's fleet of four destroyers almost single-handedly obliterated an armada of wooden sailing vessels loaded with the Imperium's finest legionnaires as they threatened to open a new front in an already devastating war. It had taken an Act of God himself to will these vessels into existence, train their crews, and press them into immediate service. While accolades and awards were heaped upon him at the end of the war, he could not help but continually imagine how the Imperium's sailors must have felt to be that outclassed.The terror of having your elegantly-crafted timber vessels explode or flood without being able to see what hit you,with no opportunity to fight back? Nobody deserved that, not even the genocidal bastard lackeys of the Imperium.

Arrias sighed. Times were different now.

He had bore witness to the rapid change that seemed to engulf the Astorian League, and likely the world at large. Captain Riverton Arrias had grown up a sailor, like his father, and his father before him. Seamanship and sailing were in his blood. Now, the burning lamp-torches of ports he regularly called home in his childhood were being replaced with something new, something he couldn't even begin to conceptualize: Electricity. For civilians. He had thought such a thing, used to power his vessel's 'all-seeing eye' and hydraulic pumps for actuating its guns would never see use outside of a military situation. The witchcraft of the ballistic computer his gunners and gunnery officers used to compute trajectories for the shells was now deemed old hat, soon to be replaced by an electronic device that could tell itself what to do, and how to do it, requiring only that an book-trained operator press a button. The captain of the Caractus shivered at these dangerous marvels. He had seen what this sort of technology could accomplish in combat, and the nightmares that wracked him in his sleep further solidified his impassioned resistance to what those above him deemed necessary for establishing an era of peace and prosperity.

A knock sounded on the door of his stateroom.

"Come in."

A jaguar opened the door, stepping inside. He wore the uniform and possessed the age of an executive officer. He saluted his superior, remaining at that position only until Captain Arrias urged him to take a seat at his table.

"I thought I would give you an update, sir." the Caractus's executive officer barked. "Navigation has us on course for a Silver Concordat outpost in the Metrium Islands. We should be arriving within visual and firing range by dusk."

"Excellent." Captain Arrias nodded. The badger looked out of the stateroom's porthole at the horizon, light of day bathing the four vessels under his command in radiative warmth.

"If I may speak freely sir?" the executive officer offered, with a responsive nod coming from Arrias. "Perhaps demonstrating the power of this devilry once more will shock the world out of the drastic changes we're seeing back home. Our people don't know that they're playing with fire."

Arrias grinned in response. Devilry was perhaps the best adjective someone could use. Something as destructive and alien as this could have only come from the bowels of Hell itself. "Lieutenant, if I may ask... What is your background?"

The jaguar shifted his chair, the screech of metal on metal made both of the room's occupants perk their ears briefly. "Farmer, sir. A subsistence farm in West Oren, in the Duchy of Camaris. Before I shipped out here, I noticed someone trying out one of those new machines... a tractor, I believe it was called. This machine could do a week's worth of labor in mere hours. It's fueled by the same sort of liquid that fuels our vessel, it uses similar engines to what rumble and rage below us. It feels degrading, sir."

"Degrading? How?" Arrias perked.

"Working with my hands feels ennobling, sir." the XO responded. "This... advancement? It demeans the value of hard work, and..." the XO shrugged his shoulders as he stared into space.

"You feel uncomfortable." Arrias responded.

"I worry about the military applications of all of this, sir. Just as the Panthalassans beseech us to mechanize reaping crops, I feel we will eventually mechanize reaping lives."

"More so than we have now?" Arrias gestured to the ship around them.

"Yes sir." the XO solemnly sighed. "It frightens me, knowing what we have done to the Imperium in the past with these ships, even if it was for a good cause, a righteous cause... just what have we enabled?"

"It is on us." Arrias started. "It is on us to demonstrate exactly why these advancements should be cast into the dustbin of history where they belong, and the Panthalassans sent back to where they came from. This world has no room for their alienating ways."

"Except for these vessels...?" the XO interrupted.

"These vessels saved our way of life in the past, and yet, I feel conflicted using them. They are but a harbinger of a world we should resist with every fiber of our being. And that is the purpose of our mission. To demonstrate their destructive power. Through the shock and awe we will dispense upon our adversaries, the world will learn once again that there should be a limit to the hell we can unleash upon each other." Arrias answered.

"Yes sir."

The sound-powered telephone adjacent to the Captain buzzed. Both officers, deep in thought, jumped. Captain Arrias picked up the telephone.

"Captain's Quarters"

"Your presence is requested on the bridge forthwith, sir." the sailor at the other line commented. Arrias hung the phone back against its cradle, shaking his head.

"A Panthalassan once told me that where he comes from, even these are extremely outdated." the Caractus's executive officer sneered disapprovingly at his own memory, motioning to the phone. "Did you know they want to build communication networks spanning our territory? 'Wire-less,' they call it? Personally, I don't wish to exist in the same world as something like that."

"With any luck, we will be long dead before that sort of thing ever becomes a reality in Aurentel." Captain Arrias chuckled innocently, rising to his feet.

Captain Arrias navigated the Caractus's corridors to the bridge, a windowed structure high above the ship's bow. As he entered, the sailors on watch turned and saluted before being ordered back to their prior tasks.

"Captain." The sailor at the Navigation station turned to the badger. "We're approaching the Metrium Islands. Lookouts and the radar operator-"

Captain Arrias chuckled. He never used the official name for what he termed the 'all-seeing eye.'

"-report no contacts. It's... strange, sir. You would think the Silver Concordat would be running a patrol or two out here. We haven't even seen as much as a fishing vessel."

Arrias nodded. That was strange. Especially in a wartime stance, the lack of any obvious patrols was an oddity. Of course, the Metrium Islands were little more than a supply depot, at least that's what his intelligence briefing indicated. In a roundabout way, it would make sense that they wouldn't-

"R-Radar contact!" A voice shouted from a sound-powered speaker on the bridge, likely from the console's operator in the vessel's Combat Information Center. "Fast-moving! Bearing on us from the northwest!"

Northwest? Arrias gulped. The Metrium Islands were to the east of their current position. What could...?

"Several new contacts! N-no count! Bearing down on us from the northwest!"

"Bring all vessels to general quarters!" Arrias barked. His hands curled around the sides of the table in front of him, the sounds of the whistle, the general quarters command, and the klaxon that sent a couple hundred sailors below him scrambling for their battle stations were a blur vanishing an adrenaline-fueled haze. Lookouts swept their gaze to the northwest.

"Contacts closing, bearing on us from 325, ten miles out." the radar operator reported, trying to keep his professionalism intact as adrenaline and terror coursed through his veins.

"Whatever's coming, let's make this a fight to remember. May nothing hinder us in our mission." Arrias spoke. He spoke with the righteous vigor of a commanding officer on a mission. The vigor of a man dedicated to demonstrating that he had something to prove. A mission to demonstrate to the world that the gears of rapid modernization would stop at his whim.

Ultimately, his theorizing, his commitment, political maneuvering, plotting, and passion,would mean nothing.

The anti-ship missile slammed directly into the bridge, shrapnel shredding personnel that the thousand kilograms of combusting hexogen packed into the missile's warhead did not already incinerate.

Captain Riverton Arrias was killed instantly. His body evaporated from existence within a millisecond.

___________________________________________________________________________

Kyriakos looked at the BattleCam's television footage above the table with a sense of dread. The same dread clutched the golden jackal's heart tightly. He paid no attention to what otherwise seemed like an insignificant mote of dust puffing up from the artificial seascape below him.

He watched in silent terror as more missiles arrived, and suddenly his miniscule fleet was no more. The squadron's three other destroyers: The Strand, Sutch, and Sundercliff, were struck almost simultaneously. His heart was torn asunder as the ships twisted apart in explosive glory, the cameras above the table watching in ultra-magnification as a game-master thoughtlessly recorded the results of this engagement.

"Surpriiiiiiiiiise~" chided an otter across the table from him in a playful, singsong voice. "Y'know, Kyri, you should pay for my gas money, I had to drive out here for this since you can't keep your own specks under control."

"I just watched over a thousand and three hundred people be erased from existence, the least you can do is treat them with a little bit of respect, Bastien." Kyriakos barked.

"I don't see why I should treat things smaller than insects with a microgram of respect." Bastien retorted. "Anyway, that was cute. Your guys were sooooo outclassed!" Bastien giggled with glee. "Maybe you should have forced that modernization thing down their throats, instead of thinking that the opinions of itty-bitty things you could inhale if you sniffed near them mean anything. To say nothing of your military's lack of intelligence... We just finished that runway last week!"

Two hands fell against Kyriakos's shoulders as he tuned out Bastien's gloating. The hands gripped tightly. If they didn't, he probably would have gone to the other side of the table and punched Bastien right in his face.

"Don't. It's not worth it." A male voice behind Kyriakos sounded.

"I just watched a little more than a thousand of my people get massacred without the chance to defend themselves, and his response is a fucking giggle?" Kyriakos growled. His teeth biting into his lower lip drew blood. His blood. "He's a monster, Talis. Just like the people he commands, even if he thinks they're so much less than him. He's just like them."

"I know." the coyote behind Kyriakos replied. The two looked up at the TVs that started showing replays of the 'battle,' if it could even be called that. A squadron of naval bombers had lifted off from the newly reinforced, but unknown to Kyriakos's fleet, Metrium Islands Naval Base. The bombers had flown to the northwest of the destroyer squadron, and unleashed every missile they had. It had been a fluke that the first missile struck the Caractus, the flagship, first. Kyriakos had known about the Traditionalists, and especially about Captain Arrias, whose actions originally required his presence here. Now, that particular faction didn't have a leg to stand on. It appeared that the Imperium, and thus its successor, the Silver Concordat, had learned something about superior technology from the last campaign.

Kyriakos now hoped that his people, particularly the generals and admirals of the Kingdom of Oren, would learn something from this. As the four smoking hulks of the destroyers sank, empty and broken lifeboats loosing from their davits and rising to the surface, he hardened his resolve. Once, he was willing to give the more 'traditional' sectors of Oren some leeway when it came to modernization. After this senseless waste of life?

No more.

"Talis?" the jackal turned his head toward his friend. "How are you at seizing moments?"

"Decent, why?"

Kyriakos diverted his gaze from the "ENGAGEMENT CONCLUDED" graphic that now dominated the television screens above the table, turning his head and looking with rage into his best friend's eyes.

"Good. Because we've got some house to clean."

___________________________________________________________________________

Tabletop Warfare: Aurentel is an ongoing worldbuilding project by Cadence Andrysiak, being updated irregularly. It can be found at