Only cat I can get down with!!

Thinking of Koana's infrastructure projects and his dirigible disaster that definitely widowed a mother of 3 adorable mamool ja babies, this tunnel is definitely not in the yok huy style, and I have to conclude he ordered it dug and created.

Based on the entire history of rail infrastructure from the real world, even allowing for "Sharlayan innovation" and the use of magic, there's no way people didn't die making this too :P

Even if we pretend Tural is a complete utopia (it's not, there's bandit camps literally next door to the tunnel, who were super-charged by the introduction of guns and flood of people from Tullioyal striking out to Shaaloni and then apparently losing their job security and being unable to find an honest living in the society Koana built), we have to imagine at least 1 person got phineas gage'd and there was at least one horrific rock fall remembered in infamy by the locals, which loporrit radio will do a 10 part carrotcast on in 10 years time laying out the failures of the overseers and the tragic stories of the people who lost their lives interwoven with a minute by minute timeline of the way the fault in the rocks above them strained and finally broke.

Honestly it's scarcely believable they didn't run two trains head on at each other for fun with everyone having a fun day out beside the track to watch the collision before everyone got pelted with supersonic molten train bits.

... My point is that there's loads in the overland storytelling to pick at to remind us just how horrifying Shaaloni is if you start turning over literally any rocks and thinking about what's happened there, but also there's a bunch more horrors to think about that we've barely even started thinking about :)

When you do the cutscene up to Vanguard you go along literally miles of trainline out in the open desert with no shelter, perfect straight line, revealing that Yyasulani is actually like at least 20-30 miles away, if you look at the absolute vastness implied by the backdrop to that cutscene, and then you think about the actual material conditions that it takes to lay that much trainline, and how little evidence there is that Koana imported mammets from Sharlayan, who are a metaphor in themselves but DO do all the hard work for them (how the fuck has my queue for either alliance raid not popped yet and I'm still typing); we have to assume that instead of taking the shortcuts that Sharlayan does so that everyone can enjoy a middle-class life at the very least, instead he almost certainly had all of that done with manpower.

While the mamool ja seem to be running the dirigibles for the most part, there's none north of the bridge (conspicuously so), xbraal and ... hyur sorry I forgot their turali name... do everything in Shaaloni. Another weird absence is the Pelu, who supposedly go everywhere, but also are not only absent entirely from Solution 9 but also don't even appear in Shaaloni. Which is weird, because you'd think merchants, especially travelling merchants, would love to cross that bridge and bring familiar necessities to a population transplanted from the city. Given Koana has strong ties to the Pelu, you'd think he'd have reached out to them but it almost sort of adds to an idea that he either has split on them after his adoption and no longer wants to be associated with them, or else that he wanted them left out of the Shaaloni project and made no formal connections to invite them up there and declined to issue them any permits.

In any case, as I hit 50 minutes on this queue, it does leave me wondering who DID do all the work in Shaaloni and what it says about Koana and the choices he made. The Landsguard only seem to go thataways for serious problems, and their influence seems to end at the bridge, and beyond that you're in the wilderness, and local law is enforced without input. It's very much a colonial project even within Gulool Ja Ja's own country and own sphere of influence, and given human nature, it feels reeeally uncomfortable to worry about the lack of oversight that One Guy was given to start mining and building all over the country.

Perhaps the swampiness of Kozamamuka and steepness of Urqopacha put him off from learning about THOSE sorts of challenges for a trainline and the flatness and openness of Shaaloni was too tempting for the start. But on the other hand, the other areas all offer strong political bases to argue back against the presence of an extremely disruptive rail line appearing through their territory, and the only people with a claim to Shaaloni were expressly the people who Koana felt had rejected him, and therefore he was free to build with only a token asking them if it was okay, and proceeding to massively disrupt their way of life and their sacred rroneek migratory lands to the point of near-catastrophe. Which, we've established, he very much did not care about until he met a rroneek in person.

In the sidequests you do hear a lot of people did leave the indigenous communities to join in the rail building and cereuleum mining, and in sidequests their knowledge does help with problems that have been caused by these activities and you know, oh it's all fine now this local knowledge is proving to be important to this huge upheaval of modern life blah blah all hold hands and work together. Which, like. Yeah. Not the best demonstration that his projects are actually socially sound.

In the quest where we and Erenville go after the bandits, someone does cite the mine for I think copper, being abandoned in favour of cereuleum, and the former miners making up a lot of the bandits, but it does beg the question of why they were not simply hired to do cereuleum instead, which seems like a weird personnel oversight on Koana's part, and makes me wonder if between people he'd trained for the most specialised jobs, and favouring new people who he'd got passes to Shaaloni and therefore had to promise jobs, he also screwed over even people who may or may not have been Tullioyal natives who headed north for work, but simply earlier than his new infrastructure projects.

In any case, I think it's pretty obvious once you've talked to everyone in the zone and wandered around it for the years we've had Dawntrail, that the only conclusion I can make is that Koana massively exploited the locals for their labour, and then left them so isolated from their communities that they didn't get to connect with them until random sidequests bring them back to learn things they should have known all along.

With the huge influx of people to do the building of the rail, mines, cereuleum processing plants and new towns, but not enough jobs once the rail line is finished and even some of the pre-existing mining jobs are lost as everything swaps to 100% cereuleum mining to continue to uphold the rail line, this has created mixed communities of both people from Shaaloni, and from Tullioyal in new towns with new law enforcement and no traditions other than new wild west stuff like gun duels and taverns. It's not surprising that there was a huge surplus population of workers who then turned to banditry.

While it's a shame we never really went into why there were bandits in Kozamauka (because it probably would have revealed similar failings in Gulool Ja Ja's rule that we weren't allowed to think about and Wuk Lamat could paper over later), I think the damage that Koana did to Shaaloni is kind of criminal, and has pending repercussions that are going to take generations to fix.

AND I'm living in low key terror of how murky Northern Thanalan is with its much more advanced and long-running cereuleum works, and how Shaaloni might look the best it will look in our lifetimes now, and in a few years the people of Tullioyal will be having days when the winds blow from the north and terrifying blue clouds start coming over the city and finally make them wonder about what's going on over there... (#climatechangeera)

you#re kidding me.