Fairy Tales 🧚 Black Diamond
The Blue Dreamers
The Blue Dream Alliance
Ragor the Clerk was from a family of clerks (or, as the British are fond of saying, clarks). This family traced its origins all the way to the first clark of court history, Azulus the 3rd, who lived 2300 years ago on the home planet of Premium Blue. This planet was located on the nordermost edge of the Blue Dream Continuum, which was itself located on the nordermost edge of the Dolcezza Triangle. The Continuum was a founding member of the Blue Dream Alliance, which was a cultural, economic, and security agreement between the powerful empires of the Vicinese, Blue Dreamers, Panophiliacs, Pink Sea Creatures, Green Buzzards, and Aatari. The Vicinese were by far the most powerful species in the Alliance, yet they learned early on in their history not to mistake Blue Dreamer dreaminess for weakness.
The Dreamers were the first powerful intergalactic species that the Vicinese had to deal with in their expansion soodward into the Kraslika. The Vicinese soon found out that the Blue Dreamers were a somewhat schizophrenic species: they were at times nebulous and dreamy and at other times ruthlessly oriented toward survival and practicality. In their minds this wasn’t a contradiction, since in order for them to dream freely they needed to take seriously the security threats around them. They needed to either dominate other species or make pacts with them.
As a result of the Blue Dreamers’ unexpected and relentless resistance, the Vicinese decided to name the principles of inter-universal co-operation after them: The Blue Dream Alliance. This made the Blue Dreamers feel that it was less a concession than an acknowledgment of the power of the Blue Dream Continuum. This was a convenient illusion fostered by the Vicinese, and yet they slowly began to understand that what the Blue Dreamers defended with feral brutality was in fact worth defending.
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Blue Edicts
Early on in their history the Blue Dreamers mostly relied on edicts and domination. All of their early institution — of law, history, and the documentation of evidence — were geared toward domination, and it wasn’t until they encountered the Vicinese that these were reoriented toward diplomacy and tact.
Yet one thing remained constant, whether they were dominating or negotiating: their tendency to ground their dreaminess in documented historical facts. For instance, in the early wars against the other species in the Blue Dream universe, they would slaughter or massacre a species, yet they would also take meticulous notes on the way this affected the general well-being of the Continuum. These notes went straight to the Blue Jurisdiction, which was the official name they gave to the collective institutions of their vast empire, which directly controlled almost one quarter of the Blue Dream universe. The warnings the clerks gave, called Blue Edicts, were followed with an obsessive type of scrupulous obedience. Their obsessive obedience to edicts could only be found on several dozen Vicinese, Baulian, and Aatari planets. Their mania for historical documentation was unequalled in the cosmos. In other words, they were the Mormons of the Kraslika.
Two instances illustrate the point. First, when the Blue Dreamers eliminated the Drimine Ratpeople, they conducted detailed studies on the effect of this genocide. The Dreamer historians concluded that such a genocide was well executed and beneficial to all, except of course to the Ratpeople themselves. But even then, the Dreamers allowed a thousand Ratclerks to live on for sixty years after the genocide, so that the Dreamers could collect their assessment of their own demise.
In another case, the extermination of the Purple Drilk at first seemed positive (higher employment, reduced plague in the Drilkstream), yet it ultimately weakened Dreamer immune systems. Apparently, the Drilk were scattered across the nebula (like “a filthy river across Paradise,” one early historian commented) and thus they acted as a filter and an early warning signal for all the viruses that might eventually infect Premium Blue. The Dreamer High Command issued Blue Edict 13, which forbad extermination and genocide on the grounds that it might ultimately be bad for the Continuum itself.
In brief, the Blue Dreamers were smart enough to learn from their mistakes.
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Bluplants and Bluprints
Ragor was what Dreamers referred to as a Doppioblu: a Bluplant and a Bluprint. He was a Bluplant because he had been planted in another universe for strategic reasons, and he was a Bluprint because he served as a model, or blueprint, for future generations of Bluplants. He was one of three hundred Doppioblus on Earth, most of whom were tasked with understanding and documenting key aspects of earthly existence. They did this so that the Blue Dream Continuum could take full advantage of the situation once the Baulians took over Earth.
Some Dreamers debated the nature of the Baulian takeover, and even talked about whether or not it would happen. Yet these Dreamers were laughed at in the Department of Future Affairs, since they clearly hadn’t been following the detailed notes of the intergalactic councils or the Grand Assembly, which met every year on Kollarum. These clearly indicated that the Baulians would be allowed to continue their takeover of the Virgo Supercluster. The important thing was to take advantage of the inevitable event.
The Department clearly understood the criteria for continued existence of subject species in the Baulian Empire. As meticulous as always when it came to procurement lists, instruction manuals, process memoranda, extinction criteria, financial statements, and items on an agenda, the Department bureaucrats double-checked to make sure that operatives like Ragor were near the top of the Baulian Historical & Cultural Remnants List. Ragor would be safe to document the historical and cultural moment, to neutralize threats to Dreamer interests on the planet, and to suss out information about the Soul Star. According to the bureaucrats, once the orange beams sliced up the planet’s military and political infrastructure, Ragor and his companions Maria and Elee would be free to continue their comfortable lives on the outskirts of Calgary. All that the Department required of him was that he write a weekly report.
The Department even had the engineering blueprints the Baulians would use to remodel Ragor’s little corner of Earth. Their lives would in fact be greatly improved by all the carnage and destruction. Instead of ugly highways leading through tedious urban sprawl, there would be garden-ways leading through parks and hanging tree-villages. There would be a commuter beam to any city on Earth, and from the centre of town they would be able to go to any galaxy in the Great Triangle. And best of all, the strip malls with their 7-11s and car-dealerships would be turned into golf courses. If there was one human thing the Baulians couldn’t get enough of, it was golf.
While Ragor’s survival was a matter of precise calculation, his companions Maria and Elee were just plain lucky. If they had been back in the Philippines, they might even have been exterminated, unless they worked at one of the beaches the Baulians reserved for Pink Star retreats and vacations. In such a case, they would have had the continued privilege of serving their pink patrons, instead of becoming bio-fuel for the new pink & green economy.
Not that their good luck would stop them from complaining, as Ragor’s desultory reports about their lack of enthusiasm made clear. Initially they complained that Manila was a cesspool of grime and corruption. When they got to Canada they complained that everything was boring. Surrounded by luxuries she couldn’t imagine in her Tondo slum, Maria complained, “Peace, Border, and Good Government is a dancy-fancy slogan, but why everything must be clean in order all the time? And where are all the peoples in the street?”
Still, Maria and Elee made good martinis. Here, Ragor’s report livened somewhat, as if he had been drinking one of these martinis while he wrote. Blugrass, the clerk who processed his reports, was bored to death of stock futures and body-count demographics, and therefore appreciated these detours into social relations. Blugrass went so far as to suggest that during the upcoming period of terraregeneration (when a gigantic glowing pink bubble would be placed over their house) the trio might relieve their isolation with what he called quarantinis. He recommended a blend of home-made tropical distilled mashes, 90 percent Ukrainian vodka, Swiss gentian, and Aperol spritz. Blugrass also worried that with all the bombing and hammering above them, his immigrant friends might imagine their Filipino-Canadian dream melting in front of their eyes. His cure for this inevitable immigrant malaise (what he called immigraise) was the Canadian Immigrant Tropical Martini: Swedish vodka, maple syrup, Caribbean rum, Cointreau, fresh lime, fragipani essence, blue curaçao, melon liqueur, and a generous dash of bitters. Ragor appreciated Blugrass’ continued support on his mission, and he gave detailed feedback to the clerk on the successes that his suggestions achieved.
In truth, Blugrass was Ragor’s only real audience, and every report Ragor wrote was dedicated to him.
And yet eventually Ragor would have three audiences. First, Ragor’s weekly report (along with his personal asides) went to Blugrass. Second, Blugrass’ executive summary of that report (without the personal asides) went to the Blue Dreamer Department of Future Affairs. Third, Ragor would write a very different report, called a “Weekly Integration Assessment,” for the Baulian Department of Historical Rescue. His Baulian job title would be Subject Helper Historian, or SHH for short.
The Baulian’s main requirement was that every SHH assess the way their culture could best adapt to, and be further improved by, the Baulian Rescue. The SHH wasn’t to bother himself with rules, ethics, or regulations, since those would be under the purview of the Baulian authorities. Rather, he was to suggest ways that his fellow subjects could adapt psychologically and sociologically to the radical changes all around them. Their assessments were intended to help subjects come to terms with their own shortcomings, and to help the Baulians understand the savages that were once making a mess of their planets.
The Baulians allowed SHHs complete artistic license as long as they were in no way critical of the Master Race. Apart from their weekly assessments, they were allowed to publish any type of writing. They had complete artistic freedom, as long as what they wrote was critical of the subject race and as long as it made a convincing case for why the Baulian Rescue was the only viable option.
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Ragor was looking forward to the years ahead, for he knew that the story he had already started would be allowed to continue: a satiric account of the world as he knew it prior to the invasion. It starred a mad magician who marries a hopelessly idealistic farm girl, their dolt of a son, and a pretty girl named Alice. Although it was a fictional account, it was based on 100% real events occurring in his little corner of the Earth. From there, the cast of characters would travel the globe, illuminate the idiocy and contradiction of the human race, and make the general argument that only God or the Baulian Race could save it. Ragor was careful to leave an ambiguity here: either the Baulians were working on behalf of all the Benevolence in the universe or they were that Benevolence itself.
Ragor suspected that the Baulians might be puzzled by his story, and that he might need to reassure them that it was 100% fiction. Not that they really cared what humans thought was fact or fiction. Their only concern was that humans be persuaded to abandon all hope of opposing the Baulian Empire. As a result, Ragor could get as convoluted as he wanted, as long as he made it clear that his story was a caustic satire aimed at corroding the notion that human existence made sense. He would therefore lampoon the irrational obsessions of the human race, and show what a mess they were making of their accidental sovereignty of the land.
In order to flatter the pink marshmallows, Ragor would write in his Preface that the Baulians were so powerful that they could easily withstand whatever slight coincidental buffets of critical wind his account might appear to raise. In all events, any such slight wind would ultimately turn against the humans, making their windows tremble and their shop sign go flying into the street. The hurricane of his narrative would flatten their perverted notions of assembly halls, buildings with little crosses or sickles on their roofs, houses of parliament, and football stadiums where tens of thousands of people came to watch ant-like stick-figures kick a ball around.
Ragor would also tell his pink overlords that whenever the satire became too obscure, he would pop into his own story to comment on the action. He would even take on an imaginary alien perspective, one that of course would corroborate what the Baulians believed about the idiocy of the human race. He might even pretend to be, say, a dreamy alien from a blue universe. This of course would sound preposterous to the Baulians, who knew for a scientific fact that there were no universes beyond the Great Triangle, and that none of the galaxies within the Triangle were blue. Ragor would assure them that everything he said about The Blue Dreamers, the Vicinese, the Fallarians, and all the other aliens, was just playful, harmless science-fiction. Ragor knew that the Baulians loved science-fiction, as long as they were cast as the Master Race.
The whole arrangement suited Ragor perfectly. As long as he was entwined in several layers of narrative conundrum, and as long as no one could get at what he was really trying to say, he felt completely free, completely unobliged to write about what other people wanted to read. Except of course Blugrass, who would read anything.
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