Troj

From Wikimalia

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Troj, Haven of Knowledge, City of Progression

Etymology

Troj is pronounced troy in common which derives from an ancient salamae word detailing a process in which one rises silently from one's hiding place. This is commonly used in hunting techniques of the salamae. They will often hide in swamps or jungle brush and rise silently and suddenly when the moment is right during their grand hunts.

Troj has many nicknames though its most prominent ones are the City of Progression and the Haven of Knowledge. Some trullocs simply call it the Blasting Zone. Troj is well known for its progressive attitude and constant push for innovation in its building and everyday living.

Troj inhabitants are known as Trojans, and the name lends itself to describing progressive movements such as the Trojan Slemor Program, an aggressive breeding program that has resulted in quickly maturing slemors that are extremely agile and speedy.

History

Beginnings

Troj began as nothing more than a collection of small homes and a town square in a village full of lekleks who spent their days tinkering and gathering resources for day-to-day life. The village was flattened on a regular basis by massive explosions that would rock the village's stony foundation.

Records remain unclear about when this land was first settled, but evidence shows that the lekleks chose to settle at the Troj location around 800 BU. A previous city may have existed there at a pre-Sundering date, and the lekleks simply moved into the remains of that ancient city and tinkered with what they found there. All true evidence of a ruined city has long been destroyed in the multiple blasts as well as new construction that has occurred in the city site of Troj.

The population of the village grew and waned depending on the availability of resources and the boredom of the lekleks that lived there. This continued with very little of note until 293 BU when Snorel Cogears screamed "Eureka!" in his tinker shop, which he had built underground right into the bedrock. Snorel had computed the amount of time and resources wasted in rebuilding the village and its structures after an explosion over the course of one hundred years. He concluded that if the city was built of stone, the impact costs would dramatically lessen. As he emerged from his underground lab to share his computations with the rest of the village, he found only the smoking ruins of a few huts, shops, gardens, and a few survivors staggering around the burning husks.

Snorel Cogears initiated immediate plans to build an economical, precise, and practical city, and his original plans would have made the city almost twice the size it actually became. Though some of the more prominent tinkers disagreed with his evaluations, Cogears' plans came to fruition simply because there were not enough survivors to nay-say him, and his lack of injuries in the last explosion proved his point well.

The Architecture

Once Cogears' plan was approved, his two biggest problems were where to obtain the workforce to build the city and where to obtain the stone needed for construction of this size. The immediate leklek population numbered far too few for a project of this size even with their innovative tinker toys for building, so the lekleks immediately sent messengers out to all neighboring villages for stone masons, tinkers, and carpenters. Nearly four hundred lekleks gathered to build the city, but Cogears did not have the workforce nor the stone needed to begin building. Disheartened, he proceeded to revise his plans for a smaller city to be built of wood. The day his plans were finalized, approximately twenty tribes of salamae emerged from the jungles bringing wagon loads of black granite with them.

  "...and they came out of the jungle like multi-colored jewels 
  spilling onto green velvet. Together, the salamaes and the
  lekleks erected the great city of Troj in a day."
                                    - Wikimalia, Author of Salamae Tails

When questioned why the secretive race suddenly came out into the open, the salamae replied only that they were guided by the divine. While salamae and leklek labored together to erect the great walls of Troj, leklek practicality became tempered by the salamae spirituality, and the shamanic salamae learned the basics of what would later be known as gyrodynamics and tek. Troj, the newest of the three main cities on Primordiax and possibly the most populated, now stands on the edge of a deep Katayvan jungle. Great walls of black granite tower nearly twenty rands tall on the outer edges of the city, and the walls repeat themselves throughout the rest of the city along the roads and fencing in the main buildings, creating passageways and a secure, though slightly claustrophobic, atmosphere.

Modern Troj

The Trojans boast a fast paced, progressive lifestyle full of innovation and creativity. The two marketplaces found within the city house some of the strangest, and often most explosive, goods in the world, and traders from every nation gather to find the newest, most interesting items. Due to the popularity of its markets, Troj has grown quite prosperous - an excellent condition for a city where explosive accidents happen on a daily basis. Travel guides often recommend protective head gear when traveling through Troj, and many citizens often bless the founders of the city for their foresight in building with stone. Building repairs happen quite often to the walls and structures of Troj. The Great Chain Reaction of 53 A.R. annihilated the entire West Side Marketplace and shops in the Trade District. The first explosion occurred at a rokkit exhibit where an unknown leklek was showing off his latest invention. He set fire to fifteen rokkits at once promising a dazzling display of light and colors that would rival a team of elementalists expending all their powers at once. The first rokkit dazzled the crowd as planned, but the other fourteen flew off in different directions with disastrous results. Two exploded in an alchemist stall which resulted in a mass explosion filling the air with noxious chemicals, and the rest set fire to most of the merchant stalls within the area. The casualties were enormous, and as a result gyrodynamics became heavily regulated. Unsurprisingly, the city required a year's worth of rebuilding after that incident.

Due to the heavy regulation of gyrodynamics after the Great Chain Reaction, the study became quite popular with many of the scholars in Troj. Three years after the GCR in 53 AR, a team of tinkers came together to build the Universal Gyrodynamics Academy housed in Tinker's Haven, the tek based section of Troj. Within the stone halls of the Academy, tinkers gather from all over the world to contribute to the progression of science and tek, and with the Unification, the knowledge is shared freely between Troj, Askagard, and Chemer. The establishment of the Academy allowed for tinker experiments to be housed in a fortified laboratory, preventing any further major disasters. The laboratory wing of the Academy was rebuilt fifteen times between 56 AR (the founding of the Academy) and 124 AR when the Universal Laws of Gyrodynamics were published.

Currently, the city of Troj is under siege by the void. As a result, many of its denizens fled to the city of Askagard to seek refuge. Sadly, many died that day, and their sparks, extinguished.

Cityscape

Government

A council of seven currently rule Troj, though several council spots may be open at any given time. Members are elected by the local populace and tend to be one of the Blessed or Unblessed, but elections happen when the busy, fast-paced locals actually get around to it.