Margunut
Seeds Of Ruin
Widely grown throughout southern Donnter, the margunut is a short, thorny shrub native to the inner highlands of the temperate Pasiphae rainforest. The plant's Gollandiac name is derived from its purple flowers' superficial resemblance to the common daisy. Margunut shrubs grow short, rising barely a metre from the ground, with thick, broad elliptical leaves. The plant is notable for responding strongly to magical manipulation, both in its life and when processed to derive a range of products used in an array of industries. After rubber and palm oil, margunut oil is the third most valuable non-grain agricultural export of the region, with total exports from the Republic of Nouvoloire and its neighbours valued in the tens of billions of Nouvoloian Livres to customers on every world.The Old Ways
Margunut has been cultivated by the Aukarugyal peoples of the Pasiphae for centuries, who ground the young shoots of the plant into a thick paste, or its nuts to extract their viscous oils for use as medicine, to aid the work of their tribal magis, or for use in religious rituals and ceremonies. Through the use of bands coated in margunut paste and wrapped over their eyes, Aukarugyal magis were said to possess the ability to gaze directly into the Underlay, their sight passing through any obstacle and seeing clearly across great distances. It was these same magis who tended to the groves of margunut kept in every Aukarugyal village, cultivating the plants over generations. The modern strains of margunut grown in commercial plantations across the continent are all derived from those bred by the jungle dwelling Aukarugyals, in some instances bought, in others seized by more predatory means.
Industry And Empire
The plant would acquire an entirely new purpose with the arrival of industry to Donnter. This transformation of the continent's economy saw an explosion in natural resource exploitation in order to feed the growing manufacturing heartlands of the Goilac Empire and the other powers of the region, which drew pioneers and investors deep into the once barely explored interior of the Pasiphae and other untamed lands to see what riches they might have hid. One team, representing a Goilac aristocrat-owned industrial concern, and which had embedded itself in a nomadic Aukarugyal community, discovered that the oil of the margunut exhibited remarkable behaviour when exposed to the aerium lifting crystals of the aeroship which had arrived to recover them. Further examination would yield a remarkable discovery; when used in the process of crystal growing, a bath of margunut oil yielded crystals of an exceptional clarity, purity, and performance. With the market for magicrystals of all kinds growing rapidly across the worlds, this development drew keen interest from the industrial interests of Goilac, who saw an opportunity to grasp a key commercial advantage in a new and expanding market. At first, this newfound hunger was sated by trading with Aukarugyal settlements and tribes for the nuts, with both money as well as manufactured goods being exchanged for the crop. This led to a greater integration of the Aukarugyal peoples with their settled, urbanised neighbours than had ever been before, pushing many Aukarugyal communities to leave their nomadic lifestyles behind to become increasingly sedentary farmers of the plant. This disruption of the traditional Aukarugyal way of life was accompanied by increased standards of living, a product of this new wealth and greater access to technological amenities. In Goilac, however, which controlled the greater part of the Pasiphae, these developments would not be met with universal pleasure. The same industrialists who were buying the margunuts in the hundreds of tonnes soon saw that production of the resource could not keep pace with demand as long as it remained in the control of the Aukarugyals, who still jealously guarded the secrets of their cultivation methods. It was also felt that, if control over the plant could be wrested from the Aukarugyals, these manufacturers would be able to cut costs and grow their profit margins. Attempts by company agents to bully and bribe their way into the secret of margunut growing, however, were soon stymied by the collapse of the Goilac Empire, the splintering of its territories, and the rise of the Republic of Nouvoloire in 131 A.S. This dramatic change in government saw a newly installed democratic government that was deeply interesting in curtailing the powers and privileges of the oligarchic industrial interests that had dominated the economy of the Empire in its waning years. This new, more inclusive political regime also paid particular attention to improving the economic straits of the Aukarugyal peoples by protecting them from exploitation and enabling their communities to engage with the broader Republican economy on a more equal basis. These interventions, and others being instigated across the breadth of the economy, would earn the fledgling government the eternal enmity of these wealthy, powerful commercial entities.
La Clique
The efforts of these industrialists across every sector of commerce would find common cause with a range of other political forces who had grown disillusioned with the new democratic government, as well as those who had simply never given up on the memory of the Empire. Gradually, theocratic clergymen, disenfranchised aristocrats, and zealous ultranationalists would coalesce to forge a new political coalition bent on bringing down democracy in Nouvoloire, and these wealthy corporate entities would decide that their interests were served by supporting this authoritarian movement. One campaign designed to destabilise the republic's new political compact was the waging of a propaganda effort to demonise the Aukarugyals, an effort that targeted the rural populations of Gollandiacs who lived in the farmlands and ranches of the Nouvoloian hinterlands. These regions, which bordered the edge of the Pasiphae, were home to communities of Gollandiacs whose distance from the former imperial core had left them politically disengaged from the machinations that brought down the realm. The region's culture was imbued with a strong sense of cultural conservatism, centred on nostalgia for the Empire and implicit trust in the Goilac Church, and opposed to the new democratic government. A legacy of distrust towards the Aukarugyals had dominated the region since time immemorial, with constant skirmishes and raids over land between settlers and local tribes fuelling enmity across generations that no amount of declarations of unity from the central government could heal. The ground was, thus, ripe for exploitation by a political coalition which saw no harm in vilifying an entire ethnic group. The propaganda campaign would play on these cultural biases to paint the newfound economic development of the Aukarugyal lands and communities, and their enfranchisement under the democratic government, as nothing short of an existential threat to the region's prosperity, safety, and very way of life. These communities were told that, with political equality, Aukarugyals would threaten to reclaim the land they had lived on and farmed their whole lives, driving them off with the full support of a neglectful, unjust government in the capital. Only by supporting the newly established bloc of arch-conservatives and Gollandiac chauvinists, it was said, could these people retain their dignity and livelihoods. Indeed, these parties promised to designate greater and greater swathes of jungle and brushland as free for Gollandiac settlement and 'improvement', if and only if they could overthrow the current democratic government. This stream of vitriol soon merged with a torrent of hate and bigotry being spread across the whole Republic from every angle, which hammered at the fragile political unity that underwrote the very existence of the democratic system and paved the way for its violent collapse. When the hammer finally fell in 137 A.S., the new authoritarian coalition that ruled the country, now styled 'La Clique', had very little interest in reining in the excesses of the industrial concerns that had subsidised its rise.
The Cordon
The methods of economic exploitation that would follow in the wake of the new order took varied forms, and were enacted by industries across every sector of the Republic's economy. Picking away at the edge of the vast jungle, company agents would oversee the clearing of large swathes of land by fire and axe to make way for ranches, mines, plantations, and factories, all under the explicit protection of the government and without regard for the numerous treaties and laws that enshrined Aukarugyal rights over land usage. Industrial and agricultural waste was explicitly used to contaminate rivers and the land itself, rendering it uninhabitable for Aukarugyal communities in order to drive them off and make way for commercial use. These attacks against the Aukarugyal people and their lands, however, would reach new heights in 139 A.S., with the proclamation of the 'Cordon Sanitaire'. This action, the brainchild of conservative officers in the Army, ethnonationalistic politicians, and industrial magnates, saw the commencement of a sweeping counter-insurgency campaign across the Pasiphae, ostensibly as a response to attacks on government and commercial infrastructure in the jungle by bands of Aukarugyal separatists and criminals. All movement, trade, and communication between the province and the rest of the Republic was curtailed, subject to strict scrutiny by the Bureau Central de Sécurité. Military forces under the newly established Commandement Sud surged into the region by their thousands, tasked with protecting the operations of farming, lumber, and mining interests from local 'bandits' by any means necessary. Aggressive patrolling to root out sympathisers and supplies supposedly hidden amidst Aukarugyal villages deep in the jungle saw soldiers burn down nearly every settlement they came across, and mete out their own 'field justice' against the local population as they saw fit. Tribes were simply wiped from the map, ancient spiritual sites bulldozed to make way for new plantations, mines, and the sprawling rail and road lines that tied them together. With the Cordon forbidding low level commerce between the Pasiphae and the outside world, and with their traditional ways of life suppressed, many Aukarugyals were compelled to work for the very industries that had occupied their lands, long hours for little pay in terrible conditions, with only ramshackle company provided houses to come back to at the end of the day. Those in the Republic who still sympathised with their plight could not get word out from the region without facing crushing censorship and intimidation at the hands of the BCS, which established an entire division dedicated to ensuring that the darkest secret in the regime was never brought fully into the light.
The Cruel Twist
The magicrystal industry would join in the plunder and looting of the Pasiphae with as much enthusiasm as every other in the Republic, securing access to both the minerals used as raw materials in crystal production as well as plantations to grow as much margunut as they could need. These hopes, however, would not bear fruit. When the first harvest of margunut was brought in, from plantations built on slash-and-burned jungle and worked by bonded Aukarugyal labourers, it was found that the oil extracted from the nuts was utterly useless, exhibiting none of the fine properties that had made the substance so desirable. With their multi-million Livre business now threatened, since supplies of Aukarugyal-grown margunut had collapsed with the proclamation of the Cordon, these industries worked desperately to find a solution. Villages were looted for their groves of margunut, and plantations were established in every environment in the jungle it could be made to grow in. Attempts to use the latest fertilisers and other chemical aids showed no results, and soon these industrialists had to watch as their monumental investments in plantations withered and died before their very eyes. In later years, after the fall of La Clique, those who would return to Pasiphae in an attempt to restore the supply of margunut to the worlds' economy would discover that the Aukarugyal rituals dismissed as savage customs by the intruding Nouvoloians were in fact crucial steps in the cultivation of useful margunut, imbuing the soil and water the shrubs grew from with certain properties that enhanced its magical attunement. The very violence that gave these industrialists power over the land ruined the treasure they hoped to seize; the destruction of the soil from bombing and fire, but above all the wanton killing of the very elder magis who kept the groves and farms, rendered the whole effort futile. When democracy finally returned in force, attempts at reconciliation between the Aukarugyals and the rest of the Republic were slow but eventually successful. Under a more equal, just, and empowered government, the rights of the Aukarugyals were restored as fully equal in every way to those of any other citizen, and the excesses of the regime's oligarchic corporations were abolished. Now with the protection of the government, margunut production was restored, and attempts to expand it beyond villages by sharing the knowledge of Aukarugyal magis on with others on a fairer basis were explored.
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