♦{the Clans}--A Literate Warriors RPG

[Fallen]

<our advertisement>

'Our wakes are stained with crimson.
We can't see what lies ahead.
Bloodied claws and darkened paws...
Our legacy, our war, our dead.

A season has passed since the demise of Murtagh, and the Clans have had a long, tough winter. Even now, the prey is skinny and few; many a cat has been heard to curse the soul of the silver tabby, who lead them so far.
But there are cubs to be trained, and borders to patrol. The cats cannot dabble in the past, when the future of their Clan depends on what they do in the present.

But there are a few cats, for whom the death of Murtagh is not the end of an era, but a beginning...
Avengepaw, Deathpaw and Bloodpaw, Murtagh's heirs, are due to begin their fighter training. They will work hard; they have their father's name to avenge, after all. Mentors are needed for them, but for now, the cats of StormClan are eager to help in educating them in bloodshed and murder.

Fire-Heart, who cleansed the forest of the black-hearted Murtagh, now has a new task at paw. The wolves have returned.
Will the weakened FireClan be able to hold them back, or could it be too much for them? Who would know...

Do you side with the Clan of Storms, in their secret quest for revenge?
Or will you have different opponents to tackle in FireClan? Perhaps the clans of River or Forest would suit you better...
Either way, now is the time to choose, so choose you must.
FireClan, StormClan, RiverClan, or ForestClan...

Enter the blood-shed.
Free positions:
StormClan Leader: (Pre-made Profile)
StormClan Seer (Pre-made Profile)
FireClan Seer: Cloverflower needs a bio/player
RiverClan Deputy [Better be quick!]
RiverClan Seer
Avengepaw and Deathpaw.

Affiliate Code

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[glitchy blitchy]

During the days that followed, my wanderings took me to many parts of inner Tokyo. I walked about the streets, watching men hurrying to meetings, traffic roaring in all directions, and women shopping, always shopping. Many young women, hoping to get in touch with a young man interested in marriage, were trying their luck at vending machines dispensing their horoscope and details of a suitable male participant in the scheme. But more young women, it seemed, had joined the men in the pursuit of a career, and showed little interest in domestic things. With equality in the workplace, Japanese women have been handed a harsh set of choices: marry and run a household on their own, while their husbands spend most of their waking hours at work or drinking with their colleagues, or accept the same kind of workload and have no time for a family.

Robots scurried around, keeping buildings and sidewalks clean. A considerable proportion of vehicles were electric. Still, pollution was heavy and disposable gas masks were available from vending machines everywhere. And people bought and carried the masks with them. Some wore them whenever they were outdoors, either because of pollution or due to a widespread phobia against other people's germs; others just kept them on hand for the case there'd be a poison gas attack. There hadn't been one for many years, but these people didn't want to be caught unprepared.

I descended into the underground. I took an express elevator five hundred feet down to the lowest level of Alice City and began working my way up. I was in one of three huge, cylindrical office blocks, together forming a city of their own where a hundred thousand people worked. Ascending from the lowest car park level, I came to a deep train line station, the main gateway between the cylinders and the outside world. An interminable flow of commuters and shoppers came and went. There was nothing to reveal that I was in the very bowels of the earth, rather than in a regular subway station a few feet below the surface.

A couple of floors up, I entered the lower garden, at the bottom of the cylindrical center of the block. Here, birds sang and fountains sparkled. Daylight, concentrated by huge, movable mirrors on the roof, beamed down the shaft and was amplified by the silvery windows lining it all around. A gigantic shopping mall encircled the garden, providing every imaginable service. The people who worked here had no reason ever to see the Tokyo that bustled more than 300 feet above their heads.

A further ride in an elevator brought me halfway up to the surface. Office suites extended several ways from a luxurious lobby, nestling against the windows toward the light shaft in the middle of the cylinder. Along the sides of the lobby, the video wallpaper showed peaceful sceneries from the gardens above. The pictures were live: you could see people moving about and airplanes flying overhead. Everything had been done to relieve what claustrophobia there might have been to expect among the occupants. But wherever I looked, I saw fire escapes and fire fighting equipment prominently signposted. There was no doubt it was a long way up.

Ascending closer to the surface, I encountered a distribution point of the Greater Tokyo subterranean freight network. This was a robotized web of special tracks, comprising 200 miles of tunnels and 150 storage depots. In a never ending stream, thousands of containers moved along these tunnels. On their way, they passed through automatic sorting centers and were, eventually, deposited at distribution points such as the one I saw. Subsequently, electric trucks drove them to their destinations along the streets of Tokyo.

Via a series of escalators I then arrived at the terminal of the underground airplane, or Geoplane, that I could have taken from the airport. Moments later, I was again above ground, much relieved. I decided to wait a while before I took the subway to my next point of interest.

The building in question was in plain view, although several miles distant. It was Sky City, a giant, hexagonal tower, 3,300 feet high. Between its six soaring concrete pylons, each dividing into two legs halfway down their length, were suspended fourteen fifty story building blocks, one above the other, separated by wind gaps to lessen the load from typhoons. 100,000 people lived in the upper blocks, and 35,000 worked in the lower ones.

Standing at one of the entrances to Sky City, I marveled at its sheer bulk. The tower was 1,300 feet in diameter at its base and 500 feet at its top. Just as in Alice City, the center of the tower was hollow. Each of the fourteen blocks had its own garden at its base, covering the entire central shaft at that level. Here, too, mirrors, augmented by fiber optics, distributed daylight.

My brief excursion into the building confirmed my expectations. From the top, the view would have been spectacular, had the air been clear. And, as I had thought, anyone who lived and worked in Sky City had no reason ever to leave it save for recreation. Everything was there, including a hospital. And next door was a high tech funeral parlor, not the kind I was used to from home. This one was complete with laser light show, dry ice mists, motorized coffin, and computer animated interviews with the departed.

By this time, I had had my fill of architectural marvels. I didn't care to visit Pyramid City, over a mile tall, which housed a million people. I had taken note of the 500-story Aeropolis tower out in Tokyo Bay, the home of 140,000 residents, with 300,000 places of work, but I felt no desire to take the fifteen-minute elevator ride to its top. I wanted to see something beautiful for a change.

So, the next day, I went to the gardens of the Imperial palace, the great oasis in the heart of Tokyo. The cherry trees were in blossom and the gardens were a sea of pink and purple. Everything was quiet. Ancient buildings and elegant little bridges showed off their ornamentation in the bright spring sunshine. I sat for a long while on a bench, just taking in this piece of nature in the middle of the chaotic city.

The contrast between city and garden was enormous. Here, the ducks and the carp would continue their peaceful existence even if life in the city stopped, as it would have to do in the case of, say, a major strike or power failure. The millions of people in Tokyo, as in other large cities, could only be fed, housed, employed, transported, and entertained through the flawless workings of a high-tech, commercialized infrastructure.

It seemed to me that a society so highly organized was somehow, in its very essence, different from and more restricting than older, simpler communities. In the old society, people worked on their own or together, as the case might have been, to survive and better their living standard. Although cooperation was important and beneficial, your life and your survival were, first and foremost, your own responsibility. Here, the technical workings and the organization of society were out of reach to every ordinary citizen. All of that was decided for you by an invisible elite. There was no element of self sufficiency left, not even a tiny bit. And the interaction between people was no longer a matter of choice or convenience; it had become a fixed kind of role-play with no alternatives.

An elderly Buddhist monk seated himself near me and commented on the beauty of the surroundings. I welcomed his friendly approach, counting myself lucky that he spoke perfect English. I told him about my interest in his country and her people, and something about my musings on the workings of modern society.

The two of us soon found that we had much in common, and we were getting along marvelously. The monk, whose name was Mikio, had been a business executive until several years earlier, when he had decided to change his lifestyle. He didn't care to talk very much about himself, but he gave me a quick outline of his background.

"I was the Chief Information Officer at a large bank for many, many years. Then my wife died, and I reexamined my life. I found that I knew too much about how we're being controlled and manipulated. I wanted my freedom from the consumer society and I simply dropped out and became a monk. It turned out to be a complete break with my relatives, as well: they haven't talked to me since, as I brought shame on them by leaving my 'respectable' job. Now all I own are a robe, a pair of sandals, a bowl, and a few other things, and I find I need nothing else."

However, when it came to explaining the workings of the society he had turned his back on, Mikio had no inhibitions.

"Japan is very much a prototype of the 'ideal' consumer society. And it's by no means an accident: this country has always been run according to plan. We're a very governable nation. Many years ago, when computers were quite new, our government came up with a national scheme for what was then called the Information Society. The idea was to create an information intensive way of living and working. Our consumption of goods and services couldn't grow any faster, so this was the next logical step in the process of continuing the expansion of the economy.

"The course then chosen has remained through all the intervening economic ups and downs. In short, the very design of our society forces every citizen to use the technological services provided by government and business. They must do this in order to be competitive enough to be able to satisfy the growing expectations advertisers keep generating. Our owners and leaders have succeeded in engaging every Japanese in the rat race, and peer pressure ensures that there's no escape."

"Surely, this isn't a specifically Japanese outlook?" I observed. "North Americans, Australians, and Europeans do very much the same thing, don't they?"

"This is true," the old man in his saffron robe replied. "But our ambition level in this respect is higher than anybody else's. We have a tradition of total conformity. We're used to concerted, government led campaigns to carry out every policy that our leadership has adopted as beneficial. Elsewhere, part of the population wouldn't pay any attention to such campaigns. But here, everybody accepts this kind of programs without coercion. Most of us actively want to conform. And for the rest, a tempting materialism is inducement enough."

"Who is tempting whom?" I asked. "Materialism is a normal way of life for nearly everyone, isn't it?"

Mikio, clearly, was no materialist. Everything he owned was on his person. His home was a bare cell in a monastery. He had to beg for every meal he ate. Yet he seemed freer from care than anybody I had ever met. Now he had found some crumbs in his bundle and was feeding the squirrels. A tender joy was in his eyes, as he watched them eat. When he returned to economics, his expression changed to one of kind endurance with my ignorance.

"You must understand how human society is structured before you can grasp where the influences come from. Think of Australia for a while. Have you ever seen a sheep farm back home?"

Around my childhood home, sheep farms were all you saw wherever you turned. This I now told Mikio, and he made me describe to him the rolling hills, the dusty, browning pastures, and the black and white dogs driving the flocks to the shearing shed until, in the end, they were walking on top of the sheep as the mob pressed together in the sheep-yard, waiting for the hardworking shearers inside. I didn't have the heart to tell him that all this was now gone, replaced by robots, GPS-actuated virtual fences, and injections of a special protein to make the sheep shed their fleece.

"If you want to understand how society works, it's an excellent exercise to think of sheep first," Mikio said. "There are four basic classes of people in every society, and these classes interact in a very clear cut and purposeful way.

"The great mass of regular people are sheep. The sheep convert natural resources to wealth and provide services, for their own and everybody else's benefit.

"Every flock of sheep has its owners. There's an owning class in every society. Even where so-called socialism was tried—in truth, the Eastern Bloc countries of the past century practiced state capitalism, not socialism—the party bosses were in the position of owners. The owners are idle and live off the sheep's back, as you say in Australia.

"Then, to keep, indoctrinate, dupe, and protect the sheep, and to extract the wealth that's needed to support the owners, the latter employ shepherds. Politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, brokers, financiers, soldiers, professionals, police, clergy, entertainers, teachers, and managers fall into this category. Evidently, the shepherds will receive a handout for their trouble. A lot of wool is pulled over their eyes, as you say, to prevent them from seeing what they actually do, but should they understand it, their self interest will keep them serving the purposes of the owners, anyway.

"The owners also promote conservative political views among the shepherds. This provides right-wing politicians and keeps the attention of the shepherds on any unearned benefits given to the sheep, and away from the large-scale welfare payments society bestows on the owners in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and preferential procurements."

"It seems that you just placed everyone in society into three categories," I said. "Which is the fourth one?"

"The last class is the wolves," Mikio continued. "In Australia, you'd talk about dingoes, of course. The wolves—that's to say, the criminals—take their sustenance from the flock, just like the owners do. Neither class can get rid of the other, nor could they live without each other. The wolves need the owners to maintain the flock, and the owners need the wolves to justify the existence of shepherds with their fees, taxes, rules, and regulations. Both classes share a way of life and a habit of tax avoidance. As long as wolves and owners stay within accepted limits, they tolerate each other; indeed, occasionally they even cooperate."

"At Australian police academies," I interjected, "cadets are taught that the public is their enemy. Not the criminals. That seems to agree with what you just said."

Mikio nodded thoughtfully. "Law enforcement's foremost duty is to protect the owners and their businesses from the people, not the people from the criminals. Think about the meaning of the term 'Public Order.' That's what the police are here to maintain. But who would threaten it? Not the burglar, nor the rapist, nor the embezzler. When public order is disturbed, the culprit is the public. Regular, honest people who, for some reason, have become enraged. They're the danger, and they're the enemy.

"There's strength in numbers, but that strength must be meticulously circumscribed. Control of the many by the few is a fact of life, even where it goes by the name of democracy.

"From time immemorial, human society has been organized along these lines. What has changed in the past century is the practical role of the sheep. Technology has eased their burden, marketing has replaced the stick with the carrot, but their shackles remain."

"I wonder if it's really as clear cut as that," I ventured. "There are few people one could unequivocally class as owners, for example. Modern times must have blurred the distinctions of your model of society. But I can see that it would have been very accurate up to about the year 1900."

Mikio agreed.

"Ownership is more widespread now than a century ago. A large proportion of the shepherd class are also owners on a limited scale. But, what's more important, ownership has become institutionalized and internationalized. As companies grew bigger, individual capitalists had to bring in outside shareholders. Now institutions control most of our accumulated wealth. Some of those institutions are sovereign funds, owned by rich states, not individuals. This has made the power of ownership faceless, merciless, and utterly conservative. Most of the people now exerting that power are employees of the owning institutions: they aren't authorized to show compassion on anybody.

"However, behind the institutions are wealthy individuals operating globally. The richest 2 percent of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth; the poorer half of the world's population owns less than one percent of our shared assets. Middle-class ownership, which was an important force as late as at the turn of the century, has fallen off sharply, as more and more people have been drawn into on-line speculation. The stock markets are mechanisms for concentrating wealth to the rich: the latter create the fluctuations, and sell when prices are high and buy when they're low, while everybody else buys highly valued stocks, and then panics and sells them off when they've dropped below some limit.

"Another thing that's different today is that many of the sheep in society now wear white collars and work in a service profession. Some of them are highly educated, some unemployed. But allowing for these changes and a lot of overlapping, the basic setup of interests remains the same. Politicians, bureaucrats, and media pander mainly to the owning institutions. Efficiency is still measured only in terms of profitability and minimizing the work force. The only newsworthy economic indicators we have are those that gauge how well human activities cater to the needs of the owning class. In short, the only economic process of any consequence taking place in our society is that the rich are getting richer."

"And what's the alternative?" I queried. "You already pointed out that Communist revolutions didn't change anything. George Orwell showed the same thing in his Animal Farm. Should we rather strive for anarchy, perhaps?"

"Anarchy is an elite fantasy," Mikio retorted. "There may be a small minority of idealists who could live briefly without any kind of leadership. But, as with other utopian thought systems, anarchy simply became an excuse for vandalism and terror as soon as it became widely known. Anarchy doesn't work with real people.

"Human society readily lends itself to exploitation of the people by the clever and the ambitious. Many will grumble against such abuse and may support the political opposition or a revolutionary movement in the hope of getting a better deal. But, as we know, any such change of the ruling layer only results in more of the same. Losing the customary social structure would hurt everybody. The masses can't function without leadership, the shepherds would lose their jobs, and any vacuum at the top would just sit there waiting to be filled.

"Have you noticed how the media report on civil wars and popular uprisings? The most calamitous news isn't how many people have been displaced, killed, maimed, and tortured. The most dreaded line, the one that's meant to make us shudder from uncertainty and fear, is, 'Nobody seems to be in control.' If total freedom, or, in other words, anarchy, were such a desirable state, then, surely, we'd be expected to react differently to such news."

"You'd think the wolves would like it, though, if the flock lost its protection!" I suggested.

"Not for long," Mikio replied. "After a quick kill the flock would scatter and perish, and the wolves would starve to death—or would have to learn to eat grass; in other words, to do honest work. The wolves are just as dependent on the productivity of the sheep as are the owners and the shepherds. In fact, if all the latter were lost, the wolves would sooner herd the flock themselves than risk losing the social fabric that keeps them in business.

"The model of society I've described to you remains the only workable one. It caters to the ambitions, abilities, and inclinations of practically every human being. Whether it turns out well or poorly depends on the character of the leadership. And here we come back to the old rule: in the long run, people get the kind of government they deserve. Good government comes about only through the strength of individual character and integrity among the people."

[Bear]

/Credit to -Shadowpelt- for the black cat dividers!
/Pawzes buy you epic magic stuff, but can only be won in compitions.
/

Full credit to My Virtual Warrior!



Caring for your Cat!

To care for your cats you feed them, water them, give them something to play with, let them sleep and pet them. BUT there's a twist. Certain actions effect the other meters. Here's the formula:


When your cat eats they get thirstier
When your cat plays they get sleepier
When your cat sleeps they get bored


Eternal


There are two versions of WP, combined into one. They are Eternal and LifeCycle. There are no elders or deaths in Eternal. Al thought your cats do get sick and can become 'unplayable' if you neglect them. (Unplayableness can last from an hour to a mouth)





LifeCycle

In LifeCycle, bred cats are a kitten for a week. There is also elders, who cannot compete in competitions, and will die after 2 months. Sickness may also claim a cat's life in LifeCycle.



Traits


The traits are Beauty, Size, Speed, Agility and Stamina. You divide the percentagages into 200. Kittens may go above 200.




Cats for Adoption


Cat 1


Cat 2


Cat 3


Cat 4


Cat 5


Cat 6


Cat 7


Cat 8


Cat 9


Cat 10


Cat 11


Cats for Adoption: Set 2
Credit to Mothflutter

Angel Cat ~ IMPORTANT! You can only have one angel at a time, you msut have 3+ cats already and you must have been a member for 1 week.

Black&Blue Cat (with wings)


Black&Orange Cat (with wings)


StarClan Sky Cat



Gray Cat / Blue Eyes


Orange Cat / Green Eyes


White Cat / Green Eyes


Black Cat / Green Eyes


Black Cat / Violet Eyes


Gray Cat / Blinking Gray Eyes
-Cat A -Cat B - Cat C -Cat D
-Cat E - Cat F - Cat G - Cat H - Cat I -Cat J

Your first cat is free, your second costs 50 Pawz, and every other one is 100 Pawz. Heres the form to join/adopt another cat:


Screenname:
What your profile says:
What you say about your cat:
Which Cat:
Cat Gender:
Cat Name:
Eternal or LifeCycle:
Traits:
Profiles
jelly2000's Profile (LifeCycle)
Squirrelpaw's Profile (Eternal)
(Stormyskies)'s Profile (LifeCycle)
blueoakfire's Profile (LifeCycle)
Thunderlake's Profile (LifeCycle)
Icestarandstonekit's Profile (LifeCycle)
Shimmerleaf's Profile (Eternal)
KitKatHeart's Profile (Eternal)
Inuyasha's Profile (Eternal)
Icetail Rox's Profile (LifeCycle)
Fading Destiny's Profile (Eternal)
Thundersky81's Profile (LifeCycle)
Graystripefan101's Profile (LifeCycle)
Nightshadow/\../\'s Profile (LifeCycle)
Ice that froze over time's Profile (LifeCycle) //
•●ρєρρєямιηт♥'s Profile (LifeCycle)
Mossecho's Profile (LifeCycle)
Larkstripe's Profile (LifeCycle)
нσηєуƒєяηcℓσυ∂тαιℓ 's Profile (LifeCycle)
Tearberry's Profile (Eternal)
Honeysky's Profile (Eternal)
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Fan-based Shops
Cookie Shop
Cafe
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Pawz Earning Games
Never Ending Story


Competetions
Fashion Show