Right screw democracy this is now a dictatorship
Nah just kidding. Due to dodgey public imagination and lack of actualy voting I hereby proclaim that this will be the story of a dude called Henri. A Frenchman living in Spain in 1836. As such you can probably guess this will be a Spanish AAR.
I will be using:
VIP 0.4b
Normal/Normal
The main focus will be the story the actually gameplay will be used to determine the course of the story with some screenshots for added effect
So dont expect a blow by blow account of my game it will not be 'I began building some factories in Castille to induce some immigration'. Well you'll get the point anyway as the story progresses. So anyway... here goes.
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Chapter 1 - Sur La Course
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It was an exceptionally cold evening in Marseille. The mediterranean water around the port usually supplied warm, dry nights with the occasional thunderstorm and splattering of cool showers of rain, this however was winter. Which goes along way to explaining why it was cold, and why it was infact raining. The moon shone brilliantly through scattered clouds illuminating the raindrops adn casting erie shadows about the streets, unlit laterns generally did not give off light which is why the streets glowed with moonlight.
Le Prison De Rocquevaire however was not situated in the main city. It was several miles inland along the River Rhône. It was a small fortified structure built into the base of a cliff overlooking the vallée du Rhône just west of a town called Rocquevaire, ironically, the prison was named after this town. Unfortunately for the hardened criminals inside, the prison was facing the wrong way for them to look out of their cells, and see the dazzlingly common lunar spectacle being played out. This however did not matter as they had no windows to look out of anyway so they had no idea they weren't missing anything.
One of these hardened criminals was Henri, who was not at all hardened and only barely classed as a criminal. He was about six feet tall and well built, with tassled, short black hair and a small double forked goatee. His skin was paler than most local Frenchman as he was originally from Normandie but had moved to the south in search of work, which he had failed in finding due to the fact he was currently chained to a sandstone wall. Henri was not at all overjoyed about his current dwelling. It was dark and smelled of urine and faeces. The other inmates were not the most respectable people either. One of them, a dark skinned fellow that went by the name of Jonas, claimed to have pulled someones belly button out with a picture hook and peed through the hole. Henri considered this was the sort of man to avoid, in an ideal world. Curiously enough, in the years that followed, Jonas drowned while trying to retrieve a glass eye from a fellow sailor onboard a French warship. The sailor inquestion was tied to a cannon and sinking rapidly into the black abyss at the time.
The sound that awoke Henri from his slumber that night was an altogether unexpected one. Not because of the sound itself but because of what was making the sound and where it was coming from. You see, being on a cliff 200 metres above a river, the sound made by cannonballs smashing rock into pieces not one you would be used to. The fact that the rock the cannonballs were smashing into happened to be directly infront of you also made it unwelcome. By lucky chance, some radical idiots had decided that firing cannons at the prison in hopes of killing the inmates inside instead of waiting until they were executed, was a far more effective way of getting what they wanted. They had not, however, considered that walls collapsed, cannons needed reloading, and people could run. Another lucky chance was that one of the cannon balls directly struck the rock to which Henri was chained to. The cuffs immediately crumpled and he managed to get one arm free. He was busy fruitlessly trying to retrieve his other arm when another cannon ball hit that rock too. He now free and made and quick dash for the nearest whole in the wall. Once outside it took him a few minutes to get his barings the dark. He could make out the idiots with the cannon on the far side of the river and the road leading down from the cliff to a small bridge. Next to the small bridge was a small rowing boat. Henri did some quick thinking and decided his best option to run through woods. So thats what he did. The fresh air felt like a new lease of life as he cantered happily along to freedom. It took him a few hours of scrambling through the trees, sustaining many smaller cuts and bruises, to reach the coast. It was beginning to get light again and being found out in the middle of the coutryside a few miles from a destroyed prison by guards searching for survivors would be a foolish thing to do, on that note he hurried on towards a small farm. He found shelter in the barn and covered himself in hay taking in its warm smell and huddling up in a heap to avoid being found, he quickly fell asleep again.
Once again he awoken sharply sometime a few hours later. Blinking the cobwebs of sleep out of his eyes he squinted up to see a portly man in a straw hate standing over with a pitch fork. The man turned towards the barn doors and grunted something incomprehensible, two men in dark blue coats, white trousers and black felt shakos. They were unmistakably part of the French Army. Resistance, Henri mused, would not be the best option so he allowed himself to be hauled up forced him outside. His eyes were met first by the sight of several more soldiers like the chappies that had picked him up. He then noticed they were guarding a group of rough looking not entirely unlike the ones he had spent the last six weeks with. Immediately he realised they were all prisoners that had been caught and rounded up and now it seemed that they were all being forced marched down to the city. He knew this because one of the soldiers, evidently a commanding officer of some kind, ad shouted 'You are all prisoners. We caught you like the pigs you are and you are now being forced marched down to the city'.
Instead of going through the next few days, lets skip ahead to more important events. Basically Henri was taken to the port of marseille and sent to work on a labour camp in the carribean. At least he would have been. The transport ship hit rough waters passing the straight of Gibralter and ran aground. All survivors were made captives of the spanish, well, all those found by the Guardia Civil anyways. Henri managed to swim ashore after everyone else so he was kind of lucky again. He took refuge in a small church where a priest tended to him for a week. Having no money, and nowhere to go the priest suggested he join the army. Henri did so mainly because he couldn't think of anything else to do.
This is the start of his adventure....
