Ahoy, Kujira

Ahoy.

I want to talk to you about blade-sport.

You know, that sport you need to be a lawyer to understand? The sport that seems to have as much to do about sword-fighting as much as it has to do with supply logistics and proper tea etiquette? The one who only complete weirdoes care about? Weirdoes who actually like to physically, with their bodies, and their grimy little paws, rifle through old pre-Revolution books, despite it all being a tap away online? Yeah, that's the one. I'm that weirdo.

If you're a fellow weirdo like me, you're probably getting excited to hear, see, and feel stock VR footage from some of the great matches of the most decades, featuring the athletes that you grew up following each week as they battled for the Kujiran Open Cup. Sorry, I don't really have that for you today. This is just a simple hypertext essay. And as you might have guessed from my mention of old pre-Revolution books, I want to talk about blade-sport back when nothing even close to cameras, not to mention recordings, or computers, or programmable nanites existed. The old stuff.

Oh, you're ready for that too? You already know about the Fantabulous League of the Apollan Era and the drama of season that happened in 30 BR? The spark that would eventually lead to the Revolution of the Below? If you're a weirdo like me you've probably already know a lot of names of so-called "officers" in the FAAL, which often seem to end in 'son'. Sadly, I'm not going to talk about any of them. And not that league. Well, not on purpose. I want to follow a group of officers who were considered a footnote, even at the time.

And not just because they played in the old, displaced Szczybak-Daughter Inter-regency League Championship for the Game of Officers, a league with such a long name I'm going to never say it again and just call it SILCGO. No, these officers played in the ladies' league championship for SILCGO. And yes, back in the bad old days. Industrial Era, remember. When women were women and men were men and they had their energies and I'm already tired of thinking about it.

Oh you don't care about women's sports? Well, neither did they in those times, so maybe you have more in common with these old fuddy-duddies. But also, fuck you. I'll remind you that the ladies' league competitions were just as popular, and sometimes more popular, in some of the Conglomerates, particularly ones with chronically underperforming men's teams. Remember the dumb long name for the league I said. The Scuttlebutt something or another? Did you notice that name was a "daughter" not a "son"? This wasn't the old old Ancient days.

And the ladies' league was definitely popular in what we now call the Frisian Free City, or in that time, New and Old Frisia. It had 5 teams alone in a whole league of 30! But even in 140 AE, as they numbered it then would have thought much about these lady officers as they were fresh rookies... I mean "recruits" from various youth league junior "academies" as they called teams then. Yeah, those are the ladies I want to talk about.

Care to listen?