Chapter 6
Following the war, we entered a period of extremely high activity. We had vanquished our foes, and now, victorious, we had generated new-found interest in the game among the membership. Activity soared and the base was strengthened. We saw the signing of many new treaties, strengthening our foreign relations. Our NS itself showed rapid signs of recovery following the war.
We also saw some very promising new members of government. Beefspari quickly became a rising star, even though she was not a goon by birthright. JamezBfod finally stepped up and joined the festivities in IRC. Many new people were elected and appointed. We also started expanding the powers of governmental aides into fully fledged lower governmental agents.
However, even in this period of growth and prosperity all was not well.
An intense rivalry was building behind closed doors, one which had started many years ago, and was once again reaching critical mass. I am speaking of course about the rivalry between salithus and myself. I am not going to sugarcoat it, I hated salithus. I hated everything about him. I hated the way he treated me in discussions, I hated the way he treated everyone we were directly allied to with contempt (even if they did not do anything worthy of the scorn), I hated the way he had no respect for me and my position, and I hated him, hate, hate. From our humble beginnings (see
the lunar wars thread) we had culminated a rivalry which I doubt has ever been matched in browser game governance.
salithus' only real value, if you could call it that, was to act as a foil for my views. He was always for pushing the boundaries, always for ignoring the diplomatic consequences of our actions, and above all else being a dick to everyone in the process. salithus, in comparison to, say, fw, makes fw look like a saint. While fw was always the ~wild card~, he has respect for our long-term diplomatic plans, respect that salithus lacked.
The story of fw and salithus I imagine is an interesting one, and one I hope fw will share. For a long time I thought fw was in many ways perfectly aligned with salithus and his beliefs. I thought this in large part because salithus went behind my back, offering the pilot seat to fw after I had handled a raid incident not to his liking. fw and I privately compromised on him getting the co-pilot position instead. I did not act at this time because sadly I felt that at that time there was a great deal of sentiment against me, and it was a battle I could not win. I decided to continue biding my time, and building better relations with the rest of the GOONS government.
It is funny, to an extent, how over the top salithus was. He was never satisfied with anything. Following the negotiation of reparations at the end of the TOP-C&G war he railed on the negotiator for not getting something which quite literally wasn't on the table, and couldn't have been in the first place. As well as the amount being slightly lower than desired. salithus was livid. Of course this was par for the course for him, and the rest of the government ignored that outrage.
And so I (and the rest of GOONS gov) endured him. The game continued, GOONS continued, my festering hate of him non-withstanding. Eventually, for one reason or another, he sought to reform government. Of course, this was completely out of line with how things should work, as per the charter, or our constitution now for that matter, but he was never one to follow our laws. Seeing the reformation for what I believed it was, an extremely transparent ploy to remove me from power and decrease the power of those who disagreed with him, I immediately posted a rebuttal to his initial post stating that his entire frame of reference was false, and that he was imposing him view on what we should be doing on the rest of us. Of course he moved my post to a new thread and titled it "GOONS Government - Unrelated Discussion Thread" And continued on with his thread, which appeared to be for feeling out who he could trust or not by having us rate each other. It was this action that convinced me it was time to save a backup of the forum, again. I always did this when salithus and I fought as "insurance".
Along with his interest in reorganizing government, he also began reorganizing the forum permissions (for no discernible reason). He removed my administrator and moderator level privileges (after I had saved the backup of the forum). I couldn't even mask anyone. This is where the rubber hit the road for me, I was going to get my privileges back, and if salithus refused, I would declare him in dereliction of his duties and treasonous, and expel him from the alliance, hosting a new forum based on the backup somewhere else. What actually happened was completely different than what I expected to happen, but fortunately had the same desired outcome. fw was restored before me, and he restored my privileges. This is where the story could have ended, but it gets better.
fw made, in my opinion, one of the greatest posts I've ever seen him make. Sadly this post will be forever lost to history as it was after the backup, but it called salithus out and accused him of "the laziest coup ever". This is what I'm guessing through salithus into his rage. For a long time fw had always sided with him in arguments, but not this time. As fw would tell me "I can put up with your bullshit just fine, but I'm not putting up with sal's". Or something to that effect. This is the point where salithus saw that his plan wasn't going to work, and pulled the plug on everything. If he couldn't have the alliance, nobody could.
This is where years of paranoia on my part had paid off, months of saving the forums database. I sprung into action and rehosted the forums with the help of bros of MK. I was free, the alliance was free, and a new post-salithus golden age began. I reformed the charter into the constitution we have now, and began making diplomatic contacts with people I'm sure salithus hated for one reason or another. We have only benefited from his loss, and as things progress, it will only become more clear how his policies hurt us, and why we are far, far better off now.
The future never looked brighter.
