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 Post subject: The Badger Clan
PostPosted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 3:26 pm 
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Over the years since it had been founded, the Badger Clan had fallen into an almost complete obscurity, its interactions with the wider Empire practically limited to paying taxes. Part of the reason was that because of earlier eviction of Ki-Rin by the Lion from the lands around the Dragon Lake the Badger lands along the Path of Woe were separated from the wider Empire by a territory that nominally was belonging to the Lion, but in reality constituted a no-man's land the Lion did not settle in and very rarely patrolled. With little external interference for three centuries straight, the Badger had learnt to be entirely self-reliant and very attached to their traditions. The Emperors came and went, but the ways of the Badger didn't really change as the Ichiro remained largely ignorant of tumults of the recent era. The Badger were untainted by Gozoku affiliations simply because they did not register in the political calculus of the Triumvirate and were never a subject of political manoeuvring during its rule. While the Nasu during their heyday had claimed several holdings in the north-western Rokugan as their own and their respective work on regional infrastructure had made a difference as civilisation made an advance beyond the Firefly River, the Badger largely had kept their isolation. Whatever problems they had been experiencing, with Yobanjin, banditry, natural disasters or stray evils, had been their own. This was not to last, however, and the agent of change would be Otomo Reju.

In 435 Reju, who was in his fifties, was exiled by Hantei Yugozohime to become an 'ambassador' to the Badger as a punishment for his past involvement with the Gozoku. He was spared a sentence for treason because he had begun opposing them ever since they had moved against the Brotherhood. He was forced to leave his colleges, his fortune, his reputation as a moralist, the fledgeling family of his name and the works of his life behind. Until Matsu Mochihime died in the Battle of White Stag the Emerald Magistrates had been ensuring that he would have had no contact with his children, or the outside world. For those seven years, he lived among the Badger in the same isolation his hosts had long been in. And he got enamoured with them. With their simple life, sensible practicality of their ways that to him seemed close to the Tao, but above all else - with their culture of athleticism. He got so excited during the first Great Games he witnessed that he even made Badger enthusiasts of sports bemused.

The Badger had initially received him with general wariness, but as any Otomo worthy of the name he managed to polarise them. The majority got quickly fed up with his overblown manners, innovative ideas and inclinations to patronise, considering him a blight on their traditional ways, and concluded it's best to avoid him if not outright kill him. The elders of the Clan did not like 'bad influence' Reju was having on the youth, but the Champion forbade them to arrange an 'accident'. Still, there were a few young ones who got fascinated with the strange Imperial and actually decided to listen to his stories and teachings. As the Badger did not have any monasteries of the Brotherhood in their lands for reasons only their Champion really knew, he was the closest to a teacher of the Tao they had ever got. Among them, one man Reju formed a close, some would say intimate bond with, Ichiro Fureheshu.

Fureheshu was a very peculiar man by Badger standards. On one hand, he was the epitome of strength and athleticism, many considered him the reborn soul of Ichiro Domogu, some even went further and considered him the strongest man of all time. On the other, he had a quiet, humble, contemplative nature and an artistic soul with great sensitivity for the world. He was free from both Badger curt abrasiveness and blind adherence to tradition. For him, the older Otomo became a spiritual guide. Fureheshu chose to be a follower of the Tao and planned to join the Brotherhood as soon as he would be allowed to enter inkyo. Unfortunately, he perished in 462, a few months before that, while heroically defeating a powerful oni that invaded Badger lands. For that, his liege bestowed onto Fureheshu's son the right to found his own vassal family, for the first time in the history of the Badger.

Reju had died 5 years before, of old age, and Fureheshu had allegedly helped him fulfil the old man's wish to reach the southern tip of the Badger lands he had been forbidden to ever leave by the Empress, and to look at Rokugan one last time. Before that, however, during the post-White Stag political thaw, the exiled Imperial had managed to re-establish ties with his progeny which was then struggling with running the Four Colleges he had left them with. He had been sending many letters, compiled by his son into an ethnographic treatise in its own right, mostly about the miracles of the obscure Badger culture. He also wrote extensively about Fureheshu, though some of his letters on him for some reason did not make it into that compilation and circulated as inspiration for more or less decent pillow books (like a spicy romance entitled The Dormant Volcano). Reju had been a staunch advocate of giving the Badger ethos of physical fitness and the idea of Great Games Empire-wide recognition. Alas, that wouldn't happen neither in his nor in Fureheshu's lifetimes.

However, the oni that had killed Fureheshu had actually been stirred from its lair beyond Rokugan by an incoming Yobanjin invasion. Later the same year 462 the northern barbarians attacked along the whole length of the Great Wall of the North, through passes in Phoenix, Dragon and Badger lands. Hantei Restuhime mandated the Imperial Legions to stem their expected advance through the Path of Woe, not expecting the Badger to stop them. The force was led by Hida Iemon, nephew of then Crab Champion Hida Yugureko and father of Hida Tenburo, hailed for both his strength and his strategic acumen. Iemon had actually browsed Reju's treatise as it was the most contemporary source on the Badger lands, in case the Yobanjin would overrun them and he would have to act on his own. He was both baffled and curious on learning first-hand how exaggerated the account on his distant cousins' prowess was, and planned to challenge Fureheshu to a wrestling match if the man survived.

The Badger actually managed to halt the Yobanjin at the Badger's Scowl, and the Legions under Iemon arrived in time to break the siege and rout the barbarians. Fureheshu's son, non-accidentally named Reju, was among the defenders, and he accepted Iemon's challenge in his deceased father's stead. But the Hida commander wanted to make it big, and played up to late Otomo Reju's idea: he suggested the match to happen the next year, as a part of Great Games. With a typically Crab tact, he suggested the Games to happen in the Dark Edge Village, blessed by Osano-Wo.

That was a loaded choice, and caused no small scandal. The place where Doji Hatsuo claimed Emerald Championship later became the hub for Emerald Magistrates, and many other high-profile tournaments were held within Kurayami-ha. In the Gozoku era for that reason the Nasu took it from the Lion and made their regional bureaucratic centre out of it, from where they could coordinate with Doji Raigu's Emerald Magistrates to check and deter the Lion. Hence, it grew to be one of the symbols of Gozoku rule, and was treated as such by Matsu Mochihime immediately after she came to power. She called the annual conference of jurists, the Hashira Houritsu, to Kurayami-ha, only to order the gathered magistrates she saw as loyal to the Triumvirate slaughtered or burned alive in buildings. Once the purge of the Office was done, she pledged to rebuild the devastated place anew. She didn't deliver on that promise, as other matter preoccupied her until her death at the White Stag. The Dark Edge remained a ghost town, and most likely only the blessed nature of the place may have prevented it from being inhabited by foul, vengeful spirits.

The news soon spread. Publicity attracted commerce - the Tortoise, Yasuki and Yamasura Agasha merchant patrons as well as so-called Kaeru from Rich Frog moved in to clean it up and prepare the place for a first major event in three decades. The Reju, emboldened by creeping rehabilitation of their progenitor, openly supported the Great Games at the back of the Crab. It would be the first time ever they were organised outside the Badger province, and practically first time ever that more than a couple of Badger samurai would be leaving it with an intent to come back. If anything, this was a symbolic moment of the end of Badger long, partially self-imposed isolation.

The first inter-Clan Great Games attracted sizeable attendance, mostly of curious audience rather than non-Badger participants, though some Crab, Lion, Dragon and exactly one Boar did arrive for a contest of athleticism. It spurred quite a festival as well as that part of the Empire was jubilant about the Yobanjin being defeated, and of their regional hub being suddenly revitalised. Javelins were thrown, boulders were carried, no-dachi were crossed, business was made, bets were placed, opium was smoked perhaps for the first time with machi-kanshisha. And in the grand wrestling finale Fureheshu Reju defeated Hida Iemon in a spectacular way. To save face, the Crab admitted raw potential among the Badger that nevertheless required training to become more sumai than brawling. Reju, sharing some of his late father's humility, took the offer and after the Games travelled south with his followers to be admitted to the prime sumai dojo of Rokugan.

Unlike the rest of the Badger, who remained wary of the outside, within a few years since their founding the Fureheshu became an itinerant and somewhat worldly family. In the Crab lands, it relatively swelled because many ronin saw it as a better opportunity to acquire good allegiance rather than through Twenty Goblin Winter. Amid mounting rivalry over sumai prestige it eventually became a bone of contention with the Crab and led them to make the Fureheshu realise that they had overstayed their welcome in Grip of Earth Dojo. But they had places to go. Some returned home, but others moved to live in Dark Edge Village to oversee future Games. The bulk, however, took the invitation of the Reju, strongly supported by the Tortoise, to found their own sumai stable and athletics dojo by the House of Waning Light in the West Hub.

For a time, the Fureheshu prospered, and with them the Badger. In the West Hub they bonded with both the Boar and the Tortoise, while their focus and neutrality to the idea of progress made the nearby Lion tolerate them. With the help of Boar prospectors ore and gem mining picked up in the Badger provinces what significantly increased Badger income, secured their provisions and allowed them to avoid further entanglements with sponsors for both the Games and their dojo in the West Hub. Shiro Ichiro became a visited place as trade routes, mostly Yasuki and Agasha ones, expanded up to the Path of Woe. It is through Badger that the Empire got limited access to Yobanjin goods as they had secretly made peace and began exchanges with the Mountain Wind tribe in the wake of the conflict. Of those goods, oyumi, or crossbow, attracted interest of the Kaiu who started perfecting it and developing similar weapons for siege and naval warfare. From the outside, the Badger seemed well on route to leave their isolationism for good. Even the Imperial doctrines of Hantei IX of shunning shugenja seemed to be playing to Badger tastes.

However, this seemingly bright future encountered a challenge - unwillingness of the majority of the Badger to adapt to it. They had become resentful, melancholic about the old ways when the lives of their fathers was free from corrupting entanglements. They dissented the fact that the majority of participants in the Great Games were no longer the Badger and the Badger were not always the winners, while the pure nature of happy competition the Games once had been was corrupted by commercial kitsch and rigged bets. The weak, ailing Emperor is no longer an example. When a staunch traditionalist Ichiro Kakeguro came to lead the Clan in 497, he severed ties with the Mountain Wind, started to restrict external access and banned imports of opium as he deemed it degenerating lives of the Badger youth, what led to a serious dispute with the Yasuki that only deepened the Badger drive to self-encapsulation.

The Fureheshu were caught in the middle, not really knowing how to pull back, or whether it is even expected of them. Their status now is tenuous. The majority of them knows no life beyond the relatively cosmopolitan one in the West Hub or the Dark Edge Village, where they enjoy many friends, command respect and cultivate Imperial connections. Their current daimyo, Fureheshu Kikujiro, regularly fights in honbasho before the Imperial Court and has held the title of yokozuna for five seasons already. He is worried that his choice may soon be between forsaking everything or being cut off from the roots. His family is prospering and may not be without options, but the prospect of shedding Badger identity is not something he even considers, even though he allows the thought that his liege is acting out of envy.



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