Talia: Kingdom of Banditry

Within is Talia's small, desolate and barren town, named Nailscrap Town. For the sake of a brief peace, the bandits chose this upstream region to build a town out of rags, steel rebar and wooden planks.

It was pure chance that the planet thieves came to Talia during a hurried flight from the pursuit of the Galaxy Rangers.

In the beginning Talia was only a wasteland that many called “the Junkyard of the Star System”. Planet-destroying wars of the past had thrown ruins piled as high as mountains onto Talia, which brought irreparable radioactive contamination and took away the last hope of sustaining life. The panicked thieves had nowhere else to go and fell into a cave beneath the planet's surface, which turned out to be a tunnel left behind by a race of gnawing creatures… The thieves escaped their doom by a hair's breadth, and the ideal of a Kingdom of Banditry was quietly born in this lost and secluded refuge.

The network of caves is connected together like a colossal labyrinth. More bands of thieves were drawn by this ideal and by this land of dreams, and they came to pile up wealth and to trade technology, laying the foundations of the kingdom.

More and more bandits settled here, and the desolate planet began to bustle in a most unusual way. The famous thieves spoke of their ideal of a Kingdom of Banditry and promised that the treasury would be used to build an equal and just nation. But as the accumulated wealth grew ever greater, it was these same thieves who tore up their own fragile agreement and sought to seize all the wealth for themselves. Mercenaries, riots, enemies within and without… chaotic struggles broke out one after another, and perhaps from the very start those who raised the banner had never once believed in their own ideal of so-called fairness.

And so the deluded bandits returned to an age of chaos in which ignorance was honored. They seized the water sources to build towns of their own, and they mocked the very idea of fairness and justice.

Everyone in Nailscrap Town is fierce beyond measure. They drive off-road vehicles with savage destructive power and fight other bandits for resources out in the desert, and they make armor and weapons out of scrap iron and old electrical wire… The more barren the wasteland, the more wildly they let themselves go, like one last frenzy before the end of the world. Those sweet ideals are like something thrown away, sunk in the hot radioactive wind, and they have long since left no trace at all.

Half drunk and half awake at their lavish feast, the bandits realize that the Kingdom of Banditry was never meant to build something, but to destroy something.

This is an electric wire picked up from a scrapyard. Its insulation has fallen away, and some of the remaining sections have still not stopped working. In the bandit town of Talia there has never been any such thing as true garbage.

The bare wire is old. It once lay neatly arranged aboard a starship in hurried flight, until the starship's attempt at escape brought on an enormous shock wave that left the wire exposed to the moisture in the air.

The whole ship was dragged into the tangled underground passages. On that pirate starship the sheet steel shielding was stripped away layer by layer, and the electrical lines were torn out just as savagely, and all of it was then used to build the first market of the alliance. The thieves began to pile up wealth and to speak of their ideal… Soon afterward came the long internal feuding, the suspicion and the mutual betrayal, and the fires of war between the dictators and those who reviled them finally spread from the tunnels underground up to the desert on the surface…

This bare wire is still old. It was dug out of a pothole by the bandits and then connected to a huge refitted off-road vehicle, open to the wind on every side, that drove to a distant water source of Talia.

The first priority of everyone who survived the war of betrayal was to locate Talia's water sources. They drove thousands of miles every day across deserts strewn with shards of glass, in vehicles that were shabby and poorly made in the extreme. The gangs sometimes chased one another, thick dust and smoke rising behind them, and sometimes threw men onto or off the vehicles… the pressure of survival left them unable to think of anything else. Only by pressing on ahead could they keep from panicking.

This bare wire was very old from the very beginning. It was taken out of the off-road vehicle by the bandits and set into the town's light box, and the wire was so old that the electric light flickered on and off without stopping.

An old gangster who called himself a “policeman” founded the original Nailscrap Town. With hard-handed tricks, a caustic manner and the strength of his own personal charisma, he brought proper order to the scrapyard, and the town grew livelier by the day. Eccentric engineers turned machines into waste without meaning to, and reckless wild men enjoyed fighting in the underground arena… At the bar counter one night, they filled their cups with grape juice that smelled of gasoline and clinked glasses to celebrate living one more day.

There is nothing new on Talia, only old things that take on new missions as the times shift and change.