Elder Days of the City of Industry

Right now, outside my room, there is a crowd of probably-drunken strangers. One of my suitemates was specifically delegated to tell me this for fear that I would "take it better" if he, specifically, told me. (This is somewhat odd.)

But that's not important now. What is important? The history of a fictitious race three-thousand years old, of course!

Three-thousand years ago, beneath the site where the city of Industry now stands, a great race once made their capital. They stood five feet tall, universally; not a man nor woman of them was an inch shorter and taller. Their skins were of as many hues as those of Man, if not more, and their clothes and fashions and languages were as diverse as our own; but their heights were all the same, for any member of this Elder Race older than the age of twenty-one.

They knew not fermented beverages - by reason of chance or physiological incapability - drank not of the hot drinks from which Mormonity is prohibited, but only of milk and honeydew. At their capital, they erected a great Pleasure-Dome; its size, a feat far beyond their engineering techniques, was maintained only by employment of a ring of Psykers, whose flashing hair and floating eyes were dangerous even to percieve; their chamber was walled off, and those who trespassed were more often than not driven mad.

Sometimes their eyeballs got loose and floated away, and people had to go hunt them down and put them back. It was really quite a bother.

Theirs was a tranquil, ideal society; but it was their homogenous height, in the end, that was their bane. The races of Judea crossed the Ninth Sea, and colonized the lands of Calif-Horn-Yah, as they named it; from nearly their first contact, they warred against the Elder Race. Their opponents had battle-psykers and powerful perfume, which for a time gave them an edge against the Judaen tribes, and nearly sufficed to "push them into the sea". But the Judeans struck back with a deadly weapon - a massive, flying metal blade that maintained a constant height of four feet, five inches from the ground - even on uneven terrain. All the adults of the Elder Race were tragically slain, uniformally beheaded. Their Pleasure-Dome collapsed, to be forsaken for millenia, until the artefacts uncovered there created a new age of Industry; for which purpose the city was founded.

Happy-whale end!