ZOMBIE FORUMS

Right, which is why those rangers all got bored and took up parchisi.

Don't think the elf command authority even suspects Santuarial is there. If any elf does, it'd be Sarine or somebody much like her- a rogue to the racial consensus, smart enough not to tip anybody off about it. A hidden breeding population of errants ready to repopulate the world once the pressure got let off would freak the elves out as bad as Ian has. So they're more likely to be talking about his sister.

They could be, objectively speaking, rather callous people. Heck, we're talking about a culture that would have a damn good reason to have 20 different ways to say 'progressively deteriorated physically and then died' and 'progressively deteriorated mentally and then killed themselves'.

It would be a moment that came for every Santuarial half-elf, multiple times, in their lifetime. Maybe it doesn't occupy the same social 'place' to them that it does to us.

Has anyone considered the possibility that the bad news is about Ian's mother? I mean, sure, it looked like he was mad at her, but that's probably more of a coping mechanism.

I very vaguely remember Jordan Kennedy destroying half of New Hampshire due to losing control of her psychokinetic powers... She mentioned that construction of New New Hampshire was coming along...

That's not a war. War is masses of troops, and is a matter of numbers. Sending out lone assassins is a means of damage control, taking out the isolated half elves who are causing, or may cause, problems.

What the Elves have going with half-elves is pretty by-the-book 'war', albiet of the neolithic variety.

Kill 'em wherever you find 'em, and go thousands of miles out of your way to find them. The numbers involved may be pathetic, but tell that to the dead.

Bravo, Phil! There used to be a scholarly trope, back in the heydey of left wing historicity, that all indigenous (read as: "tribal") people were really pacifists, because they just raided each other instead of forming armies and occupying and oppressing other people. Common sense suggests all you need to have a war is a group identity, a club, and a time-persistant pissy attitude.

Yeah, the war between the Elves and Half-elves never really ended, save in the formal sense that the half-elves took so many losses they no longer posed an organized threat. That didn't keep European colonizers of the New World from exterminating categories of unwanted locals from the Aleutians all the way to Tierra Del Fuego. In the interests of fair play, they didn't invent this form of warfare, it has been around since the middle of the last ice age, practiced on all continents.

The elves are carrying on, heck, like they were humans,/ bless their hypocritical little hearts.

I never said there was pacifism on the elves' part. All I'm saying is that "war" is not the term I would use for it.

When 5 soldiers show up and are refered to as "what's left of the elven army," I think it's safe to say that the elven army has been somewhat reduced (Obviously it was an overstatement, but I doubt they're up to taking out a full city of half elves). There is no way that the rangers could complete the absolute genocide of the half elves that was the original goal. What they're doing now is more akin to terrorism: instilling fear by the public murder of individuals.

I suppose, if you want to define the activity of the rangers as "war," then yes, they are at war. But it should be made clear that that is the sole available means the elves have of waging a war.

Furthermore, I'll add that occasionally rangers probably lose their fights, and die. If Misa is the youngest elf at 1,200 years old, then the half elves must be breeding faster than they can be eliminated, and are almost certainly killing elves faster than they're reproducing. Anyone with half a brain should be able to see that math, and the elves do have half a brain: therefore they should know that they cannot effectively eliminate the whole of the half elves. I'll state again that, since they know they cannot achieve that goal, I say they've given up on eliminating the half elves, and are merely playing damage control.

Actually, I'll disagree with that entire thesis and I have a real-world example; Palestine. Multiple rockets per day, fired into Israel, may not be very effective but it is still an act of war and is still a war-crime (indiscriminately targeting civilians) if carried out by the legitimate government (which it is, as Hamas has claimed at least one of those attacks). Now these rocket attacks are, relatively speaking, pin-pricks to Israel, they still must respond to them as they would to any other act of war. This is what Gaza is about.

Likewise, the Half-elves and the Elves have not stopped the war, the Elves simply stopped persuing them due to exhaustion. Yes, rogue Rangers, like Sarine, who were originally on the other side, are undermining and moderating the genocidal temperment of the extremeists. However, that doesn't alter the state of the continuing war and the relative status of the Half-elves. That's just like a ceasation of Hamas rockets doesn't mean that they've declared peace. It only means that they need time to reload.

Meanwhile the elves are intensively ignoring the two real threats that they truely need fear. Their own biology, which is understandable considering that they are stuck with it for the duration, and mankind. I'm sure many centuries long debates among those with any brains could be summed up in the following:

Man. We should have never brought him civilization. Wisdom has made him something that will destroy us all.
Wisdom. No. Wisdom a poison to man... but ignorance will make him a god.
Then we truely are doomed.

As I said, those types of acts can be called "war." But I more define "war" as something you think you can win. The Palestinians actually believe that they'll defeat Israel and reclaim that land at some point; the elves should have no such delusion of success. If you know you're not going to win, and are just taking pot shots to disrupt something, then I'd count it as "terrorism."

But as I said in the last post, you can call that "war" if you want, but it should be noted what kind of war it is, since it's easy for others to take it to mean the more conventional warfare, which the elves are incapable of waging.

Throwrug just drop it. Even on this post moderen believing board your want to define things by your own vernacular is going to fail. Unless Poe chimes in to clarify things th eassumtion is going to be "war" over "not war".

I don't think that rangers lose very often. It's only very occasionally that they come up against a half-elf with the training and werewithal to be any kind of threat at all: there arn't many Meji's or Ian's amoung the half-elves. They're mostly just Derren's.

Rangers are, generally speaking from what we've seen, utterly badcore. They kill single half elves, who are usually pretty defenseless, and they've been doing it for a while. Whenever they suspect more then one half elf, they call in another ranger or two. They've been doing this for thousands of years.

Whatever the current military strength of the elves, they've demonstrated the ability to rustle up some numbers with a "call to arms" type deal, and they probably have some insanely powerful mages. Santuariel is more of a village then a city. If the elves find it, there's no doubt in my mind that it's toast.

You know the more I think about, the more I come to realize that Meji's father fucked up. Helping to bring another half-elf into the world has got to be one of the worst crimes imaginable for the remaining elves.

Has the pre errant war elven population ever been mentioned? Any population for that matter? It would be nice to get a data point to extrapolate from.

How's this:

The "Errant War" is over. Elves and Half-Elves are no longer fighting a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional%20warfare">conventional war</A> against one another.

They are, however, fighting some sort of unconventional, <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare">asymmetric warfare</A> (of which <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare">guerrilla war</A> and <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism">terrorism</A> are subsets).

Now, if you want to argue about exactly what sort of asymmetric war is going on here, go right ahead. But can we all agree that Elves and Half-Elves are not fighting a "conventional" war, but are engaged in some sort of "unconventional", but declared, state of hostilities toward one another? (Where "conventional" and "unconventional" are used here as political terms of art to refer to "war between recognized legitimate states using similar-scale full armies on the open battlefield" versus "all other sorts of sustained armed conflict").

Asymetrical war: It's too difficult to fight in a stand up fight* so we're coming up with ingenious low-cost ways of attacking the other guy.

*Either there aren't any population/production centers for us to attack or we're too damn weak to fight them in a stand up fight.

This is the best summary of the situation that I've seen in this thread, and it leads to the best analogy yet for the rangers: <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad" >Mossad</A>.

As for why the elves haven't gone after Santuariel directly: as Sarine said <A HREF="http://www.errantstory.com/archive.php?date=2004-12-06" >long ago</A>, elves aren't all-knowing. They know the half-elves "scattered to Anilis knows where," and for as long as the elves were locked up in their self-pity fortress, they didn't really care where. That ended a while back, but in a world where the population density doesn't seem high and it takes time for non-magical transportation to get you from one country to another, interactions between Santuariel half elves and Praenubilus Astu elves have probably been rare enough that the Mossad-style reaction to possible enemies of the state has sufficed.

The REALLY interesting question is: will it suffice in the future? We already know that conventional elven military are being mobilized to go out into the world. It won't be long now until they discover (1) that Santuariel has a pretty good reservoir of half elves, (2) broadly where it is, and (3) that Ian comes from there, and may still be there. And THAT is when the military excrement hits the rotary oscillator.

Well clarified, both of you.

Meji and Jon have no doubt been very careful not to speak to Sarine about Ian more than they absolutely have to. But, Jon knows that Sarine totold the Elvish leaders most of what she did and learned on their little expedition together. At some point, though, she will learn or guess about the half-elven haven and they may realize that killing Sarine is the only way to keep all of Santuriul from being massacred. Meji might have to make a serious moral decision, for once. Jon, of course, angsts over all his decisions.

Yeah. I seem to recall when Sarine learned or inferred the truth, the implication was that there'd be hell to pay for the rinkai asshole responsible, if/when she ever got around to reporting back to her superiors.