The Arkhem Wars

Welcome, my dear readers. You are some of the lucky few to have entered the halls of Arcueid-Bronsted’s castle, one of the few remaining stalwarts of the Arkhem Wars. This castle now houses one of the remaining few Lewis Bases, and I would be deeply honoured to take you around the building to view some of the most majestic remnants of the wars.

In this first room, you will find several pictures of soldiers standing at attention, soluting one of the great leaders of the war, General Laurie. The elderly among you might recognise the General as being one of the first to design and construct the facilities you see around us today. Of course, ever since the dissolution of the IUPAC, most of the bases have fallen into disrepair. The base in which you are now standing is one of the most well-preserved bases – even the lone pair of sentry towers remains intact.

Moving on into the next room, we come to the intelligence unit of the base. This was where the Union used to send out information in the form of codes to their soldiers on the front line. Using massive Spectrometers and Radars, the intelligence officers would be engaged in an information war, vaporising the last traces of evidence, accelerating the acquisition of information and deflecting the enemy’s suspicions. The hardest job, of course, was detecting enemy troop movements...this was made difficult due to the constant contamination of information samples. It is even said that the world’s most renowned superspy, Sigma Bond, worked here.

This room is also important for other reasons – it may not look like it, but this is where the first few copies of The Precipitation of War were drafted. It is all due to the influence of the men and women who were working here that we all know the progression of War. At the end of the war, all of the books concerning this particular subject were gathered here. Even the rarest volumes of this series, ProvoCation, Solutions to the War and Contact: The Process can be found within these walls.

Moving along, we find ourselves within the Engine Room. This is the heart of the facility, and it is what powers the lone pair of sentry towers and the Spectrometers located in the other sections of the facility. The generators powering the entire facility used to run on the BMW Engine (Bohr-Mendeleev-Watson), but that particular reactor was rendered obsolete with the discovery of the free energy provided by the Gibbs Machine. Even now, the Gibbs machine is proving to be extremely useful in providing many bases with free energy – some Gibbs Machines have even been fitted with TAS reactors, to quicken the creation of energy and increase the spontaneity of retaliation.

Near the end of the war, however, there was the possibility that the Gibbs Machine would be rendered obsolete like its predecessor, because of the discovery of the SHE (Standard Hydrogen Engine).  Unlike the Gibbs, which released its energy in the form of heat, the SHE automatically converted the energy into electricity, which was a far more efficient way of powering the vehicles used in the war. Sadly, the SHE never saw mass production, because the materials needed to build the engine couldn’t be found in common laboratories, the engine needed to be kept in extremely specific conditions, and researchers couldn’t agree on a name for the tubular mechanism that powered the SHE. 

Moving on to the penultimate section of our tour, this is that part that you’ve all been waiting for: the War Room. This is where all the Machines of War were stored after the government closed down the facility. As you can see, most of the weapons were kept in pristine condition – here is a pistol used by the Free Radicals – a group of terrorists cum superspies who were terminated halfway into the war. Over here, we can see the remains of what used to be a Cathode Ray – an artillery weapon that could fire over long distances. And here is a VESPER scout jet – one of the very first aircraft that could identify enemy formations without the use of a spectrometer.

On this side of the room, we see the very first steps towards the dreaded (and forbidden) art of MechAnimism. I trust that you all are familiar with the attempts of the military to synthesize new weapons of war through these dark methods. Even I know little about these disastrous experiments – there are even rumours that they managed to rearrange a person’s constituent atoms! It is lucky for us that IUPAC cancelled these diabolical experiments before they came to fruition.

Finally, we have come to the last room – the R&D Department. This is where the military developed their various technologies. Here, we can see their research into what was then the pinnacle of military theory – the Ammo Theory. This theory – when completed – would fully realise the potential of valence platoons in scouting, attacking and special operations such as Sigma Bonding.

Research was also being conducted into the manipulation of gravity. The military created many machines, including the Van der Waal Tank, which could cause the metal on other nearby tanks to be warped and distorted. There was also the Polariser, which could manipulate even light into various shapes (this was discontinued, however, because they could be easily found with the deployment of OATS (Optically Active Tanks/Soldiers)). 

Another important piece of technology that was being developed was the Auto-Calibrated Instantaneously Delocalised Structure (ACIDS). These were at the forefront of military research, and would have allowed for the full, unhindered movement of ground-based facilities, allowing them to attack other bases via Nuclear Reactions. Unfortunately, the war ended before these ACIDS could be utilised. Nevertheless, other resourceful scientists managed to modify the ACIDS for civilian use, and now play an integral part of our lives.

Well, folks, this ends the tour of the Arcueid-Bronsted Castle. We hope to see you again next time, and please remember to buy something from the souvenir shop over there. Ciao!