The city of Isin is not actually the city of Isin. Technically, it's the city of New New New Isin. That was the trouble with Isin. It was all wrapped up in itself. Like fabric around a nun, or a baby, or a whore.
People had been there, as in the physical location, for longer than history could be expected to remember. People have been in Isin since the word "people" meant something very different.
The first city called Isin was dragged kicking and screaming into the world by Heralds of the Church of the Third Sphere. A fourth-era religious order known for staunch orthodoxy and insufferable smugness. A cult whose grandest miracle was being almost universally despised by anyone who heard their sermons. Isin to them was a Good Rock. A polite term for "delusional pipe dream about the future City of God."
And it was a rock, a miraculously barren rock in the midst of a freezing swamp that only seemed to produce the sort of wildlife that stings and gnashes. Kunaabe oral history does seem to know of the location, but also seems to assume the foolishness of anyone attempted to actually travel there. This did nothing to deter the Church of the Third Sphere, as records indicate they were not aware of Kunaabe presence in the area.
The first 400 years of Isin's history were typical of other Good Rocks: regular periods of plague, mass starvation, and hyper-niche religious conflict boueyed by the occasional successful interaction with nearby Kunaabe and Baquari communities, at which point the enterprising trader would be ritually banished for speaking to hererical, racially impure outsiders.
Significant improvements were made to Isin after the local potentate promised that the Third Sphere would appear in the sky that spring. After the date passed, and no celestial body appeared to unite the Sun and Moon, the potentate was ritually burned to death, and his body was cast into Isin's only source of fresh drinking water. The fervent believers promptly died of several drinking-water related things at once. Those with a lick of sense brushed up on their Kunaabe and got busy creating a new sub-ethnicity, leaving Isin abandoned.
A decade passed. And much like the local chitin eel population grinding the corpse of the arch-astrologer into algae food, Isin soon became host to a new, beautiful population: Good, honest, criminals.
-- from An Addicts History of New Babel, by Ord Mornie
The tungsten revolution hit Isin like a brick to the face. A peasantry equipped with full exo-rigs could do the work of five men. Previously unliveable toxic swampland was cultivated into food-rich unliveable toxic swampland. Times were fat and happy. The people who worked in the fields could afford a second shirt, and the squabbling gangs of guild leaders and ex-bandit warlords could now throw the peasants in prison for failing to call them "Your Lordship".
The tungsten revolution brought changes. Changes chiefly in the form of exo-rigged cutting edges that tear through fifth-era armor like an orgasm through a wake. So, in a feat rarely seen among kings and politicians, the nobility thought about the future.
Tearing other nobles into little bits? That was all well and good. Gentleman's work. Telling peasants to tear each other into little bits? That was also well and good. A chief duty of every sensible noble. But peasants tearing nobles into little bits? That would be upsetting.
It was the tungsten revolution that prompted the newly-minted nobles to stop killing each other long enough to form the first Concourse of Five Houses. It was from this orgy of nepotism (in the name of peace of course) that the state of New Babel was born.
And it is here, with the bandit warlords who had the good sense to build a tungsten refinery, that we find the genesis of Isin's very own nobles. The Honorable and Noble House Maciae. Who are, legally speaking, not slavers.
-- An Addict's History of New Babel, by Ord Mornie
