What’s Really Going On Around Here
The following is a transcript of a lecture given by official Jihad historian Dr.
Jason Carmichael to the incoming class of recruits at TRES Corps Headquarters on
April 12, 1999.

Who are we?
At first glance, it seems like a dumb question.  We're the Jihad!  But, if a
thoughtful Jihaddi approaches the idea, they find it's not as simple as it
seems.  We are an organization made up of many different types of sentient
beings, recruited not only from the four corners of the world but of the
multiverse, and we have a healthy respect for differences.  With all this
tolerance for the eccentric, how do we manage to keep the Jihad together?

It is simply thus:  B'harnee must be destroyed, all else is irrelevant.

This is the binding thought.  However, a thoughtful man would ask why this is
the binding thought.  For that answer, gentlemen, you need a bit of a tour of
Jihad history, and that is why I am here.  I hope at the end of this tour you
will have some idea of the nature of the Wyrm we oppose, why we -- the Jihad --
came to be, and how we got here from there.  So with no further ado, let us
begin.

We don't know a whole lot about the Beast we oppose.  We don't know where he
came from or even what he truly is.  There is speculation he is a demon from
the deepest pits of Hell or some truly malevolent spirit.  We really don't
understand his nature, or why he chooses to fight the way he does.  Any attempt
to answer any of these questions or even approach the Wyrm himself has one of
three consequences:  Either the Wyrm is slain temporarily, or the one
approaching the Wyrm has ended up either dead or spongified.  We can surmise
from the above fact that B'harnee must be a very private whatever he is.

But some conjecture and piecing together what we do know, we find that first of
all he is probably not of this Earth.  Second, he has some kind of alliance
with the Lyrans -- although the details of the alliance are unknown to us.  We
also happen to know that the Lyrans hate and fear humanity to the point they
wish to destroy us, but we aren't quite sure why. Third, B'harnee cannot be
killed permanently with any weapon we have short of Lord Owsen's Barney Slayer
-- and even that is ambiguous as we've never really had a chance to test it.
Fourth, he has two associates that are similar to what he is -- B'haby B'hop and
B'heeJ'hay.  It isn't really a lot.  But most importantly, we know the effects
B'harnee has on humanity -- and if you haven't seen it, I hate to tell you that
it isn't pretty.  Luckily for us, he wasn't as much of an issue in the past as
he is today...or human history may have taken a different and more unpleasant
course.

Perhaps he didn't really get a chance to destroy this world as he so
desperately wished because there was no simple way to destroy the world in
those days.  Communication between parties was slow and painful, and even the
dual inventions of the telegraph and the radio still didn't change the fact
that it was difficult to get a message out to a lot of people in a way that
didn't involve them thinking about what they had just read or heard.

Ah...but then television came into the mix.  You've heard all the derogatory
names for it, I have no need to go into those.  For the first time in human
history, we had a medium that instead of encouraging thought, encouraged people
to sit and look at the images until their brains turned to pablum.  And it's
really no surprise that we see the rise of B'harnee in conjunction with the
maturing of this technology.

Now, before we get into a debate over the merits of television, I want to point
out that it is not completely an evil.  It does serve a purpose for
entertainment and education.  However, in the form it has now, there is not much
use for the imagination or the intellect.  And that is the weapon that the
Beast counts on...to be able to invade the brain and take over without his
victim even realizing what is going on.

It's hopeless, right?  I mean, there's no way we're going to convince the
Mundanes to give up their television sets and go back to reading and listening
to the radio.  In fact, if you tried such a campaign in Mundania, you would
be laughed out of your seat.  And revealing the true nature of the Beast is an
impossibility as well.  I mean, c'mon, a children's television character is out
to destroy humanity as we know it?  Even if you did get past the absurdity of
your postulate, the panic that would ensue would play right into the Beast's
hands.

So the war must be secret.  But who can be trusted with that secret, and be
willing to be the good guys, doing a job that must be done with absolutely no
recognition?

Enter the Jihad.
Unfortunately for students of history, there isn't much in the way of actual
tangible history left from the early days of the Jihad.  While I was present for
a large portion of it, even my carefully kept notes were lost in an accident,
and I only have the memories of myself and others to rely on.  The problem with
memory, especially in a literate culture, is that it tends to become myth rather
easily, and the distortions from mythologizing something make it harder to make
out what the original truth was.

But two facts seem most important in the lead up to the Jihad. First, the Wyrm
seems to have decided that the best way to bring about his Purple Kingdom was to
reveal himself to the world -- not as the slobbering form of incarnate evil that
we know him to be, but a sugary-sweet children's television show character.  In
some ways, this choice of guise turned out to be lucky for us, because it has
helped us keep our War out of sight of the mundanes, but on the other hand, it
also turned out to be unlucky because the primary audience for a children's
television show is the young and impressionable minds of children.

Soon after B'harnee's show went on the air, sometime in the mid to late
eighties, a man whom we Jihaddi would come to know as the High Prophet (pez be
unto him), but who at the time was nothing more than your ordinary construction
worker, would begin to have the first in a sequence of dreams and visions about
some evil loose on the world that would destroy humanity if it wasn't checked.
At first, he wasn't sure about these visions -- would you have been if you were
living a perfectly ordinary mundane life and you started getting odd visions
about a kid's television show character being the incarnation of pure evil?

Luckily for the Jihad and the fate of humanity, the High Prophet was willing to
put up with these visions, and as they continued unabated, he began searching
out others who might be having these same visions.  It was made easier by the
fact that his visions seemed to want him to search out these others.  Over the
course of a couple years, he found them all -- a priest, a soldier, a doctor, a
teacher, a physics Ph.D student, and an airline pilot, and from that humble
Seven came the organization that you are all a part of today.

In 1990, after several meetings with those others who shared his visions, the
High Prophet uttered what we know today as the Three-fold Truth, which included
the statement I gave you at the beginning of this speech.  With the arrival of
the Truth, he was finally able to call forth that most noble undertaking.  He
called a Jihad -- a Jihad against the Evil that had come to torment Earth.  The
War began at this point, the same War you and I are fighting today.

The early days were a pretty heady time to be part of the Jihad.  Missions were
taken on solo and in pairs.  None of the structure that the current Jihad relies
on to be able to function existed at that point, and people were pretty much
cast to the wind, doing simply what had to be done in those days.  Granted, the
opposition forces weren't very well organized at that point either, which was
probably the one saving grace for the nascent Jihad.

The Studio Four
In late 1991, an event happened that nearly broke the cover of the young Jihad,
which would have destroyed the Cause.  I mean, before, crimes were up as Jihaddi
would take on minions of B'harnee in less than subtle places and fashions, but
this event was different because of the scale of the crime. Four young recruits
to the Jihad decided that it was time to take the War to the enemy's lair.  They
decided that they would break into the studios in which B'harnee's show was
filmed and find some way to make it impossible for B'harnee to continue to tape
the show.

Unfortunately for them, the cops showed up at the studio halfway through this
rampage and the four people there were busted for breaking and entering and
malicious vandalism.  This would not have been so bad for the Jihad if one of
the people responsible for the job hadn't broken down and confessed exactly why
and what he was doing there.

This event was, as you can imagine, front page news.  Especially when it at
first seemed as if the young man who had said this was turning out to be
perfectly sane in all ways other than his rather interesting delusion.  The
other thing is that he knew a few names, and there was some pressure coming down
from the other side to book these four away, as well as anybody else who might
have been associated with the studio ransacking.

The very first Jihad cleanup crews were used on this mess.  Some of us took
spots as reporters to swing the reporting of this mess, and even one daring
Jihaddi somehow managed to get himself put on the psychiatric team evaluating
the Studio Four, as they became known.

There was lots of debate among Jihaddi in those days about what to do with these
four young men, as it looked like charges were going to be filed by our
Opposition, hoping to strike a blow for their side against us.  Finally, it was
decided that we unfortunately had to abandon these people for the greater sake
of keeping the War going.  We also had to make it so that in the future, when
the Wyrm and his minions tried to accuse us of existing, that it would make them
look insane.

To accomplish this, we added notes to the file of the one that told everything
that he was known to have schizophrenic breaks with reality, and we let the
others know that if they so chose to join their friend in his testimony that we
would do the same thing to them.  The other three thankfully chose to be
sentenced rather than make things any harder for the rest of the Jihad, and the
crisis of exposure was over.

But it became clear that the ad hoc structure that we had formed to run the
Jihad was quickly being outpaced by the membership growth, and a couple of our
founders had expressed an interest in returning to a so-called 'normal' life.
It was decided that even though the High Prophet had done much good for the
world by uttering the three-fold truth and calling a Jihad, it was time for a
different way of organizing ourselves.

Before any of this work in rearranging could be done, though, the High Prophet
and several of his closest associates turned up missing and could not be found
anywhere.  What exactly happened, we still do not know.  Some of the more
religious members thought that the High Prophet and the other missing had
ascended for their role in bringing about the Jihad, some of the more pragmatic
thought that they were simply tired of inter-Jihad politics in the wake of the
Studio Four and thus had simply wandered back into Mundane life without telling
anybody, and some of the more conspiracy minded held that the Wyrm and his
allies had captured them in a ploy to destroy the Jihad once and for all.

If it truly was the latter, it didn't work.  From the original Seven, we still
had Lord Owsen and the Mystic Mongoose around. While neither of them wanted
to be the man in charge -- they had seen the stress on their old friend during
the bleak winter when it looked like we were about to lose everything -- they
did an admirable job holding the Jihad together until somebody else could be
found to lead it.

The Rise of the Jihad Autonomous Organization
To explain how the Jihad moved to this next stage, I have to step back a little
and tell you of the rise of the proto-JAO.  In the wake of the Studio Four
incident, some Jihaddi thought it was wise to band together in groups and work
towards the destruction of the Wyrm in that fashion.  A group of people had
access to more resources than a single person.  Also, the Jihad had learned the
value of cleaning up after itself, and it was easier to be able to plan missions
knowing that you both had a cleanup crew in place and that the cleanup crew was
your friends. It also allowed for some flexibility for passing orders from the
top to the bottom.

A lot of these organizations were set up around a similar geographical area,
most notorious being the band clustered in and around Texas A&M University,
which produced a number of well-known Jihaddi, and another band clustered around
the upper Midwest that later became known as MAUL.

But a couple of these proto-JAOs took a slightly different approach to
maintaining a membership base.  First of all, they allowed anybody to become
part of their organization, and made it less tied to geography.  Second, they
picked somewhat of an overarching theme for their membership to consider
themselves part of.  These two proto-JAOs called themselves, respectively, the
Dobermans and the Resurgent Templar, and are the forerunners of today's Doberman
Empire and TRES Corps.

It should be noted that some of this ability to transcend geography was in part
due to the introduction of the JihadLinker.  Before, when one had to rely on
ordinary methods of communication, there was less ability to coordinate what was
going on with your fellow members when you had to rely on the plain old
telephone service.  But even at the basic stage, where 'Linkers acted as
glorified pagers, there was a tremendous freeing of resources, and it allowed
for the non-geographically linked proto-JAO to come into ascendance.

All of this leads to the leadership race which Owsen and Mongoose were
overseeing, since neither of them wanted the job.  And although they looked at
the geographically based proto-JAOs, they took a longer and harder look at the
two that were managing to transcend geography.  Of the two, the Dobermans were
both older and larger, and their leader, Fleet Commander Serbeus, seemed the
wisest choice to lead the entire Jihad.

Thus Owsen and Mongoose named Serbeus the new leader of the Jihad.  Serbeus,
besides leading the Dobermans, was also somewhat a student of classics, and his
first act was to rename his office to the Office of the Praetor, perhaps to
confer upon the Jihad the majesty of the Romans.  Soon after he was
named Praetor, Serbeus would add the appellate "Empire" onto the name of his
organization. It is pretty much from the addition of this appellate that we
declare the first fully fledged Jihad Autonomous Organization, the Glorious
Doberman Empire.

The entire period I refer to here is now referred to as the Golden Age, though
as a member throughout most of the period in question, I fail to see what is so
Golden about it.  It was most definitely not as idyllic as later Jihaddi would
make it out to be.  This is probably partially due to the tendency of memory to
make myth, and the Golden Age is a time that has fled into myth.  We have a
little better idea of what was going on in the next period of history -- a point
in time that a current Jihaddi might actually recognize what's going on, a time
of the first JAOs and the first attempts at working globally.

We have already discussed somewhat the rise of the Doberman Empire, so let us
concentrate on what other major JAOs existed about this point.  Those are, in no
special order, TRES Corps, the Midwesterners Against Ugly Lizards (MAUL), the
Blood Jihad, and the Legion of Doom.  Also, at about this time we had the rise
of a couple small R&D shops and the emergence of the Maenads, both of which had
an interesting effect on the Jihad as we know it.

Going Global
As I mentioned, this is the first period where we were able to work beyond the
borders of the United States in any coherent way, which is good because the Wyrm
was starting to eye territory elsewhere.  One of our first missions out of
country was the Montreal Incursion in 1992, which is important for two reasons
-- it was one of our first missions outside the boundaries of the United States
and it was the first time we met a certain sponge minion by the name of Mikey
Crawford.

However, in late 1993 and early 1994, not only was the Jihad starting to attract
recruits from other continents (most notably Europe and Australia), but we began
having the manpower to stage skirmishes in those countries.  Unfortunately for
us, our Adversary had found his way to England and Australia before us, and got
somewhat of a head start in working his evils on those populations.  Thus, we
had to make up for lost time.  Probably our worst blow came in 1994 when the
Wyrm announced that he would be translating all his shows into Spanish,
French, German and Portuguese which meant that his influence would be spread
that much further.  With this threat, some of the JAOs tried to boost their
capabilities to respond into Europe and Latin America, the two biggest targets
for the Wyrm.

The Secret War had grown from something ran out of a few American cities into
this worldwide response team in just under four years.  Divine interference or
manifest destiny aside, this accomplishment is something for which the Jihad
should be proud.  The Doberman Empire was conducting operations in Australia,
Europe, Brazil, the United States and Canada simultaneously in the Spring of
1994.  The Doberman Empire was definitively the best equipped and largest
fighting force the Jihad had ever fielded, and they were very good at their job.
We'll come back to this thought in a second.

TRES Corps, which had emerged under the leadership of Lord Owsen from the
struggling band of the Resurgent Templar, was less able to be involved in world
straddling missions of great importance, so they decided to concentrate instead
on being able to respond quickly to any threat in North America, and having good
intelligence in place to be able to respond to those threats.  When the DE
picked up a formerly independent R&D shop known as WEDJEE, then headed by a man
known simply as Captain Midnight, but who would later become Fleet Commander
Samhain of the DE, TRES responded by starting their own in house R&D group that
would gain the appellation of Zeta.

The Blood Jihad, from its very founding by a couple of the oddest people to
ever grace the Jihad's presence -- a pair known as Arsenal the Lone Warrior and
Uplink -- had an interest in both space and R&D, and soon became known as the
place in the Jihad to go if you had an interest in the mix of those two
subjects.  We are still not entirely sure how they managed to get their stuff in
orbit, or just how they managed to establish a moon base without anybody
noticing, but somehow they did.  There are guesses that there were deals made
with Russia, who, for cold hard American greenbacks, was willing to pass off
Blood Jihad launches as their launches, but this is a subject upon which the
Blood Jihad High Command kept utmost silence.

The Legion of Doom prided themselves on their special operations skills.  They
also prided themselves on being one of the more extensively cross-trained troops
in the Jihad.  If you needed somebody who had an obscure skill-set, chances were
that they called the Legion home.  The Legion also excelled at despongification
techniques, being one of the first groups to establish a division specifically
devoted to studying ways to clean Barney's influence out of people's heads.
They worked in small groups, and were masters of striking hard and fast -- and
were also among the first JAOs to really excel in cleaning up after themselves.

Lastly, there were the Midwesterners Against Ugly Lizards, or MAUL.  The thing
to keep in mind about MAUL is that they were the only JAO to survive from the
time in the Jihad when people banded together because of their geography. Thus,
they had a very strong association that the Midwestern United States was theirs
to protect.  The other interesting thing about MAUL is that they refuse to use
anything better than current technology in the mundane world -- they really like
their tanks -- and they don't have much clue in the meaning of the word
'subtle'.  Thankfully for the Jihad, the few times MAUL has gotten on the wrong
side of the cameras, they've been taken for the United States military.

And that is a brief look at how the Jihad stood going into the summer of 1994,
unafraid of the world, taking on the HellWyrm wherever he might strike, and
thinking that nothing could seriously harm them.  They had managed to avoid the
news cameras for years, and perhaps it was hubris that caused the next big
crisis of exposure.  It started with a lost prototype JihadLinker.

Mr. Crawford's Linker
A Canadian member of the Doberman Empire was doing some normal work in Montreal
when he put the prototype JihadLinker he was entrusted with in his bag and then
failed to zip the pouch he had put his Linker in.  Of course, as he was
wandering through Montreal, the Linker fell out of his bag.

Normally, this wouldn't have been a big problem, since Linkers were arcane
things to use back in the day, but this was a new prototype with the simple to
use interface and the bright shiny green Send button.  It was simple enough that
a Spongie could figure out how to work it, and I suppose you can guess what
happened.

Yes, the prototype JihadLinker ended up in the hands of Mikey Crawford.  Now
Mikey was already starting to gain a reputation among both Jihaddi and his
fellow spongies as a fellow who always walked away from Jihad operations, ever
since his first appearance in the Montreal Incursion a few years back.  Mikey
typed out something along the lines of "hI al yu evul juhadee" and punched the
shiny green send button.  Little did any of us know at the time that this one
action of Mikey's (somehow sent to the 'entire Jihad' distribution list) would
very nearly lead to the end of the Jihad.

Mikey's message triggered a flurry of activity as to where a spongie had gotten
ahold of a JihadLinker, and how a spongie would have been able to figure out the
arcane interface.  Within a day, the Dobermensch who had lost the linker
realized what had happened and pulled out his old one, only to find a flurry of
activity over a sponge minion on the link.  Wisely, or maybe not so wisely, he
kept quiet for a few more days before he reported the prototype missing.

One mystery was solved when the prototype was reported missing -- the question
of just how a Sponge Minion figured out how to use a Linker.  The prototype was
much easier to use.  However, there was the bad news that it was a prototype and
thus contained the latest encryption schemes and other gadgetry that we didn't
really want in the hands of the enemy.  Thus, the Doberman Command decided that
they would do an all-out raid on the McGill campus (which is where the signal
from the Linker was pretty consistently coming from -- Mikey had decided that
talking to Jihaddi was a pretty fun activity and was pretty consistently sending
messages extolling the virtues of the Wyrm) and take the Linker back from the
spongie who had it by force.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of Dobermensch who wanted to participate in this
raid since they were rather angry at the Sponge Minion who was polluting their
link.  Serbeus probably both invited too many soldiers along and assigned the
wrong type of mission.  This was definitely a case where a snatch and grab
carried out by a small team would have been best, but Serbeus decided that Mikey
was probably hiding in a Purple Forces safe house, which would mean rather a lot
of manpower to take out.

Thus a large contingent of heavily armed Dobermensch were ordered around the
McGill campus one sunny June morning and ordered not to fall back until the
Purple Forces base was found and cleaned out, and especially not to return until
the prototype was back in their hands.  Not only did the mission fail as Mikey
Crawford was not where we expected him to be at that time, but two Dobermensch
were less careful than they probably should have been as to whose face they
waved their weapons into.  The civilian couple they mistook for spongies were
actually undercover RCMP officers who didn't really appreciate having illegal
weaponry waved in their faces.

To be fair to the two Dobermensch who were not exactly as careful as they should
have been, most of the invading force weren't exactly careful as to who they
were frightening -- enough so that several Canadian papers were screaming about
the attack on McGill, even the Albertan ones.  But the two Dobermensch caught
by the RCMP were in a lot more trouble than their buddies, and the trouble
doubled when the RCMP discovered that both of the terrorists they arrested
carried American passports.

This fact, as you can probably imagine, caused quite an international uproar.
Canada was not pleased with the prospect of terrorists slipping over the border
to conduct operations against Canadian citizens, and there was some diplomatic
tension between Ottawa and Washington over the whole matter.

Inside the Jihad, things were even more tense than they were in the relationship
between the United States and Canada.  There were two reasons for this -- first,
if either of the two that were caught in Canada decided to speak about what
exactly they were up to, the entirety of the War would be put at risk.  Plus,
there was a lot of finger pointing going on over whether MAUL (who had
explicitly refused to jump in when the Dobermans realized they were in some
trouble, stating a lack of jurisdiction) and TRES (who came up with some
intelligence that Mikey may not be where the Doberman Empire expected him to be,
but couldn't get anybody in Doberman High Command to listen) should have tried
harder to stop the events that lead to crisis.

As the summer drug on, we found that Canada was willing to drop the book on the
two caught Dobermensch, which rather worried many of the higher ups in the
Jihad, for all it would take is one person spilling the beans.  Luckily, the two
had learned something from earlier history, and they knew to keep their mouths
shut as to why exactly they had been at McGill with heavy arms.  Nobody, by some
freak miracle, had been killed at McGill, nor had anybody been shot.  After some
negotiation with liaisons in State, we managed to get the two a very good
lawyer, and they were summarily found guilty, given a suspended sentence, and
escorted out of the country with word that they were no longer welcome in
Canada.

While the diplomatic crisis between the US and Canada was resolved upon the
return of the two Dobermensch to the United States, the internal repercussions
of this raid would resonate through the Jihad for months to come.  The biggest
of course, was Serbeus' retirement from both the Doberman Empire and from the
Office of the Praetor.  As his replacement in both, he named Commander Augustus,
the one man in the DE high command that had recommended not going after Mikey
Crawford in Montreal.

Augustus' first move was to start an inquiry into how the McGill raid could have
occurred and suggestions as for how to keep it from happening again.  His second
was to court martial the two Dobermensch who had been unlucky enough to get
caught, but to make the point very clear, he also court martialed their
commander.  Augustus was quoted at the time that "I want it to be known that
this war is first and foremost a SECRET, and officers within the Jihad are to
conduct themselves with that thought above all others."

The task force on how to prevent this sort of incident from happening again came
up with a few very good solutions.  Unfortunately, they also came up with one
solution that would cause problems down the line.  Among the good solutions they
had is that we need to strengthen the Liason program, which was working well in
the US, to other countries in which there is a large chance the Jihad would
conduct major operations -- and first and foremost on that list is Canada.

Second, it was recommended that there be spin teams in place to clean up after
these sorts of messes.  While every Jihaddi I've talked to hates spin duty, most
of them acknowledge the importance of the job in keeping the world ignorant of
their war.  They know quite well that while they would love to expose their
Enemy for who he is, this is impossible, and that it takes just one piece of
stupidity for their own cover to be blown.

Third, there was a few hints that the disaster at McGill could have been
prevented if either TRES Intel had been able to get their findings to the DE or
if MAUL had gone ahead and provided the backup requested. Thus, Augustus thought
it might be all well and good to weaken the 'autonomous' part of the acronym
'Jihad Autonomous Organization'.  It seemed like a good solution to stop a
McGill crisis from occurring again, but the ramifications of this would soon
play out for the Jihad.  We'll come back to this in a minute.

Rising Stars
I had meant to talk to you about two groups that would play an important part in
the Jihad -- the rise of the small R&D shop and the Maenads of the Holy Albino.
Both reach their heyday in the period between the Second Great Exposure and the
rise of Serp, so it is instructive to talk about them.

I have previously mentioned WEDJEE, the incorporation of which into the Doberman
Empire gave Fleet Commander Samhain his original DE rank.  I have also mentioned
TRES Corps' Zeta Squadron, their own in-house group.  The Blood Jihad also had
their own R&D crew, known as the Skunk Works.  The last of the independent R&D
shops, a small operation known as the Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow, was
started by my esteemed colleague, Professor Malaclypse.

The independent and JAO based R&D shops play an important part in the rise of
the Jihad.  It dates roughly between the beginning of 1993, when WEDJEE was
first formed to Operation WorldWalk in March of 1996, a good three years, and
those three years are best summed up by Professor Malaclypse when he once
characterized them as 'The Age of Amuck Scientists'.

It was, from what I understand not being a techie-type myself, a wonderful time
to have been a Jihad scientist or technician, for ideas were springing forth
from all corners.  Sometimes their inventions were useful -- these were the
folks who originated your JihadLinkers, among other things.  But sometimes, they
were just silly -- Admiral Keith's Mathattackius gun is probably the example
you're most familiar with, but there were other atrocities against science
committed in this period.

Of course, the most vibrant period for the techies is the Fall of 1994 to
Worldwalk, in which thousands of oddities were produced randomly for the Jihad,
some as desponge tools, some as sheer 'what the hell were you thinking?'
curiosities.  It should be noted that the brilliant minds most associated with
their respective JAOs R&D shop -- Admiral Svartalf of TRES, Professor Malaclypse
of VR, and Centurion Ceberus and Fleet Commander Samhain of the DE -- all got
their starts during this time period.

As our opponent has no appreciable R&D shop whatsoever, but amazing adaptability
to take on whatever we throw at them -- or in the case of the Lyrans, to
sometimes transcend it -- our R&D shops have been one of the things that have
kept us in the war for nearly as long as we have been fighting it.  Even if they
do have the occasional flight of fancy that leads to some atrocity against
science.

Oddly enough, the other group that came to the forefront in the halcyon days of
1994 were the Maenads of the Holy Albino, a group that is nearly as
diametrically opposite the pursuit of Science as you can get and still be in the
Jihad.  I say this with some tongue in cheek, of course, as some of our best R&D
minds are also Maenads, but the mysticism of the Maenads seems to collide in
interesting fashions with the focus on science to fight the HellWyrm that the
Jihad seems to have.

Thus, it is interesting to note that at the same time the High Prophet was
beginning to have his first inklings of visions, so was the Chosen of the Holy
Albino, as the story goes.  For six years, they hunted the Wyrm and the Lyrans
on their own terms, but as time progressed, they found themselves running into
more and more Jihaddi.  As there were few in the Maenads, they realized an
alliance would be beneficial and Windigo the Feral, aka now-Commander Inagei of
the DE, led the Maenads in making themselves known to the Jihad.

Since then, they've been violent but effective warriors for the Jihad, and
whether their mysticism is correct and they are selected by the Holy Albino, or
if the skeptics are correct and they are simply picked by Windigo, it is mostly
considered an honour to be invited to join the Maenads.

The Rise and Fall of Serp the Feral
Part of the reason I bring this up is that the Maenads play an important part in
the next big event of the Jihad, which is the rise and fall of Praetor Serp.
Serp was his Maenad name; his full DE rank and title was Centurion Anhur
Sparticus Hades.  He was, at the time of his induction into the DE in December
1993, one of the Jihad's brightest young stars.  He had served a good proportion
of time as a mercenary, hopping between African bush wars before finding out
about and joining up with the Jihad.

Once he was in, he demonstrated his knowledge of tactics to Fleet Commander
Serbeus, and so impressed the Fleet Commander with his knowledge that Serbeus
gave him one of the fastest promotions to Warrior that we have on record in the
DE.  He performed ably in all the missions he was assigned, and managed to bring
back all his men from every mission.  His biggest coup was during the Second
Great Exposure, when his command was the only one to even somewhat succeed on
the mission. They surrounded the safe house, entered, found it empty, and
retreated.  While this was technically in violation of his orders, it impressed
both Serbeus and Augustus at his responsibility in a situation where everybody
was losing their head, and his promotion to Centurion was both the last act by
Serbeus in the DE, and confirmed as the first DE act of Augustus.

He continued serving as Augustus' tactician through the fall and winter of 1994
and doing a very good job at it.  His promotion to Commander seemed all but
assured once a spot was opened for him, as his only real competition he had was
fellow-DE Centurion Manticore, and Serp was sure that his tactics and strategy
would win him the position over an R&D geek.  Besides, that very same winter, he
had been inducted into the Maenads, something which Centurion Manticore had not
managed to do.

While he was biding his time, waiting for the promotion he knew that he so
richly deserved, his tactics skills were often requested for use by other JAOs,
and so he would often go to help them do mission planning.  Remember, the task
force studying the McGill Incident had recommended that JAOs be a little less
autonomous, and part of that was involving high ranking officers of other JAOs
in your battle planning.  Thus, Serp found himself well-recognized throughout
the entire Jihad.

In May of 1995, Augustus, proud of the work he had done for the Jihad, decided
that it was time that he stepped down and went into a well-earned retirement.
But before he did that, he announced that there would be a Jihad-wide election
for the Praetor position in June, after he stepped down.  The second thing he
did was name a new Doberman Empire Fleet Commander.  Much to the shock of Serp,
his bitter rival, Centurion Manticore, was named Fleet Commander Samhain.

Worse, when Serp angrily brought up the unfairness of it all to Augustus,
Augustus told Serp the reasons he had picked Manticore over him -- mainly that
Manticore was much more competent at the two tasks of dealing with lower-ranked
officers and having a head for details that was important to the position of
Fleet Commander.  Augustus also made a point of telling him that if one of the
two Commander slots had opened up, that he would have been the man, but that
Augustus honestly believed that he wouldn't make a very good Fleet Commander.

Serp thought for a while about everything Augustus had said, and then decided
that he would get the one position that could tell even the Fleet Commander of
the Doberman Empire what to do -- Praetor of the Jihad.

We now know that if Augustus had kept Serbeus' tradition of naming his
successor, we probably would have never had Praetor Serp in the first place, as
Augustus probably would have named either Samhain or TRES Admiral J. Foxglov to
the position.  But Augustus had a quiet love for democracy, and he honestly
believed it was truly the best way for the Jihad to pick its leaders.
Unfortunately, the problem with democracy is that everybody gets to pick, and
people often end up with exactly the government that they deserve.  Such was the
case here, as Serp was well known to the lower ranks in other JAOs, and they
went overwhelmingly for him, despite the DE not really voting for him at all.
Perhaps this should have been a warning sign to the rest of us that Serp may not
have been the wisest choice.  However, we were pleased that we made it through
an election and we had our first elected Praetor, and Serp looked as if he would
mend fences with his commanding officer as he named Samhain his adjunct.

And at first all seemed well with Serp.  He was genuinely liked by the lower
ranks, and he started a number of projects to make inroads on the HellWyrm.
Some of these were massive multi-JAO projects, and the practice in collaborating
would come in handy sooner than anybody imagined possible.  The assault had the
HellWyrm retreating.  For the first time it felt as if the Jihad had the upper
hand against their Opposition, by what seemed to be their daring Praetor's
doing.

Serp had a few good ideas as well.  He was the first to think of the monetary
aspects of running a huge war, and the International Jihad Treasury, the bane of
Jihaddi everywhere, was one of his innovations.  He was consistently looking for
ways to make money for the Jihad as well as fighting the Wyrm, and given his
background, he hit upon the obvious solution -- sending Jihaddi as mercenaries
into the wars he had once fought in.

Unfortunately for Serp, an angry and violent reaction to this plan came from his
commanding officer, the man he thought he could control by becoming Praetor of
the Jihad.  Samhain was so angry with Serp that he resigned his position as
adjunct right then and there and blistered Serp's ears with invective that none
had ever heard from Samhain before or since.  Instead of taking no for an
answer, Serp got the bright idea to try to oust his old rival from the Fleet
Commander's chair in the DE so that he could take the job.  The month of
December was spent in a Jihad version of chicken -- both Serp and Samhain trying
to see who would blink first.

As the rest of the Jihad began to understand why Serp and Samhain were in this
bitter feud, it was obvious which side they began to side with.  None of them
thought that sending their JAO's soldiers to fight in wars that didn't even have
to do with the HellWyrm, whether it was for money or whatever else they could
get in trade, was a very good idea.  One by one, all the other leaders sided
with Samhain.  Serp, of course, tried to excommunicate all of them, but before
he could name replacements, Windigo asked for him to come to her office for them
to talk.

Serp walked into the office with Windigo, the door closed, there was the sound
of raised voices, and then the door opened and Windigo was the only one to walk
out.  An inspection of the office behind her showed nobody in the room and no
signs of the Praetor.  The only comment anybody could get out of Windigo was,
"Offended me, he did," and to this day we have no idea what happened to Serp
except that he was gone.

It was January 1st, 1996. In a few days, the high command of all the JAOs got
together and decided that they would first not repeat Augustus' failed
experiment in democracy, and they unanimously named Admiral J. Foxglov of TRES
Corps their new Praetor.  That was the beginning of the year that seriously got
Weird.

Operation Worldwalk
Why was it weird?  Well, in March of that year, the HellWyrm decided he was
tired of this tickytack war of attrition with us and decided to bring it all to
an end by collapsing all the known universes into one that he figured would be
more favorable to him and not to us.  He planned to accomplish this by the
means of a device that would do this collapsing of timelines.  Our attempt to
stop this fiendish plot is recorded in Jihad archives as Operation WorldWalk.

I will warn you, before I head into this section, that some of the stuff I am
about to describe may not make much sense, but I assure you that the events I
will attempt to relate to you really happened, and wasn't the result of the
entire Jihad taking a hit of LSD all at the same time -- even if that's what it
felt like at the time.

It was a sunny day in mid-March when things went haywire suddenly and without
warning.  I know most of you have probably seen the Matrix, when Neo experiences
his bout of deja-vu, and that is how the first few permutations felt, as if we'd
seen this before.  But not realizing what we were up against yet, the Jihad
dismissed these odd cases of deja-vu as nothing more than deja-vu and continued
in our normal routines, which turned out to be the dumbest thing we could have
done.

Since the whole episode is difficult to describe in any meaningful way in the
third person, let me tell you what I was up to, since I found myself drug into
this war.  At the time, I was a young professor at Indiana University in
Bloomington, and I had agreed to spend my spring break at the Doberman Empire
headquarters so that I could talk to their young recruits in much the fashion
I'm speaking to you all now.  I had started out early in the morning and made
good time, and arrived at DE HQ about two hours before the first queasy feelings
of deja-vu were reported.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones.  DE HQ, along with several of the other
Jihad bases had, in the age of Amuck Scientists, installed some equipment that
nobody was really sure was going to work exactly as predicted.  I suppose
there's something to be said for preparedness, as the gadgets worked exactly as
they were supposed, isolating Jihad bases in the storm the Wyrm had cooked up.

What was that storm?  Well, none of us had a clue what was going on except for
the odd senses of deja-vu until suppertime.  I recall having just sat down with
Fleet Commander Samhain and the rest of the DE command staff when a young
Dobermensch came running into the room with the news that they were getting a
transmission from the Wyrm.  We were eating in a private dining room, so I was
privileged to watch said transmission.  It was typical Wyrm insipidness, but the
plans he detailed silenced the entire command staff of a JAO for five whole
minutes.

What did he say?  Well, he told us about his shiny new machine, that he had
buried in New Mexico, and he told us that he was in the process of getting us
out of his hair for the last time, because his shiny new machine was in the
process of compacting the multiverse into something that would be more tractable
to him than this one was.  And he very specifically mentioned that there was
nothing we could do to stop the Jihad from becoming obsolete and if we were to
try, it would do no good, so we shouldn't even bother to stop him, and we might
as well live our last few days in peace.

It was hubris at its finest, but as I said, the statement stunned the entire
command staff of the DE, and I'm sure it had the same effect on other command
staffs throughout the Jihad.  A frantic teleconference was arranged by the
Praetor, and the entire high commands of all the JAOs was frantically called
together.  It was a relief to see so many of the highest-ranking Jihaddi still
around, but worse news was to follow when a couple folks reported that they
hadn't heard from folks who had been sent out on missions over the last few days
and hadn't been under cover when the Wyrm flipped his machine on.

You see, when the Wyrm announced his plans to contract the entire multiverse
into one universe that was much more favorable to him, he released a string of
reality quakes.  The first few were subtle, hence those odd sensations of deja-
vu folks had been reporting all afternoon, but they were about to grow in both
number and magnitude.  Somehow, by sheer luck and mad geniuses doing the
science, the majority of the Jihad's bases had been equipped with dampeners that
reduced the effect of these reality quakes on the folks inside.  We didn't
really know what would happen when we sent folks out into it, but of course we
had to give it a try.

The boys in both TRES and Doberman Intelligence placed the signal around
Carlsbad, New Mexico, probably somewhere in the massive cave systems nearby.  So
now the Jihad had an agonizing decision to make.  Did they send people out in
that time storm knowing that they might not be able to make it through, or did
they hope the collapse of timelines would play out in their favor?  The Jihad,
being who we are, chose to go with the slight glimmer of hope, and organized a
quick inter-JAO exploratory team to meet up near Carlsbad and spelunk into the
caverns from there.  Warrior Ashur Galand (now Centurion Ceberus) was chosen to
head this last ditch effort at stopping the Wyrm's evil plans, and they were
sent out into the time stream with the hopes of the entire Jihad behind them.

Those who fought in this force tell me it was quite the experience, as they
moved across country trying to get to where they belonged, with scenery changing
in odd fashions and even their very transportation and clothing changing
depending on which quake was rattling through.  The scariest part, some of them
told me, was when people would change or disappear in front of their eyes, as
one time stream made it more likely that one person would be there instead of
another.  Somehow they fought through the geography and the quakes and what
appeared to them as quite the acid trip and somehow made it in one piece.  One
battle later, in which the opponents kept changing along with everything else,
they were filing into the system of caves which is Carlsbad Caverns, desperately
searching for the machine that was doing this all.

Now the thing was, as they had been making their way to Carlsbad, the machine
had been speeding up as it had less and less universes to incorporate into the
flattening, so the rest of us were seeing things outside as careening from
universe to universe to universe in a rather quick fashion, almost like flipping
through a TV set with millions of channels.  Only it was the universe, and we
had no control over the rate of channel-flipping.

The exploratory team found the Wyrm in the deepest cavern at Carlsbad, watching
his machine near the end of its task, and gleefully celebrating that the Jihad
would not pull a rabbit out of its hat this time and stop his nefarious plans.
Unfortunately for the Wyrm, Galand and his company stepped out of the shadows
just as he finished gloating to whoever could hear.

In the fiercest battle the Jihad had ever fought to that time, the machine was
destroyed just before it could finish crushing the universes into one, and
B'harnee found himself temporarily inconvenienced.  One of the more interesting
unsubstantiated pieces of this battle was the conviction of some of the Jihaddi
present that the Wyrm had killed Warrior Galand, but that Galand had somehow
come back to life and returned the favor to the Wyrm.  Reports like these were
dismissed as the remnants of the acid trip like nature of the expedition, but it
gives you an idea of the oddity of both WorldWalk and the Jihad.

When Galand destroyed the machine, it unleashed one last massive reality quake
that put things mostly back the way they were as the timeline tried to
heal itself from the damage the Wyrm had done.  It wasn't perfect, though, as
TRES Corps immediately reported in surprise that they had a small space fleet
and Space Station Ithaca, and the Blood Jihad reported that Luna Base had
somehow gotten larger.

Plus, there were many Jihaddi who had been in the world when the quakes had
occurred and hadn't been heard from since.  Occasionally, you'll find some older
Jihaddi recognizing a friend who had battled next to him prior to WorldWalk only
to go missing in the chaos that was WorldWalk, only to later show up rejoining
the Jihad but not remembering their prior Jihad career, which causes a lot of
awkwardness on both sides. Thus, if you get recognized by an old-timer, be kind
to him or her, for you might be their long lost friend -- even if you don't
remember it.

After the psychedelic mess that was Operation WorldWalk came the aftermath.
Most folks were fairly sure it the Wyrm's attempt to find a more tractable
universe, just as he said when he was gloating to the Jihad's various
commanders, but some of the more conspiracy-minded among the Jihad suggested it
was the Lyrans attempting to make an end run around humanity.  The collapse of
the timelines might have simply caused us no longer to exist, and since the
Lyrans want to see us dead, this would have worked just as well as killing us
off.

It was time for a break from the Wyrm and it felt nice to know that Galand had
iced him for us so that we could concern ourselves with preparing for the next
war.  For some reason, the Legion of Doom decided that they had to get in space
now, and threw all their resources into creating a space fleet.  The rest of the
Jihad went on training and drilling, proud of how well they'd come out of
WorldWalk, and thinking there would be absolutely no way the Wyrm could top what
he'd done.

So we went through the spring and summer of 1996, blissfully content that we
could take anything the HellWyrm could throw at us.  Thus, it came as a horrible
surprise when we found ourselves under attack once again in mid-August -- and
this time the HellWyrm had found allies.  On top of it, the Wyrm, with help from
the Lyrans, had put some sort of mystical spell on the top dozen of our leaders
at the time that made it nearly impossible for them to hide.

Operation Phoenix
For the second time in the year, we were taken by surprise by the enemy.  When
the Wyrm returned to earth with his new allies -- an alien race known simply as
the X'hirjq -- we were nearly sunk in the war before we started.  The X'hirjq
seemed impossible to beat because they were more technologically inclined and
they were stronger, faster, and more adept than the humans they were fighting.
And to make things worse, they had joined up with the Wyrm of their own free
will, which meant that they had lost none of their faculties to spongification.
Plus, at the time, we didn't know that the Wyrm had cast his tracking spell, so
they kept popping up around the most important Jihaddi.  It is a surprise that
as many of them survived Phoenix as did, given the focused attention upon them.

It has been said that Jihaddi do not know the meaning of the word 'quit'.  At
the worst, when it looked as if many had been killed in their attempts to fight
the X'hirjq, the Jihad still picked up and continued to fight ever onward.
However, the losses racked up all over -- in Scotland, in Atlanta, in
Louisville, in Iowa, in San Juan, in space, all over the place, the Jihad was
losing and losing bad.  It was a bad time to be on the home team.  Somehow,
despite all this, the Jihad kept fighting, sacrificing everything it could in a
desperate attempt to make the impossible happen.

One of the most notable sacrifices made in the War Against the X'hirjq was that
of Admiral Michael Davis and Captain Patrick Stewart of the Blood Jihad, and all
the crew of their ships _Lexington_ and _Defiance_.  In the middle of the war,
when it looked as if all hope were lost, the two ordered their fighters to do as
much damage to the X'hirjq mothership as possible.  Then, when it looked like
they were about to be swatted, the two proceeded to make a kamikaze run on the
mothership with their own ships, killing everybody aboard both the _Lexington_
and the _Defiance_.  It had about as much effect in the long run as a gnat
colliding with an elephant, but for them even to attempt it showed the bravery
of these two men and the crew of their ships.

The turning point for the Jihad, however, was probably the battle for the new
TRES Corps headquarters starting September 10th, 1996.  It started much as many
of the other battles had -- very badly for the Jihad -- and got much worse
before it was all over.  The X'hirjq smartly sabotaged our communications medium
before they started the attack in earnest.  To make things even worse for the
Jihad, the weather, which had been sufficiently odd since the start of
WorldWalk, delivered a surprise blizzard to Colorado the same night the X'hirjq
and the HellWyrm decided to bear down and take out TRES HQ.

The morning of the tenth dawned overcast and cold, with heaps of snow on the
ground from the prior night's blizzard. It also looked like more snow was on the
way. The fighting started out on the highway, but the Jihaddi fighting were
pushed back towards the headquarters.  It did not look good for the Jihad, and
if the X'hirjq and the Wyrm were allowed to take TRES, the war would be over.
Surprisingly, then-Commodore Marburger showed his courage under fire by trying
his best to keep the Jihad fighting and just not fleeing against an overwhelming
show of strength by the opponent.  The day progressed with the blizzard dumping
more snow on the heads of those fighting, and the fight wore on.

About sundown, the Jihad managed to briefly turn things its way when it
unleashed the artillery it had on the B'harnate heavy infantry on the field and
a contingent of Dobermensch showed up to help spell the weary TRES soldiers who
had been battling all day, and this combined force finally finished off all
B'harnate troops on the field.  But the battle was still far from over.  The
next morning, the morning of September 11th, the X'hirjq took their spots and
fiercely began attacking the TRES and Doberman soldiers on the battlefield.  But
in a miracle, the blizzard broke, and the sun shined through on all the snow and
ice that had accumulated on the battlefield, and the X'hirjq put off their
attack plans until nightfall because they were blinded from the reflection of
the sun off the snow and ice.

The night of September eleventh, and the morning of September twelfth, the Jihad
contingent at TRES HQ fought as hard as they could, but there wasn't much they
could do against the tactical and numerical superiority of the X'hirjq.
Finally, the Jihaddi retreated back to the base itself, hoping that it could
hold against the mighty force advancing against them.  But the force overpowered
the Jihaddi even at the gates of the headquarters, the power blew, and all
was lost for the Jihad.

Except that the power had only flickered and not died, and when the power came
back up, the Jihad guns at the gates were able to finish off the last of the
X'hirjq.  The sun rose on the morning of September twelfth with the Jihad in
possession of the battle that turned the tide.  The battle for TRES HQ had
carried a costly price for even the victors, as a large contingent of Jihaddi
had perished trying to deliver a victory.  This battle still remains to this day
the costliest in Jihad history in the number of Jihaddi killed or injured in the
fighting.  It was, in all senses of the phrase, a Pyrrhic victory for the Jihad.

Strangely enough, three days later, many of the Jihad higher ups would fight
perhaps the oddest battle they'd ever fought.  They ended up fighting against
B'harnate friendly copies of themselves, and after our guys defeated them to a
man, we discovered that the X'hirjq had been conning both us and B'harnee.  We
discovered that the X'hirjq weren't here to destroy us, but that they were here
to test us.  They had only joined in an alliance with the Wyrm as a way to get
here and pull off this test because humanity meant something special in the
X'hirjq belief system.  So the bloodiest war the Jihad had ever fought was
pretty much for nothing.  Let me repeat that, nothing.  All the sacrifice, all
the bloodshed, all the fighting was for nothing more than a stupid test.  If
that doesn't make you angry...

In the end, the final toll was thousands of Jihaddi dead, thousands more
wounded, the Legion of Doom all but destroyed, the Blood Jihad nearly without a
command staff, the DE lost most of its worldwide bases, and TRES was forced to
rebuild a headquarters mostly leveled to the ground.  To make things even more
interesting, the X'hirjq had oh-so-helpfully blasted humanity with an
industrial-sized psychic blast, so that it would not remember the events of
Phoenix, which was good for us in one fashion because it meant that the War
would stay a secret, but combined with the events of Operation WorldWalk, it
meant quite a mess in terms of the psyches of the mundane world.

Given a disaster of this scale, one would expect that the Jihad would take a
large amount of downtime in order to rebuild, right?  Nothing is ever that
simple in the Jihad.

Operation Pacifica
In mid-October, roughly a month after the X'hirjq invasion, a young lieutenant
in TRES Corps who was helping get JihadNet back on its feet noticed an odd
analomy out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.	 Analomy seemed the best word,
because sometimes the structure would be there and sometimes it wouldn't, and
this seemed awfully odd.  So, he reported it to Admiral FoxGlov, who took an
interest in the analomy.

After closer investigation, it was confirmed that there was an island out in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean that was not connected to the Earth in any
significant fashion.  Not only that, but it was full of Sponge Minions and
Lyrans -- and in another shock, life signs that matched up with a Jihaddi who
was missing in action in Phoenix.

But before Admiral FoxGlov could report this to his higher ups -- Admiral
Marburger and Grand Admiral Owsen -- Owsen went missing in a fight with the Hell
Wyrm that Marburger witnessed.  Before Owsen was taken, he handed over the
Slayer and his pistols to Marburger, which meant that the one weapon that might
just be able to kill the Wyrm stayed in Jihad hands.  Shaken by this, Admiral
Marburger assumed the Grand Admiral's chair in TRES Corps -- only the second
Grand Admiral in that JAO ever -- and as his first action determined that TRES
would send an expeditionary force to the island.

However, since TRES didn't have a navy, he had to call in a favor.  Luckily for
the Jihad, the Doberman Empire maintained a small navy, and the Pacific branch
of the DE Navy, based in San Francisco, had seen very little damage from the
X'hirjq Invasion.  Nobody was really quite able to explain how San Francisco had
been rendered exempt from X'hirjq attacks, but explaining it took a back seat to
just being thankful that there was a naval fleet to transport them in the first
place.

So the Jihad descended upon Doberman Naval Base San Francisco for the long trip
out to Pacifica, which is what the island had been dubbed.  A large portion of
Jihad higher-ups felt some obligation to make this trip, and it was probably the
closest thing we have had to an all-star cast heading out to battle the
HellWyrm.  This is probably the dumbest mistake the Jihad has ever made, and the
Jihad has made quite a few mistakes over the years.

Of course, the war started out well.  While there was some disasters, the trip
out was relatively quiet, and the spongies in the city provided no challenge to
Jihad troops.  To make things more interesting, the Hell Wyrm was culled from
the battlefield early by an angry young TRES Corps officer, Lt. Geier.  It was
the first time the Jihad found itself with the upper hand early in a battle.  Of
course, the Jihad would quickly learn that early successes made the fall all
that much harder.

You see, we found out too late that Pacifica was a trap set up by the Lyrans to
lure Jihaddi to a place where they could be captured and destroyed -- using MIA
Jihaddi from the X'hirjq invasion as the bait in the trap.  And we gave them a
very large chunk of the command staff of all the remaining JAOs.  To give our
commanding officers the benefit of the doubt, it should be pointed out that they
weren't going to leave MIA officers to rot, as that's never been the way the
Jihad has operated when given a choice.

Given the mission objective -- that is, find out if there were any of the
Jihad's missing in action on Pacifica and if so, to rescue them -- we were
relatively successful in achieving those goals.  Pacifica turned out to be much
less of a disaster than Phoenix had been, and we were able to find out more
about the Lyrans, that shadowy race that seems to be associated with B'harnee.

The reason we're aware that it was a trap is that the Maenads, bolstered by the
addition of four more to their ranks -- Grand Admiral Marburger, Fleet Commander
Samhain (which is ironic considering the role Maenadship played in the story of
Serp), Admiral J-Rock of TRES, and then-Captain Felton, also of TRES -- fought
their way to the Citadel, where they took on Charn'el, the High Mage of Lyra.

The people who were present at that battle are notoriously reluctant to talk
about it, given the death of their comrade, Lord Tilden Owsen, at that battle.
However, despite Owsen's demise, we were able to recover the Barney Slayer, and
it is being held in a safe location for when it might be needed again.  The
Maenads also, somehow, managed to banish Charn'el from this plane.
Unfortunately, without Charn'el's power to hold up the island of Pacifica, it
began collapsing into the sea, and the Maenads were barely able to escape with
the Slayer and some Lyran books and artifacts.

In the end, Pacifica occupies an odd position in Jihad history.  It wasn't a
victory per se, but it wasn't a defeat either.  In the end, I suppose stalemate
would be the best word.  We lost some of our best in the fighting, but managed
to deal a blow to the HellWyrm and the Lyrans, and for good or for worse,
Pacifica is the start of what we can now safely call the 'modern Jihad'.

The Triumverate and the Beginnings of the Modern Jihad
After the events of Pacifica, Praetor Foxglov was tired.  He was tired of
fighting pointless wars, tired of losing people, and the Praetor was probably
reeling from the loss of Owsen on top of everything.  He resigned from the Jihad
which left the office of the Praetorship open again.  A hastily convened
conference of Jihad higher-ups decided that the office was too much for one
person, and decided to dissolve the Praetorship and replace it with a
Triumvirate.  After a bit more deliberation, they decided the first Triumvir
Praetors, the official title of those holding seats, would be Grand Admiral
Marburger of TRES, Windigo, and Shardik (also known as Warrior Hephaestus of the
DE).

The Triumvirate was a bold new direction for Jihad leadership, and it was one
that was probably needed, because the Jihad had grown much more complex than it
had been in the days when Owsen and Mongoose had chosen Serbeus for the job.
There were more demands on their time, and although JAOs had winged back to
being slightly more autonomous than they had been in Serp's time, people still
looked to the Triumvirs for many things involving funding and general direction.

And the Triumvirate was needed pretty much right away when Blood Jihad Commander
Theodore Brock (aka Arsenal the Lone Warrior) went, as best we can tell,
absolutely and totally nuts.  To understand this, you have to understand that it
had been a very bad year for Arsenal.  He had a reputation for being secretive
at the best of times, and Admiral Davis had privately reported some concern
about the mental state of his commanding officer after the events of WorldWalk.

A total break with reality didn't occur until after the kamikaze run of Admiral
Davis and Captain Stewart in Phoenix.  In the same battle, the ship that Arsenal
had been commanding had been disabled and left for dead by the X'hirjq. By the
time Arsenal and the people on his ship were able to bring the systems up and
running again, the war with the X'hirjq was over.  The combined guilt of being
unable to help his officers fight the X'hirjq combined with the mental state
that Admiral Davis had been concerned about led to a full blown psychotic break,
and while the rest of the Jihad was out cavorting around Pacifica and, later,
working on cleaning up from the mess of the X'hirjq invasion, Arsenal started
making plans to, in his eventual words, 'get help'.

There was many odd requisitions for some types of experimental gear, which were
somehow gotten without comment.  This probably happened because there was so
much going on in the Jihad that nobody really had much time to pay attention to
what Arsenal was doing, and probably, in all honesty, nobody much cared.  The
Blood Jihad had become a broken shell of its former glory, and the fact that it
was hanging on at all was somewhat of a minor miracle.  The only reason anybody
had any thought of the Blood Jihad at all is that the Andromeda remained our
only significant space presence after Pacifica and there were more important
things to worry about.

So, on January 18th, 1997, Arsenal went to the Andromeda to make what he called
'a sup rise inspection visit'.  Within the hour, TRES Ithaca reported that the
Andromeda's engines had fired up and she had left Earth orbit.  They also noted
that they had tried to hail the starship and got no response.  Given this
strangeness, and fearing the ship had been taken by enemies, they launched
interceptors.  The Andromeda wouldn't let the interceptors get too close, and
repelled any that did with non-lethal force, and so the TRES craft dropped into
escort to watch what the Andromeda did.

After a few hours of escort duty, the Andromeda suddenly and without warning
opened a portal in front of itself and dove in.  It was all the TRES pilots
could do in their surprise to take the readings, and in debrief, seemed as if
they were almost unsure of what they had seen.

At four PM Eastern time, Lt. Colonel Ariana Mahtash, ranking Blood Jihad
officer, who had been left in charge of Base One while Arsenal made his
inspection trip, received a delayed message from Arsenal.  It was in this
message that he stated that he had gone to find help, and that she was to serve
as ranking officer of the Blood Jihad until such time as he could return.  She
contacted the Triumvirate and was told to wait for a few days to see if Arsenal
returned, and if not, then she was by all rights the commanding officer.  The
days passed, and on January 23, 1997, Ariana Mahtash, who had been a Jihaddi for
maybe eight months at that point, became the new commanding officer of the Blood
Jihad.

Verthandi Ascendant
Things were in chaos.  Mahtash knew that she needed some help.  The base systems
were in a mess, and she needed somebody with a head for detail.  Luckily for
her, she knew somebody who might be able to do the job, and her first act as the
commanding officer of the Blood Jihad was to ask Grand Admiral Marburger to
reassign her friend, Lieutenant Katze Brenner, to the Blood Jihad.  Brenner, who
had taken leave for two weeks to get established in the semester, had already
headed for Base One to see what she could get done unofficially, but the two
friends were glad when Marburger acquiesced to this request.

The other piece was, when Mahtash and Brenner were trying to find out who was
left in the Blood Jihad (the records at Base One were in a shambles after
Phoenix), they were presented with the sudden surprise that Professor
Malaclypse not only still had a Blood Jihad commission, but that he wanted to
help them get the organization back off the ground.  For their parts, Mahtash
and Brenner were glad to have him around as they both were relatively new to the
Jihad and didn't always know what was useful and what wasn't.

While Brenner, Mahtash, and Malaclypse were putting in all this effort to
upgrade and reform a JAO which sorely needed it, the Lone Warrior’s close friend
and former Blood Jihad R&D chief Uplink showed up, which surprised all parties
because it had been assumed that he had gone with Arsenal.  After some
questioning, it was ascertained that he had been in South America investigating
a slight rise in spongification rates in Rio de Janeiro, and the only way he
could think of fixing the problem was to, in the words made famous in Vietnam,
"destroy the village to save it."  He was shouted down by both Mahtash and
Malaclypse, but decided that the Blood Jihad was legitimately his command, and
thus attempted to put his plan in action.

Luckily for the entire Jihad, Mahtash and Brenner had been working overtime to
reform the Blood Jihad's requisition system, and the second Uplink's attempt to
requisition the material and troops he would need to pull off his Rio scheme
crossed the system, the new Blood Jihad command knew about it.  When confronted
with the evidence, Uplink still talked about the rightness of his crusade and
how this would strike a victory against the Wyrm.  Enraged, Malaclypse invited
Uplink to "settle this in private."  What exactly happened in that meeting is
unknown except to the parties involved -- Uplink has not been seen since and
Malaclypse refuses to discuss it -- but it is believed that the Professor
dispensed proper justice for Uplink's crime.

In the wake of the Uplink incident, it was decided unanimously by Brenner,
Mahtash, and Malaclypse that the Blood Jihad was better off being left in the
past, and decided to merge its functions with Professor Malaclypse's independent
R&D shop, the Evil Geniuses.  The Triumvirate, never overly fond of the old
Blood Jihad in the first place, agreed to this change and the Verthandic Rangers
came in existence, with Brenner, Mahtash, and Malaclypse leading in a structure
very similar to the Triumvirate.  They became known as the High Council, and
Brenner and Mahtash both took the title 'Councilor'.  (Malaclypse preferred --
still prefers -- the title 'Professor' and was known to berate recruits who use
the title 'Councilor'.)

The Rangers, as they became known around the Jihad, quickly established that
they were, along with TRES Zeta and WEDJEE, home to some of the best R&D minds
in the Jihad, and the Explorations staff became known as one of the quickest
response teams in the Jihad despite their overly casual attitude towards command
structure.  The other thing they added to the Jihad was an ability to strike
across dimensions, given Professor Malaclypse's research interests.  All of
these pieces would come in handy in a few months.

Changing of the Guard
The time between early February, when the Rangers threw off all the old
trappings of their Blood Jihad days and July, when things heated up again, was
relatively quiet for the Jihad.  The only interesting thing that happened during
that time span was that in May the first Triumvirate stepped down, saying they
were proof of concept only, and it was time for more permanent members to serve.
The first trium suggested Professor Malaclypse of VR, Captain Rens Houben of
TRES Zeta, and Commander Shahrazad of TRES to serve as the new Triumvirate, and
the heads of all the JAOs agreed to that.  The three respectively named
Commander Aris Merquoni of VR, Councilor Brenner of VR, and Captain Jones of
TRES to serve as their respective adjuncts.

This brings us to July, in which excitement happened.  Granted, the summer of
1997 wasn't as exciting as the entirety of 1996, which had brought us Worldwalk,
Phoenix and Pacifica all in one year, but it was the summer of 1997 which
brought the events of Marraketh and Homefront to our attention.

The events of Marraketh are less important than that of Homefront, but
chronologically it comes first, so let's touch upon it briefly.  When I was
interviewing the principals in this event for their take on it, Councilor
Brenner laughed a bit and said, "You have to ask about the most embarrassing
event in my life, don't you?"

And Councilor Brenner is right, since the events of Marraketh begin with her
indulging her curiosity and being kidnapped back to her homeland -- the
aforementioned Marraketh.  The problem is, at the time of this event, Marraketh
had been under the influence of the Wyrm for nearly twenty years of our time.
So VR scrambled a team together and went into Marraketh after their Councilor.
Of course, the team also happened to be Professor Malaclypse's first beta of his
machine, and the machine acted predictably under the circumstances, scattering
the Rangers across Marraketh and the next country over.

However, everybody managed to get themselves to Rhye, where Malaclypse had
scouted ahead, and things ended up turning out for the best for all concerned.
They rescued Councilor Brenner (indeed, in the reports, it seems as if Brenner
came through the ordeal rather well, which is probably why she can laugh at the
whole thing now) and liberated Marraketh from the Wyrm's thrall.  Not bad for a
few days' work.

Operation Homefront
Compared to Marraketh, Homefront turned out to be a much more difficult problem.
For the first time in the Jihad's history, we were confronted not with the Wyrm
himself, or the Lyrans, or any real metaphysical threat at all.  This time, we
found ourselves dealing with one of B'harnee's elite Wyrm Minions -- a group
known as the Liasons (which are not to be confused with our Liasons).  This
particular Liason was named Rhyn, and the guy was a technical genius.  Yes,
there are geniuses working for the other side, as surprising as it might seem to
you.

In fact, one of the ironies of Homefront is that for a brief time the Jihad and
the Lyrans were on the same side -- at least in the goal of shutting down Rhyn's
operation.  The Lyrans were even less amused at the idea of some ingenious human
coming up with a way to pacify the whole planet without using any magic
whatsoever than the Jihad was at the idea of the whole planet being spongified.
Thus, both wanted to do whatever they could to stop Rhyn's plan.

Of course, the question is, what was Rhyn's plan?  It was really rather
ingenious despite being overly complicated -- technological solutions to create
what is basically a psychological effect tend to be these days.  He planned to
spongify the world with technology.  He stuck these devices that were like
crystal radios all over the world, and what these devices would do is pick up a
signal broadcast from their main base in Kansas and relay it to the next
station.  They would also amplify the signal over the local area, so that
everybody within range would become spongified, thus achieving the goals of his
Lord, and letting him be in a position to rule the world.

The Jihad made it a priority to take out as many of these array devices as
possible when they discovered that the Lyrans were doing the same thing, and
they discovered they were up against a time constraint.  That and there were
simply too many array devices to stop.  To kill this thing, they had to descend
upon Rhyn's base in Kansas and destroy the generator.

The leaders of this expedition were then-Commander William Keith (now Admiral)
of TRES and Warrior Persephone (now Centurion Selene) of the Doberman Empire.
These two were the first to scout out the problem, both did some individual work
on taking out Elements, and then both of them lead a team of mostly young and
inexperienced Jihaddi into Rhyn's base and managed to take out both the
Generator and Rhyn.

While it didn't have the sheer total-war elements of Phoenix, Homefront goes
down as one of the more ingenious plans the Wyrm or those allied with him have
ever pulled off, and it has made us more interested in the Liasons and what
exactly they do.  This is one of the more interesting things going on in Jihad
intelligence at the moment, and it's something that I strongly urge you to
pursue if you find that you have any interest in that sort of thing.

He Walked Around the Horses...
There was a month of relative quiet after the events of Homefront before the
Jihad was confronted with yet another crisis. This was a smaller crisis than any
of the operations, but any time a head of a JAO goes missing, it is a small
crisis for that JAO.  TRES Corps, by this time, had become the biggest JAO in
the Jihad, taking the mantle from a struggling Doberman Empire still attempting
to recover from its blow in Phoenix and Pacifica.  And when the biggest JAO in
the Jihad somehow comes up with a missing leader, the entire Jihad is somewhat
affected.

We don't exactly know what happened, which seems to be a common tale to all
these disappearances.  All we know is that Grand Admiral Marburger had gone off
to vacation in San Francisco, one of his favorite spots.  When TRES needed to
reach him on some matter of relative importance, and couldn't hail him on a
linker, they sent one of the local TRES officers into San Francisco after him.

The TRES officer reported back that Grand Admiral Marburger was nowhere to be
found, but that he'd left a trail of sponge minions on the way to wherever he
went.  It could have very easily been another mess of exposure except that the
officer was very quick on her feet in coming up with a cover story on the spur
of the moment, and she had some help in the form of a Jihad Liason who worked in
the San Francisco Coroner's office.  The disappearance is still filed as an
unsolved mystery with the San Francisco Police Department, and we duly hope it
stays that way.

Soon after these events, Captain Shahrazad would resign from her Triumvirate
position and Captain Jones declined to replace her and stepped down from his own
adjunct seat.  In another near-unanimous decision (with one abstention, seeing
as how she was the subject of the vote), the respective JAO heads named Grand
Admiral Davies to the Triumvirate, and Davies named Commander Nolan of TRES her
adjunct.

Mystical Underpinnings
Now, I've talked a lot about Jihad technology in this speech and not as much
about magic, despite the Jihad being involved in fighting something that is
pretty much a mystical war.  While many Jihaddi over the ages have been mages,
and some of them have been pretty adept at the magical arts, the study of magic
has lagged behind.  With the chief allies of the Wyrm being the Lyrans, a race
of magic-users, you would have thought this lack of proper study would have
become appearant to Jihad leaders early in the battle.

Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to point out the obvious, though, and that is
exactly the case that lead to the forming of the Jihad Praxeum Veneficus (or the
Prax, as it is often referred to by its members.)  It took a new Jihaddi in
TRES Corps, one Lieutenant Joe Schneider, to make the point that what the Jihad
really needed was a place for the mages of the Jihad to learn and gather
information.

Lieutenant Schneider took his idea to Grand Admiral Davies, and Davies was
delighted at the thought, and brought it over to the Triumvirate. Davies,
Houben, and Malaclypse all agreed that a 'college of magic' such as Lieutenant
Schneider was proposing was a good idea, and a vote was taken for Schneider's
proposal.  It passed easily, and the JPV became the newest organization in the
Jihad, with Schneider bearing the title of Archchancellor and Admiral Keith of
TRES Corps and Operative Lorin of VR as the two second in commands.

While the JPV has existed for about a year, they have already made a huge
contribution to the magic knowledge of the Jihad in much the same way that the
research and development folks made a huge contribution before WorldWalk.  While
we hope there will be no 'Age of Amuck Mages' to go with the 'Age of Amuck
Scientists', the mages of the Jihad have benefited hugely by being able to work
with each other, and the Jihad has benefited from having its top magical minds
working together, just as they had by letting its top technological minds loose.
And JPV scored quite the coup when the Triumvirate decided that the Barney
Slayer should be with the mages so that the mages could attempt to figure out
how exactly it works.

In January of 1999, just after the new headquarters was finished, the
Triumvirate called Archchancellor Schneider and told him to get an honour guard
together from JPV to escort a package from the airport.  The honour guard did
the job it had been called there to do, and the package turned out to be the
Slayer, moved under secrecy to the new JPV base. The Slayer has been there
since, in a heavily guarded room.

Changes Upon Changes
During the summer that JPV was building their campus and expanding the horizons
of thaumaturgy in the Jihad, Grand Admiral Davies grew tired of commanding the
Jihad's largest JAO, and wanted to have the freedom to do other things.  She
talked with Admiral Felton, her second in command, and the two agreed to swap
spaces. Felton became Grand Admiral Felton, only the fourth in Corps
history.

In the fall of 1998, Professor Malaclypse also decided that it was time that he
spent more time on his research, and he resigned all his Jihad commissions.
However, it turns out that the best place in the world for him to work on his
research interests is his old JAO, so you can often still find him around VRHQ.
For the first time since the Triumvirate had been formed, the adjunct agreed to
take the vacated seat, and Commander Merquoni joined the Triumvirate.  She named
Grand Admiral Felton as her adjunct.  At the same time, Davies named
Archchancellor Schneider as her adjunct, as Nolan had resigned his adjunct
position.

That brings us to the here and now.  What history I will be talking about next
year is the history that will be made by each and every one of you.  Remember
that relatively new folks to the Jihad, such as Grand Admiral Felton,
Councilor Mahtash, Rear Admiral Brenner, Admiral Keith and Archchancellor
Schneider have made huge contributions to the Cause, and while those five might
seem rather imposing to all of you now, I once remember all five of them -- all
of them TRES Corps recruits -- sitting where you are now, listening to me tell
them about the past of an organization of which they would contribute the
future.  And their future became the past I now tell all of you about.

The future is yours.  Make the Jihad proud.

Thank you.