> Here’s another attempt at some annotation:
>
> Biology: Caphans photosynthesise as a secondary source of energy, and their skins are green. The average lifespan of a Caphan is around sixty Earth years. Caphan females have reproductive quirks described under Gestation.
>
> Blue Caphans: A second racial type on Caph was eradicated in great wars of genocide two thousand years ago. Any child born with a bluish cast is seen as evil and is exposed to die.
>
> Book of Accomplishments: The register maintained by the house mistress and archived by the matriarchs which lists the virtues of a slave. Skills such as weaving, dancing, and lovemaking, achievements such as a special artistic performance, a sporting victory, or coupling with an important figure, are permanently recorded. Faults and failings are also logged. The Book of Accomplishments is used in calculating the value of a Slave.
>
> Cast Out: A Master’s final sanction against a slave is to cast her out. This strips her of any protection under law, bars her from any economic activity, and leaves her homeless and destitute at the mercy of any who would prey on her. Slaves who are cast out do not last very long and make miserable ends.
>
> Childcare: Caphan females remain with their mother (and are valued along with her) until they are sold to their first Master when they are nubile. Caphan males of high parentage are educated separately once they are weaned and rarely see their mother, although a mother may accrue glory and value from the deeds of a strong son. Males born of slave fathers are slaves.
>
> Daax: A legendary figure of story, a slave who gained great honour by defeating the vile Torvaal and restoring her son Haavax to his father, Lord Haakor, at the cost of her life.
>
> Eunuch: Many male slaves are castrated in infancy, especially those who are to be trained as guards or pleasure slaves. This is not always seen as a negative thing on Caph, as it opens up career progressions not otherwise available.
>
> Free Women: After the Return of Kiivan the law has changed to allow a new status, that of freewoman, which has similar rights and duties to that of Master. A Free Woman has either been given her freedom or has bought it from her Master, and is able to own property including slaves in her own right.
>
> Gestation: Caphan females may have more control over their reproductive systems than human women, including a limited biological contraception ability. They can also delay gestation for almost a year (Earth time) after conception before commencing the growth of the foetus, and then take around nine months (Earth time) to bring a child to term. 80% of all births are female. Children with birth defects are usually exposed to die.
>
> Harem: The company of pleasure slaves belonging to a Master, and the place where they are housed.
>
> House Mother / House Mistress: An older slave set in authority over others, responsible for the running of the estate and the harem.
>
> House of Jathaar: A provincial Clan loyal to Emir Kiivan.
>
> Nymph: A female child who has not yet left her mother to be sold to her first Master.
>
> On Lemans: “The slaves of the Guild may not be pampered bed-toys like the rich beautiful vapid pleasure slaves but they are the accountants, emissaries, scribes, bodyguards, and custodians of Princes.â€Â
>
> Orange Coats: A sign of status amongst Masters, albeit of lesser importance than yellow/lemon/saffron coats. The Emir once wore a cloth-of-gold coat.
>
> Raiders: Stealing slaves is a common pastime. By law the slave must resist being stolen and defy their captor until seven days have passed with no challenge to their theft; thereafter they become the legal property of their captor. “A slave-girl must fight to resist raiders, must not surrender herself to them for seven days until it is clear that her former Master has relinquished his claim and will not make a challenge of balek gorn for her return. Then she must yield to her new owner. But there is no precedent for a slave who has been legally sold, properly transferred either through the ritual of vina drea or through common bargain, to deny her new Master’s rights. That sets her beyond the law, and the sentence must be bloody death.â€Â
>
> Sisters: Caphan women have body-sisters (those who share the same mother), clan-sisters (women of the same clan to which they belong at any given time) and nymph-sisters (girls with whom they grew up).
>
> Songs: Amongst the various ballads mentioned are The Lost Daughters of Ygrail, The March of Gaath, and modern favourites The Ballad of Kiivan and Ohanna, Vaahir and Kaara, and The Ley of the Nine Exiles.
>
> T’Grum Trees: sweet-smelling fruit-bearing perennials.
>
> The Ballad of Vile Yaarkis: A traditional tragedy. “As Yaarkis did to the harem of Leriid in the tales of old, such would be Ohanna’s terrible end.â€Â
>
> The Citadel: The core of imperial buildings at the heart of the capital of Caph.
>
> Tradeslaves: The skilled craftwomen and men who possess skills such as smithying, technology, mining, animal wifery, gemcutting etc.
>
> Uglydrudge: A pejorative term for a drudge, also used as an insult upon other slaves.
>
> Value: Caphan slaves are accorded status by the importance of their Master and by their recorded value. Value is determined by the price most recently paid for them and by their record in their Book of Accomplishments. Slaves of otherwise equal rank determine precedence by last assessed value. A typical drudge might have a value of 1000 shekli, a provincial pleasure slave might be worth 100,000 shekli, and a really renowned pleasure slave could command values well in excess of 1,000,000 shekli. The Nine Exiles are usually listed in order of their values at their last assessment before leaving Caph.
>
> Other information:
>
> Caphan IX days are around 22.43 Earth hours and they measure time in fourteen variable-length hours between sunrise and sunset and again between sunset and dawn. The planets in the contellation of Caph have a complicated elliptical orbit around their mother sun. While the inhabited world of the Caphans is relatively circular in its rotation (almost four of our years for one rotation of their sun), allowing for mild seasonal variations and an annual monsoon, its neighbouring planets have much greater ellipses, so that occasionally Caph is not the ninth but the tenth or even eleventh planet from the sun. The proximity of the Andromeda nebula makes the skies bright by day and night, spectacular with blues and purples and reds.
>
>
> Readers Unfamiliar With Caph Start Here:
>
> It all started, as so much of the Parodyverse did, with an in-joke. During the big space-epic Transworlds Challenge storyline somebody joked about the lack of green-skinned slave girls. All space-epics have to have green skinned slave girls.
>
> So CSFB! and Goldeneyed liberated nine green-skinned slave-girls from the Slimy Slaver Lovetoad of Frammistat Eight. The problem was what to do with them next. Deputy-Leader Yo instructed them to go see Visionary.
>
> The slave-girls interpreted this as to mean that they were now Visionary’s property and waited for him in his bedroom. When Vizh had recovered from his near-coronary and stopped hiding in the bathroom he discovered that (a) These nine girls were pleasure-slaves from the planet Caph, where women outnumber men by 5:1 and all women are property, taught from birth how to please their masters; (b) Through quirks of Caphan rites-of-conquest legislation he was now their legal owner; and (c) the greatest, most shameful, and most terrible fate of a Caphan girl is to be unowned, cast out with no master, a fate the women in his bedroom feared more than death.
>
> So Vizh took the Caphans home with him to his Condo (and he was, of course, a perfect gentleman; assuming perfect gentlemen go bright crimson all the time and walk into objects). Later a ritual was observed that effectively transferred ownership of the girls to the Manga Shoggoth, who was able to relocate them to safety on his dimensionally-separate continent of Lemuria along with many other slaves he has rescued from various times and places.
>
> All of the stories concerning this are collected in The Caphan Story Archive
>
> Miiri, brightest of the Caphan women and their natural leader, recognised that Visionary had been a very nice man, ethical within the boundaries of his strange society despite amazing temptation. So now she was no longer technically his slave she adapted to the customs of her new world and acted decisively as an independent woman. She consequently gave birth to Magweed (a.k.a. Naari) and Griffin, Visionary’s twins. But that’s another complicated story.
>
> The youngest of the nine Caphans was Kaara of Jaaxa, who had been sold at auction after her clan were treacherously slaughtered by an enemy. The young man who sought to own her as his own was sent away to torture and death. But Vaahir of Viigo did not die in the salt mines, but instead escaped with the aid of a disguised emissary of the elder gods, Nyalurkhotep. Vaahir sought to save Kaara from the villain who had carried her off – Visionary.
>
> One almost-end-of-the-world later, Vaahir saw the error of his ways, saved Kaara from Nyalorkhotep, and helped the Lair Legion save the Parodyverse. The Shoggoth sentenced him to exile on a distant world where he would protect the weak and share their hardships to learn humility and compassion. Details appear in the Tenth Caphan Saga.
>
> Back on Caph, the ruling houses gave shelter to the Pigeonwarriors, homeless survivors after the destruction of their planet Thonnagar. However, Ancient Shadara and her eyrie came with treachery in mind, seeking a new world to rule. With the aid of the betrayer, Prince Aarmus of Aarixus (who had once sold Miiri to the Slaver Lovetoads), the Caphan ruling elite were wiped out in a planetary coup. Aarmus became the puppet ruler of a Pigeonwarrior-run world.
>
> But there was resistance. Shazana Pel was a renegade pigeon warrior who rescued the eleven-year-old Emir of All Caph, Prince Kiivan, from assassination. With aid from the Hooded Hood she kept the boy alive and helped him to escape. At the same time eleven-year-old Ohanna of Raael, Miiri’s younger sister and last survivor of the House tasked with preserving the Emir’s sacred treasures, carried to safety the greatest relics of Caph. Ohanna’s father gave her in slavery to the Hooded Hood, and he in turn set her to care for Kiivan. He delivered both of them into the tutorship and guardianship of Vaahir of Viigo. The story appeared as Untold Tales #219: Shazana Pel Must Die
>
> For reasons of his own the Hood mentored Kiivan and Ohanna, sending them through his dimension-spanning Portal of Pretentiousness to other places and times where they could learn and train. The two youngsters grew together for six years, learning from alien races such as the Xnylonians and Naicluv, from organisations like the Intergalactic Order of Librarians and the Yellow Flashlights Corps, from time fighting beside Vaahir, and from an eventful visit to Earth as friends of the Junior Lair Legion.
>
> The Caphan situation has become more complicated. As resistance mounted the Thonngarians realised they are too few to hold the planet. Instead they made a deal with the Parody Master, exchanging Caph to his authority in exchange for a favoured place in his armies. The transfer of power is only a few days off.
>
> In consequence, Ohanna came to Kiivan and reminded him of the promise he had made her on the night they had fled Caph. She had claimed a slave’s right of protection from her Emir, for her and her world. Now she brought Kiivan the honour sword of Gaath, founder of his line, and set him on his task: the liberation of Caph.
>
> Kiivan has made preparations and alliances. With the Hood’s assistance he gathered together his young friends from Earth: Probability arsonist Kery Shepherdson, fabric manipulating Fashion Accessory (Samantha Bonnington), demihemigod Harlagaz Donarson, meat-manipulating Ham-Boy (Fred Harris), computer genius Hacker Nine (Zach Zelnitz), the Hood’s son Danny Lyle (Denial), transformer robot Glitch, polite British superhero Captain Courageous (Kit Kipling), the vegetable vigilante Kid Produce (Jasper Stevens), and Falcon’s little sister Lind Wilson (Falconne). At the start of this story they are all in a borrowed Xnylonian stealth scoutship heading for Caph IX in the constellation of Cassiopeia.
>
> But the Hooded Hood had one last trick to play. In exchange for collaborator Prince Aarmus delaying the transfer of power (without realising why), the Hood sold Ohanna to him. The Portal of Pretentiousness swept her from the Xnylonian shuttle and Kiivan to Caph and Aarmus’ stronghold. Ohanna’s bluff of having a concealed explosive was called by Aarmus’ leman Kiije and we last saw the two women squaring for combat.
>
> All of which is an awful lot of events from one running joke. And here we are, racing towards the punchline…
>
>
> ***
>
>
> The Ballad of Kiivan and Ohanna
>
> "Oh promise me," Ohanna cried, "the ancient rights of all -
> Protection for your people, justice, honour; hear our call.
> Oh promise, me," Ohanna asked, "to serve as Caliph should,
> To stand for us with your last breath, to spend your dying blood."
>
> "For here I hold in bloody hands the treasures of your reign
> The things my House died to protect to help Caph rise again.
> Here Gaath’s great sword," Ohanna called, "that Emirs held of yore -
> Mine to bestow upon the Lord who’ll make Caph free once more."
>
> "That is your right," Prince Kiivan owned, "and right of all our race,
> Who have not always had their rights nor had their lawful place,
> And so for you," Prince Kiivan vowed, "and every Caphan soul -
> I am your Lord, I’ll do what’s right, and one day I’ll be whole."
>
> "Then wrongs shall be amended and then all oppressions cease.
> Then I’ll return and lead you to a day of joy and peace,
> I promise you, Ohanna, that our world will see new starts.
> This is my blood oath," Kiivan said, "so hold it in your hearts."
>
>
> ***
>
> From the Ballad of Visionary
> Canto II Stanzas XII-XVII:
>
> With trembling hearts they waited for their fate
> Poor exiles from their lost and blissful home
> No help left now but kneel low and await
> Their master’s will. They stayed to hear their doom.
>
> With tread like to colossus lords of old
> Regaliad in princely mustard gown
> Imperious Visionary as foretold
> Came to inspect his trophies with a frown.
>
> His noble gaze swept o’er the captured prize
> Who cowered eager for his royal word
> Afraid that he might cast out or despise
> Or slay them cruelly as they had heard.
>
> Yet pity moved his mighty, gentle heart
> And never did he do his chattels woe
> But embraced them and stood to take their part
> And brought them home to shield them from all foe.
>
> No art may speak the wonders of his lands
> His House of marvels where he ruled as master
> He healed his slaves with kind and gentle hands
> And sheltered them from peril and disaster.
>
> Prodigious was this Visionary king
> Or mighty size and strength and full of fight
> None could resist his will in anything
> The rest of him was just of medium height.
>
>
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