Cuyler

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The town of Snoopy was established on August 9th, 113 B.G, by Pietrus Homerius, zoon vat het Semme (later shortened to Homer Simpson). Born and raised in the town of Almeren’t, Simpson would often explore the area surrounding his town by boat, which led him to develop a keen interest in the area around the mouth of the River Rô. Seeing potential for a thriving commercial center, he moved to the original Snoopy Island with his family and began to develop the region with the hope of attracting settlers from nearby Moresnet.

Though Snoopy was officially founded with a bilingual language policy (Simpson’s mother was a native English speaker, and he himself spoke both Dutch and English fluently), English began to dominate the city’s institutions, serving as a lingua franca for Moresneta settlers as well as explorers from the fringe western town of Caribou. This infuriated the Opstandelings, a coalition of linguistic purists who sought to reinstitute Dutch in Snoopy’s city government. Though their original movement proved unsuccessful, the Opstandelings eventually decided upon a compromise: establishing Anglish as Snoopy’s sole official language. Led by the charismatic Ætheswald Smagglefang, the Opstandelings rebranded themselves as the Withstanders and campaigned for a radical shift in Snoopian language policy.

Despite their best efforts, though, the Withstanders’ requests were repeatedly denied by the Snoopy City Council. This infuriated Smagglefang, who decided to direct his efforts to founding the breakaway city-state of Anglishstead across the Sea of Dunwich. Smagglefang’s ventures attracted several prominent intellectuals, among them Sasha Quisley (founder of Snoopy University), Bram de Vries (prominent cartographer), and, most notably, future despot August Cuyler. Cuyler joined forces with the Withstanders after he was rejected from his high school’s chess club; his early interest in the group developed from his enthusiasm regarding alternate history scenarios of World War I.

The Founding of Cuyler City[edit | edit source]

Cuyler’s association with the Withstanders saw him arrive as one of Anglishstead’s first settlers. However, his continued insistence on using loanwords from Old Norse lead to his gradual exclusion from the Anglish community. Additionally, as Smagglefang described in his personal journal, Cuyler was “kind of a dick” (The Daybook of Smagglefang, 3). After one heated game of backgammon, Cuyler was exiled from Anglishstead for good, leading him to embark on a journey of soul-searching. Travelling more than a kilometre on foot, Cuyler eventually arrived at the eastern mouth of the River Rô and constructed a house. Thus, on May 19th, 6 B.G, the city of Cuyler was founded. Because of its substantial distance away from the Rô’s other settlements, Cuyler City initially failed to attract any settlers. Thus, Cuyler focused his time on infrastructure projects for the city, such as constructing a monumental statue of himself and excavating an extension of the Nether Line. Additionally, he personally constructed dozens of empty houses, in anticipation for a wave of tourism to the city. Though unsuccessful in the short term, Cuyler’s ventures attracted the attention of the Garh, a travelling band of metaphysical entities from the Horologium Supercluster who sought to invest in earthly real estate. After surveying Cuyler’s surroundings, Tlachajm Garh, leader of the Garh, materialized on Earth’s surface. Manifesting themself as prominent housing mogul Joseph Garth, they immediately sought out Cuyler, hoping to secure the rights to build a “real-estate center” in Cuyler City. Cuyler immediately agreed, interpreting Garth’s arrival as “the recognition he deserved” (Profile on August Cuyler, 5). Following the acquisition of the site, Garh developed the center for use as their commercial platform, as well as secretly constructing a base of operations for the rest of the Garh in the bathroom of Cuyler’s tourist center. Garh’s rampant new developments and prominent advertising campaigns caught the attention of many foreign entrepreneurs, leading to an expeditious surge in tourism and settlement around 2 A.G. Using Garth Properties (later Garth-Corp™) as a bridge to other economic ventures, Garh established themself as CEO of a rapidly expanding commercial empire. Cuyler’s original empty houses were quickly converted into housing for Garth-Corp™ employees, and Garh encouraged the development of an unabashedly corrupt “City Council” in order to garner themself more political clout. Cuyler’s meteoric rise to relevancy caught the attention of Snoopy’s government officials, who felt that Snoopy’s commercial sector was threatened by Garth’s developments. Thus, they formed the Society for the Prevention and Adequate Containment of Esoteric and Occult Phenomena in Cuyler and Environs Surrounding (SPACEOPCES), a department which sought to investigate James Garth and their ventures in Cuyler City. The establishment of SPACEOPCES also led to an uneasy alliance with Anglishstead, with whom Snoopy had long had rocky relations.