Kanaran Independence Movement

The Kanaran independence movement was a rebel movement focused on removing Kairosian presence and influence in Kanara following the Battle for Kanara in 2320, at the end of season 2. It was largely successful, albeit drawn out, with Kairos officially withdrawing from the city in 2350, a few years after the end of season 4.

Battle for Kanara
Main article: Battle for Kanara

When it was revealed that King Reggie of Kanara had been replaced by a devil of violent intentions, the cities of the archipelago banded together to take down the threat. Following the battle, Kanara was left in shambles, its king gone, its buildings reduced to so much rubble. Kairos stepped in, offering aid in the reconstruction effort, but it soon became apparent that they wished to rebuild the city in their own image and had no intentions of removing their people from the city—rather, more Kairosians began entering the city, slowly pushing out Kanaran enterprises with their own.

Initial Protests
On the one-year anniversary of the Battle, the city put on a great celebration of Kairosian/Kanaran solidarity. It was true Kairos had helped: the influx of people and money to the city had allowed for much faster progress than would otherwise have been possible. All the same, there were a number of people who viewed the situation with skepticism, who didn't approve of the Kairosian influences visible in many of the new buildings' architecture, who felt that the Kairosian guards weren't there to protect them, but to oppress them, and that the Kairosian merchants, for all the money they brought with them, were only undercutting Kanaran merchants and pushing them out of the market.

During the celebration, a large group of Kanaran dissidents staged a protest. Unfortunately, the event turned violent, and those who'd spoken the loudest against Kairos fled the city to the nearby mountains.

Relation to Goliath Tribes
Within Kanara, a council had quickly been established to govern the city in the sudden absence of their king, and although the councilmembers had just as quickly become little more than figureheads, it was known among the people that they were generally Kanaran loyalists. Notable among them was Orin Sunshine Avakalathi, a veteran of the Battle who'd come only recently from his home in the mountains before sacrificing his youth and physical strength in an arcane ritual that was vital to winning the Battle. He'd spoken with leaders of the other cities, asking for their support in the reconstruction effort, and had even convinced some of his own people, typically isolationist in nature, to offer their aid as well. While the goliath builders were comparatively quite small in number, they were still noticed and known, and the dissidents considered Sunshine an ally.

When that core group escaped into the mountains, then, they sought out and made contact with Sunshine's tribe, the Avakalathi. The tribe took them in for a little while, offering them food and shelter on the stipulation they become and remain contributing members of the society for the duration of their stay. The rebels' numbers grew somewhat over the following years, and they eventually moved lower on the mountain, where the elevation was easier on them and they wouldn't be overwhelming the tribe.

Leaders and Ideologies
Two people emerged as the main voices of the rebels in the mountains: Estebborus Rhogan and Iris Ellimara.

Estebborus Rhogan
A black dragonborn of imposing appearance, Rhogan was known to be intelligent, opinionated, and stubborn. He favored a long-game approach to the Kairosian issue, believing that keeping it fully peaceful was how they would guarantee the movement's continued success, as it would keep intracity relations positive rather than creating divides among the citizens, and allow them to build something that would last in the wake of Kairos' absence.

Iris Ellimara
A slim high elf with a sharp gaze, Iris was considered calm and quietly empathetic. She preferred a more decisive approach, believing that the longer the movement took, the stronger a hold Kairos would have on the city, and the more likely the movement would fade into obscurity and face no success at all. She believed they should do whatever was necessary to get Kairos out immediately, before it was too late.

Communications
Within the city, Sunshine had developed a small but growing network among the rebels, using his well-established preference of speaking face-to-face with the people (or their representatives) with whom he was working as cover. Although he fell under light suspicion from Kairos, he was mostly written off as a kindhearted fool and left to his own devices. Unfortunately, in 2327, a few years after the end of season 3, Sunshine passed away. His sister, Mourner, did what she could to continue his work, but without his title of councilmember to justify her movements, fell under closer scrutiny and was thus limited in her contributions.

It was around this time as well that Auris Sunwolf Oretharos, a Weaver of the Oretharos tribe whom Sunshine had contracted in 2320 to spread the tale of the Battle in the hopes of keeping public opinion of the reconstruction effort positive, returned to Kanara and to the tribes. Although largely unaware of the movement, she was already a sympathizer and brought with her new hope for the movement: she was in possession of a large number of Sending Stones, which she offered for the movement's use, while she herself had legitimate reason to move between the tribes and the city with some regularity, as she had a number of friends and acquaintances in New Gork, whom she might visit via the Kanaran branch of the Adventurers' Guild. All of this served to greatly improve communication between the various groups associated with the movement.

Even with this improvement, however, communications within the movement were still sorely lacking, with only the briefest of orders or reports moving between the leaders in the mountains and the supporters in the city, and any plans were slow to bring together, with many smaller groups working almost entirely on their own. With the movement so spread out and unorganized in this fashion, it faced little progress for many years, and peripheral support waned.

Termites, the Sending Transceiver, and Revitalization of the Movement
In late 2344, during season 4, the Kairosian Ministry of Renovation and Modernization contracted an adventuring party from New Gork to determine why their mail wasn't reaching their agents in Kanara. The party discovered a few Kanaran rebels at the heart of the matter, who were keeping the order to demolish the Soaring Dragon Theater from being delivered. The theater was a cultural hub of its neighborhood, but had recently been discovered to have a termite problem and some dangerous water damage.

The rebels questioned the origin of these issues, as the theater had been in perfect repair not long before, and the speed with which the Kairosian ministry swooped in with its ideas of reconstruction. With a mole in the mail service, the rebels had kept the order from going through, but had been unable to mobilize any further related efforts. The party from New Gork ultimately switched sides in the matter, and spearheaded a Kanaran repair and renovation effort. To keep Kairos off their trail, however, they did "solve" the mail problem—the rebel unit abandoned their efforts in that regard, and the mail eventually got through, only to be replied to by the New Gork party with claims of being incomplete and needing further documentation, ultimately leading to a wild goose chase of various Kairosian officials looking for termites in lumberyards across Kanara in search of the source of the theater's issues, with the Kanaran renovations being finished long beforehand.

Around this same time, Elias Halliday, an inventor and rebel sympathizer, completed his work on his "Sending transceiver," a device capable of receiving and routing multiple Sendings, allowing one speaker to reach several listeners at once. Elias' wife, Freyja, was a lumberjack with a small-scale operation of her own, which had been shuffled to the bottom of the list for termite inspection due to its size. Unfortunately, although the transceiver was intended for rebel use, the timing lined up such that delivery was impossible, as the inspectors were due any day.

Worried that the transceiver could be confiscated under the various regulations pertaining to magical artifacts, and at the very least, that discovery would draw unwanted attention, but unwilling to risk any familiar faces being spotted at the Halliday residence so close to inspection—and particularly not by the inspectors themselves—the rebels managed to contract a new adventuring group from New Gork to retrieve the transceiver before the inspectors might find it. Iris privately requested that, should any high-ranking Kairosians come around, the adventurers might capture them and deliver them to her, as she'd lost her inside information with the end of the mail hijackings and was currently flying blind as to Kairosian plans.

The party was successful in securing both the transceiver and the two inspectors who had been sent to the Halliday residence. The inspectors, Laius and Andromeda of House Asturius, were uncooperative with rebel efforts and of low rank and thus limited knowledge. Despite this, Iris was able to infer from their conversations a good deal about the bureaucratic structures in place, including the politics between them, information which was vital in her ensuing efforts to undermine the various ministries' presence in Kanara.

The inspectors' low rank was ultimately a saving grace of the situation, as, alongside various rebel convolution efforts, their absence went unnoticed for quite some time. When at last there was rumor of an investigation into the Hallidays on the matter, the inspectors were released without harm. This was a calculated move by Iris as any useful knowledge beyond the involvement of Iris and the adventuring party had been kept from them (including their own location) and, with little to nothing to show for it, they were judged more likely to keep quiet on the whole matter in order to save face—a calculation which paid off in the end, as nothing further came of it, particularly due to the relevant ministries having other, more pressing matters to attend to than the delinquency of two minor officers.

As for the transceiver, it took some time to set up the related infrastructure, but once everything was in place, communications saw vast improvement, with orders and reports now moving directly to the proper recipients in timely fashion, rather than via the convoluted and long-winded paths of before. This, in turn, allowed the rebels much greater mobility as a whole, and they were able to act and react more quickly and comprehensively than ever before, with a fair number of peaceful protests, boycotts, and so on staged at various times throughout the city under Rhogan's direction, supplemented with Iris' work to find convenient accidents for key shipments to Kairosian merchants and further convolution of any and all red tape involved.

Song of the People
As time went on, it seemed that no matter the safeguards Kairos enacted, the most important orders and policies were filtered through so many additional steps and regulations that someone had to be purposefully fouling the system—and that they must be intimately familiar with its workings. An investigation was launched, but almost immediately met with a comical number of difficulties and never saw success. Many took this as proof that someone was actively behind the matter, but it was never proven.

Similarly, rumors swirled of an informant among the Kairosian nobility as their merchants' key shipments seemed inevitably to find too much trouble on the seas to make their Kanaran efforts profitable, but again nothing could be proven.

In the midst of chaos, hope was born. More and more often, it was Kanaran merchants who were the ones to meet the demand, and Kanaran hands that rebuilt and restored the last buildings in their former image, with nary a Kairosian pillar to be seen. New songs could be heard on the streets, if you knew where to listen: songs of hope, of hidden strength, of a city reborn.

In 2350, Kairos officially withdrew from Kanara.

It took some time for this to be acted on in full, but by 2360, Kanara could finally be said, without disclaimer or caveat, to stand on its own.