Penguin Mafia
There is a more complete version of The History of the Penguin Mafia, but here follows a simple timeline of the Kingdom events that have been known or suspected to involve the Penguin Mafia:
July 28, 2004: Hippies begin protesting against the mass slaughter of Yetis at the Icy Peak. Unfortunately, this disrupts the Yetis' principal food supply - unwary adventurers. The Yetis begin to starve. (They are noticeably weaker, become Emaciated Knott Yetis, and drop much less Meat.)
August 4, 2004: The first Penguin Mafia scouts are seen at the Icy Peak, attracted by the increasing wealth of the Kingdom, principally at this time created through yeti farming. Wiser people begin to suspect the Mafia are manipulating the well-intentioned but naïve Hippies, in the hope of reducing Yeti numbers and starving them out.
August 8, 2004: Black Sunday. Infinite Meat bugs galore, discovered by players, and widely publicized. Shortly afterwards, some of the richest players start getting night-time visits from Don Pygoscelis (#176862), taking large amounts of Meat -- up to 100 million Meat at a time. Penguins appear in The Hole in the Sky as well. The Council of Loathing commissions the building of The Huge Cannon to drive them away, to be funded with bugmeat.
August 9, 2004: Penguin activity on the Icy Peak increases (and continues to increase gradually, between now and November). Mafia Arias are sung for the first time. And then sung for a second time, this time with a support cummerbund, after the "unfortunate" effects of the first attempt. Kneecapping sticks, scrolls of pasta summoning and iron pasta spoons make their appearance.
August 10, 2004: The Huge Cannon is, unexpectedly, completed early, thanks to a massive donation from Qrrbrbirlbel. It is never fired, but the threat of it causes the Penguins to retreat from the Hole in the Sky, though they remain at the Peak. However, they have a backup plan: Uncle P's Antiques is built, and begins selling Mr. Exploiters (1,000,000,000 Meat each), 'Villa' documents (500,000,000 Meat each) and Mystery Raffle Tickets (10,000 Meat each), all intended as meatsinks for Black Sunday bugmeat. The Council begins another donation collection, this time to create Time Juice. The Penguins start imposing a tax on trades between players, which at this time can only consist of one person trading items for the other person's Meat.
August 12, 2004: Rum begins to appear in the Kingdom. Officially it is trafficked by the Pirates, but rumors are that the Mafia is behind it.
August 14, 2004: The Great Sober Pill Raid. All sober pills existing in the Kingdom are deleted without compensation. Again, the Mafia are blamed. Mystery Raffle #1 is drawn: 11 first prizes of a Mafia bow tie and 3 Acqua Del Piatto Merlot. 200 second-prize winners win a Merlot.
August 19, 2004: Mystery Raffle #2 is drawn: 11 first prizes of cement shoes and 3 Acque Luride Grezze Cabernet. 200 second-prize winners win a Cabernet.
August 26, 2004: Mystery Raffle #3 is drawn: 11 first prizes of a Mafia stogie and 3 Uovo Marcio Shiraz. 200 second-prize winners win a Shiraz.
September 8, 2004: Mystery Raffle #4 is drawn: 11 first prizes of a Mafia violin case and 3 Maiali Sifilitici Pinot Noir. 200 second-prize winners win a Pinot Noir. Uncle P's Antiques increases the price of raffle tickets to 100,000 Meat for Raffle #5. The trade system is changed to allow for multiple items and Meat on both sides of the trade. Also, the Penguins cease "taxing" trades of Meat between players.
September 21, 2004: The Council finally ends its Time Juice fundraiser (which had not received a significant donation in at least three weeks), handing out 8 bottles to every account in the Kingdom. It has long ago forgotten what they were actually for.
October 18, 2004: Mystery Raffle #5 is finally drawn. Eleven first prizes of old school Mafia knickerbockers and 3 Spasmi Dolorosi Del Rene Champagne. 200 second-prize winners win a Champagne. In addition, there are three "Zero-th Prize Winners" who win all five Mafia equipment items, and one "Grand Prize Winner" who wins all five Mafia items, three Champagnes and a Crimbo Duds. He is promptly attacked in PVP until the Crimbo pants are stolen off him before he logged on to find that he had won. The pants are later replaced as a free donation by the player Aardvark.
At about this time, Don Pygoscelis's original game account disappears, to be replaced by a "younger" account with a higher account number, #293918. Speculation abounds that the old Don has been "inhumed" by a successor who may change the Mafia's policy.
November 14, 2004: Villa documents and Mr. Exploiters halved in price, to 250 million and 500 million Meat respectively. Uncle P's also begins to sell Mob Penguin protection contracts at 5000 Meat each.
November 16, 2004: The Penguin Mafia start hiring themselves out to "hit" other players. Four varieties of mugging are offered:
- For 10,000 Meat, we will beat somebody up and break their knees. (Effects: Beaten Up and Broken Knees)
- For 20,000 Meat, we will beat somebody up and break both their knees and their familiar's knees. (Effects: Beaten Up, Broken Knees, And Your Family, Too
- For 60,000 Meat, we will deliver the 20,000 Meat treatment to somebody, and up to three of their friends. If they have any friends, that is. (Effects: The 20k treatment to the victim and three people on their contacts list.)
- For 100,000 Meat, we will deliver "The Don's Special" to somebody. This one does some... permanent... damage. (Beaten up, broken knees, broken familiar's knees, and a permanent reduction in stats: the victim also got a severed rocking horse head.)
As you know, Uncle P has been selling protection contracts, each of which will cancel out one of the above "favors." For 5,000 Meat, we will tell you how many of these contracts your target has left.
If the target had a Mob Penguin protection contract, a Mafia hit would remove the contract and have no other effect. Controversially, the Mafia were no respecters of the Magical Mystical Hippy Stone: even people with intact hippy stones could be attacked, at the behest of other players. Many players complained that they had kept their hippy stones intact specifically to be safe from other players -- some even quit the game over this issue: certain others quite happily enjoyed beating down on people who had thought they were safe, and believed Mafia hits to be a good thing. Some people even arranged to be beaten up deliberately so they could collect the horse heads.
November 18, 2004: The Council decides that the solution is another bugmeat-burning fundraiser to restore the badly-depleted Yeti population to the Icy Peak. The target set is 5 billion Meat.
November 20, 2004: The Council have actually gotten 2.8 billion, and agree to reduce the price to 3 billion. The last 200 million arrives almost immediately.
November 21, 2004: Two Yetis arrive from distant lands. However, they don't seem to want to, erm, breed. Since this is put down to reluctance on the part of the male yeti (apparently the female is ugly -- an easy mistake for humans to make since we have no idea what's attractive to a Yeti), they decide to try plying the male with alcohol. Donations of booze come pouring in, including massive donations of roll in the hay, extra-spicy bloody mary and salty dogs from BoozerBear, who has millions of these drinks left over and duped.
The Council also starts a naming contest for the Yetis.
November 22, 2004: Evidently yetis breed REALLY fast in captivity. A batch is sent to the Peak already. Yeti activity at the Peak increases, at the expense of the Penguins. The Knott Yetis that are at the Peak are in full health and fitness, and drop their full complement of Meat once again.
November 23, 2004: A second batch of Yetis are sent to the Peak. Unfortunately, a stampede breaks out while they are in town, and Uncle P's Antiques is stomped into rubble. The Mafia Hits cease, and Mr. Exploiters and Villa Documents are no longer available. Yeti Protest Signs stop dropping at the Peak -- one of the Yetis' first targets has been the crowd of unarmed, defenceless hippies who were protesting their slaughter and causing their starvation. The Yetis are now well-fed. Isn't life ironic? Yeti activity at the Peak is now much greater, and it is Penguins that are becoming scarce.
December 9, 2004: Don Pygoscelis starts selling entry to his own clan, "The Don's Family". Rank in the clan is strictly dependent on the amount donated, from 10 million up to 1 billion. The Meat will be funnelled into the Clan Coffer and used for clan warfare. A few big names join, others send their multis over. There are a lot of severed rocking horse heads in the stash. These are looted within less than a day -- at the time there was no limit on taking items with an autosell value of 0 from the clan stash.
Almost immediately, a Yeti clan is also formed, Oyabun-Kobun, led by one Oyabun Gigantopithecus. This clan, too, demands Meat donations for rank, and promises to fund clan warfare against the Penguin clan. The person who looted The Don's Family joins Oyabun-Kobun...
January 19, 2005: The final batch of Yetis is sent to the Peak. Penguins vanish from the Peak, although The Don's Family and Oyabun-Kobun continue their clan war for a while. The winner of the Yeti Naming contest is announced -- it is Riff, who has named them Cerulean and Periwinkle.
The Cannon Museum is built in the Right Side of the Tracks. The Huge Cannon -- still never fired -- is moved from the main town square to stand on the Museum's roof. A habitat for the original Yeti couple is constructed in the Museum for them to live in after having completed their task of intensive reproduction.
Some time in May, 2005: Both Don Pygoscelis and Oyabun Gigantopithecus disappear from the Kingdom. The human members of their clans remain, but there isn't really a point to them any more, and the clan war is long over. Is this the end of the Penguin Mafia?...
October 19, 2005: As The Gray Plague ravages the Kingdom of Loathing, people start looking in unlikely areas for a cure. And a number of unusual items are found. One of them is a blood flower, on the Icy Peak, at the site of a battle where both Penguins and Yetis have fallen. Most likely, one of these blood flowers marks the final resting place of Don Pygoscelis II and Oyabun Gigantopithecus: literary narrative demands that they must have finally met each other in combat and slain each other, explaining the disappearance of both Don and Oyabun at once.
BUT...
October 26, 2005: The Great Time Catastrophe, sometimes known as White Wednesday. Temporal Rifts open up all over the Kingdom. One of them is by the Icy Peak, and leads back to the days when the Penguins battled the Emaciated Knott Yetis there. Half a Cannon appears in the town square (rather incongruously, since the entire original Cannon is still on the Museum's roof), and a rebuilt (or never-destroyed) Uncle P's Antiques in the Wrong Side of the Tracks, selling Villa Documents and Mr. Exploiters at their original prices. The original account of Don Pygoscelis reappears, complete with original account number... perhaps his initial disappearance, after the 5th Mafia Raffle, was not a case of him being assassinated by his successor (who set off the Mafia Hits and subsequent crime wave); perhaps he fell into a momentary timeslip and disappeared, and the second Don merely took over in a power vacuum. Anyway, Don Pygoscelis I is back.
November 3, 2005: Most of the Temporal Rifts close, including the one to the Icy Peak In The Recent Past, but the Half Cannon still remains, as does Uncle P's, and the still-silent Don Pygoscelis.
November 28, 2005: The Money Making Game in the Casino changes, letting players gamble against each other while the house gets a cut. At first this is thought to be run by the Council, or by an honest private business: but is the Mob getting involved in gambling? However, so far all the gambling in this game has been scrupulously honest and above-board: this game, at least, is probably not Mob-influenced.
June 4, 2006: Shortly after the events of The Comet, tents begin appearing around the giant chunk of Grimacite in the Grimacite crater.
June 5, 2006: Construction around the crater continues, with prefab huts popping up.
June 6, 2006: A crane appears at the crater, but any attempt to investigate further is stopped by a guard in a rubber suit-- a strangely penguin-esque guard with an Italian accent. It is, of course, a Penguin Mafia lackey. In their usual business manner, the Penguin Mafia took control of the crater and converted it into a mining operation. The Penguin Mafia was on their way back, and although nobody knew their true intentions, it is likely to involve self-enrichment.
Later that day, Don Pygoscelis himself appeared in the Villa chat channel, for the first time since his reappearance back in October...
June 10, 2006: At A Construction Site in the Right Side of the Tracks, a "burly construction worker in a tuxedo" could be seen briefly. A member of the Penguin Mafia, perhaps?
June 13, 2006: In the Right Side of the Tracks, the Penguin Mafia opened The Raffle House. Adventurers could purchase a raffle ticket for 1,000 Meat. The purpose of the Grimacite excavation is finally made clear by the two items being raffled that day: Grimacite galoshes and wedge of gray cheese. Prizes would be awarded on a daily basis.
June 17, 2007: Strange weather developed over The Grim Grimacite Site, and adventurers found themselves able to enter the mines, battle the Penguins therein, and gather depleted Grimacite. Some believe that the Grimacite has been fully harvested, as adventurers reportedly did not detect the radiation which was present nearly a year prior, but an identical storm cloud above The Sorceress' Chamber suggests that something more sinister may be afoot...
June 24, 2007: The Naughty Sorceress appeared at the Grim Grimacite Site, and stole "the core" for reasons unknown. (This did of course coincide with the eve of NS13.) The next day, the Raffle House replaced its Grimacite prizes with a new series of equipment made from depleted Grimacite.
October 15, 2008: The Raffle House unexpectedly stopped its raffles, citing a recent business arrangement. Workers at the Grim Grimacite Site mentioned a new business associate, but did not reveal any names.
October 27, 2008: On Halloween the Kingdom suddenly found itself terrorized for five days by desert monsters that had been mutated by depleted grimacite. The monsters ran amok until November 1st, disappearing as suddenly as they appeared.
November 4, 2008: The Raffle House reopened for business. Meanwhile, at the Grimacite mine, workers mentioned an "old bearded lunatic".
December 1, 2009 The Don begins his return to the Kingdom by leaving an advent calender in everyone's campsites. He also begins recruiting adventurers to assist in raising funds for the Crimbo season. The Don also opens up his Clan, Cosa Nostra, to applications. Loyal adventures are soon in his ranks.
December 14, 2009 Cosa Nostra is open for all who are loyal, and there is a planned "story time". Prior to story time /clan is lit with the conversation of those who recall the Mafia's first visits to the Kingdom. Absolute legends catch up in chat. Then, around 10:00 PM EST time Don Pygoscelis himself is in /clan. The Don tells his children his story, the story of his father, Andelle Pygoscelis. The event, recorded by Mizem, goes down in history to be retold by many. Don Pygoscelis has turned a new leaf.
December 15, 2009 Don Pygoscelis leaves Cosa Nostra for his Crimbo Compound, both an in-game location and a clan of his own. Lynnox (#1335002) is left in charge of Cosa Nostra. The Don rewards those who deployed hobos with Crimbux, a new currency for Crimbo. More of these Crimbux can be earned by performing favours for the Don, as well as through gambling in the Crimbo Casino.
December 19, 2009 The fifth favor performed by adventurers for the Don unveils, through Edwing Abbidriel, the Don's plan to use the Crimbomination to perform one massive shakedown of the Kigndom's inhabitants. True or not, adventurers are given little choice but to help the elves, regardless of where their loyalty stands.
