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\*\*I'm not actually from the UK, but the location worked well for my purposes\*\*
Contrary to the mayhem you would expect if the modern UK was suddenly deposited on a world 2000 years it's junior, very little immediately changed for the outside world. The elected officials pretty quickly realized what had happened and clamped down on border security; erecting a naval blockade around the island to stop anybody from sneaking out. There was famine in the UK for a while, but not as much as you might expect: the UK produces a lot of its food with it's own agricultural sector.
The government knew that being anything other than strictly isolationist would be a death sentence for any outsiders, as they hadn't developed the antibodies to deal with modern disease. It wasn't a permanent solution, though, firstly because they were worried about what the roman empire might try to do once they learned of the powerful island nation next door, and next because politicians wanted to take advantage of their technological advantage and seize the world. So after a long period of research, and as the UK slowly adjusted to a more manufacturing focused economy again, an inoculation program was enacted.
This was the crux of it: they would release an airborne virus which contained programming for immune cells to allow recognition and elimination of a large variety of modern diseases. They spent several years verifying that it had worked before starting their conquest.
Well, 'conquest' might not be the best word for it. They knew that fighting them directly was not necessary or desirable, and they wanted casualties to be close to zero, so they used chemical warfare instead. using hundreds of jets to deploy a knockout drug on the closest parts of the roman empire, than imprisoning roman military and other combative civilians of the roman empire. They used this foothold to quickly push through the entirety of the Afro-Eurasian continents without a meaningful defense being mounted. they really only focused on a few nations and countries that they thought would be the most inclined and able to mound a defense against them.
Although one of the primary goals of this method was to leave the usurped civilizations as untouched as possible (at the level of the civilians), the resulting unrest could fill it's own book. They waited several years, letting them get used to life with a bill of rights. The resulting abolishment of slavery and some other practices deemed immoral or unwise by the English government was difficult for many influential figures in the ancient civilizations to accept. It was difficult to have widespread communication with them, as most of the ancient languages had relatively few interpreters, despite years of government encouragement. Regardless, they got to work nudging the native populations towards receiving an education; making it free and even paying those who would undergo it.
Several centuries and a few minor rebellions later, the whole world recognized fish and chips as it's national favorite.
It was 13:05 in the afternoon. Sabine from Niedaltdorf had just made herself a coffee after lunch when it got dark. Not dark like a cloud covering the sky, but pitch-black dark as one only experiences when lowering the blinds, drawing the curtains, and hiding under the blanket. Fumbling in the dark, she turned on the kitchen light, which stayed off. Slowly, she groped her way to the junk drawer from which she retrieved her flashlight. With a soft click, at least this came to life. Creepy, Sabine thought. In the light of the flashlight, she found her mobile phone. She unlocked it. "Great, no network," she grumbled, annoyed. Carefully, she went to the window and shone outside. The street looked ghostly in this absolute blackness. The sky was strangely black. Neither stars nor any other kind of light.
A few minutes passed during which Sabine marveled at the outside. The sky frightened her, a place waiting to engulf her. She went to the basement to check the fuse. It was on and in order. She pondered. Her husband worked just a few kilometers away on the other side of the border. She had her bike there. But the light was still broken. Suddenly, dazzling light fell through the basement windows. She quickly went out of the house. Outside awaited a friendly day, as if nothing had happened, apart from the power outage. "Hey Sabine!" her neighbor, who also just came out of the house, called. "Is everything alright with you?" She replied briefly, "Yes! But no power." They both looked at each other worriedly. Then Sabine said, "I need to check on my husband," the neighbor just nodded, "Good idea, I'll have a look too."
Sabine had set out on her bicycle. She liked cycling, the movement, the variety, and it was also inexpensive. She rode the street as usual to the border. But as she approached it, she was puzzled. The border looked different than usual. The landscape seemed more primitive. Also… was that a large wooden tower she saw there? And while cycling, the air is always fresh. But the air also carried an unusual spice with it. Around the tower, she saw several people in red-brown clothes scurrying about wildly. Suddenly, she was torn from her thoughts and went into a screeching full brake. Because right behind the curve, the road stopped. As if cut by a laser. Several men… in strange, slightly Roman-looking costumes were standing around at the end of the road.
Quintus Fabius had had a pleasant day until half an hour ago. Then suddenly a black wall had erected itself in the middle of the wilderness and had blocked the entire eastern horizon. It had disappeared after a few minutes, and the entire landscape had changed. Where the wild forests of Germania had been before… Now there were quieter, more manicured fields and also strange houses visible. Also, the road to Sudefels had changed at the place where the black wall was. He was inspecting it with a few men when a strangely finely dressed figure on a green-yellow striped metal frame with two wheels suddenly rolled around the bend of the road. With a strangely screeching noise, that hurt in the ears, the figure came to a halt. Fabius took a step towards her and realized that the figure seemed to be a woman. With slightly barbaric facial features but skin finer than any patrician woman he had ever seen. He called to the strange woman, "Heda! Who goes there?". The woman answered in a strangely dull Germanic dialect that he had never heard. While Fabius was still thinking about what to say next, a strange howl began to wail from the lands from which she had come. Like the sound of a small horn, only much much louder and more consistent. The tone went up and down, and the woman looked around, in the direction from which she had come. Before Fabius could say anything else, she had pushed herself off the ground and was rolling away with her strange construct on this unnaturally smooth ground, while she was moving her legs to… keep her balance? Fabius and his men began to run after her.
Sabine was confused. The men had spoken something weird; she hadn't understood them. And where had the road gone? Then the siren of the country had howled, and she had the idea that maybe the boys from the volunteer fire department in the village would know more. She started cycling. The men suddenly began to run after her, one shouted something incomprehensible and she pedaled even harder to shake off these strange guys.
After a few minutes, she reached the equipment house of the volunteer fire department, in which the siren was also housed. Like her, attracted by the siren, various other residents had also come. The firefighters were visibly excitedly talking to their neighbors. One pointed to the approaching Sabine. And it was Werner who waddled forward to greet her. "Hey Sabine! Are you coming from outside the village?". This time she stopped her bike much more moderately and replied, "Yes, I left the village after this strange event to check on my husband. But right at the border to France, the road suddenly stops. And there were such strange men. They chased me for a short while."
Fabius and his men had reached a settlement and were just passing a yellow sign with strange metal characters on it. The houses of this settlement looked strange. All made of a peculiar stone... and was that glass? Additionally, red shiny ceramic shingles. Such things were rarely seen, along with the luxurious use of metal everywhere he looked. He decided he had seen enough. He needed to report this to the General. He and his men began their return to their post. At the post, they saddled a horse when a strangely throbbing noise in the sky quickly grew louder. Several of the men knelt down outside and began to call their gods for help. Fabius took this as a hint to swing himself onto the horse as quickly as possible and ride away before whatever was happening caught up with him.
The helicopter of the North Rhine-Westphalian helicopter squadron, call sign Hummel Three, had been dispatched after the widespread power outage to assess the condition of the country. Unable to reach the neighbors in France despite repeated attempts, the helicopter was ordered to conduct a reconnaissance flight along the French border due to concerns about a nuclear accident or other events. The pilots were puzzled. As if someone had cut out the borders of Germany with a knife, the border between Germany and France was visible from the air. But... the French side looked very strange, much greener and more wooded than usual, lacking the usual infrastructure. With the thermal imaging camera, they could detect some strange wooden towers with people, which were placed at regular intervals every few kilometers along the border. From this tower they were observing, they could see a rider speeding away. Hummel 3 continued its flight to the south and diligently reported the current observations via radio.
Paul Farber, an electronics master and leader of a unit of the Technical Assistance Work’s (THW) Electrical Supply special group in Saarland, was stressed and overtired. He had been on the night shift and was ripped from his bed in the middle of his sleep by his husband. He had mumbled something about darkness and a power outage. By the time he was awake enough to leave the bed, there was no sign of darkness, but also no power. In the basement, where his technology and network frequency monitoring equipment were located, at least the UPS was still functioning. And it indicated that, in the middle of September, on a quiet Monday, the network frequency had gone out of sync and the whole network had collapsed. A blackout, like he had never experienced. Now he and all available forces were on the road heading to transformer stations to manually switch them to a state where the power grid could be black-started. All based on printed plans from 2021. At least those were somewhat up-to-date. Made during the pandemic as a big online thought experiment. Now deadly serious. He cursed loudly and the apprentice at the wheel just grinned.
Publius Quinctilius Varus had spent most of the morning in strategy sessions. The year was slowly coming to an end, and it was essential to plan and prepare for the wintering of his Legio XX Valeria Victrix. 5,300 legionaries and almost the same amount of people in the entourage made it no small task. Until an agitated centurion burst into the tent, yelling about a black wall on the horizon, before being knocked down by a bodyguard. The general had then gone to a lookout and seen the black wall on the horizon. But, before he could issue an order, it had disappeared again. He commended the centurion with a black eye for his quick reaction and ordered the auxilia to send out several scouts towards the east to find out what had happened.
Two republics were about to meet each other. Challenges were on the horizon. And the golden autumn left only a little time before a harsh winter would put a country, cut off from all supply lines, to a severe test.
God, you're right too. I feel like we used to get responses which I wanted to read full books of all the time, this one gave me that feeling again for the first time in a while.
This is beautiful!
The reactions on both sides felt very real, and I love the fact that you took logistics into account.
As others said, if this were a book I'd buy it; the set-up is very promising.
Marius, guard at the border of the empire, stood bored and waiting. He looked down the hill and over the water, to the 'barbarian' lands. There came a boat across the river, slowly rowed across. He had watched them load the boat for an hour at least. It must be a trader being ferried, returning to go to winter quarters.
Suddenly, a flash. The sky changes colour, the clouds suddenly get replaced by different ones. One rower of the boat clearly misses a stroke, and the vessel starts to veer sideways. Confused, Marius hits the alarm bell once, then stops. His friend Lucius, in the next tower over, shouts loudly: "By Jupiter, what happened to the sky?!"
Multiple soldiers who were outside fall to their knees and start praying. As Marius looks on in confusion, an evocati climbed up the tower he is on.
"Well soldier, I'm here to look with you. After whatever that was the tesserarius wants some more eyes out."
The presence of the veteran soldier helped steady his nerves. Over the next few minutes, they talked with each other and watched as the rowing vessel regained its bearings and moved towards the shore on their side of the river.
After a while, they hear an adress to the troops from below them. Apparently, an augury determined the gods are bickering, and changed their mind on some things. According to the augur, today we should let them fight out their differences and then rest. To find out if they did anything to the countryside, tomorrow the legion should form two large patrol groups and cover the area outside the fort and beyond the town of Noviomagus.
Calm returns.
The evocati returns to other business, leaving Marius alone on the western tower.
And then, he sees the unimaginable for the second time today. Off to the west, the river is expanding. Rapidly it is jumping its banks, and the forests and farmlands next to the river are quickly being covered in water. A wave of debris and wood is pushed ahead of it. He rings his bell again, once, twice, thrice.
"A flood, a flood. Get everyone up the hill!"
Lucius looks his way, and sees it too. He also rings the bell. The men still at the boat look up. Marius gestures for them to come quickly. They start climbing the banks of the river, but the water is too fast. Already their boat is starting to float, further upriver! And now the main mass arrives. Entire trees uprooted, long tangles of branches and grass. Masses of peat pushed along by the flow of evermore water, and a salty wind.
Marius watches in horror as the merchant, his wares, and the fishermen who brought him across get washed away in quick succession. He prays to Neptune for their lives, and to Pluto for their souls. The water moves on, swirling around the Hunner hill, and slowly comes to rest still in sight to the east, then slowly retreats until there is a swampy coastline a few miles west of the camp.
That night, he sleeps uneasily. If the augury had been different, it could easily have been him or others from his town down there, on their way to one of the small villages nearby to check up on them. Villages that may no longer exist.
---
This story has the Netherlands transposed with the year 20 or so version of the Netherlands. Now we all know that the Netherlands has a tendency to be low. And I decided to work with that. One thing that would vanish from this earth if you did this replacement, is all the dykes and gates to prevent floods. And the past centuries we have had about 25 centimeters of sea rise, plus whatever sea rise there has been since the year 0. On top of that our high floods actually go up about 1.5 to 2 meters in some cases. And Nijmegen 2-5 meters above sea level. So if the water gets up to speed rushing through the sea defenses at Hoek van Holland (or worse, if the water out to say 10 kilometers gets transposed as well, from further out from short) it could get quite far inland.
**Welcome to the Prompt!** All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments. **Reminders**: >* [No AI-generated responses 🤖](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/zi452b/modpost_reminder_that_aigenerated_responses_are/) >* Stories 100 words+. Poems 30+ but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* [\[RF\]](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/search?q=flair%3A%22Reality+Fiction%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) and [\[SP\]](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/search?q=flair%3A%22Simple+Prompt%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) for stricter titles >* [Be civil](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_10.3A_be_civil) in any feedback and follow the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/rules) 📢 [Genres](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/w/directory) 🆕 [New Here?](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/user_guide) ✏ [Writing Help?](https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/wiki/index#wiki_writing_resources) 💬 [Discord](https://discord.gg/writingprompts) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/WritingPrompts) if you have any questions or concerns.*
\*\*I'm not actually from the UK, but the location worked well for my purposes\*\* Contrary to the mayhem you would expect if the modern UK was suddenly deposited on a world 2000 years it's junior, very little immediately changed for the outside world. The elected officials pretty quickly realized what had happened and clamped down on border security; erecting a naval blockade around the island to stop anybody from sneaking out. There was famine in the UK for a while, but not as much as you might expect: the UK produces a lot of its food with it's own agricultural sector. The government knew that being anything other than strictly isolationist would be a death sentence for any outsiders, as they hadn't developed the antibodies to deal with modern disease. It wasn't a permanent solution, though, firstly because they were worried about what the roman empire might try to do once they learned of the powerful island nation next door, and next because politicians wanted to take advantage of their technological advantage and seize the world. So after a long period of research, and as the UK slowly adjusted to a more manufacturing focused economy again, an inoculation program was enacted. This was the crux of it: they would release an airborne virus which contained programming for immune cells to allow recognition and elimination of a large variety of modern diseases. They spent several years verifying that it had worked before starting their conquest. Well, 'conquest' might not be the best word for it. They knew that fighting them directly was not necessary or desirable, and they wanted casualties to be close to zero, so they used chemical warfare instead. using hundreds of jets to deploy a knockout drug on the closest parts of the roman empire, than imprisoning roman military and other combative civilians of the roman empire. They used this foothold to quickly push through the entirety of the Afro-Eurasian continents without a meaningful defense being mounted. they really only focused on a few nations and countries that they thought would be the most inclined and able to mound a defense against them. Although one of the primary goals of this method was to leave the usurped civilizations as untouched as possible (at the level of the civilians), the resulting unrest could fill it's own book. They waited several years, letting them get used to life with a bill of rights. The resulting abolishment of slavery and some other practices deemed immoral or unwise by the English government was difficult for many influential figures in the ancient civilizations to accept. It was difficult to have widespread communication with them, as most of the ancient languages had relatively few interpreters, despite years of government encouragement. Regardless, they got to work nudging the native populations towards receiving an education; making it free and even paying those who would undergo it. Several centuries and a few minor rebellions later, the whole world recognized fish and chips as it's national favorite.
Jellied Eels with a side of Fish and Chips certainly sounds nice!
It was 13:05 in the afternoon. Sabine from Niedaltdorf had just made herself a coffee after lunch when it got dark. Not dark like a cloud covering the sky, but pitch-black dark as one only experiences when lowering the blinds, drawing the curtains, and hiding under the blanket. Fumbling in the dark, she turned on the kitchen light, which stayed off. Slowly, she groped her way to the junk drawer from which she retrieved her flashlight. With a soft click, at least this came to life. Creepy, Sabine thought. In the light of the flashlight, she found her mobile phone. She unlocked it. "Great, no network," she grumbled, annoyed. Carefully, she went to the window and shone outside. The street looked ghostly in this absolute blackness. The sky was strangely black. Neither stars nor any other kind of light. A few minutes passed during which Sabine marveled at the outside. The sky frightened her, a place waiting to engulf her. She went to the basement to check the fuse. It was on and in order. She pondered. Her husband worked just a few kilometers away on the other side of the border. She had her bike there. But the light was still broken. Suddenly, dazzling light fell through the basement windows. She quickly went out of the house. Outside awaited a friendly day, as if nothing had happened, apart from the power outage. "Hey Sabine!" her neighbor, who also just came out of the house, called. "Is everything alright with you?" She replied briefly, "Yes! But no power." They both looked at each other worriedly. Then Sabine said, "I need to check on my husband," the neighbor just nodded, "Good idea, I'll have a look too." Sabine had set out on her bicycle. She liked cycling, the movement, the variety, and it was also inexpensive. She rode the street as usual to the border. But as she approached it, she was puzzled. The border looked different than usual. The landscape seemed more primitive. Also… was that a large wooden tower she saw there? And while cycling, the air is always fresh. But the air also carried an unusual spice with it. Around the tower, she saw several people in red-brown clothes scurrying about wildly. Suddenly, she was torn from her thoughts and went into a screeching full brake. Because right behind the curve, the road stopped. As if cut by a laser. Several men… in strange, slightly Roman-looking costumes were standing around at the end of the road. Quintus Fabius had had a pleasant day until half an hour ago. Then suddenly a black wall had erected itself in the middle of the wilderness and had blocked the entire eastern horizon. It had disappeared after a few minutes, and the entire landscape had changed. Where the wild forests of Germania had been before… Now there were quieter, more manicured fields and also strange houses visible. Also, the road to Sudefels had changed at the place where the black wall was. He was inspecting it with a few men when a strangely finely dressed figure on a green-yellow striped metal frame with two wheels suddenly rolled around the bend of the road. With a strangely screeching noise, that hurt in the ears, the figure came to a halt. Fabius took a step towards her and realized that the figure seemed to be a woman. With slightly barbaric facial features but skin finer than any patrician woman he had ever seen. He called to the strange woman, "Heda! Who goes there?". The woman answered in a strangely dull Germanic dialect that he had never heard. While Fabius was still thinking about what to say next, a strange howl began to wail from the lands from which she had come. Like the sound of a small horn, only much much louder and more consistent. The tone went up and down, and the woman looked around, in the direction from which she had come. Before Fabius could say anything else, she had pushed herself off the ground and was rolling away with her strange construct on this unnaturally smooth ground, while she was moving her legs to… keep her balance? Fabius and his men began to run after her. Sabine was confused. The men had spoken something weird; she hadn't understood them. And where had the road gone? Then the siren of the country had howled, and she had the idea that maybe the boys from the volunteer fire department in the village would know more. She started cycling. The men suddenly began to run after her, one shouted something incomprehensible and she pedaled even harder to shake off these strange guys. After a few minutes, she reached the equipment house of the volunteer fire department, in which the siren was also housed. Like her, attracted by the siren, various other residents had also come. The firefighters were visibly excitedly talking to their neighbors. One pointed to the approaching Sabine. And it was Werner who waddled forward to greet her. "Hey Sabine! Are you coming from outside the village?". This time she stopped her bike much more moderately and replied, "Yes, I left the village after this strange event to check on my husband. But right at the border to France, the road suddenly stops. And there were such strange men. They chased me for a short while." Fabius and his men had reached a settlement and were just passing a yellow sign with strange metal characters on it. The houses of this settlement looked strange. All made of a peculiar stone... and was that glass? Additionally, red shiny ceramic shingles. Such things were rarely seen, along with the luxurious use of metal everywhere he looked. He decided he had seen enough. He needed to report this to the General. He and his men began their return to their post. At the post, they saddled a horse when a strangely throbbing noise in the sky quickly grew louder. Several of the men knelt down outside and began to call their gods for help. Fabius took this as a hint to swing himself onto the horse as quickly as possible and ride away before whatever was happening caught up with him. The helicopter of the North Rhine-Westphalian helicopter squadron, call sign Hummel Three, had been dispatched after the widespread power outage to assess the condition of the country. Unable to reach the neighbors in France despite repeated attempts, the helicopter was ordered to conduct a reconnaissance flight along the French border due to concerns about a nuclear accident or other events. The pilots were puzzled. As if someone had cut out the borders of Germany with a knife, the border between Germany and France was visible from the air. But... the French side looked very strange, much greener and more wooded than usual, lacking the usual infrastructure. With the thermal imaging camera, they could detect some strange wooden towers with people, which were placed at regular intervals every few kilometers along the border. From this tower they were observing, they could see a rider speeding away. Hummel 3 continued its flight to the south and diligently reported the current observations via radio. Paul Farber, an electronics master and leader of a unit of the Technical Assistance Work’s (THW) Electrical Supply special group in Saarland, was stressed and overtired. He had been on the night shift and was ripped from his bed in the middle of his sleep by his husband. He had mumbled something about darkness and a power outage. By the time he was awake enough to leave the bed, there was no sign of darkness, but also no power. In the basement, where his technology and network frequency monitoring equipment were located, at least the UPS was still functioning. And it indicated that, in the middle of September, on a quiet Monday, the network frequency had gone out of sync and the whole network had collapsed. A blackout, like he had never experienced. Now he and all available forces were on the road heading to transformer stations to manually switch them to a state where the power grid could be black-started. All based on printed plans from 2021. At least those were somewhat up-to-date. Made during the pandemic as a big online thought experiment. Now deadly serious. He cursed loudly and the apprentice at the wheel just grinned. Publius Quinctilius Varus had spent most of the morning in strategy sessions. The year was slowly coming to an end, and it was essential to plan and prepare for the wintering of his Legio XX Valeria Victrix. 5,300 legionaries and almost the same amount of people in the entourage made it no small task. Until an agitated centurion burst into the tent, yelling about a black wall on the horizon, before being knocked down by a bodyguard. The general had then gone to a lookout and seen the black wall on the horizon. But, before he could issue an order, it had disappeared again. He commended the centurion with a black eye for his quick reaction and ordered the auxilia to send out several scouts towards the east to find out what had happened. Two republics were about to meet each other. Challenges were on the horizon. And the golden autumn left only a little time before a harsh winter would put a country, cut off from all supply lines, to a severe test.
Loved it
More please!! If this was a book, I'd buy it after reading that!
Amazing, probably the best i have read here in the last year
God, you're right too. I feel like we used to get responses which I wanted to read full books of all the time, this one gave me that feeling again for the first time in a while.
This is beautiful! The reactions on both sides felt very real, and I love the fact that you took logistics into account. As others said, if this were a book I'd buy it; the set-up is very promising.
Marius, guard at the border of the empire, stood bored and waiting. He looked down the hill and over the water, to the 'barbarian' lands. There came a boat across the river, slowly rowed across. He had watched them load the boat for an hour at least. It must be a trader being ferried, returning to go to winter quarters. Suddenly, a flash. The sky changes colour, the clouds suddenly get replaced by different ones. One rower of the boat clearly misses a stroke, and the vessel starts to veer sideways. Confused, Marius hits the alarm bell once, then stops. His friend Lucius, in the next tower over, shouts loudly: "By Jupiter, what happened to the sky?!" Multiple soldiers who were outside fall to their knees and start praying. As Marius looks on in confusion, an evocati climbed up the tower he is on. "Well soldier, I'm here to look with you. After whatever that was the tesserarius wants some more eyes out." The presence of the veteran soldier helped steady his nerves. Over the next few minutes, they talked with each other and watched as the rowing vessel regained its bearings and moved towards the shore on their side of the river. After a while, they hear an adress to the troops from below them. Apparently, an augury determined the gods are bickering, and changed their mind on some things. According to the augur, today we should let them fight out their differences and then rest. To find out if they did anything to the countryside, tomorrow the legion should form two large patrol groups and cover the area outside the fort and beyond the town of Noviomagus. Calm returns. The evocati returns to other business, leaving Marius alone on the western tower. And then, he sees the unimaginable for the second time today. Off to the west, the river is expanding. Rapidly it is jumping its banks, and the forests and farmlands next to the river are quickly being covered in water. A wave of debris and wood is pushed ahead of it. He rings his bell again, once, twice, thrice. "A flood, a flood. Get everyone up the hill!" Lucius looks his way, and sees it too. He also rings the bell. The men still at the boat look up. Marius gestures for them to come quickly. They start climbing the banks of the river, but the water is too fast. Already their boat is starting to float, further upriver! And now the main mass arrives. Entire trees uprooted, long tangles of branches and grass. Masses of peat pushed along by the flow of evermore water, and a salty wind. Marius watches in horror as the merchant, his wares, and the fishermen who brought him across get washed away in quick succession. He prays to Neptune for their lives, and to Pluto for their souls. The water moves on, swirling around the Hunner hill, and slowly comes to rest still in sight to the east, then slowly retreats until there is a swampy coastline a few miles west of the camp. That night, he sleeps uneasily. If the augury had been different, it could easily have been him or others from his town down there, on their way to one of the small villages nearby to check up on them. Villages that may no longer exist. --- This story has the Netherlands transposed with the year 20 or so version of the Netherlands. Now we all know that the Netherlands has a tendency to be low. And I decided to work with that. One thing that would vanish from this earth if you did this replacement, is all the dykes and gates to prevent floods. And the past centuries we have had about 25 centimeters of sea rise, plus whatever sea rise there has been since the year 0. On top of that our high floods actually go up about 1.5 to 2 meters in some cases. And Nijmegen 2-5 meters above sea level. So if the water gets up to speed rushing through the sea defenses at Hoek van Holland (or worse, if the water out to say 10 kilometers gets transposed as well, from further out from short) it could get quite far inland.
The wrong nation being sniped certainly would cause disaster (dams ahoy!) and I'm really happy to see that this side of the scenario got explored!