Xidelstat is a territory of Jord. It is bordered by five states, not including its mother-state: Samir to the north; Yorkley to the east; Farilos to the southeast; Kadesh to the south; and Barisma to the southwest. The flat steppe area that came to be Xidelstat was uninhabited and for the most part undisturbed. Some oil company from Jord ventured into the unforgiving landscape and actually struck oil north of where the future territory’s capital would be. Having discovered such a treasure, the company sent a team of lawyers up to the national capital of F.D. Porto-Maro to request this federal land be sold or given over to Jord for the cultivating and refining of oil.
The national Agricultural Committee sent out a surveyor to determine where this unnamed territory would begin and end, and the deed to the land was sold to Jord for a five percent cut on the profit made from the oil each year. The territory was named after Franklin Xidelstat, the foreman of the team from the oil company that had struck the liquid gold.
Over the years, people from all the eight states brought their families to Xidelstat and created families there. Towns began to crop up and eventually cities were born from the influx of people, mostly oil workers and their families. Eventually Xidelstat developed its own micro-government, and although it was the pride of the Jordans, the capital Kitam was much too far away for them to keep a reign on the developing state-that-could-be.
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Xidelstat’s principal cities are Sarabi, the capital, Quentin Town, and Feolus. They are each just miles away from an oil refinery or well, where most of the men of the cities worked. Sarabi became the territory’s industrial center, with warehouses and headquarters of such companies as the Borenir Corporation, the most successful company in all of Zuria. A railway station was built in Sarabi—aptly named Central Hub Rail Station—and the trains which run between Sarabi, Quentin Town, and City West in Yorkley, branched out into smaller towns like Uríth, Feolus, and a few in Jord where the steppe ebbed away. The Warehouse District and what became known as the Housing District were joined when the roads expanded, and soon the Public and Business Districts joined them at the intersection of Q-Town Road and Great Lady Main Street.
Sarabi and Quentin Town are the only cities in Xidelstat with public libraries. Quentin Town, however, is the only place in Xidelstat with a university. Zed University has been the birthplace of hundreds of profitable lawyering careers; these men and women usually go to work in the Federal District of Port-Maro or Yorkley. Doctors and engineers are also turned out at Zed, though higher education is not a requirement for much else; and the principal business of the territory being oil drilling and refining, there is little use for much education in Xidelstat at all. Quentin Town is the home of work seminars and big corporate meetings because of the Quentin Auditorium, which is also a theater that houses local productions that people come from miles around to watch.
The town of Feolus is small, with an almost rural atmosphere. It has one manufacturing plant, where locals work with porcelain and glass. They make fine china, bath tubs, sinks, windows, mirrors, and glassware. There are even a few privately owned glass-blowing shops where the owners make glass figures and stained-glass hangers and windows (for a hefty price, most of them). Most of the wares from the plant are shipped in wagons to Sarabi, packed onto trains and sent to department stores across Zuria. Most people in Xidelstat, however, buy these things (for cheaper, in fact) straight from the plant, and so there are few department stores in the territory.
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It took generations for the people of Xidelstat to consider themselves Xidelians, instead of the Farilons, Kadeshians, Barismans, ‘Delans, Hadians, Yorkers, Jordans, and Samiros/-as that their predecessors had been. When Xidelstat threatened to appeal to the national government for their independence, its power- and money-hungry neighbors Barisma and Kadesh brought their militaries in to Xidelstats’ borders and, without intervention from the mother-state that was ignorant of its territory’s situation, the two states fought for the right to overtake the territory and claim it for its own.
The war that rocks Xidelstat lasts 2½ years. The first period of the war, Barisma and Kadesh battle at the border, where even the Xidelians are unaware that there is a war. The second period, called Il Scåthan, or Krój Duży in the vernacular, sees the two armies going deeper into Xidelstat, eventually overtaking Sarabi and beginning to rip it apart. The armies also begin to take civilians and force them to fight among their ranks, as they’re cut off from their supplies and the rest of their men by the opposing army at their borders.
Something merciful happens after those two and a half years: the plainclothes militia from Samir has come, and although there are soldiers left from Barisma and Kadesh meant to kill any remaining draftees, for the most part there is peace. The national government eventually sends aid to the territory, including architects to rebuild Sarabi and rations and things. Luckily, outside of Sarabi there is little structural damage, although many Xidelians had disappeared and would never be found again. The government also granted Xidelstat its statehood (despite Jord’s assertion that they had no right to do it) and protection by the militia until Xidelstat could muster up its own forces. Barisma and Kadesh were sanctioned and in some cases embargoed, and many of their militaries’ officers were arrested and would be tried for war crimes. A few more years would go by before the draftees who were herded back into Barisma and Kadesh—or, those who survived—were discovered in the prisons and labor camps and freed by the newly-formed Xidelian Army.
