A description over on the Cold War between what would be the Republican Sphere, led by the United States and the Monarchist Sphere, led by the Japanese Empire. The Republican Sphere would consist of the United States, the Anglosphere, western Europe under socialist parties, the rump Soviet state in Ruthenia (formerly Ukraine) and South China with its capital in Nanjing with the Japanese Empire consisting of its puppet states in Asia, the restored monarchy in Russia, their puppets over in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and the Empire of United India . The Cold War was over old vs new, with the US funding insurgencies, even red ones with Ho Chi Minh over in Vietnam. The Cold War lasted as long as it did due to treason in the Soviet Union resulting over in the Japanese gaining access to the atom bomb. Japanese expats became increasingly common as Japanese-Americans were barred from entering Japan and were stalked often, though this led to solidarity with other nations, with some even declaring the Cold War less on Jpan and more on the empire (or more specifically, the council of generals using the emperor as a puppet).
The treason that would see the end of the USSR would see the Soviets fight bravely to stop the puppet state, which would valorize them over in the Americans, and helped reverse the Red Scare in many nations, especially the US. The Cold War continued on for a few decades, with close calls such as when the US put nuclear warheads on Sakhalin, which became a homeland for the displaced Ainu, stanuchly loyal American allies. It would finally end in the Great Revolution in 1980. North China would kill the puppet emperor before surrendering to the social democratic South China for reunification, Korea overthrowing the Japanese overseer along with others in Southeast Asia and even the Japanese communists being led by the Emperor's son to overthrow the generals, with the Emperor himself deciding to die with intergrity... and blowing himself up to protect his son and get back at his captors, and creating the only "communist constitutional monarchy" in the world. The world would see the end of the Cold War and the Great Red Wave.
"Bharata's fate to be united by conquest and become a great power was sealed when the Sikh Empire and Gorkha Empire combined into one empire... and their armies were admired, feared and respected by all"
As the 1980s started the Indian government was determined to innovate in the fields of computing and communication, and hearing about the plans for the Minitel in France it decided to have something like it.
And so the Bombay Boards System was born, the idea was simple and straightforward, create an online service with a limited audience around Bombay, run it for a while, and then take the lessons learned and apply them to a brand new, shiny, well planned, national service...
Well, that was the theory, the practice saw the service be massively expanded, amended, and reinvented over the years, meaning that yes, now India has an online service at a national scale, hugely popular and useful, and it's still the Bombay Boards System. People often joke that the new replacement service will come online on the day that Bombay officially becomes Mumbai, another idea that has been famously stuck in bureaucratic drawers forever.
And that's how the thing works, sprawling, extensive, filled with quirks and it's own terms for a lot of things, what would be sites and pages elsewhere are "boards", forums are "rooms" and topics "tables", users send "notes" instead of messages to each other, chats are "topics" and it doesn't matter if they are between two users or a group.
And so we come to the quote, which is about one of the most popular games in the service called "Paint War", which sees users coloring pixels across a map (India, Asia, Earth, Mars, there have been lots of variations), and since each individual user is limited on how much he can do it they will organize themselves into "empires", and an "empire" can be created around anything, cities, regions, sports teams, religions, ethnic groups, a brand of chocolate, really anything.
And that's how the Sikh and Gorkha empires managed to work together to fill the Baratha part of the map in which they were playing with an impressive image of a smiling mango in one memorable night.
"I thought the treadmill crane was fictional"
