The Rye
Megrimlock reveals the e-True Rye Story:
June 13th 2004: A new clan, The Rye, is formed by Kitsune_Tsuki and Widowmaker. For four months nothing happens. The two co-leaders are crippled by mutual contempt and continually stock the stash just so they can loot one another.
August 2004: The Rye goes to the top of the Clan Warfare boards after exploiting a bug regarding Bowls of Oatmeal. Before they exist. Mr Skullhead applies and is rejected. A rumour spreads around the forums that Widowmaker killed the Hermit but Kitsune resurrected him a few seconds later, and no-one noticed. The incident passes into KOL mythology and swiftly degenerates into a tired joke.
September 9th 2004: KungFuJoe and Marshall join the clan. Widowmaker boots himself and promptly rejoins with his multi Thisguy. Kitsune_Tsuki pops out briefly to found Warehouse 23 with Cardern, the player who famously caused Black Sunday, hacked Canadia, and ascended before Jick had even thought of the concept. KungFuJoe and Marshall bail to W23, Kitsune_Tsuki returns to the Rye with her new best friend, Pappabear. Pappabear founds numerous philanthropic projects within the clan, until an accident in his bathroom leaves him a bitter and scarred fuckwad. He jumps ship for Noblesse Oblige, a clan which will later disband and have its name stolen by Bashy. Yes this all happens on September 9th.
November 2004: Wrongshui trumps Fnord6 (as he was then) by bringing out the very first version of chatbot. Sadly it proves to be massively unpopular amongst the playerbase since regardless of what message you send, it replies "I hope you get cancer".
December 13th 2004: PhilANThropiSt joins the Rye by masquerading as a nice person. He promptly exploits the clan karma system with his limitless supply of cogs and sprockets and somehow ends up leader. He then claims to have founded the clan himself and offers his private porn collection to Chubbles to enshrine this fallacy in the official History of Loathing. Philanthropist then floods the clan with his numerous multies, best known among them Mortice and zarbuncle, who notably profited from 669 scrolls which Jick had created after a typo. This enables them to dual-wield asparagus knives and kill the Toot Oriole, which prevents all new accounts from progressing in the game until Jick flies over to Scotland and gives Philanthropist an atomic wedgie and he promises to put it back the way it was. Later that week, OzzyOzzy scams BoozerBear out of his MAHI fez and Jick has to make another one to stop him crying.
December 25th 2004: A temporary truce breaks out in the ranks of the Rye, which now has 117,843 members. SexyGoddess leaves, taking all her fans and adherents with her. This brings the membership total down to 117,842.
January 7th 2005: The Rye now has more members than there are player accounts in the Kingdom. Jick grows suspicious and secretly sends in NPCs to find out what is going on. It is discovered that the Rye's resident uber-hacker, Fanatix, has rewritten several basic mathematical laws in order to get more dry noodles. Fanatix is banned from the Kingdom for several minutes. His multies, Winston Churchill and Sealh8r, continue to prosper in the PvP arena.
February 30th 2005: In a brilliant PR campaign, the Rye codes its own items, the steaming evils, and leaves them in Boozerbear's inventory with a note purpoting to emanate from Jick. Boozer then sells them to 11 billionaires, keeps one, and sells the last one back to the Rye, who through Mugsy Toothe's 1337 bargaining skills reduce the price from 999,999,999 to 14 meat and a pair of "special" bloody clown pants. Little does the rest of the Kingdom know that when the Rye activates its own steaming evil, 666 days later, the other evils will explode, sending trojans to the PCs of the other recipients.
March - May 2005: Jick invites Rye superstars Cyberwocky, Arr Saying Piratess, John1008, Hotstuff and Riff to test ascension. The new testing team is somewhat dismayed to find that after a whole year, all that Jick has actually implemented is a message at the top of the Sorceress's tower saying "The sorceress attacks you but you win! Play again?" with a link to the new account page. Hotstuff and Riff leave the team, and the clan, in disgust. As Jick takes a back seat, the remaining team members co-opt the noted game designers behind World of Warcraft from the Rye ranks - Lookit this Turtle I tamed, Old Ned and wedgiesailor. Bashy begs to join but is rejected. The Sexy Six, as the new team erroneously describe themselves, set about designing forty eight new zones for the post-ascension world, with eight new snazzy character classes including Icecream Ninja, and the now mythical "Herbivorous potplant" familiar. Sadly, following a drunken night in Tijuana, the group return to find that Jick got bored in the Asymmetric office and replaced all the new content on the dev servers with midget clown porn. Their anger at Jick is reciprocated when he discovers that they have not brought him back any photos from the donkey show.
June 2005: By this time, Jick's mom had put up the "Countdown to Ascension" timer on the login page in a vain effort to prompt her son into doing some work. The rift between Jick and the Rye is irreconcilable, and in desperation Jick turns to some of his old buddies from Warehouse 23 to introduce the content they had been developing for their own highly original online browser game "Kingdom of Boathing". The post-ascension world rolled out after a frantic 48 hours is very different to the Rye's template, though rumours persist that the "Electric Monkey Kill Zone" remains on the database and can be accessed once a player carries over every skill whilst punching themselves in the face.
July 2005: Following their rift with the establishment, the Rye brood and plot their revenge. The current leader, StupidLisaGarbageFace, resigns and in a fit of pique, Fresh Curd removes all traces of his existence not only from KOL and its archives, but also the American health insurance system. el Lasagna becomes the first person to complete every hardcore oxy ascension in the same day. This arouses some suspicion but is quickly silenced by the "ghost mod" Rat of Holbor. Bashy begs again the join The Rye, and is mischeviously informed by ParanoidAndroid that he will be accepted if he completes 1000 ascensions. He is still trying.
October 2005: The event now known as White Wednesday was caused not, as many assume, by Jick clicking a few buttons when he was out of his face on marzipan, but in fact by a frenzied stalker attack by w_nightshade, the Rye's resident homicidal maniac. Accompanied by a dwarf whom he insisted on calling "Mini-Me" and who appears in many instances of his artwork, nightshade camped outside Jick's house with a tactical nuclear crossbow. His assassination attempt narrowly misses Jick, passing right through his poncho to strike the backup server. Since w_nightshade is only fourteen years old and a sissy, Jick is so embarrassed by the whole event that he makes up a cover story and bribes the unquestioning playerbase with shiny things. Out of interest, the plague which appeared in the game on Columbus Day is a nod to the real-life syphilis epidemic which broke out following the Rye's Clan Convention in Rio de Janeiro in September.
November - December 2005: Having duped enough ultra-rares, untradeables and imaginary items to enable them to buy out the game, The Rye take a break from playing in order to work on their new project. The players hire newbies to run their accounts whilst they develop a hyper-advanced Artificial Intelligence intended to be released upon the game and like, totally pwn everyone in pvp. Sadly a power shortage occurs, and the much vaunted superbot "Kahroo" emerges a shambling mess, defying her masters by keeping her hippy stone intact. Beware, though, for it is rumoured that tubby is working on kahroo's deadly successor, and in the halls of /sekrit it is whispered that kahtwo will be become self-aware on January 17th. 2084. Tubby is hella slow.
January - June 2006: The clan keeps a low profile, particularly after Mr Magnifico and ms_pellar are found to be behind the "Kingdom of Leching" underground porn movie which got Jick in trouble with his mom. The Springfest clan meet, held somewhat inconveniently in Minsk, is spoken of only by the denizens of /lounge in awed tones, and details are withheld on pain of death. Or at least a nasty kmail. Suffice to say, sleaze damage is introduced to the Kingdom in tribute to Vladjimir's exploits with the Siberian wildlife.
In a break from playing World of Warcraft, Jick checks in on the Rye using his top secret multi smoove mooth. Sadly for him he is soon rumbled, and finds himself locked into a low level clan rank called "Non-sexual slave boy" (so-called to differentiate it from Maceblade's custom rank), and forced to farm for ultra-rares for the rest of the clan. Complaining that he specifically designed the game for this to be fruitless, his whining falls on deaf ears and he is forced to spend up to seventeen hours a day in the haiku dungeon looking for the fabled Knob Gag Generator. The_Inferno keeps his solid gold ferrari as collateral. The upshot of this episode is that Jick attempts to change the ultra-rare code to allow himself some time to eat more meals each day, but in so doing opens a loop which allows eagle-eyed Betrayer to alter the names of the ultra-rares at will. The Asymmetric team manage to contain the damage to a great extent - The Hypnodick thankfully never reaches the live servers - but a cover story has to be invented for the sudden appearance of the Talisman of Bakula. The rushed nature of the charade is exhibited by the fact that the item itself is crap.
Clan funds, meanwhile, are running low. Thanks to lazy mork's coincidental creation of a multi called John Wilkes, however, all proceeds from the new KWE fights are accidentally siphoned off to him instead of being sunk by the game. This situation is allowed to continue when Crawly blackmails the Asymmetric team with compromising pictures of Multi Czar.
In May, many members of the Kingdom are thrilled by the new content development with the comet. Whilst the idea may stem from Jick's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after w_nightshade's assassination attempt the previous year, the Rye are unimpressed by the whole thing. The one exception to this is the Left Hand Jack, who repeatedly boasts in every chat channel going, even empty ones like /fulloflosers and /totallyfictitious, that he has spent at least ten times longer stargazing than anyone else. When he fails to show up on the leaderboard, Jack takes his posse (or possibly his grandmother) down to the Asymmetric office to complain. In a long and heated argument, using mostly monosyllabic words, it is explained to Jack that taking photos of the actual night sky and scanning them into his computer doesn't really count. Heartbroken, Jack is mollified when Xenophobe buys him some chocolate chip ice-cream, prompting a bright idea for an ingame reward. All this, of course, is an elaborate ploy to distract attention from the fact that darionlar has resurrected her old Don Pygoscelis account and is busy fleecing /villans of their meat and items with promises of exclusive access to the new "teh Awesome" zone unlocked by the secret Penguin Mafia quest. But, you know, who likes /villans anyway.
July 2006: A new ultimate power clan, The Ryesse Aflardocaine Warehouse Powder Jizzflaps 23Dub, is formed when members of the Rye invade the real life clan halls (which exist) of the other attention whore clans and give them Chinese burns until they are forced to declare en masse "I'm gay for the Rye". The Rye take their accumulated 93 trillion meat as spoils and then order Hotpasta and Bashy to make them fruit slushies.
Other History:
The Rye's "official" history written by the dedicated Chubbles can be reached at http://clanhistories.communityofloathing.com/therye.htm
