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In brief, Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle was a powerful necromancer during the Second Empire, one who reached heights that no other necromancer ever had before, not even in Uther’s time. His particular brand of necromancy got excluded, leaving him as the sole practitioner, but as far as enpersoned exclusion zones went, he was pretty calm and relaxed, capable of making deals with those outside his realm. At the time, that included the Second Empire, and they invested money into the Captain’s lands, putting up factories which were staffed by zombies, the name given to special creations that would slowly decay over time, but could be directed toward simple work until that point, the pinnacle of mindless labor. The Captain’s realm took in raw goods and sent out finished ones, at a fraction of the price that anyone else could do the same work for, and he did it with branding and public relations, little stamps that said ‘zombie-made’ on plates, hammers, all kinds of things. The zombies were, per the Captain, ethically sourced, only taken from people who died naturally in his realm, which had a fair population of the living as well.

The only problem was, Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle had been lying, and the zombies weren’t fully dead at all. Instead, the person who died was locked into their body, fully able to feel everything that happened to them, but unable to take any action on their own. The ‘zombies’ would sit there doing assembly work, watching as their bodies slowly and inevitably decayed, unable to speak, unable to stop, watching their own demise at a remove.

Eventually, the truth came out, thanks to some investigative reporting and a few very specific entads that allowed the zombies to have a voice. It was a big, complicated mess, an atrocity committed almost entirely by one man, and it got tangled up in the burgeoning world economy and the complicated ethical positions of the Second Empire. The upshot was that ‘zombie’ became a dirty word, especially after Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle published a long screed about how people knew in their hearts, and didn’t care, and would continue to buy the products from his factories anyway. ‘Zombie’ had always been his word, with slightly cutesy connotations, pictured in his propaganda as dim-witted but loveable creatures. It was a lot less cute when you knew there were people trapped inside those bodies, forced into permanent labor as they watched their bodies degrade, feeling every single bit of their slow death. Captain Blue-in-the-Bottle had been wrong about people: they’d stopped buying his stuff, mostly through coordinated action and a stringent ban by the Empire of Common Cause, and he’d been stuck in his exclusion zone for quite some time, increasingly unhinged and severely unhappy.