Order of the Baristas

For the canon entities, see The Baristas.

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The Baristas are an ancient order bound by a shared belief in exaltation through the brewing and consuming of coffee and coffee-based drinks. While the worship of Great Coffee in the Immaterial Plane can be traced back to the days of King Tom Hurtin, the order itself was formed in the aftermath of the Coffee Wars by the scattered barista tribes that survived the conflict.

Orders of the Baristas

The Baristas operate on a decentralized structure of cells, organized in orders, centered around aspects of the coffee trade. The largest and most well-known orders of the Baristas are the order of the Great Machinists, the order of Holy Beans, and the order of Orders, but the very structure of the Baristas allow for several other smaller orders, including the Milk Knights and the order of Temperatures.

Order of the Great Machinists

The Order of the Great Machinists seeks to brew great coffee through the conception of intricate coffee-making devices, believing that one can understand coffee through the understanding of the mechanical process of making it. To show their commitment to that understanding, Baristas of the order receive their holy sacrament through the outfitting of mechanical limbs, a process that makes them a fully functional coffee machine.

Order of Holy Beans

The Order of Holy Beans worship coffee through pilgrimage, going around the world to uncharted places in search of the most powerful coffee beans in existence, from the Unknown Forest Robusta to the Thunder Plains Arabica. They are also charged with the roasting and the blending of the beans, performing great ceremonies in which it is said the coffee acquires its strange mystical properties.

Order of Orders

Shrouded in incredible secrecy, the Order of Orders use all manners of subterfuge in order to advance the great coffee prophecies known as the Secret Menu. It is widely speculated, though not actually verified, that members of the order have been the cause of many significant events through coffee history, including the First Schism and the Awful Coffee Disaster.

History of the Baristas

The Court of King Tom Hurtin and the First Schism

Long before the discovery of underground fossilized drinkable coffee reserves in Massachusetts, the coffee trade in the Immaterial Plane was centered around the court of King Tom Hurtin, of Canada. Looking for a great hot drink to start the day, Tom Hurtin sought advice from the local barista tribes, who had engineered the first of the Great Machines, the Québécois Press (later known as the "French-Canadian Press", eventually shortened to the "French Press"). Seeking to bolster Canada's coffee industry, he invited the baristas to his court as advisors, forming the Royal Coffee Society of Canada/Société Royale du Café Canadien (RCSC/SRCC).

Under King Tom Hurtin, the RCSC was free to innovate, and create many of the fundamental techniques and rituals that are still used in coffee-making today. However, as its numbers grew, controversies began to erupt, as political factions began jockeying for power and royal favors. These tensions culminated with the invention of the Ontarian Press (later renamed "the Italian Press" following a series of highly unfortunate typos and mishearings). Unable to reach a consensus on the better way of making coffee, and with some factions vying to promote coffee outside of Canada, much of the senior leadership of the RCSC decided to leave the country in search of better prospects.

The Dunkies Corporation

Sitting on the world's largest deposit of raw donut ore, the Dunkies corporation was rapidly expanding and gaining power over the city of Boston. A minor incident at a Gloucester glazing mine led to the discovery of a naturally occurring pocket of drinkable coffee, leading Dunkies executives to expand their operations into coffee drilling, and calling on the expertise of baristas to build the coffee refineries of Quincy, Braintree, and Weymouth. Seeing the potential in Boston to become the new Great City of Coffee, many of the RCSC baristas took jobs with Dunkies, hoping to take the word of good coffee worldwide.

Despite their pivotal role in the incredible success of Dunkies' Refined Coffee, baristas were systematically kept out of decision-making power at the Dunkies corporation, with some blaming the uptick in coffee demand for the Great Jelly Flood, and the 18-month stoppage in service required to repair the damage it caused. As part of a wider move to remove human workers from the resource extraction process, the Dunkies corporation began working with Clambridge University on alternative means of producing coffee and donuts, including the Super Donut particle accelerator.

The Coffee Wars

Following the discovery of an illegal coffee experiment laboratory in Brockton, and amid mounting frustrations with the Dunkies corporate structure and board, the baristas of Boston chose to band together and leave the corporation, grinding all coffee operations in the city to a halt. Eager to take control of the city's natural resources, Tom Hurtin mounted an army and began descending on the greater Boston area, setting up camp in the nearby city of Medford. Fearing the prospect of having to hold off an invasion without a morning coffee, the Dunkies board chose to activate the Super Donut, in hopes of having enough coffee from alternate dimensions to fulfill demand. The rushed activation, in addition to flaws in the design of the particle accelerator, led to the time-space shattering explosion known as the Big Dunk.

Thinking the city defenseless in the immediate aftermath of the blast, Tom Hurtin's troops moved through the time-scattered streets of Boston, only to be met with resistance from multiple eras of the city's resistance cells. Fighting to a sometimes-literal standstill. The merging and un-merging of parallel realities that took place during the first Battle of Boston caused the coffee beans in the kitchen of dissident barista Ulysses D. Donut to get turned into tea leaves, which, once brewed, could be turned into a hot drink of comparable power to coffee.

Rallying the various pockets of resistance across Boston through the power of tea, Donut led a small force to the Battle of Bastings. Over the course of a 12 days game of "Go Flish", he kept Tom Hurtin's troops to a stalemate, until issues with currency conversion and a lack of sevens in Donut's hands forced Tom Hurtin's to file for bankruptcy and withdraw all troops from the city. Shortly thereafter, Boston's first congress passed two laws: one instituting the current electoral system, in charge of electing a mayor following the ILB post-season, and another banning the possession and sale of coffee throughout the city.

The Founding

Effectively forced out of the city of Boston, and having witnessed firsthand the dangers of centralizing power, the surviving Baristas on both sides of the Coffee War chose to re-center themselves on the spiritual pursuit of coffee. The orders would be free to pursue the Great Deeds of Coffee through any way they wish, and they would organize in whatever way they saw fit in order to accomplish their task. The event was described in Order of Order legends as "our first victory, the first step on the journey to the pure light of the Perfect Cup".

Baristas in ILB

• Avila Guzman
• Sparks Beans