During the Middle Ages, nobility and city councilors in the Kingdom of Castile's capital, Burgus, were examining ways of getting the populace from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. Streets were clogged with merchant caravans taking goods to and fro, a situation exacerbated by the city being smack dab in between the Kingdoms of Navarre and Leon, of whom traded with one another extensively. Pedestrian travel was becoming increasingly difficult, and an alternative was needed. After much deliberation, the city's rulers came to the conclusion that taking to the air was the only viable option.
But how would they do this? The skies were strictly the domain of birds! Not so, said a group of local engineers. For centuries, man had been lobbing gigantic boulders through the air with the use of catapults and trebuchets, ever improving their range and accuracy. Surely, the technology could be adapted to accommodate human flight, if for only a short time.
At first, the temptation was to go with cannons, as they were the sexy, new technology of the time. However, then, just as now, there was one topic front and center in the realm of public discourse: climate change. There had been two years of drought in the region, and locals were concerned that perhaps God was angry with them for some reason. Was it really wise to use cannons, devices that require explosive, fiery, sulfuric compounds in their daily operation? Some felt that cannons were just too closely tied with the Prince of Darkness, and would only further enrage their Lord and Savior if they were implemented. So, the nobility yielded to public pressure, and opted for a more socially responsible, less blasphemous solution to mass transit.
Over the next two years, engineers began construction on a series of super catapults with corresponding nets at strategic locations throughout the city. After completion, and rigorous testing, adults were permitted to travel across the city for a nominal fee. While it was hoped that children could also use the system, their weight, and the tendency for their tunics to open mid-flight and act as a sail made it very difficult to calculate their trajectory, resulting in many of them being hurled into the sides of nearby buildings and rivers instead of their intended destinations. There was discussion of possibly tying several children together so that they weighed the same as an adult in order to deal with this issue, but it was ultimately scrapped.
In the early days, there were only a few catapults and nets throughout the city, placed in centralized hubs. Citizens would have to make their own way to these before they queued up, and were launched to wherever it was that they wanted to go. City officials grossly underestimated how popular this service would be, though, as hundreds, then thousands flocked to these spots. As time wore on, the catapult hubs became overwhelmed, and the nobility decided to administer a limited number of permits to local, well-to-do merchants allowing them to set up their own catapult services in order to help further meet demand. It made perfect sense to let these people with vast resources and apparent business acumen handle the much needed expansion of this service.
At first, this provided some very much needed relief for the city's catapult system. New locations were opened up, some even in suburban, residential areas, allowing far more people to soar to the market, town square, flour mill, and so forth with ease. Unfortunately, these private endeavours were not held to the same strict safety standards as the city's own network were. Moreover, the merchants seldom consulted with one another, or even the city, when scheduling or targeting their location. What followed was a series of disasters as scores of commuters smashed into each other in mid air, and soon it was raining humans. This spread panic, and mistrust throughout the city such that over time locals used the catapults less and less, opting for the slower, albeit safer roads on the ground.
And with that, Burgis' brief love affair with the skies ended, and humans gave up on hurling themselves heavensward as a means of travel, something not seen again until the Great San Francisco Circus Cannon Delivery Company of the mid 1860s.
