Thank you all for your helpful answers. I was concerned that anything I thought of seemed better suited to the cultural settings and research assignments and I'm trying really hard not to work ahead to keep in the spirit of the challenge. But if that's the best solution, I'll go ahead and do that.

As far as the prophecy goes, it is a circular self-fulfilling one where the real meaning only happens because of the actions taken as a result of misinterpretation. I've been avoiding dealing with it because I went to great lengths to make it line up with both religious holy days of the time and natural phenomenon that actually happened just to realize I made the rookie mistake of not converting everything over to the Julian calendar first. Now I need to completely rework it.

I'll spend 15 minutes untangling prophecy stuff and the rest of an hour on daily living stuff, put it all in a database, and then call it good.

Thanks again!

Sihaya