alicornutopia | blood sweat tear

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blood sweat tear

He's moving her to a different court to see if it'll improve her attitude. She's allowed to fly. It's been a long, long time since she was allowed to -

She is only allowed to fly to her destination, not anywhere else. She notices that she is not where she should be, that she cannot progress to where she was told to go, and she careens out of control when her wings won't flap anymore, and she crashes.

---

with Miles (kappa)

with Minus (kappa)

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"Yeah. We do have the first-mover advantage, and that's not to be discounted, but... I'm torn between wanting everyone to know about the names problem so they can protect future generations of mortals, and wanting no one to know about the names problem so I don't wake up one morning to find some paranoid individual has gotten hold of a gate-capable fairy and started invading every planet they can find a holo of. I hadn't realized until just now how much of the stability of human relations is maintained by the inability of people to travel from point to arbitrary point without passing through the intervening space... but I know how much it would benefit people to be able to stroll casually between star systems, so denying everyone gates forever seems like the wrong answer. I don't know."

"I certainly know less about how mortals and their planets work than you do."

"Anything we do, including 'nothing', might conceivably lead to the wrong person getting their hands on the wrong magical or technological advantage and starting one or more huge wars," he sighs. "This is not a good situation to be in."

"Yeah."

"Looking at things from as unbiased a perspective as I can manage... my planet is probably one of the better ones you could have landed on, and I'm probably one of the better people," he says. "The second-best place I can think of... has a historical problem with trying to conquer other planets to add to their eight-planet empire, but I've met their Empress and she's as sensible and levelheaded a person as you could ask for; if you got in with her you'd be all right. I'm thinking about this because with the stakes as high as they are, I want to be sure you have access to the best possible resources even if that means recommending you set up shop with a rival political entity."

"Thank you."

"I think the situation you're in comes out on top relative to any attempt to move to the second-place planet, just because there's no good way to send you directly to their empress without anyone else having the chance to interfere. And interference could get unpleasant, and I'd have no leverage there to help. Well, very little leverage. I did rescue their empire from civil war one time, which is how I know how trustworthy their empress is in the first place, but I didn't get much lasting public recognition out of it and I definitely couldn't get you all the way to a private audience with her while maintaining all necessary secrets."

Nod.

"Barring any further sudden epiphanies about the implications of the situation at hand, I think my major medium-term goal here has to be getting you in a position to overthrow the Queen, and making sure you have appropriate protection afterward. Which might mean you overthrow the Queen and then rule Fairyland as a Vicereine answerable-by-custom to my Emperor, unless you have somebody else you'd like to appoint to that job once you've secured the Queen."

"I... don't know who else would be good for it. Answerable-by-custom?"

"Well, in practice, I'm the only one who can actually stop you from doing whatever the hell you like with Fairyland, and if I thought I might have to do that I wouldn't be trying to hand it to you in the first place. A Vicereine or Viceroy is supposed to do what the Emperor tells them, but the ways in which this is enforceable against mortals mostly don't hold up against you even without all of Fairyland in your pocket. We would pretty much be trusting you to just politely refrain from spending the at most two hours it would take you to find out your own Emperor's name despite our best efforts to hide it, and in return for your forbearance and general cooperativeness with imperial directives, you could fold yourself into our galactic reputation for being a really bad idea to try to conquer, and have the assistance of our military in protecting yourself and the Queen against external threats."

"Sounds fun."

"It sounds pretty farcical to me. We'd have to redact the Emperor's name from the loyalty oath, assuming you could even take the loyalty oath since I doubt Eleven wants to let you in the same room with the Emperor long enough to say anything, and you couldn't ever learn what the vast majority of planets and interplanetary governing bodies in the galaxy are commonly called because any one of them probably shares syllables with a few billion people's names. For that matter I guess I'm taking your word for it that you're not analyzing everything I say for possible name contents. But even if you're being nice and not peeking, most political entities aren't named things that are otherwise words."

"I am not laboriously rendering your utterances into phonemes and juggling them into sequences that might theoretically sound nice to a human parent."

"Good. Also, in case you were wondering, my professional analysis of how easily you could in fact conquer my planet is 'very quickly, but for at most a couple of weeks before the inevitable civil war started'. We have a galactic reputation for being a really bad idea to try to conquer for good reason."

"I have no reason to think your planet needs conquering, not that I'm basing this lack of impression on much information."

"I wish you could meet my Emperor in some sort of minimally fraught social context. I like him. He's... the sort of person an Emperor should be."

"High praise. Is he the letter writing type?"

"Oh, probably."

"Seems easy to redact."

"You'd think that. And, well, it is, but... he's the Emperor. I get to be only mildly paranoid about how I interact with you, because I don't rule three planets. The Emperor can't take the risk that you might secretly be scamming us about how this whole system works. I don't think you are, he doesn't think you are, I'm not even sure Eleven actually thinks you are, but security is security and... the magical unilateral liege relationships are an especially upsetting possibility, I think."

"Not that I want you to be more paranoid, or anything, but it's more or less traditional to ask a new vassal for all the names they know anyway."

"Which would save you two hours. Concealing the Emperor's name from you if you really want it is a lost cause; that's why everyone is so aggressively paranoid about making sure you can't communicate directly with him in any way. For similar reasons you're very unlikely to meet Eleven."

"...I think I won't extensively theorize about how I'd conquer the planet if I wanted to. It sounds much less hassle all around to just buy one."

"Yes, I agree."

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imeanforever - 2016-02-02 18:16 (UTC) - Expand

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