Turn 4 Available Actions and Advisor Advice
You hate morning sickness.
You aren’t that fond of mornings in general, but morning sickness makes facing the day even more of a trial.
You complain about this to your husband (it’s HIS FAULT) and Sergeant Ngô every single morning, usually while one or the other is helping you keep your hair out of the way while you lose last night's meal.
If the doctor’s tell you ONE MORE TIME that this is normal you are strongly tempted to send them to the execution grounds.
Everybody is so damn cheerful about the fact that you are pregnant. And, to be fair, once you’ve gotten past the morning sickness itself and had the ONE (damn pregnancy!) cup of coffee you are allowed each day you are nearly as cheerful about it.
You deny it, of course, but you squealed with excitement when you got the news and have been mostly faking how grumpy you are over the whole thing.
You still miss your coffee. Even Janet keeping her promise to make your one, lonely cup of coffee each day a true masterpiece of the coffee maestro’s art doesn’t make up for the fact that you have far too much blood in your caffeine system.
But coffee is bad for the baby, and bà put her foot down. Evidently your baby has also been virtually adopted before birth and bà always wants more grandbabies.
On the plus side, even though Tyler is insufferably smug, you now have a surefire way to keep the old lech under control. You have yet to learn the details, but humming the Blue Danube Waltz while grinning at him and mentioning clogs seems to do the trick nicely.
You’ve now met Tyler’s wife. She’s an absolutely wonderful woman, a professional actress, and an even more incorrigible prankster than her husband. All of those paparazzi photos of Tyler with scores of models and younger women over the years? Every single one has been of her in various disguises. Every. Single. One.
You don’t know whether to be extremely impressed or extremely frightened by this. You settle for both.
You spend quite a bit of quality time complaining to your loving husband (it’s HIS fault that you are now related to this family, after all) and Sergeant Ngô about this.
When you had gotten home after your honeymoon you’d discovered that Hurricane Bà had swept through the palace in your absence, targeting your wardrobe. Gone were all the sensible beige and pastel outfits you’d liked to wear. Instead all of your clothing, apart from your uniforms, were bold and bright colors. Bà simply declared that you were a married woman now and no longer had need for childish clothing, and that was simply that.
You weren’t sure how this worked. You are the Queen, you are pretty certain that means you get to choose what to wear, but for some reason your wishes in this matter are of absolutely zero consequence.
You, of course, complain about this to your husband (because it’s HIS FAULT you are no longer single) and the ever patient Sergeant Ngô.
The media loves it, of course, you are giving them all sorts of headlines, ‘Her Majesty spotted drinking water, implications for the wine industry? News at 11!’.
They should be worried about the coffee industry, although your husband drinks enough of it anyways. At least he is kind and considerate enough to not drink the Black Bean of Life in front of you.
You love your husband, even if it’s all his fault.
The economy has been badly rocked, even the excellent growth in the aerospace sector is massively offset by the near collapse of the banking and investment sector. Seizing control of the major banks and financial institutions in the wake of the scandals and conspiracy has revealed even greater depths of financial chicanery. Tax evasion, insider trading, embezzlement. The records are all there and the number of extremely wealthy people finding themselves before the bar of the Queen's Justice is nearly endless.
You order audits of those banks that hadn’t been involved in the conspiracy, and to your relief you find that they are mostly clean. They tend to be far smaller institutions rather than the big commercial banks that were in the conspiracy up to their well-manicured eyebrows. Your auditors find little things here and there, the minor foibles that occur in any system and generally can be put down to human error. A typo here, a misplaced digit there, the total fines from every single irregularity in the banking system outside the big players who are now nationalized would barely pay for your coffee budget before you got pregnant.
Or so your loving husband had the bad grace to joke about. You complain to him (it’s HIS FAULT you can’t enjoy coffee right now, although on more mature reflection the other benefits outweigh this…) and Sergeant Ngô about this.
It seems to take forever, but nine months is nine months, and wonder of wonders your baby decides to come out on schedule. The doctor’s are a bit surprised, since usually firstborns are far less predictable.
You spend the hours in labor alternately cursing your husband, crushing his hand, and screaming. But eventually it all becomes more than worth it. The moment the nurses settle a beautiful baby boy in your arms for the first time… all the waddling around like a blimp with legs, all the morning sickness, the lack of caffeine, the awkwardness, the pain of the delivery, all of it faded away to insignificance.
You had a son. Jeremy Desmond Griffith. Jeremy after your father, Desmond after your husbands father.
You have an heir.
The papers, of course, have a field day. You can hear fireworks going off and the street parties even from where you are lying in the recovery ward of the palace clinic.
You don’t care about any of that. You have a son. That’s all you care about right now.
Of course, the governance of the planet doesn’t much care about what you want, there’s still decisions to be made and work to do.
General Wolf is very worried about the information that is being gleaned from the prisoners. They say they are ‘pirates’ but according to him their equipment is just too… uniform… for that to ring fully true to him. The four mechs that had been destroyed were all the same model, all the tanks were the same model, all the infantry had the same rifles. That speaks to him of an organized force, not a renegade band.
“I know that we are in a tight spot financially, but we really need to expand our military strength. Our best bet would continue to be keeping the enemy from even successfully landing, so I would advise expanding our aerospace corps. Next to that, our armored forces took very heavy losses in the last incursion. For now, I would advise completing the rebuild to at least battalion strength, focusing on the new Phalanx tanks over the older Hoplites.”
He nods over at Doctor Palmer. “Once the labs are online, I would also recommend completing tests on several of the Tank-X prototypes that they’ve sent us for evaluation, and beginning preparations for series production. Specifically the
Chasseur, the
Wulfen, and the
Foxhound. We also have a tender out for a low-cost tank to bulk out our forces, but no decision has yet been made in that regard.”
Tyler is the next up. “I agree with General Wolf as to the importance of strengthening our defenses, however I would urge you to not neglect the economy here.” he smirks a bit. “We’re in a rough patch, but we’ll be far stronger on the other end. To that end, I recommend expanding our orbital surveillance network and conducting photo surveys. We are currently running into the limits of some of our mineral extraction efforts and finding new deposits may be just the thing we need to boost our economy long term.”
Doctor Young had sent you a short memo stating only that the foreign ministry was still in a holding pattern. She has some ideas, but they are a year or two away from being useful.
Professor Chapman brings out a large binder of graphs and charts, and asks that Tyler and Janet both be present for this. “The damage wrought by the Gem conspiracy was very widespread, not simply to government institutions but also to the poor and middle classes. Despite the great corruption at the top, many of the businesses that they ran provided badly needed employment to various communities, which are now struggling back to their feet. I strongly recommend doing everything in our power to help them. Some assistance now would not only shorten the amount of time it would normally take for the economy to recover, but also build up reserves of good will.”
Tyler agrees. “It’s a good idea, especially since it will be seen as the Crown mitigating the consequences of the actions of the guilty upon the innocent. Handle it right and we could see significant economic growth. I fully back this.”
Janet is also fully on board with this and adds her enthusiastic endorsement. Of course, nearly everything she does is enthusiastic so take that as you would.
Grace is still overseeing work on the new labs and is very happy about progress. “We’re almost done! And then we can expand so we can do even more research! We should have those new guns for General Wolf on schedule and maybe a bit below budget, but what I’d really like to do is a full orbital survey. We have the original colony maps, but I’d like to see how well those correspond to reality. We don’t even need the labs for this, just flight time with the shuttles!”
Juanita mainly wants more resources for POW questioning, she thinks that her people are getting closer to fully breaking the ‘pirates’, and if General Wolf’s concerns are true, then finding out is even more critical than before.
In between enthusiastic babysitting for you and gleefully telling you about her latest boyfriend (Number 11 now! This one has GOT to be the one!), Janet lets you know that Justice is in a good place at the moment and doesn’t need any new resources.
