Turn 60 - Shifting Inside Patterns
You wake up to a bit of excitement as a seamount has decided it wants to try that ‘island’ thing all the cool volcanoes are doing and breaks the surface to give it the old college try. Thankfully the eruption is well offshore and away from shipping lanes, and the eruption itself is not putting excessive ash into the atmosphere. It does make for some fascinating viewing, as the jets of magma shooting into the sky are visible from the volcano observatory on Mt Griffsport with a pair of binoculars.
That at least is positive, because the economy on Griffin’s Roost itself is anemic, barely recovering from the recession last year. It looks like quite a few investors and banks were caught zigging when they should have zagged and are still scrambling to catch up. A discrete check verifies that absolutely nothing illegal or even unethical, heck nothing with even the appearance of impropriety, had gone on, just a business cycle catching people unaware and resulting in financial issues for segments of the economy.
You receive some more updates from Tarentum. The local Patricians, including the Proconsul in charge of the planet, had survived the uprising and are already working on putting together a new government. They have sent a dispatch to you, offering to appoint the CO of 1st Infantry, General Skillins, who has been defending the planet to this point, as
magister militarum and designating your forces as
foederati. This would formalize what is already going on, without the appearance of you taking over.
| [] | Agree to the proposal | Prevents certain events |
| [] | Disagree | Allows certain events |
A
Scout from the Shogunate arrives in system, again carrying a single shuttle rather than a dropship.
A few days later, Siriwan requests a meeting with you, which you grant. She comes in, holding the hand of a sturdy little toddler wearing a rather fetching child-sized and appropriately formal kimono.
“Your Imperial Majesty, it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce you to my Emperor, Tenno Takeda Daido.” she says formally, although the formality is a bit ruined by the little boy having his thumb firmly in his mouth.
Now that is a surprise, and all of your Ba instincts immediately go into overdrive. Not five minutes later, the little Emperor is happily playing with blocks in the corner of your office, watched over by the griffkittens, while you give Siriwan a Ba Look.
The explanation comes at that point. The Takeda clan is… highly disfavored in Kurita space, with members of the clan having to remain incognito and conceal their heritage, else the ISF would kill them as threats to the Dragon due to their descent from the Imperial Clan. Daido’s parents had been discovered by the ISF, but the then infant had been rescued by Siriwan’s personal bodyguards responding to the ruckus caused by the assassins murdering them.
Siriwan had then publicly declared the child as Tenno, and herself as Shogun, in order to both cast defiance at her father as well as distance herself from the pretensions of her family, which presumed that the ‘Dragon’ was supreme to mere Emperors, regardless of their divine descent according to Shinto belief.
Her first act had been to eliminate those who were loyal to her father, especially the remaining ISF agents on the two planets she considered ‘hers’, as both were effectively controlled by the Shinto monasteries and temples. She had then traveled to Nowa Warszawa, knowing that the local commander was an overly aggressive and impulsive fool. She had broadcast her defiance in a manner that the local CO couldn’t mistake, drawing the majority of the military forces on the planet into attacking her forces on Kuroisora.
At this point she smirks just slightly. “Your Majesty, the forces you saw when your reconnaissance squadron came into the system were… a bluff. I had not yet completed the upgrades and training for their crews, and each vessel had only a single pilot on board.”
Your palm has an intimate and loving relationship with your face at that revelation, so blandly delivered.
“But I was fully prepared when they arrived, and we were able to obliterate the attackers, albeit at significant losses ourselves.” she says more soberly. “At that point, I traveled here, hoping to bring about peace with you. The rest, as they say, is history.”
And with that comes the reason for why she had little Daido brought here. The two systems she controls are extremely lightly inhabited, mostly by Shinto religious communities centered around monastery complexes. She has very little industry, and even less military strength considering the losses she suffered.
And that’s the rub. She has no interest in building up industry, and thus harming the, in her words, glorious scenery of the planets she oversees. She would prefer if she could return to being a simple
miko like she had been before her family ties had dragged her into political affairs. Sure, she loves the sword, studies warfare, is a fully qualified mechwarrior and pilot, and is in general a martial polymath, but she has no ambition for conquest of anything except herself.
You manage to keep a straight face at that, because you catch the faint blush, poor girl is still paddling hard up De Nile.
Ideally, she would like the two worlds she is responsible for to be under your protection, allowing them to continue their traditional ways of life without needing to fear outside enemies. She has little to offer, the yards on Kuroisora were destroyed in the fighting, she has even less industry or commerce than Griffon IV, across two systems, and brings almost no military forces to the table beyond a single
Scout, two elderly
Tramps, and about a half dozen surviving refitted
Avengers.
You’ll need to think about this for a while, making a decision while under the influence of Ba is probably not the best idea.
In other news one of the mining stations on Griffon II strikes gold… literally. A large chunk of ejecta from the planet, kicked up by the intense volcanism, is approximately a million metric tonnes of pure gold. It had been covered by a thin crust of carbon, and had been ignored in favor of other pieces of ejecta for decades, but one of the stations had finally decided to crack it open, and hit the motherlode.
Needless to say, the miner-owned mining company that runs that station is now rather wealthy, even after taxes.
