Courtly Chronicles 7

Forgot that it was also the 1st. Whoops. 

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[Tanya Degurechaff von Goethe aka Tenya Deguchiya aka Archduchess von Goethe, circa 1927, age 13]

Politics was not fast. Even in a world with global instantaneous communication, affecting public policy in a material fashion was a steady effort over weeks and months, and international relations was an order of magnitude slower than that.

It was with that knowledge that Tanya took pride in how swiftly they were able to secure a position of respect among the Imperial court, using a combination of flattery, reason, and the occasional misdirection to bend the Kaiser on multiple points of policy when it came to the war’s conduct.

That was the key to successful manipulation of governmental figures. You can’t get people to do whatever you want. That’s not how things work. In a proper democratic government, you could get around this by instead persuading the public at large, and through that their duly elected representatives. That isn’t to say that your average democratic representative actually cared that much about what their constituents think, but elections had a striking tendency to put into office people who at least knew what their constituents wanted them to do. Once you had that handled, getting them to follow through was simplicity itself. Persuasion was a matter of currency, and few things had more favorable exchange rates in a politician’s career than being able to truthfully claim that they followed through on their campaign promises. Corporate interests were usually able to overcome that by just spending even more money, but one of the primary advantages of the Hero Industry being an industry, in Tanya’s view, was that you suddenly had a rich corporate interest whose explicit interests aligned with… being morally upright paragons that citizens could look up to. Pillars of Heroism allowed a consolidation of that political power that Tanya liked to think they wielded wisely… What became of it?

…getting back on track. In a more autocratic government, the number of people you needed to manipulate was a lot smaller. However, you had very little control over who had what kind of power, and again, you can’t just get people to do whatever you want. They are individuals, and each of them have their own lists of preferences. Theoretically, you can get anyone to do anything for the right price. In addition, anything can be converted into money, with enough intermediate steps. Tanya supposed even Being X would not be immune to bribery, if it was taken in the form of, say, paying full time priests to perform rituals of worship on a regular schedule. Cash rewards would do wonders for church attendance, after all. If you framed it properly, like ‘The Lord Provides for their flock’, you could even get most of them to be quite earnest in their prayers, as unlike all the other phony religions, it would give you money, instead of asking for it. It would just be a wasteful form of Universal Basic Income, after all.

In practice, there were many things that were prohibitively expensive to get people to do. The majority of those things were generally things that would be profoundly unethical to compel people to do anyway, so that wasn’t as big of an obstacle as it seemed. The more serious obstacle was the second theoretical, in that many things had ruinous exchange rates with money and could not be easily purchased, although some try. Honor, for example. The esteem of peers, the loyalty of your subordinates, the awe of the common folk. Most poetically, the gaze of history.

Even Kings and Emperors could be swayed by all of those things. They were the things they couldn’t simply demand, as those with full command of their country’s resources. Thus, the currency that they could be paid in.

Unfortunately, not even Tanya’s mastery of magic could wave their hand and provide such ephemeral coins. So they have to turn to items that have reasonable exchange rates for those things: Good ideas, effective implementation of those ideas, and most importantly, the ability to claim specific accomplishments when his reign was recorded in the history books. Granted, ‘bringing Dacia into the Empire’ isn’t the most enduring accomplishment one could put down in the history books, but the Kaiser was definitely proud of the feat.

What can such a payment buy Tanya? The one thing that no one else can provide, of course: Authority.

“As the neutral host, allow me to welcome all of you to Lothiern.” The designated diplomat said to open the negotiations. “Representing the Francois Republic is Monsieur Laurent, speaking on behalf of the government-in-exile as a whole.” Tanya had never been impressed with the diplomatic core of the Republic, but at least this time they sent someone who could maintain a polite facade in the presence of an Imperial representative. He gave Tanya the impression of one of those politicians who thought of all functions as just parties by other names, never truly sober but able to avoid direct insult even while blitzed out of his mind.

“On behalf of the Legadonian Entente, we have Herr Nilsson, speaking on behalf of the Council of Ten.” The Legadonian politician was a member of that Council, in fact. Ironically, ignoring the fact that the moderator was the Prime Minister of Lothiern, that meant that Nillsson was the highest ranked member of government sent. He seemed to be rather calm, given the stakes here. Whatever he anticipated happening as a result of this event, he was at peace with it.

Not like it mattered. The Kaiser’s patience had worn thin, and while a ceasefire had been declared on the relevant fronts for the duration of the talks, it was on the condition that all participants of the talks be authorized to agree to terms unilaterally. This was agreed to… on the condition that the person sent on behalf of the Empire be Tanya von Goethe, with that authority. Mister Lloyd really came through on that one, after Tanya had led him to believe that much lighter terms could be negotiated. Which wasn’t wrong, but also overstated. The Kaiser wasn’t exactly happy with that condition, but after some smoothing over of his ruffled feathers, he agreed to it while promising dire consequences if Tanya was to fail him in securing favorable terms. Tanya made sure to signal the appropriate level of fear to his intimidation.

“Finally, we have Archduchess von Goethe, speaking on the full authority of Kaiser Wilhelm III of the Empire.” Finished the moderator. “Now, the Empire has prepared initial terms of surrender, and will be presenting them now.”

Tanya passed the documents to one of the Lothiern aides, one for each of the other dignitaries. “These documents were penned with the full approval of the Kaiser. I’m sure you’ll find them to be more magnanimous than previous offerings, which reflects the Kaiser’s commitment to restoring peace to the continent.” They weren’t entirely unreasonable offers, really. A little hefty, but you always ask for more than you expect to get. It’s understood that they’ll be able to negotiate things down, the only question is by how much.

The key provisions of the Legadonian surrender terms was the forfeiture of all claims on contested territory, namely the Daneland, as well as a few minor land concessions on the southern tip to help enforce the naval concessions, so as to cripple their ability to wage war against the Empire in particular. Most critically, they acknowledged full fault in provoking the entire conflict, which was completely non-negotiable. Ever since the Rus invaded, that front had become largely stalemated, or even a losing situation, so the terms were relatively light… but Mary had taken a bit of a walk through the front lines there a few weeks before the ceasefire, so it could be forgiven if their impression of the situation was somewhat more dire.

For the Francois, the terms were more onerous. They had used an armistice to evacuate a government in exile, infuriating the Kaiser and allowing for the full occupation of the main Francois territory. Guerilla combatants have been winnowing the Empire’s forces with American weapons and supplies for over a year, and the Kaiser was eager to actually claim his victory. Contested territory was to be surrendered, pushing the border back a little over one hundred kilometers. Full acknowledgement of fault when it came to their craven attack, surrender of colonial territory… It was severe. Oh, and reparations, of course. Yet, it was still a lighter sentence than the previous terms the Kaiser had initially sent the previous year.

Naturally, the terms were impossible. The colonies were basically looted to the bedrock to finance the deals with the Americans, there were no strategic reserves of anything that the Empire didn’t already cart off, and adding reparations on top of that would quickly lead to an authoritarian warmonger in the Prime Minister seat within twenty years.

So it was Tanya’s duty to lower those terms to something that the Francois would accept. More importantly, they needed to be terms that they would follow through on.

The other diplomats stared hard at the terms, taking their dire situations seriously. Tanya looked through their other papers, using it as a prop rather than seriously reviewing the contents. Herr Nilsson seemed largely resigned, focusing intently on each individual term and weighing their odds of getting them negotiated away. Monsieur Laurent wasn’t as angrily indignant as Tanya expected, his mouth set in a firm line as he read the terms. There was no way the Francois would send someone without having them read the previous surrender offer, so if Tanya was a betting person, they’d put their money on Laurent taking the difference between the two offers and extrapolating from there how much leeway he had to argue things down even further.

It’s a very promising start. Tanya still expected this to take a month.

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Tanya always thought that they were humble, given their station in their first life. Nearly forty years of being in the top ten heroes of Japan, even if only three of those six-month terms was in the number one spot. As such, they were frequently flattered and sucked up to by all sorts of important people whenever they decided to participate in high society. CEOs, politicians, pro heroes, Tanya had gotten very used to people ascribing significant value to Tanya just having a positive impression of them, something that Tanya thought they had gotten sick of.

But instead, Tanya had missed it dearly, suffering under the disrespect given to children and women. But now? The Albish knew how to make some very high quality sycophants.

“Checkmate in four moves.” Tanya said as they finished the chess match. After a moment of examining the board, their opponent nodded and flicked their king piece, acknowledging their defeat.

“So Chess is still around in three hundred years?” Sir Chalmers asked. Tanya liked him, he was completely willing to believe the reincarnation story, and was fascinated by it. Most importantly, he wanted to know more about the cultural shifts rather than technology. Tanya had thus indulged him over the last few days to stave off boredom as the Francois and Legadonian delegations mull over their counteroffers.

“It wasn’t very popular in my home country. Shoji and Go were the traditional two-person board games there.” Tanya explained. “But my old teacher loved the game, and ended up passing on that passion to my daughter when she was his student. Naturally, this meant I had to play with her every day for years.” Fortunately, a chess app meant that they could easily just always have a game going and make moves whenever there’s a spare moment, but that still translated into tens of thousands of games when you considered the fact that Nezumi liked to simultaneously play both of her parents just by the moves being spoken over a three way phone call. It was a great family bonding activity that could be done anywhere with cell phone service. Tanya always had cell phone service. “She got pretty good, and so did I.”

“You are good.” Sir Chalmers agreed. Tanya was fairly confident that he wasn’t letting them win. “You haven’t mentioned children before.” He added.

Tanya stilled at the slip up, but took a deep breath and shrugged. “I don’t like talking about it.” They admitted. “I could say something like how I learned to reflexively avoid mentioning such topics, which is common in my old industry, but it’s just none of anyone’s business. The short version is that I married my high school girlfriend right after graduation and had two children, a girl and a boy. Very idyllic. My daughter went into the same kind of business I was in, while my son became an actor and musician.”

“Good show.” Sir Chalmers said, an Albish turn of phrase that Tanya chose not to become irritated by the implications of. “Did he do plays, or cinema? When my boy first introduced me to those films, I knew that it was going to be something special.”

“You have a good eye for innovation.” Tanya complimented. “He started his career as a voice actor, providing dialogue for animated works, but after getting a spot in a major film he moved on to focusing on more of those. Entertainment is a big business in the future.”

“Excellent.” Sir Chalmers said gleefully. “I wonder if I could get in on that? Pre-empt the Americans on this?” Did Tanya just butterfly away Hollywood as the premier global movie producer? Whoops. He continued: “How are plays in the future?”

Tanya frowned. “I’m not entirely sure. They still exist, surely, with new material still being produced… Mostly musicals I think. I’ve mostly been exposed to amatuer works by students, as plays and other kinds of performances are popular things for classes to do for the Culture Festival, which is an annual school event. My wife’s class did one in second year…” 2-A and 2-B competed that year by doing what the other class did in the first year, trying to out-do them. “They did some traditional folk tales rather than anything modern. Amateretsu and the cave, the slaying of the eight-headed serpent god, that kind of thing.”

Sir Chalmers actually did know a bit about Akitsushima, which was probably why he was chosen to properly try and get useful information from Tanya. “Wait… Isn’t that the legend that includes one of the goddesses doing a strip tease?” He gave a lecherous grin at that. “That’s my favorite Akitsushiman legend.”

“Hagakure played that part.” Tanya explained. “So no one could see anything untoward. She was invisible, you see.” Tanya smiled lightly at the pun.

“Like the Invisible man?” Sir Chalmers asked. At Tanya’s confusion, he explained. “It’s a book, about thirty years old, about a chemist who learned how to turn living bodies invisible. He wraps himself up so that people don’t notice that he’s invisible.”

Tanya blinked. “Yes, exactly like that.” Hagakure probably knew about that book, given her hero name. Whether she knew when she picked it… less certain. “Most of the time when looking at her you just saw a floating set of clothes, although sometimes she wore stockings and gloves so you could see her limbs, maybe a hairband or hat so you could sort of see her head.”

“Fascinating. So this is an example of those ‘quirks’?” Sir Chalmers asked.

Tanya nodded. “She was able to gain more general control over light, including the power to make herself partially visible, but that’s a good example of a more modest quirk that was improved drastically with training rather than just being powerful to start.” Tanya scratched their cheek as the topic drifted. “Ah, but while I could keep talking about quirks I’ve seen for literal weeks, I’d rather not.”

“Understandable.” Sir Chalmers said insincerely. He was fascinated by quirks… “I thought it was a safer topic than your current work. Is there anything interesting you’re working on that isn’t a military secret?”

Ah, that was a good point. “Ah, there’s not much else I can do to the military orb’s programming without redoing it all from scratch, and recalling mages from the front to retrain them on a new OS? Forget it. I’ll wait for the next model of orb, they’ll want to upgrade the current crop eventually.” Tanya explained, probably unwisely but ‘not being in a hurry to upgrade the greatest orbs in the world’ is far from valuable intelligence. “I’ve been working on civilian grade models recently. Watch this.” Tanya took off the broach that was in the place that their type 97 usually was, one of the concessions the Empire had agreed to was that there was to be no military mages in the security detail.

Sir Chalmers frowned. “I thought you weren’t allowed to bring orbs to this.”

“It’s a civilian model, as I said.” Tanya clarified. “C-class mana ceiling. As long as I stay under that level of activity, Lothiern’s magic scanners will politely ignore anything I’m doing. Besides, there’s not any military formulae in here either.” They fiddled with the external bits and bobs on the orb, eventually placing it on the table as the metal legs made it look like a little desk. Tanya activated the formula using the saved parameters.

The orb started to sing.

“What am I to be,

What is my calling?

I gave up giving up,

I’m ready to go!”

It was the only English song that Tanya had programmed into the thing. One advantage of having an aspiring musician as a son was that it prompted research into how one could turn code into music lyrics, allowing them to create illusory voices with some effort. As the song continued, Sir Chalmers seemed enchanted by it, and slowly it formed an illusion of Soki’s performance at a New Year’s party, age 9, with Kyoka taking Fumikage’s spot, Tenya taking Bakugo’s, with Denki and Momo playing the same instruments as the song’s debut.

Tanya frowned. “The video’s desynched…” Tanya was afraid that buffering would be an issue, given that the audio and video formulae were different enough that they had to be synchronized manually, but perhaps… “Bah.” With a flex of will, the image winked out while the audio continued.

At the end of the song, Sir Chalmers whooped with delight as he applauded the performance. The normally out of mind attendants and assistants joined in the applause. “Exquisite! I’ve never heard that kind of music before. What do you call that genre?”

“Eh?” Tanya replied. “I’m not entirely sure. I wasn’t really big on music, although I did learn how to play the drums.”

“I thought I saw the gentleman you used to be there. Why did you remove the illusion?” Sir Chalmers asked.

“It didn’t line up with the sound properly. Speaking from experience, that tends to ruin the song.” Tanya explained.

“Those were some interesting guitars.” Sir Chalmers pointed out. “They were so sleek. But why were wires coming out of them?”

Tanya blinked. “I suppose electric guitars haven’t been invented yet.” Sir Chalmers seemed intrigued at the concept. “I’ll look into it. The point is that I’ve been experimenting with variations on the recording formula for entertainment purposes. It’s trickier than I expected it to be.” One of the side-effects of mass deployment of the type 97 was that there was now a rather large stockpile of low-quality elenium, incapable of being used in military-grade orbs. Tanya had already worked out the lowest possible production cost for a model similar to the orb they had on the table, but getting the software to work properly was… tricky. Modular memory sticks were also providing challenges.

“Already thinking about post war innovation, are you?” Sir Chalmers said as he examined the orb.

“In the Empire, Francois Republic, the Legadonian Entente, and the Allied Kingdom, the only allowable exception for conscription, if one is a mage, is already being involved in a vital magical industry.” Tanya brought up two fingers. “Orb production or research and development. That’s it. Even medical and industrial mages can be conscripted, although the medical mages continue to practice medicine.”

Sir Chalmers looked like he was going to object, but Tanya held up a hand to forestall it. “Just because the Allied Kingdom has yet to follow through with conscription, “ Evidence suggested that the ‘volunteer only’ recruitment drive was not as voluntary as it claimed to be, but it wouldn’t be helpful to belabor the point. “-does not mean that the recently updated laws on your books do not follow this trend.”

With his objection silenced, Tanya continued. “It is the current opinion of all four of those governments that, for a mage, there is no preferable profession to war. Many young mages will be left unemployed at the war’s conclusion. This is one of many things I’ve been experimenting with as potential magical industries. Sound-only isn’t much, but if visual illusions could be combined with it? Photography is an art form in of itself. Giving even just a handful of ex-conscripts a way to use civilian orbs productively has value.” Computation orbs and magical scanners did make it more difficult for mages to become villains, but it was far from impossible. Eventually, orbs will be on the free market that can handle spells strong enough to do some damage. It’s important to prepare for such a situation in advance. Quirks showed that humans can adapt to supernatural powers over only a handful of generations, so Tanya expected orbless casting to become common in the future.

As Sir Chalmers politely excused himself, Tanya sighed at the amiable conversation being killed. A hero’s work was never done.