The Testimony of the Right Honorable Erich of Frostbane, Ta’al of Volparnu and Grand Vizier of the Skarsian Matriarchy
It’s my own fault. I did ask for everything. It’s because I didn’t trust Danak to know what was important. He’s not used to dealing with kompromat. Oh, he’s capable of being pragmatic if he has to, but at the core of him, he’s an honest man who believes in loyalty, a man who is best at straight dealings.
And I’m a man who believes in survival, and that in order to have the best chance of it, I need to be well-informed. That comes of growing up on a world which gave no gifts to humankind and required a certain hardness to meet its own. There’s a word in the old Volparnian dialect: fra’cchil. It’s a powerful metaphor. For one, it’s a word we use as another name for our planet, but its literal meaning is learned in boyhood. It means a snowball with a rock hidden inside. From there, it comes to have a connotation of “turning a game into serious business.” When used to describe a person, it means, “a man who hides his poisonous intent,” and it is an ambivalent judgment. A man cannot survive on a frozen world without trust in his companions. So I’ve learned to recognize the right sort of ally, to cultivate a practical loyalty.
Danak’s loyalty is rigid, which is why I trust him at my back, but also expect him to make stupid decisions under certain circumstances. Ashtara’s loyalty isn’t human, and I’m incapable of understanding it. No, my true ally, which I sensed from the moment she set foot on Volparnu, is Tara. I could see it despite the recklessness, the acting-out. She believed that she wanted to die, but the core of her was steel, a rock inside a snowball. She was a survivor. I believed that if I could win her over to my side, she’d help me to triumph over my idiot brother.
As it turns out, she did that, and more, but hardly in the way that I had planned.
Ah well, these ruminations are nothing but procrastination. You’d asked about the files gathered by the Twist.
Marty wasn’t joking. Not to insult any of the Most Puissant Sentients gathered at this hearing, but quite understandably, the Twist really have no concept of what is considered scandalous in human society. There are entries like “The Lobostriian Emperor practices improper dental hygiene,” and “The Vizier of Skyvale ate all of the éclairs and lied about it to her husband.” “The President of Tranta made repeated visits to fashion model Carly Wong’s personal quarters” sounded very promising, but on investigation, I discovered that the affair is public, the president’s wife knows all about it, and the general attitude towards it is nonchalant. And then I came across “On the instruction of the Kaiser, the Forian Minister of Agriculture placed meta-strychnine 243 in the coffee of the Vice Regent, who died later that afternoon.”
You can imagine my response.
I sent out a few carefully worded messages. The next morning, I received a special express communique from the datahub at Memehaven. The Forian Parliament, under pressure from the Kaiser, commenced debating their resignation from the Alliance of Mankind and a return to the IndWorlds.
I document this only for later reference. I’ve been informed by the Twist nuncio that a request from our government for assistance in quelling the unrest in what the Combine of Sentients considers our rightful provinces is completely legal. It is only when such assistance is rendered without prior consent that the legality is debatable, such as the recent Hreck intervention in the Terran conflict.
The question is, of course, not about assistance at all. The question is of conspiracy to overthrow a legitimate government of Advanced Sentients – no, two legitimate governments.