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Knight of Dandriss: Stone and Steel

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    • [X] Look for allies new and old

    While there is something of an impulse to just do things purely for the fun of them, Ella has to admit that her job never really ends. She might mingle and flirt a bit more freely with her identity partially obscured, but ultimately social events like these were for advancing her position and that of Razorleaf Meadows, and such things had to serve a purpose. She would be well served by directing her efforts towards improving her situation among her allies and looking for new people to draw into her personal circle.

    Random Encounter (69)
    Examination (Int+Intr) 18 + 24 = 42
    Curiosity (Int + Aca) 15 + 18 = 33
    Charimsa (Chax2) 58 + 28 = 86

    Drifting among the crowds, observing the costumes on display, Ella soon found herself drawn into a mutual orbit with a man decked out in elaborately made military plate based on designs from when horses and sails were the fastest way to travel across Earth. The plates were of a manufactured metal base and were intricately worked with glazed black and gold enamel and sparkled over with embedded diamonds. The helmet was all encompassing and was set with an elaborately sculpted face mask set in a dramatic expression of mirth. Other than a voice that was probably male, Ella could read little of who was inside the armour, so all encompassing was it. Still, the person was almost certainly powerfully built to carry the mass of the armour, and from the other people around him, a charismatic individual as well. While perhaps not the most wealthy of individuals judging by the costume worn, they were certainly well enough off, and had all the right airs to make a potential ally.

    Noticing Ella, because she was deliberately hard to notice, the armoured man turned her way and said in a slightly distorted but still warm voice, "Well now, I see that one of the wealthier and bolder attendees to this party has decided to drop in on this little circle here."

    Smiling as she smoothly moved into the little group gathering, Ella replied, "You undersell yourself. Your own costume seems to have required extensive design work in of itself."

    "Oh, the design is mostly historical - although ironically from a much more recent history than most people suspect - so most of the work was actually in getting it produced by hand instead of printed out," the man explained, his voice chipper.

    Ella raised an unseen eyebrow. Production of something like that by skilled craftsmen would add considerable cost to such a design in comparison to the much more typical use of machine printing and fabrication. She expressed her surprise outwardly by saying, "Oh my, such extravagance. You must be from out of town then, as I do not think that there are any with that skill here in Razorleaf."

    The man nodded and said, "Yes, it is a rather specialized skill set, mostly used for other projects that would have no market here."

    Clue (Int + Aca) 49 + 18 = 67

    Thinking such things over in her head, Ella asked, "I take it you have contacts in the research community then?"

    "You are a well informed lady. Yes, there is a tangential relationship with my job and such things," the man said. He then glanced around at the other guests and said, "We were just discussing something somewhat tangentially related, actually. Another guest had brought up the feeling that the current governor is failing in her job by refusing to expand local military capacities, and the discussion then drifted to the opportunities being missed out on. I was mostly expressing my condolences for poor Major Chambers, stuck as he is here with only minimal opportunities for local advancement. I reckon that he would have made Lieutenant Colonel a year or two faster had the local military been reinforced by now."

    Rankling slightly but keeping it from showing, Ella stated, "Oh? I was under the impression that even without all the cuntlicking the media does for her, that she was still doing a good job in protecting the populace?"

    One of the other women in attendance snorted at that, causing more than a few to flicker glances her way. Inwardly Ella was amused due to the fact that even if they trended towards being more her fans than not, the media still annoyed her, and thus her comment had not entirely come from a place of deception, and yet now if anyone had suspicions that she herself was the topic of conversation they were now possibly cast upon the other woman. Still, after a moment for everyone to collect themselves and of thought, the man replied, "Well, while partially true, the issue is that despite the dangers, she has made no move to expand capacities despite the dangers."

    Ella had a hard time responding to that directly since it would reveal too much knowledge of who she was if she started complaining about budgets or the expenses occurred in repeatedly repairing her mech, so instead she replied thoughtfully, "You know, I hadn't thought of it like that. I'd just thought she was doing well with what she had, hadn't really thought about things beyond that."

    She had, of course, thought about things beyond that, she had just been figuring that either major military activity would die down, or she things would get hot enough that reinforcements would be sent her way. Investing in additional troops had just seemed like a good way to slow down expansion and so she had mostly ignored it up until now.

    "She's mostly been investing in energy production and entertainment. Given the reason she was sent down here, you would think a barracks would be in order," another of the guests pointed out.

    "A barracks is actually a rather tricky thing to get built - not the building, but the politicking to be allowed to build one. It requires a certain degree of trust and infrastructural and institutional investment in other things in order to get one. It's ironically easier to get authorization for an expansion than it is to build a new one," one of the men in the ground - almost certainly an officer of some sort - pointed out.

    The armoured man nodded towards that man and said, "This is true, although from the looks of things the governor has had enough spare resources to do the petitioning and squaring away of military resources needed for such an initial expansion, but has chosen to spend them elsewhere."

    Deciding to poke the man, Ella said sweetly, "Oh ho, and now you give yourself away! Surely you must be Major Chambers himself!"

    The armoured man leaned back and pointed at a small gaggle of militarily costumed people on the opposite side of the room and said, "I am fairly certain that the major is over there, actually."

    "Oh," Ella said with deflated sadness. She actually already knew that - the man before her was too tall - but it would help her maintain the fiction that she wasn't Ella around these people.

    The obvious officer who had spoken up before did tap a finger thoughtfully against his mask and say, "Although I suppose under those circumstances we would probably be in a circle right now complaining about how the good knight has been spending frivolously on military matters and done little to support business."

    "I wouldn't," a third woman noted with a touch of annoyance. Ella wondered what her issue was.

    The armoured man on the other hand actually gave something of a snort of amusement, "Actually, yes, that would be typical of such things. The governor invests in military expansion and no one shows up, to which people systematically bitch about the waste when she could have invested in other things. Of course, then the argument from people like me would be that she has made things strong enough that the expansion is the reason nothing significant happens."

    Making a bit of a hum, Ella asked, "Well, I do think it was mentioned that certain opportunities were missed. What were those? Always looking to expand my portfolio, so it would be good to be on the lookout for such things if they change in the future."

    "We were actually arguing about that shortly before you joined," the officer said. "Most here agreed that without some manner of military grounds any opportunities to perform field testing on experimental military gear - which the duchess does so love - is out of the question, but there was something of a contention as to whether or not a barracks would become a 'if you build it, they will come' opportunity."

    The man in armour shrugged and said, "The duchess is known to occasionally fill open billets just because she can."

    Now getting something of a feel for the conversation, Ella said, "Oh, so this is a conversation between military men, is it?"

    The armoured man placed his hands on his breastplate in mock shock and said, "Whoever could have guessed that a man in historical armour might be involved in the military in some way?"

    That got a round of laughter from everyone, at which point one of the women involved said, "There was also a large amount of shameless flirting involved among these gallant heroes."

    "Oh, shameless flirting?" Ella then looked over her own costume in exaggerated fashion and said in utter deadpan, "No idea how to do that."

    Before that round of laughter faded, the armoured man stated magnanimously, "Now, now ladies, we're all adults here - wealthy adults at that - so there's plenty to share."

    One of the women frowned beneath her mask and asked, "Is that true that some of the less well off will lie about being up to date on their birth control to cause an 'accident' and force a support contract?"

    Waving dismissively, the armoured man said, "It happens - the high profile case in Rainbow Bridge comes to mind - but far less often than the media likes to talk about. Most of the time such things are face saving measures by the family when a child decides to rebel by not wanting to keep the situation at the level of an affair, or are more or less earned on the part of the man being 'tricked', insofar as women who don't want to have children don't and it takes both partners failing to take their drugs for an accident to have any chance of occurring. I'm sorry, but I feel no pity for a man who doesn't want to have kids who also doesn't keep up with his birth control. The government offers it free and there's no school you can go to that doesn't drill it into you 'if you don't want kids, take the damn medication' from puberty."

    Hmmmm (Int + Intr) 85 + 28 = 113

    Ella's brain carefully put this complaint together and then in a moment of grandiose insight, she realized that she knew who she was talking to.

    Baron Malcolm Adler of Rainbow Bridge. He was in his early forties and had earned a knighthood for valour in combat against reavers, and then a barony through a combination of popularity and political acumen. While he had a wife, he had also been involved in reproduction contracts with other families. It allowed him to network and allowed older families to outbreed with a known success story in a way that wouldn't tie them to him. Anna had of course lead the way on this sort of thing with her multitude of husbands, some of whom were still with her, but most of whom had moved on after only short dalliances. Also, while Anna had gone with gender-segregated lineages, most people had moved onto other forms of contracts that would specify which children went to which dynasty regardless of gender, especially as more limited reproduction contracts were realized. The cheeky bastard was not just subtly trying to find young women from rich families who might like to have kids with him in the future - thus increasing the number of favourable connections he had - but also to seed the idea that Razorleaf Meadows should invest more strongly in acquiring military resources.

    After all, Rainbow Bridge had been primarily turned into a training camp!

    Smirking on the inside, Ella spoke up and said, "Actually, speaking of there being enough to go around, that jogs my mind of something military related I had heard. Have either of you brave military gentlemen any experience with the General Problem? I've heard of it but it sounds... well, rather general."

    There was a pause in the conversation before the officer said, "Huh, haven't heard anyone bring that up in a while. Well studied. Anyway, the 'General Problem' has to do with the rank structure in Green Owl at the moment. You see, we don't really have enough population capable of supporting a military for more than one or two generals and a commander-in-chief. The Duchess has been able to triple the number of generals by breaking up the infantry, mechs, and air force into different services, but a lot of people feel that the mechs and the infantry are better off as a single force and that we really don't have enough combat aircraft to warrant a full general there."

    "So just don't have as many generals," one of the women pointed out.

    "We don't, and that's the problem," the officer explained. "Generally speaking - heh - establishing an effective and efficient general staff is a gigantic pain in the ass because the skills are different from the ones you use when you are a captain or even a colonel. The Duchess is trying to expand, but she's being picky about those who get one stars, let alone a second, and she is producing a surplus of candidate colonels just so that she can retire them to the Academy to pass on their knowledge while she works on building up the institutional infrastructure to begin expanding the number of general officers once again."

    "Must create a lot of resentful colonels," Ella commented, eliciting a slight turn of the head from the armoured baron.

    "Some. While everyone wants to be promoted, especially since making it to colonel frequently means a knighthood or a promotion to baron, the longer a colonel sits at that rank, the bigger the fear that he will be retired out early because there isn't room for him or her at the top," the officer explained.

    Judging by the posture of the man Ella was now certain was in fact Baron Adler, said baron was not quite in that position yet, but getting close. While he had been moved to a training position, he had also been given his own settlement to run as an academy. If the army expanded enough in the next few years, he could easily become a General of Training and Recruitment or the like. Not just one of the literal handful of generals, but the first one to a new position.

    If, on the other hand, it didn't expand fast enough, the next new general officer slot could go to someone else and it could be decades before he got another shot, when it would probably go to a younger officer with a better grounding in how to actually be a general rather than a colonel.

    Hmmm...

    Ella wasn't sure if she was ready to have kids yet, she was still young enough that she wouldn't require any kind of technological assistance for a few years yet, which for rather bullshit traditionalist reasons was considered "best" for the nobility, but for Stone women she was starting to enter the 'prime age' and she should seriously consider pursuing a reproductive contract at the very least within the next few years. Adler was already taken, but after Anna's reforms had swept through the nobility it was almost fashionable for a single woman to have a child from a prior contract before getting into a primary marriage. She could contribute to her family's continuance and prove her skills in networking while also assuaging the egos of more traditionalist dynasties by simply declaring that all of her children from that point on were those of her husband. Ella certainly wouldn't have to put up with that sort of thing if she didn't want to, but there were certainly opportunities for the future.

    Checking the power indicator on her costume, she then declared to the group, "Well now, this thing doesn't have room for a fusion reactor, so I must be seeing the servants about a battery change. I will see about returning, but the party does swirl about, so if I do not see you all again this evening, know that I greatly enjoyed our little chat."

    Moving away from the group to indeed go change the battery on her costume, Ella also motioned over to one of the masked servants.

    Please tell the gentleman in the black and gold armour to come meet me...
    [] After the party (1x)
    [] After the party and bring a friend (0.8x)
    [] After the part, I'll bring a friend (1x)
    [] For lunch tomorrow (0.5x)
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [X] After the party, I'll bring a friend (1x)

    Time to find our horny business woman ally?
     
    Last edited:
    [X] After the party and bring a friend (0.8x)

    If the point of this exercise was to make friends and allies, let him bring the friend to give us a chance at another ally or contact.
     
    Who's the friend we'd be bringing? I'm also not totally clear on whether this is a political or sexual meeting, what with the talk of him giving her a kid.
     
    Aight, so long as I know what I'm voting for.
    [X] After the party, I'll bring a friend (1x)
    I think Ella would appreciate controlling the guest list.
     
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