In the novel, he rescued a White Mexican Noblewoman (scion of some ancient Spanish house nobody has heard of or cares about) from Aztec pirates, who was the ultimate woman (pathologically domestic, knew, "her place," and was entirely devoted to the service of men). They never married, though.
That's not a thing that actually, y'know, happens, so I'll say that during his period of ineffectually flailing at pirates, Rumford's crew stumbled across a refugee vessel that didn't realize early enough that it needed to fucking run, and Rumford took a liking to Maria. He basically made her a live-in maid, and she more or less rolled with it because she was thousands of miles from home with no support network and had to survive. Whether or not they had something with the external aesthetics of a romantic relationship is an exercise left to the reader, but the CMC has her enshrined as a First Lady-ish figure regardless of whatever the actual facts may be. Her life is strictly structured to best enable her use as a PR piece and a feature at the social functions of the mighty, so she drifts from event to event, always present but never really included, masking what is essentially an entire lifetime of bitterness and spite behind a pleasant smile, as she is, to this day, still intent on surviving in the hell her world has become.
She is also a highly-valued contact and asset for at least six foreign intelligence agencies and as many as eight-two resistance movements. When everybody sees you as furniture and insists on inviting you to the fancy dinners, you hear a lot, and Maria has a lot of vengefulness built up about how her life has turned.
Actually came to mind recently.
The woman lived with Rumford for anywhere from 5-10 years before his assassination, and essentially kept house for him.
And we know that the original ruling Vics in general, and Rumford in particular, were terrible at data security; I mean, they attempted to run their military HQ out of a diner after all.
She is one of the few living people who knows where the bodies are buried. She certainly heard Rumford boast about Atlanta among his intimates. Dollars to donuts she has actual documentary evidence of Rumford's culpability in the nuking of Atlanta; maybe even stole his journals after his death, or abstracted similar documentation. Not to mention the Shanghai terrorist attack.
Why she hasn't shared it with anyone? May well have. But I doubt she's shared any documents.
You dont survive two decades plus as a figurehead of an ideology you detest without being very cagey.
Lady is probably in her 50s now, if she was abducted as a young woman in the 2040s. She didn't get that old by taking stupid risks.
The EU are one of the more well off factions, and if we show that the Victorians are no longer a threat, we can spin this as an opportunity to rebuild the America with help of foreign aide and security.
California and New York have intact education systems, and the bigger universities actually have online syllabuses and lectures IRL.
The African Union's power blocs exist, as well, as does China and South America.
Even Indian organizations are not exactly going to be , and religious NGOs have a track record of operating in underdeveloped regions.
Education aid is not something that's hard to get.
Cuba used to export teachers and educational experts to Third World nation states, and still does.
Has anyone answered the fishing problem Victoria faces?
Their new navy was fishing boats and it's implied to be a significant portion of their protein supply. We sunk that.
We sunk most everything on Lake Erie that they attempted to weaponize.
But we didnt touch Lake Ontario, or the St Lawrence Seaway, or the vast majority of the Atlantic coastline.
There are going to be fishing boats left on Lake Ontario and on the Atlantic coastline, and any losses should be fairly easy to replace, given the small size of those things.
It's the cargo ships that are all kinds of fucked.
Because they'd have looted those for moving men and supplies. And we would have sunk them.
Add in the civil war and we might be talking about mass starvation and a huge refugee movement..... INTO our lands. Or Detroit. We going to need that census and farming.......
More like into Ontario, actually.
Pennsylvania is a devastated place with a degraded road network and a very dim view of Victoria and Victorians after decades of punitive raids.
Crossing it in any numbers is going to be bad juju; impossible to attempt in winter, difficult in spring, and
Refugees are going to be pursuing a couple routes(red for the Commies, blue for FCNY):
- Across Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence Seaway into western Quebec and upper Ontario
- Across the Welland Canal into lower Ontario and towards Detroit
- Across PA/OH/IN overland towards Toledo
- By river via the Allegheny-Ohio from NY to the Mississipi confluence across PA/WV/OH/KY/IN
- Off the Atlantic coastline of NY/CT/RI/MA into FCNY's Long Island coastline.
- Across the Hudson into New Jersey
- Across New York State to the Bronx Wall.
Only a few of those options are even remotely family friendly, even if you had the supplies.
It's FCNY that's going to see the most of these, not us.
Because it has close land and sea borders to most of Victoria's most populated areas, and some of the places where fighting from our invasion and the civil war has displaced the most people.
While I suspect they can and will move a lot of those people across the river into New Jersey, they'd still have to feed and house them.
And keeping them that close to the Vic borders is a potential flashpoint once Victoria begins to stabilize.
This spells an opportunity for us to get paid for doing something we'd normally do anyway.
Just have FCNY fly them out on aircraft into O'Hare, and we can resettle them into Illnois/Iowa/Wisconsin.
Using 2x chartered Boeing 777-10X equivalents flying 4x a day from Chicago to New York and carrying 450 people each, they can move 3600 a day or 108,000 in 30 days.
I'm not sure Victorian refugees may be accepted. Lots of places may shoot them on the border.
Lots of places
will shoot them on the border, or otherwise disappear them. Or just loot them and turn them out with nothing.
Remember what happened to the Buffalo relief force when news got out that the Leamington Force had been smashed?
Hell, remember what happened to the survivors of the Leamington force?
We'll have to actively reach out to relocate any refugees in lower Ontario, and bank on FCNY doing the same in PA/NJ/NY.
We can probably rely on Vox Populi to help amplify the Commonwealth's commitment to take them in, but we'd need to actively invest in physical outreach to make communities pass them along instead of ignore or shoot them.
Yeah... But the problem is threefold.
In order:
1)There's several hundred kilometers from the closest points of Victoria to our territory.
Anyone coming to the Commonwealth's current borders has to either go overland towards Toledo, crossing Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana(>400km).
Or go downriver via the Allegheny-Ohio at least as far as Indiana(>500km). Or walk cross country over the Welland Canal past Hamilton towards Detroit(>300km). Or go directly across Lake Ontario or from parts of Quebec into upper Ontario and head for the Lake Superior coastline(>200km)
On foot, no motor vehicles and little food across a population that may well be actively hostile.
Refugees won't make it without help.
And we already committed to take refugees with the provisions of the treaty.
2) Get someone else to pay for it.
FCNY for example would probably pay a premium to get a chunk of the refugees they are about to receive off their hands.
Refugees are generally economic assets, but you need to invest in them.
What would be an immediate resource sink for a high tech, highly educated polity like FCNY would be immediate assets for us, both workforce and as PR, because the general level of technology in the Commonwealth is stuff they'd be familiar with.
3) They're Victorian
citizens subjects is probably a more accurate term.
The enforced Luddism of Retroculture means that we're not actually looking at people with especially great expectations here.
Especially if they're running away from Victoria.
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