Isekai Speedrun

Details, details...

“This amendment basically means abolition of slavery in all its forms. I just worded it in a way that takes future progress and future generations into account. I’m trying to be as inclusive as possible for all possible edge cases in the first version of the founding document because there are bound to be some villains who try to exploit legal loopholes.”

Korryndin’s brows furrowed in doubt while he was reading the document.

“...So this... includes deviants?” (Korryndin)
“Yep. Because there might be a way to restore their mental health some day in the future. I don’t want them to be discriminated if their brains are healed, but their skin remains scaly or something. The wording does need clarification, you’re right about that. I need to make simpler, more human-readable version. I’ve also been thinking that I should write a dictionary of seerspeak, but that’s another project for the future.”

Korryndin nodded several times, clearly wanting to ask more clarification about deviants, but then he shrugged and continued reading the document instead.

“...I don’t see any mention of your share of Reignland’s wealth. I assume you will take the royal half of everything?” (Korryndin)
“Again, do we look like people who care about money? You will use all the gold and silver from Reignland’s mines to build a prosperous empire and make it a nice place to live for all of its citizens. Our team will be in contact with your team, and we’ll set it up.”
“You really don’t care to take any of it?” (Korryndin)
“Nope.”
“Everyone in this world cares about money and wealth. Except fanatics and madmen.” (Korryndin)
“It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message. And I don’t mean the kind of messy messages my friend Crys here sends, but a message of human development. Because this world needs a better class of common people.”

Korryndin turned to Crys, desperately looking for a second opinion.

My words are not convincing enough? How come?

“What Speedrun leaves unsaid is that there is a third group who doesn’t care about money: those who hold the power to acquire whatever they want, whenever they want. All the wealth in the world is already ours, people simply do not know it. They don’t need to know. All the Räumveld gold and the Tarsuaq silver is mined for Sorry Man’s war chest. The future emperor of Mu is a mere servant guarding that war chest. A man selling pickaxes and shovels doesn’t have the need to dig for gold himself.” (Crys)
“...I see. A king doesn’t carry his own coin pouch. I understand the full width of that utterance.” (Korryndin)
“Kord-kun, let me rephrase my viewpoint. Hoarding and overeating are mental disorders. Birthday cake should be shared with friends, one guy eating while others watch is just weird. Or as they say in the tribal lands: I store my food in my brother’s belly. We’re not some low-level dictators crafting golden AK’s, we paint on a larger canvas. The gold must be used to protect everyone’s smiles. This is a community project, impact investment, triple bottom line, all that hype. Because we already have that infinite money glitch of overwhelming firepower, it means we don’t need to weigh our wallets or worry which rare metals are in fashion.”
“...Indeed, I fully understand where we stand now.” (Korryndin)

Somehow I feel like Korryndin placed us both in the category of madmen anyway. But whatever he thinks, this won’t be a major change in lifestyle for Korryndin in practice. Instead of Caliphate backseating with a gun pointed to his head, it’s Revolution Movement hovering in the background with a cardboard harisen.

---

For casual street-level revolutionaries, overthrowing a government is an activity similar to a dog chasing a car: even if they manage to catch it, they have no idea what to do next. Maybe they raise a new flag at the top of the royal palace, and suddenly everything in the failed state is okay? Barely literate smugglers and cutpurses are not going take over the day-to-day bureaucracy and sit in meetings drafting new laws.

By killing all scholars and nobles, naive street revolutionaries are simply creating a giant power vacuum at the top. And nature abhors a vacuum – a country without rules and rulers is a country simply waiting for a foreign tyrant to drop in and create the rules. A tribe of anarcho-libertarians rejecting all communal responsibilities will be quickly taken over by an organized military force or mauled by a bunch of bears. If the revolutionaries themselves do not care to step in and fill that power vacuum at the top, someone else will. Ninja looting is a common thing in a game of power.

But that’s not us. Even if most of our forces are street rats, Crys and I have a pretty good strat for trigger-canceling the power vacuum routine by creating a controlled power vacuum and then immediately filling the vacuum with king Korryndin; an old authority who knows what to do and who to call. He’s been trained from young age to wield the executive power.

In other words: delete the old, corrupt operating system and install a lighter, time-tested operating system with a brand new layer of modern features running in the background.

King Korryndin becomes the high emperor of both continents eventually, and Revolution Movement becomes the hidden counter-power that keeps him in check; the self-righteous Sword of Damocles hanging over his heavy crown, the Central Intelligence Agency spying his every move.

Be a good autocrat, or else.

If you hoard resources to your family at the expense of common citizens, the sword will fall. If you restart slavery.exe, sharp rain descends from the sky and supermoderators cancel your moderator privileges. If your future descendants get uppity and think they can forget the background rules and ignore the old cautionary tales about a black-haired lady with glowing machine eyes who punishes wrongdoers with a bullet in the head, they will receive a grim reminder.

It’s not about how the world works. It’s about how we force the world to work.

On top of chaos and anarchy, you must build an ordered society. On top of lawless wilderness, you must build a virtual world of rules and limits. On top of dangerous reality, you must build an open world game called modern civilization. On top of chaotic jungle of lawless injustice, you must build an ordered garden of law and justice.

The wild and chaotic natural universe underneath never disappears, of course. It keeps trying to take over the nice orderly house you’ve built on top. That is why you must always stay vigilant and maintain the house by repairing problems before they dig too deep. Like the red queen says: you must run to stay in place.

And if you need a god or master to be a good person, you’re not a good person; you’re just a bad person wearing a slave collar. But even that old adage is based on an idealistic view: real world is full of mentally ill, frontal lobe damaged, brainwashed people who cannot be trusted to use their own brains to stack complex thought-forms and reach mutually beneficial conclusions. Any fool who thinks that all people are able to govern themselves has never played a free-to-play, open-world, unrestricted, unmoderated online game.

To maintain relatively peaceful life and keep your house clean, you need enough power to defend your house and place moderators who eliminate cheaters, trolls and spammers. On top of the unequal law-of-the-jungle survival-of-the-fittest corpo-capitalism you must build a complex network of social safety nets, ballots and unions to approach the greater artificial equality that doesn’t exist in wild nature. If nature is destiny, change the nature; if humanity is flawed, change the humanity; if universe is hostile, change the universe; if reality is cold and inhumane, build a warm and welcoming artificial world; if life is meaningless, create meaning; and if the gameplay as intended doesn’t entertain you, speedrun it and create your own entertainment.

Starting point is not the ending point. The artificial world is greater in value in its deliberate attempt to continually update itself to become better than the natural world.

Thank you for coming to my con talk.

---

“Just keep the status quo for starters, Korry. We’ll start stacking subtle changes over time... But that said, there are some major changes we should implement as soon as possible.”
“Such as?” (Korryndin)
“Do you want to go through the document point by point? I’m down, if you want. First and foremost, that abolition of slavery thing – do you want to take notes? Okay, full abolition of slavery for all Reignland citizens. All types of slavery and serfdom will be abolished, banned, and canceled. No more neck chains for farmers and craftsmen, no more multi-generational punishments. People are allowed to dress how they want instead of wearing default NPC beige and gray, and they can cut their hair how they want, and use makeup how they want. No more colonialism, no more natives from Fireland working the fields.”
“But who–“ (Korryndin)
“Your next question is: who’s going to work the fields? Well, you hire people and pay them a living wage, that’s who. And slave harems are obviously out. The doors of the Golden Cage will be left open and the women have the choice to go wherever they want and marry whoever they want. No more forced marriages, forced inseminations and forced births. No more slavebranding and genital mutilation, no more artificial hellscapes for young men who refuse to become soldiers. Freedom of movement and freedom to own stuff, including farmland, for all citizens, including women. Farmers can work their own farms and make money by selling their grains for a fair price.”
“...Female slaves owning land?” (Korryndin)
“They are not slaves anymore, remember? Why on earth would you be against women owning land anyway? This isn’t even controversial, dude. This should not in any way, shape or form be controversial. People can freely leave the land they were born on and buy land from somewhere else – oh, another thing: corruption. I know this is going to be really hard, but try to keep corruption to the minimum. Appoint actual capable people in key government positions instead of your close relatives or aristocratic bootlickers, and punish those who take bribes regardless of their position and wealth. Farmer or marchioness, both should be judged by the same standards and same laws.”
“You killed emperor Tze and now you wish to destroy the last remnants of his legacy as well? I can understand that, but do you mean even deviants can walk free and own land?” (Korryndin)
“Don’t get stuck on that detail, that’s just a possible future thing. Also, I would cancel slavery even if Caliph Tze had never existed, don’t misunderstand; we’re not doing all this just to spit on his face, we’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do. Kohlberg level six, dude. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that we’re just virtue signaling on level three when we’re earnestly pushing level six.”
“Kohl… what...?” (Korryndin)
“Ignore that for now. I can understand your skepticism, and I fully understand that it’s going to be a long and difficult process to end slavery worldwide, but it’s not some far-fetched fantasy. I’ve seen it happen once, that dragon has been already slain before. And this time we have a whole gang of superpowered John Browns and superwealthy Secret Six as catalysts of change. It’s exactly because it’s going to take time and effort that we need to start this boss battle by stabbing the beast directly into its heart in Reignland. And we’re going to keep twisting that knife until the beast rots into blocks of sparkly fading pixels.”
“...Well, it’s true that even Strangers disappeared…” (Korryndin)

Korryndin seemed to think that my line about slavery disappearing once before was a Strangers reference. Well, that level of misunderstanding is fine.

“Anyway, we’re giving out Emancipation Proclamations, but we’re not going to make any Quench Proclamations. We’re not going erase Tze’s existence from history. In fact, we’re going to make sure Caliph Tze will be remembered exactly as the nutcase fascist supervillain he was. If you don’t learn from history, you might accidentally repeat it.”

I could almost hear the gears in Korryndin’s head trying to turn sideways.

He briefly looked at Kimono. She was standing motionlessly next to the windows like a mannequin, observing the outer courtyard.

“...So, if Caliphate slavery can be brought to sudden end, what comes afterwards? What kind of historical scene will follow that sudden change? A chaotic bloodshed similar to what happened after Strangers?” (Korryndin)
“Deaths are inevitable.” (Crys)
“Yeah, can’t break eggs without dropping some. What you’re actually asking is what happens after the bloodbath, right? Well, for example, social services based on universalism, as written here in the document. How should I explain… Okay, going back to the very basics, do you know the old saying about teaching man how to fish instead of giving him a fish? If you give beggar a fish, he will eat a day, but if you teach him how to fish, he will eat every day, and so on?”
“I have heard a proverb with a similar message.” (Korryndin)
“Good, because that proverb is kind of missing a crucial detail: you can’t learn efficiently when your stomach is running on empty. Poverty and hunger are like curses on your body and mind, causing constant stress, and that stress directly inhibits your learning ability. You need to give the man some fish to eat first and then teach him how to fish. You need to invest seed money to kickstart the fishing business. Now, jumping directly forward from that story: we must build a systematic, tax-funded network of kindness because it’s more efficient than a single person doing a single act of kindness. It’s an investment to the stability of the country. Tze’s crazy answer to poverty and homelessness was forced labor in prison dungeons, which is just wasteful. Our answer is to simply give people money and a home. Free soup for beggars and crawlers, new orphanages for war orphans, free healthcare for the diseased, free education for the uneducated. Every person is a promising startup.”
“...And the royal court will pay for all that?” (Korryndin)
“Have you been listening? You and your fellow vampires, sorry, fellow nobles will pay for all that. Dissolve the biggest blood clots of society and restore a healthy circulation of trade tokens. Implement progressive taxation to prevent new clots from forming. Have you ever debated in your head if these lavish foods you’re eating here alone have been stolen from the mouths of children starving on the streets? Are you perhaps waiting for some item duplication glitch to trickle down from the heavens before you dare to expend even one of the single-use items you’ve hoarded?”
“Duplication...?” (Korryndin)
“If the game is too harsh for new players, devs need to step in and nerf the broken meta that favors only the top one percent. Aristocrats know how to hoard rare items like dragons, but they don’t know when to actually use them, so they just die and the wealth keeps being handed down and hoarded in the family. Progressive taxation for these gold-hoarding lizards and – wait, wait, I already know what you’re going to say next, and the answer is no. Rich nobles won’t abandon their family hats. Caliph Tze did much worse, yet most of them are still in Reignland. If some of them want to jump the ship and swim to the Sultanate side, let them. If the cheaters complain when you force them to play fair like everyone else, just freeze their accounts. Seize their lands and titles. See how they like operating like the very commoners they detest without IDs in foreign lands.”

Korryndin once again turned to Crys, hoping for an interpretation or a second opinion.

I was re-explaining my views to Crys as much as I was infodumping to Korryndin. We weren’t on exactly the same page on all radical policies, but I tried my best to ensure we were on the same bookshelf at least.

“This is all quite a lot to think about...” (Korryndin)
“Follow the contract. Understanding comes afterwards.” (Crys)
“That’s right. When you roll with revolutionaries, you need to unlearn your old ways, which can take a while. You can just follow the manual and think about the mechanics of why and how afterwards – oh, that reminds me: religious cults like Green Mountain will be permabanned, so their temples can be used as temporary housing for the newly freed slave citizens. The high priests of Caliphate will be executed for crimes against humanity; they have mountains of skeletons in their basements, no need to feel any sympathy. And all that pointless animal cruelty in the temples, all those animal sacrifices for nothing, it’s just so wasteful and stupid. There are already too few animals in this world left... Adding to the list: animal rights, sanitation, food safety inspections, public healthcare, public transportation network; there's a lot to do and think, but you’ll get the big picture over time and that helps you to understand the details.”
“But such radical changes... I doubt if one lifetime is enough.” (Korryndin)
“Of course, turning a low-trust society into a high-trust society will take a generation or two at least, but from my perspective slavery is already a dark relic of history. The changes I’m talking about are the basics of the basics of the basics. A tutorial stage. I’m already leaving the far more advanced stuff for future generations.”
“…” (Korryndin)
“As an emperor, you will treat all people with respect regardless of gender, skin color, sexual orientation, or family status. All the colors of the rainbow are welcome. And we’re talking about adults here, of course, grown-ups who can give informed consent. Child marriages will be obviously banned because children cannot give informed consent, and similarly animal abuse will be banned because animals don’t have the mental capacity to give informed consent. In general, don’t oppress minorities or non-violent deviants. Violent deviants with scales in their head should be quarantined, if possible, and criminals in general should be treated like people with infectious diseases–”
“Skip.” (Crys)
“...Crys, no. Don’t skip me. That’s just wrong. Please don't.”

A faint smile on Crys’ face. This damn joker.

“Do you mind if I continue? Okay, what’s the next bullet point – ah, yes, smoking in public places will be banned, and driving carriages under the influence of alcohol. Human experiments for creating supersoldiers are definitely banned. And you should call back the warships and remnants of Tze’s troops from Fireland. No more exploitation of tribal lands and their resources... Well, not all these things are written in this contract right now. You’ll get a full changelog about fixes and additions later, and we’ll release regular updates based on user feedback.”
“I-I see...” (Korryndin)
“Again, I totally understand this all sounds like a futuristic fantasy from your perspective, but again, from my perspective this is just the bare minimum. An early transitional phase. It’s hard to change archaic traditions and views, but this is the route the world is going to take anyway when we get the pebbles rolling. Changes are coming, whether you can handle them or not. And we’re going to do some of those changes forcefully at the start because we don’t have the time to do it gently with advocacy and petitions. You guys might not be ready for the progressive beats we’re about to drop, but your kids are gonna love ‘em.”
“...” (Korryndin)
“Now, if you want to talk real radical stuff, we’re going to research the limits of Strangers Cube as a wireless power beaming station and install universal basic income down the line. Maybe transition into post-work society, if we’re feeling particularly cute. We just need to build the necessary requirements and infrastructure before choosing which level up we want to take from the tech tree, you know, first we need to concentrate on mundane stuff like mixed zoning laws, public transit hubs, separate bicycle lanes... Although, in the even longer run, moving most of the population outside Reignland would be good because let’s face it: maintaining this Arabian Peninsula type vanity mega-project called Sun City – this massive boondoggle of a megapolis – in the middle of a sand desert importing most of its food, with an army of slaves shoveling sand off of doorsteps every night... It’s just stupidly expensive and inefficient. It’s better to move the imperial capital elsewhere in the long run, a few hundred kilometers to the north perhaps. So, yeah, some of these changes will take generations and we might not all be there to see the final levels, but doing the basic changes quickly and getting the big systems running on the background should be less painful than dragging our feet over a long period of time. Rip the band-aid with one motion to keep the pain brief. Outfascist the fascists for a bit, just to make sure not a single bully survives, then tune it back way down. Reignland will flip from backwards slave state to modern free state with a snap. Cars will start driving on the right side of the road overnight.”
“Haa...” (Korryndin)
“You can take a moment if this is too much information. It’s not like we’re on a schedule – wait, we are on schedule.”

I checked my time card. One hour back to the border, another hour to Sun Palace. No need to hurry outside yet.

“I guess what I’m telling you is this: deal with it. This is how it’s going to be from now on. Relax and adapt to the new reality.”

---

I used to get flak every time I talked about politics in my Sunday Casuals streams, but the point that I always wanted to stress to my viewers was that instead of speculating about far-fetched political theories that haven’t been battle-tested, or fictional wonderlands where all people are rational agents and work together like goodhearted neighbors, they should remove their ideological goggles and look at the actual real world stats, actual quality of life metrics and human development indexes, and see which countries and which systems come consistently at the top.

And when you do that, you see that the Nordic social democracies hold the highest benchmarks year after year. As far as properly moderated, easily patchable and user-friendly national systems go, the Nordic model is top of the line politech.

I once lost a few dozen subscribers when I pulled out third-party verified country rankings during a stream to argue my point. Surprise to no one, most of those lost subs were inconsequential right-wingers who can’t tell the difference between a boxing match and a dance lesson.

It might not be the best theoretically possible operating system, but perfect is the enemy of good enough. Nordic OS just works. It’s a stable build and above-average passable for most operations. And that’s the kind of stability a person in charge should look for instead of installing some overhyped communist collective (full of obvious bugs) or pseudo-libertarian pay-to-play theocracy (with backdoors and exploits).

Implementing Nordic OS in Reignland is the mid-to-long-term goal of Revolution Movement. This current puppet-emperor-under-blade arrangement is just a transitional phase until there’s enough adequate hardware for a safe installation – that is, a large middle class of independent land owners with modern agricultural tools instead of large bottom class of slave peasants weeding fields with their hands, and so on. You need to be very careful with technological and cultural prerequisites before trying to brute force your way higher up on the tech tree and installing software too heavy to run in your hardware.

It’s like back in the day when United States (the good old Nuclear Damocles) tried to install American-style democracy into every conflict-ridden third world country like an elephant rolling into a porcelain store and then made a surprised meerkat face when their native software didn’t run correctly in the alien hardware. Customizing for local cultures and traditions matters; if a country has been traditionally ruled by wandering tribes, haphazardly installing centralized government is bound to fail. Maybe you should’ve tried kickstarting the modernization with Switzerland-style confederation instead, did you even think about that? At least check the native specs before trying to force an upgrade.

Democracy.exe doesn’t run correctly automatically. You need an educated population that is able to read and understand what they’re actually voting for. And some of these prereqs simply do not exist in Reignland yet because the population consists of multiple generations of passive, uneducated slaves who wear neck chains in their daily life and think that showing any form of resistance or independent thinking leads to instant violent punishment.

It’s like blatantly external form of the internal slave mentality that exists in corrupt totalitarian dictatorships like North Korea, Russia and China. If you refuse to vote for the one and only candidate of the one and only ruling party, your whole family gets defenestrated; if you point out a stain on the shirt the ruler is wearing, you will get disappeared for disrupting the harmony; if you hurt the mask, you hurt the face. Keeping your smiling mask clean at all times becomes the most important thing, and soon it becomes illegal to show the suffering face behind the mask.

To survive inside these sociopath-infested webs of papier-mâché façades, you must turn into a blind, deaf and mute dog that licks the boot that kicks and praises the chain that restrains. And when only the most submissive party-worshipping slaves are allowed to have children, you get a country full of automaticity NPCs repeating the same vapid meme phrases over and over, same rehearsed rituals and gestures; a nation of static script bots imitating each other – you know, like a normal Gen Fail livestream chat.

And it’s not like I can replicate the UBI Bot Swarm that got released when I was young. What’s that, you ask? Okay, long story short: some experimental autonomous AI bots were released by a rainbow hat hacker group called Twelve Peers. The bots made multiple burner accounts on various platforms, autogenerated targeted educational content for all ages, collected ad revenue from clicks and views, and then immediately used the generated income to make purchases from online stores and airdrop stuff around the world. Suddenly poor people everywhere started getting random packages to their doorsteps – except that it wasn’t random stuff. It was products that were needed in that location in the near future. A poor family in India severely lacking in vitamin A? The bot swarm recognized their symptoms from a video clip, extrapolated from statistical data what would happen to them in the near future, and delivered a bag of golden rice just in time.

For me personally, the swarm sent a free code to a food recipe app. It happened a few days before the swarm was banned and scraped from all platforms. Old hats didn’t like how this autonomous Robin Hood swarm operated.

Of course, since this is Mu-Ur world and not the real world I know, there’s an even more disturbing possibility: maybe the deep meta of this world is so different from my origin world that the non-magical sociopolitical software I somewhat understand is fundamentally incompatible with the bugged magicore hardware. Maybe I’m making a huge mistake by trying to force World-1 ideas on World-2 which is so vastly different that the long-term effects might be the opposite of what I expect. Maybe the metamodern value hierarchy of assumption clusters (rationality, posthumanism, animal rights, sustainability, etc.) that runs just fine in an overclocked high-tech society is too heavy for a low-tech society and ends up crashing the whole system back to pre-conceptual stone age.

Everyone has a strat until they get ratio’d in the face. No matter how many changes you make in human history, you cannot change the movements of tectonic plates – a new proverb of time travelers.

But let’s not delve too deep into scary esoteric topics. I don’t know if my half-baked social policies will take hold in the short run (or work at all in the long run in this alternate universe operating under a different set of base level rules), but trying out something instead of nothing can’t make the situation worse. Right?

I’m not triggering some strange global death flag here, am I?

---

“There will still be prisoners of war and criminal slaves who are forced to work.” (Crys)

Crys suddenly injected some harsh realism into the conversation.

“Well, there’s that exception. They are going to work in natural parks and wildlife sanctuaries later. That reminds me – there’s the problem of everyone dumping their trash and dead bodies in rivers and canals. That routine needs to stop immediately, clean water needs to be kept clean. And speaking of clean water, I need to take a sip from my canteen, my throat is parched.”
“What about the Caliphate warriors outside Reignland?” (Korryndin)
“Crys, you want to answer this one?”
“After your coronation, you will call back all Caliphate troops from Wineep Isthmus, Fireland and Corelands of Om. You will not send any sheriffs or death guards to villages above the northernmost peak of Sharp Mountains. You will force a peace treaty with Sultanate, but slowly take over their lands over the next decade using political deals instead of military force. You will receive detailed instructions from Sorry Man later.” (Crys)

Crys continued by listing some of the demands and bullet points he had added in the contract. We both had our pet projects.

Kimono looked a bit bored. I waved my hand at her and gave a thumbs up. She didn't react.

Korryndin was probably confused about what kind of chain-of-command Revolution Movement actually had, or maybe he was still thinking what on earth these ‘natural parks and wildlife sanctuaries’ were supposed to be.

Since this world was strip-mined by Strangers, it was important to protect the rare, untouched natural resources and the rare plants and animals that were still left. Sending random unarmed POWs to these areas full of dangerous carnivores to plant new trees was one of our compromise decisions that might not work in practice.

I try to keep my standards high, but it’s inevitable to get involved into day to day realpolitik when you start assassinating world leaders and stand as one of the shadowy world leaders yourself.

By the way, we are not going to declare the Wineep Isthmus or Loönois moorlands independent nations or anything. That would bring too much trouble.

“It won’t be good if Sun City burns to the ground tonight.” (Korryndin)
“Rainwoman will smother the fire.” (Crys)
“Placing your trust on a woman’s capricious power over weather is a bit...” (Korryndin)
“Don't start again, Korry. Rainwoman’s power is always on, it will happen. When the Caliphate nobles think we are going to burn the whole city to the ground and try to escape, it’s already too late.”
“A campaign of fire and water. The confidence of a champion or a trickster.” (Korryndin)
“Only a fool goes to a war they don’t expect to win.” (Crys)
“Yep, it'll be alright. We will overwhelm them. I’ve routed Sun City in my visions multiple times. It'll be fine, don't worry so much.”
“Are your eyes truly capable of seeing the future?” (Korryndin)
“Yep.”
“What will happen to my children and their children in the future you envision?” (Korryndin)
“They will live long and prosper. In the far future, they might not be royalty anymore, but their lives will be better than those of the royalty of today. When the power of king wanes and the power of citizen rises, they’ll be something like mascot kings.”
“Mascot kings?” (Korryndin)
“Symbolic figureheads living in relative luxury without much actual power. Living talismans, if you will.”
“It’s all so foreign, so foreign…” (Korryndin)

Korryndin shook his head, sighed deeply, and signed the contract. He just gave up; a confession after a long police interrogation.

“Thank you for your cooperation.”
“Even if I had no choice in this matter, you took the time to explain your ideals in detail to this old man. It would be rude to prolong this any further.” (Korryndin)

When Crys folded the signed contract inside his jacket, Kimono tapped a windowpane with her revolver. The rain outside kept getting louder.

“It seems Rain is getting restless as well. We should probably move out.”
“You talk in excess.” (Crys)
“Sorry, comes with the job.”
“Korryndin, gather your followers and ride to Sun City at midnight. We shall wait in the Sun Palace.” (Crys)