Debauchery Worlds 76

Commissioned by Southmonk

Debauchery Worlds

Chapter 76

-VB-

Alan Marris

Cylene, Coreward Principality

2984.09.05

While our expeditions across the multiverse continued to do all of their things (like solar-nuking Chaos and failing), we continued to run the Coreward Principality to the best of our abilities. 

Coreward Principality didn’t change much in the months since the conquest into the Draconis Combine, even if the Draconis Combine itself had changed. 

Of course, the people of the worlds we conquered expected to be under some kind of warlord as they had been told. However, we were not traditional warlords. In fact, we were apathetic administrators in a sense. We accomplished by specific but limited number of laws for all of our subjects to follow. 

Freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom from harm, and freedom of religion. With those four basic concepts, we created thirty or so laws ranging from allowing a citizen to express themselves but only if they do not cause harm to others (expression vs. harm) to allowing anyone to practice any religion as long as said religion was not a A) cult, B) scam, and C) not causing harm. Of course, interpretations would be a problem in the future… but there wouldn’t be a future where I wasn’t here. Even if I, the original, somehow died, I, Alan Marris, would continue due to the cloning technologies we used. There wouldn’t ever be a time when the interpretation would change because we were the administrator, executives, legislators, and judges. 

However, outside of those thirty or so laws and the four foundational concepts, we allowed each and every single one of our worlds to operate as they wished as long as they followed the laws, the four concepts, and paid their taxes (manpower, material, or money) in time. In exchange, we provided protection.

Most of the worlds agreed to our rules, which we gathered the consensus of by distributing large networks of guarded electronic polling stations. 

Most. 

Umijiri, while we have been distracted, got taken over by remnant Draconis Combine forces led by an ISF cell. They eliminated all of the high ranking civilian officials on the planet and declared that Umijiri would “resist the enemy until the end.”

Then they hid behind civilians. 

So… we did what we had to do.

We pulled another Skat, but instead of dropping a meteor on a world, chose to blockade the mining world with insufficient food production.

ISF as a whole may be ruthless and cunning, but individual ISF cells weren’t. Or that was what I was seeing. ISF, I knew, was selected more for their fanatical loyalty, not their ingenuity. 

Anyways, we told the people that either they kill the terrorists themselves and the food shipments resume… or they don’t and they can “figure it out.” We let them stew. By our projections, Umijiri had one month’s supply of food. 

But aside from Umijiri, all other worlds bent the knee, so to speak. It helped that they honestly considered us to be a more “generous” ruler than the Draconis Combine for a few reasons. The most prevalent being that we weren’t Hohiro “dumbfuck” Kurita.

Like… Now that we had some time to relax and look over the history of the people we were ruling over, we understood why they were so accommodating with us. 

Or rather, they thought we were accommodating them! 

Hohiro Kurita set up some of the most imbecilic, brain dead, and utterly ruinous set of laws and policies that saboteurs could only dream of! He was killing his own nation with stupidity.

So, yeah, the people of the Draconis Combine were happier with us than with the Draconis Combine. It definitely helped that I didn’t ask them to abandon their culture… like Hohiro Kurita did. 

Like. Bro.

Asking someone to change their diet’s hard enough already. Abandon their culture unwillingly? 

We wanted whatever it was that Hohiro smoked, but unfortunately, we killed him, his stash, and his palace.

R.I.P. whatever he smoked. 

No, wait. What if it made us stupid? Because there was no way a ruler who managed to get on the throne of one of the largest polities in (local) human history would be so ill educated. The only way for him to be so stupid… was if whatever he smoked broke his brain.

Never mind. We don’t want…

… But then again, we had a lot of bodies…

Would it matter if one of them became that stupid? We could assign a minder to the mind broken clone.

Hmm…

Yeah, no.

We already had a very recent episode of “stupid think.” We weren’t going to do another one so soon. 

Whatever. 

Now. 

While internal matters progressed smoothly, it was another matter diplomatically. 

For one, Lyran Commonwealth was starting to throw its weight around toward me, and I had no intention of going along with their bullshit. Or rather, more specifically, Alessandro Steiner was being an asshole by making unreasonable demands. If he wanted a taste of my campaign on Luthien, then they were very welcome to try. 

And while the Archon was an imbecile too caught up in his own nonexistent legend, his people weren’t so stupid. 

Particularly, their businessmen operated far smoother than their archon ever could be. Since I wasn’t banning Lyran business on my worlds, they’d already moved in mere weeks after my “conquest” of the Draconis Combine in order to pry my technologies. 

It was going to be problematic for me, actually, because Lyrans fought on a battlefield that I was … not good at. 

And deploying an ever increasing number of clones just to keep track of bureaucratic and business nonsense didn’t sound like a good idea to me. 

I needed a dedicated counterintelligence and bureaucracy that wasn’t staffed entirely by me.

… I needed to ask the Federated Suns for some help.