DELIBERATIONS, AND NO MORE PROCRASTINATION

Gidea paced nervously as she weighed up her options; there weren’t a lot of them 1. go with her daughter's idea and go back to the royal palace and be haunted for eternity by backstabbing internal politics, 2. Go on a rampage and slaughter every backstabbing greedy little scumbag in the palace, and that would take the rest of eternity since it seemed greedy scumbags were not a finite resource in politics. 3. Uncover the conspiracy and probably have to deal with constant assassination attempts in the meantime. Or 4. Run, run, and never stop running.

Personally, Gidea was inclined towards option four, but it seemed her daughter was more inclined towards and had made some progress in the direction of the third choice. It seemed that Rosalind and Mibbet had managed to work loose a thread of palace life, and now all that was left to Gidea was to take that thread and give it a tug, to see what comes unravelled.

It was by no means going to be an easy task, whoever it was was dealing with demons, among other things, after all, and the palace weren’t allowed to go to them for answers. Something about the moral high ground or some such nonsense. But there were advantages to a high ground; it made it so much easier to snipe others.

This investigation was by no means going to be an easy one; so far, whoever was responsible for these attacks had been immensely careful about not leaving loose ends. All the people involved had been off before they could speak up, and the palace was not exactly the easiest place to spot a conspiracy. Partially because there were so many of them going on at once, everything around there had a hidden meaning. Hell, order the wrong flavour of ice cream in the inner court, and somebody would take a hidden meaning from it, and possibly somebody would show up dead. Some places looking for a well-hidden conspiracy was like looking for a needle in a haystack. In the inner court, it was more like looking for a needle in a needle factory, using a giant magnet. Blindfolded, without gloves. (In fact, very much like that, in the sense that if you go in blind, you will quickly discover that the one thing that was in plentiful supply was a bunch of pricks, oh, and you were likely to end up with multiple diseases of an unpleasant type into the bargain. Oh, and almost everything would end up rather stabby; it was the go-to solution in palace life. One of the main reasons Gidea preferred the arena was the rule that you had to stab your opponent in the front, and at least in the arena, the people wanting to kill you were a little honest about it. Oh, that and the food in the arena was hardly ever poisoned; she hated her food being poisoned. Oh, sure, it wouldn’t kill her; her toxin tolerance was through the roof, but it did rather upset her tummy, and she really really really hated it when that happened; privy doors got boring to look at rather quickly after all, no matter how creative the graffiti it all gets boring eventually.

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At least she knew where to start, though; if anybody was going to be involved in this mess, she had a sneaking suspicion that Lord Inna-Troff would have his dirty snout in it, he always did, and as the name suggested, he was a squealer once you had him by the short and curlies. It was time to shake him down, see where he trotted off back to, and she was truly gizzy with anticipation.

It had been a while since she’d last been back; like most of her ancestors, she was not built to live caged in. But for her daughter? For that, she was willing to go back to the cage for a while and probably cause as much fuss as possible doing so. She still held controlling shares in most of the local gossip sheets in the capital and had plenty of dirty data on most of the lords to ruffle a few feathers too. The only one she didn’t have a controlling share in nowadays was the Frailey Maille, owned by the Frailey family. Partially because their family excelled at making everybody hate everybody else, so usually turned people on each other, so they were too busy bickering to notice the family buying up more and more small “independent” papers. Resulting in not a single really free sheet in the entire capital, not even the ones that were given away.

So that would make the media tricky, but she had a few solutions to that, especially thanks to her daughter's new friends, who had their own ways of getting information about it. From the grumbling of the wizards, it was pretty obvious who controlled the information networks there, and it definitely was not the same individuals who supported Automata liberation. Her daughter was always far too direct a thinker, but she had to agree that the overthrow of wizard control had been a bold move and worth the support. Now it was up to her to make sure it didn’t come back to bite her daughter on the ass later. Good intentions were a great thing, but they were also something those with bad intentions could weaponize against you.

A lot of very rich companies had lost a lot of profit when they had lost their free labour, and while it was true, they shouldn’t have been keeping slaves to start with, the grey area had been kept deliberately murky by them for centuries. So naturally, nobody saw the appalling conditions or the cost of such actions. Now it was time to make sure to bring it all to light, in as loud and public a manner as possible. They had worked hard to hide all of this, and she hated it. Plus, the ethereal network could include pictures, and with Construct management was becoming more accessible by the day. This... she thought, is going to be fun.