***** PoV: Victrina Vitafino *****

“Well, that was fascinating,” I said out loud, briefly confused by my voice sounding a bit odd, before I remembered that I was using Arthur’s voicebox, rather than my own. [It’s amazing how comfortable the two of us have become that it took me a moment to realise why my voice sounded so odd.]

{Yeah, It’s surprising to me as well. The gestalt isn’t usually anywhere near this effective until several decades in, but it’s also not usually quite so necessary.}

“So the System mentioned something about there being several factions?” asked Spaghetti, interrupting our internal duologue.

“Not counting you guys, and maybe me, I’m not entirely sure what my faction status is at the moment, there are three parties composed of eleven factions. The eleven factions represent the Ten Kingdoms that make up our world, and one for the Vantabu Collective that ties them all together, while the parties refer to how they tend to vote in the Council of the Grand Conclave.

“The three parties ar the Loyalists, the Neutrals, and the Antagonists. The Loyalists work together to support the System and try to accomplish the goals set before us by the System to the best of our abilities, with the rewards from the various quests taking second place to the good that we can do for Calador. The Neutrals don’t really care about the System and it’s objectives one way or another, they are more focused on personal progression. Fortunately, they tend to agree that the Loyalist’s opinions are generally better for business than those of the Antagonists, so they are slightly more likely to vote with us. Finally, the Antagonist faction(s) hate what we and the System are trying to do on Calador, and actively try to make things worse in a way that benefits them, or are just not compatible with what we want to do.”

“What exactly do you mean by not compatible?” asked Spaghetti.

“There are two different factions this applies to, the Dangest Harmony, and the Commonwealth of Barcentil. The Dangest Harmony is a hive of sentient insects with a wide variety of variations, most of them carnivorous. Honestly, they would be just as much of a problem as the Dark Lord of old, more on him later, except he cursed them somehow, and now they’re not reproducing anywhere near as quickly as they used to. Given who and what the Dark Lord was, the curse didn’t do what it was supposed to do, but the Dangest Harmony aren’t telling us what exactly it did. Which is hardly surprising considering they don’t like us, and I’m not entirely sure they know what all it did.

“The Commonwealth of Barcentil, on the other hand, is a predominantly human kingdom where, in theory, everything is owned by everyone and shared equally because everyone is equal. In practice…”

“Some people are more equal than others?” Arthur asked.

“Exactly! Some people are more equal than others, and everything is horrible for those on the bottom of the pile. As much as we don’t like their way of doing things, the way the treaties are structured inside the Vantabu Collective, we cannot actually do anything about that unless they ask us to.”

“Well, that’s a shame.” interjected Spaghetti. “Fortunately, we are not bound by those treaties. We’ll see what can be done without just tearing things down and making an even bigger mess.”

“I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that. While I’m at it, I might as well go over the last of the Antagonist factions, the so called United Kingdoms, which are more a loose collection of personal fiefdoms than an actual kingdom, they are only united because none of them had the strength to stand against the Dark Lord on their own. Once they started working together on big picture stuff, they realized they actually liked the benefits of doing so. They rotate which of them is the High King every three years, and they have some sort of council structure that seems to work, but they do a rather spectacular job of keeping everybody else out, so we don’t really know the details on how that works.

“Any questions at this point?” I asked.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Not at this point, no.”

“Alright, so before the System showed up, our world was beset by a Dark Lord, who tried to drown the world in darkness and putrid ooze.”

“Wait, if he tried to drown the world in ooze, how come the entire planet still supports life?” asked Spaghetti. “I mean, there’s the occaisional desert, and the poles are frozen solid, but otherwise it looks like your standard Goldilocks planet. There are no massive dead zones like I’d expect.”

“I’m not sure, I’ve never heard an explanation that made any sense to me, but I’m not exactly an academic. What I can tell you is the druids from Lithofasia played a huge part in his final defeat, they just didn’t have the manpower to fight him on their own.

“Anyway, there were far more than the ten kingdoms once upon a time, before the days of the Dark Lord, who, by the way, never bothered to share his name with anyone who survived his schemes. Whatever records there were of who he was and why he decided to do what he did were either in one of the kingdoms near his lair that he burned to the ground before the whole putrid ooze thing really got rolling, or in his lair which the Automata used their beam weapons on, so there’s only a glassed out crater.

“The basic story is he burned the neighboring kingdoms to the ground, which gave him the space he needed to get the ooze doing whatever it does before it started spreading, and then he tried to drown the world. Many kingdoms were not ready, and fell to the ooze before they could find a way to fight it. The remaining kingdoms either had some way to defend themselves from the ooze, such as the Dangest Harmony, the druids from Lithophasia, and a combination of the Mercens and the Automata Authority, or they were behind one of the kingdoms that could.

“Initially, it was only the Druids that managed to do more than hold him back, but they could only push so far before they started to run out of manpower. Fortunately, at this point a man by the name of Vantabu had managed to rally together the refugees from all of the various countries and provided the druids with a chunk of the extra manpower they needed to keep pushing the ooze back.

“By the time all of the kingdoms were helping and the Dark Lord was well and truly on the back foot, the now Presidanti Amigua Vantabu was firmly at the head of the newly established Vantabu Collective. A few years later, when everything had more or less gone back to normal but before tensions had truly started to rise between the various kingdoms, the System showed up and moved our world elsewhere. It claims that someone was upset that the Dark Lord failed, so they were going to do something drastic in revenge for defeating the Dark Lord. Those who created the System didn’t want that to happen, so when they needed people to make the System work properly, they told it to rescue us.

“Nobody is quite sure what to make of that story, but everyone agrees that the benefits of working with the system are worth dealing with it’s shenanigans.”

“Before we get into that, can you go back to giving us a run down on the various factions?” asked Spaghetti.

“Yes, thank you for keeping me on track. The Neutral factions are the Republic of Mercantile, the Kingdom of Agraria, the March of the Mercens, and the Automata Authority. The only reason these four factions haven’t merged into one is they would get less from the System if they did. Agraria grows the food, as well as the mining and forestry and whatnot, but farming is their specialty. The Automata do the manufacturing because they like making stuff, but they need a reason to make stuff. The Mercens are Mercenaries looking for something worth protecting. And the Republic wants to make money, while helping people get what they need along the way. They were neighbors before the Dark Lord showed up, but ended up working so closely together during those days that they were well on their way to becoming one kingdom when the Druids managed to make contract with them despite the ooze in the way. They are Neutral mostly because they are self sufficient to a ridiculous degree, and don’t really care about the Systems offerings in terms of goods and whatnot, as far as I can tell. There’s probably more going on there, but I’m a ranger, not a political analyst.

“Finally, the Loyalist factions are the Shifting Clans, the Kingdom of Lithofasia, and the Empire of Dorf. The Shifting Clans are nomads that can shift from human to animal and back again, and their clan structures shift constantly for reasons that nobody I’ve tried to talk to has been willing or able to explain. Then there’s the Kingdom of Lithofasia, which is primarily elves, and a smattering of other races. As such, they have a much higher concentration of druids, mages and rangers than anyone else, which is why they were the ones to develop the most effective counter to the ooze. Finally, there is the Empire of Dorf, who were the last to join the Collective as they had retreated under ground and sealed the entrances behind them, since they are mostly dwarves. They might not have been happy about having to retreat underground, but that was preferable to fighting a losing war against the ooze.

“Any questions before we finally poke at Arthur’s Status page?”

“None that wouldn’t be better answered at the Grand Conclave.”

“Alrighty then, let’s get to it!”