Reya Rust Metron sat in a seat inside the Steel Palace’s communication room. This had been the second straight day that she’d tried to reach her father. Last night, she’d finally made headway, actually managing to schedule a call with him despite his busy schedule.
Reya sighed as she straightened out her dress, and finger-combed her styled blue hair. It’s ok… it’s ok. Calm down. Take a deep breath, and talk to dad about what you think is right. You’re the crown princess, after all.
Reya looked at the clock as the time ticked away, and at 4 A.M. on the dot, she pressed the call button on the hologram after it had linked to her contacts list.
Had this been a public forum, she may have worried about her devices being hacked remotely, but this was a royal chamber. There was no way that Judgment’s defences were so weak as to allow people to actually hack into them.
Plus… Reya rolled her eyes. The only person who could break the rules here is on my side. What do I have to fear from anyone else?
She fidgeted with buttons in AR, and soon, she was face to face with her father, King Metron, and at his side, Queen Metron. The king smiled upon seeing his daughter’s face. “Hello Reya. How has your trip been?”
Reya had to force herself to hide a smile, and she answered truthfully. “I’ve had an… epiphany since I’ve come over here.”
“Oh?” Queen Metron interjected for the first time that conversation. From what Reya knew about her mother’s speaking habits, it was sure to be far from the last. “And what did you realize, exactly?”
Reya laughed at the concept of her own mother sizing her up. She would replace the aging queen in ten, maybe fifteen years time, and then she’d never have to listen to Queen Cindy’s judgmental tone ever again.
However, until that time came, she’d just have to bear with the humiliation of her mother questioning her every move. “I realized that no one is ever going to help me get where I want. Not Joshua, not Lucina, and certainly not you both, my parents.”
The queen looked as if she wanted to speak, so Reya beat her to the punch by saying, “In fact, that has been a huge theme of my life. Never anyone to hear me out, listen to my problems, console me, or even tell me what I was doing right or wrong.”
Cindy Metron rolled her eyes and said, “All of our children have had the freedom they’ve needed since a young age. You are not an exception, and who you become, or who you’ve become already is entirely on your shoulders.”
Reya sneered, causing her mother, who had never seen Reya do anything other than smile, to flinch. “Of course you’d say something like that. However, just know that no matter how you try to justify it: shitty parenting is shitty parenting. You can’t absolve yourself of duties that you had no intention to carry out in the first place. You may be a great king and a great queen, but as humans? You’re both nothing more than failures. The worst kind of garbage that shirks responsibilities in favor of their own selfishness.”
Reya saw it in the Queen’s eyes: for once in her life, she was speechless. Reya felt a great deal of satisfaction gazing at the queen, but a snide cough from her father drew her attention away from that.
“Reya, dear, I know the only purpose of your call was not to make your mother depressed. What have you been up to in Asahi?”
Reya cleared her throat and took a breath to calm her heart before starting her practiced speech. “I have been creating deals and mutual benefits with Emperor Goto. First, I have secured a lower cost of exporting goods made in the Luong Empire to the Metron Kingdom.”
Queen Metron raised her eyebrows and asked, “How much of a markdown could you have possibly managed to create in only a day and a half?”
“Fifteen percent.” Reya delighted once more in the shocked look of her mother, but a quick question from her father distracted her again, much to her chagrin.
“That’s nice and all, dear, but what did you give up to get such a price?” Reya drummed her fingers on the control panel and sighed.
“Why can’t you ever just take things at face value, dad?” The king gave her a knowing look, and she smirked.
“Ok, I guess that was asking too much of the great King Claude Metron. Before you say anything, please hear me out to completion. Firstly, this is by far a done deal, and we are still finalizing terms of the contract.”
Both the king and queen nodded knowingly. As if such a major windfall could just settle into their laps in a mere two days time. However, two days was a very impressive time frame to have gotten that far in negotiations already.
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“Emperor Goto has agreed to mark down fees for importing his goods if we do the same on our end, and lower the export prices to the Luong Empire by twenty five percent.” The queen bit her lip, and the king gestured for her to continue.
Thankful for the patience on their end, Reya continued, “In addition, Emperor Goto has thrown in the option to choose a cut of prime Virizium at the beginning of every month, when they do their monthly excavation.”
Words could not describe how funny Reya thought her parent’s blank faces looked. Had she really been afraid of these people for most of her life? She should have just taken a gamble on herself earlier.
The Metronian Princess frowned as she recalled when exactly it was that she felt the desire to change, and actually act on it. In the end, it really was because of him… Starlord’s rotten taint. Do I really have to become a deviant in the bedroom in order to attract him?
“I’m sorry, what was that?” Reya shook herself back to reality, as she had just missed the tail end of something her mother had said.
“How in the Starlords names did you manage to pull something like that off. Did you have something to blackmail the Emperor with? Tell me what it was!”
Reya was taken aback at her mother’s fervor, until she recalled a certain story. Reya opened her mouth, and was likely to dig her own grave in the process, but a well-timed intervention from her father shifted the blame onto him.
“Your mother is obsessed with the emperor, yes. No matter what tactics she tried to get him to fall for her, he didn’t ever take the bait when they were still in school. Instead, she got the second best thing.” King Metron pointed to himself with a self-deprecating smile, and the queen slapped him on the shoulder.
“Don’t talk about yourself like that. Although… I do admit that I may be a little obsessed with getting revenge on him at some point for all the humiliating denials he’s caused me.”
She took a breath to calm herself, but it didn’t work, and she still had a slightly unhinged glint in her eyes as she said, “That’s why, if you have anything to tell me about him, anything at all, then tell me!”
Reya merely chuckled at her mother’s behavior, an act which shocked the Queen. “Before I tell you what I did, let’s go over a few things, shall we? First, you both remember what we use Virizium for in the Kingdom, correct?”
Queen Metron rolled her eyes, a gesture which caused her husband to laugh. “Yes, Crown Princess Reya Metron. We know what Virizium is used for. We’ve been trading for the stuff for thirty years. At this point we’d know where every source, legal or otherwise, in the kingdom is located. Do you know what it is?”
Reya cooly played off the mocking use of her title, and said, “Yes, for Virizium batteries. When you run an electrical or plasma current through Virizium, the energy inside can double, or even triple due to the effects that Virizium’s particular magnetism has on such currents.”
King Metron nodded in approval. “Of course, we basically use the damn stuff to power our entire uplink to the Judgment System. Why the redundant question?”
Reya smiled, “Did you know that one piece of Virizium ore the size of dad could also be used to power our entire colosseum?”
That made the king pause in his tracks, and he studied Reya’s face carefully. “Where did you learn this knowledge? I haven’t ever heard of anything like that before.”
This time Reya had a confident smile on her face as she answered, “Of course, I heard it from the Emperor himself. Why else would I even bring up this topic. He also showed me how it works in person, and I will send a video of the process to you after this call is over.”
Queen Metron slammed her fist on the desk she was using and roared, “What in the Starlord’s tainted hells did you do to get that emperor to bend so much!? Tell me now!”
King Metron ‘gently’ escorted his wife out of the conference room and returned to his seat, a stoic smile on his face. “Honestly, she’d be so much more attractive if she didn’t lose her cool whenever Emperor Gotoshi is involved. Truth be told, I still think she wants to sleep with him, as some weird form of victory.”
Reya’s face twitched. Disgusting. Seeing the look on her face, the King shrugged. “Eh, there are people who have far stranger things that they desire to do, and those people are usually far less powerful than your mother.”
Reya seemed confused upon seeing this new side of her father. Come to think of it, the times she’d been alone with him together were some of the happiest of her childhood. It was only when her mother got involved that things started going south.
“Although, I am curious, Reya. What exactly did you tell Emperor Goto in order for him to even partway commit to a deal like that? If we were going at our normal pace, it would take decades for us to even come to an agreement anywhere close to that.”
She grinned at her father, having all of a sudden regained some of the child-like mischievousness that she had tried to shed off earlier in the week. “Truth be told, dad, I only offered him a hot commodity, and convinced him that it was worth trying to acquire it at all costs.”
King Metron tilted his head. “Did we even own something like that? Stop being coy. What did you tell him?”
Reya’s grin grew into a fully bloomed smile as she said, “I only convinced him that it was in his best interest to lure away a particularly powerful and newly named Paladin into their royal family.”
King Metron’s eyebrows raised at her words. I’ll use any political chess piece I can afford to, and right now, you’re expendable, Joshua.
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Reya stepped out of the conference room she had been using for the last two hours. She and her father had worked together to create a new draft for the deal with the Luong Empire, and the combined effort left her exhausted. Exhausted but proud.
She walked down the hall and into the Emperor’s personal lounge with a smile on her face. She saw that Joshua was curled up into a ball on a couch, and Lucina was having a very serious looking conversation with Akahime.
The Imperial Princess spotted her and waved, a gesture which the young Metron happily reciprocated. She walked up behind Joshua, and thought about surprising him, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood for that.
So, instead she walked around to the front of the couch, sat down next to Joshua, rubbed his back, and said, “So, what have you been up to lately?”