Book 5: Chapter 9

Book 5: Chapter 9

“Balance of power” as a concept was interesting to Kay, especially as he’d become a person who both had power and could be considered a power. He’d originally begun to think about the topic at some level of depth after the deaths of his family. A self driving transport truck had hit his family’s car and killed his parents and little sister. In the wake of that tragedy and the lack of what he considered acceptable punishment for those at fault and no real attempts to solve the problems that had caused the accident, he’d started looking at politics, feeling driven to reform the system into something better.

From his perspective the situation was simple, multiple people, his family included, had been killed, and the only punishments handed out were fines against the companies who were responsible for the deaths. The courts had even ruled that there wasn’t anyone to be tried for manslaughter, as there were no drivers for the trucks and there was no way to reasonably blame the programmers who made the trucks’ software or the company executives for the deaths. Kay believed that there needed to be harsher punishments for the executives, managers, and other employees of the corporations that allowed or enabled horrific accidents to occur. The idea that it was cheaper to pay fines when people died than it was to fix the mistakes that caused deaths, and that that was an acceptable way to do business, needed to be stamped out with prejudice.

Sadly, Kay was a bit naive. Driven by his rage and grief, he didn’t consider the forces at work to create and sustain the system he lived in. It took him a few years, but eventually he came to understand the modified version of Newton’s First Law of Motion which was the first law of politics: The people in power will work to stay in power, and will work to keep other people from having any power. The current politicians he’d have to work for and suck up to in order to get anywhere wanted the status quo to stay because they benefited from it. The corporations paid for their pet politicians to make sure they could avoid the kind of punishments that Kay wanted so that they could push the limit further and further in the name of greater profits, at the expense of anyone who happened to be too close. It didn’t matter to them that the completely unmonitored self driving trucks were dangerous, just as it didn’t matter to them that their factories were dumping toxic waste into water supplies or that they were destroying the Amazon Rainforest for resources and land.

Trying to change the system from the outside would get him nowhere, the mechanisms of power were too entrenched to overturn without an armed rebellion, and trying to climb up on the inside would turn him into the very thing he hated, a jaded politician willing to sell his soul for the tiniest scrap of influence and the next big payday from his corporate backers. Realizing that had sent him into a downward spiral, which had taken quite a while to pull out of, and left him directionless for some time. He still hadn’t been totally sure what his life was going to look like before he’d been suddenly yanked into Torotia, and he’d had to accept that he was never going to get the kind of vengeance he wanted for his family.

Those experiences left Kay with an interest in both the philosophical ideas of the balance of power and in the actual real world exercises of power, which came to the fore in the negotiations with the visiting representatives of organizations and the delegates of foreign powers starting the day after his coronation. The one delegate he most wanted to speak to, the Elder from the Shattered Clans, had politely asked to be put near the end of the list, and at Ahthia’s recommendation Kay had agreed to that. That left everyone else, and while they were a disparate conglomeration of interests, at a base level they were all after the same thing, more power. Whether it was through commerce, influence, alliances, might, or perception, everyone who sat in front of Kay with a request or offer wanted to gather more power to themselves and their organization or polity.

Kay had to balance his own personal and national power against those he was negotiating with to get the best outcome for his nation and people, and that was where it became interesting and made Kay begin to think of the topic and his past, because it was in the best interest of his people for Avalon, and Kay personally, to gain more power. He’d known it intellectually, but that was the moment where Kay really came to understand where leaders became corrupt. It was one thing to be able to acknowledge that leaders became corrupt when they sought power for themselves for its own sake and for their own sake rather than seeking power to use it for their people and it was an entirely different thing to understand that. He’d known that corruption was a problem and tried to make a government that would minimize it, but he hadn’t had any experiences that had shown him how alluring the draw of power could be and the willpower that could become needed to resist that pull.

He realized it in that moment because he didn’t have enough power. For most of the people coming to negotiate, they were after smaller things, trade routes, exclusive manufacturing rights, permission to begin building a presence in Avalon. Representatives from the smaller nations and city-states in the rough and tumble and often contested region to the west wanted guarantees of independence or military alliances to ward off their enemies. Mostly, people hoping to offer something valuable to get what they wanted, but in a few cases some of the negotiators had things they knew Kay or Avalon wanted or needed, and they were there to fleece the best price possible for themselves.

The Fejon Training Guild was a comparatively small organization both in general and when held up against their own contemporaries, but they were the only one of their kind willing to come to Avalon this early, and they had something Kay wanted for his people, knowledge. Organizations that gathered information on how to get rare and powerful Classes, whether earning them at tier one or tiering up into them, weren’t terribly rare, but they weren’t common either. It required quite a lot of seed money and influence to get established enough that they could acquire really desirable information without getting crushed by more established competitors, but once they managed to get the ball rolling they were quite profitable. Nothing could stop Kay’s citizens from getting Classes, literally nothing could even enchanted slave collars like those used by Nelam only stopped people from tiering up, nothing could stop people from gaining tier one Classes, but the barrier of knowledge prevented many people from getting better Classes.

Stolen story; please report.

“A mercantile group that focuses on alchemical ingredients, your majesty.”

“Anything interesting about them?”

“Not particularly, your majesty, they’re likely to ask for similar concessions as the other merchants so far, trade routes, priority on their desired ingredients, or a monopoly on one or more of the markets they sell or buy in.”

Kay hid his eye rolling at the constant “your majesty-s”, the protocol he’d pushed through called for only one every few minutes since he couldn’t get anyone to back him up on doing away with it entirely, but he wasn’t going to punish the woman for being outwardly respectful. He assumed that that was what she was doing, if she was actually deliberately disobeying protocol to get to him that would be pretty funny since it was so hard to detect. “Will anyone be sitting in this one with me? I know that Cyrus is scheduled to join me for some of the economic discussions.”

“No, your majesty, Minister Aventi won’t be in any negotiations till tomorrow when the notable trading guild and mercantile groups become involved again. The Prime Minister will be joining you a few sessions from now, though.”

“Oh? Who’s that with?”

“The delegate from the Seramist Isles, your majesty.”

“Oh. Make sure Eleniah is available and included in that one, please.”

“Of course, your majesty, I’ll locate Lady Eleniah and make sure she attends.”

“Perfect, thank you. Alright, go ahead and send in the next group. I wonder what they’ll try and bribe me with this time. Potions that use blood as an ingredient maybe?”