Mocun ((AMW only))

[Dra-pol]

That way rice, seemingly endless, the pantry of a great and hungry nation. This way an awesome forest of cranes, swaying back and forth between skeletal buildings that grew in flesh and stature before one's very eyes. The heat was inescapable but familiar, if perhaps becoming a little drier than he was used to at this time of year.

”I am Sho Cheiy, and I come by the direction of Brother Hotan. The Chaoist People's Republic requests an audience.”

He repeated the words for the thousandth whispered time, fondling the seal of the Central Directorature which he held in the folds of these alien robes, those of a monk foreign to him but seen on occasion throughout these concrete streets. The garments served at least to deflect some of the curious gazes earlier directed at the visitor who stood fully thirty-centimetres shorter than the average in this city's dominant community and who had a complexion neither here nor there with respect to the local norms.

The Sho allowed himself to become for a moment uncharacteristically -and, he felt, unforgivably- distracted by an argument outside this communally-operated café in which he sampled strange tea quite unlike the blend he preferred in Lu'ek. A wife was publicly divorcing her husband on the roadside. ”They still have marriage” he noted, observing another difference to home, ”But if she can renounce it like this, perhaps there is no legal weight to the institution?” Such strange folk are these.

”It was America! Am I not to sample the local cuisine on a holiday?” The titanic, flame-headed husband protested with a confused wobble in his baritone. ”Not if it's cow! You promised my mother!” the wife asserted again, slapping the back of one hand on the palm of the other as she looked to him then turned away in annoyance. ”Ham! Hamburger! There, I've told you twice!”, ”Oh, you stupid man! I can't believe I married someone so stupid!”

Cheiy criticised himself again for eavesdropping and left the café, making a point to walk at a supposedly relaxed pace, which was also strange to him.

It took more than one hour to reach Naya Raipur's embassy district, wherein he approached the formidable gates of one more than usually well-appointed residence.

”I am Sho Cheiy, and I come by the direction of Brother Hotan. The Chaoist People's Republic requests an audience.”

The Major kept his robes wrapped tightly about him, meaning to disguise his identity from those foreign operatives he presumed to be watching the embassy's comings and goings from without.

He waited.

The Gull Flag hung limply over-head.

[Iansisle]

It perhaps seemed strange that here the Gull Flag should be so still when back on the Shield everyone was waving it with an exaggerated fury. The last week had featured a brawl in the National Assembly, as debate over the fate Citizen Callahan, the ci-devant High King, had reached a crescendo. The Moderates led by Charles Bradsworth had restored regular order and voted to again delay sentencing. Bradsworth no doubt worried about the impression that a regicide would make on the outside capital which had the Shieldian economy humming along at its greatest level since the industrial revolution.

That might become a moot point, some forecasters warned, as the increasing bad temper of the mob and civil disruptions drove away capital on their own. Mass protests, which were usually non-violent, had become a daily feature of the Ianapalis landscape. The anger was fueled by paranoia. Since the much-heralded 'mop up' of Operation Granary, the COE had been finding more and more Gandvian agents all through the power structure of the Republic. The gallows set up in Gull Flag Square were seldom in want of a neck to stretch as the traitors - a not insignificant number of whom, it seemed, came from the Moderate side of the aisle - were sent to their reward.

Shaken, then, by the increasing volatility of the situation, and the fact that it seemed the Assembly might collapse at any second, the Directorate of Foreign Affairs was better positioned than might have been expected to respond to a diplomatic request from the Chaoist People's Republic, perhaps the last state it might have expected to come calling. Sho Chely spent some time waiting in the once-grand (its marble now stained or stolen; the magnificent interior gardens long since let to rot) front office before being led to his meeting in a backroom office where new drywall likely hid the mold-tainted original walls from view. The ambassador, a fidgety little man from Dunourton who had superb credentials regarding early and enthusiastic support of the revolution and somewhat shakier bona fides as the representative of a state, greeted him warmly and made a great show of admiring the Central Directroature's seal.