2335 hours (MIST)
Internal server rooms
Ground floor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Building
Chalcedon, Monavia
The nine-hour time zone difference separating the Monavian Empire and Guadalupador meant that the encoded transmission that Trigra sent to the Ministry ended up arriving late at night, only to remain stored on some server for a few hours before a technician arrived early on the morning of October 14 to process it. Although the Ministry had some of its own programs and systems for decoding encrypted messages, the Ministry had never received one that used a Dorian cipher before, so the technician had to wait for one of his superiors to give him permission to send it to the Monavian National Intelligence Administration for analysis. The MNIA’s computers were sufficiently powerful to both decrypt Trigra’s message and determine what the encoding system was within eighty minutes, so the Ministry was able to receive the decoded version before Garmash arrived at her office. As they often did in cases like this one, the provided the Ministry with the Dorian encoding system they discovered so that the Ministry could decode Trigra’s future messages without needing any external help.
At nine o’clock the decoded version was printed out and sent to the Foreign Relations Council’s offices on the fourth floor, where one of the members read through it and began discussing it with a colleague. By the time Thurman emerged from his office to take a break from a two-hour binge of reading through reports, he found four of his fellow council members excitedly talking about a piece of paper laying on a table around which they were seated. “You all look excited about something,” he observed.
“Indeed we are!” exclaimed one of his colleagues. We received a communiqué from a foreign leader named Giuseppe Trigra. Apparently he wants to accept an invitation to open up diplomatic relations with our country.”
“So he does,” Thurman trailed off. “I will need you to hand me that communiqué when you’re done rereading it. Minister Garmash was expecting a reply.”
The advisers seated in front of Thurman suddenly found themselves feeling slightly awkward about reading and discussing the message without Garmash’s permission. “We didn’t know it was intended just for her,” one of the men said defensively.
“How can you think such a thing?” Thurman contemptuously shot back. Did I really just hear that?
“See for yourself.”
Thurman picked up the communiqué and started reading. “You’ve got to be playing a prank on me.”
“No, this is very real. Whoever was taking Trigra’s dictation probably just forgot to put Garmash’s name on the address line—that, or the folks at the MNIA probably deleted it by accident when they were decrypting the thing.”
Thurman quietly nodded his head in acknowledgement of the fact that he had gotten excited over nothing. “All right, I’ll take this to Minister Garmash’s office right now so she can write a reply.” He picked up the sheet of paper and tucked it back into a spare envelope he found outside so that prying eyes could not read it by accident. As he started walking away from the council’s suite of offices, he suddenly had another thought and returned to the meeting room.
“There’s one more thing,” he explained. “Yesterday the minister sent out an additional letter to a woman named Natalya Saiko. If you happen to get your hands on a copy of that, please send it up to her at once. If she wants your advice on the matter, she’ll send it back to you to discuss it.”
October 14, AD 2025
0915 hours (MIST)
Office of the Laura Garmash
Fifth floor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Building
Chalcedon, Monavia
Minister Garmash arrived late at her office on the morning of the fourteenth. Her delay was not the sort that occurs because of heavy traffic or some other inconvenience, but rather was the result of a meeting she had at the Royal Residence earlier that morning. She had called the Office of the Royal Secretary during the previous evening to request a meeting with the Crown in hopes of briefing them about her decisions regarding the situation in Guadalupador. The Crown was somewhat optimistic, though the old memories of what happened in Prevania resurfaced at one point during the briefing. Although the Monavian government had succeeded in finding out the truth about the Prevanian situation when it transpired back in 2010, by the time the truth came out the Prevanian government under the rebel Arkadios had used nuclear weapons against the island where his rival had holed himself up, resulting in a radioactive mess that persisted to the present day. Needless to say, Garmash had reason to be cautious about the situation in Guadalupador since she had little idea of whether or not it would follow a similar path.
Thurman reached Garmash’s office only minutes after she had settled into her seat and lined up her mail for processing. She was in the middle of reading through a letter from a Monavian embassy located overseas when a pair of loud knocks stole her attention. “Please come in.”
“Good morning Minister. I trust the visit went well?”
“It was as good a visit as one might want, given the circumstances,” she replied vaguely. It was only then that she noticed Thurman was carrying something. “What’s the envelope under your arm?”
“You have a reply from Premier Trigra,” Thurman announced proudly. “It appears that he would like to accept your offer.”
“Good. I’ll read it right now and start drafting a reply.”
“I’ll let you know if a reply comes in from Ms. Saiko.”
“We should still call her Premier Saiko around here,” Garmash corrected Thurman, “at least until we can determine if her removal is wholly legitimate. If it is, we can address her by a different title. The same goes for Trigra. The means he used to remove Saiko are still unclear to us, so there’s the chance he’s not legitimate—but just in case he is, we need to address him by the title he is claiming unless the truth says otherwise.”
Thurman nodded in agreement and ever-so-slightly bowed his head. “In understand your point. If there is nothing else for me to do here, I would like to return to my office and finish reading.”
“You’re free to go.” With that final dismissal, Garmash waited for Thurman to shut the doors behind him before reading through Trigra’s reply. It did not take her long to write back.
October 14, 2025
Your Excellency:
I am pleased to report that I have obtained the permission of my superiors to organize a diplomatic mission to make a goodwill visit to your country and to discuss possible terms for forming a permanent mission. This process will probably take a few days because there are very few Monavians who speak Dorian with any fluency and the sheer distance between our countries will require the mission to make stops between multiple flights.
While I certainly appreciate your explanation of the constitutional procedures that your country’s legislature used to remove Premier Saiko from power, I must admit that I was sorry to read that they had found fault with her administration. That being said, when I directed my research staff to examine translations of news articles about the National Assembly’s actions, they were surprised to discover that the National Assembly did not conduct a formal hearing on Saiko’s performance before voting on her removal, nor did they appear to have any debates on the matter. I mention these things because my diplomatic corps has rarely interacted with foreign governments in which public institutions are able to act so quickly on issues of leadership without extensive deliberation, and I want to be able to brief the mission I am sending to Nosamo about these aspects of your government so that they can avoid potential misunderstandings when they visit.
Sincerely,
The Right Honorable Laura Garmash
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Several hours after securely faxing a copy of her latest letter to Trigra’s office, Garmash received a communiqué from Premier Saiko. The MNIA had much more difficulty with decrypting the codes Saiko used because they were more secure, but eventually their massive server farms were able to muster enough computing power to decode Saiko’s missive. The information she provided was helpful in that it proved that Trigra was telling at least some of the truth about how the National Assembly used Article 23. At the same time, it also proved that Trigra was playing loose with his facts, especially those related to the Assembly’s voting process. Realizing that a bit of research could be conducted to reveal additional details, Garmash telephoned her research staff and asked them to get their hands on translations of Dorian publications, especially news related to the National Assembly.
It took the researchers nearly an hour to acquire translated copies of the information they wanted, but the time required for this effort turned out to be well-spent. “As is so happens,” one of the staffers told Garmash over the line, “the National Assembly has only 700 members, and 316 of them not only abstained but walked out in protest.”
“That still means that a majority of them voted against Saiko.”
“No, not at all. Only 200 of the members voted against Saiko and 184 voted in her favor. This means that if the other 300 had chosen to remain on the floor and cast favorable votes, she would have survived the removal vote by a landslide.”
Garmash was shocked. “If that is true, then she was voted out of office by less than thirty percent of the Assembly. How can that vote be binding?”
“We don’t know. Frankly, these numbers are making us a bit curious about the whole matter.”
“There’s no need for you to concern yourselves with this particular issue at the moment,” Garmash assured the researcher. “II have already devised a plan for handling the matter.”
After she had finished her conversation with the researcher, Garmash began typing up another letter to Saiko.
October 14, 2025
Your Excellency:
I am pleased to inform you that my office received your message earlier today and that I remain willing to continue corresponding about the information you mentioned in it. I have informed my superiors about various aspects of the situation in your country and have received their blessing to assemble a diplomatic mission for later deployment there. My government hopes that it will be able to establish friendly relations with your people over the coming years, but before that happens, my superiors also wish that the dispute over your removal can reach a favorable resolution.
While my government has not yet acquired footage of the hearing in which your removal took place, my research staff was able to acquire translations of Dorian publications that were circulated shortly after the hearing ended. Although I remain skeptical about some of your statements concerning Trigra’s plans and intentions, I no longer feel a need to doubt your claims about the hearing because they have been corroborated by the evidence that my staff collected, including actual vote tallies. I confess that my government is mystified by the idea that a public institution of any kind can vote to remove an incumbent official without a true majority of the entire membership, though perhaps you might be able to explain the Assembly’s procedures to me better than anyone else at the moment.
With the aforementioned items in mind, I believe that my office could pursue constructive solutions by sending diplomatic representatives to meet with you in whichever country you are now residing, provided that said country’s government is willing to permit Monavian officials to make such a visit.
Sincerely,
The Right Honorable Laura Garmash
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Once the letter was finished, Garmash printed it out and scanned it into a fax machine to create a digital file, which she sent to a technician for final encryption and transmission along secure lines to the place from which Saiko had sent her first reply.
