[right][sub][i](Addressing: [@Sep])[/i][/sub][/right] [right][sub][i](Starring: Andrei)[/i][/sub][/right] Genghis Khan probably shouldn't drink so much. It makes his steps unsteady while he crunches through this soft grass underfoot. Sway, sway, stumble, crunch- should soft grass be crunching? Lazy programmers. The city of Zhongdu is near, but not as near to him as the army he's brought to conquer it. Khan hears their tired sighs, and sees the bags under their eyes- the exhaustion of a war that's become a siege. A long, bloody, useless siege that will lead thousands to be slaughtered. And for what? Why doesn't he ever choose a happy place? Probably the same reason he's drinking a vodka-tequila mix in ancient China. Is it depression? No, Oliga- the Khan does not get depressed. He's just tired, is all. As his holographic son, Tulip or Tule or something, rambles about cavalry, and soldiers, and how to break the walls of Zhongdu, Genghis at last finds himself losing the will power to keep up this stupid game. He mumbles "Hologram: Exit." The world around him blinks away, and he ceases to be Genghis at all but becomes Andrei again. Look at the time- he was playing the holo-suite for seven hours. Some people probably get work done in that time. Even some fellow Oligarchs. But not Andrei. He hasn't done anything like labor since when he was meeting up with all those stuffy diplomats way back, when the Gateways first reopened and he demanded the Zetans explain their existence. (They did not provide an explanation.) Trying not to think about those days, or much of anything, he slowly drifts off to sleep. Andrei wakes up on the floor at 4 A.M to a message from the Office of the Savant, which should be alarming enough to make him shout out in surprise. It does not, however, because he has to scroll through sixty or so other messages to get to it. (He has never cleaned out his inbox, and never will.) By the time he reaches the Savant's orders, Andrei is already far too tired again to feel shocked or concerned. His mind registers something about diplomatic duties, and quickly deciding that sounds like a problem for future Andrei (poor sucker), drifts back into unconsciousness. Future Andrei wakes up on the floor at 1 PM to find three new messages, all from the Office of the Savant again, and begins to panic. Well, he begins to make as decent an imitation of panic as a groggy, hungover, not-depressed man can. It mostly amounts to standing up at an odd angle and trying to force himself out of the room, but before he can get quite there, his stomach forces out its contents in the form of vomit. How many bottles of vodka-tequila did he drink? The holo-suite hid them as he was playing, placing over them bushes and rocks and crunchy grass, but could not now. Several sad bottles that used to hold poison lay scattered around the floors. They're crystal clear, and Andrei could see right through them if he wanted to, but there's not much to look at- a deactivated holo-suite is only an undecorated white room. It feels alarmingly like being in a hospital. Within an hour, he's heading off-planet. That was the time it took to respond to the messages with many apologies, get a plan drawn up, and get used to the idea of traveling around with no security. Andrei is a very powerful man, by ECU standards; his mother owned huge shares in the entertainment industry, and since she died, Andrei now owns huge shares in the entertainment industry. (Actually, come to think of it, that Battle of Zhongdu game he played last night might have been financed with his money.) But all the protectors and security types are being 'redistributed,' so that hypothetical hoard of wealth won't buy him a single guard right now. Half of them are hovering over Zeta-5, and the other half are getting called to the big cities to 'put out fires.' The fires mostly coming in the form of protesting discontents, a sudden new rise in Mixtists zealots, and a lot of opportunists taking advantage of the chaos for some good looting. He's heard it's chaos in Neo London. It's hopefully calmer at the Meeting Place, which Andrei is approaching now in a little, unarmed shuttle. There's a bunch of newbies on the scene- Lorne Administration?- that the Savant wants contacted. Apparently they showed off some impressive engineering in a chat with the Undefeated, and that's just the kind of tech the ECU needs for the war. When he manages to find their ship amid the general mess of vessels that is the Meeting Place, Andrei shoots of message that he neither planned nor rehearsed: [i]"Lorne Administration, this is the ECU oligarch and new diplomat Andrei Fedorov, here to, uh... to welcome you back to Earth. And talk. We want to talk. Thanks."[/i] Yeah, that's smooth.