(A note from Jeff Mach here –
The new Dwarf/Dark Lord book doesn’t seem to want to play by a lot of rules. So you’re going to see rather a lot of pieces of them, some here, some on my Patreon, some both. Usually, my free Patreon will have a bit of extra detail; but we’ll see how that goes.
Here’s another piece of the story. You do NOT need to have read “Diary of a Dark Lord” or “I HATE Your Prophecy” to read about Dark Lord Alice. It might help. But then again, maybe not a lot really helps Alice.
Hello; I greet you on at least fourteen sides of the Sacred Heptadecagon. I hope Heptadecagons are sacred. These books are not extremely helpful; but I am least qualified for other things and have lost a few more contests than I would care to admit, and I will, I suppose, sometimes be your Narrator.
Would you really like to know the procedures by which I (somewhat unreliably) attempt to narrate some basics? I can offer them if you want. But let me tell you a bit more.
As you may or may not know:
There is a Dark Lord named Alice. There may be a few versions of her. We believe in a version of her that retired to her own castle and lived a happy life of research.
The only version we know, however, stepped through a very jagged dimensional portal some time ago in what was probably an unintentional display of thunderbolts and explosions. The Elves became very angry. The Orcs saw a chance to collect some Elf skulls. There was a massive battle. Alice may or may not have taken part. The Orcs won, and installed Alice, not necessarily happily, as ruler.
This was probably very dramatic and exciting, but Alice just wanted it over with. Sorry.
Alice had won. But it sounded incredibly unpleasant and really, really bad for her research to have Orcs and Kobolds and (Gods forbid) Goblins moving in and…ruling the conquered peoples.
The conquered peoples, for their part, began weeping and wailing and bemoaning their fate before anything had happened. I doubt this surprises you.
(There was a certain gnashing of teeth, but not amongst the upper classes of course; that was delegated to the servants.)
Alice considered wiping them all out.
Messy. Depressing. Quite a lot of work. Also, there were chocolate chip cookies.
It might even have been possibly that not everyone deserved death. How would she know?
So she sat down and thought out a relatively rational form of government wherein she would maintain ultimate control but use a wise and motivated parliament of representatives from all of the conquered nations, magical species, and other group entities who were now, unfortunately, theoretically completely under her sway.
She invited all the nations to search amongst themselves to find Ambassadors to the Dark Lord, wise, knowledgeable, influential individuals who had both the fortitude and the personal magnitude to balance the Dark Lord’s wishes against the needs of their people and, indeed, against the mutual benefit of all the governed. There was no benevolence; mutual cooperation would make life simpler and could even hypothetically improve the quality of life of all those under her sway.
And this would pretty certainly lead to even better chocolate cookies and, you never know, it could happen, very possibly Hobbit Weed Brownies.
So she sent forth a great Proclamation to All, announcing that, though they were conquered, she would extend mercy; they could send Ambassadors to plead their causes, aid in the burden of governance, and keep civilization largely intact.
She made room for a hundred Ambassadors, did build them a great Embassy, vast and powerful in its own right, adjoining her citadel, and waited for the leaders to be chosen and sent unto her.
As with many things in Alice’s life, she would wait a very long time.
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