Turn 29 -
You Could Have An Aeroplane Flying
USS Enterprise joins the next convoy heading out to Griffin V, although this particular trip is carrying more than simply supplies.
Granted, the exploration Aerodyne is packed to the overheads with crates of medicine and food, but all of the ‘mech stalls on HMS Harris are filled with something else.
Massive grifftigers from the Great Hunter Company. The Eldest had rather pointedly volunteered their services to help secure Griffin V and had pointed out, quite reasonably, that a bunch of great big cats would be marginally less threatening than sending mechs. Cats, after all, were cute.
You weren’t all that certain of the logic, but were willing to give the big guys their chance to join in the diplomacy, besides the ex-slaves on Griffin V would probably need to get used to the big cats sooner rather than later.
Willis and Sarah going along was less welcome, but they’d talked you around to it. The Royal Family really needed to make an appearance, and Sarah had made a solid case that the two of them could generate plenty of good will.
Of course, this meant that Bastet decided to go along as well.
You realize belatedly that this might have been a ploy by the tigers. After all, the few tigers who’d visited the titanium mining area down in the antarctic had all reportedly been fascinated by thick snow and had spent hours playing in it. Now there’s an entire planet of the white and frozen stuff.
You are tempted to recall the convoy at that point, as you remember just how much Sarah loved playing in the snow the one time you’d gone up to near the summit of Mt Griffsport where there was a year round snowpack. This was obviously a conspiracy by your youngest and the grifftigers to have an entire planet of snow to play in.
That’s your theory and you’re sticking to it.
There’s a massive landrush on Pollux once you make the decision to focus the continent on agriculture and direct the Ministry of the Interior to prioritize the same. The extremely agreeable climate and superb conditions swiftly show through. The initial boost in food production has brought food prices tumbling down and as herding is established in those parts of the continent less suitable for farming prices drop even further. Some of the established agribusinesses are grumbling about the loss of profits, but you check the latest tax audits on them and they’d previously been printing money, now they are simply rolling in it. Greedy bastards.
As the development of Pollux grows the total cultivated region will expand, with significant benefits for food production. As more cities and settlements are established the benefit will grow as well.
Naturally, Parliament now decides to stick their oar in.
Granted, the idea isn’t half bad, to be honest. Moreover in the long term it may well be very useful.
What they are proposing is a new Department of Colonization, to manage expansion to other worlds, their settlement, terraforming, and integration into a wider Griffin’s Roost empire. Not a bad plan at all. It would come jointly under the Ministry of the Interior, Foreign Affairs, Justice, and Military and would be in charge of all of the above facets of expansion.
The catch is that they are also proposing that this Department report to a joint oversight committee rather than directly to the Crown, thus bypassing some of your authority.
[] Agree in full - Colonization Actions will now be a separate category that uses either Interior, Diplomacy, Justice or Military slots to complete. +5 to all colonization targets. -2 Crown Influence, One time cost of 100,000, +2 Lords and Commons Influence
[] Agree in part - you want the Department, but not the joint oversight committee. You’d be responsible for the results either way, that committee is just a way for the politicians to take the credit while leaving you the blame. As above, but no change to Influence, -25 support in Commons and Lords.
[] Disapprove - -10 Support in Commons and Lords
In other news, there’s an amusing ‘scandal’ taking place in Griffsport. Oh, it started out seriously, but then it went so far off the rails that it didn’t take a genius to realize that the Department of Periphery Studies was involved.
It started out with a mild panic, because Griffsport Police getting sudden calls about dire penguin sightings in downtown have a way of causing a reaction. Officers swarmed the area, searching for the lethal little avians.
There were no birds.
Well, not
real birds.
Somebody in Periphery Studies had bought a shipment of toy remote control battlemechs and had installed them inside plushy dire penguin casings, loaded recordings of what they thought were actual dire penguins, then conducted a Dire Penguin Parade to further their campaign for Dire Penguin Rights and that Humans And Dire Penguins Can Coexist In Peace! They hadn’t bothered to get a parade permit, nor had they actually told anybody, including their faithful white-coated research assistants, what they were going to be getting up to. Thus the mild panic.
The first clue that this was off the rails was that that recording, you know, the one of ‘actual dire penguins’? Were actually ducks. Lots of ducks. Quacking. Loudly.
In chorus.
You can’t stop chuckling, although you do send a note to the zoo that since it’s impossible to keep actual Dire Penguins, perhaps animatronic ones based on these silly things might be an idea to showcase that type of wildlife?