It should have angered Arianna but over the millenia she had grown numb to the utter idiocy of her fellow Banmeru. Expecting this time to be any different was just her sharing in their idiocy.It was just as her husband once said, “It’s like when your neighbour insists on smoking up the yard, you scold him once, twice or even thrice but then you just go and report him because now you can’t even be angry, you just expect it.”

The reference might be lost on her but the underlying meaning was not, it was time to drop the hammer on these perps.

Teleporting to the room she let her aura spread free, letting these arrogant politicians know that she was not to be ignored. As expected, her release of aura caused the bunch of misbehaving brats too liven up

Too bad it wouldn’t help them now.

“Your governance of Laurien has left much to be desired. I had hoped that you would show some progress, that at least one of you would choose to pursue cooperation, but clearly, I set my expectations much too high for what seems to be little more than a bunch of quarreling brats.” Arianna said

“The only established education system is the one run by the Algrean United Confederacy, and yes we changed the name again. That is not the point here, you good sirs and madams have been oppressing the good citizens of Laurien and it shall continue no more”

“Um...the Algrean United whatever refers to the Algrean United Nations right? The united government formed by all the nations of Algrea?” a single Faction Master that probably suffered from serious Intelligence debuffs, said.

“Yes, that is what I said right? You must have been daydreaming because I also remember saying that the name change was NOT IMPORTANT” Arianna said practically shouting by the end.

“You are all dismissed from your posts and banished from Laurien” Arianna finished, teleporting the Faction Leaders and their assets out of Laurien, leaving the consequences for someone else to deal with.

SCENE CHANGE

Kingdom building, more like confusion building, what had possessed me to pursue it? It had next to no administrative information and seemed to be more about warfare than building anything, except of course a collection of spouses. Why someone would want so many spouses was beyond me, all they seemed to be useful for was poisoning them with an astonishing variety of poisons.

Nevertheless I did eventually find something useful. Administration and its effects on the populace by Donald Arlford. By the name of the author it seemed to be a relative of mine, perhaps it was misshelved? Maybe I should have seen what shelf it was on?

Ten minutes later

‘I should have seen the shelf’-I thought between sobs- ‘How could they do this to them? No to me? How could they do this to me? This book should be banned! How could they have allowed such incompetence? I should- Suddenly the sadness stopped and I was interrupted by a voice that said “I should have known better than to leave you alone, of course you’d go and read the perma-shelved books.” Meemauy said, sounding genuinely tired.

“Well since you are already awake, let’s just begin your training.”-I tried to interrupt but Meemauy wouldn’t let me-“First we shall train your abysmal wisdom stat, your class should help with that”-she summoned a very large, very intimidating pile of books- “Your physical stats could also be better, everything but intelligence could be better actually, so we’ll have to schedule that. You can try crawling all over the library, should get you a fairly large number of points.”- she paused, looking at me expectantly and when I did nothing she said- “Shoo”- she made a weird gesture with her hand- “Go, Crawl”

Irritated at her just ordering me around, I took off. I made my way through the Library, not really having any sense of direction. I may have been hoping to run into some secret alcove where I could just hide, maybe read a few books? Sadly, reality was not my friend today, I found a cascading waterfall with a cave behind it. Good spot, bad for books. The water was afterall a deal-breaker.

It did however make for a stunning scene. The entire waterfall was under a translucent coloured roof that had a checkered circle pattern on it, it led to the formation of a somewhat moving image on the waterfall as it seemed like there were balls of different colours constantly falling down the waterfall. The wood of the Library also made way for white marble around the waterfall, thought that was...a bit too much? But it didn’t seem to get noticed on the first try either.

Either way I made my way to the cave through a slippery path along the edge of the waterfall, I noticed that it seemed to fall straight to a lower level through a large opening in the floor. After arriving at the cave, I suddenly felt very sleepy, as if someone had drained all of my energy. It might have been best if I had checked my notifications too.