From previous posts Russia appears to be on an upswing of anti-Semitism one of the things that Kiki can do in her unofficial role as the most prominent member of the Russian Orthodox Church in Germany is to preform outreach to the Jewish community as a doctor, take meals with Jewish families, participate in Sabbath services as a sign of solidarity.
Stupid Luck and Happenstance, Thread III
- Thread starter Peabody-Martini
- Start date
Possibly, but then you have an issue that she'll be seen as German first and Russian Orthodox second.
At which point the Anti-semites have another stick to beat Russian Jews with - they're more loyal to Germany than Russia. It doesn't make sense, it has no basis in reality, but since when has anti-Semitism ever made sense?
Of course, if Kiki AND Gia make those visits...
I should have added that it should be done in a low key style, not making a big deal about it and of course if Gia and her family joins in that sends a powerful positive message that is mostly unspoken.
I wonder how the Second Czar of the Second Russian Empire is doing because that is usually when you find out if a restored monarchy is going to last and with the death of Czar Gregory a power vacuum was created as he welded more power then the new Russian Constitution allowed for and we haven't heard anything about how the new Czar is doing.
On this occasion, Zella is in the strange position of being innocent.
I have no doubt normal service will be resumed shorty.
So, is Marcus trying not to look off to the side at Zella or not look below Kiki's face?
ferdi254
Banned
Dan the operative sentence is just above that. She decided to rather look aggressive than clumsy. Meaning she deliberately hit his eye and that with unnecessary force.
If I stand behind you and you hit my eye so that it is seriously hurt and swollen it is a deliberate act of yours. Stumbling et al cannot excuse that.
If I stand behind you and you hit my eye so that it is seriously hurt and swollen it is a deliberate act of yours. Stumbling et al cannot excuse that.
Her father Emil also had the ability to 'hurt' people because he wanted to, but apart from hurting his mother by running off to join the Army at 16 (and getting a scar on his face for his efforts) or hurting Manfred von Richtofen's feelings on a winding country road on his motorbike, he learned to keep the dishing out of pain to the battlefield and only against the Kaiser's enemies.
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Another of the Public Relations duties that Kiki may be doing is visiting the various War and Veterans Memorials along her route placing flowers and making short speeches about sacrifice, it will be interesting to see how the Second Russian Empire honor the fallen without mentioning Stalin and the Communist Party.
I have the feeling that Kiki was enjoying the sun in the "European" style, ie topless.
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You have misunderstood this passage entirely.
This was a genuine accident. As a matter of ego though, Zella would rather be thought of as having done it deliberately as opposed to what actually happened, which was that she slipped. Because to admit that this was really an accident would run counter to the image that she has carefully created.
You have gotten this exactly the wrong way around.
ferdi254
Banned
Dan I am playing football (soccer) since more than 4 decades. If one player ends up with the elbow (or fist as there is no other way to get a seriously hurt eye) in contact with the eye of the other player he gets send off.
Red card immediately because this is a deliberate act. Always. It does not happen by chance.
The only way it might not end in such a measure is when both players jump up to use the head to play the ball and crash the heads. This was not the case here. And if an arm is involved in such a situation… Red card, have a shower.
Red card immediately because this is a deliberate act. Always. It does not happen by chance.
The only way it might not end in such a measure is when both players jump up to use the head to play the ball and crash the heads. This was not the case here. And if an arm is involved in such a situation… Red card, have a shower.
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on a flat bottomed boat in a sea way some one losing their balance on a companion way might well fall backyards arms flailing in an attempt to keep balance, some one following up behind to close can easily get caught by a elbow in the face. I have seen it done more than once. No malice at all.
This. The difference between a flat, stable piece of ground with two teams of overly competitive football players and a river barge on the open sea that has some landlubbers on board as passengers.
You are still clinging to the misperception that the act was deliberate.
It was not.
You have conflated attitude afterwards with motivation beforehand. The attitude afterwards is a cover, a smokescreen, a sop to Zella's ego. Nothing more.
The only motivation beforehand was "don't fall over".
Here are the facts:
Zella slipped - confirmed by Zella to Kiki, someone she has NO reason to lie to, in fact, if she thought that Markus had been deliberately too close, would have said as much to Kiki who would be a sympathetic audience.
Markus was too close - in a boat's corridor, that will always be the case. There was nothing deliberate or untoward about it. It's just happenstance.
The only people who think it wasn't, or might not have been, an accident are Ben, who is a potential unreliable narrator given his previous experience with Zella, and you.
You have misunderstood the facts, (as much as a work of fiction can have facts). That is all there is to it.
This was not deliberate, no matter how Zella plays it off afterwards. There is really nothing more to debate on the matter unless further information comes about in the story arc.
part 131, Chapter 2233
Chapter Two Thousand Two Hundred Thirty-Three
3rd August 1973
Saint Petersburg, Russia
“Keep close” was the standing instruction to Markus as he stood and watched as Princess Kristina warmly greeted her cousin, Imperial Grand Duchess Jehane Alexandra and her son. The two of them were chatting in Russian and as the Grand Duchess entered the saloon with Yuri recording with a video camera and Markgräfin Marcella waited to begin asking questions.
It was fortunate that so far, the Grand Duchess seemed to be what Markus understood she was. The Princess and Markgräfin had been a somewhat rude surprise for him. He had thought that he knew them from seeing them on television, but as it turned out they were very different from their public personas. Princess Kristina wasn’t necessarily the wholesome, pious woman who had dedicated herself to medicine that she was depicted as. She very direct, even rude at times when she finally spoke which wasn’t very often. Markgräfin Marcella presented herself as a fun adventuress on television, but Markus had learned that she was actually extremely prickly with anyone she didn’t know. There was also the black eye that she had given him. He found that both women were scary in different turns.
Everyone else on the barge just seemed to either ignore whatever they were doing or just rolled with it. Markus had spent his entire life on either his family’s farm on the outskirts of Frankendorf, or at the Luftwaffe Academy which he had gotten into due to his father being considered a hero in the Soviet War. So, he had never encountered anything like them before. A few days earlier, Frau Dunn had sent him to tell Kristina and Marcella that it was almost time for the evening meal and found them sunning themselves on the foredeck. Sure, he remembered the snickering comments back in the Academy about how the women on beaches, especially in France, went about doing that. To actually see it up close, in real life…
All he could do was focus on Kristina’s face while trying to ignore what else was plainly visible. He had overheard then Marcella’s comment about him making it obvious, in many ways that had been more embarrassing than his own reaction upon seeing Kristina and Marcella laying in the sun while they were essentially naked. It was the sort of thing that he never would admit to anyone.
Since then, he had done his level best to avoid them, which was not easy on a craft the size of the SMS Epione. Oberstleutnant von Hirsch had told Markus that Kiki and Zella, the names he used for them, engaged in wild behavior from time to time and it would take some getting used to.
Frau Dunn was a bit more useful. She had told him that those two girls behaved the way they did because they were young and didn’t see the harm so long as it was in a private setting. Markus was a bit befuddled by that. They were what? Thirty? That was hardly young from Markus’ perspective. When he had said that; Frau Dunn had just smiled and said that when he was her age, thirty would seem rather young. She was the reason why Princess Kristina had inadvertently picked up an odd accent when she spoke English because she had been present through Princess’ infancy and early childhood.
That had made the four days it had taken to get around the Baltic Sea, hugging the coast so that they were never far from a port in case the weather turned. Their arrival in Saint Petersburg had greeted with considerable fanfare, but Markus had been warned that they would need to be extremely cautious around their hosts. It was figured that Markus didn’t really know anything useful, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be targeted. Not for the first time, did he wonder what exactly he had gotten himself into. When Markus had first learned that he was being appointed to be a part of the Staff of the Consort of the Princess Royal, who was considered an up-and-coming Luftwaffe Officer with an incredible record even without who he was married to factored in, he had been overjoyed. He should have known that he would need to change his perspective when he was told that this appointment was dependent entirely upon his discretion. Markus had been informed that the House of Hohenzollern would be very generous to him for that, but there had been a warning about spending a lot of time counting penguins if he chose the path of indiscretion.
As it was, Markus was going to be stuck on the barge for the next several weeks and it seemed like every moment there was something else odd going on. Nothing that was illegal per say. Just sort of low key odd. He suspected that Marcella and Yuri smoked cannabis for example, but that was supposedly no worse than alcohol. The Americans disagreed though and he had been told that avoiding things that fell into legal grey areas was probably the wisest choice. That had to do with the issues the Heer had with Amphetamines during the Second World War and afterwards. The weapons locker on the ship that only the Captain Kirchhoff and Kristina had the keys to was shockingly comprehensive.
As Markus stood there watching the Princess and the Grand Duchess chatting over tea, he became aware that Nina, Kristina’s little girl was peering around his legs. Rauchbier the dog busy sniffing at his feet. One more odd little incident to add to the ever-growing list. He was supposed to be getting an education while he was doing this year-long appointment and he was, just this was probably not the sort of education that his Professors would have imagined.
3rd August 1973
Saint Petersburg, Russia
“Keep close” was the standing instruction to Markus as he stood and watched as Princess Kristina warmly greeted her cousin, Imperial Grand Duchess Jehane Alexandra and her son. The two of them were chatting in Russian and as the Grand Duchess entered the saloon with Yuri recording with a video camera and Markgräfin Marcella waited to begin asking questions.
It was fortunate that so far, the Grand Duchess seemed to be what Markus understood she was. The Princess and Markgräfin had been a somewhat rude surprise for him. He had thought that he knew them from seeing them on television, but as it turned out they were very different from their public personas. Princess Kristina wasn’t necessarily the wholesome, pious woman who had dedicated herself to medicine that she was depicted as. She very direct, even rude at times when she finally spoke which wasn’t very often. Markgräfin Marcella presented herself as a fun adventuress on television, but Markus had learned that she was actually extremely prickly with anyone she didn’t know. There was also the black eye that she had given him. He found that both women were scary in different turns.
Everyone else on the barge just seemed to either ignore whatever they were doing or just rolled with it. Markus had spent his entire life on either his family’s farm on the outskirts of Frankendorf, or at the Luftwaffe Academy which he had gotten into due to his father being considered a hero in the Soviet War. So, he had never encountered anything like them before. A few days earlier, Frau Dunn had sent him to tell Kristina and Marcella that it was almost time for the evening meal and found them sunning themselves on the foredeck. Sure, he remembered the snickering comments back in the Academy about how the women on beaches, especially in France, went about doing that. To actually see it up close, in real life…
All he could do was focus on Kristina’s face while trying to ignore what else was plainly visible. He had overheard then Marcella’s comment about him making it obvious, in many ways that had been more embarrassing than his own reaction upon seeing Kristina and Marcella laying in the sun while they were essentially naked. It was the sort of thing that he never would admit to anyone.
Since then, he had done his level best to avoid them, which was not easy on a craft the size of the SMS Epione. Oberstleutnant von Hirsch had told Markus that Kiki and Zella, the names he used for them, engaged in wild behavior from time to time and it would take some getting used to.
Frau Dunn was a bit more useful. She had told him that those two girls behaved the way they did because they were young and didn’t see the harm so long as it was in a private setting. Markus was a bit befuddled by that. They were what? Thirty? That was hardly young from Markus’ perspective. When he had said that; Frau Dunn had just smiled and said that when he was her age, thirty would seem rather young. She was the reason why Princess Kristina had inadvertently picked up an odd accent when she spoke English because she had been present through Princess’ infancy and early childhood.
That had made the four days it had taken to get around the Baltic Sea, hugging the coast so that they were never far from a port in case the weather turned. Their arrival in Saint Petersburg had greeted with considerable fanfare, but Markus had been warned that they would need to be extremely cautious around their hosts. It was figured that Markus didn’t really know anything useful, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be targeted. Not for the first time, did he wonder what exactly he had gotten himself into. When Markus had first learned that he was being appointed to be a part of the Staff of the Consort of the Princess Royal, who was considered an up-and-coming Luftwaffe Officer with an incredible record even without who he was married to factored in, he had been overjoyed. He should have known that he would need to change his perspective when he was told that this appointment was dependent entirely upon his discretion. Markus had been informed that the House of Hohenzollern would be very generous to him for that, but there had been a warning about spending a lot of time counting penguins if he chose the path of indiscretion.
As it was, Markus was going to be stuck on the barge for the next several weeks and it seemed like every moment there was something else odd going on. Nothing that was illegal per say. Just sort of low key odd. He suspected that Marcella and Yuri smoked cannabis for example, but that was supposedly no worse than alcohol. The Americans disagreed though and he had been told that avoiding things that fell into legal grey areas was probably the wisest choice. That had to do with the issues the Heer had with Amphetamines during the Second World War and afterwards. The weapons locker on the ship that only the Captain Kirchhoff and Kristina had the keys to was shockingly comprehensive.
As Markus stood there watching the Princess and the Grand Duchess chatting over tea, he became aware that Nina, Kristina’s little girl was peering around his legs. Rauchbier the dog busy sniffing at his feet. One more odd little incident to add to the ever-growing list. He was supposed to be getting an education while he was doing this year-long appointment and he was, just this was probably not the sort of education that his Professors would have imagined.
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P-M posted a picture of the type she's based on when she was first discussed in thread.