Stupid Luck and Happenstance, Thread III

Yeah, at this point, I seriously suggest Ben just leave. It's evident Kiki isn't gonna respond, might as well show her that her actions have consequences.

Eh, disagree. One, he’s too smitten, and two...

Papa Louis just put his foot down. The next time Kiki tries to hide from her own feelings, he is going to side with Ben.

Yeah. She’s had the most out-there declaration of love going, plus a more personal one, and her dad just told her ‘figure this out’. It would take purest stupidity on her part for her to decide ‘no, actually’.
 
I think that at this point Kiki is now coming. To the realization that Ben isn’t going anywhere. She just needs to learn how to deal with that now that she knows.
 
I think that at this point Kiki is now coming. To the realization that Ben isn’t going anywhere. She just needs to learn how to deal with that now that she knows.
And that is part of the problem is that Kiki knows that Ben will always be there for her and at some point that is not going to be enough for Ben.
Ben is not pressuring Kiki to marry him now but he needs to know where the future of this relationship is going and Kiki is not giving him any indication of how the future is going to play out.
 
Part 107, Chapter 1744
Chapter One Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Four



24th August 1966

Piombino, Italy

“As near as I can tell without speaking to the apple, it sounds like the apple panicked” Tatiana heard her mother say into the telephone, using the strange code talk that probably wasn’t fooling anyone. It was a reminder of how they had needed to remember that they were undoubtedly being spied on during what was supposed to be a family holiday. Tatiana felt like it was a massive invasion of her privacy while Malcolm didn’t care and Marie thought it was funny to read Charlotte’s Web aloud in the room where they had found a microphone that they had been told to leave alone.

With the Emperor back in Potsdam he was now just a phone call away. That was a reminder that the Summer Holiday was waning and in a few days they would be boarding a train that would take them back to Berlin. Then another academic term would begin. It had been nice over the holiday, having her mother completely for a change. Often it felt like if Tatiana’s mother had a different family entirely and her actual children were something of a nuisance at times. There was also this Fürstin garbage. The Emperor had not done any of them any favors when he had done that and there was no way he had not known what he was doing. Tatiana knew that her mother absolutely hated what that had done to her and her family, but she had to be gracious as always. Now Louis Ferdinand was back, having issues with one of his manic daughters being reclusive at times and Tatiana wanted to throw the phone out of the nearest window.

The house they were staying had a balcony that overlooked the harbor. Their host had returned from Rome a day earlier and he was smoking a cigar out there. Opening the door, Tatiana looked at him and said, “Your house is awful, there are bugs everywhere.”

Cosimo de’ Medici just looked at her amusedly.

“Your mother understands the game” Cosimo said, “If she were not staying here then the SIM would be bothering you just as much, only they would be even more visibly intrusive.”

“I hate it” Tatiana said, “What she is. Why can’t she be normal?”

“Normality is overrated” Cosimo replied, “And for a woman like your mother, normal wouldn’t have served her well in this life.”

“I don’t want that kind of life.”

Cosimo just laughed. “Life doesn’t give you choices child, it’s a bastard that way” He said, “It serves you up as much as you can handle and then adds more until it either breaks you or else you learn to play the game.”

“The game fucking sucks” Tatiana said sharply with as much venom as she could put into her words.

“You sounded exactly like your mother when you said that” Cosimo replied, much to Tatiana’s complete embarrassment.



Jena

Kiki’s return to Jena was just long enough to sleep in her own bed and to try to reorient herself before she left for Laupheim. The problem was that life kept throwing disorienting things in her path. Ben had apologized for missing her on Pohnpei when they had spoken on the phone. She doubted that he suspected the truth. That she had gotten frightened when she had learned that he was coming to her father’s villa on the island and had hid. Perhaps going back to Laupheim was a good thing, she couldn’t run from things there the way she seemed to in the rest of her life. She certainly felt like running at that very moment as she learned what Vicky had been doing over the summer.

She had fallen asleep shortly after getting home the afternoon before and had slept through the night, only waking up about sunrise. She had come downstairs with her head full of fog and feeling slightly unwell.

That morning over breakfast, Kiki listened to Vicky as she told her all about Anna, a young woman she had met at the pottery class. She had taken the class to get to know the instructor but had met Anna instead and the previous weeks had been so incredibly wonderful. Vicky was still in the throes of first meeting someone and while not in love, she was clearly in lust. That was hardly a surprise considering how Vicky had lived for the first two decades of her life. Kiki remembered with some embarrassment how she had not seen that in herself before she had acted on it. With her being in medicine, she understood that people existed on several different levels and that intellect only being a veneer much of the time. Strip that away and people were just big dumb animals, acting on fear and impulses. There were parts of the brain that interacted with different systems in the body in ways that were not entirely understood. It seemed absurd to Kiki how often there was absolutely no thought involved in some of the most momentous decisions that people made. So, Kiki sat there with a cup of tea in her hand, hearing all about Anna and she really wanted tape her sister’s mouth shut.

“Of course, Anna is excited to meet you” Vicky said.

“I don’t care” Kiki replied. All she wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep until her body no longer thought it was on the other side of the globe.
 
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Marie is, in this instance, 100% correct.

Though I don't know if I'd go for Charlotte's Web, The Hobbit with terrible voices would be my speed.

Glad Cosimo told Tatiana who she was like, saved me the hassle.
 
I have this idea that with the stuff going on in Poland and the Albanian/Turkey/Greek thing, that the “Fixers” from the European governments have a get together much like there respective leaders. The only problem that I could see is Fyodor, if he voluntarily bring Gia or involuntarily brings her. As in the WE are going to this and when Fyodor contacts the Czar, the Czar manages to take an inspection tour of the Siberian mines at that time. Bonus points if it’s in Winter.
 
I have this idea that with the stuff going on in Poland and the Albanian/Turkey/Greek thing, that the “Fixers” from the European governments have a get together much like there respective leaders. The only problem that I could see is Fyodor, if he voluntarily bring Gia or involuntarily brings her. As in the WE are going to this and when Fyodor contacts the Czar, the Czar manages to take an inspection tour of the Siberian mines at that time. Bonus points if it’s in Winter.
The Czar would probably be smart enough at this point to know that Gia, on her down time, is not a fixer, but a very capable person for managing the fixers.

Less 007, more M.
 
What is the status of the Polish Army?
Without any information from this timeline I can only speculate that after the defeat of the Soviet Union the Polish Army demobilelized rapidly and with no mention of being part of deployments by the German Empire like South Africa, Mexico, and Korea the Polish Army has not seen any meaningful action in over twenty years.
With this in mind the Army could be full of officers who are there not because they are competent but are cronies of politicians.
The Army could be one of the centers of Polish Nationalism and what happened in Krakow is just the first in a series of actions that will bring Poland to the brink of Civil War.
 
Marie is, in this instance, 100% correct.

Though I don't know if I'd go for Charlotte's Web, The Hobbit with terrible voices would be my speed.

I'd go for the Brothers Grimm, the gory ones, with the terrible voices.

Or War & Peace, read in a dull monotone & atrocious Russian accent. Very... very... s... l... o... w... l... y...

“You sounded exactly like your mother when you said that” Cosimo replied, much to Tatiana’s complete embarrassment.

I remember when my sister had this type of epiphany. She had two toddlers of her own, who had just done something they both knew they shouldn't have done, and my sister was in the process of telling them off. She said "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand... OMG! I sound like Mum!!" Damn near peed myself laughing at the look of total horror on her face.
 
Part 107, Chapter 1745
Chapter One Thousand Seven Hundred Forty-Five



26th August 1966

In transit, near Frankfurt

Looking out the window of the train, Emil had plenty of time to consider the events of the prior days as he made his way home. He had been extended an invitation to attend a dedication of a monument to the fallen in the Battle of Verdun on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Battle’s conclusion. Traveling with Maria, Zella and Walter, Emil had been astonished to find that a forest had grown on the battlefield that he remembered as a moonscape pocked with shell holes. A far sourer discovery was the reunion of those who had fought in that battle and just how few remained after five decades. Emil had told this to Piers Sjostedt who just looked at him with a serine expression on his face and said that it was the nature of things. Their generation was passing into history.

There was also the battlefield itself. The Meuse Heights including Souville Hill were now part of a larger National Historic Park with signs reminding visitors to remain on the paved paths because there was still unexploded ordnance around as well as being respectful of the dead. If Emil hadn’t felt like he was walking on ghosts before, learning that the old battlefield was considered a vast graveyard by the French State certainly would have driven that home. Seeing the monument to the hundreds of men forever entombed within the bunker complex that made up Fort Souville was a reminder of how real the ghosts that haunted Emil were. They all had names and families that had missed them after Emil had caused the chain reaction explosion that had neutralized the fort. Unlike them, he had gone home afterwards.

The village of Verdun itself was much how Emil remembered it, just the people there had a completely distorted picture of what had happened decades earlier. They remembered Emil as a hero of sorts. The concept wouldn’t really be articulated within popular discourse until decades later during the Second World War when the Japanese were looking to bow out of the conflict, and they had decided that the German Empire was an honorable enemy who they could negotiate with. That was how the people of Verdun still regarded him. This was because Emil and some of his men had guarded a church full of women and children convinced that they were going to get ravaged by the bloody Boche because he had wanted to secure the cooperation of the Parrish Priest.

The town had remained occupied until the war had ended, but whoever had followed when Emil had moved on had not seen fit to damage the good will of the civilian population. Years later it would be held up as an example to follow when what were called “Spanish Rules” were formally adopted by the entire German Military because someone in the OKW realized that heavy handed treatment of civilians created more problems than it had ever solved in a rare moment of bureaucratic clarity.

Zella and Walt had kept hearing about how their father had proven himself to be a good man caught up in what the French regarded as a terrible situation. It was understandable that Zella had a lot of questions while Walt just took it at face value. That was the difference in nature between Emil’s two adult children. He had done his best to tell Zella what had really happened, and she had told him that he needed to take more credit, whatever that meant.



Vis Island, Croatia

The radio signal from a merchantman had been four R’s, meaning that an armed raider was operating in vicinity of Vis off the coast of Croatia. Ominously, the signal had been cut off before the operator could send additional information.

Louis and his small flotilla had been out on patrol in the Central Adriatic when they had received word from Trieste about the presence of the raider. They had proceeded south and east at flank speed but had only found wreckage south of Vis. The detachment of men from the Croatian Navy on the island had been apologetic when Louis had questioned them about what had happened. Most of them had been recruited locally and all they had was a handful of old rifles and pistols that looked like they were left over from the First World War. The only boat they had was an old Revenue Cutter with a British Maxim Pom-Pom One-Pounder, adequate for taking on smugglers operating in the region or enforcing fishing quotas but not for what they had witnessed. According to them, they had seen a freighter attack another and the deep concussions they had heard were of something far larger than they could handle.

Louis understood that meant that he was dealing with at least one Q-Ship of unknown capabilities who was bold enough to operate within sight of Vis. He also knew better than to accuse the men from the Croatian Navy of cowardice, they had done their jobs by reporting what had happened and not committed suicide in a futile act of bravery. He saw the looks of envy that that they gave the Windhund and the other more modern units of the flotilla. He figured that a bit of military aid would go a long way with these people and would need to fire off a message to that effect to Wunsdorf when he returned to Trieste.
 
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Emil is reminded yet again of the remorseless March of Time and is still embarrassed by how his actions in the village are perceived. Zella, having heard all sides of the story, (French, German & Emil's) has a better appreciation of why the French village still holds him in such high regard.

Meanwhile, things are heating up down in the Adriatic. Q-Ships, as well as smugglers, for Louis Jr. & his band of merry men to deal with. They just have to determine whether or not the Q-ship is a pirate, a privateer or an official armed merchantman/auxiliary in direct Albanian or Turkish naval service. The rules for dealing with them differ. Although that can wait until AFTER they capture or sink the damn thing.
 
Meanwhile, things are heating up down in the Adriatic. Q-Ships, as well as smugglers, for Louis Jr. & his band of merry men to deal with. They just have to determine whether or not the Q-ship is a pirate, a privateer or an official armed merchantman/auxiliary in direct Albanian or Turkish naval service. The rules for dealing with them differ. Although that can wait until AFTER they capture or sink the damn thing.
There was an old RPG I used to play, many, many years back, and one of the taglines it had for the Law Enforcement was "Shoot first, shoot second and keep shooting until everything has stopped moving, then ask if anyone has any questions"

I don't think they'll quite take that route, but if they are forced to open fire, then the pirates may find they've bitten off more than they can chew if the Navy respond with a similar attitude of maximum aggression controlled and directed with pinpoint* accuracy.

*pinpoint is a relative term
 
Emil from all descriptions of him is probably one of the most healthy and youngest of all the veterans who attended the ceremony and that will weigh heavily on his mind as the pace of deaths from the veterans start to accelerate.

Prince Louis Ferdinand with that report he makes is going to find out that he is no longer is considered to be a royal just play acting as a sailor, but as someone who is going places on his own merit.

ARD seeing that Zella has connections that can only be dreamed about by others could send her and Yuri to check out stories about pirates in the Adriatic.
ARD probably will have a new toy for Zella to play with, the first television news van from VW that has a compact video editing machine that will allow them to send completed reports from the field.
 
Now that there are freighter sized q-ships, they might be needed. A gun says one thing, but a torpedo can't be fired to disable or warn--so someone willing to fire one should put a certain fear into bandits that think they will be processed and released/bailed out/whatever. (Especially if they are carrying munitions)
 

ferdi254

Banned
Q ships is beyond the capacity of your Mafia or other organised crime actors. Those would (if they had the capacity) have been and mostly are too clever to act in a way that would give nations with worthy menofwar to commit them against them.

Criminal action is a very economic activity if done in big scale.
 
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