Snippet #8917

Maunkee Empire Territory
Planet T'au
External Government Building
Conference Room 207

Quincy's face was calm and reserved. Noble.

Within he was full of joy, bursting with it. Already they had fallen for it! Already he was a valuable asset to Qujo-Maunkee relations. War? Was there anything more wonderful than war! Did anything ring so sweetly in a capitalist's ears? It was a well accepted rule. If you want to make money, invent machines that help people kill each other.

Quincy walked a fish-man triumphant. He let the procession lead him onward, all the while inside he knew that the Qujoray had their claws in place. Who needed a military now?

Of course... Quincy remembered the USSR, poor beyond belief, utterly backwards, and it fancied itself utopian! If a war was going on, it would never hurt to bet on both sides. Either way, you become a valuable, protected asset, and the more guns of your own you destroy, the more each has to buy...

Something he would have to pose to ThuyastaHrn.

Qujoray Confederacy
Fay System
Ewp: Mining Planet
Tunnel 8

The notorious leader of the Qujoray Confederacy, a self made man in every possible way, who crawled from complete insignificance to being the single most powerful Qujoray of all time.

He was old. Intensely old. So old that now he was entering his second life stage. Most Qujoray died before this, but he had kept immaculately healthy. He was beautiful to look at, his body was powerful and sinewy, and though his body was an intense cerulean, he cast a sort of violet hue on all the walls around him. His tendrils were longer than most Qujoray, perfectly smooth and now decorated with beautiful decoration, actually veins which, in the second lifestage, arranged themselves according to, of all things, astronomical (or astrological, according to the Qujoray) figuration. He floated in the water with total ease, his broad shoulders and chest move with perfect fluidity to his slender, flat stomach and down the twelve foot long tendrils, which occasionally had slender, lovely spines protruding from them.

His dorsal fine was long and slender, and his forearms were marked with beautiful retractable webbing, he looked like he could have flown straight out of the sea. In this lifestage, the Qujoray were semi-hermaphroditic. His longest tendril was now finned and ended in a great decorated blade of webbing. His head was smooth, and his eyes were each setting suns, just behind their glass-like container, they burned red, violet, yellow, and orange.

Tunnel 8. ThuyastaHrn's Treasury. So named because it was rumored it held ThuyastaHrn's personal funds, which were said to equal the entire confederacy's. It was not true. Here he had signed the many "Infallible Papers" creating leagues of corporations bound to each other by "New Nationalism" a craze which had brought the Qujoray together in their mutation, and allowed for the colonization of the Fay System.

The Confederacy was not legislative in any way. Its only purpose was to maximize profit. The main power was really the Confederate Reserve, which loaned money throughout the Confederacy and abroad, and otherwise overlooked contract and kept opposing interests down. It had created a hierarchy of businesses and corporations that was totally fluid, but effective enough to keep order.

And from Tunnel 8 ThuyastaHrn could keep all this in line. Now he looked on a massive map of the systems, it flickered in the water, and he swam through the tiny floating stars like some great aquatic god, planets smaller than his fingertips about him. His sunset eyes searching for the next place to let loose his bait and bind to the Qujoray economy.