Oh. Well, that's far more unbalanced than Opalyn expected.

She's still not really sure if overthrowing the Farm and then potentially this entire universe is actually merited, much less whether she can do it. They certainly have plenty of poverty and injustice, but is she sure that she has some important quality that would allow her to simultaneously do better and hold onto power? Definitely not sure after only two days of being here.

Besides, it seems like the Farm being in more of a state might not be all that temporary, if Princes are in such short supply.

Moamo knew all of this and much more, when he put her back in here. What's his actual role in this world's power structure? Was any of what he said true, and how can Opalyn ever find out? Certainly not from in here.

It would be very easy to get caught up in political power games here, with Duchesses and Countesses and Barons, and Opalyn is not sure any of it matters. It's all kid stuff compared to the bigger game outside the Facility. She should probably be spending as much time working on mastering wizardry and sorcery as she can.

But on the other hand, she'll need trusted people for whatever she does next; it's nearly impossible to implement big change all by yourself.

On the whole, she thinks she doesn't want to be pressured into it on a timetable by people accustomed to playing the small game.

"You haven't entirely answered my question about what they'll do to the Grands. Sounds like they do pose a threat. They always have, but it's even more acute now. They're incapacitated as long as they're in collars in the Facility, but if that were ever to change, that would pose a big problem. And now they no longer make up for that threat by providing powerful lightline charging services."

Opalyn think getting some of these folks on her team might help for her outside-the-prison game, whatever that turns out to be, and they might be much more approachable than normal.

"I think I'd like to meet some Grands. How do I do that?"

"It hasn't become evident that this Farm never again gets a Prince, or the Grand Dukes here would already be dead.  I'm not sure they can afford to kill the Grand Dukes without shutting down two-thirds of the lightlines, or shutting down a third of them and doubling the prices of the remaining ones.  We're in an interregnum where the Grands are temporarily deprived of their political power, nobody knows for how long; the Dukes will be treading carefully around them and not burning bridges."

"You could easily enough get an audience with a Grand Duke by saying that you want to know where to pledge your allegiance after they return to power, maybe?  But to state what would be obvious here, you cannot recruit them to kneel before you, or even politely speak to them as equals, if they do not see you for a greater power than this."

"It sounds to me like Eldrida is pretty screwed right now. Having to shut down two-thirds of the lightlines would have a very large effect on the system as a whole, is that right?"

"And if that's right, then I can't imagine they'll allow the current state of affairs to persist for very long at all. The lightlines must... "

not flow...

"The lightlines must glow. They have to, economically."

"So it seems like we'll almost certainly get a new Prince, or some other new way of overseeing the Grands as they go about their work. Soon, probably. Unless the lightlines can run without recharging for much longer than I currently believe."

"Your section of Mayvos must have been operated with remarkable efficiency and even aesthetics, if 'they have to, economically' is a fact that implies 'they will'.  There is no Prince who starves.  The one who holds theoretical authority over the matter is the Dread Emperor, and it's not obvious that he actually cares if two-thirds of the lightlines shut down."

"My estimate, the lightlines start to run dry after two months, could be a quarter that or fourfold.  After that, they actually start to reprice them--they don't reprice right now, that is just way more foresight and proactivity than people have, when they're hoping somebody else fixes the problem instead, and their pricing authority isn't clear."

"In two years, the Princes of the planets that have diminished or expensive lightline access, are so extremely inconvenienced and unhappy and fed up, that they get together in a group and agree something ought to be done.  They can't immediately agree on how much they all ought to contribute to pay for something to be done.  They do all loudly agree with each other that the Princes of Capital who are available for hire at all, are insolently demanding to be paid far too much for taking command of the Farm."

"Two years after that, either the problem is so bad that they finally stop bickering and meet one of the Capital Princes' prices, or they've gotten used to things being that bad and it never gets fixed ever."

"Or there could be a Prince of the Capital who's always wanted to have free run of a whole Farm full of helpless noble prisoners, and they could take this place over tomorrow."

This is not a good way for a universe to be. Opalyn is offended.

"What is it like for the regular people on the planets that are cut off, it it takes time to restore the lightlines, or if they're never restored?"

Please don't say they all starve please don't say they all starve

"Hmmm.  I think people who made previously exported, now unexportable goods, suffer great concentrated unemployment; some of those cannot find other employment and they die.  People who imported goods must now do with inferior and more expensive local substitutes; there are many more of those people, inconvenienced to a lesser degree.  The manufacturers of the local substitutes thrive, unless of course the lightlines go back up again one day, and then they are impoverished."

"Does every planet have enough food to feed its own people? What about medicine? What about materials for building housing?"

"Or is this system so accustomed to being well-connected that the disappearance of the lightlines will constitute a major disruption to the basic function of human life and there will be a big die-off not limited to some very small percentage of people dealing in luxury import-export?"

"The long-distance lightlines have never been charged enough to ship ordinary food.  Low-volume low-weight high-value goods are what gets shipped.  They ship eyeballs, not flank steak.  People who once grew spices are now unemployed; and everyone else has to eat blander food."

"Metal ingots don't rot; they get shipped through intervening space, on space barges.  There's probably some neighboring planets that ship food back and forth that way.  But not over lightline."

Okay. This is not the humanitarian disaster Opalyn feared. It's bad, but it's not three-quarters-of-everyone-dying bad.

"I'm glad to hear that. Still, I'm surprised that anything worth building in the first place isn't worth carefully maintaining. Usually infrastructure starts to pay for itself and then becomes indispensable. Anyway!"

"So I now understand how it is that we might be without a Prince for an unpredictable amount of time, but how we will probably get another one eventually. And I guess this means that the Grands are kind of... temporarily embarrassed. They were powerful, they will again be powerful, and their current lack of power is just an anomaly."

"How is it that the power structures within the prison need to change at all? I guess the token distribution will be different, but why don't people just stay in their current hierarchies and hang tight for the inevitable restoration of the previous structure? What inequilibrium was introduced that prompted a great shuffling, today?" 

"Worth maintaining for whom?  Who pays?  If it's worth something to three people, which of them pay how much?"

"And I'm not sure what to say in answer to your question except that it seems to involve... different basic assumptions about how politics works, and I'm not sure which assumptions differ?  Authority comes from power, the ability to threaten or bribe.  The Grands lost power, the ability to bribe and threaten, so nobody will treat them as having authority until they regain that power."

"Well, who paid to build the lightlines in the first place? How did they decide to make that investment? And who pays for this Farm and its management and overhead?"

Opalyn is not sure where to go with that second part. It's as if these people have no object permanence about power. It's very strange. She'll come back to it.

"I think the lightlines were made by the Dread Emperor, very long ago.  Probably the Farm was made at his command as well.  And when the Dread Emperor set that up, I assume he established the prices that the Lightline Authority pays to the Farm for charging?  At least, I don't see who could set a price like that if the Dread Emperor didn't."

Oh no.

"Prices are set by... fiat?"

"I do know what a market price is, but I don't see how that concept would apply to a single seller of stuff the Dread Emperor made, paying part of their income over to a prison with a lot of captive sorcerers."

"So, in my world, we do sometimes build great big projects that we expect to serve many people, and it's somewhat difficult to get the funding right for those projects. I'm thinking here of massive transportation infrastructure projects that take many years to build."

Opalyn doesn't mention that the infrastructure is just humble tunnels and bridges; there are some ways that Eldrida is much more advanced than Earth. Simple intraplanetary transportation feels kind of weaksauce now that she's seen lightlines, but she'll press on.

"Before anyone builds such a thing, many smart people think hard about it for a long time and try to make predictions about how the project will help the economy grow or help people have a better standard of living or both. They estimate how much traffic the new route can carry and model how that will change shipping and employment patterns and so on."

"If it looks like it's a good idea to build it overall, the next step is to figure out how to pay for it. Sometimes this is done with taxes, at least for the initial construction. But often there's some sort of toll on the finished piece of infrastructure, such that those who use it also help pay for the construction and maintenance costs."

"And the workers who do that construction and maintenance are generally free people being paid market wage."

"So overall, the whole thing has to make sense, economically. It has to balance out. It's not always perfect, sometimes the projections are wrong, and the shortfall is made up by some other part of the system. But we do try very hard to get it to balance, or else we just don't build it in the first place."

"Right, so, I expect that the way it worked in Eldrida long ago, as opposed to whatever goes on with your planet recently, is that the Dread Emperor decided there'd be lightlines and he made some.  And he realized they needed to stay charged, and didn't want to spend a day out of every year doing that himself; and also he needed a prison; and he made those two problems solve each other.  Possibly somebody ran numbers on which planets needed how many lightlines, but I'd guess the Dread Emperor just went by relative surface area or did some other math in his head or told somebody else to do it."

"He winged it. And so it's not a stable system, and it can just fall over sometimes, and there's a lot of drama and some death when it does."

Hmph.

"It's very stable on the level the Dread Emperor seems to care about, of planets and Princes never warring on each other.  That part hasn't fallen over since the day the Dread Emperor set it up.  Because he can and does kill anyone and everyone that tries to knock it over."

"If ever a sorcerer is born greater than he, and they kill him, they'd sure better be ready to take on that duty."

Opalyn is learning so much about Eldridan politics!

... But some parts of it are still mysterious.

"Got it... I think. I want to go back to the part where there's so much upheaval in the prison right now."

"So... let's say Grand Duke A has Dukes B1, B2, and B3 who in turn have a bunch of Counts and Barons. And then one day the Grand Duke is no longer getting tokens from the prison economy anymore, but everyone anticipates that he will someday again be getting his usual stream of tokens."

"I am still not sure why B1, B2, and B3 don't just stay in a loose coalition with each other, doing most of the same things they were previously doing when A had power, anticipating that they will again be in A's organization once A gets power again. What does anyone stand to gain by reconfiguring?"

"I mean, that may be largely what they end up doing?  But also the coalitions need to resolve among themselves what purposes they'll follow, since they're not following their former ruler's purposes, and those new purposes may imply different coalitions."

"From every Duke's perspective, it's an opportunity to do things more their own way, that they've always dreamed of, if they can find the right allies for it."

"Well, that would be my perspective if I were a Duke.  Many actual Dukes are probably wondering who they're supposed to submit to, if nobody above them is controlling their orgasms."

Opalyn wonders if this entire place really runs on orgasm control or if that's just Iilasir's thing. Could go either way, really -- but the idea that the Dukes are a bit lost without the leadership they're used to getting does sound fairly plausible. It's easy to imagine that some of them are at loose ends right now. And she guesses maybe they'd try to solve their aimlessness by looking for sexual dominance rather than, y'know, leadership. After all, there's not much to actually lead in here, so maybe it really all does just come down to sex games.

"All right. Well, I still want to meet a Grand or two, and I don't want to say anything to them about my strange origins. I just want to have a conversation. I guess I don't mind if they think I'm potentially going to align with them later, though I want to avoid committing myself to that now. How do I go about getting a meeting?"