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Minister’s Ideas
Your Majesty. The ministers would like to share their ideas to help you with reformations in the future.
Diplomacy
Sir Theremis at your service, Your Majesty. My ministries aren’t sure if Central alone is enough to stop Raziel and we’re not willing to risk the country we love to find out. That’s why we need the combined strength of other countries. We have two ways to achieve this and I’ll provide advices for both methods.
First option is forming a Continental Alliance. I can see your Majesty has already laid foundations on this path so I’ll provide advices on how to proceed. Just don’t make it seems like you’re biased toward a particular country or others might think you’re disrupting balance of power and distrust you.
For Amagal, it depends on who’s on the throne. King Rotiart is sly, but since the way he ascended the throne violated Amagal culture, he needs to keep his reputation absolutely clean to justify his reign. We can drop hints that we know he engineered that drought and blackmail him into compliance; King Merius might be mad, but he has a soft spot for perusing unknown knowledge to grow stronger. If we can convince him Central’s diversity is an endless pool of new knowledge then he’ll most likely stick with us; Queen Varea is already our acquaintance and, if you wish, you can further cement the alliance by marrying Ms. Chiyo to become her relative. Beside, forgive my rudeness, we can hold Ms. Chiyo hostage if queen Varea somehow betrayed us.
For Begus, it revolves around the queen and the church. I see you’re quiet close to Queen Jeanne and we can perhaps marry her relatives into our court. I won’t stop you if you want to marry her yourself, but just remember combining two countries is much harder than it looks. Our cultures and demographics are radically different and hard to assimilate, opposing nobles might unite to stop you, and foreign countries might oppose this shift of power. The church is an influential force to stabilize Begus and they also support Queen Jeanne, so it’ll be smart to keep at least cordial relationship with them, with the help of Ms. Mira. I understand your hate on racism, but solving racism takes a long time and I don’t think Raziel will wait that long.
For Dorgania, its quiet straightforward: Make king Lancafew believes Central as an ally is more useful than as a colony. We had secured non-aggression pact and several trade deals with them, which is a good start. Life in desert is grueling and most of Dorgania’s industries are dedicated to military, this gives us opportunity to provide something they couldn’t produce themselves. Food is their largest import from us, and we can provide Rakake with more exotic cuisines that couldn’t be made in desert. Our steel industry is also a valuable bargaining chip for us as steel is crucial for their arms industry. Central can also offered to be a diplomatic bridge between Dorgania and other countries so Dorgania can focus on their military affairs in the west while other countries won’t be offended by their wooden attitude. There’s also an option of helping them regulate or crack down their abolitionist movements, which they would definitely appreciate. I’m not forcing you to help their slavery; I’m just saying the option is there.
Of course, if we can’t ally with everyone, there’s always the option of Conquest and Vassalage. I myself am a dove diplomat so I personally would keep it as last resort, but I’ll do my best to help if you choose this option. First we need to make sure other countries won’t intervene when we focus on one enemy at a time. We can do so by stirring up the distain between them, like telling Amagal how others want to steal their knowledge, telling Begus how others reject their religion, and telling Dorgania how others want to liberate their slaves. To help with the conquest we can stir up some domestic trouble for them as well, like triggering noble or beastman civil war in Begus, inciting slave revolt in Dorgania, or convince the residents of hellhound village to come out and do what they do best to Amagal.
Commerce
Sir David at your service, Your Majesty. As Minister of Treasury I’d like to suggest some financial reforms. Let’s start from dealing with corruption. I’ll never doubt how Your Majesty uses your money, but we still need to prevent the bureaucracy from committing embezzlement. For this I have a rather unorthodox idea: Seeking help from Ms. Sandra and Ms. Jaylin. Ms. Sandra being a thief could probably think of every possible ways to steal funds, and I heard she’s rehabilitated into “Righteous Blade” recently. If you trust her then we can probably have her working with the police to patch up holes in our regulations or even use her as a spy to catch whales. Ms. Jaylin seems to be enthralled by our treasury. If we can make sure she herself doesn’t steal, we can use her passion on gold to have her monitor and catch anyone who dares to steal “her” money.
My next proposal is rather ambitious. As you might know, independent businesses and trading form the bulk of our economy. For their future development I propose establishing a central bank system. There are already some private bankers in our country but a national bank is more reliable and trustworthy. We can attract entrepreneurs and skilled workers to our country by providing loans to start their business. Merchants will have a safe way to keep and transport a huge fortune without the risk of bandits. Inflations and deflations can be mitigated by regulating coinage and interest. If things go well we can even attract foreign investment with our stable and trustworthy market and turn Central into an international commerce center. It can protect us from foreign invasion as other countries wouldn’t want their money to be looted. Mr. Darude would be a perfect candidate to handle the negotiations.
Construction & Industry
Sir Edward at your service, Your Majesty. Our country is rich in resources and has lots of potentials become an economic powerhouse. Apart from construction I’m also responsible of domestic development. That’s why in addition to the construction project I marked on your map, I also have some extra ideas to develop our industries.
Food industry is obviously the most important industry for us as our farms provide fresh ingredient for kitchens around the world. However, as our cities grow I’ve started to realize not everyone knows how to cook and some are too busy to eat leisurely in the restaurants. We need to come up with new culinary business that’ll thrive in urban zone. If Ms. Kayelinth is interested, we can use the food from her farm to test out my new idea called “fast food joint”. The menu will be focused on inexpensive meals like salad, stew and meat slice to target common citizens. Ingredients will be cooked beforehand so the customers can get their order almost instantly. We’ll also provide packaging so they can take it back to their home or work place. I remember your companions had a cooking contest with Tami from Pumumu and Keylessia from Orchel, perhaps they can help coming up with new dish ideas? I envisioned this would quickly grow popular in big cities like Aldlyn. If things go well perhaps we can even expand this new type of business to other countries.
Eventually, Raziel’s army would come and we must be prepared. Although our food production can sustain us for a long war, the size of our kingdom isn’t that big and it’s lacking strategic depth, so I would prefer stalling the invaders at our borders to prevent our populations and industries from devastation. We don’t know where Raziel’s would come from, so we must be prepared in case he bypassed other countries and directly goes for our border. We need to build massive walls and fortifications to protect exposed border, which unfortunately Central has little experience in that matter. If we can get permission from Begus and Dorgania, we would like to learn from the dwarves who excel at such matter and study the Great Wall of Dorgania to help designing our own walls. It seems your majesty had befriended Ms. Adrianna who’s a famous dwarf with many connections while I heard Water Spirit helped building some defensive installations for the Great Wall. Perhaps we could ask for their help?
Science
Hi! Head researcher Hilda at your service. Since our country is a birthplace of creativity and fresh ideas, it’ll benefit Central greatly if we utilize this advantage to its full potential. So I’d like to propose some ideas.
First, I want to expand our mandatory education system. Having lots of literate population not only helps greatly in academy research, it also means skilled workers can train their apprentice more easily, soldiers are less likely to misinterpret their orders, and many other unforeseen benefits in other professions. We can then set up several different departments of academy to attract scholars around the world, especially for those that are ignored by other countries but are definitely useful if explored, like Zoology, Agronomy, Engineering, Geology, Meteorology, Astronomy, etc.
Speaking of which, don’t we already have some candidates? Ms. Chiyo can help us with magical research and Alchemy. Akai and Yami can keep working on their Engineering. Monster Hall can be a good place to learn more about the Zoology of monsters, with the help of slime girl Lexi, dark elf Ellanore, Tabsy from Big Farm, Meilira from Whisperwind farm and beast tamer Aiyana. I heard there’s a dwarf called Bob who need income for orphanage, perhaps we can hire him as part-time professor of Geology when he’s having trouble with jade mine? Mermaid Coral could teach us Oceanography while elf Renna could teach us Agronomy that’s unknown to Central. If Your Majesty is so kind, perhaps you, along with Ms. Mira, Ms. Kayelinth, Libelle, Leneth, Glyntris, Lili and even ghost Shey can write down how each species fly differently? It’ll be tremendous help for Aeronautics.
If it’s morally fine, I’d really like to hear from that necromancer at Skylo Tower. Having labors that require no food and no sleep can help our economy a lot. I’m also interested in the way professor Gloom “manufactured” Ms. Ryoko, can we do some experiments on her like how Akai experimented on your Majesty? Zady’s witchcraft could potentially be very useful to us as well. Perhaps it can be the key to defeat Raziel’s titans, right? Everything for science!