After a long night, Kaldalis woke up later in the morning than usual. It was nearly ten in the morning. He wasn’t late for anything, and he’d made no morning plans, but he still sat up suddenly with a jolt.

An idea had struck him out of a dream like a bolt of lightning.

The dream had already mostly faded from his mind, but he still grasped the basics. Blearily, he blurted the idea out into the room, hoping that saying it aloud might help him hold it as he awoke.

“Model UN,” Kaldalis said, his voice still slurred with sleep.

As the dream finished fading into the fog of his mind, he wondered who he was talking to. Heluna had left sometime earlier in the morning, so he was alone. The idea he’d had was nearly gone, but his own words came back to him.

“Model UN,” Kaldalis said, his voice a little steadier. “Like in school?”

Kaldalis - well, technically Dylan - had been in the Model UN club in high school. It had been the result of getting ambushed by the cute girl doing the recruiting for the club and not having the presence of mind to refuse, but he stuck with it. For some reason, he was the republic of Benin, which meant that he didn’t really have any weight to throw around, but he did have a vote, which meant that he still got a lot of attention from those who wanted to lobby for their own purposes.

He’d hoped to develop his social skills by playing politics, but at the end of it, all he could really say he developed was his bad French accent and a knee-jerk response correcting people’s pronunciation of Benin.

“Ben-EEN,” Kaldalis muttered to himself. “But how does that help?”

He scrambled with the covers briefly before getting out of bed, mulling over the question. What had he dreamed? What happened? He worked his way around the bed as he made it, straightening the covers on both sides.

Had he been back in high school again? Was he at a Model UN meeting in his underpants?

Details didn’t come back to him. But his brain was working, filling in the blanks on its own. He was back in high school, but - as in most of his dreams now - he was Kaldalis, not Dylan. Others around the classroom were the people from his life in this world. Garyung, Cerh, and Jetmorpan were the major players. Garyung was trying to get the other two to agree to something, but they were just ignoring him.

But when the time came for votes, Garyung made his play to force their hands. He had Kaldalis’s vote, and the votes of enough other countries - represented in the dream by shadowy figures, because Kaldalis obviously never met President Eileen or Overlord Yeln or whoever the fuck else - to threaten a majority. If Cerh and Jetmorpan didn’t want Garyung to override them with the raw support he’d built, they had to negotiate.

But they didn’t listen. In fact, what Garyung did made the situation worse. They dropped out of the UN and declared war on Garyung.

And they had the support of the shadowy figure who represented Zara.

It wasn’t exactly how the dream had played out. In fact, he couldn’t be certain of any of the details being accurate. But this is what his brain produced as he finished making the bed and started getting dressed.

“Alright,” Kaldalis muttered to himself as he struggled with his pants. “So what the fuck was so important about that?”

It was actually obvious. What he was looking at was what had happened, and what would happen next. The two towns had refused to listen to Garyung out of personal dislike. If Garyung used whatever clout he could muster to force them to listen, they’d panic at the implied threat. And if they panicked, they were part of the Zaran kingdom. There was no way to describe Zara as anything short of a near-apocalyptic threat to Cotanaku.

“Okay,” Kaldalis said to himself, gathering up the scattered pieces of his armor from around his bedroom. He grunted as he dropped to the floor and fished one of his greaves out from under the table at the far end of the room. “So what’s the lesson here? What’s so important that I can’t sleep in until quest time? How do I stop this from happening?”

He tried to put his armor on physically, but eventually just gave up wrestling with the unbuckled straps and scattered plates and splits, chucking the whole thing into his inventory so that he could equip it with the game system.

The problem, at its core, was the implied threat. Garyung didn’t want to imply any threat, but that didn’t stop Cerh and Jetmorpan from finding one. In the dream, he only got the support of the other nations to try and make a peaceful agreement, but it was too much for them to stomach.

“I need to make them listen,” Kaldalis said to himself as he checked over his armor. “But without making them feel like we’re arraying a lot of forces against them.”

Kaldalis jumped with a start when the idea came back. It was the same bolt of lightning that had woken him.

“Cut out the other voices,” Kaldalis said. He started for the door. He had to get to Garyung. “Take this down from a Model UN with the entire club to a private meeting. We can get them to act like sensible people because it’s not on an international stage.”

His mind raced with how to entice them to agree in the first place as he burst out of his quarters and made for the town hall. Garyung might have more knowledge on that. If not him, then perhaps the council could come up with something to offer. Some concession that could earn a few days of trust.

Kaldalis knew the next batch of quests was coming in a few more hours, but the town center was already bustling with adventurer activity. He didn’t think that was smart of them, since Garyung’s new system put a daily cap on quests, but he was glad progress was being made on the town’s defenses. There was another watchtower done already, and the walls looked just a little taller than they were yesterday. He wanted to make sure things were still rolling all day long, though, so he intended to hold his quest allowance for the afternoon.

If after this meeting with Garyung, he had time to spare, he would have to amuse himself in some other way. Not that there was a lack of options, between fishing, crafting, and other gathering quests. Though he was of a mind to drop by the sailor’s district again to ask how he could help get them materials outside of the quest system.

With so much attention on the quest, the town hall wasn’t busy. There were some clerks moving about, but nobody stopped Kaldalis as he went up the stairs to Garyung’s office.

The man was there - working at his desk on a stack of paperwork - and he acknowledged Kaldalis as he entered, but held up a hand to stop him before he could speak.

“I needed to have this done an hour ago,” Garyung said quickly. “So unless someone is dying right this second, I need you to let me finish.”

Kaldalis wanted to crack a joke about it, but after what they’d discussed before - how Garyung’s neglect could cause severe damage to Cotanaku’s infrastructure - he didn’t want to test the consequences for the sake of a smartass remark.

Across from Garyung’s desk were a pair of finely-carved wooden chairs, so Kaldalis took a seat. Now that he had a moment to occupy himself, he took a look around the office. It looked like it had once been bare and sterile, but that hadn’t lasted. There was a shelf behind Garyung’s desk that was stuffed with books, but they were all jammed in crooked, with several vertical stacks, and only about half of them arranged with the spine pointing outwards. Here and there a sheet of paper poked out from between the pages.

Similarly, the desk looked like it was nearly new. The corners were still sharp, as if the wood had been cut, left unsanded, and the surface hadn’t been used or handled enough to round off any of the edges. But there were scratches and dings across the area within reach of Garyung’s long arms, and more than a few ink stains. There was a cup near the corner stuffed with pens and pencils, with an inkwell right next to it, all of it smudged with ink and graphite fingerprints.

Garyung’s chair was lined with some kind of pebbled skin, either that of an Irritator or possibly a daemonraptor. But the thick hide was already cracking and worn from use. Garyung had only been running this town for about a month - with a week-long vacation in Baimer - and already the office was showing such intense signs of wear and activity.

“Alright,” Garyung said, finishing up whatever he was working on. He tucked the documents into a folder, and put that folder into an envelope, and then put that envelope into a desk drawer. “I literally just need to fill it out. The system takes care of the rest. So what’s up, Kal?”

“Did you ever do Model UN in school?” Kaldalis asked, blurting out the first thing that came to mind.

“Model UN?” Garyung laughed. “I thought that was a Hollywood myth they made up for teenage sitcoms, like cohesive friend groups and teachers who actually talk to students.”

“It was a thing at my school,” Kaldalis said, “but that’s what I’m proposing. Kind of. Only, you know, we actually have political power and resources and are making policy decisions.”

“So like the actual UN,” Garyung pointed out. “Not model at all.”

“Well, yes, but actually no,” Kaldalis said. He pulled his chair up closer to the desk, grabbing a handful of pencils out of Garyung’s cup. “So here’s the problem. This is the situation now.” He arranged nine pencils across the desk, gesturing at all of them together. He tapped two of them with one hand, and with the other hand made another gesture encompassing the others. “These guys don’t want to listen to you. Because they’re afraid of how it’ll make them look in front of all of these guys.”

“Right,” Garyung agreed. Following along, he put down the fountain pen he had been using to fill out documents. “And we can’t even actually make them look bad in front of those guys, or this guy is gonna fuck us up.”

“Exactly,” Kaldalis said, happy that Garyung was picking up on it. “So here’s what we do.”

With a single gesture, Kaldalis swept all the other pencils off the desk, leaving only the two he’d tapped and one other - to represent Garyung. After a moment’s pause he grabbed the fountain pen and tossed that one on the floor with the pencils, too.

“Please be careful with that,” Garyung asked, though his eyes were locked onto the three pencils on the table. “So what are you saying?”

“Maybe not Model UN, because we obviously are actually representatives of our respective powers,” Kaldalis said, tapping the pencils. “But Mini-UN. We meet behind closed doors, just the three of us. Cotanaku, Panbu, and Kayore. We talk like adults, openly and honestly, with the promise that none of those other writing utensils are involved.”

Garyung nodded, slowly at first, but gradually picking up speed and energy. “Yeah, alright,” Garyung said. “It’s risky, since they’ll obviously outnumber me if we bring anything to a vote. But I don’t need them to vote on anything. I just need them to listen, with a promise of privacy.”

“All we really need is for it to be non threatening,” Kaldalis said firmly. “As soon as a threat starts, the fountain pen comes back and a naval force larger than our population is gonna fuck us up.”

“Right,” Garyung agreed. He cast about briefly, looking for something. Kaldalis wasn’t sure if it was a book, paper, or a writing utensil. Likely the latter, as most of them were on the floor now. “We just need to-”

“Sir!” A voice called from the hallway outside the office. A human man burst in, and it took Kaldalis a second to parse that the man was wearing town guard armor. “Emergency! Emergency!”

“What is it?” Garyung barked, leaping to his feet.

“Infernal Horde,” the man said, gasping for breath. “They’re nearly at the gates!”