Solivagency - Empires SMP

XIV

It was the morning of the meeting, and Joel felt awful.

"Do I have to, Lizzie?"

"Yes." She patted his shoulder sympathetically.

"But it's just..." He waved his hand around to gesture in complaint. "Annoying, with all those people around."

"Babe, it will be fine," She promised, patting him on the shoulder. "What could possibly go wrong?"

-

As it turned out, a lot of things could go wrong.

Problem Number One; Joel should have really anticipated Pix coming earlier. Like, seriously. He was always precisely twenty minutes early for anything, and for his closer friends that could extend to up to an hour.

And because he was basically family at this point, Pix was two hours early. To a meeting he had only just started setting up, because hey, procrastination. And when he procrastinated, all his clones procrastinated. Which meant that nothing got done. This resulted in the hall he had been planning on holding the meeting room in being nowhere organised - it was still a complete mess from the last meeting, where Gem had set Sausage and fWhip on fire at least three times in five minutes.

Fortunately, Pix had come at the rather convenient time of Jimmy managing to convince Lizzie to play chess with him again, and the Vigil Keeper found great amusement in trying to explain to her that no, the queen can't teleport anywhere she wants too on the board, and stop trying to steal and eat your brother's pieces when he isn't looking, which meant that, thankfully, no one minded him slipping out to totally finish up work on the meeting room and totally not sneaking too the safe room and depositing a massive slice of cake on the side, and on second thought a clock that actually worked upon noticing that Xornoth was asleep and- what do you mean? No he hadn't, why ever would you say that?

Problem Number Two occured very shortly after; fWhip had left him a lovely surprise of exploding piece of granite with the words 'Merry Christmas' scribbled on top, which one of his clones barely had time to read before he screamed, threw, and narrowly avoided getting blown up. Why did he write 'Merry Christmas' on top anyway? It was Diwali. Christmas was not Diwali.

However, Problem Number Two was fairly easy to clean up. A few cusses to fWhip and salmon were made amongst him and the clones, before Problem Number Three made its grand and spectacular performance; the seating plan.

It was fairly easy to make a seating plan (or so he thought), but this one had some... errors. For example: sitting Sausage in the middle of Scott and Jimmy. And knowing Scott was already pretty pissy, Joel did not want to be in the fallout of him getting jealous. No end of grief had been supplied the last time he had started a sword fight in Katherine's green house over it.

The Shattered Sister Queens could stay together, that was fine. And Countessa Arna was on friendlier terms with them than they were with the other emperors present. But then Joel realised that Scott and Arna would be sitting next to each other. Someone had said that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, but Arna had a glass body and threw boulders, and whilst it caused problems for her (eg; glass is fragile), she had a certain fondness for taking the absolute piss out of many empires, especially Rivendell, no matter how polite and well mannered she acted in public.

And of course, Underlord Tannith usually refused to meet with anyone, and was without a doubt the most unpleasant ruler out of all of them. Joel had no idea where to put her in a place that wouldn't start a war, so he settled for putting her next to Northern Shattered Sister Queen (was she Jayna, Jida or Jarina? Joel honestly couldn't remember) and hoped that would do the job. If it didn't then at least he could claim he tried.