The King and his merry men

[Victor Wolfe]

Once again one of the assassins old comrades had sprung up from the city, this time the young psychic Erik Vrell, another veteran of the battle that had brought their city to its knees, and much more... alive than the last time they met in person. Victor had always liked Erik, not as easy to tease as Dave, but good at following orders and loyal to a fault. He had asked a great question, what did being a Lord entail? Victor had spent the last few minutes thinking over possibilities of what could be done with his new position. As the answer started to formulate the assassin draped his arm over the boy's shoulders, guiding him towards the sides of the entrance to the throne room. 

"Well, you see my most trusted of friends, I have been given the monumental task of trying to repair our diplomatic reputation, now I could do that by immediately sending out diplomats with talks of peace and friendship to every other city and large group in all the verses. However, I think that before we truly start to look outwards, we need to fix the diplomatic rifts in our own city." As they stopped walking and Victor finished his explanation of his immediate plans Erik raised an eyebrow, not wanting to enter into the depraved cesspool of perversion and gore that was his superior mind in search of the real meaning behind this "diplomatic rift" but before he could open his mouth Victor noticed the questioning eyebrow on the otherwise non-emotive youngsters face. "Well to put it bluntly, if we ran on approval ratings like those weakling democracies do then we would all be packing our bags because the tangled is nice this time of year and we want our heads attached to our bodies. We have made a start but we have a herculean task ahead of us to win back the hearts and minds... of... these people, hm, their minds?" Victor appeared to enter a trance as he pondered, ideas started to meld in his mind, New Babylons presence over the city had been weak for so long that they had lost control of the narrative, much of the so-called "news" was likely based on rumour and sensationalism. What they needed to do to start the process of winning back the people's hearts was to take back control of the narrative.

Whilst the lord mused at the different possibilities Erik took the chance to slip out from under his arm, repositioning to face Victor, whos free arm found its way to his chin, stroking his non-existent facial hair. "Vict, I mean Lord Victor you have that look on your face that tends to lead to bad things happening," Erik said as he worried what scheme Victor might end up dragging him into. "Oh nothing bad, just think we need a more efficient way to distribute news, I don't see many Babylonians reading a one thousand page thesis on why they should pledge their everything to us, and newspapers take a conscious effort to read so many of our citizens still might miss out on it, and not everyone has access to the database, and town criers on every corner would take much manpower, and leave less room for prostitutes. This is quite the conundrum we have here" Victor stated, his voice a mix of annoyance that he could not come up with an answer, and a little excited at the prospect of challenging the problem head-on. Eventually, Erik chipped in with his usual dead-pan voice "what about radio?"

The assassin stared at the boy, a blank look on his face as if Erik had just started speaking in tongues. "You know? Radios? they use waves to send sound across great distances ?" Victor continued to stare, only understanding around half of what he had just been told. Raising a finger Victor immediately pulled out his dataverse device, reading up on radios and their functionality. "Wow, that certainly is a thing, think of the potential, and all we really need is a few channels and we can control all viewpoints on every issue, this is just wonderful, I must test it!" Victor said as he started to summon everything he would need. The Omnilium flowing from his hands to create two-three meter, tall black speakers, followed by a small recording device. Speaking into the device he announced "Now introducing, Erik Vrell", his comrade looking at him surprised.

Victor tinkered with his dataverse device, putting the recording before a music file named "JoJo Pillar man theme" he assumed it would fit as Erik was thin like a pillar. As things fell into place it would seem that the assassin had timed his plan perfectly, for just as he finished setting things up, the witch from before exited the throne room, seeming a little annoyed. Dave had an almost adorably frightened face. It had seemed that things had not gone as well as they could have. This is going to be fun Victor giggled to himself as he snuck up on Erik, whose attention had been laser-focused on the witch. Before the guard could speak Victor pushed the psychic into the room and pressed play on his dataverse device.