Efficiency in the Face of a Gaping Hole in the Machine

Efficiency in the Face of a Gaping Hole in the Machine

Postby Glenn » Sat Jan 04, 2014 10:23 am

It had been a perfect storm.

Your guard described what you had built as an equation. Balancing forces, puzle pieces fit seemlessly together to form a functioning whole. Improboble mathematics. Of all the Were one piece to slip and fail, he said, so too would the whole. I disl This was and remains true: that what you haf built, improboble though it might be, you haf built soundly. Each body suffered superfissal damage. Each body prevailed despite. Had we wholly lost any one of these ---- the Constabulary, the Militia, the Inquisitory ---- Myrken would not haf fallen to the Civil bodies. It would haf fallen into chaos and violence, to be resolved months later and at an enormous cost of both lives and trust, the old pattern of years of centuries repeated yet once more.


One piece had fallen. It was not the sort of piece that Ariane Emory would think of first and foremost. It was not the sort of piece that should have toppled other things with it. It was not the sort of piece that should have been necessary if all else worked.

No, it had to be a perfect storm and it was.

Glenn Burnie had learned from the mistakes of the past. Glenn Burnie had learned from the disasters of the past. He had prepared. That was why the tapestry had held together, why the government had not fallen when so many had before. Even in the face of tumult and chaos, it stood. Every piece was there for a specific reason. Every piece was there to combine with the others and stand against the very ideas of fate and doom and darkness. It was a wall.

If you take one brick away from a wall, it does not fall. It does, however, leave a hole.

The Foundation had been decimated. Famine followed. The government had to face this crisis without the tool specifically meant to fight it.

Even that, in and of itself, might have been surmountable. It was not just one piece missing however, but two. The Governor was gone, trapped in Golben, himself starving, then an invalid recovering, and ultimately, finally, crawling back to his feet. He had anticipated the mob. He had anticipated the response from the people to Rhaena's slights and the slights of her thralls. He had not been able to anticipate the famine, not on top of everything else.

The Foundation should have done its job. It was created, with the memory of long razed Foggy Bottom in mind, to help recovery and to prevent suffering. It had a stock of money and resources to rebuild destroyed homes, to help the hungry, to support orphans and give a hand to the poor. Rhaena Olwak, at her very lowest, after losing her hand and her spirit, had been put in charge of it. Glenn knew she had excellent organizational skills and could manage the money. Moreover, she needed purpose after losing so much. When she was transformed due to Catch's energies a number of winters ago, she became far more pleasant and saw the need to give and help and to provide schooling through it as all the more important.

When her sanity fell due to the Storyteller and so much more, it was one of the first things to fall with her. Other resources were poured into it in Glenn's absence, important resources, but instead of rebuilding and preparing for disaster, it became a bloated monster meant for beautification and reeducation. It was where she found the most fervent of her civil constables and it was these poor soul that were left maddened by her death or the first to be attacked by the mobs. A number of them had survived both eventualities, but their personalities were permanently changed. They were part of a new rising class but so lost in Rhaena's mad ideals that they were utterly useless in their old job.

Resources still remained, however. They had been massed in the Foundation before Rhaena's death and while some had been stolen away by the Foundationers who survived, in their fallen leader's name to prepare, perhaps for a future rebeautifcation and some minor amount was taken by looters, much still remained. Even more had been filtered directly to Rhaena herself and the looters had gotten none of that.

Unused. Untouched. For no one existed to touch it or to use it.

It took Burnie weeks to dig out of the chaos and his own infirmity, weeks to realize this. By then, it was too late to make the most use of it. He had filtered the money held by Rhaena back into the remnants of the Foundation's coffers. It let him discover first the rest and second that so little had been done with it to help people. His machine had broken and he had never fully realized it. It WAS too late though, for the northern and eastern pathways had frozen. The only way through the mountains now would be with the aid of Burel, and that was a path that once crossed, could not be uncrossed.

There were merchants to the south, in the royal province and elsewhere, that had stocks for the winter untouched by the unnatural desolation in Myrken. They knew the problems at hand, however, and were more than happy to fleece Myrken Wood for whatever they could.

Still, money was money and grain was purchased, as was dried fruit and meat, things that could last, that were easy to transfer. In the end, the tally was not enough. It was something, though, a gesture as much as anything else, something to help, to tide over as more solutions were sought. The Foundation was gone. Anything it was replaced with would have a stigma. In so many ways, Rhaena tainted the very idea of it down to the core. No, these men and women distributing food were workers from the Governor's Office, clearly uniformed as such, even if some of them were new (carefully vetted) hires. The distribution itself would be protected, in part, by the militia, and guided by Treadwell's tax records as to ensure that people were not forgotten or left out. Things would be explained as best as they could be at the time (that more was being sought but this was what could be offered for now, enough to supplement, enough for a short period of time). It was ultimately a lightning operation, arriving, distributing, and leaving mysteriously and quickly, never staying anywhere too long.

It was not a permanent solution, but it was a sign. Burnie and his office, the Militia, the Council, the government, had shaken off the ice and death and the chains of the last few months that had kept them from acting. The machine was moving once again.
Glenn
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