Ovlak Aslenia Derrigor Karhasker was not in a happy mood; not at all. No, today was a day of wrath and fire, of teacups flung at servants and priceless Artani oils being thrust from windows or hacked apart as she made her ponderous way from her boudoir, through the gallery and down the steps to her throne room. Ovlak of the Karhasker Sveni, ruler of the entire planet Huskuuru, Aslenia was not a person who you wanted to make angry. Indeed, through her centuries-long corpulent existence, many thousands of souls—whether innocent, guilty or something in between—have discovered to their peril how boundless the Ovlak’s wroth can be. As her grav-chair descended the stairs, floating four feet above them, Aslenia continued to curse and shout, her thick voice slamming against the walls and scattering servants before her, making them flee like rats before a flood.

Those laboring in the great tower of House Karhasker, stretching far into the sky and built into the very cliffs east of Ahskra, knew very well how dangerous their mistress was when in one of her moods. No mere conveyance was her chair, no, but rather a defensive platform in its own right, with a dense nuclear battery and four barrels sticking out on each side, ready to discharge high-energy beams which could render a person’s makeup to the atomic in the span of milliseconds. And even if the Ovlak’s life-extending chair was not such a lethal object in its own right, the ancestral great-axe she wielded as she glided along the halls(her painting slashing axe) was terrible enough a weapon to give the greatest of warriors pause.

“Greedy! Fucking! Leech! Merchants!” she shouted as she swerved into the great hall, her axe’s double blade glowing with a baleful yellow light as it slashed through a three-millennia old tapestry hanging along one wall. Her pudgy legs were kicking with each swipe, her rabid eyes scanning the room for any signs of less clothy and more fleshy targets upon which to unleash her ire.

“Meki-Dokar scum! Half-Sveni bastard whelps of dickless dogs! Corner my market! Corner my market!? I’ll show them what-”

“Your Excellency Aslenia, they are here.”

The Ovlak’s chair spun about, and her axe came with it, swinging out in a deadly arc to decapitate whoever it was who dared address her august personage, dared approach—

The axe hit nothing but air, and she brought her left arm up to halt the swing. Before her chair knelt a wizened, scrawny old man, head bowed, bald pate displayed.

“Your Excellency,” her vizier said again, “the Meki-Dokar delegation has arrived.”

She eyed him, fingers twitching where they gripped the haft of her weapon. For a minute or more there was utter silence. Ovlak Aslenia’s anger still boiled and raged, but some far-buried mental instinct told her not to slice the kneeling old fool into many asymmetrical chunks of flesh. Training a new vizier, after all, was not something she had the patience for right now. At long last, Aslenia gave a shuddering, almost petulant sigh and affixed her axe to the magnetic clamp installed on the right-hand side of her throne.

“Show the bastard ilk in then, Gormimus,” she said with a lazy wave of the hand, already gliding up the stairs to her dais. Her throne swiveled around and slotted into the space carved for it in the pink marble, though with its deadly barrels still very much above ground and primed to fire. Finally settled, Aslenia’s eyes scanned her hall. No guards stood along the pink walls(she kept none in her hall, trusting to her throne, axe and auto-turrets hidden within the walls to keep her safe). What irked her was that none of her servants, other than the bent-backed vizier, were at hand—no cupid-faced boys bearing trays full of sweetmeats, no maidens fair ready to pour whiskey into goblets, no—

A great grinding of gold-plated steel reverberated through the hall as Gormimus pressed the button which made the door(twelve by sixty feet) slide down into the depths of the tower palace. It took a full three minutes for the thick metal portal to descend, every second of which the Ovlak promised a slow death to the absent servants who had abandoned her to such a dire lack in repast. Her vizier seemed patience itself as he waited beside the grinding door, arms folded behind his back and eyes staring at the empty bottom part of the wall where just this morning his favorite Asservian tapestry depicting the fall of Ghaskalex had hung. After the Ovlak’s assault, all that now remained was a crumpled cloth upon the floor, with the tapestry above being nothing but red sky, the tops of trees and walls—any context lost.

When the door finally slotted itself firmly open, the Meki-Dokar delegation entered without being bade to do so, a breach of protocol that sorely angered Aslenia. Yet, the insult went still further—those that entered were clearly not of Meki-Dokar blood, nay, they weren’t even Sveni! Three ragged beggars, slaves, mendicants—the Ovlak cared naught what they were—slouched into the room. At least, two of them did, with the third borne aloft between them on what seemed to be a silver platter with many wires looping out of it and into the human atop. The two bearers were wide-shouldered, a man and woman, with scarred and beaten visages. The unfortunate being atop the platter, though, was so pierced by pipes and wires that no good guess could be made as to its original form. Aslenia cared naught, for her attention was solely fixed upon the smooth, crystalline screen that had been installed into the being’s torso.

She scoffed as the two brutes made their way toward her throne, careful not to drop their burden.

“So this is how the Meki-Dokar conduct business among Sveni, eh?” she demanded when the troupe finally came to a rest before the stairs to the dais. The two bearers, eyes downcast, said nothing. A gurgle came from the platter-being, then the distinctive sound of liquid flowing through pipes. Six seconds later, the crystalline screen flickered into life to show a room of bare white stone, with three benches carved from the wall. Atop each sat a person, each wearing a hat of considerable height and intricate decoration. The man seated in the middle, gaunt with a coppery beard hanging to his chest, spoke up. As he did, the mouth of the platter-person started moving, the words spewing from its lips sounding exactly as Aslenia knew the man to sound.

“Ah, the celebrated Aslenia Karhasker! I thank you, my dear fellow Ovlak, for seeing us at this time. We have much to discuss, indeed we do.”

“Stuff your shitty words down where they belong and come to the point, Ysivir. I received your missive, I read the figures, so what the fuck more do you have to say for yourself and your mongrel family?”

The man on the screen was still smiling, and he sketched a mock bow. Aslenia was startled when the thing atop the platter also bowed, so much so that she almost incinerated the trio of messengers on the spot. Her hand hovered over the trigger button as she met Ysivir’s gaze.

“Why my dear—why so hostile? It is with good intentions that we come to your tower, after all. Business knows no barriers, as my grandfather used to say.”

“Piss on your business and piss on your grandfather, miserly leech that he was. Get to the point, so that I can order your two slaves and their dinner thrown down the mountain. You, Ysivir, wrote to me that you’ve set up gorp pens on Jeriskar, Terimbun and Lop. You even went so far as to tell me you’ve started growing gorp right here on Krask, less than a day away from Ahskra via the subrails. You’ve cornered me, you copper-haired son of a whore. Stole my single most profitable export, ready to over-supply it to the markets and cut me right out of the equation! Somehow you’ve gotten the genes and in the age-old slimy fashion of your rotten excuse of a Sveni house, now you’ve come to gloat about it? Is that why your little beggar brigade has trooped their way here? If so, we have nothing more to say to one another. Gormimus!”

“Yes your Excellency?”

“Fetch my bath-bearers. Have them dispose of this rabble.”

“Certainly, your Excellency,” said the Vizier, casting one last forlorn look at the violated tapestry before heading out the great doorway.

“As little as I value my messengers, dear Aslenia, I doubt the time has come to send them plummeting just yet. Why, you haven’t even heard my proposal!” Ysivir exclaimed, his voice coming out in a tone of mock-indignation.

“And just what, other than sticking your gangrenous digits into my gorp fruit trade, do you wish to propose? Talk, dog, for soon such a chance shall no longer belong to you.”

“Ah, always such haste! Such impatience! Why, my proposal is simple: you breed gorp, we breed gorp. Now, as much as it might pain you to hear it, our breeding pens on the continent’s northern plains are well on their way to producing their first harvest. You know what that means my dear? Of course you—”

“For fuck, say your say, Ysivir!”

“Very well.” Ysivir’s face became deadly serious and he leaned forward on his bench, eyes twinkling. “You Karhaskers, despite not being of a mercantile bent, have successfully bred gorp worms for many millennia, exporting their fruit to all of Ahskra and well beyond. I see no reason to end this proud tradition of yours, indeed, my offer is this: let us share the market, my dear. There is no need for a price war—indeed, you would come off badly second, considering that we now have pens on four planets whereas you, as always, have access only to Huskuuru. So, my dear, dear Aslenia, let us work together! Let us merge our markets, set our prices, and so generate profit for all concerned. Indeed, if—”

“Hear me, Ysivir,” the corpulent Ovlak interrupted. “Know this—you are correct. I will not win a trade war, seeing as you Meki-Dokar scum have had so many thousands of years in which to hone your skills as two-bit peddlers. No, I am not that unwise. However, there shall be war, there shall be a great bloody war and in the end I’ll make sure that the spikes upon my parapets will be decorated with all your long-hatted mongreloid heads! That is all!”

“War? War!? There has never been a war among Sveni! What you propose can only-”

The man, or rather his flesh puppet, spoke no more, for this time Aslenia did slam her fist down on the trigger. There was a bright flash of light as the barrel let loose its beam of energy, swiveling from left to right. Three heartbeats later, there was nothing but ash on the floor and silence in the great hall. Ovlak Aslenia studied this once-human detritus, then looked up as someone entered through the great gate.

“Ah, Gormimus, just in time! Now, do clean up this mess.”

Aslenia then noticed the eight naked men, all as heavily built as oxen, standing behind her vizier.

“And bid them bring my bath. It is high time I enjoy a pleasant stroll through my gardens, eh Gormimus?”