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Prince Fair Blossom
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Central Underground Bunker, Fort Firnis on 18th October
To call Fort Firnis a “fort” would be quite an understatement. It is, in fact, a multitude of low buildings in the centre of various overlapping defensive positions covering miles and miles of ground, very close to the southern border of Southkol.
In fact, a few ruined buildings in the south of Southkol serve as makeshift barricades for one of the outer defence layers.
Although, or maybe because Fort Firnis is very close to the border, it serves as the main supply depot for the Kormunian Army, with its own railway station and a fleet of transport vehicles. It's also a way-station for soldiers arriving from the Kormunian hinterland or leaving the combat area to be assigned somewhere else. Last but not least, the deep underground bunkers provide workspace for the staff of the local commandeering officer.
It's also a very busy place, you learned as much.
After spending a whole day in the care of a few very nervous doctors, who seemed to have been inclined to make your stay in the well-equipped hospital as boring as possible, Stanislaw and Jourdane were finally able to convince the person in charge to let you leave, but during your first night in the living quarter you grew to miss the secluded tranquillity of your bed in the sickbay. Kormunian soldiers seemed to have a field day marching up and down in endless columns right in front of your door, and the angry shouting of the officers in a language you don't understand didn't help at all.
After your first night in Fort Firnis the local commandant, a brigadier called Nesive, showed up and apologized several times for the inconveniences, by which, as far as you grasped, he meant the fact that your hotel was blown up by a missile.
On the other hand, the news that all members of your Gorvian staff made it through the night alive and in relatively good health cheered you up to no end. After the arrival at the Montgomery Hotel, most of them had gathered in the hotel's lobby on the first floor for a late drink and thus were able to swiftly evacuate the building. Now, just like you, they are guests in Fort Firnis.
Jacobsen, the man of the CCSH, and Quant, the journalist, have not been as lucky. They are both still in the sickbay, Quant recovering from smoke poisoning, while Jacobsen seems to stable, but unconscious after receiving serious head injuries.
For a change, you don't wait for Stanislaw to visit you in your quarters. Instead, you pay him a visit in one of the rooms where your entourage spends the day sitting on their bunk beds, trying hard not to revel in inactivity. Ironically, Jourdane, the blind woman, who still knows the place better than any of the Gorvians, usually helps the Gorvians out whenever they get lost in the underground maze they have to stay in while the fighting on the surface still lasts.
The battle, and every Kormunian you spoke to now calls it so, is going quite well- depending on the point of view, of course. Since the Kormunians were quite concerned about the well-being of you and your staff, you unconsciously side with them whenever you think about the fighting.
The intensity of combat died down quickly on the second day, but, understandably, you were not allowed to get to the surface.
“Would have been quite a scandal, getting the Gorvian president killed on his first visit in Kormun, would it not?” the Brigadier Nesive told you once in his horrible accent. You agreed wordlessly.
Nesive, a military man who seems to fulfil all movie clichés up to the point of constantly biting and chewing a fat cigar (heaven knows where he got those in this isolated country), has provided you with a communication line to the outside world, something which seems more difficult for the Kormunians than you previously imaged. The military communication hub you saw would have been scrapped in Gorvia twenty years ago.
Beside the highly important call back home, where Florence and the rest of the G.I.A. keep things going, you actually got some news about the reason you came to Kormun in the first place: The negotiations have been postponed by a week and, since the building, where the negotiations should have been held originally, has been flattened by a 650 kilo bomb, the new location will be Horest, a small village near the border to Tarrperia, an area that is considered much safer than either Southkol or Northkol at the moment.
The negotiations weren't cancelled altogether, because, as the Kormunians found out, elements of the Lovkosi Army defected to the ultraconservative hard-liners in Lovko, who oppose any solution to the conflict which does not include their radical views. Still, they might want to participate in the negotiations, if only to show their current influence among the Lovkosi, and send their own representatives along with pope Solia IV. Nesive, however, said that the leaders of the Kormunians are sceptical whether the hard-liners should be informed about the new location, fearing another attack. It's true that the attackers did not have the intention to sabotage the negotiations in the first place, the blowing up of the Montgomery Hotel has been merely an accident. They did not, or could not, know the Gorvians were in the hotel, or at least that's what the Kormunians claim.
As you enter their quarters, you notice the members of your delegation are sitting together in a sinister circle. You notice Jourdane, who spent a lot of time with the Gorvians, is absent.
“Ah, Sir!” Stanislaw greets you. “We were just talking about you?”
“You were?”
“Well, yes. To be more precise, we wanted to ask you something.” Stanislaw gestures towards the assembled men and women. “Boredom seems to be the seed of loony ideas. We discussed our current situation, and if we stay for the negotiations...”
“If we stay?”
“Well, Sir, if we abandoned the negotiations now, who would blame us? Our life of every one of us was in danger, after all.”
“I see.”
“Don't get we impression we'd want to. If you decide to stay, we'd all stay with you, right guys?”
Murmured acknowledgements from the group.
“So?”
“I think you'll concur if I say, the situation has changed quite a bit since our arrival. We got a new negotiating party, and we don't know how the other factions will react to that. On the other hands, nobody, not even Jourdane, knows that I understand Lovkormunian perfectly. And Mister Leschki here...” Stanislaw points at a scrawny man with a birth mark on his face. “...his Lovkormunian is not half bad, either. And then Miss Shaley...”
A tall woman with black hair stands up. You can see the day-old, first-degree burns on her hands. “I learned Lovkormunian at school, Sir.”
“...which leaves us with three persons able to snatch some Intel.” Stanislaw concludes. “And I think information is what we need right now, if we still want to go through with this. As it stands, we'll fly to Horest in three days, and the other negotiating parties will arrive simultaneously. That leaves us at least three more days to try and sneak into one of the camps and take a closer look at their agendas. I can think of various excuses to get in touch with either party, the only problem is we don't have enough people to survey both the Lovkosi and the Kormunians. If we want to achieve anything in a short time like this, we'll have to concentrate on one faction. You might even consider one-to-one talks with either Solia IV. or Field Marshal Austeaux, to see what they are willing to tell us and how far it differs from what we can deduce.”
“Well, originally I had planned not to talk to any of them before the negotiations officially start. Would give nobody reasons to doubt our neutrality” you say.
“I, personally, think we should try to get as much Intel as possible, Sir, especially about how the factions react to the uprising of the hard-liners in Lovko.” Stanislaw answers. “This will help to avoid stumbling into something heedlessly.”
“Yeah, and end up in a burning hotel or something like that” Leschki says. Some of the others laugh.
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