OMG COME HERE indeed. Seriously, just…what? This makes less sense than that picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head; less sense than Bulgaria and Greece declaring war on me for attacking their traditional enemy, the Turks. Those, however, can be attributed to the peculiarities of the diplomatic system; I had a high enough belligerence, they went “oh shit he’s trying to be a hegemon” (note:
not a “hedge mon,” that’s a Jamaican dude who sleeps under hedges, a hegemon is a state that wishes to accomplish a hegemony for itself and I believe it is a real word no matter what blatant and foul lies Microsoft Word attempts to push onto me) and then declared war on me. Because I had high belligerence, in case that lesson was lost because of my other ramblings.
This is more surprising than my underestimation of Turkey despite holding two or three war games concerning the invasion before the LAN. I had wanted to make sure that I could beat Turkey before German managed to blitz to Istanbul and take it. I succeeded in the war games in annexing Turkey in two and a half months or less, which was my estimate of how long it would take Germany to reach Istanbul blitzing through Austria-Hungary-Romania-Bulgaria (though in the end they went with Czechoslovakia-Romania-Bulgaria) but during the game itself was two German advances away from failing here. I also held war games concerning the conquest of Manchuria, as I wasn’t sure that Vorshilov would be able to actually conquer that Asiatic state at all, even without any sort of time limit as was present in Turkey. Well, he did in the war games, though they didn’t take Tannu Tuva into consideration or the concentration of units that I effected in-game at Vladivostok; in the war games, they were spread all around Manchuria’s border, thus forcing them to diffuse their own forces.
Anyway, I’m losing the thread here as I break down the fourth wall; all the dust and debris is doing an admirable job of camouflaging it with the color of dust and debris. I scream out “OMG COME HERE” into the local area cyberspace between my laptop and Discomb’s laptop and pause the game. I immediately rush off to get cookies his mother had baked some time previously and began demolishing them, taking the bowl back with me when Anton arrives from the other room. My coke (not the white stuff) is already gone, emptied some time before; my papers with my vital details such as build plans, technology orders and corps commanders off to the side. With the cookies in my lap and Discomb to my right, I reveal a slight amount of information his spies would never have found for themselves (given that they were banned in the Riga Treaty of 2007, which stipulated the laws of game and war). This information will quickly be out of date due to the ever shifting nature of military deployments, but nonetheless, something is revealed.
Me, with the enormous tear in my shorts that came from working in construction for a month though I can’t for the life of me remember how I actually got it, obviously amused and explaining things to Discomb.
What I’m telling Discomb about, however, is far more amusing and more important than a bit of soon-to-be-obsolescent information on my military deployments in a certain local area. Specifically, Japan is up to some ridiculous antics. They are more ridiculous than the thoughts that must have been going through the ambassador from Bulgaria’s head when he delivered the declaration of war from his government to Litvinov. They were more ridiculous than Manchuria’s earlier antics that resulted in them doubling their territory and just about shattering Voroshilov’s Manchurian Front. Japan was finally on the attack!
Yes, after several long months, Japan was making its presence felt at last! They were attacking and killing Soviet soldiers, and were being killed in their turn! It was an amphibious assault! It was taking place at Narva!
Wait.
Narva? As in, Narva in…in the Socialist Soviet Republic of
Estonia?!
WHAT.