After analyzing all the information, I concluded that humans were humans no matter what they looked like. Their politics stayed just as bullshit as ever!
The nearest settlent to the Bee Empire, Krisha village, was a part of the Lower Grazahmich Province in the Naregan Kingdom. A prosperous place, with fields that brought harvest three tis a year and forests where the ga never ended. Snow only fell high into the unliving mountains (this is how locals called actual mountains, as opposed to "living mountains", or pillar mountains, or the massive stone-like trees which opposed to actual wooden trees), and very few people saw it at all.
As far as my available information sources were concerned, the kingdom spanned for half the world and was surrounded by barbarians, monsters and evil spirits with even more tongue-breaking nas than these spirits' countries.
(I wouldn't have rembered all these nas without a perfect mory, and I wondered how locals themselves rembered them.)
Most importantly, from what my hard-working girls gathered from Anad Shach and other humans, only a few centuries ago, the Naregan Kingdom was a bunch of much smaller kingdoms.
Now it was a united country ruled by a High King, but its separate provinces often rebelled for one reason or another, forcing the High King or a province's lord to gather armies to squash the rebellions with a terrible show of force.
The Upper Grazahmich province was currently rebelling for ethnic reasons. Anad Shach called them "savages" and "bandits", and they called people of Lower Grazahmich "wild dogs".
Yeah, nobody could be more racist to each other than ethnic groups of people who look exactly the sa to an outsider…
Now brigand armies of Upper Grazahmich were robbing nearby provinces to get resources for their rebellion, and the lord of Lower Grazahmich was recruiting peasants to an army so he could raze and rob cities of Upper Grazahmich "in the na of the High King" (and in his own coffers, of course).
All the while, as rumors had it, gods beca angry with the people and began throwing plagues at them, their cattle and their crops. The rapid evolution of sicknesses was affecting the humans, too—but at least they had enough sense to isolate the sick.
On a more local scale, the Beehounds discovered a town and a couple dozens more villages of humans. All of them were about as technologically developed as Krisha village—not much. Although for , any place without cars and glass windows felt terribly backward…
The Beehounds returned shocked by the amount of humans in a town, but ready to persevere even against the power that this many humans represented.
But I saw only great opportunities.
***
"This is our chance. War is a ti of opportunities and profit! It's the ti when everybody has problems and needs solutions. Which we can provide!" I told Ambrosia so ti after getting these reports. "Just imagine it. With telepathy, we have convinced the village elder that we were forest spirits. Why not convince the locals that we are ssengers of their gods?"
I was lying on the softest pillow in the Empire—Amby's chest—after a round of vigorous Horizontal Gene Transfer. She was absentmindedly playing with the hair on my nape—a heavenly feeling that cald and stimulated my thoughts at once.
Later, this will have to be brought to the Council so we could chart detailed plans. Right now, I was thinking aloud.
"I see you want my opinion on this, Necty…" Ambrosia humd thoughtfully. "For soone who, as you said, uses lies every day, the humans are easy to trick. But tricks… They are unreliable, like a poorly made hamr. How could we know they won't fail us at the least convenient mont? With the Krisha village, we know as much as its humans that if we wanted to, we could still kill them all. This keeps them obedient."
I chuckled.
"You are right, Amby, but this is where the beauty of the best tricks appears. Humans also believe that gods can kill them all at any mont, so as long as they believe we are their ssengers, they will act as if we can kill them. There are also individual humans who carry power over entire nations. We can threaten one human well enough—and this will make them obey, and then will make their entire nation obey."
I felt, rather than saw, how Ambrosia nodded.
"Yes. Human leaders are as important as leaders of bees… Although much harder to define. The warrior humans and the scared humans of Krisha village had separate leaders, but worked together, didn't they? I imagine that with their strange little colonies and families, humans in the large kingdom have even more leaders. Can we threaten them all?"
I made guesses in my head.
The High King was sowhere far, far away. We just couldn't logistically reach him. But the Upper and Lower Grazahmich were within range—sowhat. It won't be easy or entirely safe, but we could gain power of these two kingdoms without putting the Bee Empire at risk.
Ruling from the shadows until it was the ti to step out of them…
Sounded pretty nice. We were, after all, just tiny bees in a tiny empire compared to the human countries.
For now.
"I must ask Things-Things to craft a larger map. A map of the entire Naregan Kingdom… Our wall map won't fit the entire thing!"
Now Ambrosia chuckled.
"Perhaps it would fit if it took an entire wall of the hive cave."
"You know, sohow I'm not sure about it, Amby…"
I wondered how large Earth-Oga-0048 truly was in size.
I also wondered where I should start with laying out the threats to humans. But one thing was clear—a mission like this required agents with special training. They would have to travel far and alone like Beehounds, sneak around and kill like Commandos, and know as much about humans as Explanatory's Researchers team…
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