Merlot knew shredder gas was fictional — made from nightlock berries crushed into a fine powder. A chilling parallel to Zyklon B, used at Auschwitz, which was all too real, unlike Catwerp. So far, the story had been growing darker. Lolita stubbornly refuses to give up on her quest for revenge. He had forgotten what made Lolita so unyielding, forgetting at times that he could be stubborn, refusing to accept the doctor's diagnosis that he had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from the war.
Alan encouraged him to vote every four years for the next president. Merlot thought it was pointless to make the trip to the voting booth. Especially when the election felt like a billionaire's club deciding which billionaire gets the next handout.
"Don't you care who's in charge of the country?" Alan snapped. He did care, but he knew his vote wouldn't change his salary. What he needed was a job that paid enough to live, not another ritual that pretended his voice mattered. Tired of the same recycled promises about fixing inequality. The rich kept getting tax breaks, and the poor kept being told to be patient — or to pay more.
Merlot read in the news that the president's son mostly kept to himself. He didn't blame him — how could anyone live freely with the Secret Service following every move? Online dating was out of the question, not with scammers pretending to be him. Sure, the kid was cute, but too young for Merlot's taste. Hard to enjoy a real date when the paparazzi can turn one awkward moment into a headline. Maybe they should get a life and let the boy have one.
Merlot never collected celebrity selfies like Pokémon cards. Refused to pose as a fan—it made him feel small, like he mattered less than the person beside him.
The president's son's upbringing had been sheltered. Couldn't have a birthday parties as a kid without the paparazzi turning it into a spectacle. The hidden curse of having a father in the Oval Office: a life stripped of normalcy, shadowed by cameras and suspicion.
Still, Merlot couldn't feel sorry for him — not when he stood to inherit a tax-free estate, assuming the bill passed. Maybe this was his father's way of showing love. Merlot suspected the boy would have preferred time and attention over another expensive toy. He'd seen on television how the reporter interacted more with the boy than the president ever did from behind his desk. Perhaps the estate was his father's way of making up for lost time. Merlot didn't need a trust fund—he needed Medicaid. Some wounds can't be bought away. Years of therapy hadn't erased the memory of being expected to live as a boy, not a girl. Yet he had grown into the man he was never meant to be.
Merlot scowled at Borealia's latest decree. The head tax, born in 1885 to punish the Red Dragon, was her way of saying thanks for the cheap labour. Once the railroad was done, she didn't need his workers anymore—just their wallets. The Red Dragon's sons had laid her tracks, bled in her tunnels, and died for her progress. Borealia called it nation-building; Merlot called it theft with paperwork.
Borealia at least had the decency to look sorry—sort of—after targeting the Dragon. Uncle Sam? Not a shred of regret after flattening Nippon. Nippon had started it, yes—but in the end, history was less about truth and more about who could wear the crown of cruelty.
Borealia blinked at Uncle Sam's outrage. Why was he yelling? She didn't just burn the White House—she burned the Treasury Building, the War Department, and the Capitol, too. Equal-opportunity arson, really.
She threw up her hands in protest. "I wasn't even alive in 1814. My birthday's 1867—blame the British officer ticking off his 'buildings to torch' checklist." The major general had ordered all public buildings destroyed; Barbecue Day in Washington was his idea, not hers.
Borealia never had any love for Uncle Sam's "liberation" offer in 1813. She turned Beaver Dams into his personal walk of shame—an ambush that wiped the swagger off his march and left him face-first in the dirt. Sam swore his knees gave out that day.
Borealia called it what it was: an embarrassment, proof she'd outplayed him. Sam fired back that, if his knees hadn't folded like a cheap futon, he would've won hands down.
Borealia's history books praised her morality and charity—except when it came to the enslaved woman who torched Montreal. She was later hanged. Her only stroke of luck was not having her hands cut off. That part got edited out. Too messy for a clean narrative.
Felix, Merlot's character, had to learn the truth about Intermarium: a place far uglier than Lolita's fairy tale, where patriotism was served with sanitized history and convenient lies.