Excerpt from the Diary of the Empress of the Earth, Tan'Ya
It truly was a blessing to be born in a world where reincarnation is seen as the norm. Granted, it was also the norm that past memories are lost while reincarnating for most people, with the most notable exception being the Avatar. But this really brings into perspective how skewed the worldviews of the people here are. They hardly blink an eye when I do or say something utterly illogical. It is both a blessing and a curse.
How many lives have I lived before this one? It was getting harder and harder to parse through the wealth of information in my head. Obviously, Being X did something to me for his stupid experiment. It would seem I have no way of reliably forgetting my past selves. But that is a tale for another time. The tale I currently am still weaving however, still gets on my nerves.
I was born roughly 50 years ago, in the Earth Kingdom. A kingdom so ridiculously hard headed that in a literal hostile invasion by our neighboring nation, the best the nobles could manage was a temporary truce to repel them, only to snap right back to fighting with each other.
If I were to compare the internal politics in the Earth Kingdom, I would say the closest approximation would be the Romance of the Three Kingdoms era of China. Every minor noble with a city to their name acting like hegemons, paying little to no attention to what was happening literally three feet away from the city gates.
The country basically threatened to blow itself up every three days, but anyone with the power to stop or curb the revolt had no interest in doing so. After all, they were safe behind their impenetrable walls.
For the first ten years of my latest attempt at the comedy called life, I was merely just another orphan out on the streets, left to die with little-to-no chances of surviving. But I was not a mere yet another homeless orphan. I had centuries of knowledge and experience to help inform my decisions. I did what any enterprising individual in my unique situation would have done. I gathered like-minded orphans and formed a gang organization to further my goals in this life. Screw over all those who screwed me over.
It took me five years of constant political maneuvering and posturing to build up my wanna-be mafia organization to the heights needed to take over my first city. And soon, my second. Turns out that the common populace were sick of the constant wars, even rocks break down from the erosion caused by dripping water, after all. I built an entirely new system of governance from the ground-up for my cities, and renamed my gang organization to the United Earth Nation Coalition
The grand plan, as I had called it, was to grab up a handful of regions, gather enough power to repel the fire nation if they were to somehow reach so far inside the Earth Kingdom territory, and secede from the Earth Kingdom. I had not accounted for the fact that the fire kingdom would be so enterprising.
What I had not accounted for, however, was the ridiculous leaps in technology made by the Fire Kingdom in a relatively tiny period of time. It almost makes me wonder if they have a reincarnator in their midst as well.
The Fire Nation had, you see, discovered the potential of steam-powered mechanics. They have gone through a very weird industrialisation period. I too wanted to use early versions of the steam engine to increase my social capital, but the sheer amount of time it would take for me to do so with the resource I currently had on hand made that project unfeasible.
But, the fact that the Fire Kingdom had access to steam-powered ships and some kind of cannon that used Firebending instead of gunpowder to function meant that I could piggyback their new technology and my knowledge to give myself a cutting edge. After all, there are plenty of volcanoes here, with sulfur and saltpeter to make the medieval Japanese's version of gunpowder.
Within five years of the start of my campaign for a peaceful life, I had crafted a proper military doctrine regarding the various weapons used by my army, whether weapons of tradition, or of my own design. I had also managed to create a blueprint for a single-shot musket rifle, which someone on my staff likened to 'the thunder that comes after the flash of lightning you never see.' And that became the motto of my rifle corps, who called themselves the carriers of lightning.
Though guns were functional and worthy tools but they did have some problems especially against fellow Earth Kingdom bender when you can literally raise a wall of dirt in between you and the enemy trying to shoot you it means very little which was why guns theoretically or more used for skirmish operations ways to murder the enemy when they least expected it slowly weakening the power of the region we were in until the only benders left were the ones under our employee and once that was done just took about another 5 years the earth Nation as I had deemed it was in power with me as the new leader.
By that point I was 20 and I was a veteran of several campaigns. And my forces were a lot stronger than the earth Kingdom. Over the course of the next year I was able to push into the Earth Kingdom through a heavy campaign of making the enemy fear fighting me and by the end of that year the rest of earth kingdom fell except for one issue that remains occupiable the Earth kingdoms mega City.
Now I had to possible ways to handle it lay siege with the idea to eventually just charge the walls and have at it after all, I had plenty of artillery by this point to break down those walls but I had to admit it would take a long time to break those walls down and there was always the possibility that their earthbenders would rebuild them for my troops could preach the breach.
There's also the possibility to try and dig under the walls and maybe gain access to the city that way but again that would result in fighting with benders and being a non-bender. Well I could not afford the chance that that would fail badly.
There was the one thing that I could do and I don't think the bender of the mega City considered that was simply to cut the city off completely. Reroute and damn the rivers so the population was not able to get a good amount of water to prevent anyone from leaving or entering the city with any trade goods and simply hold the entire thing under a massive siege.
Yes it was a very hard thing to do after all it was a mega City they were miles upon miles of walls to watch however most of the local population was actually in favor of my conquering which meant they weren't really interested in trading with the mega City if that meant the continuation of a stellar regime at failure.
In essence the Earth Kingdom had lost the mandate of heaven and through my expertise at drawing out the pain of it all I made it very apparent who had the mandate nowadays.
The royalty of the mega City and the earth kingdom was destroyed within two years meaning I had the most powerful City.
Granted I didn't spend much time there for the first two years and after all being inside the city put me at the behest of the political population who were not exactly happy with the drought I had manufactured for what inside the city the years before. I Did not want to have a situation like what had gone down in Paris and the rulers of the French Kingdom.
Thankfully though I had a good excuse for why I did not spend time in that City after conquest. The fire Nation still needed to be dealt with and dealt with.
Raising the Earth's Nations army I went to war with the fire nation. It didn't matter that they had their steamships fire bending when all you had to do was continue a volley of fire at them from beyond their fire Bender range.
They can do all their fancy dance moves all they want and 100 yards was not something they could throw fire far enough to stop and frankly the manpower advantage was ridiculous at this point.
Most wars won by whoever has the large enough Bender manpower and normally that would be the Earth Kingdom so the fact that the fire Mage was beating the Earth Kingdom showed that theory had quite a lot of skill when it came to bender on bender combat. However, now that I could get non-benders involved as well, the manpower advantage was astronomically even larger and guns were a great equalizer.
Forcing them to the coast was easy, forcing them off the continent was harder but artillery was brought in from the siege of the capital city and positioned in places that gave them good overreach of bays that allowed the fire Nation to continue their colonization though we forced that to come to an end. Also at this point we were producing enough gunpowder that I was willing to just drop explosive minds into the water and let it float about and see what happens.
Took 5 years to clean that up after the war but it did its job as the firebenders were forced to back off with their Navy allowing us to officially take the coast back.
As soon as that was accomplished I set to work building our own Navy, this time based on the principles of getting artillery guns on the sea so I could continue to fire at the Fire Nation from great distances and force them further and further back.
Once I was sure that the fire nation was forced back beyond a safe distance I set about dealing with the Earth Nation and realizing that it wasn't just the Earth Nation at this point. Percentages of the population I realized were actually water benders who had been transported from the southern water tribes and fire Nation individuals who'd been left behind during the evacuation. I could try and return them to their homelands I realized but well they were an advantage.
I left them alone. If they wished to return to their home countries, they could do it themselves. What was important now was to get the economy working and keep the military at a professional level.
Also to rebuild the government into something that would not be easily corrupted by the fire nation is an attempt to gain control of segments of the former Earth Kingdom.
Representative republics Commonwealth and democracies that's what I instituted across the Earth Nation or attempted to with a central Senate in the mega City in order so I can run itself fine enough now I couldn't exactly get rid of monarchies. There was simply no way these primitives would accept that so the best way to deal with the need for a monarchy was to make it a nearly powerless entity.
After all the government that governs least governs best the most I set up for the civilian government to get done was a simple idea that roads must be built so commerce must flow and they took that to heart, the senate set up a tax in order to pay for those roads over the next half decade being confident was bound together bye not only good road networks but bonds of steel is I Incorporated the railroad into an existence.
Of course the first example of the railroad was run on wooden rails simply creating a system by which horses could drag a large stockpiles of things back and forth from major cities but someone quickly figured out that "oh yeah those steam engines that were put in the new warships could also be used to build a train and from there railroad economy was funding things."
This also helped with transporting the military around which was able to shrink quite a bit local governments were allowed to build their own military from the volunteers that helped free the continent of the fire Nation. But I only kept a small army of very well trained professionals on a mobile network with units mostly focused near areas the fire Nation may try to invade in a small detachment in the Central City in case I needed to use them to prevent an overthrow of the government.
With a small fleet of Earth vessels in a professional army, I believed the Earth nation was safe and by the 30th year of my life I was fine being called the new Queen of the earth Kingdom, even the empress a few times.
Still wasn't a fan of the mega City. I prefer to live outside of it mainly because I had a feeling through research that there were organizations that determined how things really were run inside that City and if I entered it I would probably be surrounded by Yes Men who would blind me to what was really going on.
So I built my own governmental house outside the city. If I ever needed to retreat inside of it it was only a couple miles away and it was within railroad distance so if there was anything the government needed me to sign I could come into the city but I was maintaining myself as an individual of the land.
Anything I was trying to mimic a certain Roman Emperor who'd rebuilt the empire after decades of disaster and then farm a little bit. Granted I was farming on a massive estate and had plenty of employees to do the job but it was a nice life.
As for the world around the earth Nation I was someone aware of the events going on, without a need for slave labor that push the fire Nation into the southern water tribes and with their government being thoroughly defeated the raids on the southern water tribe dropped to near zero and then drop to zero when Earth Nations fleet began to patrol the region. I even sold them a few fire Nation vessels thinking they could do whatever they want with them, granted they needed to come to the Earth Nation to resupply but it was still a friendly Navy that could watch over their own territory. It Was also a Navy I didn't need to maintain our national taxes and they needed to pay us to maintain.
The ruler of the fire Nation apparently committed suicide or fell on his sword or something the reports I got from that were never very cleared up though the possibility that it was suicide was high on that list simply due to the fact that they seem to style themselves after Japanese culture. Either way, having a 60 year war turned upside down in a matter of years seems to have upset the man quite greatly.
The next ruler, a teenager , had taken over the kingdom and had accepted various dysphoria of Earth Kingdom nobility into their Islands, obviously trying to build a case for another invasion. Which gave me plenty of reason to keep pushing for a continued building of the naval effort trying to Ally with the northern water tribes so that we could present a unified front if they tried it again.
There was also a dysphoria of traders and collaborators in the northern and southern water tribes. I didn't go after them as hard simply because they were probably not going to be used to justify an invasion of the earth Kingdom, not unless the water tribes decided that my anti-bending thinking was a problem. Then I might avail myself of services to remove them from the board before they could be used against the earth Nation.
As far as I was concerned the world was set right at this point. The Earth nation was a strong power on the board keeping the water tribes supported so they could maintain their independence and from what I could tell the fire Nation was no longer as fiery with their rhetoric about invading the Earth Nation. Their new leader, someone named Iroh, was more in favor of peaceful relations from what I'd seen.
And I was more than happy to retire to my villa and let the natural government take care of things. And for the first few years that's basically what I did but times changed and I needed to do something more than enjoy the villa and the large harem of women who'd found their way to my side over the decades.
The first problem in my books was trying to decide how to prevent the inevitable civil war. I was not going to be producing an heir so when I finally did it would either be the government taking over or a return of the royalty that had screwed everything up to begin with.
That seemed like a bad thing so I did the most reasonable thing I could. I opened up a school for gifted benders and kept my eyes on them and once one showed themselves to be particularly gifted I offered them a chance to become my hier.
I had managed to survive by the skin of my teeth and being one step of my opponents politically my hair would need to be the same way however I particularly gifted Bender would make it a little bit easier for them to survive and I just had to teach them that they're not over blow their abilities so they didn't become a menace to society.
Young girl named Toph came to be that hair blind but very effective with her bending and I particularly thought that blindness would actually be of service to her. It's kind of hard for a person to become Superior and mentality when they know that they are not even if they have a superior bending the fact that they are down one important sense would remind them that they are not immortal and things could go wrong.
At least that's what I would hope, so once that was done I made sure that she had a good education lined up and had a portion of the Villa alto herself. After all they need her wandering into the large side of the Villa that was controlled by my harem.
That I hope it would first all civil wars that could prop up an actual heir to the throne even if it was meant to only be a ceremonial position or one use for the military seems like a proper way to keep the situation underhand.
But coming out of early retirement to do that had revealed several other interesting things that I should learn about.
While visiting the city I realized that there had been apparently a miscommunication between me and several agents over the years as I had simply tried to push for a more reformed society, one that was heading in the upward direction of progress, liberation and science… Apparently the agents I had thought understood that we're not quite understanding that.
A thing called the imperial cult cut apparently been formed by someone at some point and basically worshiped me as the next Avatar, claiming that fire Nations destruction of the of the air Avatar had created a reset in the line of avatars and instead of the Bender gaining the powers of the four elements I had apparently gained the power of the spirit to quote unquote Marshall the people is against their oppressors.
I had to thoroughly bang my head on a brick wall when I got home after seeing some of the propaganda posters that had been put up. It looked like some of the worst elements of every religion had simply been rolled up into one to try and paint me as a religious figure.
I was supposed to be a founding father not a religious entity but apparently I would not be graced with uneasiness.
What was I to do when that category I didn't know yet theoretically I could order the guard to break in and break some heads and get those people to stop worshiping me, which of course had several dozen problems. One I didn't know how far this had spread and so attempting that may appear to be me just attacking the population going man with power.
And two I shouldn't have the ability to do that after all trying to lead the people to a better existence means not demanding people follow what I would like to believe. It was better to lead by example than to crush on her foot but how do you lead by example people out of worshiping you as a religious figure.
A few headbangs on the wall later I had come up with nothing. Perhaps simply my separation from the people had done it. Perhaps I should move into the person City and take up residence in the palace. It was a thought I would hate to do.
And my attempts to keep the peace through Superior arms being supplied by the Earth Nation had created an unfortunate situation that I had not foreseen.
You expect nation states to have a certain policy when dealing with foreign relations. After all, even Ally has been your ally for a good many years, they should stay your ally right.
The problem of course being that in the last few years the water tribes had been drifting further and further away from the earth Nations fear of influence.
With the fire Nation no longer being aggressive in their attempts to raid the Earth or water nation and see me more passive about how it was going to handle the world stage going forward and with the Earth Nation becoming a literal superpower simply through a cutting of most of the bureaucratic red tape and the bureaucracy in general being cut down by 25 out of 26 bureaucrats.
The Earth Nation reach was quite large and well expanding to the point that the Earth empire was being thrown about as the true nature of it again.
The Wonder tribes weren't exactly openly siding with the fire Nation that was not happening; those two got along like well fire and water not well.
But they were no longer allowing the Earth Nation fleet to harbor in their harbors or patrol their seas and we're making a deal about trying to get off of our support building their own ships.
A mistake I had mistakenly made was assuming that there would be no materials on their ice continents they could use to try and build their own equipment on mistake I was now paying for.
Their political and military leaders were getting extremely empty whenever my fleet came around and that no doubt was apparent to me that they were worried that the Earth nation was going to become the next Fire Nation and invade them.
I had no plans of that of course and I don't think my protege would have the will to do it but theoretically I could see such a situation developing through other political means after all I didn't control all the politics I didn't even in control the right to declare war that belong to the ad hub Senate I had created I simply retain the ability to fight the war as I please.
In essence it was quite apparent that the world was going towards a cold war between the three powers left after the destruction of the air nomads.
The fire Nation which was rebuilding even if they were claiming they were peaceful, the water tribes preparing for either an invasion from the fire Nation or ourselves or my own nation which I had to admit had suffered dearly under the effects of the fire Nations invasion.
It was not outside the realm of possibility that the Earth said it may vote for an invasion and I would need to try and Sue those bones before that became an actual issue. Hell there was even the possibility that my permission for the colonies of the fire Nation to stay in place would be tracked by the Earth Senate. What better way to get vengeance against the fire Nation then making them deal with the exiles of their own people.
But of course that could start a war and as much as we had enjoyed a competitive edge in the early parts of this decade after the creation of the gun. That competitive edge was fading as old models of weapons had found their way into the hands of the water tribes which they were obviously making some.
And pretend that we had always been successful in our attacks against the fire Nation is to be stupid there have been failures and with failures came the opportunity to withdraw some of our weapons and I would not be surprised if they had a stockpile of Earth Nation firearms on their home islands that they had been studying for nearly 20 years by this point which meant they probably had their own versions now.
I would need to keep a tighter leash on the Senate so they did not antagonize the fire Nation and start another war as last time it had been bloody but next time it would be even more brutal as we would no longer be the only owners of guns and I will admit it was very likely that our guns were falling behind.
Oh yes there were plenty of firearms across the Earth Nation now but that just meant that there was a lot of old muskets lying around I know I had pushed for the creation of something a bit better rifles and maybe something more than the line the most I've been able to get out of the military was rifled muskets.
The technology level was just not high enough for anything better than that and even that took expertise on metal making that rivaled the fire Nation have been able to accomplish.
Which is why I worry about what the Fire Nation has been cooking up for the last 18 years. Even if they were going peacefully, that didn't mean they hadn't gathered enough technology from the war to build something that could be competitive if they needed to be.
That actually could be a problem as well say the imperial cult decides to pay attention to what mine's saying on the Senate and go too far they had almost the exact same weapons as the army and could easily overwhelm it push into the Senate and well all of a sudden I was no longer just a back seat driver but in the middle of a civil war when my own government oh that was a pain but I hoped would not be coming down in the future more reasons to try and push them away and make sure they don't become any bigger than they already are.
And worse or worse for the rumors coming out of the territory that had formerly belonged to the air nomads. Over the last 3 weeks there have been strange reports of the return of the Avatar which was a laughable situation to say the least.
The Man was supposedly dead for almost a hundred years and all of a sudden just returns what was frozen in ice for all these years like Captain America.
The rumors of the Airbender pulling anything off was probably just a miscommunication or perhaps finally a water bender had been chosen as an avatar and have been kept secret up until this point somehow mastered airbending I don't know but I was worried about what that could mean for this situation that was developing.
A rogue political agent that could overthrow governments with superpowers was not exactly the best news in the world especially considering I was a government perhaps when he didn't like perhaps won the avatars didn't like considering they had apparently never bothered to do anything to prevent the terrible government said coming to control the fire Nation and the Earth empire.
Just another pile of worries on top of my growing mountain of worries.
My retirement seems to be coming to an end. My efforts to prevent this cold war going hot would need to be doubled.
And I would need to sign some sort of formal peace treaty with the Fire Nation as right now it was more of a we defeated them and kicked them out. If we could get a formal peace treaty maybe the world would be in a better place.
Formal treaty might at least prevent the spring up of a true conflict and maybe acknowledging the rights of the population within the occupied zone as another Nation perhaps that could be pulled off was hard to say.
As for the Avatar situation there was no proof that the Avatar was real or he had returned so I would let that lie for now needed to consolidate the government make sure that treaties with the fire Nation and water drives were secured and then I can worry about maybe dealing with a possible return of a religious idol also I need to destroy the other religious group that worshiped me as of the idol long list of problems.
All I wanted to do is spend time with the harem or maybe organize an expedition to go searching beyond the known world after all I doubted that the planet was just the four continents and many islands that were marked off on many of the maps it seemed too small to be producing the amount of gravity which meant either we were surrounded by 90% ocean or there was other land masses that we didn't know about which sounded a lot more interesting than dealing with a continued war between three tribes always trying to beat the hell out of each other over little conflicts about which element was better.
But that would wait until everything was secured once everything was stabilized then maybe I would see about getting the Senate to produce money for such an expedition. Perhaps even trying to colonize the Lost Air drive lands could be accomplished. There were several mountainous islands that no one lived on. I'm sure there would be ways for people to rebuild there.
Mackenzie Buckle
Commissioned
Writers note: and here project i probable will do myst at but not sure if i can do it, i was given long list of things my commissioner wanted to see and i believe i got all in here, i hope i do at least, weather way was entertaining but i do admit my knowledge of this aviator is great