It was a sunny spring afternoon in Gwynedd County, and in the southeast corner bedroom of Creedmoor, Sir Victor Creed's country house on the heath of the same name, the baronet's two orphaned nieces were hard at their schoolwork, for some values of "hard" and "work".

Laura Kinney sat at her desk, conducting research for an in-class presentation on the fisheries of Great Anglesey. She did not find this subject in any way interesting, but that wasn't preventing her from putting in a good effort; her holonet browser's user interface was piled high with links to all manner of documentation from the New Snowdonia Department of Marine Resources' archive, and she was plowing through it with her accustomed dogged stoicism.

Behind Laura, her "cousin" - enrolled in Philip Wilding Memorial High School under the name Sarah Inazuma, but actually called Azula - lay on her stomach on Laura's neatly made bed, propped up on her elbows with her chin in one hand, reading a slim paperback book. As her amber eyes scanned the pages, she seemed to be getting more and more annoyed about something. Presently she began making little noises of irritation, then derision.

Laura ignored her for a while, then decided to humor her and said, without turning around,

"What."

Azula glanced up from the book. "This Machiavelli person was an imbecile," she said.

Laura remained where she was for a moment, then swiveled in her desk chair and gave Azula a faintly curious look, inviting her to go on without speaking.

"When I was a princess," Azula explained, "I did virtually everything he recommends here, as though they constituted some sort of industry best practice for princes." She illustrated the point by waving the book in the air, then slapping it down on the coverlet in front of her again. "And what did I accomplish? Nothing! The square root of bugger-all, as Mairwen is wont to say." She shook her head disgustedly, opened the book again, and resumed reading. "Either human nature works entirely differently in this 'Italy' place, or this man didn't have the faintest idea what he was writing about."

Laura considered her friend's remarks for a few moments, then turned back to her own work.

"Probably best not to take that line in the classroom discussion tomorrow," she observed dryly.

Azula glanced up at her back, then smirked slightly and went back to reading.

"I suppose not," she agreed. "Ah, well."

"Power Politics" - An Exile Micro-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2013 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited