- Assassinations
- You love these. They are terrifically fun for you—particularly when poisons are involved. Poison is your favorite. Assassination is an excellent tool for subterfuge, though you've unfortunately had to delegate most of these missions in recent days as you are too busy with other aspects of your job to carry them out yourself. You've outsourced these to your team of assassins. They are not as good at them as you are, but they have a lot more time on their hands than you do, so you will have to be content with their work.
- Bed
- This is where you sleep, sometimes with your sort-of-boyfriend. It is very comfortable, but you don't spend a lot of time in it, as you don't tend to do a lot of sleeping (related topics: coffee; subterfuge).
- Books
- Your bookshelf contains spell tomes, books from your youth, and texts from your time at the Officer's Academy. It also contains fake versions of your personal journals. If anyone tries to snoop, they will think you are very boring. If they should ever find your real journal (and somehow manage to decode your cipher), they would find out that you are extremely boring.
- Breakfast
- The most important meal of the day, some say. Traditionally, your breakfast menu has been limited to coffee, but per Her Majesty's biddng after your little fainting spell last summer (a very awkward situation, if you recall), you are now required to ingest at least one "real food item" each morning.
- Breakfast Threats
-
These are the factors that threaten the execution of your breakfast mission and may bar you from completing the associated task on your to-do list in a timely manner:
- Cake
- For moral and practical reasons, you do not care for cake. Much like having friends and knick-knacks, cake is a triviality. Also, you don't really like sweets.
For some strange reason, Ferdinand seems intent on having cake with you today. You do not like this idea at all. The mere thought of this impending trial makes you itch.
- Chance
- You leave nothing to chance, fortune, or the will of the Goddess. In fact, to subvert the risk of anything being affected by chance, you plan everything you do extensively. (Some would argue you do so compulsively, though you do not think this to be a fair assessment; anyone with your job would need to account for chance just as you do.)
- Chemicals With Dangerous Properties
- Used for mixing potions, poisons, and salves. These are some of your favorite things.
- Down Time
- One of your most loathed things. In your (as of today) twenty-eight years on this earth, you have encountered it rarely and have never known how to handle it. You hope you will not happen upon any today.
- Eerie Knick-knacks
- You don't allow yourself many luxuries, but from time to time, you enjoy perusing your collection of spooky skulls, dead animal pieces, and trinkets that are supposedly cursed. (To your chagrin, none of them turned out to actually be cursed.)
- Ferdinand's Schedule
-
Ferdinand has informed you of his schedule for his perfectly normal day.
- Horses
- Horses are fine. Ferdinand is fond of them. You are not really sure what else there is to say about horses.
- The Impending Trials
- You anticipate that there are many challenges that are sure to come your way today. They weigh heavily on your mind. Thus far, you have identified the threat of:
- Your Job
- Being you is no easy feat. You are Minister of the Imperial Household, which means you are Lady Edelgard's most relied-upon servant: you ensure her safety, well-being, and happiness. As Marquis Vestra, you run your family's noble house and territory. And as tactician of the Black Eagle Strike Force, you are in charge of collecting information and assisting to wage a silent war against those who slither in the dark. Needless to say, you are a very busy boy, but you are very good at your job.
- Journal
- Where you make your notes in your secret code. Nobody will ever find this. If they do find it, it will take them longer to decode it than they have remaining life.
- Laundry
-
You are not a man who enjoys messes. But your job has, historically, involved a lot of blood, and you simply do not have enough time in the day to get your whites as white as you would like. Best leave such things to the professionals.
You have made a pact with your most trusted laundress. The bargain is thus: if you get your clothing to her before 2 PM, she will ensure it is cleaned and returned to you by 10 AM the following day. If offered to her after 2 PM, she cannot promise it will be ready by morning. You got blood on your second favorite cape yesterday—the cape you were planning to wear to an event tomorrow afternoon—and you really want to have it back in time.
- List
- You make a to-do list for yourself every night, to be accomplished the next day. It is written in your cipher for security purposes. There is also a standing list of items you complete before breakfast each day.
- Lunch
- Lunch is breakfast but worse, as it interrupts your work day just as you are truly getting into your flow. You don't really believe in lunch, but as with breakfast, you are now legally required to observe the event daily.
- Magic
-
Magic is the best. Casting spells is a lot of fun and it can be used to solve a great many problems. It helps that you are very good at it. Some of the spells in your repertoire include:
- Asmodeus's Most Evile Murder Matrix (which you recently learned about in Spellboys Monthly)
- Dark Spikes Tau
- Warp
- Mail
-
As Minister of the Imperial Household, one of your jobs is to sort, review, and respond to Her Majesty's mail. You escalate anything pertinent to her and handle anything below her purview yourself. You have been practicing her signature and diction since you were six years old and can execute them flawlessly.
Mail is sent and delivered across the continent by owl. The palace mailrooms close at 4pm each day to allow the mail clerks sufficient time to wrangle the owls and convince them to make the deliveries. You do not envy them this task and are glad it is not your job.
- The Preceding Ordeals
- The many horrors of the past weigh heavily on your mind. Thus far, you have identified the threat(s) of:
- The last time you had cake
- Owl
- Mail is sent and delivered by owl. This system is wildly inefficient as owls have the IQ of an intelligent stone, are nearly impossible to train, bite very hard, and are prone to getting lost when flying in the daytime (if they fly at all). Still, it is the postal system you have, and until you get around to inventing a better one, you must make do.
- Physical Affection
- It's not your strong suit. In your defense, you didn't exactly have time to explore such trivialities as dating or—Goddess forbid—kissing during your youth, as you were a little busy with school and your job and the war (the big one and also your secret one) and, of course, being the perfect vassal to Her Majesty. You don't really understand it, or how it works, or what to do with your hands at any given time. But your sort-of-boyfriend doesn't appear to mind, and it seems like it is important to him, and besides, you are not a quitter. You are determined to study aggressively until you have a better grasp on this business.
- Plant
- Bernadetta gave you this plant for your birthday last year. You were delighted to learn that it eats insects and small fauna. You are not one for children or animals, but this plant gives you a sort of paternal joy. You are diligent in caring for it each day.
Ferdinand and Bernadetta both insisted you provide your plant with a given name. Though this seems like a triviality to you, you have dubbed it Ferdinand II.
- Poisons
- One of your instruments of subterfuge. You make these often, although you get to use them less often than you would like.
- Pre-Breakfast To-Do List
- These are the items you do daily before you have breakfast:
- Presents
- Presents are trivialities. However, you have, for better or for worse, developed a few friendships in your time on this earth, many of whom have deigned to give you a present or two in the past. Notable presents you have received include your timepiece, your plant and most of the items in your collection of eerie knick-knacks.
- The Press
- Your nemesis. You enjoy subterfuge and keeping a low profile. The press enjoys talking about you, Lady Edelgard, and all of the things you get up to. It's their right—after all, one of the things you fought for in the war was freedom of the press. But it makes your job difficult.
- Public Audience
- Her Majesty hosts these with some frequency so that her citizens can bring concerns directly to her attention. These are one of the most stressful parts of your job. You must ensure Her Majesty's safety, keep conversations on topic, and be in close proximity to whining. You also must keep Her Majesty from overpromising or getting too excited. The last time she got too excited, it was all over the press. You did damage control for months. She said she was sorry, and you accepted her apology, but you are not sure she was sorry enough.
- Schemes
- Scheming is a major part of your job. It is also something you are very good at and enjoy doing. Most schemes involve subterfuge. The best ones also involve poisons, although Her Majesty has been less fond of these sorts of schemes since the war ended. (You still enjoy them just as much as you used to.)
- Secret Code
- How you encrypt your notes and the things you write in your journal. The only other person who knows how to read this code is the Emperor, as you use it for your shared correspondence. You devised this code when you were fifteen years old; by now, reading it is so natural for you that the complex symbols look like normal letters to your eyes.
- Sort-Of-Boyfriend
- See Ferdinand von Aegir. You've been sort of seeing each other for about a week now, or at least seeing more of each other than you used to. A lot more. It's nice. But it's complicated. And you don't have any schemes or emergency procedures to reference for this kind of situation, which makes you very nervous and a little bit ill. But despite the risks and uncertainty, some part of you thinks he might be worth it. You're not usually inclined to listen to such unsubstantiated claims, but you keep listening to this one, anyway. There might be something wrong with you.
- Spellboys Monthly
- You read it for the articles.
- Subterfuge
- Your favorite hobby. You enjoy being sneaky.
- Taxes
- You are a man who wears a lot of hats, and one of them is that of the Marquis of Vestra. One duty for the wearer of this hat is to ensure taxes for your marquisate have been paid by the filing deadline. They are not due until the end of the month, but last year, your owl was late and it was very embarrassing for you. This will not happen again.
- Timepiece
- Like a clock, but small enough to fit in your pocket. You received it as a gift from Her Majesty and the professor exactly one year ago today and it is one of your most prized possessions. It astounds you to think the time could be tracked anywhere and everywhere, without need for candles or hourglasses or church bells or clocktowers. Huge things are happening in the world of technology.
- To-Do List
- You make a to-do list for yourself every night before you go to bed, outlining your tasks for the next day. You keep track of the items in a list within your journal.
- Torture
- An activity you like to do for fun or to de-stress after a hard day. A good, long, painful interrogation is almost guaranteed to lift your mood. Unfortunately, you have had few opportunities for torture since the end of the war, and Her Majesty has never been particularly fond of your use of it (she's been downright disparaging, really, which you find rude; you have never denigrated her art or hobbies). It saddens you to think that your best torturing days are behind you, just when you were at the peak of your information extraction game, but such is life.
- Trivialities
- You do not care for trivialities. Trivialities suggest the presence of down time. If you have time to indulge in such things, you have time to work.
- Vacation
- Something other people have on occasion, usually involving travel or respite. You have never had a vacation and you doubt you ever will, as it would imply that you have down time.
- Vile Brews
- One of your instruments of subterfuge. These are not quite poisons, but they are still fun to make and use.
- Warp
-
The Warp spell is your favorite magic spell—apart from Asmodeus's Moste Evile Murder Matrix, of course (which you learned about in the latest issue of Spellboys Monthly), but while you love the latter's effects, that one is more trouble than it's worth. Warp, however, is easy to cast and can be cast frequently.
Warping is most excellent. It is infinitely faster than walking, can be cast quietly to aid in subterfuge, and you have gotten good at swooshing your cape just as you cast it so that you look very frightening indeed.
Would everyone could warp. Legs would be a thing of the past. Alas, there are those with weak constitutions (and also Ferdinand) who are unable to warp due to bad experiences losing portions of limbs or due to the illness known as warpsickness, the most common symptom of which is twenty-four straight hours of vomiting.
- Whining
- It's not your favorite.
- Wyvern Lag
- The devastating exhaustion that is said to occur when someone must traverse many miles upon a wyvern. While they are useful creatures, wyverns are temperamental, and dealing with them for an extended period of time can be very tiresome indeed. You have never had wyvern lag because you do not fly for reasons that are your own, but you are fairly certain that if you did, you would never experience this problem. As it is, you much prefer warping.