Latoll Dehbay

You are LATOLL DEHBAY. Fuchsiablood, heiress, CONFECTIONARY MAGNATE. You are the Patron Saint of Individually Wrapped Cholesterol Cloggers. You are not the rival of any other fuchsia. You have your own empire to run. The empire that you run is the little uninhabited space on corners. The forgotten shelves. The vending machine coils. The tiny gaps left unoccupied by imperial-mandated nutritional paste and whatever miserable ration bricks the fleet considers edible. You do not need a throne when you already have shelf space. The economy is capable of functioning without an EMPRESS. Millions of trolls depend on the companies they work for and the LOGISTICS NETWORK manufactured through DEHBAY SUBSIDIARIES. Entire colonies owe you their existence, not the Empress. You own PROCESSORS, SHIPMENT FREIGHTERS, PACKAGING MANUFACTURERS, GRAIN CONCERNS, WAREHOUSES, AGRICULTURAL TERRITORY. You own the factories that make the wrappers and the freighters that carry the boxes. You own the depots where they are unloaded and, increasingly, the little machines that dispense them one at a time. There are trolls who have never seen your face who have eaten something with your name stamped on the cellophane every day of their lives. You are difficult to kill, but that is not because you are particularly hard to assassinate. It is because untangling your ESTATE after your death would be a nightmare. Remove one heiress and suddenly six agricultural moons do not know where to send their grain. Three hundred freighters no longer have destinations. Packaging facilities stop receiving polymer. Colonial distributors begin missing deliveries. Factory cafeterias run empty. Cheap sweets disappear first. Then the cheap food. Then the affordable food. You are engaged in the LONGEST-RUNNING ACT of CORPORATE HOSTAGE-TAKING in Alternian History. Your victim is the Empire. Your weapon is also your supply chain. You are not just another Fuchsian Heiress. You are a FUTURIST FUCHSIA. What happens after the Empress is finally slain? A SUCCESSION. A war. A crisis. Every ambitious fuchsia in existence tearing strips from the others while fleets defect, colonies revolt, dynasties collapse and a thousand newly crowned rulers discover that sovereignty does not automatically come with functioning freight infrastructure. You are planning for that day already. Because kingdoms are temporary. Governments are temporary. Empresses are especially temporary. But somebody will still need to eat. And one thing will remain, sitting completely untouched in all of the ash and ruin of a thousand dead kingdoms. Your preservative-rich sucrose sweets. Best consumed before the date printed on the wrapper. Which, incidentally, is several sweeps from now.