An Englishman in Castle Aincrad

Floor 33 - Chapter 2: The Queen's Gambit

It felt strange to Jet that, despite having escaped from prison less than an hour ago, the town of Victoria felt no more on edge than it would have normally been. He'd seen firsthand what the NPC guards could be like if they suspected a player of breaking the somewhat nebulous rules that Sword Art Online was bound by, yet the guards here simply tipped their hats to the young queen and her seeming cohort without any kind of concern.

Either news hadn't reached here yet, or it was simply ignored, and he wasn't sure which it was. Whichever it was though, Ronie seemed to be very popular amongst the population, more so than he would have expected of a young queen accused and probably assumed to be guilty of a crime that somehow carried more weight than murder in these days...

He had to remind himself that history really was a different place to the world they grew up in, sometimes, and this was one of those times.

"Is it just me, or do the people seem to care for her a lot more than the King?" He asked Koharu, hoping she'd have some kind of astute observation.

"Yeah, they do, don't they?" She replied. "Still, it's nice to know she's not completely hated. She seems pretty happy out here too..."

"Well, we should be on our way. If we wait too long, no doubt the King will have gotten news of our escape, and the peace shall be shattered here, again."

"Again?" Koharu asked the question on both of their minds.

"I suppose you could say this town is my home, more so than the Kingdom itself. My family lived here, until the King took power, and ordered its sacking."

"Why though?"

"Let me guess, it wasn't so bloodless the way he took power, was it?"

"Not quite. His rise to power was peaceful, as far as rebellions go. No, that wasn't the problem – my parents were the problem, and they had supported the previous king. There had been... murmurs of revolt at his seizure, and so... the King did his best to ensure that could not happen." Ronie explained, and Koharu pulled her into another hug, already aware of where this answer was going. "I escaped and went into the care of my uncle. The rest of my family, they were not so fortunate."

He thought about what she was telling them – King William had essentially wiped a town off the map to satiate his own paranoia, and once that was done, he had allowed the sole surviving daughter of a family he knew hated him to be taken into court and gaslit into accepting the politics, the backstabbing and callous disregard for life that court life bought with it.

He couldn't help but offer her a hug too – the poor girl really couldn't catch a break, could she? It was almost like the world had conspired to break her spirit, to turn her into a ticking timebomb of rage and emotions... and yet, she seemed so kind?

Maybe it was a little bit of cynicism mixed into his own life experiences, but that level of trauma was not conducive to keeping your kindness in the long term...

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The palace at Hampton was... well, there was no other way of saying it, but it was gaudy in the extreme.

It resembled some of the cars he had seen around the more... effluent areas of Bristol, in that it had been modified in the most hideous ways possible, and seemed to be there to make one particular statement, and only one:

"Bow down to me, for I am superior to you plebs."

He winced just looking at the castle, and he watched as Koharu had a similarly visceral reaction to the gold-plated testament to the human ego...

"He didn't seriously have the place gold plated... did he?" She asked, hopeful she was wrong.

Sadly, Ronie didn't do much to allay those concerns, instead making them worse... "It is rather worse than that. The gold used was obtained from the pillaging of the monasteries across the Kingdom." Koharu looked understandably horrified, and he really hoped that Cardinal hadn't spent more time reading up on Tudor history, else he'd be expecting more brutal murders in the pipeline...