The(questionable) burdens of leadership of a troll Emperor by Noodlehammer

Chapter 23

Naruto was in his office, dabbling in the Dark Arts of Bureoucracy that kept the Empire running. Even he was wary of such foul practices, but the life of an Emperor was not always about waging war and conquering the galaxy. Sometimes, you had to get your hands dirty. At the very least he was not limited to doing it at mere mortal speed and could blaze through months of backlogged paperwork in minutes.

But hark! A foul harpy invaded his sanctum and interrupted his sorcerous approval of assigning more raw materials to one of the Empire's colonies for the purposes of expanding the settlement there.

"How dare you?!" Travell screeched in outrage as she stomped into the office.

"With great pleasure." Naruto responded arrogantly and then paused for a second. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Your instructors tried to tell us that the destruction of Sarita was our fault." Travell ground out angrily.

"It kinda was."

"We tried to help them." Travell asserted, obviously just barely keeping herself from shouting.

Naruto made a note to reward the instructor that had riled her up this badly. The old woman was usually about as emotionally expressive as a plank of wood(if a plank of wood could be smug), so getting this level of outrage from her was quite the achievement.

"They were at war and you gave them bombs." He pointed out dryly.

"We gave them generators that would produce unlimited clean energy!"

"Which they turned into bombs."

"We were trying to help them." Travell repeated. "If they weren't so primitive, they would have realized that they didn't need to fight anymore."

"Do you actually know what they were warring over or did you just assume it was about resources?" Naruto asked.

"Well...what else could it be?" She asked, confused.

"You haven't really been paying attention during these lectures have you?" He asked with a raised eyebrow.

"What is that supposed to mean?" She snapped.

"It means that you're an idiot if you think that war is always about resources." Was the blunt response. "Even if it was, war is an ugly thing and changes people. You can't just give them something that could end all their problems and expect them to make rational, well thought out decisions. The fact that it took them less than a day to use the generators you gave them as weapons says a lot about how bad the hatred between them must have been."

"If war is such an ugly thing, why are you forcing us to learn about it?" She demanded instead of thinking too much about his words.

"Because granny, your willful ignorance on the subject pisses me off. Your ignorance about the realities of war caused the destruction of your Saritan neighbours and the subsequent death of 80% of your own people because you weren't prepared for things to go to shit. Just like you couldn't understand the Saritan mindset, you couldn't understand the Goa'uld mindset and it nearly got you killed. If I had let you keep going as you were, someone would have eventually come along and succeeded where Zippy failed, simply because you would never have seen it coming."

"Our ion cannons have been rebuilt, we would not allow another Goa'uld to approach and even you cannot withstand our superior technology." Travell said stiffly.

"Really?" He snorted and tossed a datapad at her. "Take a look at that."

Travell quickly read through the contents and felt the blood draining from her face. There was everything there. Blueprints for building the cannon, energy frequencies, the physics behind them, the metals used in the construction, everything that someone would need to build them...and to modulate the shields of a starship to negate them.