Hearts of Iron 4 Player's Guide to Save the Isekai World

Best Friends

Revised January 2024

***

Normal  people would call the room a parlor, not a meeting room. A couch and  throw pillow had no business being so comfortable, but his head throbbed  for the wrong reasons. Erich believed she would never break her promise  to anyone, that she was beyond exploiting hints of the past.

It  was an incomprehensibly ridiculous thing to hope. But for once, before  reflection, everything became a little merry. Confidants were an  endangered species, but his reflection had since passed. What he  discovered could change everything.

He  sat up, holding his head from falling, and grabbed a sip of whiskey.  The lighter it was, the more tempting it became to empty a whole flask.  The complimentary drinks can wait for later. Never, if possible.

Erich  slumped back and sighed. The play was over. From the embarrassment  Cascadia adorned to the blood on Annalise's hands, to the terror  sweeping across the once collective mind of the nobility and traitors  within, cracking into their individual nodes. Everyone parted, needing  an intermission.

He  willed his interface into his imagination visualized, his User Interface  of the map covering CONVER (Continental Verussea) and its peripheries.  Time will tell if everything beyond it will have a DLC.

The  numbers next to the Roman Pantheon icon hit triple digits, 200  Political Power. Erich breathed through his teeth. It'd be simpler  having a Vicky 2 power than possessing something only a teenager with  24/7 access to fast food and the internet would dream of; the species  who resorted to the aesthetics of ideals and -isms in their lives inside  the pit of intellectual bankruptcy, Scientific Name: Sucker.

The  air distorted across the table, like a drop of water rippling through  damp water. The scenery behind it became a haze, forming the human  silhouette of the vessel representative of his choices. And soon, the  air became black and rosy pale. And according to those colors, so do the  black suit and fleshy features appeared.

He  was a man a fair older than him. Mid-twenties at best. His square jaw  and deep cheekbones betrayed superficial masculinity, for what was in  front of Erich was a conglomeration of every American teenage vampire  movie. But the fierce eyes behind the glasses did not elude him from the  calculating mind inside the body.

It  was like an android as he manifested, a lifeless vessel whose functions  activated as the ripples ceased. He faced Erich with the nonchalance of  existing beyond ten seconds ago.

"Captain of Industry, Thomas Laughlin, at your service, sir."

"Thomas, have you ever considered building in a desert?"

"Given the setting I'm aware of, are we, sir?"

"Let  me paint you a picture: the logistics and firepower of an early  twentieth-century army in an age when the maps still had the Ottomans  from the Balkans to Ukraine with some dragons in between."

As  Thomas took his seat, the political advisor's humanity overflowed with a  forward slouch. His knitted brows and clasped hands evoked endless  calculations, several assumptions, dozens of answers, and one question.  "How are we on infrastructure and industry?" pinpointing the capability  rather than the ability.

"Cascadia's  a relic of a once prosperous Kingdom of Laurentia, so it naturally  graced with portions of Viae Laurentia, Laurentia Roads. They're rugged  enough for megafauna heavier than the elephants you can imagine roaming  Shangri-La to haul freight carts all day."

Erich unrolled nothing on the table, and the map appeared in the middle of his action.

"We  call it Reference Points. The Kingdom is the size of Saxony, roughly  occupying the Luxembourg-Saarland-Nord Lorraine area. We can make some  sense of the locations. For instance, Cascadia is somewhere north of  Luxembourg City but not past the Mersch Commune. RF Trier, Estrier, to  our east, is a trade hub, but a secret treaty turned it into farmers  hoping for a good harvest. If you want something, you can find it there.  But we can leave that for later. I heard there's Tin Mines by  Saarbrücken."