Kaldalis managed to find his seat at Garyung’s side without any fuss as the council filed in and took their dramatic places along the big desk at the head of the chamber. When they’d last been here, Kaldalis had been struck by the high level of ominous ceremony of their appearances. But the last meeting had nothing on what he was looking at now, underlining the difference between the late “emergency meeting” and the “proper meeting” during normal hours..

The war council was dressed in the same styles as they had been at their previous meeting, but dialed up to the point where they looked, frankly, ridiculous. Their military outfits had gone from ornate to ostentatious. Medals decorating the front of their outfits that were much larger in size. The only one who was dressed the same was the Finnian at the right side, whose dark leathers were so understated that among the rest, now they were the one who stood out.

Beyond their outfits, each one now had a pair of attendants on their flanks in similar dress, just with a couple fewer medals.

“I feel underdressed,” Kaldalis whispered to Garyung.

“You’re telling me,” Garyung grumbled back. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m supposed to be like a visiting president or something and I look like shit.”

With that comment, Kaldalis started to put it together.

It was all a power play.

At the previous meeting, they had gauged Garyung, and overshot his utter lack of professionalism as far as physically possible. He was literally a monarch in a room full of drones, but they had ensured that he felt the lesser of them all. Not only was he sitting in a normal chair while they were on giant thrones atop a dais, but they were dressed for the most ostentatious event imaginable while Garyung just wore his fanciest armor. Kaldalis thought Garyung’s outfit looked fine - a set of well-polished platemail with a vague winged motif - but compared to the outrageous outfits of the council, he looked like a schmuck in street clothes.

Fortunately, the audience area of the room wasn’t empty this time. In addition to the numerous guards, there were about a dozen spectators attending, and they weren’t dressed any better than Garyung was. Kaldalis cast a careful look around at them, looking for any violent-looking Vathon, but without any idea of how to identify the first assassin they’d faced, he worried he just looked distrustful and paranoid.

“This is fine, though,” Garyung said quietly. “I kind of want to look weak? If they think I’m a total scrub, they might agree that taking Cotanaku away from me peacefully is in everyone’s best interest.”

Kaldalis nodded, though he didn’t completely agree. He was afraid that the council had already made their decision behind closed doors, and nothing they could do now mattered. But the last thing he wanted to do was crush Garyung’s confidence before this critical meeting.

Right when he thought the meeting was going to begin, though, the absurd display of power disparity continued. A clerk stepped up and began to introduce the war council members one at a time in a bored monotone, going into obnoxious detail as to their positions, titles, and deeds.

It was another tactical choice. If the man presenting their seemingly innumerable honors and achievements sounded like Ben Stein doing an eye drops commercial, they must have been nothing special. It set this council up as boring middle-management grunts in the eyes of the Zarans, while at the same time setting them miles above Garyung and Kaldalis.

“Presenting Glorious High Cleric Occbunshenev The Pious,” the clerk said, introducing the red-skinned Vathon on the far left of the council. He then launched into a long list of Vathon-sounding names explaining their parentage. More than half of the names were preceded by ominous-sounding titles like Glorious High Archpriest or Bishop of Glory, and followed by extremely religious appellations like The Peaceful or The Penitent or The Chaste.

Kaldalis managed not to snort a laugh at that one, since obviously it had been untrue, if the man in question had fathered this man’s father’s father’s father.

The Glorious High Cleric’s outfit was absolutely absurd. There were little bits of green fabric visible beneath what looked like hundreds of pounds of gold-plated decorations. Kaldalis wasn’t sure how they were staying upright, even discounting the elaborate multi-steepled hat that looked almost as ornate as the cathedral they’d seen.

“Presenting Captain Lukina Nasha of the Adventurer’s League,” the clerk continued, going to the opposite side of the table to gesture to the human woman there. He then started to recite a list of heroic deeds that seemed to go on far too long for her youthful appearance. She only looked to be in her mid-thirties, but the clerk kept going on and on about diverting dangerous monster migration paths, and preventing global famine by working to divert rivers for irrigation, and discovering and leading the inaugural group through a dozen dungeons, naming each one individually. It didn’t seem like she could have done all that unless she was older than she looked, or if she started her adventuring career at age six, and began it by ending “the great giant clan invasion of White Tiger Wilds” single-handedly.

Her outfit was only slightly less opulent than the rest. Captain Lukina was dressed only about five times more ornately than Garyung instead of twenty. Instead of functional day-to-day clothing like at the emergency meeting, she was wearing a suit of leather armor that was absolutely as fancy as leather armor could possibly be. Her cuirass was made of rows of scale-shaped leather lamellars, and each one was decorated with a little golden disc. About half of them had glittering gemstones set into it, which, if Kaldalis was inclined to stare at her chest for uncomfortably long, seemed to define some sort of shape. A family crest, perhaps? He didn’t want to make a fool of himself, and so politely averted his gaze. The rest of her armor was similarly decorated, and even if it was all colored glass, Kaldalis suspected the entire outfit was worth more than all of Cotanaku had cost to build.

“I was hoping she would be on our side,” Garyung admitted quietly as the bored clerk continued outlining her successful battle strategy against the giants. “But now I’m not so optimistic.”

Kaldalis nodded with a grimace. She had seemed like she might be okay before, even if she had appeared to be openly distained by the rest of the council, but she was playing along with their games now, despite it all.

The clerk went back across to the other side of the chamber, introducing Grand Admiral Wauktug of the Golden-Sailed Liliko’i and painstakingly outlining her military career as a series of absurd victories over four dozen foes, in ascending order of importance, first naming five famous privateers, and then a number of captains, and then admiral after admiral and their fallen nations of origin. After there, there were another dozen horrifying sea monsters described and felled.

It was all growing more and more ridiculous.

The list of deeds was presented as if she had done it all alone by her own hand, without the aid of any crew at all.

Her outfit would have made any Hollywood costume designer dizzy, and concept art of it would have convinced them to dress up the actor in a green morph suit and let the GCI team figure it out instead. The whole thing seemed to be more ruffle and fringe than anything else. Given her short stature, Kaldalis was sure that she was more suit than flesh under the ridiculous tricorn hat. Despite this, she seemed to have no difficulty moving around, as near the end of the clerk’s introduction, she caught his eye and tapped one particular medal pinned to her chest, sending him into another grand story about navigating some supposedly unnavigable reef during a thunderstorm.

For his part, Kaldalis tried his best to stay patient and attentive. It was no wonder that the council had wanted to have a proper meeting. If the bureaucracy of Baimer was what he suspected, they would need all this read out every time they wanted to make any kind of legally binding decision. If they’d started the procedure before the hasty late-night-meeting, they wouldn’t have started talking about the matter at hand until after midnight.

Kaldalis did, however, find himself wishing for a pair of glasses with eyeballs painted on the front. Listening to the slow, monotone voice of the clerk would have put him to sleep even if he hadn’t just been emotionally drained by the meeting with Haldir’s sister, and physically drained by the sudden confrontation by Demriv. He just wanted to rest his eyes for a minute, but he didn’t want to suddenly snort out a snore if he started to drift.

When the clerk went back across the room, introducing the finnian in dark leather, Kaldalis almost blurted out a guffaw of laughter. His fear of losing face was the only thing that kept it locked in.

“Presenting Emmyth Presro,” the clerk said. His expression twisted into a grimace as he added: “Public Relations.” He then immediately turned back around and went to the other side of the room with no further explanation.

The obvious spymaster seemed inordinately pleased with the effect the announcement had. Amidst minutes-long descriptions of the others, the clerk just dropping name and department and moving on had several members of the audience quietly murmur something. Kaldalis wasn’t sure if they were swapping rumors they’d heard about what the “public relations” official may have done, or wondering at how astounding his exploits may have been if their secrecy was still a matter of the kingdom’s security.

“This is all just fucking filler anyway,” Garyung muttered, not as amused as Kaldalis was by the continued charade.

“Yeah,” Kaldalis agreed. “But we’re the ones who want something from them. Let them have their fun.”

The adrogynous Bhogad was named Vanguard Captain Dancao Still-Standing and the clerk told just one story of their exploits, which culminated in a vicious wound to the chest that would have been fatal to a lesser warrior, and remained on their feet to finish the battle. No detail was too small or insignificant, if it painted them as a peerless fighter and stalwart hero. The wound itself had come while trying to protect their comrades, putting themselves on the front line against a superior force.

Kaldalis had expected to at least respect the infantry representative. At the previous meeting, the huge scratchmark in their breastplate - polished to a badge of honor of its own - had been the only sign that any of these people had ever actually been in a real fight. It hugely undermined that point when the gold-plated decorative plate armor they wore now had an identical scratch in the same place. It went from a sign of the armor having used in battle to a sign that the wound and story had become an iconic part of their identity. The scratch had been artificially replicated on all their armor. Kaldalis wondered how much of the whole story was a fabrication as well.

“Presenting Horselord Thajok of the Saddle,” the clerk continued, taking only one step back to introduce the Talsar. Instead of outlining his accomplishments in battle, the clerk went on and on about the pedigrees of his stable of mounts. Despite not being lifted up himself, the Talsar had an almost dreamy smile on his face as the horses and their esteemed parentages were named.

As much as Kaldalis took that to mean that he had never - or rarely - served in battle, he suspected as much of all the others as well. At least instead of false boasts, he had a hobby.

His armor looked the most impractical of everyone’s, which was quite a feat. His chest, shoulders, and helmet were all molded to look like hundreds of gold-trimmed horses’s heads, Kaldalis imagined that if the light was hitting the man just right, it might look like a stampede. With him sitting still in this room, it just looked silly.

“And finally,” the clerk said, absently blotting sweat from his brow with a green kerchief, “Yarganbintlehat the Incomparable, eighth in line for the throne.”

That seemed to somehow be introduction enough for the royal representative. Though it implied to Kaldalis that there might be another convention to Vathon names. The length of the name seemed to have some meaning, and the five-syllable mouthful itself might have been as good as a list of deeds and titles. Though being single-digits away from the throne was likely a tale of its own.

His armor was just as ill-fitting as last time, but now it was glittering gold and studded with green gemstones, where it wasn’t coated in at least a hundred military medals across his chest. Even the elaborate feathered helm had a half-dozen medals welded onto it, though it still sat on the wooden desk beside him instead of atop his head.

With their introductions done, the clerk returned to his seat at the side of the room, and there was a brief pause. It was long enough that Kaldalis felt like something was expected. Were they supposed to applaud? Was it just an awkward silence to let them stare up at these titans of Zara and be awed?

Or were they supposed to announce themselves as well?

In the absence of any direction, Kaldalis stood up, drawing every eye.

“Presenting,” Kaldalis began, realizing he was going to have to make this up as he went along, “Representative Garyung, Leader of Cotanaku. A good man chosen democratically to speak for us all. Righter of Wrongs, Friend to the Needy, Tamer of Wilderness, and, if I may add, the best main tank I’ve had the pleasure of working with in all my years.”

It wasn’t quite the long and resounding list of accomplishments the council had, but it was the best he could do on short notice. And also a slight exaggeration. Kaldalis had known better main tanks. It just didn’t seem relevant to mention them.

“And in turn,” Garyung said, standing as well, “Kaldalis of Cotanaku, the best offtank any man could ask for. Hero of Cotanaku and Panbu.” He paused for a minute, visibly searching for anything to add before finally settling on: “Conqueror of the Infernal Horde.”

Every eyebrow in the room shot up at that one. The quiet murmur that had accompanied the spymaster’s title of “public relations” was dwarfed by the awed muttering that followed that claim.

“You got them on the hook good with that,” Kaldalis whispered to Garyung, taking his seat again, “now reel them in.”