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With my unfortunate ascension to the position of Chancellor the second thing I received, after a tour of my new office, was a briefing on the status of our nation and its position in the world stage. I'd been entitled to attend a less detailed version of this briefing as a member of the Diet, but I'd rarely bothered. With my reputation I never planned to visit any foreign countries and I didn't expect to have any influence on foreign policy. Besides, I knew the basics of our situation from reading the newspaper. Sitting down and hearing about everything in detail really drove home the delicate state of the country.

On the domestic front there were no great surprises. Inflation was progressing at a rate that was so high it was difficult to measure. The simplest yard stick was the comparison between the gold mark and the paper mark. The two currencies had the same nominal value, but the gold mark was backed by gold while the paper mark was a fiat currency. Before the war they had traded at a rate of roughly three paper marks to two gold marks. These days it would take at least a trillion paper marks to purchase a single gold mark.

The massive inflation was wreaking a devastating toll on our economy. Large chunks of the countryside had reverted to a barter system. Countless businesses had closed their doors, unable to do business in a country where money had no value. The only bright spots were export based businesses that could sell their products for hard currency while taking advantage of cheap labor. Even this silver lining came with its own dark cloud, as such business practices created a great deal of resentment and a fair few beatings and lynchings of supposed "foreign collaborators."

Our next reparations payment was due in six months. This had been the overriding priority of the previous government. While their policies had nothing but ruinous effects on the nation, they had at least managed to stockpile over ninety percent of the precious goods and foreign currency that we would be forced to hand over.

The state of things when it came to foreign policy was also rather grim. To put it simply, our friends were not powerful and the powerful were not our friends. As Chancellor it was my duty to try to steer our country clear of disaster somehow. All I could do was to try to learn as much as I could in hopes of finding a way forward.

Our neighbor to the west was of course the Francois Republic. They had returned to their historic borders at the conclusion of the war with the exception of their annexation of Elsass-Lothringen, a territory that had long been in dispute between their nation and ours. The country as a whole was enjoying a post war economic boom. The great leader de Lugo had been hailed as a hero at the end of the war, elected to the presidency, and turned out of office unceremoniously in the space of three years.

The current government was left leaning. They had campaigned on the promise of a peace dividend and had busily gone about reducing the size of their armed forces since their election. Even so, the Francois army numbered around half a million men and could easily crush our own army in any serious conflict. Their advantage was only magnified by the treaty-imposed technological disadvantages we suffered.

Overall the public mood of the Francois could be described as exhausted by the war but jubilant in their victory. And, of course, strongly anti-Germanian. There is a natural human tendency when one person has done another wrong. Rather than feel sympathy and try to make things right for his victim, the abuser will instead begin to despise his victim, grasping on to-or inventing wholesale-even the most spurious reasons to justify his actions. Something like this had taken place on a national scale after the war. The Francois Republic had invaded the Empire in a surprise attack, therefore the Empire must have deserved it. The list of the calumnies they heaped upon us was impressive in its length, if nothing else.

To the north of the Francois Republic was our new eastern neighbor, Lothiern. Formerly the disputed territory of Imperial Niedland, the newly created republic was rife with internal divisions. Many of the citizens felt resentment towards the Empire for the bullying that had made them an imperial protectorate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This was mollified somewhat by the fact that the Empire had treated them with a relatively light hand. Their membership in the Empire was more like participation in a mandatory free trade union than any outright exploitation. Even so, modest coercion is still coercion.

However mixed the feelings of the people of Lothiern towards Germania might be, they certainly had no great love for the Francois Republic. The Francois offensive and subsequent hardening of defensive lines had caused much of the most intense fighting of the war to take place on their home soil. The tremendous destruction and loss of life was keenly felt even now. To make things worse, the Francois had required in the war-ending treaty that the newly created country compensate the Francois in hard currency for the expenses involved in their liberation. While not as severe as the reparations imposed on Germania, the measure was still widely reviled.

All in all, the people of Lothiern would not be clamoring to rejoin the Empire any time soon. On the other hand, they didn't regard themselves as our sworn enemies, either. While a military alliance was extremely unlikely, it would be possible to enter into amicable trade relations with them if our economy wasn't on fire.

Our new neighbor to the north was a little more interesting. The country of Daneland had been given the portion of Imperial Norden that made up the peninsula bordering Germania as well as the islands in the Baltic Sea, while the land that was on the Scandinavian peninsula had gone to the Entente. At the insistence of the Entente they had not been made to bear any reparations payments.

It wasn't hard to see that the Entente was interested in adding a new member. They shared cultural ties with the people of Daneland, and it was largely happenstance that had caused the Entente to leave Daneland out in the cold when they initially joined together. Historical accident or no, though, that exclusion had led Daneland to join up with the Empire more or less voluntarily. Their time in the Empire had been good to them. In addition to the other benefits associated with joining a larger nation, they had profited greatly from all the money that the Empire had poured into the area in its futile efforts to match the Allied Kingdom's fleet.

If presented with the need to choose a larger state to join, all else being equal, it was hard to say which way Daneland would go. Of course, with our economy in shambles Germania was hardly putting its best foot forward at the moment.

As for the attitude of the Legadonia Entente, it would perhaps best be described as sheepish but optimistic. They had been knocked out of the war in a quick and decisive battle and had not suffered too badly under the military government, all things considered. They even gained territory as a result of the war. However, they were still widely regarded as having foolishly instigated the Great War for no good reason. Rather than dwell on what had happened in the past, they seemed to prefer to focus on the future.

Further east came the largest departure from what I remembered from my previous life. Those memories were from history classes now thirty years in the past, but I played my fair share of WWII board games and I thought I remembered the basic layout. The creators of the treaty of Triano had largely followed the boundary lines in my memory, but the country of Pullska was a complete departure from what I knew.

First of all, there was no "Pulish corridor" to speak of. All of the land east of the border belonged to Pullska. Germania had not been left with an enclave in Eastern Preussia. As you might expect, the Germanian revanchists I represented were displeased by that. But not outraged, oddly enough.

That surprising calm had to do with the second departure from the history that I remembered: the people of Pullska were wildly enthusiastic about the Empire. They would vote to join back up in a heartbeat if given the choice and were only restrained from outright declaring a reunion by the latent threat of force. That was strange enough that I cracked open some history books to do my own research.

In the process I finally found one explanation for why the Empire was so much larger than the German Empire from my old world: here, the partition of Pullska had taken place very early in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, the push and pull of European great power politics and warfare had seen Preussia take control of over a third of the old Pulish territory. They had then set about Preussifying the territory with great enthusiasm. On the one hand, massive infrastructure improvements, state funded education, and new manufacturing concerns. On the other hand, the use of Germanian as the official language was strictly enforced and any malcontents summarily expelled from the territory. The carrot and the stick were both employed with typical Preussian efficiency.

The end result of all of this was that the people of the territory considered themselves to be true Preussians at heart with the zeal of religious converts. That zeal was only fed by the rise of Preussia into the powerhouse of Europe. While Pulish revolutionaries elsewhere might dream of restoring their country, the people living within the borders of the Empire only dreamed of Imperial glory.

With a large and secure power base behind it Preussia had then been willing to accept the offer from Osterry to join together, annex all of the Hapsburg holdings as well, and declare themselves the Empire of my rebirth. The Preussian people eventually came to dominate the new empire culturally. This ultimately gave rise to a national militaristic attitude that would lead the Empire to develop armed forces fit to take on the world and then, unfortunately, to take on the entire world in a single war.

Besides their affection for us, the great concern facing the people of Pullska was the Rus Union. Pullska had been left with a feeble army that was no match at all for the commies. Their freedom was only secured for the moment by diplomatic assurances from the Francois and the Allied Kingdom. Well, that and communist incompetence.

East of Pullska, the Rus Union was a terrifying threat but not yet an imminent danger. They had spent the bulk of the time period of the Great War embroiled in a bloody but inconclusive war of their own with the Akitsukushima Empire over control of Outer Mongolia and Manchuria, of all places. Anybody willing to mobilize a nation to fight over those backwaters was clearly a war-crazed maniac.

After that war ended the Rus Union had indulged in an extensive purge of its officer corps. Watching from the outside it was hard to say how many officers were sacked for incompetence and how many were sacked for being politically unreliable, but either way the effect on their military was devastating. They were in no shape to fight a war right now. Of course, if they ever did get their act together they would present an immense threat between their massive population and their massive industrial base. A fully mobilized Rus Union would have been a peer for the Empire even if we had triumphed in the Great War. For the current Germania, our role would be that of a small animal being crushed by a steamroller.

For now, all I could do was hope that they failed for as long as possible to get their act together. If I ever saw Being X again I'd be sure to recommend he take a tour and see what happens when you reject the free market system. I'd like to see how that hypocritical bastard reacts to a forced labor camp. While in general I'm staunchly against divine punishment, I could make an exception for communists.

As for the Akitsukushima Empire, I naturally felt some affection for the land that had been my home in my previous life. Unfortunately, they seemed firmly determined to repeat all of the blunders that I had learned by heart in history class. Regardless of my personal feelings, I did not dare to link hands with a power so intent on militaristic expansionism. I'd like to warn them of the troubles they were courting, but they would hardly take direction from some meddling gaijin. Ah, well. Even without an alliance, every time they took a poke at the Rus it would distract the bear from my new home. Ganbatte, you bloodthirsty fools!

Returning focus to our local neighborhood, the Habsburg holdings had been split into individual countries more or less as I remembered them. The only surprise for me there was again their favorable disposition towards the Empire. For them joining the Empire had been the result of purely diplomatic overtures and had led to nothing but economic success. As a result of their membership in the Empire they had been subject to heavy Germanian influence and had picked up quite a bit of Germanian culture. They would likely be hesitant to outright rejoin a new Empire, but they regarded the old one as a fond memory.

The rump state of Osterry practically considered itself part of Germania already. Although the local political leaders had taken the opportunity of the reshaped map to puff up their own importance and proclaim their ability to stand on their own, the population by and large regarded their separation from the Empire as an outrage. It was possible, though, that they would get a taste for independence over time. Especially if our economic catastrophe continued. Although Osterry had also been subject to heavy reparations, their government had opted to meet its obligations by borrowing heavily rather than by destroying the value of its own currency. While their approach was not without its own dangers, the obvious superiority over the path taken by the Germanian government had become apparent over the last few years.

The final local power was the Kingdom of Ildoa. They had been rewarded for their betrayal of the Empire with a bit of disputed Imperial territory. Somewhat surprisingly, the people of Germania did not feel the same sort of white hot hate toward the kingdom that they did toward the Francois Republic. They weren't exactly fond of Ildoa, of course, but it was widely believed that the Allied Kingdom's utter dominance of the sea-a dominance with which we had become all too familiar as the war progressed-had created a situation where Ildoa was forced to change sides in the war. It helped Germanian opinion that the Ildoan participation had been more in the nature of failing to stop the armies marching through its territory rather than actively fighting Imperial troops.

Far off in the distance lurked the Unified States, firmly established as the first of the great powers after its role in the humbling of the Empire. The public sentiment there seemed to be turning inward. In general the people of the Unified States regarded the war as a job well done rather than a reason for ongoing involvement in Europe. They were enjoying a tremendous economic boom and had the most optimistic outlook of any nation on earth.

The new states carved out of Imperial territory all had vestigial militaries at best. In the case of Osterry and Pullska this was a result of the same treaty provisions that shackled Germania. Lothiern didn't have the money to spare for a military build up. Daneland was doing well financially and was not restricted by treaty but simply chose not to invest in anything other than a navy capable of patrolling its corner of the Baltic Sea. Throughout Europe in general there was a great deal of war weariness. There was also a sense that, as nobody would be foolish enough to start another war while everybody was still reeling from the Great War, there was no need to invest a great deal in the military. Even so, while the armies of our enemies had been reduced in size from their peak during the war, any one of them was more than enough to sweep aside our own army with contemptuous ease.

I spent a long time turning these facts over in my mind, trying to find the right course of action. Even as I made my way towards my first official cabinet meeting I hadn't firmly decided what to do. It didn't help that the information came to me from such a remove. I was briefed by the head of our Foreign Office based on what he had learned from our ambassadors who in turn were largely relaying secondhand information. For somebody who used to be able to look up any relevant facts with the click of a mouse it was an uncomfortable situation.

I paused before the door to the conference room and turned to address Elya. She, together with Visha, was accompanying me to the meeting. Ostensibly they were there as my administrative assistants.

"We should expand our polling operations beyond our borders," I said. "I don't like making decisions while I'm half blind."

"Expand to foreign countries?" Elya asked, eyes widening. "That could be a challenge."

Well, naturally teams of young Germanian women walking around the Francois countryside asking questions would raise some eyebrows. I was pleased that Elya had spotted the problem, but the solution was simple enough.

"Hire locals if you have to," I said, waving my hand dismissively. "I should at least be able to get you the budget to do that much. I'll just have to be a little creative so that we remain appropriately discreet."

She nodded and I turned back to the door in front of me, already putting the issue out of my mind. Over the past few years I had found that a task delegated to Elya was a task I no longer needed to worry about.

I had plenty of other things to worry about, of course. Procrastinating wouldn't make the list any shorter. I took a deep breath, then threw open the door and strode into the room. Time to steer the ship of state.