Challenge #01307-C212: Re-forming Content

Someone who just 'removed' the tyrant, and has put their non-evil child in charge, after confronting them with the fact that the parent they loved was a tyrannical dictator sacrificing their people for their own vainglory: "My condolences on your coronation. You're welcome." -- RecklessPrudence

Queen Kindness the First had loved her father. Her days revolved around the hours that he came to her suites and played with her, or read to her, or listened while she talked and they strolled through her magnificent private gardens.

No trouble was allowed to enter her door, and her windows were too high to see any troubles.

In hindsight, it was a perfectly constructed paradise.

And then, in the space of a week, she had gone from having the biggest trouble of her day being a snarl in her hair... to learning that her kingdom was in the most dire of trouble. And that news came from a bloodstained knight who was amongst one of the rebelling forces. He had been one of her guard, and asked her about situations that she had thought hypothetical.

Until the day he stopped coming to her gardens.

Now those situations were far, far too real. Merchants had a strangle-hold on the kingdom. Their immediate neighbours were angry at her father and distrustful of her. Insane taxes went to vainglory and not to help the hungry. It was going to be a lot of work to get her kingdom stable.

That knight at least looked sad when he imparted the news. She had the one who said, "My condolences on your coronation. You're welcome," executed. That kind of thinking was no longer welcome.

Fixing her kingdom required the kind of manipulation that those with the biggest coffers had used against her father.

Before her coronation, she quickly found out who were the most vile and selfish flatterers by appearing as if she didn't have a brain in her head. They were very shocked when they learned they were being sent as emissaries to rival kingdoms, and without the vast amounts of wealth they had siphoned from the royal coffers.

That coin went to buy food for the people, and their lands turned back into farms. Even her bejewelled gardens were turned into farmland to feed so many hungry mouths.

She taxed those who owned the land and withheld it from farming. She taxed those who owned too much and did not pass on their wealth. It took years, but her reforms eventually paid off. When they finally had excess to sell, she relaxed the laws about "decorative gardening" and the matching taxes.

The merchant emissaries returned to pull themselves up by their much-favoured bootstraps. Those who survived their tenure amongst kingdoms they had turned into enemies, anyway. And now that the peasantry was literate, those merchants now became entertainment for the masses as they struggled just like any other poor worker.

Those who vilified her were free to do so, but they would not find many who wished to return to the ways of her father the former king.

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