1

These are the Caucasus Mountains. On their southern slopes, some Turks are plotting a horrible atrocity.

Somewhere in Turkish territory, three Armenians are being forced into a small space. The door closes behind them. It's locked from the outside. It's dark where they are.

They see a light. Amused, they drift towards it...

Machine guns go off, from everywhere inside the room. All falls silent.

A trap door falls from a funnel-shaped elevated structure. Three bloody corpses fall from it. They land on a pile of dead Armenians who look just like them...with a few differences in DNA. Up above, the funnel-shaped elevated structure bears a symbol of Turkic supremacy.

Meanwhile, this is St. Petersberg. At the Winter Palace, the Tsar receives a VERY rich guest from a foreign country.

As usual, Tsar Alexander II rejects Ms. Sablinova's bid, for a program that'll protect many of Russia's less-loved subjects from over-expanding Turkic supremacists. He cares about the little guys just as much as any benevolent dictator; but as usual, the empire's cheaper expenses take priority over their more costly ones; and from his experience, as well as anyone else's, Ms. Sablinova is NO low-ruble chick.

Outraged, Ms. Sablinova leaves St. Petersburg in a prolonged rage...again. She takes a train back to her company's main building, in Sweet Home Symkaria.

A few days later, she's preparing herself for a date. She'll never understand how gorgeous she is to some men. Again, she's no low-ruble girl. Some would daresay she stopped being a girl on the day she became obsessed with perfection.

She takes a train to Latveria, while wearing a fur coat and hat. Men don't stop staring at her the whole way.

In Latveria, she has her date with the country's tsar: Victor von Doom. He keeps to himself most of the time, and only flirts with women when he likes his chances...and he seldom does. He has more relatives than he wants, and Silvija suspects that he might be a microphile. She suspects she's one of the few women he's ever known who has.

They meet one another in a dimly-lit parlor. Androids, of Victor I's creation, roll and walk around, waiting on and serving them. Victor's wine is very potent. It should be; Victor takes pride in aging his wine in time-controlling casks. To Victor, the wine is only in the cask for less than five years. Meanwhile, inside the cask, the year is 802701...like in H.G. Wells's the Time Machine.

"I didn't know wine could age that long before turning into dust," Silvija protests, sipping her wine MUCH slowly than before, now that she knows its...VERY repressed history.

"It can't," Victor admits. "That was just an exaggeration, and a coy attempt to flirt with you. Whatever the case, the wine is just as much ahead of our cheap peers' time as your Wild Pack is, Silvija."

"Even if it was coy," Silvija lets him know, "it would've worked. It turns out H.G. Wells is an inspiration to me."

"Yeah, well, don't invest too much in his enterprise. No doubt, the next breakthrough in science fiction is going to make his precious Time Machine look like a child's drawing...or worse yet, Napoleon III's strategy for winning the war his country has just started with Prussia."

"Greedy Frenchmen," Silvija pouts. "You'd think that romantic men who could have all the wine and luxuries they ever wanted wouldn't waste their time trying to annex cheap societies that make theirs look like Mt. Olympus."

"Or the Eloi," Victor says, mimicking a smile. "Time Machine reference," he says more softly, mimicking an offside in a play, "in case you're not as on-fire about Wells as you bluff to be."

"Nonsense! I only bluff when I feel threatened. And no offense, but your vodka brewery here is a relic, in contrast to some of the finer works in my penthouse. I've just hired a man named Otis to build this really clever and fancy means, that will allow me to get from the floor of my building to the penthouse without having to waste the best of my body-building energy on some strenuous stairwell..."

"We're here to talk about what we're passionate about, aren't we? How'd your meeting with dear Father Russia go?"

She sighs. "He is hardly dear...to me, or to some cheap serf. And he rejected me again, thanks for asking. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he WANTS my poor Armenian kin to feel inferior to him."

"That's...the name of the game of autocracy, Dear Madame. And need I not remind you that you don't have a single Armenian in your pedigree?"

She stares at him. "I am Slav. We both Indo-Aryan! We both owe the primitive white man who created us, as do you!" She stares at him. "Your people aren't Uralic, are they?"

"Ah," Victor muses. "Aryans; of course. I guess that explains why I never hear you defending Chechens or Georgians half as much. And I thought you were better than family."

"I thought you were a Nazi at heart. Was I wrong?"

He shrugs. "So what if you are? All of the best Nazis couldn't get what they truly desired without betraying their relatives. One day I might too."

"You're a smart man, Victor. You're smarter than me, for sure. You'll find a way around that. Tsar Alexander rules the world; small countries like us need each other in times like these more than others."

Victor chuckles. "Something tells me there'll always be a hedgemony for us to worry about. Russia, Turkey, Persia, Mongolia," he stares at her. "Me, you..."

"I am a businesswoman, not a tsaritsa. I am no psychic, but I assure you that Symkaria will never rule Eurasia...or the world."

"Such a shame. You'd be a more-loved empress than I'd be."

She stares at him, with nice blue eyes. "Do you think that?"

Victor smiles, and raises his vodka glass. "I'm the smartest man on the whole damn planet. I don't think anything. I KNOW."