The King of Marakaran

That night, as Poppy went through her usual night time routine, she called up her oldest brother Dante.

"What's my little sister doing?" Dante's tired smiling face popped up in front of her.

"Yikes!" He shouted, holding onto his pounding heart as he stared at the whitish blue stuff Poppy had smeared all over her face.

"Oh relax. It's just my sleeping mask." Poppy waved an irritated hand at him.

"Oh Lordy, you scared me." He breathed. "My wife doesn't do that at night. Why do you do it?"

"Heh." She laughed. "Candace already has a husband. Several at last count. She doesn't need to do any of this."

"You're a beautiful woman. You do this and no man will be able to sleep with you." Dante frowned.

"Oh hush. Until I have someone, I will maintain my nightly mask."

Dante sighed. "So something must have come up for you to be sharing your nightly beauty ritual with me at this late hour instead of catching up with your beauty sleep."

"You're up late too." She looked behind him, seeing the familiar war room from inside his moon that he barricaded himself into when work piled up to the ceiling.

"The combination of my own businesses along with all the work that piles up from Erenveil is crushing." Dante rubbed a tired hand across his eyes.

"How was it done before?" Poppy frowned, seeing how exhausted Dante looked.

Dante sighed. "Father and Byron shared the work before. Once I became one of the Crown Princes, Father piled all his work on me."

He shook his head. "This would have been fine except I was already overworked with my own business ventures. His full load, on top of my own work, is literally drowning me."

"Ask one of the other brothers to help you." Poppy suggested.

"Yeah like who?" Dante gave her a dry look.

"Lucas?" She suggested. "Isn't he between projects right now?"

Dante rolled his eyes. "Lucas isn't trained to do this sort of work. He's an actor. A very good actor, but he is definitely neither a businessman nor a ruler of a realm as vast as Erenveil."

Dante began counting on his fingers.

"Leonardo is too busy with the hospital ships. Jason and Jared have their fashion businesses alongside the private security details they have to oversee. You and Slate are run ragged at the front lines, especially with this never-ending war. Byron is stuck in bird territory trying to put out war fires."

"What about Candace?" Poppy raised an eyebrow.

"Candace is my wife. I can't—" he gave a wild gesture. "I can't ask her to…"

"Share the burden? Partner up? Pull together?" Poppy sighed. "I swear. You are my blood brother but sometimes, I think you came out of a dinosaur egg."

Dante gave her a miserable look. "I want my wife to have a happy life doing the things she likes to do. I don't want her to work herself to death trying to help me with this crushing work load that I'm under."

"So instead, you're working yourself to death and trying to turn her into a widow?" Poppy pursed her lips.

"Talk to Candace, Brother." Poppy suggested gently. "Tell her what you're struggling with and see what she says."

Dante nodded. "Okay Sis. I'll do that."

Poppy nodded. "Dante, the reason for my call at this late hour is something I figured you can help me with. I'm sorry to dump even more work on you, but you're the only one I can think of who might be able to help. Do you know anything about the world of Marakaran?"

"Marakaran…sounds familiar. Hang on." He dug through some virtual files until he found what he needed.

"Here we go. It's a resort world. It makes the bulk of its wealth on luxury tourism."

Dante narrowed his eyes. "There is a small but significant trade business for their beautiful ocean pearls. They also have a thriving trade in rare valuable tropical fruits and vegetables. It's good money but nothing like weapons or computerized systems."

Poppy nodded. "I happened to be talking to a person who lives on Marakaran. He told me that Haribou is looking to buy the world as a staging area to sell their weapons."

"Is that a bad thing?"

Poppy nodded. "He says it will destroy their natural habitat and turn Marakaran into a dead world in a matter of decades. He asked me if there was any way I could prevent what Haribou will do to Marakaran."

Dante scratched his cheek. "This sounds serious. If they've already made plans to convert this paradise world into one of the weapons worlds, then there isn't much we can do after the fact."

Poppy sniffed. "I've only been to Marakaran once and I remembered thinking that if I ever got married, I would make my husband take me there for our honeymoon. It looks like I won't get that chance in the future."

"That beautiful, huh?" Dante's eyes suddenly grew sharp with interest.

Poppy nodded.

"Go to sleep little sis. Let me dig around a bit and find out what the deal is."

Poppy nodded, said her goodbyes and it was lights out. She had a date early tomorrow morning with Pretty Boi Ash to duel to the death with fencing swords.

As Dante closed the visual monitor between himself and Poppy, he opened up a new visual monitor and began scanning through images of the world.

It was, indeed very beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that it instantly became Dante's vision of the perfect destination wedding for himself and his brothers and wife.

Unfortunately, holding a wedding with the entire royal lineage of all seven Co-Emperors and an Empress in a location that was so rifle with turbulence was almost a no go, even with Slate's warships keeping a tight security around the world.

He rubbed his jaw, thinking of different ways to get what he wanted. After a few minutes, Dante called his attendant into the war room.

"Yes, Your Majesty?" The attendant bowed.

"Get me in touch with the King of Marakaran."

"Yes Sir."

It took almost twenty minutes to locate the King of Marakaran. During that twenty minutes, Dante was able to clear out a nice fat stack of documents that needed to be done.

It had gotten so late that Dante was about to call it a night when the alert sounded that a call was coming in.

"Your Majesty, the King of Marakaran."

Dante nodded at the attendant. "Put him on."