April 25th 2002 PRT meeting Public relations

Glenn Chambers

We watched Leviathan die again, the Behemoth fight, there were witnessess but there wasn't any live photage. We didn't have that on tape, for all of India's faults they kept the media out of that fight, for their own safety if nothing else, but Leviathan? With three days warning until he attacked a major american city and an entire country out for his blood? Yeah there was no way we could keep the media away from that.

"Damage to the city?"

"The road Leviathan landed on is going to have to be repaved, he damaged the asphalt a bit when he landed."

In other words, the financial cost to the city was pretty much nothing.

"We're going to have to hand over that sword."

Everyone else nodded their heads, that whole conversation had been heard across the world. Japan's museums were already fighting to see who would get the honor of housing the sword that killed Leviathan. We were in talks on how to handle that moment with the right amount of ceremony and pathos.

"That goes without saying Glenn, we're not going to fight the japanese on this."

I looked at their current demand, sorry request.

"They want his head?"

"As next of kin Ironwood agreed to it, but he wants enough of Leviathan's body to fill an urn for a funeral."

"We're going to have to get someone to preform the service."

We collectivly shrugged, if Ironwood wanted a funeral for Leviathan, there would be a funeral, he didn't ask for a major production, just an urn, a hole in the ground and a tombstone.

"Get him some ashes from Behemoth too, might as well make a thing of this."

That earned some stares.

"The PR blowback from-"

I shrugged.

"We're not going to tape this, hold a service, have an Endbringer graveyard. If we win it will be a tourist attraction, so let's go over his requests."

American citizenship...yeah we stalled on that, but this fourth of July we were going to make it official, take care of his family if anything happened to him, doable and expected, bury him in a hill with sunflowers if he died.

"There's a real sunflower thing with him, why is that?"

The others shrugged.

"Maybe he just likes them?"

I wrote that down, we could use that somehow, I looked at the last request.

"The World tree project."

Above our paygrade, NASA was fighting tooth and nail to get this as were some of the biggest Tinkers we had on our side, I grimaced at the signature.

"So Powell signed off on it."

This more then anything was a test, quite a few directors thought it was a trap, those that doubted his loyalty worried about it.

"If it works, this changes everything."

A series of stable wormholes leading to Mars, Europa, Ganymade, Io, Calisto, Titan, Triton and finally Pluto. Permanent wormholes leading to 9 places around the Solar system, including Earth. We were being offered the keys to the kingdom for interplanetary travel. I looked at the estimates, construction was underway. He said it would take at least a year to finish it.

"Construction is underway as we speak, when it finishes, well we're going to have to use it."

I thought about it.

"A symbol of the human spirit, of exploration, a dream of better tomorrow."

We could work on it later...I looked at the ending of Leviathan's screams.

"We're going to have to find a way to explain this."

It didn't look good, a few people shrugged.

"It was Leviathan."

"I know it still looks-"

It was a brutal way to die, I looked over the reports.

"Well ironically enough, support in the southern states is up, apparently the whole you threatened to kill my children speech struck a nerve in the conservative part of America."

That surprised me.

"Other bit of good news, sale of Ironwood merchandise is sky high with..."

Oh.

"Most of it's being bought in Japan."

That still left us with more revenue then before, now we needed to figure out how to spin this.