Hey I just wanted to give a shout out to everyone who's reviewed so far such, super special thanks to Ice Cream13, That one Eccedentesiast, The Shadow demoness, Summer Leigh wind, Dextra2, Iris99ify, and Anon's.

I'm really excited for the future chapters now that I got the exposition out of the way and I hope you all like it just as much as me. READ, REVIEW, FAVORITE, AND FOLLOW.

. . .

It didn't take long for Prussia to realize where he was being directed to. In the middle of the jumble of tents they called a capital was the largest one of them all. Its size was probably around the same size as the ones seen at outdoor weddings or the ones commanding officers brought to battle camps in the time of war.

It was a castle compared to everything around it. Prussia winced at the feeling of Aldo's grip on his wrist as it tightened before being pulled, it was Aldo's way of saying hurry up. He ignored the look Prussia sent him, not feeling any fear or guilt over it.

"Given the state of everything I would think that your people would be jealous of such a magnificent palace . . . If they don't believe you deserve it." Aldo was unfazed by his jeering tone.

"We use it as a place to discuss problems and to keep maps of the land around us. I sleep in a small corner cut off from the rest of it." Prussia had to admit that Aldo's plain and monotone replies were a bit irritating to him but guessed that it was better for Aldo as a leader to be this way, besides, he wasn't completely emotionless; sometimes it affected his word's inflection, though, rarely in a good way.

Prussia snorted. "Sounds like you don't own a lot."

"My people have more than I do."

"Funny, I would think a king would at least have more than his people-even in these circumstances."

Aldo shrugged his shoulders. "I've considered taxing them before."

Glancing at some of the tents and people around them, Prussia inspected them closer than he had before. "That would be a bad move on your part."

"Why's that?"

He smirked at Aldo's now interested expression. "Let's just say that history's never been kind on leaders and countries who tax more than people can and want to give."

"Hm, then I guess our situation isn't going to improve." Prussia narrowed his eyes at Aldo's emphasis on 'ours' thinking it was directed towards him like a vague insult.

"You know, to you being this poor might be degrading, but it doesn't really bother me." Part of that was a lie and Prussia knew it; seeing as it was somewhat degrading to be this poor when he used to be very respectable and well off in the past-or at least he thought he was.

"Really why's that?"

Prussia's lips fell for a moment, but quickly recomposed and widened more than before after thinking about it more carefully. "If Austria and Russia were here today they would laugh at how weak and poor I was but there's no way they can be laughing at me seeing as they're literally and always have been metaphorically below me."

"What if they're laughing at you from heaven?" Prussia stopped walking for a second causing Aldo to do so too, however, when they both started walking again Prussia sped past him not giving any reply.

The sight that greeted Prussia when he entered the tent was disappointing to say the least. Sure, he knew that given the state of everything else, that what he would find inside would surely not be anything luxurious, but inside was practically the same as Paige's tent-if only larger.

The only real difference was the large slab of worn wood in the middle of the room and the cloth drapes that cut off a little less than one fourth of the tent itself, he guessed there was even less in Aldo's 'room'. Like Paige's tent there were a stuffed bags in the back. Rolled up papers stuck out of a few of them, Prussia guessed they were their maps.

"I'm a bit curious." Aldo's voice entered the room a second before himself, rather than observe the room like Prussia he stared towards Prussia. "Why doesn't it matter that no one other than me knows who you really are?"

"This is a kingdom, you're the king so you're my boss." Prussia paused, for some reason the word boss didn't sound right to him at this moment. "In a sense they don't have the same the type of . . . influence over me." Aldo's cold eyes scowled at the venom he picked up in some of Prussia's words.

"If I'm in control of you then." His eyes scanned the room, looking for something to help validate Prussia's answers. Aldo's hand out stretched to point towards one of the bags off in the corner of the room. "Go take the map sticking out of it and set it on the wood!" A mixed reaction followed the order. Part of Prussia was perplexed about how such a simple and effortless command made him feel this way, the other part was aggravation that kept his feet glued to the dirt ground and had him look at Aldo the same way a child would to a parent that just told them to do their chores.

His past rulers usually didn't have him do such simple things such as this, such tasks from them were telling him to go fight so and so nation. Sometimes on a cold, wet, and/or snowing battle field where he was forced to fight while watching his men and the enemies' men die in gruesome ways. He had liked to boast about his past accomplishments quite a bit but never about the feeling he got from watching humans fall to the ground, lifeless, everything they had done erased like pencil marks on a paper and were now nothing more than shadow which something new replaced.

The feeling numbed after a while though. Fighting was so much easier when you were focused on what you were doing. Maybe it was the commanding way Aldo had spoken to him that set him off, but, whatever it was he didn't question it further.

Aldo's impatience had grown with each passing second, he was in no way pleased by Prussia's refusal to do nothing but stand and stare at him. "Prussia-"

"You may be king but you can't fully control me." Prussia smirked this time. "Besides I have yet to deem you awesome enough."

"That makes no sense, if I'm king and you're my country then shouldn't you obey what I say?" A thought came to Aldo's mind, causing his hand to move dangerously close to the knife he had recollected from Prussia on his side. "Or are you really not the kingdom of Prussia?" Aldo couldn't help but become more frustrated by Prussia's lack of reaction from the intimidating look he was giving him.

Prussia rolled his eyes, more amused than scared. "I said before that your people have a different influence on me than you." Prussia took a step forward, now trying to give him the same-if not more intense-look then before. Judging by Aldo's reaction, he would say that the two may have had something in common. "You can give them a command that they might choose not to abide by and by doing so neither do I."

Talking to Aldo was like talking to an inexperienced worker, Prussia knew that Aldo couldn't have known everything, though, it was still exasperating to explain something you already know. "You have ash-blonde hair, red eyes, and seem like you have an annoyingly obnoxious personality. You don't really represent them well as far as how you look and act."

Prussia shrugged. "I'm still my own person."

"Maybe you'd be more tolerable if you weren't." He stated dryly.

. . .

Looking down at the map below him, Prussia could only feel even more frustrated over what has become of the world. When Aldo laid the map down on the wood slab Prussia had expected it to be of himself, instead it was of what was the majority of Europe.

Unlike most maps the top of the African continent was not there at all, neither was Great Britain, Wales, Ireland, and the islands of Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland. The funny thing about it was that Russia and the right parts of Ukraine and Belarus were gone.

However, what surprised Prussia the most about the map was it was mostly labeled 'the world'. After his initial shock came the aggravating part, Prussia had hoped that most of the world he hoped to resurrect was barren and lifeless; but the three large countries on the map said otherwise.

The first one was labeled Belain, the country contained what he knew to be Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The other one, which was in the middle of the two, was labeled The Itravokia Republic. Looking at it, Prussia remembered Aldo saying that he was a former Itravokian solider.

The country's borders started from the east borders of Belain and expanded west to the borders that once were the eastern parts of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Belgrade.

The final country began at the east borders of Itravokia to the other end of the map, its name was Rukaria. "What's wrong? "Prussia didn't lift his head to look towards Aldo, although he heard him, Prussia chose not answer.

So many more questions piled up on the still unanswered ones like papers on a lazy office worker's desk. Some of the things he wondered were what these countries were like. What was the state of their economy? What type of government did they have? But one question most of all found its way to the top of his mind and left a dreadful aching in the pit of his stomach. "What happened to the world?" The words almost didn't make their way out of his mouth, yet despite saying it, the question never meet Aldo's ears.

Prussia finally reacted to Aldo's hand as it clasped down upon his shoulders, causing him not to flinch, but instead to stand and rotate swiftly to face him. Strained red eyes once again fought with almost hollow looking dark mahogany ones. Although they had their differences, both of them wanted the same thing.

The same thing being answers. "Go on," Aldo blinked at Prussia's fierce smirk that replaced the determined scowl that had made Prussia appear as if he was trying to defy him. "Ask me anything." The tone of Prussia's voice had Aldo wonder who exactly in Prussia's mind was king and country, servant and master.

He was hesitant before he started speaking, he went about it slowly; but loudly, almost as if he would start to yell if he became annoyed with Prussia. "The name of this country . . . came from an old document of the country that once had existed many years ago. I had briefly thought that if we were to be given an embodiment of it then it would be." He paused, unsure of how to go about this. "New and different from the previous one." Flames began to spark in Aldo's eyes and the fire in his eye bled into his inflection. "But you . . . you act as if you're the same great kingdom from before! Why . . . why aren't you dead like the others!?"

For a split second Prussia's eyes had widened and his facade disappeared, he hadn't-if not briefly-thought about why he, out of all the countries, was still alive. The only thing that could possibly be an explanation was that they named the land he once owned after him, yet still it felt the same as a parent telling their child that babies came from mommies and no one else.

"Of course I'm not dead!" Aldo stepped back, startled by the intensity of the reaction. With his signature look and smirk, Prussia answered with the most logical and sophisticated answer he could ever say. "Mein awesomeness is harder to kill than a cockroach!"

"You don't know, do you?" Aldo hissed under his breath, thinking how useless he was turning out to be. The only thing that he had liked about him so far was that he successfully insulted Paige, leaving her speechless behind them. "You're just as ignorant as everyone out here!"

"You know, every time you speak I think how you make a perfect king." Aldo's fuzzy eyebrows furled together, the way Prussia looked at him a few minutes ago made him believe that Prussia saw him as a demanding and incompetent fool. Why was he paying him a compliment now?

"Really?" He drawled.

Prussia's growing smirk warned him of the upcoming explanation. "Yes." His lips pulled even farther back to bare his dull teeth at him, Aldo could have sworn they were oddly animal-like or at least they were in his eyes. "You're thick headed, idiotic, temperamental, quick to judge, and a bit spoiled."

"I told you that I don't own anything other than my clothes, how does that make me spoiled?!" Aldo spat, leaning forward like a lion ready to pounce.

"You don't have to be greedy for wealth and luxury to be spoiled." A third voice, like the person it belonged to, strode into the tent with a defiant edge and stopped at its destination next to Aldo, almost slapping him in the process.

Paige stared both of them down with an icy stare; it was cold enough to harden the most caring of hearts, luckily neither of these men had much kindness in them to begin with. "Didn't we te-."

"Don't!" The sound of her had both men flinching, though, it did not make them back down. "I don't care what the bloody hell either of you think, I'm staying here with the both of you and there's not a damn thing you can do about it."

Aldo stepped towards her with a challenging glimmer in his eyes. "I can think of about thirteen different things I can do-all of which have been categorized in alphabetical order in the back of my mind since I first meet you."

"If you want to continue breathing then I suggest that's where you keep them."

A length of tension-filled quite followed for a beat. "Uh, Hello have both of you forgotten about the awesome me?!" Paige was almost glad that Prussia had broken the silent showdown while Aldo didn't care at all. "I thought you said you didn't believe I was a country."

Paige's eyes dropped to ground. "Country or not, if Aldo thinks your one that means you're going to be extremely involved i dealing with the well-being of everyone. So that makes you important either way!" It was obvious she had to swallow her pride in order for her to even say that in the silence that followed.

Aldo looked from Paige to Prussia, a bad feeling welled up inside of him at Prussia's silence. "It doesn't matter to me."

"What? You even said yourself that she didn't matter at all to this nation wh-." No word could sum up the anger he felt watching Paige stand there with her arms crossed over her chest, looking at him the same way a student would if their teacher scolded a kid they hated for doing something bad.

"I honestly don't care, she can voice her opinion all she wants and I have the magical ability to block her annoying voice out, just like you." This had both Aldo and Paige for once feeling the same thing about Prussia.

"You know, ever since I learned who you are I've been wondering about the true personality of the people I'm ruling."

Prussia only laughed at this, relishing in his frustration. "Well since we have everything out of the way It's time that I have some questions of my own answered, I'm also going to need to know the complete status of me and the nations around us, but before we do any of that there's something way more important that needs to be taken care of."

"And what would that be?"

With his hands Prussia motioned to himself. "Someone needs to bring me some men's clothing, I may have worn a tunic in the past but I've never went as low as to dress like Hungary." After saying that he pushed another thought to the back of his mind.

The thought being that Hungary would still look like more of man even if she was kicking his ass in a puffy pink doll's dress.