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Nik Asgard amte primo mani, Master-General of Land
Nik Asgard finally arrived in Europolis after sailing across the strait and then taking various public transit to reach the city. It took forever and made him arrive later than other dignitaries, but gotta practice what you preach, right? Of course, he had help from random people who recognized him not as a government official, but as a rare descendant of the first men of Azrekko. There was no hiding his visual heritage - the skin complexion of the greatest of all men who built the ancient Azrekkian world with nothing but their hands. Nik's heritage had already helped him become a huge hit among the rural Duxburians he needed to connect with as the new Master-General of Land, the Duxburian equivalent of a Ministry of Interior. Rural Duxburians, so hard for most government officials to reach and understand, practically revered the first men as the ultimate "masculine tough guys" of the desert, and thus they embraced Nik as one of their own despite being young and pretty ordinary all things considered. He alone could persuade them to do various things that liberal nanny men couldn't make them do, and that is why the government had decided to send him to the environmental conference over other, more well-known Duxburians.
However, Nik was far from any kind of tough guy in Europolis, shivering in the temperate air. Gawd, this place was soooooooooo fucking cold. Nik hailed from one of the hottest places on earth, the Valley of the Sun, which sat well below sea level in far southeastern Azrekko. According to legend, the Sun Kings of Azrekko built a forbidden city in the inhospitable valley for safely storing the gold reserve of their kingdom. While the forbidden city did indeed exist, and continues to exist due to an oasis (the invention of air conditioning helped too), the treasury was lost and never found, remaining one of the great mysteries of the country. Nik's Asgard bloodline never managed to leave this place, thus he was born to tolerate its scorching weather.
Layers, layers! Nik put on another jacket. One of the reasons he was here was concern that the climate was warming too rapidly, but now he wasn't so sure! He also didn't expect much from the conference. He was unlikely to see eye-to-eye with the rest of Europe on things like ICE vehicles (when gasoline still cost less than water), or preventing the spread of agriculture (with some of the largest food-producing regions of anywhere), and especially the continued lack of any real transition plan for workers and skills. However, the modern Duxburian Union wasn't all that far away from the European nanny libs in many categories like energy generation and recycling, so signing a deal was a very real possibility. Either way, it was worth his time. If nobody acted, his home of thousands of years would become uninhabitably hot, the desert could expand, and the food supply could be threatened.
Nik briefed his translator on what he planned to talk about. He could technically speak 4 languages fluently on his own, but his 2 best were ancient ones and his English came with an accent some thousands of years older than English itself that probably made it almost unintelligible to native speakers. Ah, the joys of coming from such an isolated time capsule of a place.
It would soon be time to meet the nanny libs and hear what wild ideas they have this go-around...
