Bathroom Monologue: Do Not Hug the Golem

A golem is the best friend you could have. Forget sexy succubae. Forget conniving imps. Just because they're your species, or have blood in their veins, or hopes and dreams, does not make them good friends or reliable business partners. In fact, all those features make them distinctly bad business partners on any important business.

One reason you want the golem as a best friend is that it'll never hog the seats during travel. If there's only room for one on the carriage, it'll let you sit. If you only have one steer, it'll let you ride it. It will walk. It will pull the carriage.

Another reason you want the golem as your best friend is that when you're stranded in the middle of The Frontier, it won't kill the carriage’s steer for food. It doesn't eat except when it's confused, and then it'll usually eat you by mistake. Succubae eat you out of boredom.

Once the steer has been cooked and gone rotten, your golem best friend won't turn on you. It won't try to cannibalize your left arm under the rationalization that you're a righty. Unlike imps, the golem best friend also won't run off in the middle of the night, abandoning you once it's obvious that it can't eat you in your sleep.

The golem is a better friend because it will actually carry you back to civilization. You’ll be sick from hunger, utterly useless to it, and it’ll cradle you to its craggy flank until chimneys are in sight. Even when the villagers run at it with pitchforks and torches, it'll stay with you until you get a hot meal.

Now after that, it will run away. It will run like a sissy. To be fair though, all best friends will run away once you're safe and people are stabbing them with farm equipment.

However, very few best friends will then loiter on the city outskirts, hiding behind the biggest tree available, until you're healthy and ready to disembark.

The only downside to the golem best friend is that it'll break your ribs when it hugs you upon seeing you again.

Do not hug the golem.

Bathroom Monologue: Empire Logic

“Of course we have scientific evidence that tyranny keeps the world safe. Science is based on what? Empirical evidence. And nothing is more empirical than an empire. And as our empire is what began recorded history, all recorded peace and justice has transpired during the empire’s reign. Any decency beforehand is hearsay and unsubstantiated superstition. Do some legislators in the legal or policing branches abuse their power? It’s possible, but also a matter of record. And the record is also a matter of record, revisable, amendable, a matter of conquest, no different from the world. The world to which we bring peace. You’re welcome.”

Fifth Floor, Housewares and Diplomacy

Jangs didn't actually have a top floor to his house. He lived in a hotel, like hundreds of the Golden Emperor's crucial employees. Living in temporary housing and seeing people check out every time you walked in was supposed to remind you to do a good job, or your room would go to someone else. His Majesty was a brilliant motivational thinker.

Bathroom Monologue: The Wine

One of the Golden Emperor’s displays of his own grandeur was the annual court wine ceremony. A bottle of the empire’s best was carted from lordship to lordship, left in the charge of one of his fifty lords for a week each. For the last two weeks of the year the bottle was left with his wife, the Jade Empress, and his oldest son, a man of little reputation. Any of the fifty-two culprits could have poisoned the bottle in any number of ways without the chance of being caught; with each lord in the position to grab more land and his family was in line to grab the throne. Then at the ceremony the emperor would take the bottle from his son and drink the entire thing, without a food tester. It displayed the amity of his reign.

Cynics say the bottle is switched the day before the ceremony. Cynics, as the Jade Empress is immortally quoted, “are short-sighted and will be tried in a court of law.” The bottle is actually switched several hundred times. If the Golden Emperor only switched it once someone, quite probably his wife, would pay off the single switcher and he’d die disgracing his throne. No, a staff larger than that which runs most of his wars is in charge of replacing, destroying, disinfecting, sanitizing, unpoisoning, fact-finding, blackmailing, threatening, extorting and kidnapping until every possible conspirator had either given up his plot or executed it thinking he’d finally shown that blasted Golden Emperor. His highness would never allow all plots to simply be pre-empted; in fact, he wished as many to be implemented as possible, and then quietly thwarted. He was a ruler who understood the virtue of embarrassment. It was why he always has his loving wife uncork the bottle at the ceremony.

Bathroom Monologue: 'Till Armageddon do you Part

The Golden Emperor and the Jade Empress weren't the first human beings to be elevated to godly status after death, but a thousand years later they would be the most famous. This was because they were the best at projecting images. Each only had one rival: the other. No one but the Jade Empress would contradict the Golden Emperor. No one would remain seated when the Jade Empress entered a room, save the Golden Emperor. Their feisty marriage was one of the quirks that turned them from mortal people to immortal legends.

Their empire stretching from sea-to-sea helped a little.

They tapped into the knowledge of the time; theirs was the first culture to discover pollination in plants. Theirs was a culture that exploded the importance of male and female elements of nature and society. The Golden Emperor and Jade Empress quickly came to embody the two halves of nature: the father and the mother. Even the materials of their namesakes symbolized the two great aspects of life. Gold represented the sun, the source of life energy. Jade represented flora, in the grass and trees of the country that fed the livestock, which in turn fed all humanity. One gave life unto the other, and the other grew life unto the former.

They were infallible. They never lost face to anyone else in a debate, or fencing practice. There was no record of dissidence within the capital. The few insurrections in the country went down as villainous, but this was because insurrections were vilified. Dissidents were dissuaded or assassinated. Keeping their reputations spotless in the time and historical record was hard work – not for the two rulers, but for their gaggles of supporters.

Jangs, a court retainer so portly one poet referred to him as “The Sphere,” was in charge of the Golden Emperor’s reputation. He was followed everywhere by highly trained ninja who could strangle a disobedient warlord without even becoming visible. They were, by and large, Jangs’ political leverage. They were necessary leverage, for Jangs’ work wasn’t all strong-arming rogue philosophers and flower arrangement. Often he was dispatched to the wilderness to retrieve an imperial stamp, or to keep three hundred barbaric nutcases from turning a narrow pass in the mountains into a bloody embarrassment to the throne. The Golden Emperor’s immortal reputation is testament to how good Jangs was. All of his deeds went unsung, but those who knew him know he worked very hard – especially against the plots of the Jade Empress. She was a conniving, vindictive wife, and worse, she had better staff.