Our council's decision that was sent to the mainland for the alliance council was very detailed. In essence, we pointed out the current lopsided military situation, and that any sort of help to these rebels risks total war, with the likely outcome being that all the entirety of the human continent would fall before the war situation could be stabilized. With many of the factories in our alliance being focused on consumer and industrial goods, rather than military goods, the other side is simply producing far more combat equipment than we are.

On one hand, that's probably part of the reason this rebellion has occurred in the first place, since our alliance has left more control to the individual nations, they've been able to improve their conditions with factories as they saw fit, rather than worsening conditions to produce military goods. Those who learn about the disparity in the other alliance end up feeling exploited, resulting in rebellions. Most individuals in their alliance probably aren't aware of how the new paradigm of power will work. For most of history, those with high levels and a combat class could take on hundreds of non-combat individuals without breaking a sweat. A true warrior class.

Now, a peasant with a gun can do real harm to combat individuals. There is no guarantee of control, and while rebellions previously were rare, and usually involved combat individuals forming a portion of the rebellion, that no longer needs to be the case. I'm not sure exactly how the elves factor into it, as very strong combat oriented individuals, like elves, still can display immense individual power with magic, but from our experience fighting Rathland and then again on the dwarven continent fighting the invading demons of Malagord, the bulk of a combat force are much weaker than a tank.

Especially after this rebellion though, the other side will be much more aware of the new paradigm. Both citizens and leaders will know where power sits. An aspect of our stance to the rest of the alliance is that if we want to be able to help in future incidents, then more military manufacturing focus needs to be undertaken by our member states. Right now, helping these rebels will only cause more harm to more citizens. We're being pragmatic about it though. We're actually advising that we send some ships as observers to watch what happens.

Our stance is that we should state aren't helping either side, but we want to ensure that there aren't atrocities committed by either side, harming innocent bystanders caught up in the rebellion. We can then also observe how they put their rebellion down, and potentially gain valuable information about their technology. If we're shooed away, then so be it. Though when it comes time with aircraft, I have no qualms with invading their airspace to observe everything we can. Unlike with ships, where they have a chance to cause real harm, with aircraft, it'd actually be quite hard for them to do anything. Even if they were able to knock down an airplane flying at hundreds of miles per hour, the number of individuals inside would be low, and the manufacturing cost is much lower than for ships.

In essence, if this event were happening five years from now, rather than today, I'd probably actually encourage us to help the rebels. Their timing was quite poor in that regard.

Fifteen days later, and we had the news about what was decided reach back to Kembora and Drazvok. As I'd been concerned with, time was of the essence, and by the time deliberations had concluded as to what we should do, fighting had already broken out in some outer regions around the rebellion.

Within our alliance, there was a very vocal minority consisting of about half of our human nations that wanted to help the rebels, even if it meant war. These nations were surprisingly the border nations, though they were also the ones who have dedicated a larger portion of their industrialization to making weapons, so they perhaps feel more ready to fight than the bulk of our forces would actually support. The second faction in deliberations was made up of the remaining human nations and a handful of dwarves who wanted to find a way to provide aid without war, whether that meant relocating some of the rebels or even just putting political pressure on the norther alliance to not be too heavy handed.

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The last faction, with our representative and a majority of the dwarven representatives, advocated for a restricted policy of non-intervention. This faction represented the plurality of the opinions, but not a full majority. This meant that we couldn't use a simple majority vote to keep complete non-intervention an option, including observation. As such, there were negotiations between member states to get votes.

Ultimately, the decision that was made was that we'd take a somewhat harder line stance by sending a decent number of ships to observe all the ports involved in the rebellion, and that we'd make a somewhat hardline statement to the northern alliance that we won't stand for outright slaughter of their own citizens. We won't argue with quelling the rebellion and those who fight, but indiscriminate killing will result in us choosing to get involved.

I'm sure that most of the alliance members are aware that we really can't actually enforce that demand. We can only observe as far as our telescopes can see. If they quell the fighters, and relocate individuals, they can disappear all the rebel citizens quite easily beyond our vision. Though the threat of immediate war might at least prevent them from killing off people who weren't actively involved, but ended up passively caught up in it.

The hardliners within our own faction even made this point. When the vote didn't go their way towards further support of the rebels, they made their own demands internally to the rest of our alliance. Basically, if more of the alliance states don't start ramping up their war production, they'll have no choice but to leave the alliance as a whole, even if that means they'll be easy targets for the other side. They don't feel that it is fair that the rest of the alliance is benefiting from their military contributions without providing their own. They did at least make a note that Kembora is contributing more war goods than anyone, but they then went on to say that the rest of the states are just acting directly as our vassals if they aren't going to even try to remain militarily sovereign.

That isn't completely true, as we've begun building fluorite manufacturing on the dwarven mainland, meaning they're contributing some components to both factories and engines for military vehicles, but on the whole, they are producing far less military goods per factory than either us or the border nations.

As could be expected, the northern alliance did not appreciate our meddling in their affairs. Surprisingly, however, they were willing to concede at least a little. Their negotiations resulted in the agreement that we could keep one ship at each port city, as long as it was more than one mile out. They also would allow us to keep more ships twenty miles out. The close ship at each city will need to be inspected to ensure that it isn't currently carrying anything beyond standard weapons.

That bounced back to our alliance, which after some discussion, was a term that was agreed to. Then all that news made it back to Kembora after another twelve days. I feel that we'll get news a lot faster once we finally get all those phone lines installed. A few moderate distance ones are up and running, but a full network will take some time. This has shown us how much benefit we'd receive from not only building more phone lines, but also from adding a full on radio relay on the mainland, our other islands, Drazvok, and then Kembora. If we did that, we should be able to communicate with the mainland much faster than we currently do.

A small receiver just didn't really work in the trade city. If we instead went up to the highest point in the nearby foothills, built a properly tuned large antenna, and all the circuitry to get it set up, I'd bet we'd be able to receive a decent signal. If each island in our chain had it's own antenna we'd be able to relay the signal as well. This would be very important if war breaks out, so I'll discuss the idea with the other ministers. Ultimately, given the delay in us gathering information, we might already be at war, and we don't even know it.

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