Vanda Nossëo is certainly ready to lavish all kinds of basically-free swag on the new King in exchange for a storefront and the freedom of all their ambassadors they did not see fit to break out promptly themselves.

Then it sounds like they can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement!

Meanwhile, Ljudizem is, as predicted, trying to figure out how to provide the maximum support to the Holy League compatible with its Vanda Nosseo membership requirements! Mostly, of course, it is Technically Not The Government doing this; the cause of the Holy League is actually popular in the country, on the simple but persuasive grounds that Gerontine rule was not, and so the attempts to gather donations to fund the Holy League, recruit armies mercenaries private military contractors medical and industrial volunteers to go join the Holy League, and sweet-talk demons into providing them with them vast amounts of war materiel (to be delivered to the Holy League) in exchange for folk songs are coordinated by private groups of enthusiastic citizens. The government is mostly just trying to make sure that everyone has access to good Vanda Nosseo lawyers specialized in the field of Newly Discovered Third-World Countries, so they can do the maximum giving compatible with the new law.

Ljudic people are also blackening the names of the Coalition to everyone they can find on Vanda Nosseo's webpages, trying to convince daeva ("they're indestructible anyway!") to sign on as volunteers, and sometimes personally crossing the border to raid and pillage the people who were oppressing them last week.

(Or sometimes not crossing the border; plenty of areas voted to join Ljudizem that Dinot's army had never reached but the landlord had been Gerontine for forty or eighty years, and the populace of Ljudizem can hold grudges longer than that.)

People going raiding and pillaging will run into the problem that this is not actually legal in Vanda Nossëo. Or, well, it could be, if that were the local law - 'no stealing' is not one of the fundamental requirements - but they are pretty sure that it is not, in the jurisdictions where it is being carried out, the local law that it is okay to go pillage people.

The local law is definitely not that you're allowed to pillage people! But surely you're allowed to pillage the enemies of Vanda Nosseo, right? And Vanda Nosseo spent all that time defeating their armies. So there's no problem, right?

No, there is definitely a problem. Do they need to send the Elspeth video around again? They'll do that while toting the first batch of pillagers off to trial.

There are people who missed the Elspeth video the first time, yes.

Are the rest of the attempts to support the Holy League working out?

The shops actually start phasing out after a place has joined up and they can all just get on a bus to go properly shopping and can also collect their basic income. There's still plenty of war materiel to be had, but the process of getting it is a little different. Medical volunteers aren't hard to find, though they're a touch redundant with the healing the envoys already have flying around. The Internet is pretty hard to rile up with tales of Coalition atrocities; there's just a lot going on to distract people and there's plenty of antibodies in the memetic water against period-typical hatred of the enemy. Also it's really declassé to be hung up on your pre-VN grievances after you could be gallivanting around the multiverse, like, what, dude, get a hobby.

HOBBY? HOBBY, other than VENGEANCE on the people who murdered my grandparents? NEVER!

Well, you could also get a job, and resurrect your grandparents?

... Great-grandparents?

Those too! Like, it might take a while to save up? But you can totally do it.

This is indeed a convincing carrot to convince Ljudizem to put aside a little of its homicidal grudge against its former oppressors. A little.

Hopefully the Elspeth videos and the trials (they're public, if anyone wants to see!) help close the gap the rest of the way.

They certainly won't hurt.

Meanwhile! Desnau also got its army teleported home. And lost about a quarter of its landmass.

It, uh... took the situation worse than Simolya did.

(Is this extremely difficult? Yes! Did they try for it anyway? Yes!) 

The Desnauen Civil War appears to be fought between mutineers unwilling to be decimated who have declared a Republic, loyalists to the King who don't care that he's a brutal maniac, secessionists in the provinces that barely did not vote to join Wolcyn who would like to murder everyone not Ljudic in them and then try for another vote, supporters of the Holy League who were attached to the army of Ljudizem and are now looking for new work, and it may possibly be worth describing Edelrich Desnauen as a fifth faction, though she hasn't declared against her father so much as carefully made sure there was no possible way he could send her orders that might interfere with taking actually effective action against the antimonarchist factions.

Welp that's ugly as fuck but the Vandans Nossëo console each other with reminders that these people are reductionist and people were dying in war constantly before they showed up and this time at least there's an end in sight.

Unrelatedly, it turns out hero crests are a) neither magical nor very intelligent and b) not all that picky about who they'll behave for. Half the envoys have them now.

They

Have

WHAT

EXACTLY

NOW???

We did say they had an alliance with the angels, anyone remember that?

The angels are indeed friendly but they didn't get these from them, they just had some apsels copy them. They're working on reverse-engineering too, since they only work for people with human-ish brains and not for e.g. Amentans; the angels might help with that but either way it's a few years out minimum.

What.