the Emperor of the Eighty Worlds

[He's in the art room, contemplating a meticulously painted sphere, a little larger than his fist. The continents don't match Earth's. They're larger, and fewer - in fact, it seems to be a surface of contiguous landmass, etched with colors carefully delineating who knows what features, disrupted by splotches of large seas, rather than predominantly oceans with great slabs of earth sailing incrementally through them.]

A planet seems so vast when the whole known world resides within one. And yet the very singularity of that cradle can make it so terribly precarious.

( TLDR: In which the Emperor rambles pointedly about history and biology and makes a mind-bogglingly ambitious offer. )