A small state has no fleet. It has a bearing. – House Rules, preface
The Republic of the Two Banks is a cool, small country: one harbour, a network of canals, a hinterland of moors and brickworks, three million inhabitants, no army a neighbour would need to fear. What it has is a Foreign Service that learned across two centuries that one keeps a seat at the table of the great only by holding a form there that nobody can overlook. In 1911 the House on the Canal was the counting house of the shipping firm Marsch & Tiede: red brick, a stairwell of green marble, offices looking out on the water where the firm's barges lay. The firm sailed to the South Seas and brought back more than its books recorded. Above the gate Consul Jorin Marsch had its house mark cut into the sandstone: a circle, three wavy lines, and above them something one may take for an eye. The firm went under in the winter of 1931, the winter they call at the river mouth the winter of the silent nets; the house stood empty, then full of files, then empty again. In 1948 the Institute for Pro...
From the lore of Das Haus am Kanal.