Post by Alina Rybalka on Dec 11, 2020 21:44:29 GMT -5
The Kozaks had expanded quite a bit in their short time in Mistral. The rash of publicity had led to interest and more importantly opened doors that were completely unavailable to them before. This meant that in order to keep those doors open, Knight had to work much more and have much more face to face contact with those various contacts to keep things running smoothly. In practice, this meant that a good chunk of her business days was spent in meetings. If she was less willing to delegate work, her entire day plus around four hours on top of that would be mired in meetings, just due to the size and scope of the organization at this point.
There were a lot of things she could just get summaries on and trust others to do, but there were a lot of things left that she couldn’t. Things like physical security assignments were things she still did, because she had to compensate for the fact that many of her people were green as grass and raise the numbers of patrols far higher than most thought necessary. She’d rather have people bored than dead, and especially with the killer still on the loose physical safety was at the absolute top of her priority list and also that of many of her contacts who wanted to use her people as additional protection. They were being used as a security service more and more from smaller jobs like being a bouncer in businesses to security on property, because with the spotlight on them so heavily recently it would be a colossally stupid move to be caught stealing or something.
And it would have been, but frankly the culture she had helped create in her group made that unviable. If they were going to actually rely on each other to stay alive and needed to have a base level of trust with each other. They didn’t have to be best friends, but knowing for a fact that your supposed ally wouldn’t go rogue and do stupid shit behind your back made it a lot easier to focus outwards at threats without rather than wasting time looking inward for threats in your own ranks. This experiment wouldn’t work if there were internal divisions this early on, and she did everything in her power to avoid them. The heavily militarized style of the Iron Wolves worked out in her favor in that respect, because it let her completely rip apart cliques and force people to work with people they didn’t know or even disliked to ensure they were capable of doing so.
What also helped, frankly, was the fact that she didn’t need strong people… she needed people who could be reliable and follow directions. Those with egos too big to work well with others were dropped, and so were the ones too selfish to put their own feelings below other people’s lives in the hierarchy of needs. Both of these types were baited publicly and humiliated, made examples out of. Anyone who thought they were too good for the group was ripped a new one in front of everyone with how completely and effortlessly Knight could dismantle even the most juiced up bully who was used to getting their way with force their entire life. Some took the correction and became better people for it, but others imploded on the spot. Those that imploded often tried to get others to leave with them, but the public nature of the event discredited them in the eyes of all but those too far disconnected to reality to be useful to the cause anyway.
At the end of the day, a top-down structure where one person was ultimately in charge only worked if people actually followed orders. That meant that she had to create an organization where people followed her orders, and Alina wasn’t picky on how she did it. Some people were convinced with facts, with statistics. Those were the easiest, because it was easy to objectively show why she was doing major moves. Some people were convinced by words, and with emotion rather than sense. Those were harder, because the faunus had never been an exceptional orator. She had certainly gotten better, but those types were largely those she helped rescue from Kerch rather than the new group. Others only understood the language of violence, of domination and power. They could be leashed if proven to be less powerful, but unreliable otherwise. Depending on how unreliable they were, these were allowed to stay for the most part. She had no problem smacking down some upstarts every so often to keep them convinced that following her orders was something in their self-interest, frankly.
It was a system that worked and worked well enough to already catapult them to controlling much of the Ground District either physically or through the loyalty or at least cooperation from many of the smaller factions. The smaller gangs and criminal organizations actively avoided the Kozaks at this point, mostly due to the fact that the first one to do so was torn to shreds and the second one was reduced to being forced to make a public apology in the Kerch Square and endure that humiliation as one of the larger groups that was meant to be a huge issue for the Kozaks moving forward. Alina just exiled them after they lost their dignity and their credibility, not giving a single fuck about what happened to them afterwards. She took all their weapons, equipment, cash, and resources and kicked them to the curb as a living example of a once-feared group who fucked with the wrong people. Funnily enough, nobody else had tried the Kozaks since.
The Peasant Party was still preaching about their dumbass nonviolent protest method for achieving a better Mistral, but people were buying into that line of defeatist bullshit less and less these days. They had tried to stay within the system and got kicked down every time they got any momentum for years, and the fact that their poster girl turned mass murderer didn’t exactly help their public image… especially when their chief rival was the one to save the Wind District from the threat of that rampaging poster girl. They put all their eggs in the Holly Hock basket and got absolutely burned, and it served them right. The Kozaks were built around one person as a stopgap, to consolidate things and get people trained up to take over the organization themselves so that once Alina was out of the picture the cause didn’t just die immediately. The Peasant Party had years to build a network and a generation of leaders for the Ground District and failed to do so over and over and over.
Alina had built in a couple of months what they and many others had failed to do in a decade, and she wasn’t done yet. She couldn’t be done yet, because she had accomplished exactly zero of her goals. She may have traded her armor in for a suit most days, but the goals were always the same. The first step to those goals was consolidating power and becoming the undisputed power in the Ground District, far enough above every other faction that nobody could contest their claim to running the show. They hadn’t gotten there yet, but they were within striking distance of doing so with only a few notable and stubborn holdouts refusing to work with them or in the case of the Peasant Party and their affiliates actively working against their growth and advancement. They could have worked together, had the Peasants been less prideful and stubborn. They could have combined resources and shared, had they been willing to listen to reason.
They didn’t know it yet, but they were going to be cannibalized for resources and lose everything but their most ardent supporters as the Kozaks devoured their entire organization whole and used the resources they once wielded with far more effectiveness. Poaching their member base had already started, and with enough massaging it would turn into a full blown hostile takeover that would eliminate them as a competing power entirely. Once that happened, the diehards would have no ability to influence anything and would be ignored due to the fact they ceased to be a threat unless they decided to publicly recant and decide to participate in the new community at large. Alina didn’t really hold grudges and was quite adept at turning old enemies into allies by simply removing their other options except for leaving the area entirely, living in anonymity without glory or attention, or throwing their lot with the Kozaks. The diehards always craved glory and attention, though, and would wither and die without it. It was a weakness that the faunus was good at capitalizing on, again and again and again.
____
She had dismissed the others who had come with her to those meetings and was walking back alone through the Ground District and stopped for a moment to admire the changes that had taken place. Abandoned and nonfunctional buildings had been transformed into houses and structures with a purpose. Small shops, gyms, living quarters, training facilities, repair shops, community kitchens, laundromats, the whole works. The quality wasn’t the best due to the lack of accessible good materials, but it was functional. It was something, and they had built it largely from scratch. From the water and sewage lines, to the power grid, to the community farms, to the schools that had opened up and the regular trainings in all sorts of random shit springing up almost daily they had built something from nothing and that was nothing short of a goddamned miracle. The general population had largely been shielded from the pressure of the rush of activity, and things were even starting to settle down and become almost… normal. She allowed herself a rare smile at that thought, with the comfort of her schedule slipping into a routine giving her a sense of stability that she hadn’t felt in a long while.
There were a lot of things she could just get summaries on and trust others to do, but there were a lot of things left that she couldn’t. Things like physical security assignments were things she still did, because she had to compensate for the fact that many of her people were green as grass and raise the numbers of patrols far higher than most thought necessary. She’d rather have people bored than dead, and especially with the killer still on the loose physical safety was at the absolute top of her priority list and also that of many of her contacts who wanted to use her people as additional protection. They were being used as a security service more and more from smaller jobs like being a bouncer in businesses to security on property, because with the spotlight on them so heavily recently it would be a colossally stupid move to be caught stealing or something.
And it would have been, but frankly the culture she had helped create in her group made that unviable. If they were going to actually rely on each other to stay alive and needed to have a base level of trust with each other. They didn’t have to be best friends, but knowing for a fact that your supposed ally wouldn’t go rogue and do stupid shit behind your back made it a lot easier to focus outwards at threats without rather than wasting time looking inward for threats in your own ranks. This experiment wouldn’t work if there were internal divisions this early on, and she did everything in her power to avoid them. The heavily militarized style of the Iron Wolves worked out in her favor in that respect, because it let her completely rip apart cliques and force people to work with people they didn’t know or even disliked to ensure they were capable of doing so.
What also helped, frankly, was the fact that she didn’t need strong people… she needed people who could be reliable and follow directions. Those with egos too big to work well with others were dropped, and so were the ones too selfish to put their own feelings below other people’s lives in the hierarchy of needs. Both of these types were baited publicly and humiliated, made examples out of. Anyone who thought they were too good for the group was ripped a new one in front of everyone with how completely and effortlessly Knight could dismantle even the most juiced up bully who was used to getting their way with force their entire life. Some took the correction and became better people for it, but others imploded on the spot. Those that imploded often tried to get others to leave with them, but the public nature of the event discredited them in the eyes of all but those too far disconnected to reality to be useful to the cause anyway.
At the end of the day, a top-down structure where one person was ultimately in charge only worked if people actually followed orders. That meant that she had to create an organization where people followed her orders, and Alina wasn’t picky on how she did it. Some people were convinced with facts, with statistics. Those were the easiest, because it was easy to objectively show why she was doing major moves. Some people were convinced by words, and with emotion rather than sense. Those were harder, because the faunus had never been an exceptional orator. She had certainly gotten better, but those types were largely those she helped rescue from Kerch rather than the new group. Others only understood the language of violence, of domination and power. They could be leashed if proven to be less powerful, but unreliable otherwise. Depending on how unreliable they were, these were allowed to stay for the most part. She had no problem smacking down some upstarts every so often to keep them convinced that following her orders was something in their self-interest, frankly.
It was a system that worked and worked well enough to already catapult them to controlling much of the Ground District either physically or through the loyalty or at least cooperation from many of the smaller factions. The smaller gangs and criminal organizations actively avoided the Kozaks at this point, mostly due to the fact that the first one to do so was torn to shreds and the second one was reduced to being forced to make a public apology in the Kerch Square and endure that humiliation as one of the larger groups that was meant to be a huge issue for the Kozaks moving forward. Alina just exiled them after they lost their dignity and their credibility, not giving a single fuck about what happened to them afterwards. She took all their weapons, equipment, cash, and resources and kicked them to the curb as a living example of a once-feared group who fucked with the wrong people. Funnily enough, nobody else had tried the Kozaks since.
The Peasant Party was still preaching about their dumbass nonviolent protest method for achieving a better Mistral, but people were buying into that line of defeatist bullshit less and less these days. They had tried to stay within the system and got kicked down every time they got any momentum for years, and the fact that their poster girl turned mass murderer didn’t exactly help their public image… especially when their chief rival was the one to save the Wind District from the threat of that rampaging poster girl. They put all their eggs in the Holly Hock basket and got absolutely burned, and it served them right. The Kozaks were built around one person as a stopgap, to consolidate things and get people trained up to take over the organization themselves so that once Alina was out of the picture the cause didn’t just die immediately. The Peasant Party had years to build a network and a generation of leaders for the Ground District and failed to do so over and over and over.
Alina had built in a couple of months what they and many others had failed to do in a decade, and she wasn’t done yet. She couldn’t be done yet, because she had accomplished exactly zero of her goals. She may have traded her armor in for a suit most days, but the goals were always the same. The first step to those goals was consolidating power and becoming the undisputed power in the Ground District, far enough above every other faction that nobody could contest their claim to running the show. They hadn’t gotten there yet, but they were within striking distance of doing so with only a few notable and stubborn holdouts refusing to work with them or in the case of the Peasant Party and their affiliates actively working against their growth and advancement. They could have worked together, had the Peasants been less prideful and stubborn. They could have combined resources and shared, had they been willing to listen to reason.
They didn’t know it yet, but they were going to be cannibalized for resources and lose everything but their most ardent supporters as the Kozaks devoured their entire organization whole and used the resources they once wielded with far more effectiveness. Poaching their member base had already started, and with enough massaging it would turn into a full blown hostile takeover that would eliminate them as a competing power entirely. Once that happened, the diehards would have no ability to influence anything and would be ignored due to the fact they ceased to be a threat unless they decided to publicly recant and decide to participate in the new community at large. Alina didn’t really hold grudges and was quite adept at turning old enemies into allies by simply removing their other options except for leaving the area entirely, living in anonymity without glory or attention, or throwing their lot with the Kozaks. The diehards always craved glory and attention, though, and would wither and die without it. It was a weakness that the faunus was good at capitalizing on, again and again and again.
____
She had dismissed the others who had come with her to those meetings and was walking back alone through the Ground District and stopped for a moment to admire the changes that had taken place. Abandoned and nonfunctional buildings had been transformed into houses and structures with a purpose. Small shops, gyms, living quarters, training facilities, repair shops, community kitchens, laundromats, the whole works. The quality wasn’t the best due to the lack of accessible good materials, but it was functional. It was something, and they had built it largely from scratch. From the water and sewage lines, to the power grid, to the community farms, to the schools that had opened up and the regular trainings in all sorts of random shit springing up almost daily they had built something from nothing and that was nothing short of a goddamned miracle. The general population had largely been shielded from the pressure of the rush of activity, and things were even starting to settle down and become almost… normal. She allowed herself a rare smile at that thought, with the comfort of her schedule slipping into a routine giving her a sense of stability that she hadn’t felt in a long while.
