The National Purpose Coup was a coup d'état perpetrated by leaders of the military and police forces against the monarch of Vaethia.

Background

The Vaethian monarchy was in a vulnerable position: the old King Syron was ill and bedridden, while his heir and daughter Vaenya was only fourteen and there remained some doubts as to whether a girl could claim the throne. In addition, the state had recently gone through difficulties, including two harsh plagues and a stall in the economy; the government had only been saved from bankruptcy thanks to the presence of Armurian companies.

A group of leaders in the executive branch recognized this weakness and decided to plan a coup, hoping to swiftly take power and rule Vaethia as a military junta. The plotters counted among their number Vallion, the Secretary of Defense (one of the five ministries), and General Senovion, the most senior military officer with an active command in the capital.

The plotters planned their coup very carefully, making sure to closely assess their resources and their disposition so they would be able to deploy their loyal units swiftly, disabling the other military and police units in the town. The coup would be over, and the plotters' regime in place, by the time armed intervention from other places in the kingdom was possible. This was important, because they would quickly need to establish their legitimacy of rule to forestall intervention by loyalist forces or by their Licali and Cuprien superiors.

Failure of the Intelligence Services

There were two main institutions in the capital whose mission was to uncover and prevent plots of this type. The first, the Vaethian Eye, was a military unit focused on foreign intelligence and internal military affairs. However, it only had a small presence in the capital, as it focused on officers commanding units on the move who were most likely to have enough troop loyalty to attempt treason. There was an active investigation into Colonel Tarn, one of the plotters, but it was not thoroughly done and he was not under full-time surveillance.

A more effective unit was the police Security Brigade's intelligence department, whose mission was exclusively monitoring political affairs in and around the capital. The plotters were exceedingly careful to maintain a tight security, and stayed well away from civilian political elements; aside from Vallion and those he intimately trusted, they did not attempt to recruit any other civilians. Thus, the Security Brigade failed to uncover the budding plot.

Execution of the Coup

The coup was performed in just a few hours, at night. The exact date was not set far in advance: the plotters had to gauge when they had infiltrated enough units to have the manpower to pull off the coup, but before rumors and knowledge had spread so far that the Vaethian Eye or civilians at Defense heard of it. The five main plotters kept information about the coup close to themselves, to make sure nothing leaked out and to stop units from communicating among each other and perhaps turning against them in a double-coup.

The plotters had three main objectives: capturing communications facilities, capturing key government officials - including of course the monarchs - and locking down the city to keep people and information from moving. They split up their forces into numerous teams, each of which had specific instructions. Some units did not even know they were participating in a coup, but thought they were loyalists dispatched to prevent it.

To lock down the city, the plotters made use primarily of armored cars from military and gendarme units. These forces utilized horse-drawn armored wagons, whose primary mission was crowd control, and which were thus well suited both to quickly transport troops (which otherwise would have to be supplied with separate logistics units, which was not feasible) and to block streets. The plotters focused mostly on the four major arteries through which people could enter and leave the city, as well as the three bridges that crossed the Crag (a ravine splitting the city). They also made sure to lock down key buildings such as the Ministry of Defense, Parliament, police headquarters, and the like.

The plotters disabled loyalist communications by stealing or damaging direct-link gem communicators of most units. Luckily for them, however, the majority of communicators were not direct links, but ran through communications nodes in either the Defense Ministry or the Royal Press, both of which were sabotaged shortly before coup forces captured the buildings, thus making sure no warning could go out to larger loyalist formations.

The key people to arrest were all written down on a long list, and units sent to capture key buildings also had orders to arrest the officials located inside them. Most police and military commanders on duty were captured when their headquarters were taken, while the rest were unlikely to even be aware there was a coup going on, and if they were, they would have no precise information and no way of reaching their units due to the communications and city lockdown. The most important people were King Syron, the chancellor, and the young Princess Vaenya. Though the chancellor was shot while he tried to escape his kidnappers, the king and the princess fell into the plotters' hands and were kept in an improvised cell in the princess's lodgings, the Hôtel of the Pond.

Aftermath

The coup was executed to near-perfection, as all objectives were attained, the loyalists failed to mount a successful defense, and there were almost no casualties except for a confrontation with the Crown Guard on the Kingsbridge and some deaths during the arrests. The plotters announced that the city was in lockdown, and they had taken over in the name of finding a "national purpose" to guide Vaethia onto a more successful track. However, the bureaucracy and people's resiliency to a forceful takeover, no matter how smooth, had been underestimated; and, though all political leaders on the plotters' list had been captured, a resistance swiftly formed. The plotters had missed several groups of power, which would become a major threat.

The first was the Faith of Vaethia, a previously insignificant grouping of mostly idealistic young people. However, they were also extremely loyal to the monarchs, and during the very night of the coup, students gathered in the academy (which the plotters had not judged a target worth occupying), exchanged information, and decided to resist. They went to communications relays in the industrial zones, and sent out word to the entire country that an illegitimate coup had been perpetrated and that only the blood of Syron was Vaethia's legitimate ruler. They also blew up rail lines around the capital, making it impossible for army units ordered up to reinforce the relatively meager coup forces in the capital to arrive soon enough. In addition, armed threats grew organized quicker than expected; spread-out gendarme units around the capital quickly formed an armed group of several hundred which might threaten the plotters' regime, the Vaerian Army - judged ineffective without its headquarters - drew up and began marching south, and Cuprien refused to recognize a government not led by the legitimate government and threatened intervention of its own. All because of some students who had let information out, ignoring the threats of the plotters' publicly announced extensive security and lockdown measures, and riled up resistance.

Additionally, Colonel Tarn from the plotters attempted to take over the regime on his own. He was dispatched by Major Atuiron, but this infighting nevertheless also contributed to weakening the plotters.

In the end, they were forced to base their rule on the monarchs' legitimacy. So they gave a public speech, presenting their new regime - preserving the existing political system, but placing themselves and their friends in key positions of power - and using Princess Vaenya as a figurehead. However, the girl was more forceful than they had hoped, and they were forced to allow her some freedoms and give her more political importance than they had hoped. They would only rule as long as Vaenya allowed them to. Still, things had turned out well: they controlled the bureaucracy, and the princess was wholly in their power despite her popularity.