In the end, it wasn’t really a choice at all. Arthur knew nothing of how to run an empire, but he knew which type he would have preferred to live in, an empire that put its citizens' welfare before its profits. Letting a company manage things would mean he wouldn’t get much of a say in how day-to-day issues were handled, but he preferred it that way. Still, he wouldn't jump the gun straight away.For all his power, Arthur’s education didn’t lend itself well to running a small business, never mind 27 planets and a population nearing 100 billion. Sometimes, the best thing you could do was step away and let the experts handle things. He’d been a little wary of IMA at first, but he trusted Iris’ judgement. That didn’t mean he didn’t do his due diligence, though.From the 12,081 reviews they had on OpenBusiness, only seventeen were negative, and fifteen of them were from politicians and diplomats, not the actual rulers of said empires. When he narrowed his search down to reviews submitted only by world rulers, 493 were positive, with only two negative. Still, Arthur wasn’t satisfied, and he went on forum pages completely unrelated to the company and saw what citizens of managed empires had to say about the state of things.During his little investigation, Roger and Iris went over the specifics of the Vesalius empire. Arthur’s stats were high enough that he could easily focus on both things at the same time. The Vesalius Empire’s total net worth was estimated to be around 450 trillion credits. When compared to how much debt they were in, Lady Melania had done incredibly poorly. Their annual income from taxes and government-owned businesses rarely crossed the 10 trillion credit threshold, which was nowhere near enough to run the critical infrastructure citizens depended on.As terrible a person as Lady Melania had been, she hadn’t been too bad a ruler, footing half the bill required to run her kingdom with the funds she (...)