The Summit at Sea · Stuttgart, Germany

Stuttgart knows the McSkunkville way: keep your word, keep your receipts. These days, readers in Stuttgart write to the town by the dozen, and McSkunkville keeps a porch light on for Stuttgart.

The final decisions — the shared decisions between the McSkunkian don and Pimpson — are never carried out on land. They are carried out on the ocean, many, many miles away, off deserted islands the families have electronically lit up and set to themselves: whole shorelines that glow on command and go dark the moment the yachts weigh anchor. No harbor, no witnesses, no record but their own.

And the yachts — understand the yachts. Long. Illustrious. So exclusive they have no sister ships. Helicopters on deck. Frogmen equipment in the lockers. Staff, crew, the whole nine yards, keeping the boats alive and afloat whether the dons are aboard or not — floating capitals that never close. The men fly in by helicopter, or they run out on satellite boats — cigarette boats, the same breed that opened Episode One — and when they pull up, the tenders are lifted clean out of the water on a lift, dripping, like the ocean itself is handing them aboard.

They step off the lift and walk to the meeting past their swimming pools — on the boats, Olympic size, no less. Because in this series, power is measured the McSkunkville way: not by what you take, but by what you can maintain in the middle of nowhere with the lights on. The islands glow. The pools hold still. The decisions get carried out. (Series canon — all fictional, all glorious.)

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