Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25936766-20170820043030/@comment-4010415-20170822031649

SpiritedDreaming wrote: That SDC symbol is on the edge of the Vacuo/Vale border though, and far from where the Vacuo symbol is traditionally shown, which is where I've always thought the original paradise to be. If that is the case, the Vacuans could have let him mine there because it's far from the centre of their Kingdom and away from land that was already ravaged by mining in the war. I don't think that's the Vacuo/Vale border, as I'm pretty sure Vale doesn't actually have that much territory settled. The amount of land that Mistral has settled was presented to us as something remarkable and special about the Kingdom of Mistral. If Vale had settled land from the north end of Sanus all the way up to the border of the desert, then Mistral wouldn't be that special, especially considering that is a lot more land than Mistral has. Mistral seems to mainly just have that loop made by the Asian dragon formation and probably part of the dragon's head.

So, the space between Vale's northern region and Vacuo's desert region may be entirely unclaimed by any Kingdoms.

It's possible that Vacuo owns all of the desert. Though, you're right that it's pretty far away from Vacuo's capital, as WoR depictions show the capital in the northern area of the desert.

Either way, if Vacuo owns all of that desert, they may have initially not wanted the SDC mining within their territory, even on the edge of it. This is especially since the big reason that Mantle and Mistral came after them was because Vacuo's territoriy has huge Dust deposits. If the SDC came sniffing around for Dust deposits near their territory, I'm sure they would've been uneasy about it, which is why it would have been a good move for Nicholas to do something to make his business' presence there not quite as bad of a thing for them.