King Pteppicymon LXVIII

King Pteppicymon LXVIII, also known as Pteppicymon the Deeply Suspicious, was a ruler of Inutilia between 810 and 811. He was a ruler of the late Djelibeybian Dynasty. His being the apparent sixty-eighth ruler to be called Pteppicymon is the most commonly cited evidence that the Great Gap was longer than most Inutilian historians believe. His name derives from both his suspicious manner of dealing with his father's will, and his suspicion of the entire royal family to supplant him and his descendants.

'Will' scandal
Upon the death of his father, Horatio IV, Pteppicymon was charged with carrying out the will. He notoriously challenged it immediately, claiming that it was invalid and made requests that could not possibly be fulfilled. The latter charge may have had a grain of truth in it. Horatio IV had sent miners to the Inutilian-Cancionish Range in search of silver after hearing about the wealth of silver being mined in the RCM. He died before hearing that there was no silver on his side of the border, and therefore quite possibly had made elaborate stipulations in his will about the distribution of the silver, particularly in regards to lavishing it on his own funeral. This second argument for challenging the will was the trigger for the Silver Wars, which lasted for over a millennium.

It was generally believed that the challenge of the will was more complicated than Pteppicymon claimed. For one thing, he refused to show the will to anyone else, not even the legal team he was paying to overturn it. He even went so far as to toss it into his fireplace, with the famous words 'take that, dad'. The other reason for suspicion is that, no longer aware of Horatio's original plans for the redistribution of his wealth, it was all given to Pteppicymon as the direct descendant according to an Inutilian law regarding property inheritance. What makes it even more suspicious is that the law had only existed for half an hour before being applied in this way. Most suspicious of all is that the public-facing Books of Law had had the date of said law's creation edited to a century earlier, but more accurate copies belonging to the Guild of Lawyers revealed and corrected the error five years later.

Royal family massacre
In the second year of his reign, Pteppicymon became highly suspicious of the rest of the royal family, believing that they plotted to assassinate him and take over the throne. He immediately issued a decree saying that all members of the family except his own children would be executed. He didn't even exclude his wife from the decree.

Shocked by this bloodthirstiness, his officials found a way to exploit a loophole to rid themselves of a truly terrible monarch. In writing the decree the king had neglected to explicitly exclude himself, no doubt assuming it was self-evident, so by his own decree Pteppicymon was executed along with everyone else.