by Jan Stryvant
"Well what the hell are we supposed to do?" Dave's voice was both angry and loud. "Morgan's lot killed damn near all of us! Three hundred and twenty there men, women, and children for fuck's sake! Yeah, so we burned down a building in the middle of town to try and kill that murderous bastard Valens. He's the one that set us up! He deserves some of the blame as well!"
"What you're supposed to do," Arthur said calmly, "is to not endanger the rest of us. What I want to know is that these things are not going to happen again. Why wasn't the silence maintained?"
Dave sighed, "One of the mages got shot and killed."
"Why was your mage, no scratch that," Arthur shook his head. "We don't go after targets in town, in such a spectacular fashion that it draws the fire department and the police."
"Vestibulum," Arthur said turning to look at Al Summers, "It is by sheerest of luck that the ritual of silence was already being performed when you attacked the Ascendants, you didn't even employ any mages. And since then you have engaged in a massive assault, in the middle of the day no less, right in the middle of Sparks. Your attempted attack on Sunday not only brought down the local police, the state police, and the fire department, but it also brought members of the federal government into play. How the hell Valens' people were able to hide all of that from all of those people is something none of us have yet figured out."
"And just where, Arthur, do you get off on telling Vestibulum what to do?" Al Summers glared back at him.
Arthur leaned back into his seat and smiled rather widely, "Sapientia is reasserting its place among the councils, all the councils, as the keepers of the rules and our traditions. You have not only lost your lycan army, which you depended on so heavily, but you have lost a fair deal of your most powerful mages, and you stand alone with the blade of the Ascendants pointed at your throat.
"Oh, and before I forget to mention it, the Council of Eruditio, has allied itself with Sapientia in the matter of maintaining the silence, and while they've never once subscribed to it, I dare say that if I ask for their help, House Valens will lend it to us."
"You'd use those lycans against us!" Al Summers yelled and slapped the table with his hand.
"No, I'd use those lycans to save the rest of us, Alan. You don't seem to understand, if the silence falls, it will be bad for all of us, not just you. I daresay everyone else here would happily join against you to save their own skins.
"So!" Arthur said and jumping to his feet he put his hands on the table and leaned forward, "I do not want to see a war between Vestibulum and the Ascendants taking place out in the open, or anywhere else that the mundanes might see it!"
"They slaughtered hundreds of our people!" Dave said.
"You murdered our leader, in his bed!" Al shot back.
"Well, he deserved it! Maybe we should murder a bunch of your women and children so you know that it feels like as well!"
"So that was you who took out Morgan!"
"Who else could!" Dave sneered.
"Gentlemen!" Arthur raised his voice, cause the other two to stop.
"Alan, who engineered the attack on the Ascendants?"
"Morgan did, he was our leader!"
"And Morgan is dead, by the hands of the Ascendants, correct?" Arthur looked at Dave.
"One man is not equal to three hundred people, Arthur!" Dave's said, though at least he wasn't yelling now.
Arthur nodded, "No, it isn't, I agree. But at least you showed a remarkable amount of restraint by keeping your retaliation out of the public eye. I've talked to Joseph," Arthur motioned down the table, "and Eruditio has agreed to handle negotiations for any settlement you may wish to try and reach, or for the terms of any fight or war you plan on engaging in.
"From this moment forward, you will both engage him or whoever he appoints, before engaging in any further hostilities, as per our traditions." Arthur sat back down, "All in favor, signify."
As Arthur watched, the hands of every other council leader, except for Dave and Al were raised. After a brief moment, Dave nodded and raised his too. Arthur almost smiled as everyone then turned and looked at Al.
"Fine," Al said and raised his hand.
"And let the silence be preserved," Arthur said, and then the others all repeated the ancient oath.
"The next issue I must raise has to do with slavery. All of the Sapientia councils, as well as those of Eruditio have agreed that the condition of slavery, is no longer allowed under our rules and traditions."
"You're giving in to those lycans?" Roger, from Gradatim protested.
"Not just slavery of lycans, Roger," Joseph spoke up. "All slavery. Of any intelligent being, be they lycan, elf, goblin, what have you."
"Are you serious?" Lee Mills asked.
Arthur nodded, "The world has changed, and we have not changed with it. So I would urge all of you to abandon the institution.
"Which brings me to the next point, Sean Valens stopped by my house today...."
"He's still alive?" Roger asked, sounding rather shocked.
Arthur nodded, "And looking rather fit as well. However, he made it clear that Monday he's going to start going around to all of the lesser councils, now that he has finished with the major ones," Arthur glanced over at Al for brief moment, "And ask for you to turn over your lycans. He made it abundantly clear that he will only be asking once. He has also made it clear that if you murder any lycans from this day forward, he will most certainly kill you."
"He can't do that!" someone, Arthur wasn't sure, muttered.
"Oh, I assure you, he most certainly can. And will."
"Arthur, if I may?" Joseph spoke up.
"You have the floor, Joseph."
"Gentlemen, and lady," Joseph nodded to Deanna, "I have done a fair deal of research into this matter, and talked with Arthur at length, even Mr. Valens briefly. You can't win, you can not even delay the inevitable. The lions do in fact rule the lycans, and they are withdrawing them from our service. Now I suspect many of you will not heed my words when I tell you to just be graceful and let them go. So on your own heads be it, however never let it be said that you were not warned."
"Thank you Joseph. Remember all of you, Sean Valens only cares about the lycans, and those in his house. He's made it clear to all of us that he really doesn't want to be involved in anything else. If you still need lycans, I suggest you consider hiring them.
"Now, I believe that you had an issue you wanted to discuss, Wayne?" Arthur said turning to the leader of the Lux.
"Thank you, Arthur."
Arthur sat back and listened as Wayne discussed a problem dealing with user rights on certain ley lines, not a huge issue, but Arthur knew that it had been years since Morgan had let any discussions of any issue that didn't involve the Vestibulum take place at any of the Conclaves. With Al Summer's submission to the vote earlier, it was now clear to everyone that Sapientia now ruled here in Reno, and that meant that Arthur would allow everyone to have their say, once again, in order to bring harmony to the councils.
Arthur was looking forward to his phone conference with the national council tomorrow morning.
Sea Change
Sean spent the day in bed, asleep. The only time he even woke up was to eat or hit the bathroom, and then it was right back to bed. Yesterday had really drained him; the line 'well, you were just dead,' from 'The Princess Bride' went through his head more than once. He knew he shouldn't have gone out yesterday, but the truth was, he needed to be seen to stop the rumors of his death. Even the First had agreed with him later that it was a wise move.
And tonight he'd need to look good for the Fellowship meeting. The reason for that was they needed to put together a plan to keep Reno free, and to expand to the rest of the state.
And then what? He kept coming back to that question every time he closed his eyes.
What next?
Going around to the minor councils, that would be easy. Sean expected most of them to fold without a fight. Any that didn't, well, they'd regret it.
The hard part was going to be the smaller independent covens. He didn't know if they had lycan slaves or not and suspected that they'd be turning up folks breaking the rules for years to come.
What Sean needed was a police force, or better yet, the police force. It might be a good idea to start encouraging lycans to join the police, then over time they could move up into the higher positions, maybe one day they could even get a lycan chief of police or maybe even sheriff here, like Roxy's father was in Vegas.
He needed to start taking the long view.
Calling up his 'stats' program, he started to look over them, it had been a couple of weeks since he'd checked them last and he knew he should have done it yesterday, but he was afraid of what he'd find then.
His mental stats were mostly unchanged, except his wisdom had gone up a point. Apparently doing something stupid and almost dying was a learning experience.
His magical stats however had changed in that his mana stat had a big negative number being applied to it, equal to a third of the total. Looking at his physical stats, all of them now had negative modifiers applied to them, the worst being his regeneration, which was down by sixty percent. The least affected was his agility, which was only down by two points.
He'd check the numbers again tonight and then in the morning to see if those minuses had lessened or not, otherwise he'd have to figure out a way to repair those stats, and that wasn't an idea he was terribly fond of pursuing right now.
But as long as he was in bed, and Roxy had made some threats about chaining him to it if he didn't stay there, there were a few things he could do, that he hadn't had the time to do for weeks now. Namely, go back to studying magic.
Grabbing his father's watch off the nightstand, Sean slipped it on and then closing his eyes he went into the classroom spell that the watch contained.
The first spell he wanted to look at were those multiplier spells that those items Peg had brought back contained. Digging through his catalog of tarball spells, it didn't take him very long to find the ones he'd made of the two wristbands.
On careful examination, he quickly discovered that they were both the same, almost exactly so, leading him to believe that the same enchanter had made them. The problem however was that compressed into a tarball, he couldn't really tweak or mess with the spells, and he wanted to change that.
In real life, you could take a tarred program and easily untar it onto a machine, edit it, then tar it back up. But untarring a magical spell took energy, and a physical object. So far he had been able to mess with the tarballs a little bit, so he could untar them into similar objects, but he'd done that by making changes to the tarball while he'd been tarring the spells.
These spells were already tarred however, and they were a lot more complicated than the ones he'd messed with before.
He considered that a bit further. What he needed was an emulator, a magical emulator. But just how would that work? He'd still need energy to untar the spells into it, so he could study them. Sean kicked that idea around for a while, would it be possible to put all of the energy into the emulator, so the spells could be untarred into it, without any need of energy from him? Then he could just erase them and do another one, and study that one as well.
Taking out a 'pencil' he started to compose his thoughts on a piece of 'paper' in the classroom, a rather handy aspect of the spell.
He wrote down several of the spells from his father's spell book, primarily the ones that all dealt with energy, or the management of energy. After he wrote each of them down, he went and looked at the structure of them, looking for commonalities, and suddenly he saw it, the only reason it took energy to untar the spells was because they were expected to generate a magical effect!
If he could untar them into a device where they weren't expected to generate a magical effect, he could watch the spell work, it just wouldn't do anything!
But, Sean stopped and thought about that, how do you create a spell in an environment where it couldn't cause an effect when it ran? The biggest problem of the emulator would be that it would have to supply some magic for the spell's 'program' to run through its steps, until the spell or program as he liked to think of it, completed. Then all of that energy would be lost, and he'd have to refuel the device with energy. Possibly a lot of energy depending on the spell.
Sean started drumming his pencil on the paper before him as he thought about it. He needed to build an emulator. But he needed simulated physical effects, just as an emulator worked in a simulated physical environment.
Sean suddenly stopped and looked at the pencil. It wasn't real. The paper wasn't real. None of this was real! That was it! He could build his emulator here where nothing was real, where the effects didn't need any power, because there wasn't anything to affect here in the first place!
Pulling out a new piece of the 'paper' he started to sketch out his idea for the emulator. He'd design it first using the same basic techniques of the emulators he'd studied in college. Once he had that done, then he'd examine the spell that the classroom existed in, especially the one that created the pencil.
Once he understood that, he'd start to create the pieces of his emulator and then he could start examining all of those tarballs he'd learned and figure out how to edit them and improve them. Sure, he'd still need energy to put them into items in the real world, but he could make them much more efficient, which would mean lower casting costs.
And the best thing about this was that the spell for creating the classroom, and the objects in it, were all in his father's spell book.
Sean felt somebody shaking him then, so checking to make sure his work was 'saved' he logged out of the classroom and opened his eyes.
"You okay?" Roberta was asking him.
"I was researching enchanting," Sean said and the stretched, yawning.
"Looks more like you were sleeping to me!" Roberta grinned.
Grabbing her, Sean pulled her down onto the bed and kissed her, "If you're nice to me, maybe I'll teach you how to do it too!" He chuckled and kissed her again.
"Well, as tempting as that sounds," Roberta smiled and gave him a kiss, "Roxy sent me in here to get you, it's time for you to start getting ready for your meeting tonight. Also," Roberta smiled, "Sarah is waiting to see you. She wanted to come in here, but I told her you had been ill and needed your sleep."
Smiling, Sean sat up and shifted into his hybrid form, while giving Roberta a hug. "I'm going to have to start getting her used to my human form; she still hasn't seen me in it."
"Well you can show it to her today. Come, she's in the living room."
Sean got mobbed by Sarah the moment he came into the living room, and hugging her he picked her up.
"How's my daughter?" he asked.
"I'm fine! How are you? Mommy said you were sick?"
Sean gave Sarah an explanation and then proceeded to get the third degree from her, as she wanted to know not only about his being sick, but everything else he'd done since she'd last seen him. He looked around the room during her questioning and noticed that all of the tables for eating were gone, and there was regular furniture in the room now instead.
"Where'd everybody go?" Sean asked Roberta between questions.
"They got the cafeteria finished this morning and moved everything into it. Now we get our privacy, well, what little of it we have," Roberta smiled.
"Just as long as nobody expects me to cook," Sean agreed.
"I thought you knew how to cook? Roxy said something about it."
"Me big lion! Grrr! Me no cook!" Sean laughed while playing with Sarah.
"Uh-huh," Roberta nodded with a smirk.
"Hey, haven't you noticed? I don't even get my own food anymore; one of you always brings it to me."
Roberta paused and thought about that a moment, "Now that you mention it, yeah, I have noticed it. Why is that?"
"It's a culture thing, sort of the whole 'lions don't hunt, the lionesses do.' Roxy started it, and the others all picked it up. The
y're rather jealous of it too. But all the lycan females do it when I'm around. I kind of like it."
"Oh?" Roberta looked him over a moment. "Next you'll be wanting me barefoot and pregnant."
"Well, already got the pregnant part down," Sean chuckled, "but if you want to see Roxy or Peg melt in their seat, watch what happens when I share my food with them, if I'm hungry."
"Why?"
"Cause a male lycan, especially a male lion lycan, only shares his food with someone he loves."
"So if you were to cook food for others?"
"My wives just might murder anyone else that I gave it to," Sean nodded. "I think it's one of those holdover quirks from our animal side. You'll notice that none of the waitresses or cooks are males."
"But you were born human!"
Sean shrugged, "That doesn't really matter."
"And all this time I thought the males back at the guild didn't want to cook because they were lazy."
"I'm just surprised that you didn't know about it. Didn't you ever bring Sampson his food?"
"Oh, yeah," Roberta blushed; "now I know why it always got a rise out of him."
"Yup, now if the two of you will excuse me, I have to shower."
"Hey! What happened?" Sarah said when Sean shifted back to his human form.
"Well, I can't very well go running around Reno as a lion, could I? Sean smiled at Sarah, "They might put me in a zoo!"
Daelyn drove him to the meeting in her 'cuda, Roxy and Cali came as well. Roxy because she loved sitting in the front seat while Daelyn drove like a maniac, as well as being Sean's right hand. Cali because he knew she'd kill anyone who tried to hurt him, plus she was still grabbing onto him every chance she got. Interestingly enough, all of his other wives really did get the same treatment from her. The first time Roberta was on the receiving end, the expression on her face was almost comical. But apparently she knew enough not to be upset by it.
"Sean!" Bill Channing came up and gave Sean a surprisingly strong hug, Sean wondered if he was feeling it because his stats were down so much, or if maybe his father-in-law really had been worried about him.
