Firesign 1 - Wage Slave Rebellion

by Stephen W. Gee

  “No, it’s people like you who are the problem,” said Mazik, spinning and pointing at Rose like a witness identifying the perpetrator. “You’re a short-sighted, small-minded little bully who gets his rocks off bossing people around just because you’re better at lying to scared old ladies. And you know what?” he said, stopping in front of Rose. Mazik loomed. “Good for you. You’re good at selling, and that’s great. But you’re a terrible fucking boss. Fucking atrocious. Everyone thinks so, they just don’t want to say it.”

  Rose turned to the nearest coworker, but they averted their eyes. Everyone did.

  “Hey. Focus,” said Mazik, snapping in front of Rose’s face and pointing at his own eyes. Rose turned back. “Why don’t you do everyone a favor and go back to defrauding old ladies full-time? Or do something useful with your life instead, you fucking asshole.”

  Mazik spun around, marched over to the chair, grabbed it, and turned back to the crowd.

  “But you know what? I don’t give a shit anymore. I don’t even care enough to rant. You wanted a few words? How about these.”

  Mazik stuck one hand out, his middle finger extended gloriously to the sky.

  “FUCK this place, and I”—Mazik picked up the chair, lifted it over his head, and slammed it into the ground, shattering it into a thousand pieces—“QUIT!”

  Panting, a smile of immense pleasure splashed across his face as the cloud of splinters rained down around him, Mazik looked down at the shattered chair fragments in his hands. He laughed, tossed them to the ground, and turned to leave.

  “So what, you’re just going to go become a mercenary?” asked Rose. “You’re just going to kill people for money?”

  Mazik turned back, anger flaring in his eyes. “We’re all mercenaries you little piece of shit, every single one of us. If the wages stop coming, so would you.” Mazik straightened up. “At least I have the decency to admit it.”

  Mazik stomped over to the door, but stopped with his hand on the doorknob. “And your weapons are terrible! One of them broke on me mid-battle!” he yelled, drawing the offending knife and slamming it into the wall. The broken blade was driven up to the hilt into the cheap plaster, sticking there. Then Mazik kicked down the door and left forever.

  May the bridges I burn light my way, thought Mazik as he left the building and walked out into the crisp morning air. It was an old saying he heard once upon a time from someone much wiser than him, but it fit now. He could almost feel the bridges burning, to that unhappy future he never wanted to have.

  Mazik shook his limbs as he leapt onto a nearby bench, laughing with childlike glee. “I can’t believe I did it!” he said as he sailed through the air. He let loose a loud whoop of delight, scaring a bunch of birds and seriously unnerving the shopkeepers he skipped past. He couldn’t have cared less.

  Mazik jumped onto a fountain and looked out over the waking city. He took a deep breath, savoring it. The Houkian air was no cleaner than before, but it tasted great to him. It was one of the sweetest moments of his entire life.

  So far.

  For more stories in the world of Firesign, visit www.stephenwgee.com. Free adventures are released periodically. Go check it out. There may be one waiting for you now.

  Afterword

  Thank you for reading my first novel, Wage Slave Rebellion. This book is the first story in the Firesign series, but it also represents the realization of a dream of mine, and there are many people I need to thank for that.

  First and foremost are my friends. Brian Hughes, Simon Rouswell, Brent Topa, Jeremiah Ray, Michelle George, R.J. Goss—there are so many people who cheered me on, and listened to me talk about this book for years before I was finally able to give them something they could read. Special thanks go to Brian Hughes. You hold the distinction of being the first person to read a completed draft of this book, and for that, I’m sorry. It was bad man, real bad. But you helped make it better, for which I am grateful.

  Thank you to everyone who helped me do the hard work of putting this together. To my editors, Jim Thomsen and Christina Tinling, thank you for cutting the fluff and catching all the errors I missed. Thank you also to Frank William and Atreyu Studios for the wonderful illustrations. When I saw some of your early sketches, I said, “Wow … there they are.” Suddenly it felt real.

  Then there’s everyone at Random Curiosity, where I’ve been writing under the name Stilts for three years and counting. There were times when I was freaking out about life too much to work on this book, but blogging at Random Curiosity kept me churning out words every single week. For that, and for all the kindness the readers of Random Curiosity have shown me over the years, thank you. I’d list you all by name, but we’d be here all day, so just know that you all rock.

  Special thanks go to the head honcho of Random Curiosity, Divine, for giving me the chance to write publically and on a deadline. I hope I haven’t been too much of a pain, and have repaid in some small part everything you’ve done for me. Sorry I repaid your kindness by making your pen name synonymous with the kind of magick that Mazik hates. I swear I came up the arcane/divine dichotomy before we ever met!

  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the other writers and staff of Random Curiosity as well—Tommy ‘takaii’ Koo, Dan ‘Guardian Enzo’ Green, Zanibas, Cherry ‘Cherrie’ Chan, Harry ‘Zephyr’ Xia, Bryan ‘Xumbra’ Tsang, and anyone else I didn’t mention, both past and present. Just being able to write with such an amazing group of people helped me plow through the rough times.

  I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to everyone who has inspired me, chief among them Terry Pratchett, Seth Godin, and Akamatsu Ken. That an English author, an American marketer, and a Japanese mangaka are some of my biggest influences probably speaks volumes about me, but I have no idea what it says. Other than I am a very strange man, but we all knew that already.

  Finally, thank you to my parents, Thomas and Sherry Gee, and my older brother Daniel Listi. I know you’ve always wanted to help me with this writing thing, even when you admitted you had no idea what to do. Don’t worry, you’ve helped a lot. Getting me this far is more than enough. I’ll take it from here.

  To everyone else, I hope you’ve enjoyed this book. Let’s continue making fun, entertaining, and interesting stories together, because this whole thing isn’t as much fun without you. Thank you so much for reading. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  STEPHEN W. GEE

  November 2014

  About the Author

  STEPHEN W. GEE is a fantasy author, anime blogger, craft beer lover, and exceedingly tall man. Wage Slave Rebellion is his first novel. There will be more where it came from.

  www.stephenwgee.com

  Notes

  1 That’s pronounced “Howkh,” like the word “how” with the first half of “cuss” tacked onto the end, which is what every Houkian does when visitors inevitably mispronounce the city’s name. Repeatedly.

  2 Though it’s debatable how anything so massive could nestle up to anything. Mostly it just sprawled. That’s one of the nice things about poets: they can find something pretty to say about nearly anything, and no one calls them out for making things up.

  3 Or a hot poker to the delicates if whoever did the naming didn’t show appropriate deference to whoever was in charge. Considering the high body count the city’s founder, Lord Houk, racked up when he was conquering the area, that probably played a part.

  4 Especially to the City Guard, who saw Mazik and instantly suspected they ought to be arresting him for something. Sooner or later they were generally right.

  5 In Houk there were three basic levels of schooling: low school, middle school, and high school. There was also college, for those considered suitable6. None of these were mandatory.

  6 That is, anyone with enough money to pay for it. On other worlds, people say that knowledge is power. On Aegis, there’s a direct correlation.

  7 Though rarely at the same time and place. There’s a bit of bad blood between humanity and the
ir hulking, two-meter-tall, blue-skinned fellow sapients. Quite a lot of bad blood. Rivers come to mind.

  8 On Aegis, most people have what are called complex surnames, which consist of a short maiden name followed by a longer bachelor name separated by an apostrophe. When a couple marries, the man takes the woman’s maiden name and the woman takes the man’s bachelor name; this results in a society of tightly-knit nuclear families and distant extended ones, which is great if you have useless cousins or greedy grandchildren you want to avoid. It also means people are often called by the part of their surname they’ll presumably always have, i.e. a woman’s maiden name (Gavi Ven’Kalil) and a man’s bachelor name (Mazik Kil’Raeus).

  9 Mazik’s boss didn’t have a complex surname because his family came from a part of Aegis that didn’t use them. Mazik wasn’t sure where. He never cared enough to ask.

  10 The Houkian language was lax with honorifics. Men are called Mas (Mas Kil’Raeus), women are called Mis (Mis Gavi), and that was enough most of the time. This saved everyone involved from many an awkward situation, such as trying to guess a woman’s age or marital status. No one wins at that game, so it’s better off avoided.

  11 Mazik served for three years in the Houkian military, just as all citizens did12, Raedren and Gavi included. What fighting abilities he learned through youthful indiscretions were refined there, and then frequently forgotten due to copious amounts of alcohol.

  12 Save for those who were rich, powerful, arrogant, or stupid enough to try to dodge the draft and risk the military finding out. Since Mazik and the others were none of those, it was easier to just serve. That was about the only easy thing about it.

  13 Banished is a more appropriate term. Aegisian gods aren’t exactly immortal, but it’s hard to get rid of them permanently.

  14 Adventurers are basically roving mercenaries with better public relations, though only slightly. The guilds helped ensure this by making sure their members solved more problems than they caused. Most of the time.

  15 By their very nature, a salesperson’s favorite customers were always the most lucrative ones. While meeting Eilou had indeed brought Mazik a lot of business—Eilou was part of one of Vector’s most active adventuring teams, so landing him as a customer had led to a number of referrals—that wasn’t why Mazik liked him. He honestly liked Eilou as a person, which, if anything else, proved Mazik wasn’t fit to be a salesman.

  16 Mazik sometimes thought that everyone should work a sales job once in their lives, so they would be a little nicer to salespeople, or at least would know when to be rude. It was only later that he began to appreciate the skills it gave him, like a thick skin and a complete lack of social fear.

  17 They were playing a new drinking game. It was called DRINK. Here are the rules: anytime your opponent/partner says DRINK, you have to drink. That’s it. It wasn’t very inventive, even as far as drinking games go, but it made up for it with brutal effectiveness.

  18 The Houkian unit of currency was known as the marc. One marc is split into 100 cents. For comparison’s sake, you can get a good burger and a beer for 1Mc, or either for 50c.

  19 Mazik wasn’t good with names, so he often gave people nicknames that he used in the privacy of his own head. He did this because he didn’t care what their names were, and absolutely not because it would have been embarrassing to ask after having known them for so long.

  20 Or worse yet, the other patrons came to her aid. Gavi rarely lost, but when she did, it didn’t mean the other side got to win. Or walk under their own power for a few months. If they were lucky.

  21 Raedren tended to get Mazik-like whenever he got drunk, which probably tells you everything you need to know about Mazik.

  22 Most conscripts in the Houkian army and navy were required to serve four years, but full casters were only required to serve three. This was based on the logic that they’re a) already mostly trained; b) significantly more powerful than regular soldiers; and c) more capable of draft dodging and getting away with it. The city let them serve one less year as incentive for them to serve at all.

  23 Though anyone can learn arcane magick, most people don’t get far for the simple reason that it’s really, really hard. Naturally, this meant there was demand for people who could teach magick. While some teachers taught one-on-one, it was inevitable that others would band together and form schools, and that some of those schools would specialize in teaching only the very best, erecting ever more elaborate and baroque institutions around themselves to disguise the fact that they taught pretty much the same things as everyone else, only for a lot more money. One of the biggest, richest, and most respected magickal universities in the Eastern world was Ain & Narouff University.

  24 Telman University was Houk’s other major magickal university. Closer to a vocational school than an edifice of higher learning, it utilized an accelerated curriculum and a focus on the practical side of magick to educate its students quickly and for a lot less money. Naturally, Telman graduates were highly trained and received almost no respect. Telman (TU) and Ain & Narouff were rivals, though you’d be hard pressed to find an A&N student who would admit it.

  25 Halvelin are little different from other humans save for their shorter average height, because they are humans. Just because they’re shorter doesn’t make them a different species; it just means the footstool industry is particularly strong where a lot of halvelin live26.

  26 Contrary to what many think, the word “halvelin” did not come about because halvelin are half the height of “normal” humans (they’re closer to 60 percent). In fact, it was the other way around—the word halvelin was the chicken to halve’s egg, which was fitting because halvelin aren’t much taller than either one. That’s what some people joked, at any rate, usually right before being punched in the crotch.

  27 In an effort to attract new worshippers, most gods offered a spell or two that any worshipper can use, regardless of skill or piety. Naturally, people abused this. Now many chose their religion based not on faith or the relative merits of the god’s teachings, but by what divine magick they needed most at the time. Serial conversions were not uncommon.

  28 With so many gods, there simply weren’t enough priests to go around. But where some saw a problem, others saw an opportunity, and began performing religious services for multiple gods. Traditionally this was frowned upon, but for the smaller religions it was better than nothing. The titular owner of Levi’s God Emporium was the priest for no less than a hundred deities, and she had five other people like her on staff.

  29 Pointy hats, on the other hand, were strictly frowned upon; most casters felt they made it hard for people to take them seriously. It’s hard to look intimidating when your hat keeps getting knocked off every time you go through a doorway.

  30 Mazik claimed to have learned this trick from an adventurer friend, though Gavi suspected he picked it up doing shady things back in college. She was right.

  31 The female version of “Sir.” One of the side effects of magick was a tendency toward gender equality in Aegisian cultures. For some reason, it was harder to discriminate against women when they could study and become just as strong, fast, and capable of terrifying violence as any man. Coupled with the fact that women made up a slight majority of high-level casters, the men in most societies had decided not to press their luck, lest a gender war broke out and they lost.

  32 This was Rose’s catchphrase of sorts, which he said no less than five times every time he tried to “motivate” his team. It was like nails on a chalkboard to Mazik.

  33 This magick was known as telephonathy, and it was the reason Stýlori was one of the most powerful deities on Aegis. While many gods still subscribed to the old model of competing for lifelong worshippers with promises of paradise, community, and that everyone else was going to burn in hell, a few enterprising gods had opted for a more transactional approach, creating useful divine magicks that anyone could use, so long as they prayed to the god in question before every use. Stýlori’
s telephonathy magick allowed people to send their voice into the mind of anyone they knew, all for the low, low price of a single prayer.

  34 Every caster has their own personal mana color. For a new caster the color is random, and will sometimes vary wildly from spell to spell, though once they’ve gained more experience they can choose their mana color with an effort of will. Since mana only becomes visible after interaction with the caster, the details are up to them.

  35 The sense of keen allows humans, orcks, and other higher-order species to perceive ambient mana. All humans can keen, though most don’t realize they’re doing it because it takes large fluctuations in the ambient mana to become noticeable. It takes training to sense more subtle differences. Casters must actively focus to keen away from their bodies.

  36 One of the benefits of keening was being able to tell who was a caster by sensing their MPB. The technique had limits, though. It’s difficult to gauge someone’s relative power level, and it can be completely defeated by a caster who releases their MPB and mana pool, leaving no mana to be keened.

  37 From the Traduuvin word “nuku,” which means “to blast with mystic energy.”

  38 Normally rope wouldn’t have been strong enough to restrain a caster, but since divine casters require spell incantations and/or special movements to use their magick, the addition of a gag reduced them to regular people.

  39 Mazik was an arcane caster, so he didn’t have to say anything to cast his spells. He just did it sometimes anyway, because he thought it was fun. Mazik was easily amused.

  40Aegis’s day had twenty-six hours, with noon falling at 13 o’clock and midnight at 26 o’clock. Have you ever wished there were more hours in the day? Aegis has them, and it’s still not enough.

  41 Even though both mugs were nearly empty. Mazik knew how to play a crowd, even if it required duplicity. Especially if it required duplicity.