by Macronomicon
“We can’t all be natural-born survivors,” Jeb said, suppressing a chuckle as he pictured himself as Zlesk’s Rambo human.
“Alas, you’re right. Humans are, in general, fat, lazy little keegan clones only motivated by fear and greed.”
Don’t forget love, sex, and stupid, Jeb thought silently.
“But as weak and stupid as humans are on average, damn near every single one wound up getting by somehow. I guess humans’ strength is their ability to get on.”
The conversation fell silent for a moment.
“Except for you.”
Jeb clenched his teeth. Even though he knew the guy was dead wrong about him, it still hurt to be shit on like this.
“You wanna hear some of my thoughts on life?” Zlesk asked.
Not really.
Jeb couldn’t afford to lie or speak the truth, so he stayed quiet.
“I believe that where we are today is just the result of a long chain of effort leading us to our current situation. I’m an officer because I worked hard to become one. Spent five years training to be where I am today.
“You, though?” he asked, looking Jeb up and down. “What long chain of stupidity and failure brought you here, I wonder?”
Jeb finally broke a smile. “Honestly? I worked hard for an outrageous amount of success that captured the attention of the entire world. All to beg on the street corner of your charming city.”
Zlesk stared at Jeb silently for a moment, fingering the beatstick on his waist. A moment later, the keegan burst into a gale of laughter.
“That’s a good one, Jeb,” the officer said, chuckling for a moment.
Suddenly the keegan stooped down from his seven-foot height and grabbed Jeb by the back of the neck, his fingers like iron rods clamped around the base of his spine.
“Don’t let me catch you begging between noon and three, alright? Or I’ll have to fine you for obstructing traffic. You and I both got better things to do than take a trip down to the office.”
Jeb shuddered, remembering the cracking beam in the cell’s ceiling that had kept him awake at night, staring at it for hours.
No thank you. Jeb wasn’t interested in sleeping in PTSD Central again, not even for three hot and a cot.
“Got it,” Jeb said.
Zlesk released his neck and moved on, apparently losing interest.
Jeb got himself situated on the street corner, straightened his smelly rags, took off his pegleg and put the stump out in front of him, rubbed some street grease on it to make it look bruised, setting the missing limb center stage.
Begging is a performance art.
Jeb set his beat-up hat in front of himself, and sat back, watching the day flow by. Time seemed to speed up as Jeb zoned out, people zipping past him, doing their dailies. Every now and then a tiny copper coin about the size of a man’s thumb would clink into the hat.
Jeb’s eyes widened when he spotted a silver glint in the sun before it hit the hat, and he gave the keegan woman an appreciative nod and a ‘thank you, ma’am’. A silver was like throwing a fifty into a pot full of ones.
Maybe later tonight I’ll take a bath and visit the bar. See if there’re any human women there interested in a hobo.
Jeb chuckled to himself as he imagined the inevitable question after a night of flirting:
‘Your place or mine?’ she would whisper sultrily into his ear.
God, could you imagine if I brought her back to my place?
There’s the trash pile I stack up to block sight from the main road. It gets removed every Wednesday, so we should have some...privacy tonight. Over there’s the blankets I use as a mattress. Don’t mind the smell, some of the trash leaked on it before I noticed.
Hey, where are you going!?
Jeb was still chuckling to himself when a richly dressed keegan and a much shorter one approached from down the street. The taller one was male, and the shorter one was immature, hard to determine their gender based on physical cues, but the clothes looked decidedly feminine—for a keegan, that was.
“Ew, what’s that?” the shorter female asked, pointing at Jeb, drawing him out of his amusing reverie, covering her skull-face nose.
“Oh, that? That’s a human,” the taller male said, eyeing Jeb and his hatful of coinage.
“It stinks.”
“Yes well, that’s more of a condition of being a beggar than being a human. He really only has himself to blame. Look at the difference between us and remember: We’re the ones that are broke. Because of the gods-damned Stitching, he’s got nine thousand more bulbs than we do.”
What an asshole.
Jeb’s brows rose as the taller keegan, presumably the father, pulled out a gold coin and leaned in toward the hat.
A gold bulb was the rough approximate of a thousand dollar bill. A single one could keep him fed and clothed for three months. Jeb actually salivated as he watched the gold coin descend toward his hat.
This right here is some premium alms.
The keegan flicked the gold coin back and forth in his fingers, flickering it in the sunshine, capturing Jeb’s attention as he leaned forward and plucked the silver coin out of Jeb’s hat.
Just that quick, the keegan man straightened and walked away.
Jeb’s jaw dropped.
Did I just get robbed!?
Visions of a shower, shave, a bowl of hot food, and a slim chance of getting a date for the evening flickered past his eyes and into the gutter.
“Hey!” Jeb shouted, trying to stand, but the pegleg wasn’t on, so he wound up hopping in place for a moment, shoving the wood onto his stump and dumping the meager copper coinage into his pocket, then clomping after them as swiftly as he could, catching up to the father/daughter pair in a matter of moments.
“…be a lesson to you, child. Nothing distracts a man more than the promise of wealth. Blind them with gold and you can take their—”
“Hey!” Jeb shouted, his vision tinged red. “Give me back my money.” Jeb dearly wanted to call him a prick, or an asshole, but that would be a lie.
So much of his vocabulary had been neutered by the first rule of Wizard Club.
“What are you talking about, beggar?” the keegan asked, raising a brow. “I do not have anything of yours.”
“Oh, were you experiencing a fugue state when you stole my goddamn silver coin!? Give me my money!” Jeb grabbed the man’s shirt in a moment of mindless anger and immediately regretted it.
The wealthy man had obviously invested some points in Body, because he peeled Jeb’s hand away from his shirt like brittle Styrofoam.
Jeb sucked in a breath through his teeth as the bones in his palm and wrist grated against each other ominously, bending ever so slightly in the keegan’s iron grip. Jeb wanted to groan in pain, but he’d be damned if he let the bastard see him sweat.
“Know your place, human,” the keegan said, staring directly into Jeb’s eyes.
“I’m not the thief here,” Jeb growled back.
“That money was too good for you.”
“You’re full of sh—” Jeb winced as Smartass pinched him in the neck. “You’re lying.”
The rich bastard didn’t say anything, simply giving Jeb’s hand one last warning squeeze before shoving him back.
“What’s going on here!?” Jeb heard Zlesk approaching from the side and his skin went cold.
Goddamn motherfucking shit-ass timing!
“Sera, here is another lesson, child,” the keegan said, glancing at the younger one standing next to him.
“Officer, I’m glad you’re here. This man tried to rob me.”
“That’s bull—” Another pinch on Jeb’s neck. “That’s a lie. He stole from my hat.”
“Garland Grenore stole from your hat?” Zlesk asked, brow arched. “Sure.”
The keegan officer grabbed Jeb by the back of the neck. “Sorry for the trouble, Mr. Grenore. I’ll get this scum out of your hair.”
“Um.” The young keegan standing beside th
e older one spoke up, drawing their attention to her.
“Yes, miss?” Officer Zlesk asked, about to lead Jeb away by the neck.
“Um, he—” The young keegan glanced up at her father’s thunderous expression and swallowed audibly. “Nothing.”
“You son of a bi—” Smartass pinched him real hard, shocking him out of his lie. The man probably wasn’t a literal son of a bitch, and saying so would almost certainly invalidate a little over three months of carefully considered speech.
These rules are so goddamn annoying!
Officer Zlesk dragged him bodily to lockup, giving Jeb a few bruises from the beatstick along the way when his pace didn’t satisfy the alien bureaucrat.
After a few humiliating minutes of being led through the streets like an unruly child, the officer threw him in an iron cage with thick bars designed to resist someone with far more Body than Jeb had.
“Congratulations,” Zlesk said as he locked the cage. “You could be the first human to be publicly executed for robbery in Kalfath.”
Chapter 2: Lesson One
Jeb was lying on his back on the cold stone bunk, watching the ceiling beam for signs of movement two days later, when Smartass popped out of the woodwork, holding some kind of miniature party horn.
Wonk! The thing unfurled and honked as she blew into it. Jeb could only assume that was what the fairy had been doing the last couple days.
“Congratulations! You have gone a hundred days without speaking an untruth!”
Jeb might have ignored her if it weren’t for the extreme boredom and the creeping dread of being locked inside a room and threatened with death.
“Oh, what did I win?” Jeb asked, sitting up. Anything to distract him from The Spike coming through the ceiling in his thoughts.
“A lesson from the most magically-gifted species in existence! You may now grovel and consider your good fortune,” Smartass said, polishing her nails on the scrap of silk wrapped around her torso with studied haughtiness. “Go ahead, I’ll wait.”
“I don’t feel lucky,” Jeb said, motioning to the cell around him.
“Nonsense. You’re probably the luckiest human on the planet right now, if luck actually existed.”
“Go ahead, lay it on me,” Jeb said, leaning back against the wall.
“Alright. Let’s start with dimensions. You’re aware of four. The three dimensions of space, and time. But did you know…there is a fifth dimension?”
Smartass tapped her fingers together, smiling ominously.
“Yeah,” Jeb said with a shrug. “Quantum physicists say there could be as many as ten. What of it?”
“Gah!” Smartass grunted, her epic reveal ruined. “Alright, fine. The fifth dimension is known as Fate, and it’s intrinsically linked to Time.”
“So, is everything predetermined, or what?”
“Not at all,” Smartass said, pausing a moment and frowning. “Every living being capable of making choices carries around a little ball of something called Impact with them in the fifth dimension. This little ball is the expression of how much change that creature could potentially exert over the future.”
Jeb blinked. “I’m not sure I follow.”
Smartass sighed and rolled her eyes condescendingly. “Say you have two men, identical in every way, except one had more money than the other. The one with more money has a larger ball of Impact than the poorer one. The same is true with physical strength, status, magical power… Anything. Any measurable advantage that you have toward impacting the course of future events is reflected in the size of your Impact.”
“Okay, I think I get it,” Jeb said, nodding.
“Now, The System was designed by a wizard in Pharos a fuck-off long time ago, as a way to regulate Impact and how it works. To manipulate a dimension that we can only perceive through environmental cues and guesswork.”
Jeb frowned.
“As a hypothetical, what do you think would happen if we flipped the order? What if, without changing anything else, you were to increase the size of someone’s ball of Impact in the fifth dimension?”
Jeb considered it for a moment. If Impact was the measure of how much a person or thing could affect the future, then having more of it would mean they could affect the future more….
“They’d get more powerful?”
“Bam! Got it on the first try!” Smartass blew her little party-kazoo again. Wonk!
“So this ancient wizard thought to himself, ‘I wonder if I could forcibly move Impact from one creature to myself.’ That’s The System. Normally, when you kill something, their Impact unravels and dissipates into the environment of the fifth dimension in a fraction of a second. Some of it might stick to you, but probably not.
“With The System, though,” Smartass said, hovering inches from his face. “The System exists in the fifth dimension as well, and when someone with it installed kills something, The System takes the Impact that would have been unraveled and lost to the environment and adds it to the User in a convenient, structured way.
“And that, my friend, takes the forms of levels, Classes, and Abilities.”
“…I don’t have The System, though,” Jeb said. What good was telling him all this? It was neat, and interesting to think of, but ultimately useless to him. He’d been blacklisted from The System.
Smartass threw her head back and groaned. “Stick with me, okay?”
“Sure.”
“This next piece of knowledge I’m about to lay on you is much rarer and more valuable and absolutely taboo to spread to outsiders.”
“Okay.”
Smartass flew up into his face. “I need you to swear.”
“Swear what?”
“Swear that you won’t spread this knowledge by any means.”
Jeb eyed the fairy for a moment before raising his right hand. “I swear I will not spread the knowledge Smartass is about to impart on me by any means.”
Click. Jeb felt something shift inside him, locking into place.
“What the hell was that?”
“Good. Means it’s working,” Smartass said with a grin as she fluttered in quick barrel rolls of excitement.
“What just happened?”
“Something that very few people know is that individuals have different qualities to their Impact.”
“Yeah, but what just happened?” Jeb asked again.
“I’m getting to it. The Fate dimension has its own rules, and something akin to the laws of gravity, whereby certain balls of Impact can attract and consume others.”
“You’re not gonna tell me you just ate my Impact and I’m a trusting idiot, are you?” Jeb asked.
“No, shut up.” Smartass scowled at him. “Every thinking, deciding creature has the ability to naturally alter the quality of their Impact. You just got the ball rolling by not speaking any lies for a hundred days. The longer you can maintain that, the better off you’ll be. After flushing all the untruths out of your system, your Impact is now sticky, capable of stealing chunks of Impact and adding it to your own.”
“Like washing off a rubber sticky hand,” Jeb said, nodding.
Smartass stared at him for a moment. “…Sure.”
“Here’s something I don’t get: If any form of power is reflected in your Impact, why not just steal money, lie and sleaze your way to the top?”
“Well, you could, but that kind of Impact—money, status and possessions—are easy to strip away. Real power can’t be taken away from you. Our kind of power, anyway. Fairy power.”
“Explain.”
“Now that you are ‘sticky’ in the fifth dimension, people will start to rub off on you. No, not like that, shut up. I mean a little extra Impact will stick to you with every exchange of power and become absorbed by yours, adding to your intangibles.”
…..
The fuck is she going on about?
“Explain?”
“Deals! I’m talking about deals!” Smartass said with a sigh. “I swear, M&M-Lord, you’re the
dumbest human I’ve ever taught this.”
“Also the only one, I imagine?” Jeb asked.
“Correct,” Smartass said, smiling.
“Impact is defined as a measure of potential influence on the future, understand?”
“Yeah. I got that part.”
“So what happens to a person if they enter into a disadvantageous bargain that benefits them little and costs them dearly? Say, paying someone to trim their lawn with all the money they possess?”
“Well, I imagine their Impact would shrink,” Jeb said.
“Not shrink, exactly,” Smartass said. “Shaved away. Taken by the one who benefitted from the bargain, the one who walked away with their money.”
“Take the money away from him, and the extra Impact is gone, though,” Jeb said with a shrug. “I’m not seeing where this is going, exactly.”
Smartass rolled her eyes. “When a fairy makes a Deal like that, a little bit of extra Impact sticks to them, increasing their intangible power, regardless of what happens to the money.”
“So fairies grow a little more powerful from each raw deal they successfully pull off?”
“Yes! Now you’re getting it!”
“And this behavior isn’t limited to fairies. Humans can do it, too. You simply have to never lie, and tempt people into Deals that are against their own interest—two behaviors that are diametrically opposed….”
Jeb frowned. “Is that why you’re a quarter inch taller since we met? Have you been siphoning my Impact away?” Jeb asked.
Smartass’s eyes darted off to the side.
“Well, I don’t need your help, so I guess—”
“Just the tiniest bit!” Smartass admitted, her eyes wild. “Your Fate is so tasty! And it’s only the amount of effort it takes you to find a single pound of sugar each month. That’s not so bad, right? It’s like donating blood once a month! That’s practically a steal by usual familiar rates!”
“How do you gain Impact from me giving you candy?” Jeb asked, frowning.
“You have to spend your time, effort and sometimes money on it—energy that could be used elsewhere to affect the course of the future. Being saddled with that debt is, on the surface, a negative drain on your Impact.”
