by Macronomicon
No, he’s looking at the camera. It’s a photo-op handshake! Damnit!
Jeb stiffened and made double-sure his junk was tucked away, grinning awkwardly for the camera.
“How can I possibly thank the man who single-handedly uncovered this horrifying conspiracy?” the emperor asked.
Like involuntary word vomit, Jeb’s mouth started talking without his permission.
“Don’t thank me. In actuality, Zlesk Frantell deserves all the credit for bringing these people to justice. He’s the former sheriff of Kalfath, a law-abiding Citizen, and a goddamn decent fellow. I owe him credit for every major accomplishment I’ve made in Solmnath, and without him I’d probably be dead a couple times over.”
Jeb grinned into the camera, his jaw clenched behind his smile.
“And…cut,” Brett said, plucking the spherical camera out of its placement and pressing the button on top.
An invisible sense of tension was cut, like a wire that had been holding Jeb up until this point, and he sagged in relief for a moment, free of his Debt to Zlesk.
Once the emperor was certain the camera was off, his bird-neck twisted, fixing Jeb with a steely gaze that seemed to bore right into his soul. Jeb’s spine straightened again.
“So. Jebediah Trapper. You didn’t show up when I rerouted all the survivors of the Impossible Tutorial to Mestikos. Why is that?”
He pinched Jeb’s hand experimentally. “I assumed it was because you were far stronger than me, which made sense at the time, but you can’t have more than thirteen Body. I could sneeze on you and you’d break like tissue paper. If you’d had more Myst than me, you would have melted the suppressor like so much cotton candy.
“Here I thought I had someone who could potentially destabilize the empire as a whole and cause some serious trouble for me, but you’re actually rather weak. What happened?”
“The gods punished me for smelling wrong. You probably tried to summon me while they were discussing it.”
The kitri’s eyes went wide, his neck waggling minutely. “Seriously?”
The bird cleared his throat, regaining his composure before he patted Jeb on the shoulder. “Now that I’ve seen you, I’m more comfortable inviting you to Mestikos.”
“What’s in Mestikos?” Jeb asked.
“The capital, and more specifically, a bunch of your rewards from completing the Impossible Tutorial. Your whole team pitched in.”
“They’re probably safer in your hands.”
“True,” the emperor said. “What good is a magic blade if a man could tear it out of your grip with his bare hands? In any case, you’re more than welcome to swing by any time you like and pick up some or all of what you are owed.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” the emperor said, turning toward his throne and ascending the stairs. “You’re the kind of Citizen I wish I had more of.”
“Speaking of Citizens you wish you had more of, is Zlesk okay?” Jeb asked.
“Zlesk who?” the emperor said as he sat.
“Zlesk Frantell, former sheriff of Kalfath. The keegan who helped me. He got captured at the same time I did. I just mentioned him?”
“Oh, him.”
The emperor took a breath, and Myst rippled toward him before echoing outward as he spoke.
“Zlesk Frantell.”
“Jeb, are you okaYYY!” Zlesk’s voice echoed from the room above them as Zlesk slipped on something above them, tumbling through the hole in the ceiling to land directly in front of Jeb.
“Ugh.” The keegan groaned, pushing himself up.
“He seems fine,” the emperor said, leaning back in his throne.
He’s literally controlling causality, isn’t he? Jeb’s thoughts were awhirl as his mind unpacked the potential.
The list of names fell into his hand because he was going to say them… I was here with that list because he was going to say them. If he says a name, they show up, through dumb luck or simply by already being present.
Jeb’s brain hurt a little as he tried to process how a Myst Core could manipulate luck in order to trigger its own activation, the last remnants of the Attribute Sickness making it difficult to think.
Is he…in control of his power, or is he getting dragged around the empire by his own Myst?
It might be a bit of both.
A glint of copper caught Jeb’s attention as the table above them slipped some more and sent itself and all Jeb’s gear raining down onto the floor around Zlesk.
Jeb’s copper plate with Vresh’s symbol clattered on the marble floor, attracting the emperor’s attention.
“Ah, I see,” the emperor said, gazing at the Mark. Jeb’s headache resurfaced for a moment, then quieted down again.
“I could think of worse roles for you than serving as Vresh’s deputy,” the kitri said, his head cocked to the side. “And I understand why she was reticent to reveal your identity.
“Once her suspension is over, I will direct her to continue your arrangement. You may leave, with my blessing. This mess is for my sworn vassals to clean up.” The emperor waved dismissively.
The imperial guards stepped away from the double doors in one smooth step, allowing them to swing open.
So I just go, then? Jeb thought, glancing around as a flood of nobles re-entered the room from the outside, gaping in astonishment at the sheer carnage.
Some of them looked less than happy, and a few of them were looking at Jeb. The people slaughtered here were the nobles’ friends and co-workers, so they were understandably testy.
Yep, time to go, Jeb thought, bundling up his clothes and gear and taking the walk of shame out of the mansion beside Zlesk. He made damn sure to find his severed finger before searching the crowd for Amanda. If Brett was here, hopefully the healer wasn’t too far off.
He didn’t want any more stumps.
Jeb was lucky, picking out Amanda’s blonde hair among the stream of incoming nobles, and he was able to beg a healing off of her on his way out, reattaching his finger in a matter of seconds with a jolt of chilling white Myst.
It was a little stiff afterwards, but that was a hell of a lot better than gone. Jeb thanked her as profusely as he could before heading for the exit, the eyes of the surrounding nobles burning into his skin.
“Hey Jeb!” he heard Brett call. When he glanced over his shoulder, the underwear model continued. “Beer later?”
Jeb gave him a weak thumbs-up and kept trodding along.
When they got back, they found the orphanage a wreck. Parts of the mansion were burned out and still smoldering, and dead bodies littered the grounds. Some of them had tiny holes through the top of their heads, while others were simply cleaved into chunks.
None of them were children.
Mr. Sophistication must have been trying to ‘take care’ of the kids while he knew Jeb and Zlesk were away, but it had turned out very poorly for them. It wasn’t just old men and women guarding the mansion, after all.
“Good job, Buck, Legolas,” Jeb said, patting the powerful stag’s furry shoulder as he limped through the courtyard. The death-deer stamped a foot and snorted proudly above an annihilated corpse. Legolas the drone hovered silently above them, the Annihilation lens pointed toward the ground.
Jeb put his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Everybody who’s still alive, gather ‘round, I need to sign your slave release forms!”
Mr. and Mrs. Lang, as well as the Everetts, popped their heads above a windowsill, followed by several hundred children and Colt.
“Where the hell have you been, pops?” Colt shouted from behind a half-burned windowsill.
Is that a rhetorical question? Jeb thought, frowning. They must’ve seen him shake hands with the emperor with his dick hanging out.
“He was shaking hands with Big Bird with his dick hanging out, that’s where he was!”
“I think you go to jail for that!”
Colt high-fived a couple nearby boys of a similar age.
&nbs
p; Jeb’s eyes narrowed as he wondered why he’d saved these brats in the first place.
He was contemplating infanticide when he felt someone tug the corner of his jacket. He glanced down and spotted Nancy. The dark-haired little girl had to crane her neck to look up at him, and she was holding a blood-soaked spear to her chest.
“Thanks for saving us,” she said, her head bobbing with childish sincerity.
***3 days later***
The bruises were starting to die down, and Jeb could drink without aggravating his split lip, so he figured it was the right time to catch up with Brett and Amanda over a beer.
Ron sat in the booth beside them, grateful to be able to drink alcohol by himself again since Amanda patched him up. The necromancer had been carried in on a walking undead bed, fully expecting to have one of his zombies feed him.
The conversation covered just about every subject, from what they’d been doing since the Tutorial ended, to money, the weather, real estate, the law, and how their lives were going.
Of course, the Courvars—sellouts that they were—were doing fine, having brokered a deal with the emperor. In all likelihood, they would be the first human king and queen of a new territory, and masters of T.V.
Jeb posed to them the question of whether television was viable in a society where everyone had to go out and physically work long shifts every day rather than a more modern approach with machinery and 8-hour shifts.
“They had radio in the forties,” Brett responded with a shrug.
“That’s true.”
“So Ron’s got a farm, you guys are going for royalty,” Jeb said, ticking off his fingers, “and Jess is a reaper-reaper,” Jeb said, making sure to flex his stiff finger as he did.
“Who am I missing? Casey, right? What happened to her?”
“Last I checked, she had, like a Denny’s or something. She brought the whole thing with her wherever she went,” Brett said.
“That’s what Ron told me,” Jeb said, nodding. “So you guys don’t know any more than that?”
“I think she didn’t want anything more than a manageable slice of property,” Amanda said. “A girl that age would probably be intimidated by much more than that. She didn’t strike me as a particularly aggressive type, either.”
Click.
Everyone at the table blinked as the magical empire-wide transmitter interrupted their conversation, making the surface of the table into a live feed.
There was a bit of fumbling with the camera and some soft cursing before the person stepped back and into focus. Jeb’s eyebrows rose as he recognized Casey’s slender figure.
“Greetings Citizens, this is Imperial Enforcer Casey Thompson, dispatched to the southern reaches of the empire upon reports of a reaper.”
She took a deep breath and continued. “Reaping is defined as the systematic murder of sapient individuals in order to gain levels at an accelerated pace. It is an intolerable cancer on our society, a direct violation of the Sacarus Accord, and the punishment is death.”
In front of Jeb’s eyes, steel puppets dragged a flailing man into frame and flayed him alive.
Casey’s complexion grew gradually more and more green, until the teen mom doubled over off-screen, retching violently.
The feed cut off a moment after that.
The members of Jeb’s team, every one of them older and wiser than Casey, sat and stared at the empty table, wondering how the hell that came about.
“There’s an explanation for that,” Jeb said, tapping at the table. “And I’m pretty sure it’s not a pleasant one.”
“If she’s working as an enforcer, there’s gotta be a reason,” Ron said, frowning.
“I’ll give you one guess as to what it is,” Jeb said, scowling. Moms in general have one unifying reason why they do insanely dangerous things they would rather not do: their babies.
“She wanted to travel?”
Brett reached over and smacked Ron in the back of the head.
Amanda took a deep breath and found the positive. “We know she’s alive, and if baby Casey weren’t alive, she wouldn’t be working as an enforcer. It’s good to know they’re both breathing, anyway.”
She took a deep swig of her drink and turned to Jeb, leaning over to glance at his prosthetic.
“I passed level fifty recently and my Class has an Ability that can boost my healing with the right preparation. I still feel like I owe you a foot. You wanna give it a shot?”
Jeb was stunned for a moment, his hand resting in the bowl of pretzels. The answer to that question was so obvious, it took him a moment to reboot afterwards. Jeb had kinda gotten used to being down a foot.
“Sure, let’s do it now,” Jeb said after taking a moment for his brain to catch up, taking off his foot and setting his stump on the table.
Ron groaned and pulled his sandwich away from Jeb’s stump. “Come on, man, I’m eating here.”
“You might want…a bit more privacy for this,” Amanda said, looking sheepish. “The requirements are…intimate.”
Jeb frowned. “What did the Celebrant of Sabrin Class do again?”
“I never told you,” she said, standing. “Come on, I got a room upstairs.” The healer walked away, her hips swaying as she glanced over her shoulder.
“Well, now I’ve lost my appetite,” Ron said, sliding his sandwich away and scowling.
Jeb blinked and glanced over at Brett. “Brett, I’ve gotta go do some…physical therapy. My finger is still stiff, you know. Gotta work with your wife to make sure it’s fully operational.”
Brett raised an eyebrow. “This counts against your IOU.”
“Fair enough,” Jeb said, slapping a silver coin down on the table and literally flying after the blonde healer.
***Emperor Pikaku, Uniter of the Continent, Ruler of Mestikos, level 327***
“That’s all I know, I swear. I swear!” Mirzos Elkor said, shaking his head pitifully, tears rolling down the sides of his skull. The former judge was suspended in a brackish mixture, slowly swelling as his body absorbed more water than he could handle.
He looked almost human now, grotesquely swollen, his skin tight, see-through, and easily ruptured.
“I know,” Pikaku said, prodding the keegan’s skin with his claws, starting a tiny rip in the man’s skin and allowing the swelling to take care of the rest of it. The rip spread on its own as the keegan gave a howling cry.
Keegan were no good in water for extended periods of time.
“Then why?” Mirzos asked once he regained control over his voice, half-sobbing.
“Because you are stupid,” Pikaku said, starting another tear across the keegan’s chest.
“AAAAAAH!”
“Out of all the nobles of Solmnath, you should have been the first to shy away from this course of action. You should have known what dabbling in immortality would buy you, but you thought yourself untouchable.”
He tore another hole in the keegan’s swollen skin, making the man thrash in the crystal bathtub.
“Well, do you still feel untouchable?”
“No!”
“That was rhetorical. I already know the answer,” Pikaku said, cutting him again.
“This isn’t rhetorical, though: Did you see any fairies on or around Jebediah Trapper?”
The judge’s face registered a moment of clarity. “There was one… Yes, I tried to kill the vermin, but he actually protected it.”
Interesting. He could have a Vow. That would explain some of the strangeness. It would also warrant further investigation.
Pikaku leaned over the side of the tub, his talons digging into the metal. “Is he celibate? Did he ever run? Tell a lie? Eat more than once a week?” Pikaku was ticking off the more obvious ones for himself. Jebediah Trapper obviously hadn’t taken the Vow of peace.
“He was a lying sack of shit!” Mirzos struggled against his bindings in anger, but the magical chains could have held someone ten times his strength.
Hmm… Pikaku grabbed a towe
l off the rack and dried his claws off. We’ll give the judge some time to compose himself and sharpen his memory.
“Keep him healthy. Let me know if he lets anything important slip,” he said, folding the towel and putting it back where it came from.
His torturer nodded silently as Pikaku stepped out of the torture chamber and into the dimly-lit stone halls of the vaults under Mestikos.
He could have gotten someone who knew more about Jebediah Trapper, but the chances that someone would notice and take offense to it were far higher. The information he got from the former judge was spotty and colored by the idiot’s own perceptions, but no one on the face of Pharos would blink an eye at his disappearance.
The chance that Jeb had some kind of relation to Mab was slim, from what he could gather, but not completely out of the question. Who in their right mind would protect a fairy?
Reports from every corner of the empire about humans having a strange kinship with fairies were unsettling. They seemed to get along with the creatures more often, innately understanding their behavior.
It was a worrisome fact, nearly as troubling as these ‘nuclear bombs’. The idea that the witch in the Death Wilds might have ways to spread her influence into civilization was unsettling at best.
Not to mention the prophecy.
No, I’ve already got the chosen one, Pikaku thought, shaking his head.
As far as the emperor could tell, for all his outlandish luck and skill, Jebediah Trapper was a meat by-product in the chain of causality that would create the next god.
Pikaku stopped and opened a door to his right, spilling light from the hall onto his next captive.
Vresh Tekalis sat at her desk, writing letters for her family by the dim light of a small candle. The enforcer glanced up, her eyes widening before she came to attention, her horns nearly scraping the ceiling.
“You’re free to go,” Pikaku said, stepping out of the melas woman’s way.
“Thank you, my lord,” Vresh said, kneeling quickly before gathering her letters. One of the letters’ edges caught the tip of her candle and burst into flame, causing the enforcer to burst into quiet curses, putting out the small fire with her flame-resistant hands.
