“A sizeable fraction of those called to lead, as you have been called, felt and believed the same way,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “You exist now on the other side of the mirror, Saint.” Crap! “Your moral thoughts do not follow a religion, they will define one.
Betrayer chortled a sotto bwah hah hah. “Exactly what they said about Jesus H. Christ in my Sunday School. I can see you as Saint Dana the Almost Virginal. Suits you to a T.”
“There is no ‘H’ in Jesus Christ,” Weeping for Cordoba said. He looked put-upon, greatly put-upon.
Dana didn’t see any way out of this mess, save to stay dead, which didn’t appear to be a viable option. That is, nobody offered it to her today – again, not meeting her expectations. However, she had one offer in her pocket to lead her back to limbo and heaven. “Betrayer, I agree,” Dana said. This whole situation had gone from utterly ridiculous to sublimely silly. Her, founding religions? If not abjectly evil, the first thing she would do after her resurrection would be to go kill a few Dubuque worshippers in a messy fashion and rid herself of any chance at this supposed Sainthood. She felt so unworthy that she found it laughable.
Perhaps she could save the whales, though.
“Then my plans have moved farther along to their inevitable fruition!” Betrayer said, sweeping her cloak theatrically around her and gloating through her cackle.
More insight filtered through Dana’s mind. “Is the chance of success of your vile plan back above zero yet, Betrayer?”
“Damnation!” Betrayer vanished.
“Bye…” Dana said. She turned to Weeping for Cordoba, who hadn’t vanished as she had expected. On the next table over, the young Lorenzi sat stunned at whatever the old-looking far-too-mortal Weeping for Cordoba told him. “I’ll tell you, I have a hard time believing she has the holy power needed to resurrect me.”
“She doesn’t.”
“Huh? Then what’s this all about?”
“She will instead blackmail Orlando, your Richard, into doing so. He has a blind spot around the irrational uses of willpower, as you well know. He will not even think of trying.”
Dana shut her eyes and winced. She didn’t know who had tacked the ‘kick me’ sign to her rear end, but if she ever found them, they were going to wish they were dead. She didn’t want to be any of this. Saint. Angel. Progenitor of an Angelic Host. Founder of religions! Baah. “Is it always this bad for people like us, Weeping for Cordoba?” Using the term ‘people’ loosely. “Tell me it’s not. Please?”
Weeping for Cordoba put a strong and leathery tanned hand on Dana’s shoulder and squeezed, giving comfort. “You’ve talked some with Kara the Godslayer, Dana. You already know the life of an Angel is often worse. Often far far worse.”
46. (Betrayer)
Betrayer closed her eyes in exhaustion and took a deep breath.
Thump went one body to the cold concrete floor of her lair, a moment later another thump. Jan and Knot. Their hearts beat slowly.
“Tell me that fucking worked,” Jan said, wheezing. “Oh, please, tell me we don’t have to do that again.” Betrayer had only been able to reach Dana with the help of the three.
“Jan, you’d think after all of your years, you would have gotten used to a little hard witchery,” Knot answered. She sounded like her tongue had gone numb.
The annoying thing about this was that Betrayer still hadn’t been able to pin down Communicant magic. Yes, she had managed to detect the crap while it worked, but as always the crazy stuff showed up in different ‘energy bands’. In analogy, any willpower use covered vast swaths of the ‘willpower energy spectrum’, and needed a lot of wattage to accomplish anything. Communicant magic used the same spectrum, worked with only one ‘frequency’ at a time, and worked with impossibly low wattage. And still, amazingly, did things.
“I’m spoiled by too much work done with magical sources,” Jan said. “There’s always Grover or one of his offspring around.” Betrayer wrote a mental note to investigate whether or not she might be able to serve as a magical source. Or at least create an enchantment to do so.
“You should try this crap in Hell, against active interference,” the Godslayer said. She sat at the third vertex of the magical triangle Betrayer stood in the center of. She sounded wasted. “It always leaves me flat on my back, unable to coma my hair for a month.” Definitely wasted, if she was attempting and failing at one of her multi-lingual puns. “Or we might end up working for Orlando. Which reminds me of my grandmother’s pie weights. We could end up being the pie weights of the cow we being!” Was she high as well? That attempt at a joke barely even made sense.
“Please just tell me if this worked,” Jan said. She stuck her hands in her frizzy red hair and pulled. “I would rather not have to do this a fourth time.”
“It worked,” Betrayer said. “I got the agreement, though Weeping for Cordoba ripped me a new one in the process.” She opened her eyes and found she was able to move her fingers and arms again. Her legs were still kayoed, though. “I’ll drop you three in a bed for your style of recovery. Me, I’ve got to go meditate in a bathtub of nice warm water.”
Betrayer stood and stretched, banishing the bathtub’s hot water, the bathtub itself, and conjured up a towel to dry herself. She could have dried herself with willpower, but she didn’t get the full benefit of a bathtub soaking unless she completed the ritual with a real towel. Five hours had passed since the Limbo excursion; Jan and Knot and the Godslayer had ‘ahem’ recovered and were hard at work on something in the lair’s computer center. Dave and Elorie were asleep, and she decided she had pushed them hard enough for one day, and delayed the next scheduled training session, with one of her automated projections, by four hours. Those two were coming along nicely. No new disaster had piled up outside of her lair, so she decided she would continue her recovery process.
She strolled down to the computer center, along the way smiling at Jan and Knot’s additions to her lair. The gargoyles now clicked their heels when they saluted her. Hellish decorations now covered the formerly plain walls and ceilings, carrying with them enough potent psychology to give her the willies. Many of the eyes followed her, both from the paintings and sculptures. Jan was most proud of the Giger-themed hallway outside of the control room, with its dripping pus and slithering stone walls that resembled masses of snake bodies.
She waltzed in to the computer center and stopped short. “You’ve set this up as a porn server?” She had spent too much time chasing the crap off her computers to have her own people putting it back on.
“Wait, wait, don’t get angry there’s a plan, ma’am.” Knot stopped her touch-typing and turned to Betrayer. Nessa and Ken’s twins slept in porta-cribs beside Knot; thankfully they didn’t wake up.
“A plan.” Betrayer stalked over to loom threateningly behind Knot. Jan, three seats down, was partially undressed, her shirt off and showing her bra and too much cleavage, on some form of cam session. The Godslayer hung upside down from the ceiling and did something indigo-y with the server farm, something well beyond Betrayer’s ability to understand. “I want to hear about this plan.” She leaned over Knot’s shoulder, purposely discommoding. “Indigo Camgirls?” The name of the site. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“We’re going after the City of God. Indirectly,” Knot said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be from another timeline? How’d you learn how to code our computers?”
Knot snorted. “I’ve been here five months. This stuff’s trivial.”
“Knot takes after her bio-dad,” the Godslayer said. She did a triple somersault and landed on her tiptoes, on top of the table five desktop units down from Knot’s workstation. Part of being her style of Angel required her to do things physically that a more normal Angel would have done magically. Such as move. “Smart.”
“Not that smart.” Not according to Betrayer’s scans. She ignored the Godslayer’s baggy message sweatshirt, which read ‘LINUX Computer Cleaning. We don’t do Windows’.<
br />
Knot turned to her and frowned, relaxing something with her Communicant skills, allowing Betrayer to scan Knot’s real mind for the first time. “Okay,” Betrayer said, impressed. “That smart.” The Godslayer hopped over and put a left hand on Betrayer’s shoulder.
“The idea is that we’re using your server farm to spread the anti-City of God gospel using both song of insinuation and enhanced skepticism,” the Godslayer said. “We’ve hooked it into both Lias and Splursh – with a squick squick rating, of course – and cross-linked examples to several existing webcam sites.”
The world did not need this. “Song of insinuation?”
“It’s like word of command, but when combined with skepticism it’s more along the lines of ‘pay attention’ and ‘go beyond your preconceptions’ and ‘don’t trust what others tell you, go look at the data’,” the Godslayer said. She smiled. “When the 2nd Gen tried this trick, after Jan and Jurgen cut off their allowances following the Montana Monster debacle, I shut it down, saying the Indigo ran on love and sex, not voyeurism and masturbation. But this is war, and so I’m being more lenient.”
Jan finished her session, stood up and buttoned up her shirt. She had a big smile on her face. “I’d forgotten how much I like acting,” she said, in Betrayer’s opinion gravely misusing the word ‘acting’. She bounded up to Knot and gave her a hug from behind. “How are we doing on the recruiting?”
“We’ve seeded the site with twenty seven Indigo and five normal camgirls,” the Godsayer said, whispering.
“I’ve got eleven more already,” Knot said.
“Good. Your turn,” Jan said. “Go put on your Domme outfit and get going.” Knot snorted, stood, and walked off, presumably to dress up as a Dominatrix. Betrayer watched as Knot’s posture and walk altered from her normal reserved self to that of someone far more dominant.
Betrayer put her head in her hands and rubbed her temples. She hardly had to act crazy anymore. Letting the Indigo do its thing covered all the crazy she would ever need. “Aren’t you putting these people at risk?”
“Nah, thanks to your willpower and Knot’s shaman tricks,” the Godslayer said. Her appearance changed from college student to that of a frilly-dressed submissive, which Betrayer thought well beyond the realm of believability and possibility. “The links are untraceable, and if someone tries, they’re going to end up chasing down City of God church supply outfits in Santa Fe and Dubuque’s territory. If they try and find the server, they will, which isn’t a problem because you want to lead the enemy here.”
Yup, typical Indigo insanity. “Fine, I’ll let you three handle this idiocy.” She paused, but then stopped, a smile coming to her face. “But only after I do a couple of terrifying webcam sessions.” She did have a couple of well-corrupted Dubuque functionaries she needed to mess with, and this would be more efficient and more fun than messing up their credit cards and tax bills. She conjured up her nattiest uniform and her favorite tricorn hat out of her clothing reality bubble, and got to work.
47. (Dana)
Dana blinked away tears from the bright sunlight and flexed her fingers.
“Dana?”
She had a heart again, and her heart beat. Her body was achingly present in the world, alive, whole, and vigorous. She looked herself over with her Natural Supported willpower and everything checked out fine – real blood, real nerves, real intestines, real hunger. She giggled when she sensed she had regrown her hymen, though.
Someone draped a cloak around her; the air she breathed stung with cold and frost. Thin, but just a little. Definitely not at sea level. Blue Ridge, perhaps?
She wanted to spend the next week closely examining all the species of dead grass within a quarter mile. She found everything so deliciously natural it overwhelmed her. She loved nature, and nature loved her.
The people around her chattered, their prose poetic and new, though she couldn’t identify any of them or make sense of their conversation. She knew them all, but her brain couldn’t connect faces to names. All but four knelt before her as the cloak settled on her shoulders. “You’re Richard?” she asked the man who put the cloak on her. He was tall and handsome, with oriental eyes. “You’re my husband.”
The review of her life had been so much easier. She had several apologies to make, one to a person named January Cox, whose face she couldn’t recall right now.
“How much do you remember about what happened?” Richard said, uncommonly open to her. He loved her with all his heart on over a dozen divine thought-tracks. Oh, unworthy me! she thought. “Do you need privacy?”
Dana thought for a moment, and then decided she went about this all wrong. She shrugged off the cloak and turned toward the mid-morning sun, allowing the sun to warm her naked body. “I don’t think I’m fully back in this world,” she said. “I’m…limited.”
She closed her eyes as she faced the sun and pressed out her senses, living and magical. Ducks called in the distance. Leaves rustled in the wind and dropped from trees. Fall, mid-October. A few tiny clouds groaned east, above. A few insects, hanging on for a few more days of warm weather, buzzed and chirruped around her.
The four people who didn’t kneel herded away the rest who did. One of the non-kneelers returned and took Dana’s hand. This one mirrored her; all the four mirrored her in some screwy way. “I must know you,” Dana said. “You’re not the same as you were when I was reviewing my life. What’s your name?”
“You should remember me as Persona, but since Portland’s gone back to her mortal name, I have as well, at least in private. You can call me Maria. Maria Haller.”
“Why’d you drop your first name?” Dana said.
Maria blinked. “Spooky.” She paused. “Because that person was a movie and television star; I used my full name as my stage name. In private, I was always Maria.”
“Maria,” Dana said. She looked at the other two, a young man and a young woman. “Bob. I raised you from a toddler this year.” He nodded. “I remember you as Progress.”
The be-studded punk Goddess nodded. “Kay Crasniak, master of Progress.”
“Kay.”
“What was it like?” Kay said. “How did you become an Angel? What kind of Angel are you, anyway?”
“I’m not an Angel, not exactly,” Dana said. “I can’t tell you. Not yet. Richard?”
“Yes, Dana?”
“I had to make a deal with Betrayer.”
“So did I.”
“How bad was yours?”
“I had to submit to a ten hour ‘lesson’, where she trained me in advanced divine fighting techniques.”
“This doesn’t sound bad.”
“The lesson had to be in front of everyone. Humiliating. My Mission feels about two inches high.” Dana looked at Richard and resolved some of the individual details. He did look worn. “She gravely weakened me in ways that are going to make it far more difficult for me to attract followers, at least until I find a way to rebuild my Mission, and she strengthened my fighting ability so much that my combat capabilities are more dissonant with my self-image than my Mission.”
Dana nodded. This puzzled the Gods, but the change felt right to her. “I think you didn’t successfully replicate me as I was when I died,” Dana said. “There’s parts of my mind, my brain, which I’m currently rewiring so I can do things like see details of faces. I apologize if I seem a bit strange.”
“Well, that’s something new and different,” Maria said. “To my senses you’re an Angel, Dana. With a mortal human body.”
“Later,” Richard said. “What deal did you make with Betrayer?”
“Oh, nothing much. In some upcoming fight I’m going to make another suicidal gesture and die again.”
Richard winced and turned away.
“Just resurrect me. You have to win the fight, though.” He didn’t comment. “Don’t tell me…no, I refuse to believe you used a one shot trick to get me back.” If so, she knew what she would be spending her free time practicing with h
er Angelic magic.
“We didn’t use a one-shot,” Bob said. He stepped forward and gave Dana a hug. She buried her face on his shoulder for a moment. “Mom, your death hurt us, Richard and me the worst of all. I went…I didn’t behave sanely for days.”
“What he’s trying to say is that he preserved your body, or what little there was left of it, in his own vain attempt to bring you back. Which failed,” Maria said.
“Hey,” Bob said, untangling himself from Dana. “I’ve got a new neo-Supported. That’s her, over there, the one dressed all in black. Her name’s PheareChylde.” Dana followed Bob’s pointing finger over to a nervous woman standing next to S’up. She waved shyly at Dana, barely visible behind her new willpower glow. “I think you’ll like her.” The undertones of his comment stuck in Dana’s mind, an invitation for later.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Richard said. “Jan and Knot are still with Betrayer, and I got a chance to talk to them. Betrayer didn’t capture them and turn them, as we thought. They found her and volunteered. They’ve gone completely around the bend.”
Dana had her own suspicions on the subject, but she didn’t want to talk about them yet. She turned to her husband. “So how did you resurrect me, Richard?” Dana asked. Right now, the four Gods looked like they would have a hard time boiling peanuts.
Richard took Dana’s hand but had to turn away. He wept, but his tears did not color his voice. “I did the impossible and accomplished utter nonsense. I conjured your body up from absolutely nothing! I didn’t build you piece by piece, I just willed you to come back whole. You did. I didn’t believe what I was doing was possible.”
“Sounds like a miracle.”
“Miracles, the supernatural, they’re all impossible,” Richard said. “I’m having a hard time with this.”
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 51
