I woke up to the sound of screaming. As I was in a magically shielded room, that was a bit weird. Until I realized that the screaming was coming from me.
Have you ever worked out too much, and woken up sore? Imagine that, but multiply it by a thousand. Then have it apply to literally every muscle in your body. Yeah, I was screaming. I’m man enough to admit it.
Now imagine it had happened somewhere you couldn’t just have someone run to the drugstore and grab you some ibuprofen or some lidocaine. To make it worse, magic didn’t have a solution. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had a spell that could work as a very mild analgesic. I just couldn’t move to cast it without whimpering.
There was work to be done. I couldn’t lie around in bed all day, so I ended up having to get Geo to meet with his underground contacts – you know, the cult – and get ahold of bunch of illegal opium poppy. Then I did drugs. Because, while there is no spell for muscle soreness, there’s a spell that will end addictions. It’s expensive – roughly the cost for a family of four to live for a month at a low-moderate standard of living – but I have money and lives were at stake.
Even then, it still hurt quite a bit to move. I probably could have completely dulled the pain, but I needed to remain mentally functional, so the dose was fairly low. So I put on my power armor and had Juiz move me where we needed to go. That helped.
After a few days, the soreness was at a level where I could function without the drugs. I was apparently still grumpy, but people would live. And so would I, despite how vehemently I would have disagreed with that statement the first day.
I realized that even I couldn’t be everywhere at once, so I created a simulacrum to assist me. In doing so, I learned something interesting. Simulacrums don’t have to be of real creatures. Quasi-real creatures work too.
I say this because I made a copy of one of my magic workshop geth.
It was a whim, really. Honestly, a copy of myself would have been the best choice, but that creeped me out. So geth it was. I put it to work installing fabricated cameras and radios in every workshop so Juiz could keep an eye on every single workshop at once.
After that, I assigned my geth – I named him Faraday – to work on teaching the different shops what they would need to know to continue work on the different components I needed. It took a bit for them to adapt to learning from a robot with a flashlight head.
For the most part, the work went well. The overtime pay was a great incentive once people wrapped their heads around the idea. Company provided lunches were another benefit they took to immediately. So even though I was working them twelve hours a day, most of the workers saw it as an opportunity.
That isn’t to say there weren’t some complaints. One event in particular merits mention.
A young noble who worked for the Gomeworks had gotten it into his head that conditions were unfair and he could alleviate his own suffering by taking it out on the peasant laborers who we’d hired. I won’t dignify the idiot by naming him. He was far from the only one who was doing so, though he was by far the worst.
Paulie was the one who brought it to my attention. He had been helping organize the laborers and had heard their grumblings. Normally I would have asked Lenn to have a word with the man so as to not interfere with my work, but Lenn and Lenntu had gone with Geo to Sandpoint by then. Apparently Geo’s search for the location of the mountain had turned up information about an expedition that claimed to have found Xin Shalast that had passed through Sandpoint decades past.
So it was that I had to deal with it personally. Aurora and Paulie went with me, but I asked them not to get involved if possible. I was annoyed at the lost productivity, but it had to be done, so I might as well do it right.
We entered the shop where the man’s group was working unannounced and caught him in the act of bullying a laborer. The kid he was picking on couldn’t have been more than seventeen and was a scrawny, malnourished sort. The nobleman was in his early twenties and had a good fifty pounds – mostly muscle – on the kid. So it wasn’t as if the kid could really defend himself from the throttling he was getting, even before you add in the nobleman’s friends.
“Excuse me,” I said. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
“This lout bumped into me while I was working. I’m teaching him a lesson,” the man snarled, not even bothering to look away from his target.
“Ah, so we have here a trifling little man wiff delusions of standing,” I said to Aurora in my best cockney accent, loudly enough for the whole shop to hear. “Finks he can strike others for petty reasons because his daddy will protect him? Such a pity. Perhaps his mother was too busy dallying wiff the field hands to teach him proper manners as befits a member of the gentry? ‘Tis a shame, really.”
<I apologize for my half-assing of writing out what it’d sound like in cockney. But I couldn’t do more without making it nigh unreadable.>
“YOU DARE?!” he roared, turning on me with a fury. Paulie used the distraction to usher the young laborer away.
“I dare call into question the paternity of one so brazenly unfit to be called nobility?” I had dropped the accent. “Why yes, I believe I dare. You are an insect, a parasite on the bloated corpse of your family name. I would be doing them a favor by cutting you down where you stand. Luckily for you, my family taught ME proper behavior, so I shall simply eviscerate you with words rather than with the jagged steel you so obviously deserve.”
He roared incoherently and charged me. I sidestepped his blow as Aurora had taught me, then the next and the next. After several moments, he had winded himself with his screeching rage.
That’s when I headbutted him.
I showed no anger, or much emotion at all. I just coldly and calmly slammed my forehead into his nose. I heard it break, the vibrations traveling through my skull. He was on the floor, clutching his face moments later.
“Pick him up,” I calmly told his friends.
“You can’t do this!” he screeched, his voice sounding funny due to the broken nose.
“It seems that I just did.”
“My father will hear of this!”
I knew that card would get played eventually. But I had been playing the game of the nobility for around a decade and had gotten fairly good at it. “Is that so? Good. You should also tell your father that if he in any way interferes with this project, every bard of the White Grotto will start singing an extremely memorable tune about a young nobleman who dies in a horrific yet comedic fashion because of a bad batch of wine from your family’s vineyards. After that, words will be spoken in the ears of a few key individuals such that within a year, even admitting to having ever tried your family’s wine will become such a mark of shame that no one with any standing will ever purchase from you again.
“Your wine will become, at best, the fare of lower quality taverns. In all likelihood, it will become the drink of choice for the desperate homeless. Your fortunes will be ruined. People will speak your family name in hushed tones for generations as a cautionary tale about not crossing your social betters.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“It would be simple and would cause me no more trepidation than I feel when stepping on a bug. So go ahead, just try it. But I would caution against taking out any of your frustration on the common people around you. Because if I hear just one more time that you’ve been using your position in society to mistreat those whose position does not allow them to defend themselves, your father will find your corpse nailed to the front door of the ramshackle hut you call a mansion. The city will probably give me a medal for taking you out of the gene pool.”
The look of terror on his face told me that I’d hit all the right notes. His friends wisely led him away before he could speak further. Aurora gave me a look. “Why the headbutt?”
“Krogan dominance gesture,” I said, like that meant anything to anyone. Well, Kira laughed. Anyone else, I mean.
“Would you really have destroyed his family like that?”
“If he had forced the issue, I’d have done it with glee. Every once in a while, someone needs to remind the nobility that they aren’t untouchable. They are allowed their place in society only so long as they keep themselves within a reasonable standard of behavior. Even if I were heartless and self-serving, a good noble knows that you can only antagonize the common folk so much before they’re forced to retaliate using their much greater numbers. So it’s up to the other nobles to keep those who get out of hand in check.”
<Look at you, pretending you’re too cool to care.>
<I hate rich idiots like that guy so much.>
The random happenings weren’t all bad. One of the workers tasked with making fairy steel beams – which cannot be melted by fairy jet fuel – made a mistake by adding too much mithral and accidentally discovered a new metal alloy with some very interesting properties. Basically, it was a room temperature superconductor.
That allowed me to, in the course of an afternoon, build a micro-fusion reactor. Which I then used to power what we were building. Well, sort of. The smaller parts still ran on magitech batteries. But the larger part incorporated a fusion reactor. Because I could.
It also gave me an idea for a new kind of plane engine, which led to me considering specs for a chassis that could use it. I fed Juiz specs through the telepathic interface. We crunched numbers and ran simulations while working on more boring but necessary tasks. Working on the specs for the plane – which I had dubbed the Night Witch after the nickname of an all female Russian bomber brigade from World War Two – gave me a nice diversion when I feared I would succumb to boredom. Juiz also seemed to enjoy it.
By the time the month was over, Juiz and I had worked out all the bugs. You’d be amazed what you can do with the help of an AI with plenty of spare processing power on the quantum computer blue box that functions as her brain. Considering the billions usually spent on developing new fighter jets, I would be able to become a multi-billionaire overnight and it would be a bargain for the government. Especially since I’m sure there’s no company out there capable of using magic and knowledge of exotic alien materials to make an orbit-capable fighter or bomber for less than a couple hundred million each.
Assuming, of course, we could get enough of a mithral supply to make the required fairy steel frames and mithracite shell. I have to assume Earth doesn’t have much mithral since I’ve never heard of it as a real material back home.
Anyway, tangent aside, it was a stressful month, but at least it was the kind of stress I was used to. Working night and day on a very important project with a deadline? That was much better than trudging through a house of horrors owned by cannibal ogres.
Even then, something had happened. At some point since then, I had gotten used to the whole thing. I still had the nightmares, but they weren’t nearly as bad. Now, I think, if I were faced with a similar situation, I might be better able to handle it. Sure, I’d be stressed and a bit terrified, but I don’t think I’d have a near psychotic break like I did then.
Of course, I’m sure there exist plenty of horrors out there that I’m in no way prepared to handle. But for someone who had been given a safe, sheltered modern American upbringing, it was progress.
As our deadline neared, Geo and co. rejoined us. The work was completed and we taught those who would use it how to do so. We had a bit of a gathering at our house the night before we were to set out. It was our group as well as Orik several of our friends from Sandpoint who had come to see us off, and Chadwick.
My adopted brother and I retired to my study to discuss his role. If everything we had read was true, the Voidstrife cartel needed to be ready to seize the opportunity to lay claim to the riches of Xin-shalast once the Runelord had been dealt with. Also, I wanted someone ready to come in and resurrect us if we died as the prophecy suggested.
I mean, the creation of Lenntu had suggested that it was possible for a man to create life without a woman. Sort of. But did that mean that we needed to create another form of life to survive? And how? Magic seemed the best solution, but I couldn’t create real creatures. So we were stuck. But so long as we won, we could be revived later. So it was horrible, but not that bad.
My real concern was Aurora. If she died and resurrected, what would happen to the baby? I didn’t have time to research whether it had happened before, and I couldn’t really farm out the research without risking her knowing that I knew. So I would do everything I could to make sure that she survived. I swore that on everything I held dear. If it was in my power, Aurora and our baby would still be standing when it was over.
“You okay?” Chadwick asked.
“What?” I replied.
“You were spacing out. It’s not like you. Not like that anyway.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m fine. Just pre-show jitters, of a sort.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re going to go out there and show that Runelord that his time is long past. When the day is over, you will have won. You were born for this.”
“I’m less worried about success and more worried about dying in the process,” I said. “I think we can do it. No, I know we’re capable. I’m just not sure we’ll survive it.”
“Well, then don’t forget to set the beacon so I know where your body will be so you can be revived.” He was talking about a magical beacon we’d devised that would send out a repeating magical pulse which was nearly undetectable unless you knew what to look for. It would allow him to pinpoint our location quickly so he could secure Xin-shalast before the Pathfinder Society got wind of it. Perhaps I was taking my annoyance at being denied their library a little too far.
Nah.
“You sure you don’t want to join us?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m no good at combat. I’m strictly a day to day activities kind of wizard.”
It was true. He was terrible at combat magic. “Fair enough.”
“Come on, let’s get back to the party. Your wife will kill us both if you make her entertain everyone alone for too long.”
The party – or whatever you’d call it – was a good reminder. It let us see once more the human – and non-human – faces of those who we were fighting to protect. But even it ended, and we were left alone, each of us with our thoughts in the dark of night.
I laid in bed, my arm around Aurora, the familiar weight of her head on my chest, the faint smell of lilacs and the soft, reassuring sound of her breathing. I had slept my two hours, and it would be dawn soon. I should have gotten up and prepared some more, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to move for risk of waking her.
Maybe Chadwick was right. I certainly felt like we had a shot. And I wouldn’t back down from this or any challenge, not when the stakes were so high for so many. So, we would fight. We would rise up and face our destiny. Not because we had to. Not because we wanted to. But because it was who we were. We were born for this. And we wouldn’t be denied. Not by Karzoug. Not by any powerful beings that served him. Not even by any gods who stood in our way.
Bring it on. Koi koi.
0 Comments