Apocalypse: Fairy System

by Macronomicon

“My name’s Jebediah Trapper,” Jeb said. “I’m one of the survivors of the Impossible Tutorial.”

  Garland’s brows rose. “Interesting. What level are you?”

  “Thirty-nine. Plus, I’ve consumed at least half a dozen Attribute potions and earned a similar number of Accolades.”

  Jeb met the man’s gaze. “I am absolutely confident I can return your daughter to you.”

  “And the kidnappers?” the greedy keegan asked, eyes glittering with barely constrained joy at the sudden solution to his problems.

  “I’m more than capable of killing the likes of them. They won’t leave that mountain alive.”

  “What do you want for it?” Grenore asked.

  “I don’t know what the final total they would have tried to extort out of you would be,” Jeb said. He’d seen the first note, but criminals tended to move goalposts. “But I will return your daughter to you for two hundred and fifty bulbs.

  “And afterward,” Jeb said with a business smile, “Svek and his pirates won’t be drawing breath.”

  “I could’ve hired a team of mercenaries to exterminate those pirates for that much,” Garland said, scowling at Jeb.

  “Really? I doubt it.”

  “…I’m not paying you in advance.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to pay me before I’ve delivered your daughter,” Jeb said.

  “Alright then,” Mr. Grenore said. “It’s a deal.”

  “Return your daughter, no more pirates,” Jeb said, extending his hand.

  “For two hundred and fifty bulbs,” Mr. Grenore said, clasping his boney fingers around Jeb’s own.

  A little spark seemed to travel up through Jeb’s arm and settle in his heart, and he knew the Deal had been struck.

  Excellent.

  Jeb smiled at the asshole and the asshole smiled back. At least, Jeb thought he was smiling. It was hard to tell with a keegan. Either way, there were bared teeth all around.

  Jeb turned and left the office, casually clomping down the street back towards his room at the inn.

  ******

  Seraine was sitting in bed, stabbing the post with Jeb’s shaving knife. Jeb was just happy she hadn’t disappeared. If he didn’t deliver the girl, his Deal would fall through and he’d get no Impact whatsoever.

  “Alright, we’re good to go,” he said as he entered. “Do you wanna get supper or something before we go to your dad’s place?”

  Seraine gave him a blank stare.

  “No supper?”

  She shook her head.

  “Alright, it’ll look a little unnatural getting you home this fast, but I am pretty amazing. Get’cher coat.”

  Seraine got her coat and the two of them left the room.

  ******

  “A-already!?” Mr. Grenore asked, his slack jaw nearly bumping Seraine’s head.

  Jeb was standing in the same office where he’d been roughly half an hour ago, this time with the addition of Seraine Grenore, who had glomped her father in the picture of an innocent hug of pure relief.

  It made Jeb’s stomach churn, but he couldn’t play his hand right out of the gate. The rules of a Deal, according to Smartass, were that he had to allow the other party a chance to repay the debt in good faith.

  “My payment?” Jeb asked.

  “I don’t have that kind of cash on hand. I’ll have to liquidate some stock. Give me a week.”

  Jeb’s eyes narrowed, calculating. The businessman was obviously wary of Jeb’s strength now. His posture was less confident, more guarded. His security guard stood an extra step farther away from Jeb. Closer to the door.

  If Jeb pushed for his payment right now, Garland might actually cave and give Jeb something of equivalent value. It felt strange to say, but Jeb actually wanted the other party to act in bad faith. It was the only way Jeb could claim an intangible asset to raise his Myst.

  If he gave the guy a week…the odds were actually pretty good the businessman’s fear of Jeb’s uncanny speed and power would dull, and the desire to hold onto his money would grow. That’s just how scumbags worked.

  Since Jeb had already delivered, the ball was in his court. He had Garland Grenore by the balls.

  The guy just didn’t know it yet.

  Now I just need to give him a time and place for a clever ambush to put me at a disadvantage.

  “Here. Saturday after next, one in the afternoon,” Jeb said. “I’ll be coming for my payment then.”

  “Generous. Thank you. I’ll have your money then,” Garland Grenore said, before the two shook hands again, both of them hoping money wouldn’t change hands, albeit for different reasons.

  Jeb walked out of the office and back out onto the street, ignoring the people gawking at him. They wouldn’t meet his gaze even if he looked at them, anyway.

  As soon as he was out of sight of the building, Jeb went back to limping, clutching his aching side as he returned to his room. He didn’t have to pretend to be a badass anymore, which was a freaking godsend. He had to have gained some Body, because Jeb was fairly sure he should have collapsed a long time ago.

  Jeb winced as he sat down on his bed, favoring his stomach wound. Once he was comfortable, he tugged the uncomfortable ring off and inspected it. It had been a long day, and all he wanted to do now was pass out and deal with everything seventeen hours from now.

  But he wanted to know whether the Deal he’d made with the pirates really had an effect, or if he was simply running on the placebo effect.

  Experimentally, Jeb put the ring up to his lips and blew through it.

  Thick grey Myst billowed outward, creating a roiling cloud in the middle of the room. It seemed to hang there, waiting for something to come across it.

  Jeb stood up and walked into the cloud.

  The grey Myst sank into his body, causing his flesh to glow with red inner light just as it had a few hours before, highlighting his bones. A flash of light passed over his eyes, and the Myst leapt back out of his body, forming into a status window.

  Jebediah Trapper

  Mystic Trapsmith, Level 39

  Accolades: Krusker’s Brawn, Siren’s Cunning, R-R-RubU’s Mysteries, Gresh’s Subtlety, Innovator, Lagross’s Power

  Body 21 (9)

  Myst 71 (7)

  Nerve 26 (9)

  Abilities: Mystic Trigger

  Accolade Pending: Lagross’s Power suspended due to multiple instances. Awaiting resolution.

  Attention, this User has been flagged for exclusion from The System by executive order.

  Four in Body…. That explains why I feel like a teenager…and am not bleeding out.

  Two in Myst and one in Nerve. Was that because of the letter? Did the pirates not have any actionable information other than that? Jeb had mostly profited financially from the pirates’ deaths, and as already stated, all material wealth fell under the Body category.

  “Smartass.”

  “Yeah?” the fairy asked, poking her head out of his pocket.

  “Is that a normal increase? Four, two and one?” Jeb said, pointing to each of his Attributes in turn. “It doesn’t feel like a lot. If I took their lives as my payment for the Deal, shouldn’t I have gotten a bigger portion of their Attributes? Some of the people there had at least thirty Body. Hell, Svek’s skull brushed off a forty-four.”

  “Umm… How do I explain this,” Smartass said, tapping her tiny chin. “Your sticky Impact can only pick up a certain amount of Impact before it simply can’t pick up any more. It’s related to the size of your Impact. A small ball of Impact can only have a small amount packed in around it before it loses the ability to adhere to more.”

  “That makes sense. Like a lint roller,” Jeb said, nodding. So a lot got wasted. Oh well. Hell of a lot better than nothing.

  “When you’re totally full up, you have to take some time to convert the new layer of Impact into sticky Impact before you can take more.”

  “That’s not going to take another hundred days, is it?” Jeb asked, thinking about his pl
ans for next weekend.

  “Should only take about a week, since the foundation is already laid. It’ll get faster as your Impact grows. The oldest Fae can make Deals at a speed that’ll boggle the mind.”

  “And once that layer is complete, I’ll be able to accept more Impact in one sitting?” Jeb asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “What about the distribution?” Jeb said, pointing at the status window again. “Is that because there was simply more Body-flavored Impact up for grabs in the Fate dimension than anything else?”

  Smartass eyed him sideways. “You’re a quick study.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Jeb said, slipping the ring back on his finger. The status window blinked out of sight as soon as the cold metal interior touched Jeb’s skin.

  He carefully lay down on the bed and put his legs up, kicking off his new boot.

  “I’m going to try and get some sleep,” Jeb said, setting his arms at his sides. Normally he liked to rest them on his stomach, but the angry, swollen stitching made that a non-starter.

  Jeb glanced at a hairline fracture in the ceiling, rubbing the scar on his palm with his thumb. He peered at the chair blocking the door, the bell attached to the window. He felt the gun bumping into his skull under his pillow.

  He didn’t think Grenore would try to have him killed, but Jeb would rather be paranoid than dead. He closed his eyes, focusing on the throb of the stab wound in his gut aching to the beat of his heart.

  Jeb slept like a baby.

  ******

  The next day was a whirlwind of signing papers he couldn’t read, getting his newfound wealth safely insured and tucked away in the city vault.

  In a world where people could shoot fireballs out their ass, a box made of solid steel wasn’t quite enough protection to ensure no one steals your cash, so the bank itself was guarded by a keegan security guard who was reputed to be a level eighty-four Mindraker.

  Whatever the hell that was.

  The bank even had a hall of fame, a glass case where keepsakes from previous would-be bank robbers were housed. It seemed a little macabre to Jeb, but out in the frontier, it seemed like deterrent was nine tenths of the law.

  After sorting and selling the substantial amount of pirate booty, Jeb was left with a hundred and eighty bulbs, and a backpack full of lenses they had stolen from local prospectors, worth a handful of bulbs apiece.

  When Jeb asked around, he found out that the term ‘bulbs’ was a reference to a psychedelic mushroom that grew in egg-like clusters. They were highly prized among Myst users in the past, and had been worth about an ounce of gold apiece before they were gathered to extinction.

  Jeb got a little annoyed when people kept asking him who he was selling the lenses to, assuming he was going to pass them off to a major corporation or noble house in exchange for a quick buck.

  It was apparently common sense that a plebian couldn’t make use of lenses.

  Jeb had no idea why he would do that.

  The backpack was like a little slice of Earth.

  There were a handful of Mountain River lenses that made icy cold water on command, several large Stone (Andesite) lenses—Jeb made a boulder out of one by accident—a bunch of Cedar lenses that grew saplings to trees depending on the Myst injected into them, a few flake-sized gold ore lenses, some pebble-sized iron ore lenses, copper ore lenses, and a single pinky-sized Wolfram lens.

  There were several animal lenses. A Hare lens, a couple different kinds of birds and squirrels, along with a single Buck lens about the size of a child’s fist. It looked like it was carved from lumpy antler, sloughing off coarse deer fur that disappeared as it fell away.

  First, the obvious question: Why on God’s green earth was a system built around gold as currency able to continue with magical lenses that could literally spit out a nearly limitless supply of gold?

  When Jeb asked around, the answer was basically: It wasn’t limitless.

  A single lens about the size of a golf ball could spit out thousands of tons of material before it eventually degraded. So, rather than search the hills for a gold mine, it was far easier for prospectors to find a gold lens, which could pump out gold until it busted.

  In essence, a lens and a mine were the same thing. They occurred at similar rarities, and produced a similar amount of product before being exhausted.

  A mine required a huge amount of infrastructure and labor, which meant time, materials, labor and workers. Workers that had to be paid.

  A lens just needed a Myst engine and a way to process the output. The only people who knew how to do that were aristocrats. The ease with which Myst produced raw materials drove the profit margin of an honest-to-God actual mine through the ground.

  This forced most value to be placed in the amount of labor that went into making and shipping goods and services. Trading bulk material back and forth was almost unheard-of unless it was in the form of lenses.

  The whole conversation gave Jeb a headache as he tried to unwind the strange dynamics of the empire’s economics.

  Finally, he decided he didn’t care. Jeb was now the proud owner of several mines/logging camps/hunting grounds he could carry around with him wherever he went, and he had the skills to take full advantage of them.

  That was good enough for him.

  Jeb earmarked fifty bulbs for the smear campaign against Garland Grenore, another fifty for starting his own business, and the rest for enjoying his week.

  Approximately eighty thousand dollars, American monies, to blow between now and the weekend after next.

  Oh my, whatever will I spend the money on?

  The time between Thursday and the Saturday after next passed by in a manic blur of enthusiastically supporting the local community.

  The leisure time wasn’t all good, as it gave Jeb plenty of time to think in between. Plenty of time to stare at the ceiling and wonder if all this craziness was actually real or not. Plenty of time to crawl inside his own head.

  Jeb was just starting to feel The Spike making it hard for him to sleep indoors again by the time the next Saturday rolled around.

  Which was why Jeb was so happy when he opened the door to Garland’s office, and found himself face-to-face with the imperial enforcer, arms crossed, one hand brushing her weapon.

  It was the same melas woman he’d seen executing that reaper a couple weeks ago. She was about six and a half feet tall, big shiny horns, black hair, with the typical muscle mass of a melas. Her dark lips were full and downturned in a faint scowl as she eyed him in return.

  Her gaze lingered on Jeb’s pegleg for a moment.

  Below her face… Jeb found his gaze wandering, so he tore his eyes away and directed them at the others. Zlesk flanked the enforcer, the lawman looking a little concerned and a little angry.

  At his desk, the keegan steepled his fingers, seemingly pleased with his ambush. By his side, his daughter was sitting, her expression one of concern, glancing between Jeb and her father.

  “Pay attention, Seraine. This is how you deal with these kinds of people,” he said, motioning to Zlesk and the enforcer.

  “Jeb, Mr. Grenore says you tried to extort him?” Zlesk asked.

  Chapter 7: Punitive Remuneration

  Jeb scanned the room.

  As far as ambushes went, it was a pretty decent one. Jeb was curious how Garland had brought an imperial enforcer into the office, but the how didn’t matter a whole lot right now.

  The enforcer was the major hurdle here. Zlesk was…agreeable, to an extent. The biggest problem was that Jeb had already spilled the beans about being in the Impossible Tutorial, which wasn’t something he wanted to make known to the government just yet.

  And yet, there was a government fixer with the authority to execute punishment on-site without a trial or any kind of due process. In all likelihood, the story had already been spread to her.

  Can’t change what’s already done, Jeb thought, gaze flicking to the smug melas bodyguard. The man didn’t seem nearly as
intimidated by Jeb as he had been last time. Probably because they had a high-level bruiser here to hold their hands.

  “Jeb, Mr. Grenore says you tried to extort him?” Zlesk asked.

  Jeb reoriented on Zlesk.

  “Extortion is defined as obtaining something through force or threat of force. There was no mention of using force, nor do I have any intention of doing so,” Jeb said, slipping Svek’s earring out of his pocket and holding it up where they could see it.

  “If you like, we could use a few Truthseekers to mediate this dispute?” Jeb said. “If mine won’t do, I believe Mr. Grenore has one in his desk.”

  It really didn’t matter if Garland said ‘yes’ or not. It was already clear he didn’t intend to pay Jeb. Now it was a fun little dance before Jeb got his Myst.

  “An excellent suggestion. I think a healthy dose of the truth should clear things up,” Garland said, fishing through his desk and coming out with a similar earring.

  Sure will.

  “Use mine please, Ms. Tekalis. There’s no telling what kind of alterations that knave may have done to his.”

  The enforcer glanced at the earring a moment, pursing her lips as she frowned.

  “You understand that if I put this on, I will be acting in an official capacity as an imperial enforcer and will immediately arbitrate a settlement to the best of my ability, and the two of you will be required by law to abide by my decision.”

  “Understood,” Jeb said.

  “I understand,” Mr. Grenore said.

  “Alright then, let’s get this over with,” Vresh said with a sigh, clipping the earring on and addressing the two of them.

  “Unless otherwise prompted, you will answer my questions with short, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers. First: Mr. Trapper, did you extort Mr. Grenore?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Grenore. Did you agree to pay Mr. Trapper two hundred and fifty marks in exchange for the return of your daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  Vresh raised a brow. “Unless I’m missing something, the matter is clear. Is there anything either of you would like to add to this?”

  Jeb stayed silent, allowing Garland to keep digging the hole deeper.