by Macronomicon
“Hot damn!” Eddie shouted, his brush with death and prized drone all but forgotten. “I need to make some drafts!”
“Hold up there,” Jeb said, grabbing the roboticist by the shoulder before he went into a frenzy. “Papers,” he said, shaking the blank sheets in front of the old man’s face. “How do I read them?”
“Ugh, c’mere.” Eddie and Jeb went down into the basement, where the old man pulled out an airbrush and popped a mixture of ink and water into it.
“I isolated out the nonporous parts of the paper, so they should be more susceptible to osmosis,” he said as he prepped the mixture.
“Light, too,” Jeb said, holding up the paper to a bright light, where he could make out faint scribbles shining through the slightly less-dense portions of the paper.
“Gimmie,” Eddie said, snatching the paper out of his hand. Putting it over some printer paper, he coated them with an even spray of black ink.
Eddie waited for a moment, then pulled the two papers apart, revealing a crisp list of names, one side written in alien, the other in English.
“It looks like there was an orphan named Tim,” Jeb muttered, scanning the list. He couldn’t bring himself to find that fact amusing.
Eddie shooed him away and swiveled, rolling on his chair back to his drafting computer, muttering to himself.
Jeb hoofed the three pages of suspects up to Zlesk, who would presumably be able to put titles to names.
The injured keegan was sitting on a bench, enjoying the blazing hot summer sun while the kids played out front. It was a surreal sight, watching children jump five to ten feet in the air during tag.
“How’d it go?” he asked as Jeb approached. “I saw you and Eddie return unscathed, so I assumed it was at least a partial success.”
“We got the list,” Jeb said, putting the papers in the sheriff’s hands.
The keegan’s eyes went wide, watering as he scanned his way down the list.
“So many….” he said softly, flipping between the pages.
“This represents maybe a third of the governing body of Solmnath,” Zlesk said, glancing up at him. “These are old, powerful families. You’d have about as much luck taking them down as you would pulling the sun out of the sky.”
The sheriff put his palm over his forehead, taking a deep breath and staring into the ground.
“If it were five or six, you might be able to rally the rest of the nobility against them, ostracize them and cut away their support, but with this many complicit in this horrifying trade…”
“They’re gonna cover each other’s asses, aren’t they?” Jeb asked.
Zlesk nodded. “I would be tempted to take my pay and extricate myself from this political garbage fire right now, if my very soul didn’t recoil from tacit agreement with these monsters’ methods.”
“Something I’ve heard: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” Jeb quoted.
Zlesk chuckled, eyeing him from the side. “That definitely sounds wiser than something that would come out of your mouth, Jebediah Trapper.”
“Oh, it is,” Jeb said, nodding. “Some old guy said it a long time ago. Was it Gandalf, maybe? Idunno. It holds true, though. They’re gonna keep doing what they do as long as nobody holds them accountable.”
“You’re right,” Zlesk said, sighing.
“How long until you’re ready for action again?” Jeb asked.
“About a week,” Zlesk said, flexing his fingers.
Damn, high Body really does speed up healing. The keegan had some pretty nasty lacerations a day ago. A week was warp speed in comparison to a normal recovery.
Jeb’s broken arm would likely take longer than that….
“Are you willing to do what we have to to keep the children out of the clutches of these people?” Jeb asked, tapping the list in Zlesk’s hand.
Zlesk straightened in his seat. “Yes.”
“Alright then, we’ve got a week until my next hearing. You rest up,” Jeb said, folding up The List before patting Zlesk on the shoulder. “And maybe give Colt some pointers.”
Jeb had some ideas for how he could legitimize the orphanage, at least enough to keep the children safe from the people in charge.
My kids, at least. Jeb was under no illusions that there weren’t more kids forgotten in the gutters at this very moment. They could never all be accounted for.
But stopping these people from killing for gain? The only thing he could hope to do was shine a light on it and force them to tiptoe.
I’ve got a week before my next visit to the court, hopefully with a judge that doesn’t give a shit about me, rather than one who wants to blame me for his crimes. Apathy would be a marked improvement.
In one week, Jeb was due for a retrial, and the lady whose ankles he’d broken hadn’t pressed charges; nobody who’d been at O’sut’s mansion wanted to admit they’d been there.
So Jeb had a week to polish up and prepare, and he had three major issues on his plate:
1: Getting Mystic Triggers up and running again.
2: Outfitting himself better.
3: Searching his body for more things stitched on by The System and getting them off.
Jeb really wanted to give himself a thorough once-over and check for more things that might have been stitched on, but the matter wasn’t pressing. He was fine now, and he would continue to be fine even if he didn’t get to it immediately.
Even if some worm-like thing in the fifth dimension was currently buried right behind his eyeball.
Jeb shuddered.
Besides, the weirdness of what came out of Jeb’s System meant it was dangerous...or at least unpredictable whether removing a piece would benefit him at all. Jeb still remembered thinking he was an apprentice wizard named Mevar for a couple minutes.
So Jeb directed his attention to the other two options. As much as Jeb wanted to make his own weapons, it was more time-efficient to buy and commission them. He couldn’t spend the entire week making a single shield-blade or wand.
Nope, his best course of action would be to send Zlesk out with a bag of gold and a list, and give Eddie some ideas, then spend the rest of the time mastering Mystic Triggers.
Delegation.
Jeb needed his Triggers back.
Jeb clapped his hands together and limped off to get to work.
******
The week went by slowly. The constant tension under the watchful eye of quickly-hired mercenaries made sure nothing got stale, and they were busy as hell, which made every day feel like its own week.
Zlesk bought him a +3 Body ring to drastically speed up Jeb’s healing, along with the magical equivalent of a flak jacket. It was a heavy vest lined with thin segments of faradan, a stone that exerted force against anything that got close to it. It would slow down anything aiming for Jeb’s vital organs, taking the punch out of them so the underlying chainmail could catch it.
Fun fact: Faradan was also what sand-pirates lined the bottom of their boats to cruise over the desert with, as well as a primary component of every major city’s walls. Jeb even spotted where they were being built to fill in the gaps left by the Stitching.
Zlesk also got him a glove with fire and speeding arrow lenses sandwiched into the back. It fired little darts of flame that emerged from the palm. It was a hand-me-down from an aristocratic keegan child, so the fit was decent for Jeb after they cut the extra-long fingers off.
It was also less-than-lethal—not being particularly powerful—but in Jeb’s experience, nobody liked getting a face full of fire-dart.
Zlesk got Jeb’s Annihilation lens gun back from the two detectives, disassembled so he didn’t get summarily executed just for carrying it, since the individual pieces weren’t illegal. They could figure out something else to do with it later.
Jeb’s fancy foot came back after three days with some new spit and polish, along with a small panel in the side that was practically invisible, where he could store stuff se
cretly.
Of course, a false foot was a terrifically predictable place to hide stuff, so that kind of evened things out—but still, it was nice to have.
Jeb stored a copy of the list of names in the little cubby and sealed it closed, marveling as the seam vanished completely. He buried the original under the orphanage’s floorboards.
As for Eddie, he took Jeb’s idea for a saw blade he could move with telekinesis and ran with it. The old man took an Udium-tipped blade and Refined the superhard metal straight out of it as a dust, then sintered a thin layer onto the blade-edge of a circular disk of ultra-tough composite material scrap he had lying around.
The material Eddie made was so tough, it would bind up his cutters in a fraction of a second, but the old man worked it easily.
Jeb watched in fascination as the old man’s pale purple Myst traced shapes along the composite, which would then shed dust of its stronger reinforcing material, allowing the roboticist to snap it off by hand, leaving a perfect circle.
When he was done, Eddie welded a composite handle to the back of it and called it a day. The entire thing was about a palm and a half wide, and in the shape of a buckler. It was unpainted and ugly; it looked like a circular saw blade, and Jeb loved it. It was somewhat non-threatening and at first glance seemed like a defensive tool, and it was just small enough to clip onto his belt.
“Yep, that’s a murder-buckler, if I’ve ever seen one,” Eddie said, eyeing his creation.
“I’ll call it the Identity Disc, after the Tron movies,” Jeb said, nodding as he imagined it flying around slaughtering people.
“That doesn’t really fit, does it?”
“I just wanna be the one who names something,” Jeb said, throwing the disk into the roiling cloud of the Appraiser.
Murder-Buckler
A buckler that pushes the boundaries of performance for a non-magical item, this unique weapon has been fitted with a jagged Udium edge to tear flesh asunder.
“Damnit!” Jeb gave Eddie the finger and stormed outside in a faux tantrum.
When he got to the top of the stairs leading out of the storm shelter, he paused, listening. Something was off.
The surroundings were quiet.
Orphanages weren’t supposed to be quiet. They were supposed to have screaming children every twenty feet or so. Jeb had grown so accustomed to it that the sound of silence was horrifying. Jeb’s heart kicked into gear as anxiety pressed in around him. The mercenaries they hired were meant to discourage an attack, but nothing was ever set in stone.
Was everyone dead? Were the bad guys waiting in the hedges to murder him?
Jeb frowned and put his back up against the side of the mansion, wrapped a bit of Myst around his vitals and peeked around to the front yard, half-expecting dead bodies.
It was mostly just a handful of the younger girls playing with dolls.
Okay, so nothing is obviously wrong.
Jeb scanned the surroundings and noticed that A: the older, more boisterous children were missing, and B: a few of the mercenaries were gone as well.
Hmm...
Jeb stepped out of the mansion’s shadow and walked up to one of the mercs playing cards with her teammate under a parasol.
“Where’s everyone?” Jeb asked, still half-expecting some strangeness.
“They went to watch the parade,” she said dismissively, laying down a card with an alien symbol in front of her team member.
“Keensha bra gosh!” her opponent cursed, slapping his cards down in frustration.
“Parade?”
******
The parade to welcome the emperor had lined the streets of Solmnath with the finest rabble. It was the only chance the common people of the city were going to get to see the big cheese with their own eyes, because there was a strictly enforced curfew a quarter-mile around the place he would be staying.
Getting a place to watch the procession on the ground was a non-starter, the streets were so choked with people. Jeb managed to track Zlesk, a couple of the mercenaries and the loudest children to an abandoned ten-story office building along the route of the parade.
The parade itself was pretty darn impressive, in an old-timey kind of way. There weren’t any gigantic floats, but there were rows and rows of odd lizard-creatures marching down the paved L.A. roads, their riders separated into groups by species, and presenting a force that would easily tear through the city if they had half a mind to.
It was impressive in that sense.
The emperor himself looked a bit like Big Bird’s cool uncle, with his large beak and cheerful yellow plumage. Riding around him were what Jeb could only assume were some of his vassals.
At his left hand rode a big, faceless suit of ominous black armor that looked something like a Nazgûl. Creepy. Jeb couldn’t judge size super well from that distance, but the person looked imposing, and possibly human. If they were melas, they would’ve had horns.
On the emperor’s right side, Jeb found himself gawking at two blonde humans smiling and waving along with the rest of the silk-swaddled aristocracy.
Brett and Amanda, the only for-sure humans in the entire parade, were right there.
They must have gotten my letter, Jeb thought, frowning as he watched the two of them give their best smile-and-wave. Now all he had to do was set up a meeting.
A new option for how to move forward opened up in front of Jeb as he watched the underwear models canter far underneath their point of view, raisin-sized at this distance.
He had friends in local government now.
I need to arrange a meetup, Jeb thought, going to find a courier, leaving Zlesk, Colt and a handful of others gawking at the size of the army marching into the city.
Once Jeb sent the letter, he spent the rest of his time working on dialing in the bandwidth of various events. The first two things Jeb focused on were the spoken word and moving objects.
Jeb wanted his automatic protections and his bullets back.
Every day, he read and re-read the book while trying exercises that he either vaguely remembered or invented on the spot. Mevar’s experiences had sunk into the back of his mind and it was hard to tell which was which.
Much of his time was spent sitting cross-legged out on the lawn, bouncing a tennis ball off of the side of the mansion, mastering both breathing in Myst to fill his Core to his new limits, as well as creating Triggers to catch the ball on the rebound.
Well, trying.
Jeb let the ball hit him in the chest before it dropped into the palm of his hand.
What am I missing? Jeb thought, eyeing the fuzzy ball in his palm. He was still trying to tune into specific events, but it wasn’t doing anything. It never triggered the ball of Myst.
If an object comes towards me at a speed greater than 5 mph, deploy the bubble of force.
Jeb tried to focus on the criteria, focusing on tuning those events in tight.
He threw the ball, which hit the wood and rebounded, hitting him in the chest again.
What am I missing?
Jeb set the ball down between his legs and closed his eyes, reviewing what he’d read in the book. He had to picture the scene vividly, so clearly as to confuse what was real, then strip away the non-relevant parts, applying the image to the Trigger.
Jeb took a long breath and tried to envision the ball approaching him, every single detail.
The sudden shriek of one of the children playing dodgeball distracted him, and an instant later, a dodgeball whizzed out and smacked him in the face.
Jeb opened his eyes with a startled grunt, expecting to see a red ball rolling away from him and a dozen guilty-looking kids.
Instead, he saw them still playing, throwing the red rubber at each other at inhuman speeds. He glanced around and didn’t see any indication he’d been struck at all. The sensation of the rubber hitting his nose faded like a ghost. No bruising, no blood, no sting.
Did I just imagine it so well that I actually experienced it?
Jeb fr
owned, looking at the tight ball of Myst in front of him.
Worth a shot.
“Hey you guys!” Jeb shouted, waving, catching their attention. The children looked apprehensive, having earned the attention of ‘The Boss’.
“Which one of you wants to throw dodgeballs at my face?”
Colt raised his hand. Because of course he did.
“Alright,” Jeb said, turning to face Colt. “Now first I need to—Gah!” Jeb grunted as a dodgeball smacked him in the nose, ricocheting off into the yard where one of the younger kids chased it down.
“Sorry, were you saying something, pops?” Colt asked with an evil grin as another dodgeball was placed in his palm.
Jeb briefly considered a cost/benefit analysis of cussing the teen out, but decided against it. Enemies weren’t going to wait for him to get ready, and throwing a fit in front of children was beneath him.
“Carry on,” Jeb said, trying to picture a dodgeball hitting him in the—
Bam!
“Gah!” Another dodgeball flew away into the yard from where it’d hit Jeb in the face.
Little shit’s enjoying this, Jeb thought as Colt limbered up another throw.
Just for that… Jeb unwove the packet of Myst and gave it a new set of instructions, then went back to focusing on linking the trigger to the—
Bam!
Jeb managed not to get startled that time, letting the ball bounce off him without comment.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this, but I’m not complaining,” Colt said, aiming for face-ball number four.
Jeb took a deep breath, closed his eyes and focused on the dodgeball coming toward him, picturing every minute detail down to the—
Faster than Jeb could react, the Myst packet unspooled, leaping outward to grab the ball mid-flight.
Bam!
Bam? Jeb opened one eye and saw Colt tumbling backwards onto his ass. The teen’s nose bore a hint of red from where the rubber ball had smacked it, and the ball itself was bouncing off to the side at high speeds.
In your face, brat! Jeb cheered inwardly.
“The hell was that!?” Colt demanded before sneezing.
“That was a Mystic Trigger,” Jeb said, weaving another Myst packet. “Throw another one.”