Chapter 27: Aftermath (Patreon)

Jeb froze in front of the throne, feeling like a very small animal in front of a very large snake…with cheerful yellow plumage.

“Without this information we wouldn’t have exposed this level of corruption in our local government, and for your help excising this tumor from my empire, I must thank you,”

The emperor stood, walking gracefully down to where Jeb was crouched, seemingly gliding down the steps, the way his legs held his body stable.

“I thank you,” He said, reaching out and putting his hands near Jeb’s neck.

Jeb’s breath caught for an instant before the kitri’s claws squished through the hinge on his collar like a soft cheese. A moment later it fell away from his neck and clattered to the ground.

Jeb immediately used Myst to cinch down on his finger-stub, stopping the bleeding.

“Get this man a coat!” The emperor said. “We can’t let Solmnath’s protector carry on in shame!”

A coat was hustled over to where the two of them stood, and Jeb accepted it gratefully, as well as the hand up. Jeb wrapped the coat around himself, glad for its length as the emperor pulled Jeb into a human-looking handshake with his good hand, albeit strangely awkward and from the wrong angle.

He was shaking hands with Jeb, but his body was turned to the side, away from Jeb. Jeb frowned at this, glancing up at the emperor, who wasn’t even looking at him, he was looking at the throne.

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.

“And…Cut.” Brett said, plucking the spherical camera out of its placement.

Once the emperor was certain the camera was off, his bird-neck twisted, fixing him with a steely gaze that seemed to bore right into his soul.

“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 cheating the tutorial. 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 Frantel, former sheriff of Kalfath. The keegan who helped me. He got captured at the same time I did.”

“Oh, him.”

The emperor took a breath, and Myst rippled toward him before echoing outward as he spoke.

“Zlesk Frantel.”

“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 mind was 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 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 into 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 noble’s friends and co-workers, so they were understandably testy.

Yep, time to go. Jeb thought, bundling up his cloths and gear and taking the walk-of-shame out of the mansion beside Zlesk. He made damn sure to find his severed finger, 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 healing 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.

***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 shown up 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 them the question of whether television was viable in a society where everyone had to go out and physically work long shift 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 with 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 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 changed the subject. “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 I.O.U.”

“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 side 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 bath tub.

“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 faeries on or around Jebediah Trapper?”

“No, I already told you…”

“Is he celibate? Did he ever run? Tell a lie? Eat more than once a week? Does he have a Vow?”

“I don’t know about the rest of that, but 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 towel off the rack and dried his claws off.

“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 were slim from what he could gather, but not completely out of the question.

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 understand 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, Jebediah Trapper was a meat-by-product in creating the next god.

Pikaku walked through the dim light, his talons clicking against the stone floor as he traveled. The light gradually grew warmer as he transitioned between the dungeon and the living quarters where he housed his prize.

The servant standing in front of the door bowed and opened the door for him as he strode into the nursery, where a human woman of middling age was cooing over Casey the Third.

“Good evening, Casey,” Pikaku said, nodding to the frowning baby as he entered, taking off his imposing mantle and hanging it on the rack by the door. The little one watched him with a level of focus that was unnatural for any sapient child of her age.

“Your mother has instructed me to read this to you today,” He said, retrieving Green eggs and Ham from the nearby shelf and sitting down beside the wet nurse. The woman passed the baby over to him, and he allowed the wriggling sack of chub to settle on his lap, facing the book.

“According to your mother, Doctor Seuss is an important part of human development, followed by Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes, in that order.”

Pikaku cleared his throat and opened the book, reading aloud the first odd picture of the book.

“I am sam. I am Sam. Sam I – ack!” A tiny baby hand grabbed onto his nostril as the baby tried to treat his beak like a handhold, crawling up his front.

“Please, Casey, Kitri noses are sensitive, and while uncle Pikaku’s are quite tough, other kitri would find this terribly uncomfortable.”

Casey clumsily hauled herself up on his beak, until the two were eye-to-eye. The baby looked at him intently for a moment, before pointing to the upper shelf, where the Mystery novels were.

“Nope, not reading Sherlock. You had bad dreams for days last time your mom read those murder mysteries for you.”

Casey the Third started bawling, her voice ringing in Pikaku’s ears. While it was tolerable, it was also annoying, but he had to have patience. Raiding a proper child was an endurance game.

“I can take her for you, sire,” the wet nurse said, reaching for the baby.

“No, these are crocodile tears.” Pikaku said, picking Casey up and staring her in the eyes. “You want me to tell your mom you misbehaved while she was gone? Because I will. Green Eggs and Ham takes less than five minutes to read, and if you can suffer through, I will read a selection from Calvin and Hobbes. The vocabulary in those is much better. Sound good?”

Spoiling a child with limitless potential was a good way to invite ruin upon yourself. Casey had other things she needed to learn above and beyond reading comprehension:  patience and compromise, for example.

Casey scowled at him for a moment, considering his offer before nodding.

“Very good,” Pikaku said, settling the infant on his lap and reopening the slender book. “I am Sam. I am Sam. Sam-I-Am…”