Chapter 24: S#!t Slides Uphill (Patreon)

Instance error resolved.

Rebooting System…

Congratulations! You have Beaten Lagross the Suppressor in a one-on-one duel. Your Power is beyond reproach!

Lagross’s Power Accolade Granted!

+5 Body +5 Myst +5 Nerve

>>>Error<<<

Several Accolades missing or corrupted. Contacting System Admin. Please hold.

An impact across Jeb’s face jolted him back to consciousness.

“Whazza?” He grunted, sitting up. His throat was hoarse, and he felt like week-old dogshit.

What the hell just happened? Jeb thought as he nearly bumped his forehead into Vresh’s. He remembered getting dragged toward the portal by the rope, not being smart enough to let go and then…

Jeb’s brow furrowed as the memories came to him like a half-remembered dream. There was a snowflake ball of himself, and it interacted with billions of other things…

Like a half-remembered dream, Jeb’s brain systematically deleted the memories that didn’t adhere to Jeb’s understanding of reality. Gradually, the memory of what happened inside the portal slipped away, leaving Jeb grasping at straws and frantically making mental notes of certain things his infinite possibilities had learned that he wanted to remember for later.

Kol:

The assassin that keeps trying to kill me. Really warped sense of honor. Pissed that he hasn’t been able to complete his job. Doesn’t have much in the way of actual attack abilities, primarily an ambush hunter, but carries one or two get-out-of-jail cards at any given time. Tried to shoot me in Vegas.

Vresh:

Leads with her right hand. Uses portals to enhance her physical range, to devastating effect. Shares some kind of power accumulation Vow with her father…. Sensitive earlobes and lower back.

The nuke:

Big fish-thing with…

Jeb’s memories failed him as he tried to organize what he’d learned. He got a vague sense of unease when he thought about it, but his memories of the outlandish experience had fled.

A jolt of alarm travelled through him as he looked around the room. They were back in Vex’s laboratory, sans nuke. All the lights were out except the faint glow from the machinery and the pale grey light from the swirling portal itself.

Looking at that light made Jeb’s brain itch. Jeb glanced around, hoping to see the other members of the enforcer company, but they were all seemingly absent. Only Vresh and Kol were anywhere to be seen.

Are they still around? Jeb thought, squinting, and fearing the worst

“The nuke?” Jeb whispered.

“I…I thought we’d dragged it back out,” she said, her voice uncertain. She held up her fingers as if reciting something she’d memorized.

“You and the nuke finally stopped moving, so I grabbed you and it. Kol had me write a letter to Vex, and we were able to follow it back to the tear in the dimension. Then we…dragged you both here.”

She ticked off her last finger.

“You followed the letter?” Jeb asked, frowning, glancing past Vresh. Kol was lying on his back with a rather large bruise on his skull where Vresh had knocked him out.

“Hey, that’s the sentence I committed to memory the first couple seconds after realizing I was losing memories. Don’t ask me what I meant. I don’t remember.”

“Then where’s the nuke?” Jeb asked, taking another look around the laboratory. It looked abandoned. There was no sign of the previous battle. No damage, all the blood was gone.

“I can answer that one.” A familiar voice caught their attention.

Click! The lights in the ceiling blinked on, revealing Vex standing in the doorway, wearing what looked like loose-fitting silk pajamas, a nightcap, and carrying a glass of milk.

They locked eyes with the sindio for a heart-stopping moment.

“Good evening. You guys got back quick,” he said, taking a drink.

“Head down that hall behind you. You take the right fork and go to the holding cells,” he said, pointing to Vresh. “And you take the left, report to the examination room and strap yourself into the table.” He directed his finger to Jeb. “I’ll be along shortly.”

“I’d rather not,” Jeb said, looking for some way to escape, turn the tide, survive. Maybe I can explode the Myst engine and create enough of a distraction to—

“I didn’t say please,” Vex said.

Jeb felt a slight tingle.

“Okay then!” Jeb’s body said without his permission, standing up and walking toward the opposite side of the room. Vresh seemed similarly under control, as she immediately started walking toward the exit beside him.

Well, this is horrifying, Jeb thought, pounding against the invisible barrier between his thoughts and his motor control. He tried to scream, stop himself, make his body go limp, access his Myst, anything he could think of. None of it worked.

The two of them marched silently beside each other for a time before splitting off to the left and right. Vresh in the corner of his eye became a rapidly diminishing series of footsteps behind him. He couldn’t even move his eyes.

Jeb’s body marched into a clean room with a solid steel table in the center. He lay down on it and started strapping himself in. All the while, his mind was desperately looking for some way to turn the situation around.

But there just wasn’t any place to start. Jeb felt no one single thing preventing him from reasserting control. He had no idea how the sindio had accomplished it, and even if he did, he had no idea what the counter would be.

All Jeb could do was watch himself strap in and stare at the ceiling.

The cracked ceiling.

Oh, I can already tell this is gonna suck, Jeb thought as his brain tried to distract itself from the absolute hopeless terror of the moment by focusing on a different absolute hopeless terror that had already come and gone.

It didn’t help much.

Is that a piece of metal shining through the crack or just a weird shadow? Jeb thought. Despite his growing panic, his heart retained a steady beat, implying that even Jeb’s sympathetic nervous system was under control.

Well, that’s fucking great. Is he interfering with the signals somewhere in my spine?  Was Jeb a paraplegic now, turned into a puppet by Vex?

Wait, I can’t move my eyes, so it’s gotta be higher up—like in the brain somewhere? That was spooky. How could Jeb know what he was thinking or doing was his own, when Vex was literally manipulating the stuff that made Jeb who he was.

A fine tune spell on the motor cortex? But I don’t even know if the eyes are moved by the motor cortex. Jeb knew far too little about the brain to risk trying to wrestle Vex’s control away.

The best-case scenario seemed like it would be a lobotomy.

“Sorry for the wait,” Vex said, swooping into the examination room and swiftly bolting the last cuff on Jeb’s left hand. Well, now I’m well and truly fucked.

Jeb sighed. His eyes widened.

I can sigh! I can widen my eyes.

Jeb immediately set about trying to bust out of the restraints, but they were predictably too sturdy.

Vex stepped back and waited, until Jeb wore himself out.

“You done?” he asked as Jeb paused, panting.

“Mmmaybe?”

“Excellent. Let’s get started,” Vex said, before the ceiling opened up, revealing steel.

It’s real! Jeb’s body shuddered as adrenaline was dumped into his system.

It’s happening again! It’s happening again! Jeb began hyperventilating as the steel beam fell onto his chest and crushed him, rendering him unable to breathe. It’s going to crush my lungs and kill me. I’m already dead! This is hell and it’s just this over and over and over and over….

Jeb’s logical brain was shoved aside as he thrashed in place, screaming himself hoarse. If he could have reached his arms to gnaw them off, he would’ve.

Jeb felt a slight pinch, then the steel beam retracted back into the ceiling. Jeb’s body shuddered in place, flooded with adrenaline, and nothing to do with it.

“Come now, it’s not that bad,” Vex tutted before going back to a magical screen and scrolling through a readout comprised entirely of foreign letters, and the occasional picture, sort of like an MRI.

Vex tapped his fingers against the counter as he read the printout.

“Oh my, that won’t do at all,” Vex murmured to himself.

“What won’t do?” Jeb demanded, craning his neck to try and get a better view of the screen.

“The Accolade I designed has a fatal flaw. It would never actually work. Oh well. At least I got quite a bit of good data about the amount of stress the fifth dimension can tolerate in regards to high concentrations of nuclear fission. So I guess it wasn’t a total waste of time.

“What?” Jeb’s eyes widened.

The Accolade he designed? The ACCOLADE he designed? Jeb’s mind immediately flipped back to the books, the eel, the spine, the pipe. All things he’d seen or removed, all stitched onto him with…

Black strings. Jeb faintly remembered the sensation of black strings that seemed to defy the natural order of the fifth dimension. Matter of fact, he could remember them because they followed the rules for Jeb’s reality more than anything else.

The bomb had black strings. Jeb was sure of it. He didn’t remember much, but the impression of black strings… The nuke never made it back to the real world, but he, Vresh and Kol did. That meant…

“Do I have a nuke inside of me right now!?” Jeb asked.

“Ummm….” Vex’s gaze slid off of Jeb’s face.

“Get it out!”

“Nnnno? This seems like the ideal moment to point out that if you enforcers had kept your sweaty philistine paws to yourselves, I could have concluded my experiment without incident.”

“What did you mean by fatal flaw?” Jeb demanded.

“Oh look, there’s the guard to take you to the holding cells!” Vex moved aside, and a small army of the tight-skinned pink people with leather armor detached his cuffs from the table and hauled Jeb off of the slab.

“Hey, HEY!” Jeb shouted as they dragged him away. No matter how he struggled, they seemed to be stronger, which made no sense to him, with how small they were. He should’ve been able to bench all of them simultaneously, but somehow they were pinning his hands to his sides.

Must be these shackles, Jeb thought.

“Put him in cell…eh…six,” the sindio said, scratching his head under the nightcap and smothering a yawn. “I gotta do a bunch more paperwork on the hostages. Make some death threats, kill somebody to make a point, that sort of thing.”

Vex waved dismissively as the little berry people hauled Jeb off, toward the fork in the hall that Vresh had disappeared down. After a minute of pointless struggle, the little tight-skinned pink people dropped Jeb in what seemed like a people-sized revolving chute.

After a short drop, Jeb found himself in a cell with Vresh and Smartass. The fairy was about a foot and a half tall, by Jeb’s estimate, all gangly arms and legs.

“The hell have you been?” Jeb groaned, sitting up and rubbing his back where it had first impacted the cell floor.

“Oh, you know,” Smartass said, rolling her eyes. “Not getting killed by people way more powerful than myself. I know when to lay low, thank you very much.”

“You’ve got chocolate on your face,” Jeb said, studying the cell they found themselves in.

The first thing Jeb could think of was: Low security.

They were kept in place by steel bars about half the size of Jeb’s wrist, with enough room that Smartass could walk through them as easily as a hallway. Not only that, they could see all the other Enforcers across the way from each other, in similar cells.

The chutes that dropped them in there were high in the ceiling, but they weren’t exactly difficult to reach. In a corner cell, an enforcer was standing on another’s shoulders and trying to disable the locking mechanism on the chute.

There were also doors leading into each cell.

Two different ways in and out? Bars instead of solid walls? Multiple people in the same cell? It’s like he wants us to escape.

Jeb shook his head. No, there’s probably more to it than that. It’s probably just a ruse. Jeb started inspecting the floor and ceiling for any kind of Myst signature he could possibly make out.

If there were beams that could vaporize people in the halls, then it stands to reason the security here is even better. It probably kicked in as soon as someone put too much of themselves through the bars, or something.

“Jeb, lend me your leg.” Vresh said.

“What do you want it for?”

“It has springs in it, yes?”

That is true. Jeb thought, brow raising. Although I doubt a spring is gonna get us out of here. Still, he slipped the leg off and opened it up. The springloaded lens-holder for his annihilation lens was easy enough to rip out. He passed the spring to Vresh, who immediately reached through the bars.

The lens Jeb tried to use, but there must have been some kind of field dampening his Myst. He couldn’t make the flaming sun in his core twitch.

Jeb suppressed a hiss, half-expecting a beam of light to come out of the ceiling and sever her arm at the shoulder. Strangely, nothing happened.

Well. That’s odd. Maybe it’s if a creature fully exits the cell.

“Smartass, can you help me get this oriented right?” Vresh asked, trying to get the straightened wire to go into the simple lock. She had a hard time getting her face close enough to the bars, which made it difficult to orient the lockpick.

“Sure!” Smartass literally walked out of the cell before Jeb could protest, and flew up to where Vresh was fiddling around with the lock, adding an extra pair of eyes.

Am I dreaming? Jeb thought, glancing around. Is this even real? The most advanced Myst user that Jeb had ever had the displeasure of meeting, and the security was roughly the same as a Texas sheriff’s office built in the 1920’s.

Jeb had the dreadful feeling that none of this was real.

What, am I fruitlessly spinning my wheels entirely inside my own mind right now, laying comatose until he decides to run tests on me again? Jeb thought. That was the level of security Jeb expected, not this.

Well, normally I’d pinch myself, but in this case, I’ve got a better candidate.

Jeb reached up and gently tugged on Vresh’s earlobe.

“Eeeep!” The enforcer let out a high-pitched squeal, slipping and banging her forehead against the metal bars. She turned and glared at him, her orange-red skin darkening to crimson red.

“I was just making sure this is all real.” Jeb said, hands raised placatingly. And confirming a half-remembered note-to-self.

“I’m real…keep your hands to yourself.” She didn’t hit Jeb, but the sheer amount of heat rolling off of the horned woman made him take a step back. He felt like if he got too close, she might scald him from sheer outrage.

Jeb knew he shouldn’t push his luck, but the snarky words just spilled out of him against his best judgement. “That’s just what a fake would say.”

Vresh snorted, then went back to work, seemingly ignoring him.

Except she obviously wasn’t ignoring him, because every time he got closer to see how she was doing, her body heat went off the charts, forcing him to take several steps back.

Jeb decided to retire to the far corner to give the woman a chance to cool off, figuratively and literally.

Okay, so that didn’t actually prove jack shit. Jeb thought, watching the enforcers stoically attempting to escape the laughably poorly designed cells. Either I’m in a comprehensive illusion or I’m not. General rule of thumb is to behave as if you aren’t, because the alternative is basically just crazy-town.

Jeb tapped his fingers on his arm, his brows slowly furrowing. So maybe…my first instinct was correct? Vex wants us to escape? Why?

“What’s got you so grumpy-looking?” Smartass asked, flitting over to sit on his lap, settling down like a small cat. The little fairy looked up at him with a mocking scowl.

“Just trying to figure out why.” Jeb said.

“Why what?”

“A lot of things.”

The enforcer’s stopped their work when Casey’s head popped into the dual row of cells.

“Guys?” She whispered.

“Casey, where did you come from?” Kor Tekalis whispered back.

“A couple rooms down,” Casey said, stepping into the room with a giant ring of keys. “My helpers managed to infiltrate during the dungeon Schism. They snuck a key to me, now we’re gonna get you guys out.”

At Casey’s feet were several small creations of hers. A stapler, a couple pieces of paper, an empty cup, some legos.

She headed over to the first cell and started testing keys on the keyring.

The first two didn’t work, but the third popped the cell open, releasing one of the Enforcers.

Something is seriously wrong, here, Jeb thought as Casey liberated them one by one.

***Kol Rejan, level 60 Courier***

Kol stood silently behind Vex, who sat at his desk with a panoramic display of the prison cells hovering in front of him, a window to the leaders of the five noble groups the Enforcers had come from, as well as the Emperor himself.

On the desk was a scattering of papers signed in blood.

“And the payment for Bruga?”

“Our clan would never pay this amount, even if we had it.” The wooly brovis said, glaring down at the contract and snorting in anger. Kol had trouble telling if it was a man or a woman, but that was fair, many races claimed keegan were hard to tell apart as well.

“My husband would sooner die than see our clan reduced to weaklings or starving paupers.”

“So be it. My condolences.” Vex said, flicking a switch on his desk to close the window before turning his attention to the emperor.

“Pikaku, do you wish to intercede and pay your vassal’s ransom?”

“I’ll stand beside my vassal’s decision.” Emperor Pikaku said through the window.

Vex flicked a switch.

On the panoramic view of the prison cells, a narrow beam of light caught the brovis male in the chest, turning him into a pile of dust in the middle of the hall. The surrounding figures who had been sneaking through the halls scattered like mice, looking for some rhyme or reason for the wooly titan’s death.

Vex turned to the Melas in the head-sized portal.

“Mr. Tekalis, is your clan prepared to pay the ransom for your brother or your niece?”

“The Tekalis clan refuses to negotiate with terrorists,” the man said.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with you being third in line to rule the Tekalis family, Kol thought, rolling his eyes.

“So be it. My condolences.” If Vex cared about the obvious political motivations, he didn’t say anything. Vex closed the window and turned back to the emperor.

“Pikaku, do you wish to intercede and pay your vassal’s ransom?”

“Yes. I’ll pay Vresh’s ransom.” Pikaku said, dipping a quill in a small vial of his own blood and signing a document, passing it through the head-sized portal

“Oh? Just the one?” Vex asked, blowing on the paper to dry the blood.

“Your prices are…staggering to say the least. Both Vresh and Kor are steadfastly loyal to the empire, unlike Gresh Tekalis. I only need Vresh to maintain my influence on the Tekalis family.”

Pikaku paused for a moment, his head cocked on his slender neck.

“And while Vresh may hate me for a time, her primary grudge will be against her uncle who let both of them down. Also, I’m fairly sure Kor would have found a way to kill me, should I have let his daughter die in his place.”

“Sound reasoning,” Vex said, dispassionately flipping a switch. The emperor winced as the elder Tekalis was disintegrated while the ‘escapees’ were sprinting down the hall, desperately searching for an exit.

Kol’s heart clenched a little in sympathy as he watched Jeb drag Vresh away from the pile of her father’s ashes. All that pain, all that effort, yet they wouldn’t find an exit until the sindio decided they were allowed to leave. ‘trapped like rats’ was an apt description.

Vex turned his attention to the next portal, the sound of chattering voices suddenly coming through as he allowed the sound and vision to connect.

“Mrs. Rook, is your family prepared to pay the ransom for your son?” Vex asked, tapping the table impatiently.

***Jeb***

This doesn’t make any sense! Jeb thought, heart pounding in his chest as he flew alongside the melas woman. Her hair was on fire, her tears boiling off her eyes, but she kept running. Around them, roughly four enforcers continued running, searching for a way out.

Their Myst and Abilities were no longer sealed, but the walls seemed to shrug off the supernatural powers without anything truly sticking.

The passage back the way they had come had simply ceased to exist. Everything was different, and people were getting picked off at random.

I knew the escape was too good to be true!

If it were security picking them off, it would be consistent. It would target the people in front, or the tallest, or something definable. To Jeb, it looked like the ancient wizard was playing with them, enjoying himself by picking them off one at a time.

Sadistic fuck, Jeb thought, gritting his teeth.

“I think he’s playing with us.” Jeb said aloud.

“No, that’s not it,” a slender Melas enforcer said, shaking his head. “It’s about money and politics.”

“What are you talking about, Glenn?” Vresh demanded, rounding on the other melas.

“Bruga’s family was poor!” Glenn shouted.  “There’s no way he could have paid the ransom! Look, Amon and Kline were only second generation nobility! Their families didn’t have the means to pay for them!”

“Feej on the other hand, she’s the sole inheritor to an ancient clan! And she’s fine!” Glenn said, pointing at the grumpy keegan woman.

“What about my father!?” Vresh demanded. “My Uncle could easily…” Vresh stopped, her hands tightening into fists as the flames in her hair surged. She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. It boiled as it left her body, the superheated water escaping .

“He could easily pay a ransom.”

“Would he though?” Glen asked.

“You’re a third son of a minor family,” Feej said, “By your logic, you should already be dead.”

Glenn paled.

***Kol Rejan, level 60 Courier***

“And that’s the last of them,” Vex said, closing the last portal before grabbing the one leading to Emperor Pikaku and widening it in front of himself, until the view of the Kitri emperor dominated the sindio’s desk space.

The two watched each other silently for a moment before the sindio filled the gulf between them.

“I’ve got a few words for you, but first I’d like to talk to your spymaster. Whoever told you I was trying to destroy the world.”

A minute later a battle-scarred older keegan arrived, bowing respectfully to the emperor.

“You wished to see me, Emperor?”

Vex waved a dismissive hand, and the spymaster began to fold in on himself with a pained gasp. The air in his lungs was the first thing to go, so there wasn’t much screaming. Kol could hear the man’s bones snapping as he was rendered into a ball about the size of a man’s head.

Then Vex lunged forward, his gnarled hands travelling through the portal, stretching forward and seizing the emperor’s slender neck. The emperor gave an uncomfortable squawk as his head was dragged through the portal into the same room as Kol and his master.

“Let me let you in on a little secret,” Vex said, his cheek nestled against the emperor’s oversized beak as he stared directly into the bird’s eyes. “I don’t like killing. I do it because It’s the only way people like you will respect my sovereignty. The fact that your mistake forced me to kill five people this evening in order to protect future idiots who might otherwise think me harmless, has made me rather cross.”

“If you ever do something like this again, I will replace you with someone more suited to your job, and treat myself to a chicken dinner, do you understand me?”

The emperor’s eyes narrowed, the long-necked kitri showing a surprising amount of spine.

“You can try, wizard.”

“Bah.” Vex shoved the emperor back through the portal. “You’ve got the message.” Vex shut the portal down.

“What about Jebediah?” Kol asked. “Nobody paid a ransom for him, yet you didn’t kill him.”

“Because I like him.” Vex said, putting his hands behind his head as he summoned the video feed of the ‘escapees’, who were finally exiting the underground into the dungeon-torn city. “Ever since the System rose to prominence, nobody takes the path of the wizard anymore. I find it endearing. That, and we’re getting excellent data.”