Long Live the Emperor: Chapter 26 [Aldrich Interlude] (Patreon)

In Alvin’s original body, Aldrich was not doing well back on Earth. Contacting his other half across the vast span between worlds had gone mostly as planned.

Clover had been difficult to work with, but once he told her he planned to switch bodies with his other self, he happily agreed. For all her talk of having served him in a past life, she didn’t seem like a loyal spirit. Not like Terra, at any rate, who was still by his side. She wasn’t quite as knowledgeable as Clover, but she was loyal and steadfast all the while.

In crossing over, he’d needed to scrape his barony dry of the last of its fleeting resources. But that didn’t matter. Once he secured what magic and treasures this world had to offer, he could reclaim everything he’d lost and more.

Terra had spent a significant amount of energy transmuting some of Alvin’s trinkets into gold. That was an act that would have gotten both of them into trouble back home. Their test with Alvin proved there would be no consequences, so Aldrich knew it would be safe to cross over. It wouldn’t do for a noble like him to be as broke as a beggar. Or as they seemed to call them in this world — as broke as a college student.

The strange lights, sounds, and even streets were all astonishing oddities for Aldrich. Every building around him stood as tall as the high tower of his manor, and many stood taller still. Some were made of thousands of bricks, each perfectly square and of the same red color. And that was the most ordinary of the structures. More still were made of this glossy gray substance he couldn’t identify, and others were towers of steel and glass as clear as a still pond. Who would waste so much of the finest quality glass building a massive tower? Apparently, these people. It gave Aldrich the creeps, and he decided he would try his best to blend in with the common folk here. He owned no land or titles in this place, and trying to claim special privileges on some noble birthright would be foolish. He would lie low and gather information for now.

That lasted right up until Aldrich got hungry.

“Merchant, I require your finest food,” Aldrich declared as he strode into the nearest convenience store after finding nothing but crumbs in the spartan accommodations Alvin had called home.

“The breakfast bar is over there. Grab a box. Coffee is on the right,” the tired man behind the counter sighed, not paying the slightest bit of attention to Aldrich’s unusual antics. At least not until he went to pay.

“Here is your payment, merchant,” Aldrich said as he slid a chunk of gold the size of his thumbnail across the table. “I trust this will be more than sufficient for your wares, so I would ask for a little information on your peers in return. Who is the best weapons merchant in this city?”

“Is that a rock?” The man behind the counter furrowed his brows.

“It’s gold!” Aldrich rolled his eyes at the man. Perhaps he’d overpaid if this merchant didn’t even recognize gold. He knew he should have had Terra make some silver instead. It just cost her roughly the same amount of power to transmute silver as it did to transmute gold, so at the time, he’d thought it wisest to spend all of her power to generate the more valuable trade good. But if merchants here were so unused to accepting gold, then he would be forced to use the lesser metal.

“I mean, it could be,” the merchant shrugged. “But we only accept paper money here.”

Aldrich furrowed his brows in confusion. “Paper what? Look at that metal, merchant! Gold is gold!”

“I don’t have a drawer for lumps of gold in my register.” the merchant shrugged. “Got cash? A debit card? Credit?”

The man had to pull out some examples from his own wallet to demonstrate. After laying eyes on the thing, Aldrich recognized the objects. He’d found them in Alvin’s pockets when they’d switched bodies and had wondered what they were for. Now he knew.

Though the merchant didn’t take his gold, he did direct him to a nearby pawn shop that would. That, at least, was helpful of him. Aldrich hadn’t liked the hungry gleam in the man’s eyes when he asked where Aldrich found the gold and demanded more. It was his gold, and it was real gold. So what if he obtained it through magical means?

Still, Aldrich made sure to lie to the man and tell him he had received it in trade from a foreign merchant. The man hadn’t seemed satisfied with that answer, but it explained why the gold wasn’t pressed into the local coinage. At least, that was what Aldrich thought until he discovered the people around here did use coins. Except most of the coins felt so light, they couldn’t be real metal. He might ask Terra to try replicating some of them, at least until he realized the true value of those coins was virtually nothing compared to the pieces of paper people favored. This was truly an odd world.

That wasn’t to say Aldrich wasn’t impressed, though. When he first arrived here, he assumed he was in one of the land’s largest and most populous cities. There were people everywhere walking the streets and riding in their carriages drawn by magic instead of horses. But a few casual inquiries told him that if he wanted a wider variety of merchants, he would have to head to the big city up north.

Which could only mean the settlement Alvin lived in was nothing more than a minor town to the locals. A lord here could probably raise a peasant levy large enough to mob every barony and county neighboring East Water without even running out of farmers for the planting season. Not that he’d seen a single farmer anywhere in these parts. Not even one of ten men had dirt under their nails or smelled of hay and dung. Aldrich considered both telltale signs of farmers, and yet he had seen no one who matched that description. He thought leaving the settlement would reveal the vast arrays of farmland supporting this densely populated metropolitan center, but he found rows and rows of slightly less densely populated settlements interspersed with a few scant, tiny manicured woodlands.

All in all, this world had a lot of mysteries. So many that a more exploration-minded man might get lost in them and forget his true mission. But Aldrich wouldn’t. He just had to remind himself that he only needed to learn enough about the locals to acquire what he needed. He was once again thankful that Clover had taught him how to leave behind his memories of language and take Alvin’s in its place. Without being able to speak the local tongue, he would be truly lost. But he was fearing he should have left more of himself behind for secrets that would be more useful here.

Oh well. Perhaps he could make something happen the next time Terra was fully ready for a fight again. Perhaps Alvin would even come looking for a fight again. Clover had never explained as much, but he’d gathered that a demon could consume a human’s soul and take their place, seamlessly integrating their memories and skills to know the names of all that human’s friends, all their family, and all their skills. Overnight, the blacksmith could have his mind replaced by a demon, and people would be hard-pressed to tell anything had changed as he kept working as normal.

Granted, the process had flaws, but that might be acceptable to Aldrich’s needs, assuming Alvin continued being uncooperative. He was a bit nervous about what the other man might be doing with his body. Surely he was being imprisoned, humiliated, and forced to marry one of Count Grandhill’s forgettable daughters. Hopefully, he wasn’t damaging Aldrich’s reputation any more than necessary.

So after gathering what supplies he could from the local merchants and preparing for a long journey, Aldrich set out on foot for this big city he kept hearing of. He spent four days walking with a bag over his shoulder, wishing all the while for a horse. Unfortunately, he hadn’t found a single one for sale anywhere.

Thankfully, good fortune struck on the fifth day of walking, and a man stopped his horseless carriage by Aldrich’s side.

“You hitchhiking?” the man asked. He was greasy and ill-garbed, but Aldrich wasn’t the kind of lord who snubbed common folk by their smell or dress. On the contrary, he often went to great lengths to make sure he was well-liked by them.

“If by that you mean walking, then I am indeed walking, my good man. I am headed to the big city,” Aldrich replied.

“Got cash?” the man asked. “I can give you a lift, but you’re paying for gas.”

“I am running low on paper script, but I do have a coin’s worth of gold,” Aldrich replied. “More than enough to pay for a ride in your carriage, I assure you.”

Aldrich flashed another thumbnail-sized chunk of gold torn off a rod of metal Terra had transmuted with her powers. The man held out his own hand, and Aldrich let him inspect it. He was confident he could snatch the gold back, even with Alvin’s weak body. That was also something he’d need to work on. Aldrich had frankly been in terrible shape. He hadn’t been able to enlist Clover’s aid as he promised, but Aldrich had walked the Dreamrealm enough to know how to tap a bit of life man from others around him and put it to better use, so Alvin’s body was quickly shaping up for the better and would be as good as his old one in a few months time.

“Hot damn, it really is gold!” the man explained as he bit into the nugget. “If you’ve got more of these, I’ll drive you wherever you want to go!”

And just like that, Aldrich secured his first servant in this new world. The man proved to be an invaluable resource. Though, at first, Aldrich was certain he’d been overpaying, being able to ask a local anything he wished during the long ride sorted out a lot of questions he had.

“By golly, man. Here my relatives call my political views extreme. You’re not screwing with me, are you?”

“Naturally not. The only good way to rule society is through the leadership of a decentralized system of feudal lords with absolute control over their personal estates and the lands attached to them. That is the only way to run a functional nation. I can’t understand how your whole ‘democracy’ system works. An uneducated peasant mob is supposed to decide on how to run the nation based on simple majority rule? No offense to present company intended, of course, but that sounds like a recipe for chaos!”

“Well, you may be right about that chaos part. Still, I’m not so sure about that part about the value of slave labor and selling off tenants like they’re assets attached to the property you own...” Aldrich’s driver chuckled awkwardly.

“It is a complex system, but I’m sure I could explain it such that any man could wrap their head around it,” Aldrich shrugged. “But I’m more interested in this arms merchant you mentioned earlier. How would you rate the caliber of his weapons?”

“My cousins’ gun shop? Well, he makes the damn finest rifles around! He stocks some stuff pretty high caliber, too. You looking for target practice, self-defense, or hunting?”

A smile lit Aldrich’s face. “I was thinking more along the lines of something a little more proactive.”

***

Before long, Aldrich was in what he later learned was called a gun store. They sold an array of ranged weapons, some of which were familiar to Aldrich and some not. The crossbows on the wall looked simple enough, even though their materials were unfamiliar. The guns were less familiar, though Aldrich was an educated man and knew of some weapons that launched projectiles using explosions in a metal barrel. Aldrich had always heard they were horribly unreliable, though, and just as likely to kill the wielder as the enemy. Apparently, this world had mitigated the worst of those drawbacks. At least, that’s what the gun merchant said.

“Ha! Don’t worry, I haven’t ever had someone tell me a gun I sold them blew up in their face and killed them,” the gun merchant snorted.

“Wouldn’t dying prohibit them from making any such report?” Aldrich asked.

The man only laughed harder at that, like Aldrich’s concern was a joke.

Still, the man was convinced that they would work well as weapons, and Aldrich settled on buying a few hundred for his new army. That was when the merchant finally turned serious again.

“A five hundred of them?” he asked incredulously.

“Enough to equip an army suitable for a baron reclaiming what is rightfully his,” Aldrich explained. “And I would like to hire you for several months to help me drill a peasant militia into a competent fighting force. I won’t be abandoned in the field again.”

The two men looked at one another.

“Uh... yeah... why don’t you just sit right over in the paperwork room, and I’ll get something to help you get sorted...” the gun merchant muttered.

And that was how Aldrich got arrested for the first time. Apparently, it was illegal to buy too many weapons from a damn weapons merchant. What were they even for if not to supply weapons?

“Gentlemen, there is no need for chains. I’m sure we can talk this out,” Aldrich complained as he was handcuffed and walked to the local guard’s personal horseless carriage.

What followed was a long series of incredibly frustrating questioning.

They asked for his name, and he provided Alvin’s. That should have been the end of things, but they asked for a whole lot of other information, like his birthday, and when Aldrich failed to answer, they grew increasingly suspicious. From then on, they started asking who he worked for and why he wanted to buy so many weapons. Aldrich answered honestly. He wanted to build an army.

The hours of questioning grew tiresome, especially when Aldrich realized he had to sleep in a cell.

“This is a waste of my time...” Aldrich grumbled. “I tried being reasonable, but I suppose that time has ended. Terra, have you regained enough strength to help me knock over this wall?”

“Yes, sir,” Terra replied meekly. For such a powerful demonic spirit, she sometimes acted a bit too much like a beaten slave for Aldrich’s tastes. While he was fond of subordinates who could follow orders, he was fonder of those who could predict what orders he planned to give and follow through with them before he even thought about asking.

Still, Aldrich wasn’t about to throw away an obedient spirit ready to serve his slightest whims, all because his spirit reminded her of some long-dead master of hers. So if she needed explicit orders, then he would happily give them.

“Then blow this wall open. I’m leaving.”

And so Aldrich broke out of prison on his first night there. He had no intention of ever sleeping behind bars, and his pride would never allow him to be someone else’s prisoner.

Getting away would be harder since he’d lost his carriage driver. But Aldrich was no fool, and from the moment he’d set foot inside one of those horseless carriages, he studied how the drivers operated the vehicle. The secret was inserting a key into an opening just behind the steering wheel. From there, one merely had to operate the wheel like operating a horse’s reins, in addition to hitting a couple of pedals at the driver’s feet. It didn’t look too difficult, and Aldrich was a fast learner. He was confident it wouldn’t take much to figure it out.

And so Aldrich borrowed a police car. He was certain they would recover it when he was finished with it, so it wasn’t stealing. Really, they owed it to him after all the trouble they’d put him through for being a lord working on the perfectly reasonable task of outfitting his army.

Driving the horseless carriage turned out to be slightly more difficult than he imagined. These things were fast, far faster than any horse Aldrich had ever ridden. It turned out his hired servant from before hadn’t pushed his vehicle to its limits because they could go far faster than Aldrich had ever dreamed of. He was racing along the roads, and all the other people in their own horseless carriages honked in recognition of his driving prowess as he passed them, much to Aldrich’s delight.

A few unfortunately proved to be rather poor drivers themselves, as they were barely able to swerve out of Aldrich’s way. Most people seemed to insist on treating each lane like they could only drive in one direction. Everyone had a very uncreative strategy for getting from one point to another. They had to learn to think outside of whatever invisible boxes they’d put themselves into.

Thankfully, Aldrich’s horseback riding skill helped him here as well, and he made fast progress toward the big city he was heading toward. At least until the local guards caught up to him again.

Sirens blared behind him, and in front of him, a massive flying machine hovered in the air. A man shouted through a device that amplified his voice to incredible levels. “You in the vehicle! Pull over or we will open fire!”

“Fire?” Aldrich wondered aloud. “Do they have fire mages among them?”

He was answered by a rain of lead flying at incredible speeds, crashing directly into his vehicle. Smoke billowed out from his horseless carriage, but it faded a few minutes later, and it seemed like his carriage could continue to run despite the damage, at least for the time being. Aldrich was smart and picked the heaviest armored of all the local guard’s vehicles on display.

“Terra, can you block those things?” Aldrich asked.

“Yes. I can transmute the projectiles into something harmless,” Terra replied.

A rain of projectiles sounded out again. Aldrich realized they were bullets based on his conversation with the gun merchant. They seemed quite potent, and without being able to enlist Clover’s help, he definitely didn’t want to be struck by one. His meager control over life mana would mean he’d be disabled for hours with just a few of those shots.

Thankfully, Terra came to the rescue. Her powers turned the little lead arrow tips into the sand, and they splattered over Aldrich’s vehicle while he traveled unimpeded. She even detected a series of caltrops on the road meant to disable his vehicle, and she destroyed those as well.

“I am running out of power,” Terra warned.

“Dig deeper,” Aldrich demanded. He couldn’t afford to have her give out on him now.

She seemed barely present by the time the population density around Aldrich started increasing again, and he knew he’d finally reached the big city he’d been told of. He arrived just in time, too, because shortly thereafter, Terra stopped responding to him entirely, and one bullet from his pursuers shot right through the back of his seat and blasted Aldrich in the ass. That made sitting quite painful, and Aldrich was worried about what would happen if one of those struck him in the head.

Clover had healed an arrow wound like that quickly, but Aldrich didn’t think he could do so without abandoning his body for the spirit realm first in order to keep his mental faculties. But that kind of thing took hours of meditation to set up without special incense and candles, and that would be rather difficult to do under conditions as tense as these.

So Aldrich drove his vehicle straight toward the nearest building. This was going to be painful, but he’d practiced leaping from his horse and rolling to a stop without taking too much damage. This would just be that, but much worse.

Aldrich slammed on the horn in the center of the wheel and sounded out loud and clear. The streets were rather crowded on the sides of this big city, which was why he disembarked here. A crowd like this would be perfect for getting lost in. Unfortunately, it also meant a lot of people had to scramble out of the way of his vehicle, flying down the street at high speed. He spotted an upturned bridge and judged with his speed he could make it.

Those who heard his horn saw him now, and they fled in panic as his carriage soared through the air and crashed directly into the nearest glass and steel structure, bending the entire foundation over and crashing it into the ground. The carriage burst into flames as its fuel spilled into the open air, and shortly thereafter, those flames turned into a cacophonous explosion.

But by then, Aldrich had his face wrapped in his hands as he jumped from the car in mid-flight and rolled across the ground. It was a terribly bumpy fall, and he felt several of his ribs snap the first time he struck the ground. His head nearly struck a block of stone at the edge of the street, and he barely stopped himself in time at the cost of breaking one of his arms.

“Oh god, what’s happening?” A woman screamed.

“Is this a terrorist attack?” Another man cried in horror. “Honey, get the kids. We need to get out of here!”

One of the bystanders even saw Aldrich’s bleeding form and torn clothes with broken bones aplenty.

“Hey man, can you hear me? I’ll call an ambulance for you,” the bystander said.

Aldrich winced at the pain, but the pain was something he’d felt before. He could deal with it. So he picked himself up, dusted himself off, and did his best to look dignified.

“I’m quite alright, thank you. But if you don’t mind, would you be willing to sell your coat? The hat as well.” Aldrich pointed to the man’s colorful cap and the jacket around his shoulders.

“You want to buy my hat?” The man looked confused at Aldrich’s priorities, but flashing the last of Alvin’s money sealed the deal, and Aldrich was soon disguised and limping somewhere dark and damp enough for him to meditate and focus on healing his battered body. The guards chasing him arrived at the scene shortly thereafter, but the chaos he’d caused with his arrival served as more than adequate cover.

Once Terra healed up, he’d have her make more gold, then sell that gold. He’d have to take things a bit slower than planned, but he’d have his army soon enough, as long as he could ditch these damn persistent guards. Really, what guard captain was so vindictive he’d chase a man all the way to another city?

Note:

I might end up moving this section back like ten chapters. Maybe even right after Alvin and Aldrich have their fight? Then I could have a second interlude just before their second confrontation, showing what Aldrich gets up to after this.

What do you guys think? Are Aldrich’s adventures interesting enough to be worth more than one interlude? He is making a little bit of trouble for Alvin when Alvin gets his original body back...