Fool's World: Brave New World (ch. 25) (Patreon)

“Welp, that didn’t fucking work,” I muttered, looking up at the bright blue sky and still feeling every horrible thing that people were doing or thinking to each other. The clouds idly drifted across the sky, moving at a sluggish pace. I closed my eyes and took in a deep breath of fresh air -- my past selfs’ screams a fading echo in my ears and were replaced by sounds of nature. I focused on the sensations that were washing over me, sensations that were far stronger than they had been before. Almost like a blanket had been ripped away that had muffled the sensations.

There were a lot fewer humans. Way, way, way fewer. Compared to the world we just left, this one seemed practically empty. I’d put the human population somewhere over half a billion, but less than one. Not even an eighth of the Earth’s population. Still, there was a lot to deal with as I took a moment to adjust.

“W-what? Where are we?” I heard Rin sputter as I tried to shift through the influence I had on this world. Apparently, there were a lot of pyromaniacs because there was a lot of ‘I should burn that building, wagon, family, etc.’ Also a lot of hate for those pyromaniacs -- which was completely understandable. I hated the people that set me on fire too. I think humans called that empathy, so, technically, I was already doing better than the old world. “Majima, are we…?”

Opening my eyes, I took in another deep breath, idly noticing how clean it was. I hadn’t dealt with air this fresh since back in the days of Ancient Persia. “Yeah, we’re in a different world. I made a wish to go to one where I didn’t have to be Angra Mainyu, but that cup scammed me. I knew I should have just made it a coffee mug,” I muttered bitterly, looking down from the sky to see both Nobara and Rin were doing their best to hide their concerned expressions.

“I gathered as much, but where are we exactly?” Nobara questioned, gesturing around us. There was a whole lot of nothing as far as I could tell -- there was an ocean before us that gently lapped at a white sandy beach, there was a sparse forest behind us… It wasn’t one for one exactly, but the location reminded me far too much of the scene that I had once forgotten, yet bore witness to just now. I looked just like where my old village had been.

I frowned, “No clue,” I admitted, making Rin’s eyebrow twitch. Fair. We were lost in a new unknown world. Given the low population and the clean air, I’m thinking this world wasn’t too far down the tech tree, so to speak. Turning my head, I looked into the forest behind us, "There's a village further inland. Not too far away. A couple hundred people maybe?"

There were a lot fewer people in this world, so there wasn’t a constant chorus of evil in my ear that deafened me to my own influence. Yet, now that I was no longer just a sample size of Angra Mainyu, I was exposed to the full weight of humanity's evil, and even if I bore that burden for thousands of years, it didn’t get any easier. There were some damn good reasons that there had been nothing left of me after the weight of my curse eroded away at my sense of self.

Pressing my lips together, I tried to make out what I was influencing them to do -- there was the basic stuff of 'fuck that guy, I should hit him' and 'I should take that, it'd serve them right.' Petty evils that were familiar to me. They didn't seem to be the pyromaniacs determined to set things and people on fire.

"Seems like a normal village-" I started to walk, only to quickly notice that neither Rin nor Nobara were paying attention. Looking over my shoulder, I quickly saw why when a creature emerged from the ocean, breaking free of the water's surface like a dolphin. Yet, instead of a dolphin, it was a koi fish roughly the size of an eighteen wheeler. Including the trailer. It sailed through the air for a moment before crashing back down far more gracefully than it had any right to. As soon as it was under, two more emerged from the water to perform the same act.

There was a long beat of silence before Nobara crossed her arms, "Okay. Looks like we have to worry about Kaiju. Majima, where did you bring us?"

I narrowed my eyes at the fish that finally decided to stay under the water. Should we catch one? I knew first hand that strangers wouldn't be welcomed into villages in this time period. With villages, everyone knew everyone and everyone was in everyone's business. Being a stranger meant that no one knew anything about you and that was a threat to their security. Humans reacted poorly when their sense of safety was threatened. There were two ways around that, though -- whether the scorn until they got to know you, or to introduce yourself as someone useful that could better help them survive.

One of those fish would feed a village for a week.

Yet, they were so out of the ordinary that I couldn't be certain whether they had some kind of symbolic meaning to the village. My own had settled where they did because a sea monster was worshiped as a…

Hm. Since when did I remember anything about my village?

"Let's go find out," I answered, resuming walking and this time Rin and Nobara followed along. I examined the memories I had of my village -- most of them came from what my lemon wedge self showed me, but there was information floating around there that I knew wasn't there before. How my village was settled, for one. Something about bandit raids. And a festival?

Nobara seemed to sense my tension as we entered the forest -- there was a well walked path from the beach to the village. Not so much as a road, but where enough feet beat down the grass and shrubbery so we didn't have to worry about tripping over anything. "Are you okay, Majima?" Nobara questioned, the question was a loaded one.

I took a moment to answer it, shaking my head free of the sparse, yet new, memories of my village. "Just annoyed that plan C didn't work. I didn't think it would, but this means I underestimated my curse." Rather badly. I was just the Source of All Evil. Period. No matter what world I went to, I would become the source of evil for that world.

However, that also didn't make any sense. I didn't know anything about this world. I had no memories of influencing it. Unless I was the source of All Evil for the entire multiverse, something fishy was going on.

Before I could think further on it, I picked up on a spike of aggression coming from the forest. A half dozen people. I didn't miss a step as we continued along the path as I tried to sort out where exactly they were and their intentions. It was difficult to make out, but they seemed to be leaning more toward 'opening a can of whoopass' rather than murder. Their locations were easier to determine as they surrounded us. Neither Rin nor Nobara seemed to notice.

"That better not be a quitters attitude I hear," Nobara chastised. "It's way too early for you to even think about giving up. The Holy Grail is supposed to be omnipresent, right? So, maybe we'll find a way to lift it here. We just have to find it." She reassured, and I saw the line of logic. It made sense. I knew how powerful the Holy Grail was. Still, I couldn't help but admit to myself that I would have much preferred to just appear in the world and not have to deal with its evils.

"Not giving up," I answered. "Just trying to figure out what our next move could be."

As if to answer me, those that surrounded us finally made their move. They dropped down from the trees they were perched on while others stepped out from the shrubbery with practiced grace. I saw that they were warriors… no, they were soldiers. All of them were women with matching makeup of a stark white base and red markings around their eyes and red lipstick. They wielded metal fans as weapons, their armor was thick green robes underneath a dark black Lamar armor.

There was no hesitation in their movements. We weren't the first party they had gotten the drop on.

"Oh, finally decided to show your faces?" I questioned them, not reacting to their appearance like Nobara and Rin did. Both readied themselves -- Nobara taking out her hammer with a cold iron nail clutched between her fingers while Rin was aiming her finger tips at the closest warrior. The one that appeared directly before us, her legs in a wide stance as she brandished her bronze fans, couldn't quite hide her surprise.

I was speaking in Japanese. There should be a language barrier between us because I doubted that Japanese was so special that the rest of the multiverse spoke it. But, I would have been wrong if I thought that.

"Who are you?" The apparent lead warrior demanded, not shifting from her aggressive stance. "Why are you here? How did you arrive undetected?" She followed up before I could get a word in. We could talk to each other. That would make things easier. In theory, because I could see her eyes drifting over my face -- at the scars that were carved into my flesh. It was written in Babel, the true language of humans, so she and everyone else could easily read the true nature of humans.

"We used a magical wish granting cup," I answered, knowing that no answer could satisfy her. "No clue why it picked your island as our arrival point. Unless you have something that could break my curse?" I questioned, throwing enough information at her to make her doubt. At first, she was annoyed, thinking that I was being sarcastic, but as I continued, a little doubt wiggled into her mind.

Rin elbowed me in the ribs, "We don't mean you any harm." She tacked on to help seal the deal. I could see the lead warrior sizing us up just as I was them. Their matching uniform, heavy makeup, and hairstyles made it difficult to tell at first, but everyone around us was pretty young. I would put the whole dozen as somewhere around our ages -- fifteen to twenty at the oldest. That told me that there was a generation killed off.

It was a pretty common thing back in the day -- when tribes of kingdoms needed to marshal their warriors, they didn't send all of them. There was an age or experience cut off, such as you needed to be X years old or have X years of experience being a warrior. In martial cultures, who raised their kids to be warriors, with a few bad battles you could end up with this situation where the oldest of the warriors was a rookie.

The girl narrowed her eyes, "I will admit you don't look like fire nation soldiers," she admitted, and… wow. There were enough pyromaniacs in this world that there was a whole nation of them? And they called it the fire nation? I mean, it made sense, but it felt a little on the nose. "However, that doesn't mean you aren't enemies."

Nobara spoke up, sounding as amused as I felt, "The Fire Nation? Do they worship fire, or something?" It was a bad icebreaker, but it did the trick because all of the warriors seemed to be thrown through a loop. "Oh, they do, don't they? My bad."

"Your bad?" I questioned, glancing at her, earning a shrug.

"We're in a new world. Don't want to seem intolerant," she answered, giving the lead warrior enough time to recover.

"You… don't know about the fire nation? The hundred year war?" Oh, not another hundred year war. I swear, the one in Europe was bad enough the first go around. It got to the point that some random farm girl had to be chosen to unfuck that cluster fuck because that war would have, quite literally, never ended without Jeanne D'arc stepping up to the plate. I'm not sure if it was even worth it because of the knife she got in the back for her trouble. Humans really were just the worst. "How can you not know?"

"Like I said, we used a magic cup to bring us here, wish is supposed to have something that can let me escape my curse," I repeated. "I know absolutely nothing about this planet beyond you having an ocean filled with huge goldfishes." I could see the hesitation in her gaze, the doubt, but at the same time, the truth was so outlandish she was struggling to see why we would lie about it. "If they're not sacred or something, then I could cook one up and we can swap stories."

Nobara cracked a smile at that, "He might not look like it, but he's a pretty good cook!" She seconded, and I could feel all the warriors looking to the one I spoke with. She was the leader. She seemed on the younger side, telling me that she was skilled enough that her age didn't act as a detractor for her leadership skills. After all, no one wanted to follow a child into battle. She seemed to struggle with the decision for a long minute, running through the possibilities in her head.

"I suppose we could eat," she decided, purposely dropping her stance before closing one fan after another. I'm guessing that was a signal to keep a close eye on us. Cautious. They were also giving us a chance to show what we could do to get a grasp on our abilities.

Clever.

"I vote Majima to catch the fish!" Nobara volunteered me without hesitation. "The water looked cold."

Rin's hand shot in the air, "I also vote for Majima to go into the ice cold ocean."

I should have figured as much. "Fine, fine," I accepted the vote I never had a chance to win. We made our way back to the ocean and I began to shrug off my clothes. Nudity wasn't anything I had a problem with, and I didn't care who saw me naked. Though, I very much doubt the gasps I heard from the painted warriors were because they were impressed. As I dove into the ice cold water, determined to catch a meal, I knew it was because they saw that the truth carved into my skin covered every single inch.

That should give them something to talk about while I went fishing.

…

The village was more of a cluster of villages, I found when we drug back the massive koi fish with a team effort. It had to be at least a ton of meat -- killing it had been pretty simple. A few projected bats to the fish's side ruptured its swim bladder. From there it was just waiting for it to drown and dragging it back. The warriors eyed it clinically, searching for how I killed it, but they didn't seem to find their worst case scenario, and that was enough for them.

We were on an island called Kyoshi, and there were a handful of villages dotted around the small island that had a dormant volcano at the center of it. The make up was a family one -- a lot of old people, a lot of kids, with far fewer men and women. It was a common symptom of a prolonged war when everyone of fighting age went out to fight.

That being said, the village we entered didn't seem to be suffering from the lack of younger men and women. It seemed the warriors of the island filled that role well enough.

The fish itself was proving to be a beast to cook and butcher. After gutting it, I ended up smoking it from the inside by filling the gut cavity with some wood, then buried it upside down so the fire would cook on the spine. The outside was covered in stones that would warm up from the heat of the fire, letting the fish be cooked all the way through. Which left me a lot of time to prepare a bone broth, to cure the fish's sizable intestines, and to prepare a sauce I knew would work well with carp. All in industrial amounts.

All the while, we were kept under constant guard even if it wasn't called as such. The kids and old people were kept away from us and the only ones around were the warriors. I especially got a lot of attention to make sure I didn't poison the food. However, while we weren't given an inch of trust, the atmosphere was relaxed while the girls watched me work my magic.

"For the past hundred years, we have been at war with the Fire Nation. They instigated it by attacking and exterminating the Air Nomads. Since then, they have been pushing the other Nations -- the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribes -- to the brink of collapse," Suki, the apparent leader of the so aptly named Kyoshi Warriors, explained, catching herself. I don't think she bought the idea that we were from a different world, but Nobara and Rin were quick to convince her that we were lacking basic knowledge with constant interjections to explain basic things. "As far as we know, only the Northern Water Tribe and Ba Sing Se in the Earth Kingdom still resist the Fire Nation."

A hundred years was a long time for a war to be fought and I doubt that it was active the entirety of that time.

"Why did the war start? You just keep saying that the Fire Nation attacked," Rin pointed out, idly sipping from her cup of tea as I began to stuff what felt like a miles worth of large intestine with a number of prepared vegetables and discarded fish parts that the village had on hand. There were more fish than veggies on account that we were on an island with little farmland.

"The Fire Nation wants to dominate the world!" Suki seemed to bristle, the question striking a nerve. It was an answer she had internalized to the point that she didn't need to think about it.

I scoffed. Loudly.

Suki's eyes narrowed into slits as she knelt on the floor of a clearly Japanese inspired patio. Rin and Nobara glanced at me, their gazes far milder but there was a message there to not stir the pot. "You scoff at that? They attacked unprovoked and they've systematically oppressed everyone under their rule! It's only because of the Kyoshi Warriors that the Fire Nation hasn't oppressed this island as well!"

"Wars," I started, tossing a fish head into a large pot of boiling broth, "are rarely ever fought because of ideology. More often than not, they're fought over for the root of all Evil."

"That being?" Suki snapped, not at all caring for the charming smile I aimed at her.

"Money," I answered with a shake of my head. "A damn stupid thing to fight over. It's gotta be worse to die over it. I can't tell you the number of times I instigated a war and while everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs about honor or pride or righteousness, the true motivations behind sending thousands of idiots to kill thousands of idiots on the other side always came down to a profit margin. Money, resources, influence, or all three. And it's suckers like you that fall for the lie every time -- hook, line, and sinker."

Enough was never enough for humans. Even if they had all that they needed, they would always desire more because they could need more one day. When that resource was under the control of someone else? They coveted it. Lusted for it. They plotted and schemed. They could get it only one of two ways -- they bought it… or they took it. Globalization had been a recent concept in human history. For more than fifty thousand years, when a human wanted something? They took it.

"The oppression you're complaining about is a result of the fact that the Fire Nation is overextended. A beaten dog will eventually bite back, but a starved one won't have the strength to," I continued, stirring a sauce as I spoke. It had a good texture to it. I would kill for some sugar or honey, but those were a convenience of the modern era.

Of all the things Suki could have picked up on, she zeroes in on that. "The Fire Nation is overextended?" She pressed, her tone suspicious. Was she thinking I was a spy for them? It didn't make sense at all, but paranoia twisted facts until they fit the narrative she decided was true.

"Gotta be," I answered with a shrug. "Wars don't last this long without a reason. Both sides eventually get exhausted punching each other in the face. Call it ten years of high-intensity fighting -- resources are expended, casualties mount, and progress decreases when the prepared resources become strained. Then you're usually looking at ten or twenty years of inaction as both sides raise another generation of combatants, stockpile resources, and the song and dance begins again." I think humans called that a hot and cold conflict.

"At this point," I continued, going off of experience. "The only thing keeping this war going is mutual hatred from both sides and the Fire Nation knows that things have progressed to a point that if they don't crush their enemies completely, they'll be crushed in retaliation."

"Majima…" Nobara sighed, making me glance at Suki, who was outright glaring at me.

"If you don't like the truth, then plug your ears or jump off a bridge. I don't care," I dismissed her growing ire.

"You speak with such contempt about us," Suki hissed, and she wasn't wrong there. It dripped from every word. "You're saying that everyone that's died until this point has died for… what, pride? For money?" She pressed, and I wasn't surprised that's what she heard. "What would you have us do, then? Give up?"

"Probably," I admitted without hesitation and I could feel the anger in their gaze. "Oh, it'd suck for a couple of generations. As much as you hate the Fire Nation, I'm betting they hate you just as much. They'll oppress you. Violate your freedoms. You humans tend to vent your hatred and rage on helpless victims when you wind up in a position of power while justifying it as 'they deserve it.' But, in another hundred years or so, that animosity will die off because the war will be over. Kids will grow up thinking that the past will have nothing to do with them. The slights, pain, and hate will be forgotten."

I trailed off as I looked to the sky, "There would still be issues, I'm betting. But, there would be peace."

Suki shook her head, "No. I can't accept that kind of twisted logic!" It wasn't like I didn't get why she couldn't. I was being pretty unreasonable and my train of thought was completely self-serving. That said, I didn't think I was wrong. "Things got this bad because the Avatar was gone, but they're back now! They'll beat back the Fire Nation and restore balance to the world!"

How certain of it she sounded caught my attention, "Avatar?" I questioned, my eyes narrowing slightly. The whispers of my influence on the world seemed to buzz with that word.

Suki stood up, "The Avatar can bend all the elements -- Air, Water, Earth, and Fire. For countless generations, the Avatar has been the bridge between all of the Nations and they brought harmony to the world! Just like Avatar Kyoshi, who we honor! The only reason the Fire Nation could get away with this was because they killed the Avatar and they kept killing them every time they were reborn, but now they have returned. So there's no way we're ever going to just roll over and give up and let the Fire Nation do what it wants!"

There was a swell of resolve at her words, but I didn't particularly care. "Yeah, yeah -- whatever -- about this Avatar, they… what? Bring peace to the world?" I questioned, frowning. Firstly, that seriously sucked for them. I had been with humanity since the very start. I knew exactly what humanity was. Being the one that had to deal with that mess for countless generations?

And I thought I had it rough.

Secondly, what were the odds that we'd show up right when the Avatar officially returned to the world? The two had to be connected. I was certain of it.

Suki was all too willing to gush about the supposed savior, "They have. Every Avatar can commune with their past lives for wisdom and guidance, gaining enlightenment through them. Combined with their power, they've been a pillar that the entire world could lean on."

That was it.

A breath of relief escaped me. I knew what the Holy Grail was capable of, but this curse… part of me wondered if it was even possible for me to escape it. However, I was just tossed a lifeline. The reason why of all places, we could have been brought here.

"Sounds like I should meet this Avatar then," I muttered, a tension easing out if me and Suki seemed put off by the pleased smile I wore.

Because, somehow, he would be the key for me to no longer carry the weight of all the world's evil.