Mark walked downstairs, and then downstairs again to the first floor, because this was a three story (and a basement!) house. Gabriel was working on a computer at the kitchen table, near giant windows that oversaw a pool area and the forested land beyond. Mark was pretty sure there were farms out there beyond the property line. He remembered Shady Acres being a farming community, and this was still Shady Acres.
Gabriel saw Mark put aside some papers, saying, “Hey, kiddo! Alex went to work already, but he’ll take a half day off when you want to go into the city. You want breakfast? There’s frozen breads in the freezer, or I can make you an omelet. Or you can cook for yourself.”
Mark smiled and asked, “Do you got cereal?”
When Mark was a kid, he had marveled at how the only cereals that Alexandro and Gabriel had in the house were a bunch of sugar-blasted fruity things, which Mom had decried as ‘terrible for your health!’ but Mark had loved those weird, fruity flavors. It had been more than one small fight when Mark had snuck those cereal boxes back home, to Orange City.
Gabriel chuckled, probably thinking the same thing. “We do. That cupboard right— Yup, you got it.”
Mark looked at ten clear plastic containers of different colorful cereals. He picked the one that had bright red and white stuff inside and poured himself a bowl, as he asked, “I do want to see what Uncle Alexandro’s work is like, now that I can actually go there, but… There’s a lot I need to do. You guys offered to help last night?”
“Absolutely! What do you want? I assume electronics.”
Mark smiled. “Yes. Thank you. I need a phone again. Those things break way too often.”
“This is a tier 4 city. Phones are part of Basic Income. So that doesn’t actually cost you anything, if you want to become a citizen.”
Mark breathed in deep. Ah. This conversation, then. Mark poured milk into the cereal, thinking, as he walked over and sat down across from Gabriel. There was a lot of room for Mark, even with Gabriel taking up a desk’s worth of space… And then Mark looked at the table again, while he was sitting at it.
“This is the breakfast table, right?”
Gabriel laughed. “Yeah. Don’t mind me. Eat!”
Mark felt a little embarrassed, for this was Gabriel’s house, but he banished that emotion and seriously asked, “Do you two actually want me here? No sugar coating it, please.”
Gabriel turned serious. He said, “It’ll be difficult, Mark. You’re high profile, and there’s a certain amount of inherent danger in your very presence in this city, in our lives. But not much more. And maybe even less danger, if you get down to it. Inquisitor Willow has already asked if you’re staying, because she wants you here, too, because having someone of your power in Memphi, in our lives, makes both me and Alexandro safer. We’re just two guys, you know? Baseline-normal people. But Alexandro has Age Manipulation, and that makes him an easy target.
“So, in all honesty, best case scenario —and the most likely— is that you’re here, all supervillain-strength, and that dragon is in our lives a little, but life continues on more or less as it always has. We expect some sort of crossfire and shit to happen, but we already have a lot of protection on top of you, so don’t think that you actually need to protect us.
“But having you here is a good deterrent.
“And you’re going to be a hero anyway, even if they do label you as a villain. We like heroes. Your uncle and I are both total nerds, so maybe we’ll get to rub elbows with people we watch on the television without them hitting us up for age treatments. They will hit you up for that all the time, though. Be aware that that will happen if you live here.
“The worst case scenario is something that the entire world will have to contend with, and not something anyone is eager to have happen at all. So they’ll make concessions to the dragon, and… And it’s a whole big thing. We’re fine with that risk, Mark.
“So to put it shortly, we want you here, Mark.” Gabriel added, “And if you want to be here, you should talk to a whole bunch of people who are in charge, because that’s the level that everyone expects you to act on, eventually. There’s Emilia Ramirez, the Mayor of Memphi. To simplify her, she’s a Technopath, with the City AI as her larger self. She’ll want a face to face meeting with you soon, if you choose to do anything other than visit. Then there’s Kraigen Steele, the leader of the Hero’s Association…” Gabriel paused.
Mark had been nodding, thankful that Gabriel was giving it to him straight, as he ate his cereal. Gabriel always had a more level head on his shoulders than Alexandro, so Mark was glad that he was able to speak with him alone. All of those concerns were real concerns, too. When Gabriel mentioned Mark being a hero, even with the ‘villain’ tag, Mark felt happy.
He was great with meeting some high-powered people, and the red and white cereal was pretty great. Better than Mark remembered, but completely unsuitable for a breakfast food… probably. Or maybe that was just Mom talking.
But then Gabriel looked at Mark, studied him for a moment, and continued, “And Archmage Blackthorn, of course.”
Mark blanked. His spoon dropped into his bowl.
A moment passed.
Gabriel studied Mark.
Mark made a decision. “I can… I can…” He made a more solid decision, saying, “Sure! I can meet… Uh. Blackthorn— I have to?”
“You would need to meet him, yes. Eventually. Blackthorn is part of the defense of the city, and you want to be that sort of person, so you will eventually run in the same sort of circles. I’ve met him before. He’s an okay guy. His demon demands he has lots of sex and lots of drugs, which is what Blackthorn wanted, and got, so he’s a pretty chill guy most of the time. I checked with Inquisitor Willow this morning about him, and she told me that Blackthorn’s oversight told her that Blackthorn is perfectly in line with his Contract, and is in no danger of Falling at all. He has over 25 years of Contract fulfillment banked, so he’d need to go cold sober for a quarter century in order to be at risk of Falling. And that’s not going to happen.”
“… Okay!” Mark said, and he wasn’t sure why he had said it so enthusiastically. “That’s! That’s a thing.”
“You still want to go to Daihoon though, yes? And you’re not actually qualified to stand on those stages yet, so those meetings don’t have to happen for years.” With a strong look to him, Gabriel continued, “But they would have to happen, eventually.”
Mark steeled himself, because yeah. He wanted this. He wanted this responsibility, this capability, and so, he would walk this path. He said, “I get it. Eventually. For now, a phone would be nice, and then an update on the thing with the killers outside the city.”
Gabriel grinned just a little. “Sure.” And then he gestured toward the archway to the main living room. “I took the liberty of ordering you a bunch of electronics this morning. You got a phone, a laptop, and some other junk in there to set up. There’s also a standard-sized webweave underarmor in there. It might not fit, so you should try it on. Alexandro is looking forward to helping you come up with an actual costume on top of the webweave eventually, and so am I. And for now~” Gabriel spoke to the air, “Bert. Please categorize Mark as a guest user.”
Mark’s eyes went wide—
The lights brightened a little bit, and a House AI spoke up with a pleasant, male voice, “Yes, Gabriel.” The AI, Bert, added, “As a guest, I should inform you, Mark, that Citadel of Freyala Resources has contacted me about your Personal AI, Quark. Quark is waiting for you to open up a new phone and to join with that phone, along with all of your personal data.”
Mark smiled, “Thank you, Bert!”
Gabriel said, “He’s not a living AI.” He asked, “I didn’t know you had a Personal AI?”
“For all of an hour, and then Addavein moved around in the air above me and everything kinda broke and went flying. Landing in the river truly broke the personal AI, though.”
“Ah, yeah. You said that yesterday— Well I’m glad you have one! That nixes one of the suggestions I was going to make tomorrow.” Gabriel added, “Well finish your breakfast and go open your presents!”
Mark chuckled, saying, “Like Christmas again!”
Gabriel got a nice, small smile. “Yup~”
… Which made Mark wonder why his uncles were never allowed to truly visit, or help the family out when Mark got coma’d, but then he remembered Curtain Protocol, and how Mom and Dad had probably had a long argument about accepting help, or maybe his uncles had withheld help, because they knew Mark would start to wonder where the rich stuff was coming from and then break Curtain Protocol, or something… But there was all that help, actually, during Mark’s coma. The nurse, the machines. Some of it was basic care, but truly basic care would have had Mark in a hospital, and not at home, right?
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Mark said, “I just now realized that you guys have been helping me financially my whole life. I know that you guys slipped me new phones every year, but... Thank you.”
Gabriel smiled a little, then said, “The finances of the family between your uncle and your father, and a little bit your mother, is a very complicated topic. You’re old enough to know all of it, if you want. I can only give you a small breakdown, though. Do you want to know some of it?”
“I do.” Mark sat back down. “Not everything, obviously, but… some of it.”
Gabriel said, “Your grandfather didn’t want to take Alexandro’s Age Regression at all, ever, and then he passed, and everything kinda solidified along those lines, with Markus and Donna being strongly independent, and them wanting to raise you that way, too. Alexandro and I were hoping that maybe when you were in your 30s that we could eventually convince Markus and Donna to de-age with me and Alexandro. Maybe move out here, too. Donna was close to accepting, but… But fishing was something Markus truly loved. He was never going to give that up.” Gabriel added, “But we helped when we could, anyway. We were actually looking into buying some fishing tanks here in Memphi and luring Markus that way. Never panned out. We did manage to help pay for a lot of things back in Orange City, though. The last thing we did was help get you that in-home coma care. Otherwise you would have been in a hospital. It was a fight to get them to accept that money, but it was a fight we actually won for once. I had no idea that Color Drop treatments existed, though. We looked into those costs later, and we simply got told we couldn’t afford it.”
Mark felt tears threaten again.
He got up and hugged Uncle Gabriel, saying, “Thank you.”
Gabriel hugged him back, holding him tight, saying, “You’re welcome, Mark.” He patted Mark on the back, saying, “Now go try out your webweave! It’s Power Level 10. Cheap stuff but a good starter set to wear under your real clothes.” He added, “And eventually a costume!”
Mark chuckled and pulled back to see a few tears on Gabriel’s face. Mark wiped away his own tears and nodded.
And then he went to the living room.
A big white box waited for him on the couch.
Mark ripped it open and unearthed a brand new phone and a laptop, both sleek silver and glass, but made of tier 0 materials. They wouldn’t survive much real battle, but they would survive most normal wear and tear for a good while. Mark plugged them in and soon he got to personalizing them with some help from the House AI, Bert. Within minutes, both machines flickered gold with a distant COFR connection, and then silver, as Quark rematerialized on his personal devices.
Mark smiled at his phone. “Welcome back, Quark. Sorry for getting you killed.”
“COFR has my base programming and I am not a living being, so I cannot be killed.” Quark added, “You have high-priority messages waiting for you from Inquisitor Lola Turner and Inquisitor David Turner, along with normal-priority messages from Eliot Cybersong and Isoko Kanno. I will play the priority messages now.”
“I—” Lola’s voice cracked, and then she easily said, “I have heard you were kidnapped and then sent back to Earth, and then set upon by bandits, of all the Freyala-damned things. I am glad you are okay. We will resume lessons when you return to Citadel. I will begin to instruct you in the ways in which it is lawful and wise to kill people for their transgressions against humanity, or when to haul them in for judgment by a city. It is a bit early for those particular lessons, but you need to know them, since, with your adamantium Shaping, you will be able to haul people around goodly distances just fine. I look forward to your return.”
Mark was wide-eyed at that dangerous message, but he felt the love therein, and he was grateful for Lola. Lola was a good person but she surely had some rough edges.
David’s message played next.
“I will leave discussion of Addavein to other parties,” David said, “But as for the bandits you encountered, I believe Lola has some lessons planned for you. Those lessons might be too early, but they’re crucial to learn. Personally, I let all criminality go, except for the criminality that you experienced. I would have brought those people into Memphi or to the nearest guard tower to request a pickup. That’s me as an Inquisitor, though; I have that executive power. Perhaps you need to get involved with the cops at Memphi, though; I do not know how they split power over there.
“If the bandits were of Thrashtalon, or demon-touched and outside of parameters, then that’s a strict execution; no court necessary.
“That’s probably difficult to hear, but you need to hear it. I’ve heard that there’s an Inquisitor Layfair on that case against the bandits. I don’t know him, but if you want to pursue that case and see what goes on there, then look him up at Collective Temple there in Memphi. Other than that, I think that settlement expedition you were going for might be a few months before it starts. You have lots of time to get back here, so take some time with your family. I’ll see you later, Mark. I’m glad you’re okay.”
… Mark had a moment.
Most of that message was nice, but...
“Those guidelines for execution make sense… but fucking hell. This shit is supposed to happen on television, not real life… but I guess it’s already happened to me. Fuck.”
Mark clicked through the phone to get to the other messages.
Eliot had written a long text message that started on part 1 and went all the way to part 36.
Mark set that aside for a moment and clicked on Isoko’s text.
‘Congrats on becoming a villain! A ‘battle’ with your ‘hero’ ‘brother’ is a great first foray into the realm of villainy, or at least that’s what grandma tells me. News of that is all over the world right now. Glad you’re okay. COFR has a chat server for people in groups, so come join Eliot and I. Eliot is freaking out about a lot, because now people are telling him that Addavein is going to be harrying him and me and everyone near you for the rest of your life. I’m fine with this, by the way. I’m gonna be a villain, too, so we can be villains together! Join the chat server!’
A chat server?
Mark almost clicked the link, but that would involve a lot of talking and Mark had other things to do right now. He almost circled back to Eliot’s message… But again, same problem.
He went through his new clothes.
Ten minutes later and Mark was wearing skin-tight black webweave that made him blush as he looked in the mirror. But, he supposed, it was ‘underwear’, so this was fine. Mark took it back off and then he put on some other normal clothes. Blue jeans and a t-shirt looked good on him, and he was happy to wear them.
“Am I really going to be wearing that webweave? In public?” Mark mumbled to himself as he put his clothes away in his room on the third floor. “No, right? I mean…” Mark breathed out as he realized something. He grinned. “Costumes go over the webweave! Right.”
Crisis averted!
Mark plopped down on his bed and started reading Eliot’s 36-part text, instantly thinking that he probably composed it with Man-made Manipulation, and that there wasn’t anything here besides worries. Mark was proven wrong after the first few sentences.
‘Glad you’re back and you survived your brother. Knew you could do it!
‘I want you as a Heavy in my team going forward. That means superhero-level power, Mark. Such a request comes with various offers, powers, and responsibilities. As such, I want you to know the current, brief rundown of all of the current offers on the table, and I want your help making decisions.
‘To start with, there’s the idea of setting up near one of the poles, so that we can constantly have trade with Earth. Trade is a big deal, and is a primary motivating factor on where to start a settlement and new major city.
‘We could also do a partnership with a current city on Earth, and become their Twin City on Daihoon, opening up a semi-permanent portal between our two worlds, allowing trade to flow this way and that. A lot of cities are asking for this, but not many of them are able to fulfill the HEAVY REQUIREMENTS for a permanent portal setup. Only two places have permanent portals on Earth; Crystal Tower, and a completely undefended portal that they let blow up all the time in the Sahara. Permanent portals attract kaiju, after all.
‘So to have a permanent portal city, we need:
‘Archmage(s), at least 5 full kaiju-level teams on BOTH SIDES of the rift, a full assortment of support staff, numbering in the thousands, for just the kaiju teams alone. And then we need 10,000 people for various city functions, like food and such. Semi-permanent portals are only open once every week, or so, and everyone is on high alert every time, because if a kaiju doesn’t come running, then every monster within a hundred miles will, and...’
Mark read for a while, his mind swirling with ideas.
Eliot was enamored with the idea of making a semi-permanent portal between Daihoon and Earth inside of a city, and Mark thought it was a pretty neat idea, too.
Mark read it all a few times, and then he clicked the link in Isoko’s message—
A whole new app opened up, called ‘Accord’.
Right away there was a warning about Curtain Protocol, and that this was Open Social Media.
‘Accord is not responsible for people developing any mana inclinations at all…’ and yadda yadda, click this click that, yes yes, agree agree...
Mark took a few minutes to fill stuff out, and then he eventually figured out that he needed to click Isoko’s link again, and that’s what allowed him to join COFR’s chat server, or more specifically, Isoko and Eliot’s private chat group, which was the only private group open to him. There were, according to the number on the screen, 18,207 private chat groups. Mark could only see one of them. The public chat groups were… not something Mark was interested in, at all. But he might look at them eventually. He saw chat groups for general partnering for training missions, new user introductions, general chat, movies, books, a whole bunch of stuff, really. Mark ignored all of that.
Inside the private group chat there were lots of messages from Isoko and Eliot, but Mark wasn’t going to read them, yet. There were over 600 messages! He did check the earliest message, though, and it was dated yesterday.
Mark smiled at that. The group had only been open for a day. Maybe Mark would read the other ones, eventually.
He felt included, even if he hadn’t been able to be there in the beginning.
Mark started typing.