Now, to dissect The Trickster God.
Hundreds of Explanatory Themes could be sifted out from Karnon's lengthy story. In regard to Henry’s primary concerns, though, the habitual targets and nature of the God's mischief, Deitological Thematic Induction Modelling highlighted just three, which together explained, at certain stages of the God’s life, up to 77% of the variance of his prank behaviours, this figure rising to 89% when smaller supplementary Themes were added.
Of the big three, first was ‘Pious Mischief’, the absurdist, over-dedication to degeneracy that typified the sect-culture of The Laughing Sons. Second was ‘Humanitarianism’, the empathetic, benevolent treatment of others, which most of us possess to some degree, even Trickster Gods. And third was ‘Anti-Colonialism’, a rejection of remote, foreign governance, like that of The Maalundi Empire, in favour of native, independent rule.
When these three were fed along with Karnon's 341,640 documented pranks into DTIM, the most accurate models reinterpreted The God's chronicle as an evolving battle between them. Throughout his life, each Theme competed in a tug-of-war for influence over his psyche, each taking turns at the dominant position in determining the composition of his antics.
Initially, in his Childhood with The Sons, from age 6 to 10, he was a pure creature of Pious Mischief, the azure-haired kid absorbing the execrable habits of his sect-brothers. In his pre-teens, demonstrated through a dying off of Pious Mischief's crueller pranks, Humanitarianism made its entrance - the seeds of this Theme had likely been sown by his first mentor, Xivtust The Tinkerer, whose prop-gags designed for his dead wife were of a benign alignment. In his teens, the maturing Karnon comprehended the oppressed, miserable state of Maalundi-occupied Togavi, and his Humanitarianism birthed Anti-Colonialism, the rejection of this plight. Subsequently, Pious Mischief's terrorism-pranks showed a fluctuation, rapidly increasing or decreasing as Karnon bickered with his adoptive father, who beat him for insubordination. His Childhood concluded with a false-flip to extremely violent pranks when Karnon, the Anti-Colonial rebel, began fomenting dissent for his liberation plans and plotting The Laughing Man's assassination.
In The Age of Wine, Pious Mischief was almost entirely subdued by Humanitarianism. King Karnon transformed into a fair sovereign and halted all but his most trivial, harmless antics. The Anti-Colonialism also fell to a moderate level, the rebelliousness of his teendom being restrained by the responsibility of adulthood - although traces remained in him humiliating Maalundi delegates during their visits.
There were also hints during The Age of Wine that his Anti-Colonialism had been transitioning to a more generalised Anti-Feudalism, both sentiments being unified by the common enemy of small, oligarchic groups exerting unjustified dominion. However, no significant democratic movements existed in that era, the polities of Karnon’s time consisting exclusively of theocratic monarchies led by deities, and his peers, the other Sons, were born nobles attuned to the status quo. Without any exemplars to attach his sentiments to and channel them productively, the transition failed to precipitate into anything more substantial than his practice of taking animals for brides. These sham marriages, within the veneer of Pious Mischief, could be viewed through an Anti-Feudalistic lens as a snub to Togavi’s nobility.
The Maelstrom Tragedy began several upheavals of these Themes. At first, Humanitarianism was his singular drive, Karnon investing everything into halting the collapse and famine. After The Eighth Prince's invasion, when Sarff and The Sons were killed and Karnon was chased into Togavi's highlands, this Humanitarianism was gradually snuffed out by a resurgence of Anti-Colonialism. The contention between these Themes was present in his guerilla ambushes, in his willingness to inflict casualties and use of terror tactics like mutilation. Karnon's ferocity ramped up after the enemy Gods started rounding up and executing his blue-haired descendants to flush him out of hiding - this dilemma essentially forced him to make a conscious choice between his people, the Humanitarian instinct, and the wider mission, the Anti-Colonialist instinct, and he chose the latter. Anti-Colonialism reached total paramountcy when he slaughtered millions of enemy civilians to repel the invading coalition of Gods.
In The Trickster Years, the Pious Mischief that'd been mostly missing for centuries returned with vigour. Thus began Karnon's irreverent tradition of pranking Gods and nations.
At first glance, his mischief in these centuries would seem a uniform, incomprehensible mess, The Trickster God committing fifteen to seventy pranks a week spread out randomly across the continents. After Henry documented enough pranks to apply the magnifying glass of DTIM, though, the first 162 years were revealed to be unique from the rest. During this initial period, his antics had a much more erratic, schizophrenic quality, one that threw off any predictive modelling - sometimes, his mischief against an enemy ended in silly, light-hearted laughs; other times, he wiped out an ally's cities.
What this instability suggested was an internal turmoil. Karnon, in the aftermath of The Maelstrom Tragedy, had to process the immense grief for his ruined homeland and his guilt from the casualties he'd inflicted at the end.
Looking to real-world orchestrators of mass-death, it was actually quite rare for them to express remorse, especially if they were victorious. To take part in an atrocity, a person usually possessed at least one feature that absolved them of guilt. The Mongol Khans, for example, originated from a tribal tradition predating the notion of universal human value, and they also adopted the Chinese imperial edict of heaven’s mandate, wherein all humankind were destined subjects and any refusal to surrender thus equivalent to treason, punishable by execution. Such factors helped to dehumanise victims and relieve the weight their corpses might have on the conscience.
These buffers to guilt were no less present for the figures in Saana who’d racked up the top body counts. The Redeemer, a literal monster, had no particular reason to be alarmed by massacring humans. The All-Mother was an ego-maniac who'd been brainwashed by her own theology, truly believing that death was an inevitability in the predestination of The Cycle. The Tyrant, when all was said and done, had been a teenager playing a videogame with videogame characters.
In Karnon’s case, though, many of the traits that might’ve dampened his remorse were absent. His psychological make-up had been normal aside from the poor manners picked up from The Sons. Although the King of Togavi by title, having been an orphan boy, he hadn’t been reared in the manners of nobility that conditioned monarchs to view peasantry like livestock that could be gained and lost without concern. Despite his patriotism, he subscribed to no theories of Togavian ethnic or cultural exceptionalism that could be wielded to equate his opponents to vermin - he'd traded with his neighbours on an amicable basis throughout The Age of Wine.
Absolution for him had been provided entirely by his Anti-Colonialism. Killing was a cruel but inescapable price of keeping his homeland safe from the clutches of foreign oppression. As a source of clemency, this ideology had been sufficient to sustain him throughout the period following The Eighth Prince’s Invasion, when Karnon had become a beast lurking in the mountains. But afterwards, after he'd won the war and the conflict ceased, he, as all must eventually, had to descend to the flat lands where the rest of humankind preferred to dwell. There, without the desperate urgency that'd focused his vision on just the struggle, he had the space to step back and examine himself under the illumination of ordinary lights. His self-image as a national hero had flaws.
Henry’s DTIM analysis lacked the resolution to deduce points this subtle. From his own experience, though, he could hazard a guess at the questions The Trickster God might have been asking himself.
Who of the dead sing songs of liberty? What had been gained from his continued resistance when most of his country was already dead? Did independence have any value when almost no one remained to appreciate it? If he hadn’t severed political ties with The Maalundi colonies, wouldn’t they have been more willing to answer his requests for aid?
Who of the dead took solace in trading death? Those enemy citizens he’d decimated, were they actually repayment as he’d proclaimed in his madness? Where, beyond loose associations and a crude sense of karma that existed only for the living, was the link that made these new deaths a form of amendment for those in the past?
Who of the dead tallied themselves among the dead? Weren’t those enemy citizens also oppressed subjects as he’d once been? Did he have to kill so many of them? Did he have to kill any? The enemy coalition may have been stronger together, but, with more calm and more patience, couldn’t he have aimed his retaliation at them separately, slowly isolating them, eliminating one at a time?
Karnon had reaped over five million lives. This massacre had been perpetrated not through subordinates or soldiers, nor through the prolonged, invisibilising abstractions of societal disruption and famine. He had personally carried out the slaughter. He’d shattered cities with earthquakes and consumed occupants within tornadoes of flame. He'd listened to their moans beneath the rubble and he'd smelled their cooking flesh and he'd made the choice not to stop.
Dealing with the remorse of such a monumental atrocity could never have been easy. One couldn’t discharge it directly by compensating the victims, who were dead. The indirect apologies we often invented, compensating family members, contributing to the mission of humanity in general, didn’t scale infinitely with casualty numbers. There was no act of charity that soothed the annihilation of millions. For deities, who reckoned their lives by millennia, some karmic balance might be reachable one day, but the issue was being able to stride that long, long distance without the burden on one’s back causing a weak point to give in, the Achilles to snap. Temporary relief, one might take from ritual, in building a symbolic monument from the bones of a friend, or in distraction, in drugged-up orgies and frivolous escapades. However, in the quiet moments, when one’s vigilance had slipped, the guilt would grab one by the ears and wrench their gaze back upon their iniquities. Each glance would pick out another mistake suffocating in the monstrous pile, and new guilts would appear, and these guilts would help to uncover more guilts, all of these guilts multiplying and propagating through the brain like a prion disease converting neural proteins to clones of itself until one’s entire mind was an incoherent soup of guilt.
For a problem of this magnitude, the solution—available nowhere outside in the material realm—had to be discovered within.
Henry, comparing the reasonable Karnon up until now to the crazy Karnon that came afterwards, believed the God's psychological metamorphosis was achieved through the synthesis of the three DTIM Themes to create a new one that would provide exoneration.
To begin, each Theme was altered in a way that severed a connection with the God’s culpability.
Pious Mischief, on careful scrutiny, had never been the silly humour it’d feigned to be, the Theme always casting a more sober shadow. The Laughing Man had formulated his gag Combat System to hide the training of a private force, The Sons, under Lamin's duress, used their pranks to terrorise Togavi, and Karnon had used the premise of an exchange of gags to terminate this cruel relationship. To inhabit this type of humour-blending double-life, one had to understand, more than anything else, how one's actions were perceived by others. This meant standing before the ugly face of the suffering one caused, close enough to mark the size of its dilated pupils and smell its fetid breath. Freeing Karnon from the pain of this hyper self-awareness, his Pious Mischief simplified into its surface layer, becoming playful, absurd, authentically pointless, a 'Pure Mischief'.
His Anti-Colonialism, which had already been shifting towards a general wariness of oligarchy, had always been balanced against contradictory demands. There had been periods when he’d acquiesced to figures like The Laughing Man or Glorious Seekubaa out of necessity to achieve peace or purchase time. Later, Karnon himself had been tasked with authority as king, a role unjust in the eyes of many new youth. Freedom, he'd learned, needed to be harmonised with order – while others might reside in the lofty tower of idealism, where rosy notions of unlimited liberty received no resistance from the clouds, one given the responsibility of power had to walk always with bare feet on reality's rough terrain, feeling out the painful bumps and stones of consequence and failure. But The Maelstrom had taught Karnon that the benefits of this balancing act had been illusory. All that building up Togavi had amounted to was raising the height from which it’d crashed when it fell, and everything must one day fall. Simplifying these contentions, enabling him to retreat from his guilt in another way, Anti-Colonialism polarised into a hard-line extremism against all hierarchical organisation, a blind, uncritical 'Anarchism'.
Humanitarianism had the most connection with his remorse, being a direct moral and sympathetic link to the fate of his victims. Therefore, its metamorphosis had been the most exaggerated.
Can one be an ally to humankind after massacring millions? To this question, Karnon, unfortunately, retrieved an answer from his Childhood, taught to him by none other than The Laughing Man, he who'd managed to find the humour in war's horrors, who’d maintained his laughter when his son had chewed off the front half of his skull.
Viceroy Lamin had often ordered his Sons to push their ‘pranks’ too far, having them commit murder, torture, and rape under the guise of frivolous mischief - hence, none of the others had interfered with the assassination. Prior to his demise, The Laughing Man would lecture them that they shouldn’t begrudge his orders but be thankful. They—both assailant and victim—were gaining a chance at life’s most cherishable prize: the expansion of their souls. (One might recognise this concept from Karnon’s mad, joke-dense conversations with Henry.)
What did it mean for a soul to expand? Well, it was an established fact in Saana that every living being contained a soul, with its release being visible upon death. The Laughing Man, adding a novel spin, had contended that souls differed in their sizes. They shrank or grew in response the totality of the possessor, which he defined as the vigour with which one engaged with the universe, a combination of physical stature, significance of actions, emotional intensity, psychic might, and connection with other soul-possessing entities. For proof of this theory, he pointed out the strange fact that man, although friendlier to cows than mountain lions, held much more respect for the latter, to the extent of even feeling more grief for the lion when he killed it despite their relationship as adversaries. The contradiction here could be explained by the difference in the size of each creature’s soul. The soul of a cow was made tiny and pathetic by its daily, unchanging habits of chewing grass, the limited routine carving a minuscule space within the universe for the creature's soul to dwell. The mountain lion, in contrast, thriving on blood, preying upon the cow and the cow’s soul, grew its own by consuming these lesser beings. To the larger and grander soul of the mountain lion, then, humans felt a greater spiritual attraction in a cosmic mechanism analogous to the gravitational pull of massive heavenly bodies. Thus, we admired lions and thought cows pitiful.
Between men, Lamin claimed, this dynamic also applied. Those individuals of greatest significance to us were not our allies but those who possessed the largest souls. And in the growth of man's soul, the true threat was not in struggle or pain but in the very avoidance of these things, in the urge to comfort that would tempt us to join the grass-gazers in the soul-suffocating bondage of the mundane. Joy and pain, either of these were antidotes to our affliction; any burst of adrenaline shocked one out of the torpor of routine and pushed them, with a racing heart, to wrestle with existence in its fullest. Rather than high or low, as such, we should aim to be more, to be higher or lower, to exaggerate the amplitudes of existence on which the riding soul could swell and shine. It was there that man formed his most vibrant memories, that he learned whether his ghost would fade or whether his legend would be immortalised, that he ascended to his most remarkable and noble and majestic, there on the extreme.
Consequently, his Sons had been doing a favour for their so-called victims by shaking up their dull lives and raising their universe-engagement to a more profound, more soul-nourishing depth. Whose memory would linger with the village longest? The peasant girl tilling the field alongside the cows or the peasant girl they'd raped and murdered? There was all the proof his Sons needed that the anguished soul surpassed the bored one.
War had twisted The Laughing Man’s mind. (Kind of. The soul expansion theory did correspond eerily close to the mechanics of Saana’s Cyclic cosmology as Henry understood them). And the falsity of his lectures had been apparent to The Sons during their time under his oppression. Following The Maelstrom, however, when Karnon was alone, without his brothers to keep him in check, the concept of soul expansion must have provided the solution for his Humanitarian failures. In fact, he hadn’t failed. The dead he'd never saved and the dead he'd claimed, in their last moments, all of their souls had been inflated to their maximum, and this unforgettable sensation flooding into him was evidence that they’d been at their most beautiful. Thereby, Karnon’s Humanitarianism morphed into a 'Soul Humanitarianism'.
Finally, after 162 years of instability, these three disfigured Themes of Pure Mischief, Anarchism, and Soul Humanitarianism—each on their own too deficient and stupid to attain permanence—found stability by complementing each other and solidifying into one demonic Theme: Soul Expansionism.
Soul Expansionism was a mischievous, anarchistic, neutral-hedonistic-utilitarianism. It was the philosophy of evoking, through the defilement of deities and other authorities, the greatest sensation for the greatest number of people. In religious terms, God was the collective of souls yearning to blossom and expand, sin was the routine, Satan was anyone who dared to lord over others and lure them into the hell of the mundane, and prayer was the high-commotion, chaos-sowing prank. Due to the Pure Mischief input, laughter ranked first in priority for stirring up sensation, but it was by no means the sole path. Terror, lust, outrage, disgust, and despair - everything sensuous added to our experience and gave succour to our begging souls.
A deranged idea, but it came to be the defining Theme behind Karnon's 'pranks' throughout the rest of his Trickster Years. It was what made him a wild, unrestrained menace, an agent of catastrophe and mayhem that some mistook for jokes, and ultimately—as Henry inspecting The Trickster God's dissected anatomy would surmise—an immutable enemy to himself.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
***
Sibylline Auguries.
The Sibyls of the Akalaum region of Aion Laisije were a sect of Miracleworkers and disciples of their Zone Guardian, Arisha The Prophet. A god of healing, Arisha’s presence on the battlefield was much appreciated by her kingdom’s armies. Her Sibyls were likewise beloved, the soldiers whom they rescued often assuming they had powers of divination. In actuality, the Sibyls were simply very talented at their craft. The best healers were able to read the pulse of war, anticipate which enemy attacks would land, and nullify this danger with an adequate but not wasteful salvo of support spells, and the Sibyls were the best of the best.
Miracleworkers, while strong in group combat, were a non-presence in duelling. In part, this stemmed from their high demand by teams, MMORPG healers still being in short supply in the year 2050. In part, the Class was trash at 1v1ing because most of its abilities were supportive. In emergency situations, a Miracleworker could often protect themselves by expending a ‘Miraculum Divinus’, a large-impact type of spell granted at Tier-1, Tier-4, and Tier-10, whose specific effect was determined by the Miracleworker’s patron God. However, these spells had lengthy cooldowns, from hours to days, that disqualified their value for the official best-of-X formats at the top echelon of duelling. Any duellists enamoured with the divine, holy aesthetic were encouraged to pick a Crusader instead. In The Company’s recruitment tournament, the Class’s viability relied on the health-handicaps.
Henry, while making a brief excursion to the apex of healing through Sibylline Auguries, attempted to build a new 1v1 Miracleworker style. He tried to optimise the selection of Miraculums and develop complementary fighting methods to compensate for the Class’s lack of offensive abilities, experimenting with everything from bow-shooting to wrestling like that SaNguiNe noob whose heart Loki’d broken.
He hadn’t prophesied a significant pay-off for this endeavour. And, after 33 months of research, he did indeed not get one. His upgraded style, Invincible Fate-Defying Oracle Sword, performed merely 48% better than the current top Miracleworker duelling art – a trash result at this stage in the climb, even worse than his reformulation of Dancing-Stone Architecture. He might’ve felt he was on a losing streak if a decade hadn’t passed between that art and now.
Nevertheless, his completion of the Auguries marked his acquisition of at least one style from every Class except for Beast Tamers. His feel for the different facets of Saana’s combat was reaching a point of supreme roundedness, Henry being able to deal beatings as and to (almost) every Class and creed.
***
Soul Expansionism cast a fascinating light on The Assassination of The All-Mother in the middle of The Trickster Years.
The grandest deed in Karnon's story could've been explained by both his Themes of Anti-Colonialism and Humanitarianism, The All-Mother having planned to subjugate the world and having enslaved and sacrificed countless people. One could also propose alternative Themes beyond the main three. He could have been driven by Vengeance, her death being retaliation for the assassination plot she’d orchestrated on his 300th jubilee that’d led to the loss of Alchemist Tshuaj. Or, there was Responsibility, Karnon’s badgering of The God-Emperor having prevented a unification of the Central Continent powers that might’ve repelled The All-Mother’s eastwards encroachment. Any one of these motivations would qualify him as a hero, the slayer of the despotic witch, the dispenser of well-deserved justice.
These reasonable explanations had been a main motivation for Henry bothering to conduct this Odyssean investigation. Part of him had hoped that, within Karnon's anarchic madness, there might be discovered a virtuous thread that would point towards an auspicious conclusion for himself. However, his DTIM analysis was decisive in rejecting all of these sensible narratives.
While traces of Karnon’s original three Themes sometimes manifested in his antics, buried deep in the gums of his antics and causing pain with the occasional mischievous bite, they were dwarfed by Soul Expansionism. His Humanitarianism impulse had shrivelled up so much that, although Karnon could have effortlessly used his global teleportation to disrupt The Death Training genocides with no cost or inconvenience to himself, he’d never bothered. For Anti-Colonialism, he’d by this era taken to tormenting his own nation as indiscriminately as the others. Although the severity of his assault against Togavi was lower, when Henry graphed the frequency of catastrophic incidents against the combined technological, civil, and economic development of each kingdom, Karnon’s pranks tended to ramp up in proportion to a country’s growth, and Togavi sat almost perfectly on the trend-line. The safety of his homeland was explained not by patriotic love but by it remaining in a state of soul-expanding chaos because Karnon had neglected to help Donnera restore it.
In the general pattern, most of Karnon's pranks by 1108 BP, seven centuries after The Maelstrom, were identical in nature to the pranks of today: giving immature kids his stat-boosting Blessing so they could murder their superiors and anyone who annoyed them, humiliating a Cooking God by having them admit defeat to a cookie, transmuting the dread symbol of Zulfikar's skull throne into pudding. What guided him was merely the drive to spread authority-undermining, soul-expanding chaos.
Framed quantitatively through DTIM, if modelling the influence of the four mains Themes together and summing their contributions, about 94% of their collective influence in the year 1108 consisted of Soul Expansionism. The Trickster God interacted with the world almost purely according to this singular Theme, whose absurd, comical simplicity saved his psyche from having to make contact with life's darker complexities. He'd regressed to the oafish state of mouth-breathers whose moral sense of right and wrong were defined only by legality, except his Corpus Juris Civilis was some convoluted code of 'prankosophy'.
So why would The Trickster God prank The All-Mother? Tangential to her evilness, she just happened to have grown too big, to have become the head of a massive, well-ordered empire whose collapse would cause thrilling amounts of material anarchy and soul-expanding sensation.
Why would The Trickster God slay her for a prank? Because, in addition to destroying the mundane order she imposed, after thousands of years of religious rhetoric about her destiny to transcend The Cycle, her being whacked made for a hilarious contradiction, one that subverted the beliefs of a billion worshippers, lowering them into mental anarchy and soul-expanding sensation.
In short, her demise had just been another soul-expanding prank.
And now, skipping ahead a millennium, we finally arrive to the present day, having extracted from Karnon's past his four main Explanatory Themes of Pious Mischief, Humanitarianism, Anti-Colonialism, and Soul Expansionism.
Each of these, separately, offered different answers to who amongst Suchi’s triplicate adversaries of The Tyrant, The Pope, and The Saviour would get pie in their face and whether that pie would be fatal.
Pious Mischief, superficially, should be unpredictable due to the haphazardness inherent to mischief. However, when one apprehended the calculative shadow cast by this Theme, The Trickster God was most likely aligning with Henry’s original assassination plan to save Suchi. The plot—like The Laughing Man’s Combat System or Karnon’s liberation of Togavi—had shared the aspects of a labyrinthine set-up and the deception of burying real intentions within layers of obfuscation and misdirection. Accordingly, Karnon could be taken at his unspoken word. The God had orchestrated the three-way meeting with the Doomreaver and encoded a solution in the pantsing prank for no other reason than to correct Henry’s failure of being discovered prematurely.
So, who gets the Pious Mischief part of the pie? Henry’s enemies. What was the pie’s filling? Death.
Humanitarianism could support Henry. He may have been haunted by guilt, but, on the whole, his actions, both in Suchi and outside of it, had been benevolent – he, too, had killed millions, but he’d saved tens of millions, with hundreds more to come. The public controversy stemmed mostly from players either like Justinian, idealists unable to fathom the entire picture, or Rose’s brother, who wanted the freedom to kill for the thrill. Saana’s native inhabitants, the NPCs, were more of the strain of the bald Instructor Apari, who’d dropped to his knees out of respect and begged for more tyranny. Nothing indicated that Karnon sympathised with the plight of players over NPCs; whether he’d begrudge the short-term losses, that was more challenging to discern.
Who gets this Humanitarian part of the pie, then? Henry’s enemies probably. The filling? Still death.
Anti-Colonialism, along with its Anti-Authoritarian sub-Theme, were far and away the hardest to project. Within Suchi, all three of them—Henry, Ramiro, and Pope Berbahaya—had aspects of foreignness and despotic hierarchical rule. Henry and Ramiro were both Offworlders, aliens from another Plane, and both had authoritarian leanings, Henry being unhesitant to sacrifice smaller freedoms for the sake of civil order, Ramiro rearranging The Slums into a monarchy through The Empire. The Pope, meanwhile, represented the Ibanpita and Inbangua citydwellers, who suppressed the Ibanmothe slumdwellers through the monthly Cleansings. Anti-Colonialism, from a Pro-Indigenous sub-Theme, might excuse The Church's behaviour because the Ibanmothe were historically immigrants (albeit with intermixing by those Ibangua like Senior Director Okai Van who’d failed Nerin’s Trials). The Anti-Authoritarian sub-Theme would violently oppose this caste-system.
Outside of Suchi, where Henry was the sole relevant party, The Company had an ambiguous relationship with Anti-Colonialism. On the one hand, from a Pro-Indigenous angle, his guild had been structured close to The Maalundi Empire that’d once been Karnon’s nemesis. The Company were a pseudo-thalassocracy, a naval power based out of Chayoka with their Trading Posts, Public Zones, and Private Zones operating similar to colonies. On the other hand, through the Anti-Authoritarian lens, the guild’s relationship to native factions was peaceful and voluntary. The Company’s goods and services, their global shipping, were exchanged at varying prices to the degree that governments complied with their reformation demands by demonstrating reductions in crime rates, freedom of movement, property rights, etc. When locals failed to meet these demands or refused, so long as they didn’t harm The Company or commit egregious infractions like arms smuggling, the guild never forced change – hence, the hellhole of Suchi, which hadn’t complied, had been left alone.
Who gets the Anti-Colonialism part of the pie? Any of them, a solid chance of all three. The filling? A mix of death and destruction.
For Soul Expansionism, the mutated synthesis of the former Themes, there was no deep thought required. Who of the three wielded the most authority, and who getting pied would invoke the greatest sensation in the greatest number? The Tyrant, that shadowy figure for whom the eyes of the entire planet had been searching, a figure whose global prominence hadn’t been matched since The All-Mother. What pie filling would invoke the greatest sensation in the greatest number? Breaking the mundane bondage of peace and order The Tyrant had imposed on the planet’s billions through his reformations, returning everyone to the soul-expanding freedom of war and famine
And the four Themes smooshed together? Well, as had been established, in 1108 BP when The Trickster God had killed The All-Mother, Karnon's balance of these Themes was weighted to 94% Soul Expansionism. A millennium later, the DTIM analysis showed no deviation since. The Post-Mother Trickster Years were thematically identical to the end of The Pre-Mother Trickster Years, the All-Mother’s death being a distracting, uninformative punctuation.
The main victim: Henry. The prank: the annihilation of all he’d built.
***
East Temple Page-Society Connoisseurship.
A holy grail of martial arts research was the formulation of a style that would allow those, like Henry, who’d selected the Civilian Scholar as their Primary Class to battle on equal grounds with ordinary Martial Class Primaries. The unique
Really, Scholar fighting-styles should have been a niche area of study, Civilian Class Primaries rarely participating in dungeon exploration or war. However, history’s researchers, being mostly Scholars, were motivated by either personal interest in self-defence or fantasies of venturing beyond the library walls. Thus, they'd produced innumerable investigations into the subject, testing which Martial Classes paired best and what Spelltomes should be prioritised for purchase. It was a fantastic waste of intellectual resources. Nerds didn't belong on a battlefield.
Henry had obviously been indifferent to this limitation up until 'recently'. Prior to a real-life week ago, he hadn’t even had Martial Class, nor the ambition to create a supreme style. He himself, in war, had commanded from the safety of the backlines, having no more physical involvement than an out-of-shape WW1 general with type-2 diabetes and hypertension.
His technique of switching between multiple Spelltomes strapped to his chest had been a lazy theft from one of the Scholar Primary martial traditions, the Page-Society Connoisseurs. This was a dead faction of intellectuals he’d learned about while absorbing books in The Sacred Library of Medrisha for his Cap hunting quest. The background for these people wasn’t particularly interesting. They’d been scions of wealthy Volefan families, who, with their parents’ pocket money, had been able to afford wide arsenals of top-grade Spelltomes to experiment and play with. Henry’d pinched their techniques because he, too, was filthy rich.
From the perspective of A Thousand Tools, though, paradoxically, Spelltome-switching was a pathway to affordability. Normal people couldn’t increase the item-component of their toolkit by acquiring a pile of Legendaries, and Spelltomes were a relatively cheaper alternative for generating versatility.
Thus, for the last martial art of this session, Henry tested whether the Scholar Primary could be a potential candidate for A Thousand Tool’s main Class, while also tackling the holy grail of upgrading the Class’s viability.
Having more Spelltomes than anyone, access to the research of most Scholar Primary traditions, and a heap of combat refinement experience (most recently, Dancing-Stone Architecture and Sibylline Auguries), he worked to optimise Page-Society Connoisseurship’s Spelltome configurations and techniques.
In a 1v1, his improved version of the original style was 48% equal to standard Martial Class Primaries for a Scholar with unlimited cash, or 42% for the budget-conscious. Fusing Connoisseurship with previous martial arts, he bumped that figure to 53% in an ultra-glass-cannon hybrid with a War-Priest’s Duty Necromancer for a Secondary Class. A more balanced, three-style hybrid of a Starhunter Earthfriend Secondary plus Nomad Sabre’s stance switching got to 58%. A four-style hybrid of the last combo plus the Construction and Landworker skills of Dancing Stone-Architecture got to 64%...
***
By the closure of his 19-year-long investigation into The Trickster God, in addition to DTIM, Henry had conducted half a thousand other types of analysis to slice Karnon from different angles. 141 of these corroborated DTIM’s conclusion that Henry and his guild would be wiped out - of these, 113 also eliminated Ramiro and The Slum Empire and/or Berbahaya and The Church. 42 analyses indicated the others as targets but not Henry. 73 led to miscellaneous mischief that varied in severity between another pantsing and the planet being destroyed by an expansion of The Maelstrom. The remaining 266, the majority, were inconclusive; as with anything to do with humans, there was space for randomness and indeterminacy, and some mysteries in Karnon’s background had been unsolvable, like how the God had survived his escape into The Maelstrom and whether he was, in fact, an orphan, his pre-Laughing-Sons infancy being unrecorded. Karnon, as he'd once claimed when they'd met Princess Pateela, might not be a human.
Anyway, having generated a vast map of possibilities, Henry readied himself mentally for whatever would happen, good, bad, or strange.
One of the low-probability positive outcomes, the ‘Boredom Acceleration Finale’, was that The Trickster God might just have Henry execute his original plan sooner. For that and similar possibilities, Henry made two preparations.
One was boosting himself to Tier-8, enough to utilise the Spelltomes he'd won in the cooking competition. Based on the rate of his miracle level-ups, he should have hit that level around his 10th session, in four days or seventy-seven years. There was, however, a method Henry'd discovered to propel himself to Tier-8 immediately, although it would come with a traumatising cost.
A small mystery had been why his first literary miracle had been awarded for his ultimate pleb-bait when he’d penned many works of a superior artistic standard during that same Overdream session. His initial hypothesis had been that the miracle evaluation system had allocated the story bonus points for the narrative around it of him attempting to bridge the historical chasm between the pleb and the patrician. This seemed like the type of pointless extraneous factor Saana would be designed to account for, pushing a pro-pleb agenda.
But after obtaining that miracle from the throwaway love-quadrilateral story he’d written in a few hours, he’d realised that his earlier judgement on the evaluation system might have been an over-estimation, that the true mechanism was much more sinister. What both the ultimate pleb-bait and the love-quadrilateral had in common, and what made them distinct from his other writings, was that they related to events in Saana, the characters being players. Henry, a patrician, had naturally avoided spoiling the rest of his stories with the gauche, quick-to-date aesthetic of video gaming by setting them in the real-world of 2050. If his guess was correct, though, the evaluation system had not been rewarding him for this tasteful choice, which would impart his works with the culturally-relevant timeless quality necessary to enter the literary canon. Instead, it had been penalising these marvels because their contents bore no actual relevance to the game universe. Indeed, disgusting. Saana, in yet another case of terrible design, was encouraging its players to squander their skills on worthless endeavours.
He’d since confirmed this abominable hypothesis through a survey of all recorded miracles.
Now, Henry would have usually ignored this insight - game level-ups were hardly worth compromising his artistic integrity. However, with threats looming, despite the scars it would inflict on his soul, he made the Faustian deal. He took the immaculate talents he’d been so lovingly cultivating on his grand tour of all literature ever written and used them—which should only ever have been used for good—to commit a crime against humanity and himself.
Marking his gravest defeat to The Trickster God yet, Henry boosted himself to Tier-8 by writing about the game. In the last years of this Overdream session, intruding even into his dedicated literature hours, he tortured his artistic sensibilities pumping out manuscript after manuscript on the insights he’d gained thus far that Saana would judge revolutionary instead of trash as it should have. He churned out a monograph on the neurophysiology of Nomad Sabre’s stance-switching, a compendium of Kemenrang’s Death Training research, a meditation manual based on Odayakan Stretching, a primer on Wankalgalese tea-craft, a secret history of the No’Are, a discourse on The Triple Dragon fusion of Sea, Grass, and Wingless Dragon, an encyclopaedia of cross-cultural combat-gags, a twenty-volume annal of Karnon’s chronology...
All composed line by painful line because the miracle evaluation system also penalised automated creations...
A mountain of precious paper...desecrated…
Although deleting any trace of these accursed productions would be no trouble, this erasure would hardly heal the ache in his heart. Whenever he turned his ear to history during this, the most debased arc of his saga yet, he heard the ghosts of his Ultrapatrician literati forebearers wailing in lamentation. No, our chosen son, do not go gentle into that pleb trite!
But he did.......but he did......
Sigh.
The second preparatory measure was much less harrowing than the first. Henry—in case he was plunged into a situation dire enough to need his ‘full’ fighting capacity rather than separate, individual arts—performed a quick study of the remaining styles in the kung-fu side-climb, then synthesised all 84 together to finalise the unperfected, humanly-possible-to-construct version of A Thousand Tools that would be available for public demonstration and consumption, a supremely-cerebral, all-encompassing martial method that covered combat technique, theory, mentality, philosophy, multi-weapon training drills, weapon and armour customisation, environmental analysis and set-ups, opponent-research, Class-by-Class match-up advice, supplementary Civilian abilities, fake lore, cognition-enhancing drug selection, and even a canonical style of trash-talk.
***
So, with the childish snoozefests of Karnon and martial arts put to bed, let us now, the adults, have some fun with the most sensual segment of this saga. Aside from that minor interruption at the tail end, during his literary climb, Henry'd continued his 8th-century rendezvous with the scholars of Tang, the skalds of Scandina—
End of Volume 3, Part II - Steppencripple
Next up: Volume 3, Part III – Love in the Time of Cripple