I swallowed my fear and anger, and immediately went to work. First, I made a public demand for Nozzle’s release. Then I petitioned Axle directly, sending his office a message with a request to meet face to face. Finally, I started making the media rounds.

Every for-profit news affiliate on the planet wanted my thoughts, and I didn’t hold back. I explained my desire to improve conditions for gobbs alongside every other species living in Storage.

A rising tide lifts all ships, after all.

I described in detail the life gobbs led, and described my humanitarian trips to Storage, leaving out what I did to the slavers. The harmony gobbs found inside Storage, living as part of its greater ecosystem, was beautiful. Natural. The way I described them, they didn’t want or need outside intervention.

My campaign categorically denied accusations of mass-immigration policies we were accused of supporting. The gobbs, I explained, had no desire to leave Storage. No desire to live on Nu-Earth or any other planet in the BuyMort system. Storage was their home, and I wanted to pull everyone else out of it to let them have it.

Storage was not someplace people should be sent, I explained. It was wild, untamed, and perfect for gobb inhabitants who had been there longer than any of the rest of us. I petitioned and received long-term records from the Knowle Institute of History that helped me paint a new picture of Storage in the public’s eyes.

Instead of being someplace they all had to be afraid of, it would become what it was meant to be in the first place. A storage facility for BuyMort, where goods passed through or sat in between sales. It could be a place for the gobbs, since they clearly wanted it for themselves. But under my rule, I promised, nobody would be sent there simply for not having enough morties.

I promised that I would reduce the need for such an outlet on our system and bring it back into harmony for everyone.

Axle and I had garnered a gargantuan amount of attention to our campaigns, which brought with it the eyes and ire of trillions. Public engagement in the election rose to an all-time high. Nobody could help but discuss my promises around Storage, whether they agreed with them or not. The news cycle couldn’t let go of the story, and for a solid week I did very little other than petition Axle for the release of my friend.

Some groups even started releasing ads on the issue. I received one that showed the gobbs in a sympathetic light, living rustic and semi-tribal lives in the midst of an overgrown metal-twisted ruin in the Storage tunnels. It urged that we let the gobbs live as they live, and have a home of their own.

A different one showed them rioting, smashing and looting a worksite, and imploring that the gobbs be confined to Storage, because they were genetically criminal and unsafe to be around.

Though the two sides were coming at it in very different ways, I smiled to think that they all were pushing people towards my end goal.

Gobbs were best left to themselves, I told all of BuyMort. They were self-sufficient in Storage, and any attempt to remove them from their home world would cause violence between the species to continue. As part of my campaign’s policy push, I told all of BuyMort that gobbs wouldn’t hurt them if only they were left alone. That all the raids in Storage were nothing but waste, brought on by eons of violent, imperialist relations between the species.

I had been waiting for the gobb story to eventually make its way into the mainstream conversation around our campaigns, and released prepared policy statements focused around retracting BlueCleave, and stopping the unnecessary military conflicts that plagued us all. Part of my demilitarization effort was going to be focused in Storage, where BlueCleave was stretched so thin as to be ineffective. They couldn’t help anyone there, so I told the multiverse we needed to perform a controlled evacuation of the megastructure.

It was also undeniable that gobbs were often used as slave labor on other worlds, but in every major planet my campaign laid out plans to replace their labor with contracts from the CloneMort facilities all affiliates gained access to once they leveled up high enough. Since most affiliates were associates of Silken Sands, the transition would be seamless. I even had projections for how much more basic soil, a staple-sale of the poor, would potentially sell for under my new system.

CloneMort used primarily clay to create their temporary robots, so soil of all types was always in demand for the strange BuyMort service. The phrase “dirt-poor” had never been so apt.

I timed that last tidbit of information with a tour of the major homeless encampments on Nu-Earth, starting with Los Angeles. My campaign and I brought summoning fobs from Terna’s World, and delivered large crates of food, clean water, and other basic necessities to the LA basin, New New Dehli, the Shanghai crater, and even the bottom of Rapture. The people living without shelter didn’t have much under Axle’s regime, but they still had one vote each.

While Axle’s campaign relied on his base and donors to carry him through, I went looking for people who didn’t bother voting, and convinced them to give it a shot.

Potential voters the world around believed me, too. There had long been an underlying fear of the gobbs in the BuyMort system at large. They were well known, very few worlds avoided their use, and every single major culture and affiliate had horror stories of gobb raids. Worst of all, no power structure within BuyMort had ever produced a real solution to the problem. It wasn’t difficult for me to present the voting populace with a picture of hope.

All I had to do was tell them I had a plan, and that it would help them. That my plan would help everyone. Change was a potent campaign message. In regard to political figures in a democratic system, populism beats establishment like rock beats scissors.

Nozzle’s capture had signaled a major escalation in the campaign, and my response was two-part. I had the public persona to maintain, but I was also working behind the scenes to free my friend. A HONI agent from Midnight got in touch and provided me with a packet of intelligence on the matter a few days after I had asked Justin Lee for help.

The various intelligence agencies operating under major affiliates liaised with one another, and while the interactions were usually monitored to ensure overall associate loyalty and compliance, some things were just not closely guarded secrets. That made them fair game to convert into morties, and my request had too many working parts attached to keep it fully secret.

While I couldn’t see any specifics about his current location or details about the security around him, BlueCleave had hired out his capture to a third party firm. Their reports and video recordings told me the story.

Their hired guns started out in a familiar bamboo-walled tunnel town in Storage, speaking to people wearing rags. An old man in particular talked at length about his encounter with me. The mercenaries used hovercraft to traverse the tunnels and seek out my gobbs camping locations. One after the other, their ship slowly flew over abandoned gobb campsites, stopping to drop off high tech traps.

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I watched in frustration as a fleet of dozens of specialized ships wandered Storage in my footsteps, setting traps for my friend. One of their snares eventually succeeded, capturing the gobb ranger when he approached to inspect it. To his tribe, he had just vanished. Fortunately, it looked like his giant spider, Babyeater, was not captured with him. Nozzle had dismounted to inspect the glowing trap.

As soon as harsh, vibrant beams of light shot out in a radius around the gobb, a team of humans and hobbs portalled in to effect his capture with a simple tranquilizer dart. In the background, my supernaturally sharp eyes spotted his spider lurking and watching the entire event.

It was over in a heartbeat too. They portalled in, darted him through the laser beam bars of the trap, and portalled back out with his limp form. The gobb’s rifle was left smoldering on the ground in their wake, sliced in two by the trap.

All of it left me where I had started. Axle had my friend and I had to get him back. Knowing how exactly they had found him in the jungles of Storage did little to soothe my anxiety around his capture. He had returned to the lake, where we had spent a peaceful night feeding his tribe. The trap had been laid on the shore of the deep body of murky water.

Not that the location mattered. They had laid traps in the concrete ruins, the cold upper storage levels, and every grassland or swamp within a thousand square miles. I had brought disaster upon his people simply by visiting them. By making friends, I had doomed them.

The stark difference between my search for Nozzle and Axle’s search reminded me of his network. He was capable of fielding hundreds of freelancers to seek out a tidbit of information about me that could help him in his campaign. He probably wouldn’t even notice the cost either. I never had, when I’d sat in his place.

During that first week back to Nu-Earth, I slept very little. Most of my time was spent on the campaign trail, and the rest was spent trying to find my way to Nozzle’s prison, one way or the other. To that end, I put out feelers among the handful of BlueCleave hobbs that had come out to endorse my campaign.

They had been unceremoniously fired, to a hobb, but they still had contacts inside the organization. Friends, mentors, family. BlueCleave wasn’t a job to the hobbs that served, it was a way of life. My return had caused major splits in loyalty. Once Phyllis was publicly removed from service for endorsing me, the number of hobb defections spiked by over eight-hundred percent. Disloyalty to the affiliate was against BlueCleave’s terms of service, and the firings were compulsory, but it still made headlines.

I put all of the hobbs who defected to work in my campaign, restoring their lost wages and finding housing for them near or in their former homes. Axle refused to comment beyond a blanket statement about morale in BlueCleave being a problem his Leadership Council was hard at work on. So I countered his statement by promising pay raises and changes in deployment.

The back and forth continued in public, but my anger toward the Knowle grew the longer he kept my friend imprisoned. His office had ignored all of my requests, and only used the short video of Nozzle politely asking to speak with me as evidence of my pro-gobb policies that would hurt Nu-Earth.

So when one of my BlueCleave contacts came through with the gobb’s location, I immediately relocated and began work on his release. Axle had Nozzle hidden in the basement of his own tower, in the heart of Prescott. It was surrounded by BlueCleave soldiers on the best of days and that military presence was only increased with the unrest my arrival had caused.

Where I would have stormed the facility before my return, instead I staged a protest. My campaign announced that BlueCleave members, unhappy with Axle’s totalitarian rule, had given us his location. We then called for all concerned affiliate members to shut down the tower with a mass protest.

Hundreds of my supporters came to aid me once I put the call out through my various media contacts. By the time I arrived on the scene, the crowds were already formed. Each major road into the tower was blocked by my protestors, carrying signs and shouting slogans.

My anti-magic helmet infiltrated the building’s security and provided me with on-sight verification that Nozzle was in the building. It also served as proof of my claim, once the media got involved. The footage showed hundreds of individual outlines, from my point of view outside the structure. My helmet’s ‘magic’ had infiltrated the security camera strips that were installed almost everywhere in the building, and gave me live fairy fire outlines from the footage. Before in-house security had responded and kicked out my malicious programming, I recorded a sizable video file for the press to enjoy.

There was only one gobb-sized outline in my recording, and he was in a room by himself at the bottom of the tower’s sub basements. I gave a brief interview inside a sound bubble set by SNN staff, where I explained that my friend was being held without cause and shared my anti-magic helmet’s recordings with them. They promptly shared it with the world, and public sentiment suddenly shifted.

Over the course of a single hour, while my protest raged and went mostly ignored by Axle, his public approval ratings plummeted. The story was simple. He was using an innocent gobb to harm my political campaign. It felt dirty to the public, like cheating.

Axle responded in the worst way he could have, by trying to forcibly shut down my protest. BlueCleave security, wearing padded armor and carrying riot shields, began to emerge from the tower in lines. They pushed back my protestors before establishing energy shield barricades.

I deployed my armor and flew to the main road leading to the tower. The hobbs following Axle’s orders hesitated at the sight of me in front of them, floating in the air. When one approached to order me back, I landed, crossed my arms, and shook my head. All around us camera drones swarmed, and a small video feed in my HUD fed me the stream.

“Sir,” said the hobb in front of me, trying a different approach. “We have orders to secure this area, would you please move back?”

I activated booming voice. “Not until my friend is free. If you want to move me, you’ll have to use violence to do it.”

A few more minutes passed while the hobbs communicated with their superiors, and I stared directly up at Axle’s office. His windows were armored and tinted to the point that I couldn’t see anything, but I knew he was up there watching.

Escalation appeared to be the next step, as several hobbs in armor stepped forward and leveled grenade launchers at me and the crowd of protesters at my back. I immediately rose into the air and shouted, “Don’t!” but the hobbs fired anyway.

Classic forty-millimeter canisters of tear gas began to rain down on the protesters, but I snatched the first one out of the air and threw it back. Then, using my height advantage I sought out the rest in my crowd and threw them back too.

The crowds started to panic, so I used my helmet’s booming voice feature to try and calm them, shouting for those who wanted to leave to do so carefully, and to avoid hurting anyone nearby. I continued grabbing the tear gas and throwing it back to the hobbs who had launched it, but I could only cover so much ground.

Then the news in my helmet caught my attention. Another flying figure, wearing armor similar to my own, had taken to the sky and was retrieving tear gas canisters in another section of the protest. Cheers started to rise from the crowd then, as several more flying hobbs in starfish suits intervened.

Suddenly the tower's security forces were scattering as the protesters pushed closer. Starfish suit enabled hobbs used breaker gauntlet technology to destroy shields, and people surged for the tower. My peaceful protest became an angry riot in seconds. The tower in Prescott was the focal point for all news in BuyMort as crowds of my supporters and a squad of former BlueCleave starfish troopers threatened to storm its depths for my friend Nozzle.

Axle’s own starfish enabled hobbs began to deploy as the riot grew louder. They hovered in place above the roads, armor deployed and atomic breaker gauntlets glowing. My hobbs moved to engage them, and a few scattered fistfights broke out between the flying figures. Most of them restrained themselves, holding their lines and protecting the shields that remained, but the threat of impending violence grew more and more present as the hobbs faced off.

In the first smart move of his campaign, Axle folded. A new squad of his security forces emerged from the tower’s garage carrying a small green humanoid between them as the starfish troopers on both sides stood down. Nozzle blinked in the sun as I accepted him from his captors, but as soon as I dropped my armor he broke out in a wide, sharp-toothed grin.

“Your home is strange, tall-man! Strange and rude,” he said, shouting to be heard over the roar of the crowd.