Gen quite liked the barracks. The Fort had undergone so many overhauls that it was almost impossible to believe it was the same building. Modern design sensibilities took over the floorplan, along with a few modern amenities. They built a plumbing system from scratch, installed regular and long-burning torches once the Goblins finally got off their murder-trip for long enough to restart trade, and even made sure everyone who was important got a corner office on the first or second floor. The crowning jewel, though, was the annex. It was an entirely new structure attached with a secure hallway, and though it wasn’t built like ‘part’ of the Fort, it would be nearly impenetrable from the outside. One of the cadets- named Elson- had been one of the few actually builders in the Old World, an architect and DIY homebuilder, and he took up a form of magic based on accounts from Ayala. Apparently, before the Gomen came the Dwarves, who were a middling race of miniature stature that were adept builders with special talent for reinforcing structures using magic. They were the very same peoples that made the Walled City in which they resided. The walls weren’t especially impressive now- some RDX was more than enough to collapse a gate, after all- but with magic fed in, it would have been nigh impossible. Even residual magic before their departure had made the walls of the city difficult to siege for decades. With a new talent emulating that power, they could sleep soundly.
Elson wasn’t as good at it as the dwarves were, but with Gen giving him almost all of the accessible External Mana, when it wasn’t needed at least, his powers kept the fort and the fancy new bunker protected, and even enhanced the walls a little. He tried not to dwell on the fact that the only reason he needed an insanely secure bunker was because he was in insane amounts of danger at any given moment, focusing more on how cool it was to have one in general. It wasn’t entirely his, though- he shared a back room with Kat, sure, but it also had the Facility. The Facility was their test-bed for magic and magical accessories, a wide-open room kitted out to the best of their capabilities. It had clay jars of various reagents that might have some magical effect, wands and rods and staves of all shapes and sizes, and even some (reluctantly relinquished) daggers of his own, in case someone focused on a more combat-oriented magic. They had robes and suits, capped tubs of blood and consecrated water, and also a snack-bar and functional bathroom. It was basically everything a training mage could want.
The three of them- Gen himself, Kat, and the Conduit- had gathered in the training area. They had been escorted by a very curious Merrilyn, who had been doing theory-work with her ‘programmers’ at the time- and Netya, the Gomen captain of the guard. He was constantly wary, no doubt accustomed to the way carnage seemed to track the three humans in the room and Gen especially. He was impressively muscular, filling out his leather armor much better- while his legs were simply massive, his previously underutilized arms and chest were trained to such a degree that they might have been comparable to some bodybuilders back in the Old World. He had a few new scars, no doubt part of the reason he seemed so uncomfortable with three humans being in one room. Merrilyn, for her part, was dressed in a wizardly get-up. She wore a long, ornate robe, complete with a hood that hung about her shoulders. She filled that out nicely, but Gen made a point of not noticing. Kat was already getting a bit possessive as it was, after all, and regardless of if Merrilyn was off her rocker, she was still a girl.
Their group of five stood in an ambiguous circle, each facing inwards. The Conduit had drawn the ‘circle’ to the best of her memory, an intricate web of geometric shapes. There were Squares within circles within squares, triangles dancing in rows, and some corner-to-corner connections that a topologist would deem impossible, but there was no magic. The five of them just gawked at it, desperately trying to replicate the girl’s night in the tunnels. It seemed pointless, though. Not even she had felt any sort of reaction. “Alright, that didn’t work. Any idea why?” He asked, making eye contact with Merrilyn. She shrugged. “Fresh blood?” She asked, and Netya instantly skittered back out of arms reach. For a guy with such brutish legs, he was startlingly nimble, and Gen couldn’t help but feel bad for him. Having the captain of the guard on Merrilyn duty wasn’t fair, even if it was necessary, and it he seemed just a wee bit traumatized.
The Conduit coughed pointedly, and they froze in place. Merrilyn was jabbing her middle-finger’s fingernail at the poor guy’s wrist while he tried to keep her at bay without hurting her. They both turned- along with the amused Gen and Kat- to look at the nameless girl. She shook her head. “I think there’s a bit more to it. You’d either have to kill him, not that you should,” she said, pausing to check if Merrilyn had actually paid attention to the last bit. The Imposter pouted lightly, displeased, but she nodded. “…or find a way to make this more meaningful. This shape had power, but I think it had a lot more to do with the voice that swamped out all the rest. I mean, we haven’t found anything else with de-facto ‘power’, have we?” She asked. She honestly didn’t know- going AWOL kind of threw you out of ‘new magic discovery’ mailing lists. Merrilyn nodded, contemplative. “I think ‘control’ is about the only thing,” she said, comfort oozing from every word. All four of them felt just a bit more relaxed, which actually set them a little on edge- the Imposter was apparently in a very ‘people person’ mood today, and it was too easy to forget how dangerous she was on days like those. Netya especially looked worried, letting go of her wrists and getting some distance between them.
“In any case,” the Conduit said, “There’s something else to the ‘boiling’ bit. I think you actually kind of talked about another example.” Kat nodded sagely. “Jim and his ‘mind over matter’, yes. He never mentioned any boiling, but maybe his was just a slow burn?” Gen tried not to groan. James had stolen away Jim, and whether or not that was the right thing to do, it was a pain in the ass. Merrilyn still hadn’t quite forgiven him for ‘accidentally’ letting her favorite test subject escape, either. “That raises the most important question,” he said, “the thing we’ve all been waiting for.” The others looked at him, puzzled. “Jim got a big power-up when he finally did his fancy ‘break-thru’ thing, but what did you get? For all that we know, he didn’t sacrifice anything, but he still got just as much power, if not more.”
The Conduit smacked her forehead. “Silly me! I never even thought to try to find out what my superpower was, nope.” Gen scowled. “You’ve got us here, this time. What have you tried?” She sighed, thinking it over. “All sorts of chants and tricks with focusing my will, with pretty much no results.” He nodded- at least she was complying, albeit reluctantly. “We’re going to give that ‘vibration’ bit a shot. I think you shook yourself so hard that your body lost track of where it was,” he said. She gawked at him. “You what?” she asked, incredulous. He shrugged. “Quantum mechanics, or something or another. Sure, it’s old news, but maybe it’s where your talent lies.
“I got the implication, yeah. I meant what kind of magical fantasy-land power has Quantum Entanglement in it?” She said, disgusted. “If it’s any consolation,” Merrilyn chimed in, “I went for programming!” The woman smiled refreshingly, practically beaming at her. The nameless girl gave up. She focused, swirling her energies about. She really had no idea how to use the stuff, but thankfully, that shouldn’t matter. The others watched patiently as nothing happened. “We’ve got to move popcorn to the top of the ‘to-invent’ list,” Kat said. “Is there even corn?” Gen asked, curious. They’d seen a lot of stuff similar to Earth, but rarely anything one-to-one. Kat shrugged. “I think I spotted a wild plant that may or may not be domesticated into something like corn on my last jog,” she said, “but the area it was in was guarded by Bearstrosities, so I didn’t get a good look.” Gen sighed. “Tell me about infestations soon,” he said. “It’s taken a lot of work to get the forest as clean as it is. Anything that takes over the vacancies will spread like wildfire.” Kat started a smug retort about wildfire and bears, but they were cut off by a gentle thrumming. It felt a lot like home- like the gentle hum of a thousand electronics. They turned back to the nameless girl, only to realize she was shimmering. They could hardly even see her.
Suddenly, she wasn’t there at all, but in the opposite corner of the room. She was shimmering for a moment longer, levitating in the air, before falling to the floor unceremoniously. She groaned. “I can’t feel my arms,” she said. Merrilyn put a hand on her chin, studying the scene. “Where did all the air go?” She asked, quizzically. “It’s magic, Merrilyn,” Kat replied, smug. Merrilyn processed that for a moment. “Fair enough.”
“I can’t feel my legs, either,” the nameless girl said. She still lay there, almost entirely unmoving- frozen still except for her thankfully functional lungs and throat. “Get her some food and water,” Gen ordered Netya, walking over to the immobile girl and pulling her up into a sitting position. She flopped about, hardly capable of maintaining the position even once he dragged her over to lean against the wall. The big man came back with a bowl and a plate of little green fruits, and with some effort, the Conduit finally got herself under control.
“That answers that question,” Gen said. The Conduit crossed her arms and sighed, furrowing her brows. “Alright, so I can teleport,” she said, “but what does it all mean?”
“We’ve got a lot of unknowns to deal with, but this is a step in the right direction.”
“How, though?” She asked, puzzled. “I mean, we know how I got out of the tunnel, but we pretty much already knew that.”
“It’s not so much the ‘getting out’ part as the ‘walking away with some random Goblin’. Could you have walked away from this? I bet it gets harder with distance, too.”
“Are you trying to imply that I burned my ability to use names for a little power boost?”
“Yeah, that much is certain. It’s also quite possible that giving it up is the reason you can do magic at all,” Gen confirmed, nodding. “Jim once said that the ‘size of the container’ mattered as much as what you did with it. That was why he did the whole ‘Internal Alchemy’ gig, to make a container for all could hold all that power.”
“Oooh!” Kat exclaimed, excited. “I think you’re onto something. Remember when we tried to give him some External Mana?” She asked.
They had run a number of tests with Jim when he was with the City of Man. One such test had been to try to see if they could feed him enough power to ‘level him up’, as he put it. There was no such luck. The mana was only useful for super basic circulation, the kind that everyone else did. He couldn’t utilize it to do any of his fancy tricks, as though it was something else entirely. “Maybe he got all that power by choosing some rules and sticking to it,” she concluded. Merrilyn shook her head. “There’s problems with that, too. What me and the programmers are doing is ‘choosing rules’, after all. We can’t just go off and do Kat’s wind magic, can we?” Gen sighed. “I’d think it’d have more to do with the fact that he gave something up. It seems like specializing was the real asset,” he said, and the two girls promptly glared at him.
There was much bickering and back-and-forth, with the Conduit just desperately trying to follow the conversation. Apparently, it was something that was fairly routine for the group, at least judging by the tone they took. It was more like an inside joke than an argument, even if they looked like they were ready to rip each-other’s throats out. The Adventurer was the first to bow out- Kat seemed to have something else in mind. Gen and Merrilyn kept at it, arguing the intricacies of this scenario or that scenario, but she refocused her attention on the Conduit.
“It just occurred to me that you’ve had the voices going the entire time and you haven’t said anything about it,” she said, half-whispering.
The Conduit shrugged. “Last time, it bailed me out, but they haven’t seemed to be saying anything too important. Honestly, I’m not sure what opened up the floodgates. Judging by what set it off last time, it’d be how much blood the General has on his hands.”
Kat cringed. “Well, what are they saying? Humor me.”
“There’s lots of little thoughts coming through. The moment I ran into Gen, they started screaming ‘Run from Captain Hook’, but since then, it’s spread out. A good chunk is saying ‘the British are coming’,”
Kat shot a glance over to Gen and took in his motif. She tried desperately not to laugh. “Is that all?” She asked, doubly curious. Prophetic voices from the beyond were neat and all, but these were interesting in their own way.
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“Quite a few are demanding I compliment your butt,”
“Hey!”
“…while others are more focused on the fact that I teleported across the room. Apparently, that fucked with the voices somehow, though It’s not clear how.” She concluded, sighing. “It’s a lot less fun having, having to deal with all of it at once.”
Kat couldn’t argue with that. “Tell us if they say something important, okay?” She asked, emphatic. If there was a chance they knew something their little group didn’t, they had to take it. Danger lurked around every turn, after all. Just in the past month, several new groups of predators popped up, endangering their trade routes. They had to deal with a particularly nasty threat from a few Gomen who were quite certain the humans had outstayed their usefulness. To be absolutely fair, they had, but the dissenters wouldn’t be arguing that point any time soon. The most troubling thing was probably the constant raids by the Rebellion. They never seemed to do any lasting damage, but they harried caravan after caravan, and no matter how many escorts they sent, they could never so much as stop them, let alone catch them. The Songstress in particular was a pain in the ass. Half the time, the guards would blink themselves to sleep and wake up several days later, leaned up against overturned wagons and carts. Earplugs were effective enough, but they had less casualties if they just let the rebels have their way, so it was an odd sort of balancing act. They tussled and tugged, but it rarely came to bloodshed. At the same time, disrupting the caravans was starting to cause enough trouble that there’d need to be more permanent measures taken.
Kat didn’t like ‘permanent measures’. She wasn’t too happy with the Rebellion as it was, even if she more or less understood their motives and methods, but she certainly didn’t want to see them obliterated entirely. She had been to the old home of the Kaenid before renovations and homesteading began, and frankly, it had made even her doubt her loyalties. There’s a decent chance that if she came in late like James, she’d have deserted, too. For all of his faults, though, she trusted Gen. Loved him, even. That being that, she was still pretty pissed she didn’t even know his real name. She gave up asking around the time she realized he didn’t remember it, either.
The nameless girl shrugged. “I’ll let you know, sure. I’m mainly waiting for that one voice to take over again. They seemed to know what they were doing.”
“That reminds me- Netya, can you come over here?” Kat called out to the big man practically cowering in the corner of the room. He nodded, ‘gracefully’ skittering around the other two humans- who were still arguing animatedly- to get to them.
“I am here, liege.” He said, eyes still darting about.
“Does ‘the Third Race’ mean anything to you?”
He froze, and rather than darting about, his eyes locked swith Kat’s own. He broke out into a cold sweat, and finally, he looked away. “That’s a tough question. Everyone knows the races. You’ve got the ‘Angels’ and the ‘Dragons’-“ He said, slowly and hesitantly. Kat cut him off.
“Wait, that’s English!” She exclaimed. She had plenty of time to learn the common language when she was crippled, and damn if that wasn’t just English. The man shrugged, raising his eyebrows. “They go by many names, like most of the Old Ones, yes.” Kat wrangled her curiosity into check. The implications of that rabbit hole could wait.
“There’s the Angels, the First to emerge, then the Dragons for the Second, the Fair for the Third. The chances of running into any of them would be virtually none, though.”
Kat clued in. “According to the Conduit, one of her Voices implied that humans were the Third Race. What would that mean?” She asked.
The muscle-bound man started another staring match, but this time, it broke off quickly. He strained some chuckles out of his throat, which sounded a little more like choking, really. “You lot have such a sense of humor, yes?” He said. When Kat didn’t provide the punchline, he broke down. She ran over to him as he fell to his knees, trying to catch him, but the man was like a sack of rocks. He hunched over, mumbling a slurry of words in a language she didn’t understand. She tried spelling her ears, but it was to no avail. Judging by the stricken look on his face, there was a decent chance he wasn’t saying ‘words’ at all.
Kat wasn’t sure what to make of that. For all his quirks, Netya had been pretty sturdy. She rubbed his back gently, hoping to coax him out of whatever panic attack had taken him. She wondered what this could mean. The ‘Third Race’ comment had seemed pretty irrelevant at time, but apparently it was every bit as important as the rest of the message. “Did you break my toy?” Merrilyn asked, incredulous. Kat turned, finally noticing the fact that the other half of their little group had stopped bickering. By the time the other two came over, the big man had finally calmed down a little bit. “Ayala was right,” he whimpered, “as she always is.”
“What happened?” Gen asked.
“He was doing fine until I asked him about the ‘Third Race’, then he broke into hysterics.” Kat explained.
“Of course he did,” Merrilyn sighed. “Haven’t you lot been paying attention?”
“For the record, I’ve only been ‘here’ for like a day,” the Conduit said.
“I haven’t forgotten,” she growled, “but that’s not the important bit. The denizens all place a huge amount of importance on the Order of Emergence.”
Gen nodded. “I did hear that the Goblins were unique in that they were among the first Twenty. The seventeenth, I think?”
Merrilyn smiled, appeased. “According to old lore, they were actually capable of challenging even the Ninth Race, which is doubly notable. Hopping up more than four or five places is practically unheard of. The fact they were merchants for small fries like the Gomen or the Kaenid for so long is just as insane, by this world’s standards. People sort of assumed it was ally just mythology, and that they were some offshoot of the ‘real Goblins’.”
That gave him pause. “So, Race order is power?” He asked, curious. She thought that over carefully, and then shook her head. “I’m not quite sure if that’s right. There’s something else going on, perhaps.”
“The voices are demanding that I do something more interesting,” the Conduit said. “I don’t think they can hear us anymore, maybe not since I used my teleportation ability, so they’re bored.”
The others glared daggers at her, and she threw her hands into the air. “Hey! Don’t shoot the messenger!” She exclaimed.
“Last time one of us got bored,” Gen growled, “we went for a ride on a Dragon-worm.”
Kat shoved him a bit and huffed. “There was more to it than that, I think,”
Merrilyn just looked at the nameless girl, unamused. “You’re going to jinx it,” She said.
“Jinxes aren’t real,” the Conduit retorted. “It’s just numbers, when you boil it down. Isn’t that half of what you guys do, with your ‘Programming’ stuff?”
Merrilyn nodded, but her eyes never seemed to move off her. “Yes, but the other half is magic. The kind that places a lot of importance on banal, mythical things. Like Jinxes, for instance.”
She opened her mouth to argue and promptly shut it. She really didn’t have an argument for that, and the others went silent too. The only sound left was Netya’s agitated rocking and whimpers, and they persisted through awkward still. Nothing happened for a good while, and finally, Kat began to chuckle nervously. Gen joined in. “It’s nothing,” he said, as the entire twenty-man platoon of Programmers, who had been doing ‘group practice’ outside, burst into the room.
“Mistress!” One exclaimed, a rail-thin man who had been in the group from the start. “…and General”, he added, off-hand.
“What is it, Steven?” She asked.
“The Rebellion is at our gates, demanding we accept their surrender, or something or another.” He said, saluting as he finished his report. In some ways, Gen envied how effectively the woman had whipped them into shape, but he’d have little luck using the methods she had, for a few reasons. More importantly, though, the Rebellion was surrendering? He had been quite clear that was only to happen in one situation- the advent of a greater threat. For all his subordinates complained about the Rebellion’s raids, they had also cleaned the Forests and Jungle so thoroughly that they only had to deal with a fraction of the threats it would otherwise possess. Really, fatalities had plummeted under the system, and even if only a third of the Caravans made it, that was as much as the city ever used to get. They staffed each with a third of the escorts, a third of the Goblins traders, and every bit as much produce. The autonomous farming towns needed a tiny fraction of the village guards they had relied on, which was a huge boon to production. In reality, the Rebellion was every bit as capable and useful as he had hoped, leaving him with sorting out the details. James was at the helm, too, and just by proxy Gen’s respect for the man had increased tenfold. He was far-sighted and useful alone, but he at the helm of the group, he might have even been Gen’s equal, provided a fair field. What could bring the Rebellion to its knees, so early?
They hurried out, the Conduit stumbling after them, and Netya only barely clambering to his feet to drag along. A number of Goblins were standing outside the fort and in the vicinity, starting from the door and trailing all the way down the abyss, then back up again, and off into the city in the distance. They stood at set distances in little groups of two, and when the General emerged, the nearest saluted. “Orders, sir?” One rasped, a perfect little soldier. “Let them in and surround them,” he said. Just as the Goblin puffed up its chest, ready to shout, he held up a hand. “Tell them to get the ‘real earplugs’ in, first.” It nodded, and finally exhaled, howling out his words in the choppy language of the Goblins. It was almost perfectly tailored to something like this, a fraction of the time used for every word except ‘earplugs’, which was of newer invention, a little more complicated.
The next one in the distance saluted, waiting just a moment to see if the message was over, and hollered once more. As the four of them ran, and the Captain of the Guard hobbled along far behind, the message traveled quickly ahead. At least, until Kat went full speed. Gen could feel the city’s mana acquiesce her a sum as she tapped into it. He could hear the sonic boom as she tore away. It wasn’t a real sonic boom, but a function of the forcible tear she was making in the air ahead of her. It was a vacuum, and in conjunction with the air shoving her forward, she practically flew along the grass, and with a single leap and a truly silly amount of mana wasted, she crossed the chasm entirely. The goblin message chain barely kept up with her, having to dip down into the abyss, and they were neck and neck. The Adventurer flung herself upwards, decelerating and gliding onto the great wall of the Walled City. She had left behind the rest of the group, but that was fine. She hadn’t had an excuse to go all out in quite a while.
The Goblins and Gomen scattered, running about as they prepared to let in the rebels, and no doubt, they’d be done by the time Gen arrived. Kat refocused on the wall, climbing up it at a breakneck pace. Finally, she mounted it, and she could see beyond, and below. The forest had changed since the last time she’d been atop the wall, with more clearings and more trails winding away from the hill into the wilds. The forest had changed, and so had the rebels. They were rougher, with tattered clothes and wild accessories made of furs and plants. No one had access to shaving- it had never been necessary for the Goblin or even the Gomen, who both had naturally hairless faces- and their actual hair was unkempt or long. They really had been a militia for this long, living off the lands and roaming endlessly, and it showed. They were all kneeling. Kat could see some of their faces as they gawked at the city they hadn’t seen properly in so long, and the animosity that radiated off of many, as well as quite a few people she was pretty sure she had never seen before. It was a tide of people, nearly as many as they had within the city, and a homecoming. The prodigal sons and daughters of the City of Man were home, and it felt like they had never left.
She couldn’t help but wonder why.