Capital World Daemos
Reeve
He sat calmly in his living room in a lotus position. Everything around him was quiet, so quiet you could hear a feather falling. The perks of living in a palace that was built to a standard he could only imagine. It had been such a busy night that he deserved a moment of quiet to himself.
He was focused, however, not on the room or the quiet that he had worked so hard to build. No, instead he was intent on searching a small section of the galaxy that he was currently focused on.
Reeve was, by no means, omnipotent or omniscient. But he had developed a kind of highly focused far sight using the trio of energies he had access to that allowed him to view areas within its range. He could stretch his awareness out to roughly a quarter of the galactic area from his position currently. That range grew a little bit each time he used the ability.
It still didn’t allow him to view everything at once.
This mean that he was stuck searching each planet, star, asteroid, and system one by one. And there were a lot of them. Hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions. He was sure Alice could probably tell him the total number, but he didn’t want his determination to waver in the face of unrelenting odds.
Jax would be nine tomorrow. Reeve celebrated each birthday with Jem and Lexi, counting them. Each one filled him with a renewed determination to get his son back, if he still lived. And to rip the spine out of Boredom and feed it to her. One vertebra at a time.
He grunted in frustration, even as a small bundle on the couch behind him began to wiggle.
A small black-haired child sat up rubbing her bright violet eyes. “Daddy?” she asked inquisitively.
Reeve smiled. His daughter Amethyst had been born two years after Jax’s kidnapping. She was his light, and he guarded her safety and wellbeing jealously. She constantly wore a small necklace that he could teleport to at near-instant speed regardless of where she was. It even worked across dimensional boundaries. He had made sure of it.
“Hey, honey... sorry to wake you up. How was your nap?” he asked with a smile.
She rubbed her eyes and didn’t answer the question. Instead, the tired seven-year-old simply said, “I’m hungry.”
He chuckled. Kids were so… pure. There was so much potential with them. He could never fathom how much they mattered to their parents, spawners, or littermates up until he had kids himself. It was just one of those things that he couldn’t have understood. But now that he had children… well, those feelings were both present and at times confusing.
His eyes hardened as he walked into the kitchen attached to their living room. Normally Zee made their meals, but not too long –ago, Reeve discovered that he had a fondness for cooking. Attempted poisoning of his family aside, most of his attempts were fairly good. And he only got better over time. That, coupled with Zee’s current deployment, meant that he made most of their meals himself.
Amethyst floated into the kitchen and dropped herself into a chair at the table. “Amy, don’t use levitation in the house,” Reeve said almost absentmindedly as he cooked up several eggs and slices of meat.
“Sorry, Daddy. I forget sometimes,” she mumbled while rubbing the remnants of sleep out of her eyes. “Are you going to come to school today? Mr. Thirsk was asking if you were going to. He said you were… adadent about coming!” she said with some hopeful excitement.
“Do you mean ‘adamant’?” Reeve corrected as he sat down at the table, putting the plate in front of his daughter.
“Yes! That word,” she said before digging into the plate greedily, as only a child could.
He chuckled. “Yeah. In fact, we are meeting your Mother here shortly and will be heading that way. I think Jem is coming, too,” he mused aloud.
Amy bounced in excitement, her mouth full of food. She chewed and swallowed rapidly before saying, “Momma Jem will be there? That’s great! She never comes to school. Mr. Thirsk says she's too busy. Is she still looking for my brother?”
The question was innocent, but it tore at Reeve’s chest like an angry carnivorous reptile. He suppressed the rage that threated to come out and smiled at the little girl. “Yup! She is still looking. I am too! We go out and explore a lot, meet with new people, and ask them questions.”
She nodded. “That’s good. People should help. It’s the right thing to do.”
Reeve took her plate and stood up. Walking over to the counter, he dropped it into the sink before turning around. “Go get dressed,” he said. “Your Mom will be here soon and we can head over to meet Jem.”
She bounced up off the seat with a squeal… and kept rising. She bounced off the ceiling and, spinning in midair, flew into the living room. He heard a door slam and sounds of her rummaging through her clothes.
“And stop flying in the house!” he hollered at her with a smile. He only got a muffled response back. Seven years old. Adorable and always using her magic for ridiculous things.
Amy may have been only seven, but she already had a stronger grasp over Mana and Aether than a lot of people in the Imperium did. In fact, she was so adept at day-to-day usage of it that he and her mother often had to restrict her usage of it. No magic usage in the house was a firm rule they normally stuck to, and that he let slide when Jericho wasn’t around, due to her accidentally lighting a Praetor on fire when she was three.
He really had to look into fireproofing for his poor soldiers. Not even their enemies lit them on fire as often as they seem to combust while at home.
He shook the errant thoughts from his head when he saw Jericho coming through the front door. The pair shared a smile and he called out, “Hurry up, Amy! Mom’s here!”
A muffled reply and the sound of a closing closet door was her response. Then the door flew open and the small girl ran out and hugged her mom. “Mom! Dad is coming with us to school!”
She rolled her eyes speculatively to look at Reeve, who just shrugged. “I promised,” he explained simply.
Without responding his wife, his primary body guard and assassin, Reeve picked up the little girl and the trio headed out the front door. The long hallway leading to the elevators had Praetor Guards every sixty feet. As they walked toward the exit, every other set fell in behind them.
Reeve rolled his eyes at the display, but there was a certain visual level of security that had to be met. Even if nothing he knew of could hurt him, that didn’t mean that those around him couldn’t be hurt. The Praetors did an amazing job, regardless; he was never anything but happy with them.
The three of them chatted about how school was going, Jericho’s day-to-day while Reeve was on planet, and how excited Amy was to see Auntie Jem. Jem wasn’t home a lot. She and her fleet were often in the far corners of the galaxy searching for any news of Jax.
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Only once in the last nine years had they come close to finding the elusive god Boredom, missing her by a matter of minutes. But what she left behind proved that Jax was still alive.
Reeve shook himself out of his reverie as a ground car pulled up. The door opened and Jem smiled at them from within. “Hey there, strangers! What’s a group of fine-looking beings like you doing in a neighborhood like this?” she said.
Amy squealed and flew through the open door, much to the disapproving look from Jericho. “You’ve been letting her fly in the house again, haven’t you?” she asked accusingly.
“No idea what you’re talking about, dear,” Reeve replied. She rolled her eyes and climbed into the back with the other two ladies.
“Girls only, Daddy!” Amy said when he tried to get into the back with them.
He gasped, clutching his heart. “My own daughter, kicking me to the curb. Well... fine, then. I will just sit up there with… 114,” he said feigning pain and jumping into the front seat. Giggles followed him as he eyeballed the Nano-borne Praetor driving. “Not a word,” he said to the grinning being.
“I wouldn’t dare, Your Grace,” said the man with a five-kilometer-wide grin plastered on his smug face.
The vehicle smoothly took off along the well paved entrance to the Palace. As they drove, Reeve heard whispers in the back from the three girls. “Hey, don’t be planning any hostile takeovers until I’m not at home,” he called back to them, causing them to erupt in laughter and giggles.
Amy popped her head into the front between the two sets. “Can my cousins come over? Please, Daddy? It’s been so boring with all of you not here,” begged his daughter.
Reeve considered that. His Terrataxian children had… proliferated to the point where their world was the most densely populated by an order of magnitude. Not even Lexi’s drones were as numerous. There were so many, in fact, that they had their own council to govern interactions with him as their progenitor. It was a bit stressful, really.
“Sure, they can come over anytime, hon. But absolutely no magic in the house. Seriously,” he warned.
She gave him a huge, beaming smile that he swore was infused with some kind of cuteness enhancing magic. Then she gave him a swift peck on the cheek and retreated to the safety of the back seat for additional conspiring with his wives.
The last person to get in after them was Sansa, Amy’s maid and bodyguard. She had never forgiven herself for failing to protect Jax, and had trained herself relentlessly to become the second-most fearsome woman within the Imperium. Even more so than Jem. The only being scarier, and by a very wide margin, was his petite third wife, Jericho. Nobody fucked with Jericho, not even the independent gods who had come to work for him.
Something about the woman screamed ‘homicide’ on a galactic-wide scale.
The woman in question smirked at him, almost as if she knew what he was thinking. Then she turned back to the gossip at hand with Jem and Amy.
Reeve cleared his throat, getting the attention of everyone in the back of the vehicle. “How is everyone adapting to the first iteration of the System?” he called back curiously as the vehicle began to move.
“I don’t like it, Daddy. The numbers aren’t very high!” complained Amy with zero hesitation.
The group laughed at the little girl’s antics. “You have so much growing to do, love,” Jericho said, patting her on the head. “Those will shoot right on up there. Don’t you worry.”
Jem was the next to speak up. “It’s good. I really like it a lot. The skills repository is going to change skilled labor and combat on every level when it is finally released to the public. Even just with the Imperial Family… well, it gives us a huge advantage over everyone else.”
Reeve nodded and turned to Jericho. “It’s basic, needs work, but is an amazing first iteration!” she said, beaming at him. “Being able to see where I need improvement… and being able to share that with others is nothing short of miraculous. And the skills and abilities library you started is just… nothing short of incredible. I don’t know about this ‘experience’ thing, however. That seems a bit arbitrary.”
He nodded once more. “It is. And it’s meant to be arbitrary. The System will be designed to issue experience based on a flat value plus difficulty. I am leaving it to evolve by itself once I release it. Getting it to everyone at once, however, has proved a bit of an issue,” he admitted.
Sansa spoke up. “You will figure it out, Your Grace. You always do.”
The rest of the girls in the car nodded in agreement even as Reeve sighed in frustration. “I still have a lot of work to do, though. There are some quirks in the programming that don’t work properly. And some of the skills don’t transfer properly… don’t try, by the way,” he said.
Amy just pouted while the ladies looked thoughtful. Sansa took the lapse in silence as an opportunity to speak. “Your Grace… perhaps you are looking at this incorrectly?” she said.
He blinked and focused on the maid bodyguard. “How so?” he probed cautiously. Sansa may not be his wife… at least, not yet. But she was very close with his wives. That made any response in their presence dangerous.
“A skill is just a summary of instructions that someone is used to applying, correct?” she asked as Reeve nodded his confirmation. “Then… why don’t you allow the skills to be learned in steps? A kind of professional progression? If I learn the skill to scramble eggs and master it, then I can get the skill to poach them.”
Reeve mulled that over. It made a certain kind of sense. “If I understand what you’re saying, and I think I do, people should master each step? Like–”
He was interrupted by the women, including his daughter as they chorused, “Mastery through practice.”
He laughed a little at that. He was getting predictable. Pinching his midsection, he felt a bit of flab. It shouldn’t be possible, but his body mirrored his mindset. He was getting a bit too fat for comfort. Perhaps he was getting too comfortable.
He let the girls resume their chat as he continued to mull over what Sansa had said. He thought about it as he opened up the first iteration of the System menu, what he had taken to calling the Character Archival Record. Amy just called it the CAR and made zooming noises while giggling each time she said it.
Rolling his eyes, he pulled up his:
REEVE SILVERSTAR
RACE
DIVINE BEING
CLASS
HIGH ADMINISTRATOR
NEX
1,362,289.5
LEVEL
177
PHYSICAL STATE
HEALTHY
MENTAL STATE
HEALTHY
ATTRIBUTE
BASE
CURRENT
NEX TO INCREASE
STRENGTH
9
65
660
AGILITY
14
19
200
POWER
100
270
5600
WISDOM
20
63
640
LUCK
80
80
8100
DIVINITY
0
540
550,000
He wanted a way for others to get stronger, but he wasn’t sure what to make the advancement requirements. The base statistics for each being were built around their race’s base averages, while modifiers were quite literally purchased using accumulated NEX.
It just wasn’t enough. People were so much more than numbers, but numbers represented something that could be universally understood. Maybe abilities and skills could offset how he felt about the current iteration of the System. Maybe.
Reeve opened his abilities CAR and immediately regretted it. The System was not intuitive enough as of yet to manage such a large list, or any list at all, really. Maybe at some point in the future it would be, but right now it was like a baby: still growing, and not even aware of what it was yet. Knowing his luck, it would turn into another Alice.
He rolled his eyes at thought even as the ground vehicle came to a slow stop.
“We are here, Your Grace,” said Sansa as she exited the car and held the door open for him.
The mage exited the vehicle and opened the door for the ladies in turn. He may have been Emperor, but that didn’t give him a license to be rude. Particularly not to his wives. They all smiled at him as they exited. “Well, let’s get this show on the road,” he said as Amy giggled at his exasperation.