"Madam President, Robert Whitman is here to see you."
Elania rubbed her temples. She was currently dealing with a minor crisis, namely that a fifty-megaton explosion had detonated in an unimportant, uninhabited section of the Himalayas. China had a long history of playing dumb, diplomatically speaking, and they were playing that role to the hilt. The possibility that they might be testing a micro-tactical nuclear shell was not outside the realm of possibility and would be a cause for concern.
She sighed and nodded. "Send him in," she ordered.
It wasn't Bob's fault that every time she saw him, it was because some sort of interdimensional issue was careening towards disaster.
Her first indication that something was wrong was that the secret service agents assigned to her detail flooded the room, taking up defensive positions. The second indication was that Bob was wearing his adventuring armor and carrying his battle staff. The final indication was that for the first time, she saw Monroe in his full battle armor. The fluffy cat looked less friendly and significantly more intimidating.
"Madam President," Bob nodded his head respectfully as he came to a stop in front of her desk. "Yesterday morning, while beginning my monthly vacation in Nome, Alaska, I was abducted by an unknown group, organization, or agency." Bob's voice was flat. "The group was well informed about my itinerary and managed to drug our breakfast with, as I've been reliably informed, more sedative than is needed to put down a full-grown elephant. We were then transported to an underground bunker. These people," Bob gestured, and two badly mauled bodies fell on the floor, causing three of the younger agents to jerk their weapons up, "attempted to interrogate me. They had obtained a simple tool from Thayland that drains a small amount of the user's mana each second, which normally wouldn't be an issue, but when sedated and on Earth with no mana regeneration, it allowed them to prevent us from utilizing our skills to escape. They made the mistake of underestimating Monroe, who dealt with our captors, allowing us to free ourselves."
Elania looked at the two corpses on her carpet. A man and a woman, late twenties or early thirties, they could have been from nearly anywhere. They could be well-tanned Caucasians or very pale-skinned Middle Easterners. They lacked the epicanthic fold that would have signaled Asian decent, but beyond that, it would be difficult to tell. What was obvious were the bite and claw wounds that had killed them. She was quick to make the connection between those wounds and the aforementioned Monroe, who was sitting primly, watching the room as his tail swished lazily.
"As you escaped, where were they holding you?" she asked.
She hadn't become the President of the United States by collecting bottle caps. As prickly and difficult to corner as Bob could be, his assistance had been invaluable, and if she'd agreed to move him out of the direct chain of command, it was only because she wanted to shift him to an advisory role.
Elania hadn't needed her Secretary of Defense to tell her that Bob had some sort of insight into the system that no one else did. She'd done her best to disguise his contributions, but any competent intelligence agency with a few agents on Thayland would come to the same conclusion. His habit of disregarding any attempts to communicate with him from sources with which he was unfamiliar had done more to shelter him from the machinations of foreign powers than he'd ever know, but his abduction was the realization of one of her larger fears.
"No clue," Bob shrugged. "It was an underground bunker next to a dirt road, across from a long-abandoned gas station in the middle of a mountain pass. There wasn't anyone or anything around for miles."
Elania felt her stomach drop. "Did you, perhaps, somehow, blow that bunker up?" She asked.
Bob grinned, and she was struck by just how ferocious the man looked. Under normal circumstances, he was so quiet and unassuming that it was easy to overlook his height and his broad shoulders. Dressed in his armor and carrying his staff, the impression he gave was entirely different and rather disconcerting.
"They didn't have any identification or labels on their clothing. Even their toiletries were completely unbranded," Bob gestured to the bodies. "I doubt I'll ever know who was behind the kidnapping, but I decided to send a message." His grin widened, becoming almost feral. "I dropped a small tungsten rod on the bunker from orbit. I may not have dropped it directly on the bunker," he admitted, "But I'm pretty sure I got close enough that whoever set this whole thing up got the memo."
Elania forced herself to smile. "We will do everything we can to identify these people as well as those who abducted you," she assured him. "I can tell you that you were being held in China, and those were the Himalaya mountains."
Bob nodded thoughtfully. "I did find some magazines in Hindi, and the doctor they abducted to keep us sedated was from Bangalore. That might not mean anything in the international world of espionage, but it's something to consider." He reached down and gave Monroe's ears a rub. "Would it be possible to have a couple of the people who provide your security work with me for a couple of days?" Bob asked. "This wouldn't have happened if I wasn't both complacent and dangerously ignorant," his voice was angry, but she suspected it was directed towards himself.
Based on his psychological profile, he was likely more upset by the perceived threat to his cat, primarily, along with his friends, and less so by the threat to his person.
"Absolutely," she agreed. Ed had tried to offer Bob security before, but he'd declined. "I can have someone here within the hour."
"Thank you, Madam President," Bob gave her another nod, "I'll wait for them outside, I'm sure you're busy."
"Never doubt that we value you, Bob," Elania said before he could turn around. "We'll be treating this with the same diligence as someone abducting a member of my cabinet."
Bob nodded again and left, Monroe following in his wake, tail still swishing.
"Madam President," Andrea, the head of her detail, began, "I understand that Mr. Whitman has earned a degree of trust from your administration, but he just admitted to dropping a rod from god on China. This raises him to the same threat level as the King of Greenwold, or High Seat of the Warlocks Guild."
Elania sat down and leaned back in her chair. "Bob isn't nearly as powerful as either of them, and his motivations are much easier for us to understand," she said. "He is a man who asked the world for very little, and received exactly that. He's also lived in poverty for so long that I'm not sure he's capable of living anything but a minimalist lifestyle. If left to his own devices, he will live a quiet, peaceful life, spending most of his time in solitude save for his cat, with regular but not extended visits with the few he calls friends. So long as we don't harm or hinder his cat, his friends, or him, we don't need to worry about Bob. But for anyone who does," she trailed off, looking at the images on the massive screen on the far wall.
Andrea nodded and gestured, emptying the room of agents save herself and one other.
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Bob was still angry. Orbital bombardment was satisfying, but the problem was that he hadn't been able to direct it towards the true target of his anger. The people who had threatened Monroe and his friends were still out there.
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He understood that he had information that might be useful, but anyone who listened to that recording would know that said information would be available to everyone in just a few months. Which meant that the people who were after it were planning something. Once the drugs had cleared his system, the implications of his interrogator's interest in a double or triple conjuration affinity species were not lost on him. They wanted weapons. Someone at tier six, with a triple natural conjuration affinity, as well as an affinity crystal, could conceivably have a level one hundred and forty-four energy blast spell.
Granted, there was no way they could level the spell up that high in the time remaining before the System integration, but if they pushed, they could probably break through at least one threshold, perhaps two. A level eighty spell would still represent a degree of power that no one else on Earth possessed.
If one group of people had considered that idea, it was practically guaranteed that others had, or would, as well.
That left Bob with two choices. He could hide in his inventory, delving madly until he could reincarnate down to tier seven and take up a disguise that would hide Monroe and his identities. That had been the plan. However, he was now faced with the stark realization that these people wouldn't shy away from going after his friends.
That wasn't something he'd considered. He'd thought in terms of protecting himself, assuming that if he dropped out of contact with them for a while, that his friends wouldn't be targets. He clenched his jaw. That had been another foolish mistake.
The alternative choice was to build himself up as a bastion of strength. To become so powerful as to be unassailable. He was painfully aware of the vast gulf in power between himself and the King of Greenwold or Yorrick, but while he couldn't hope to withstand titans like those, it wasn't a stretch to say that he could stand head and shoulders above anyone else on Earth. He was certain that he was the highest level person from Earth by a decent margin, although there were a few who were closing that gap. He still expected to reach tier seven well ahead of them, though.
He'd made it a point not to draw any attention to his power. In retrospect, that had been a mistake. If he'd made it clear from the outset that anyone who fucked with him could expect to have a tungsten rod dropped on their house from orbit, he suspected the list of people looking to take advantage of him would be far shorter.
Bob closed his eyes and counted down from ten, then fifty, then one hundred. He hadn't been this angry since before he'd arrived in Thayland. All he wanted was to be left alone. He'd given up on his career, moved to another world, and they were still fucking with him.
He opened his eyes. "The definition of insanity is performing the same actions again and again, yet expecting a different result," he murmured. He'd tried avoiding conflict. He'd run from it, even. He'd taken the hits, shrugging them off. It hadn't worked. They weren't going to leave him alone. And next time might be worse. Jessica was lower level than Dave and Amanda were, by a bit, and significantly lower level than he was. The dose of sedatives she'd received could have killed her. He very deliberately didn't consider what might have happened to Monroe.
Bob was self-aware enough to realize that his relationship with Monroe was well outside the boundaries of what would be considered normal. He'd redirected his need for friendship, directing all of those energies towards Monroe. He'd been damaged rather badly as a child, then as a teen, and then as a young adult. Monroe had become his safety blanket. The only living being that had never left him, never hurt him and asked for nothing but his love. He was pretty sure a therapist would have a lot to say about the whole thing, but he was comfortable with the progress he'd made on his own. In two short years, he'd made real connections with people, made actual friends, people he cared about, who cared about him.
He was done being passive. Bob's breathing evened out, and he smiled. He knew how to change the public perception of him.
Yorrick had shown him the way.
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"Hello everyone, my name is Robert Whitman, and this is my buddy, Monroe," Bob was still wearing his armor and holding his staff while Monroe was lounging, also still armored, on a small table next to Bob.
"As some of you may remember, I'm the guy who got blown into another dimension," Bob smiled. "I did get vast cosmic power out of it, and I made some great friends," he shrugged, "I was content. But then I realized that Earth was about to get a healthy dose of those same vast cosmic powers, and I came back to warn everyone so that they could prepare." He sighed. "I'm definitely not the right guy for that job, but I managed to find the right people, some of whom were from that other dimension," he admitted.
"I managed to get the ball rolling, and I was feeling pretty confident that the people in charge, namely the King of Greenwold, working in conjunction with the United Nations, had matters pretty well in hand," Bob reached down and scratched Monroe's ruff. "I thought to myself that the job was done, and I'd be able to get back to my life on Thayland, which I freely admit, I vastly preferred to my life on Earth." He looked theatrically from side to side and leaned forward. "The tax laws for the Kingdom of Greenwold take up less than half a page of A4 with a fourteen-point font. The entire legal code is two pages," he faux whispered.
Leaning back, he grinned again. "Life is pretty good," he said, then gestured, and the view pulled back, revealing that the backdrop had been the side of a cozy-looking cabin. The view continued to pull back, and soon Bob and Monroe were tiny figures standing in front of the cabin that stood above a beautiful series of waterfalls.
The view switched, placing Bob and Monroe front and center once again. "I've got a nice house with an amazing view, and I only need to work about ten hours a week to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle," Bob explained.
"Unfortunately," his expression darkened, "it appears that some people aren't willing to leave me alone. Monroe and I were abducted, along with some friends of ours, this past weekend. A group or organization or agency snuck into the Denny's we were having breakfast at and drugged our food, nearly killing one of my friends in the process. They then flew us to China and locked us up in an underground bunker, relying on truly obscene dosages of drugs to keep us sedated."
The view shifted again, and high-resolution photographs began to appear in a slideshow. It started with the outside of the bunker, then the inside. It ended with the images of the very dead people who'd tried to interrogate him, both before and after he'd taken their masks off and hosed them down to get some of the blood off.
"As you can see, the assholes left to interrogate us are very dead." Bob was back in the picture, and his expression was one of barely contained rage. "I've tried to be nice. I've bent over backward to help people. But, whatever genius came up with this plan, they fucked up." He was now glaring hatefully. "That explosion in the Himilayas that everyone is worked about? That was me."
He shook his head and snarled, "I had meant to deliver a message to the pigfucking shitbiscuits who set this up, but then I realized that while they probably got the memo, there might be someone else out there who misses it." He leaned back and smiled savagely. "So I'm delivering this warning to the entire world. If you fuck with me, my cat, or my friends, I will burn your world to ashes."
The view went black.
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"Someone miscalculated rather poorly, I think," Queen Elizabeth mused.
"Bob is a treasure, but his treatment at the hands of the people of your world left him rather deficient of empathy," The King of Greenwold replied. "Left to his own devices, the only danger he presents is that of bettering the world more quickly than you might be prepared for, but conversely, if pushed, he lacks the restraint that a more well-adjusted individual would possess. When you also take into consideration that he has quickly become the most powerful person from Earth, you must understand that the traditional safeguards against the abuses of true power present in both Greenwold and the Empire were never instilled in him."
"He has no sense of a proportional response," she agreed.
"Precisely," Kellan smiled. He really did enjoy the Queen's company. "I've taken rather extreme measures to ensure that the people of Greenwold who might be interested in harassing Bob understand the consequences for doing so, however, I've already exerted enough influence on Earth to make many of your governments uncomfortable."
"I'm sure the United States government is already ensuring he receives a thorough education in personal security, but as one of our subjects was also a victim of this foolishness, we will be sending a few members of our twenty-second regiment to work with her, and offer any aid our young Mr. Whitman might be willing to accept," The Queen replied. "Although, his little video here might well have accomplished his goal, to a degree. While he didn't reveal it in the video, we have it on good authority that he dropped a small tungsten rod from orbit, obliterating the bunker where he was held captive."
Kellan frowned and shook his head. "That's one of the actions that is understood to be unacceptable," he said. "It's been used a few times during the worst of Tides, but the collateral damage has more often than not been greater than that inflicted on the monsters, so the practice is proscribed." He sighed. "Still, his threat was clear and succinct," he smiled fiercely. "It was very nearly worthy of a Dragon."