“You’ve got to see this,” Terra told me in our mental link.
Dom and I had been plowing our way through the denizens of the sewers. Siff, being a smaller town, had only had about two dozen members of the Underground for Dom, but the capital had ten times that amount. We were about halfway through the process of converting the Capital’s version of the underground to our Underground.
“Where are you, Terra?” I said aloud so that Dom knew we were talking.
Dom plopped down into a cleanish puddle next to me. We were between fights, but I figured that Terra probably waited for a break in our marital mayhem to contact me.
“He’s allergic to cats,” Terra snickered her derision as I passed on the information to a grinning Dom.
“Who is?” I asked her, creating a few extra spell scrolls even as Dom cast some extra clean and repair spells around us.
“Fillibuster Burnt,” Terra explained.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“His house,” Terra gave a smug mental twitch of her whiskers at me.
“Burnt’s house?” I continued our conversation out loud for Dom’s benefit. There wasn’t nearly the need to be quiet anymore. With almost half the Underground loyal to us, we could just sit back and wait for the rest to bring in their brethren.
“Consider it a wedding gift,” Terra purred. “I’ve rubbed all over every single thing he owns and he has completely lost himself in perpetual sneezing fits.”
Dom barked a laugh that echoed down the tunnels in an eerie way. At first I tensed up, thinking we’d be discovered, but as it echoed back to us, I realized that between Dom’s laugh and the crows joining in, it was probably more likely to lead someone to believe the sewer was haunted than to credit a single man and a couple of crows with the sound. “Tell her I said thank you,” Dom paused in his laughter to say.
I did as he asked with an indulgent eye roll.
“You should come finish up the gaslighting for this guy,” Terra urged us. “He’s just gone out to have dinner at a tavern, but he might not stay out long. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to hang out in a tavern half the night.”
“You never know,” I responded, checking my maps. The maps tab in my interface had a layering ability. We’d picked up a sewer map from one of our first followers, and a city map from my college welcome package. The two could be laid on top of each other in a semi-transparent way that compared the two. Mr. Burnt had a house in the Merchant district, and we weren’t far from it. I took a moment to mark the map with the houses of all the administrators that I’d scoped out before and shared my map with Dom.
What a fun bonus that married people could share their tabs with each other. We’d taken advantage of it immediately, sharing all our tabs. It took manually updating them to show progress, but I now had his interface as a set of tabs in my own. We weren’t far from Burnt’s house.
“That sounds awesome,” I praised Terra with real enthusiasm. I hadn’t thought that we’d be able to get to Burnt’s place until much later. I had my first classes tomorrow, the idea of which tightening my stomach with nerves. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. It was that I was walking into a situation where my enemies had control.
Constitution +1
“Let’s hit it,” Dom levered himself up, and then reached out to help me. I didn’t need the help and we both knew it, but it was a nice gesture so I let him pull me up. I gave him a light kiss, and had a bounce in my step as we mostly followed the tunnels to get to Burnt’s house.
Flirting +1
Exp +10 (5,010/788,209)
Burnt’s house was bigger than Angel Hammock’s had been, and it bustled with servant activity. Burnt’s hadn’t wasted any time getting servants. It didn’t bother me, since they were busy out by the mansion’s personal well washing everything cloth and beating rugs. Dom and I slid inside at Terra’s direction. Terra had turned herself into a plump marmalade cat with broad orange stripes and fur that was a little long for the breed, but I could understand that since she was using every inch of her fur to rub against every surface that we passed.
Sneak +1
Hide +1
Exp +20 (5,030/788,209)
The opulence of Burnt’s house set my teeth on edge because I knew that it reflected the size and lushness of the one he owned back in the old world. Here was a man who made his money bullying young people who were just reaching out to stretch their wings in the big wide world. The idea that bullying like this was a lucrative profession in our old world just lit my temper.
Will +1
I had a different plan for Burnt than I had for Hammock. Instead of switching two paintings around, I replaced most of his artwork with the stuff from the Vampire Lord’s manor. Tastefully conservative seascapes were replaced with several more Rubenesque ones from our inventories. Lovely Monet lilies were replaced with gruesome hunting scenes from the torturer’s quarters. A quaint field of wheat threshing was traded for the more tortured renderings of a particularly vivid portrait of the Vampire Lord himself enjoying his harem. We were careful to use only the most voluptuously endowed women from the collection, never needing to duplicate any. The family portrait over the mantle was replaced with the Vampire Lord’s extremely risqué harem portrait.
Mischief +10
Exp +100 (5,130/788,209)
Porcelain urns of flowers were replaced with gawdy golden urns that made it look like funeral urns were being used for vases. All of it was done in moments, while the servants outside chattered among each other about how unfair the master had been to demand everything cleaned in the hour he’d be gone. I was careful not to get those servants in trouble. While we replaced many things, they were still just a jarring sprinkle of malice amidst the prevailing clutter of perfectly coordinated class and nothing was missing enough to be blamed on the servants. I pilfered a snuff box from the den with his initials on the bottom, a pipe from that desk that was also pictured in the portrait over that desk, and a signet ring from out of a desk drawer, but they were things that I figured wouldn’t be missed until long after the shock of the changed items had passed.
Mischief +5
Exp +50 (5,180/788,209)
Once we slid upstairs, we worked mainly on two rooms. The master bedroom, I traded his tasteful white and sage color scheme with similar items from the Vampire Lord’s chamber, including the beautifully gawdy bed, chest of drawers, and vanity. On the vanity, I placed several feminine accoutrements, even though I knew him to live alone. In the closet, I left a woman’s wardrobe full of sexy gowns and negligees. The servants might be washing all his regular clothing, but what would they do with the newest clothing? I was betting that, since their programming didn’t account for what to do under such a situation, that they would simply ignore it.
Mischief +7
Exp +70 (5,250/788,209)
Dom focused on another room right next door to the master suite. He stashed the bland, guest room furniture and replaced it with some of our favorite toys from the torturer’s dungeon. The bed was replaced with an iron maiden, complete with crusty blood and gore that we didn’t bother to clean off. The chest of drawers was replaced with a wall of shackles, another wall’s art was replaced with instruments of torture, and the closet was filled with silky rope and leather bondage supplies.
“Darling,” I purred at Dom, as I walked in to admire his handiwork.
“Later,” he whispered back to me. “I saved the best for us.”
I responded with sultry laugh that was cut off by Terra’s warning that the master of the house had returned. Dom and I made what my daughter would have called googly eyes at each other as we slid out an attic window and onto a nearby rooftop to enjoy the show.
Flirting +2
Exp +20 (5,270/788,209)
The servants scuttled into the house to put bedsheets and clothes onto furniture that they weren’t programmed to notice had changed drastically from what had been there before. Fillibuster Burnt strode through his front door as if he were the King of Siam, tossing leather gloves onto a table and shrugging his shoulders out of the cape that his butler barely managed to catch. He then stood imperiously holding out a foppish cane in two fingers until his butler fumbled to take it from him.
“I assume you have found and disposed of the cat that vandalized my house,” Burnt said, giving a long superior sniff that only made his nose twitch slightly.
“We did not find a cat, sir,” the butler admitted, bowing his head.
Burnt gave the poor butler a vile glare.
“But every cloth in the manor has been washed, and every rug is still airing in the back garden,” the butler rushed to assure the master.
“If I sneeze even once tonight, I expect them all to be burned and replaced by the time I return from the Universal Neophyte Leveling Venue tomorrow evening.” It made me wonder why all the staff insisted on using the full name of the college while students used the acronym. “I can replace every one of you as easily as I can the rugs,” Burnt snapped, and all I could think was that they’d be better off. What did it say that Burnt had yet to notice the main painting in the foyer of his home had been replaced with a Venus d’ Milo type painting instead of the woman with a parasol. Their color schemes were similar so maybe he didn’t know the difference.
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Fillibuster Burnt had been the bully of my old college as the head of the Code of Conduct division of the school. That is to say that my old college hadn’t relied on a Dean and a paddle to keep the students in line. It had relied on Fillibuster Burnt and his Code of Conduct violations. It was simple. It had started with Angel Hammock’s complaint, which had started as a threat of expulsion and later become me making a big deal over a simple warning. Fillubuster Burnt had then, with the cooperation of Violet Patts, found out my lab instructors and informed them exactly how to deal with any requests from me.
I realize that this sounds a bit paranoid, at least that’s how they made me feel about my complaints, but this system is entrenched and active in almost every college of America. The only way to get rid of problem students is to do what companies do. They file complaints against you where three warnings equal a reprimand, and three reprimands is an expulsion. The problem with this is that they can claim anything and Fillibuster Burnt knows exactly how to turn it into a Code of Conduct violation.
I had asked for lab stations to be placed low enough to be seen from a seated position. I hadn’t thought that should be hard considering they had to have accommodated people in wheelchairs. While I didn’t have a wheelchair most days, I did use a walker to give myself a place to sit on the long walks to buildings. I only needed it on high pain days, but that was almost every day I was forced to go to a lab where the instructors had been schooled on how to hate me. I was the daughter of two high school teachers. If you think your teachers don’t talk about you, you’ve lost your mind. They were furious and refused to accommodate my request, insisting that I didn’t need the change and was just being a pain. I’d taken it up the chain and they’d capitulated, reluctantly when my Title IX complaint had hit the federal level just in time for the finals.
The code of conduct violation had come from when my husband had walked me to class. I’d left my phone in my walker, and he’d held it up at the doorway to ask me if I needed it for class. He hadn’t said a word, and neither had I, because we knew that anything could be construed as a disruption. I’d waved him off, and thought nothing of it. Two days later, I’d had a new code of conduct violation that stated that I’d had someone trying to take video of the classroom in clear violation of the rule against filming proprietary classroom stuff. I’d had permission, through accommodations and verbal agreement with the instructor, to make audio recordings of lectures, not to mention that we were all encouraged to take lots of pictures of lab stations to study at home.
I was again threatened with expulsion in the emails, and then told I was making something out of nothing at the actual meeting with Fillibuster Burnt. Again, it was just a warning and he only wanted to know that I knew that classes couldn’t be recorded. I was suspicious, but I told him that I knew classes couldn’t be recorded and that I didn’t need or want to video record a class I had the right to record anyway. That had turned into me admitting and apologizing for wrongdoing in emails back to instructors and professors all over the place. I had never apologized nor admitted to wrongdoing and when the legal recording of the meeting had exposed his duplicity, I was again told that I was overreacting to nothing.
All I’d asked for was that the code of conduct warnings be expunged. Fillibuster Burnt had said that was out of the question and totally unnecessary since they were just warnings and didn’t count. But he’d filed those warnings so that when it had happened again, and another trumped up charge had been leveled against me, he had grounds for a true complaint, complete with a trial that had been a lot like the one here in this world.
I’d had a 3.8 GPA at graduation, despite their harassment of multiple trumped up code of conduct violations, and they’d still been one warning away from expelling me every day of my senior year. They’d lauded me as a prime example of hard work as I’d walked across the stage to graduate with honors as a Phi Kappa Phi member in good standing, even as they’d threatened days earlier to not let me graduate at all.
So, I know you’re asking yourself why kept going? Why not go to another school or just quit school altogether? The simple but not easy answer was that I knew that there were students who bought the code of conduct bullshit as valid. I imagined how those less experienced students were believing all this. I got together with others who had disabilities and we shared stories. That was when I realized that someone had to stand up to them. I’m no Malcolm X, but I could teach other students how to file the right paperwork to fight back. I really just kept thinking that the next federal Title IX complaint might make the difference.
I lost, even though I graduated with honors. Federal complaints mounted over the years I taught student after disabled student to write their timelines of refused accommodations into official Title IX complaints. Nothing helped. While I was there, nothing happened to make it stop. Burnt just kept coming after me harder and harder. Right down to the last week of classes, it was a race to see if he could expel me before the Title IX complaints became enough of a mountain to do something about it.
All Burnt had to do was use Violet Patts to contact my instructors, who would then be warned that I was a troublemaker and to not allow me to abuse my accommodations. Instructors were allowed to interpret that any way they pleased, but they were also schooled by Burnt on how to use the code of conduct to stop what he considered my little games. I understood that, from their perspective, I was just another entitled kid to be squashed into complying with the machine. I had just been trying to survive the machine with several disabilities.
Will +5
In this new world, my old tormentor had become only a part of my new nemesis, and there he stood in his own entitlement and it was my turn to teach him a lesson. He wasn’t the god of the code of conduct here. He was just a little bureaucratic bully that I could kill over and over again if I wanted to. But I’d done that on my first time through and I’d purged most of my angst and bitterness in pools of blood. This time, I had the luxury of hopefully driving him as crazy as he’d driven me.
I was counting on Burnt replacing all his household servants. By tomorrow, Dom and I would own the Underground of the Capital and a standing quest would be issued to become a servant of Fillibuster Burnt, and that quest paid very well. Even if he fired half the city’s servants, we were set to replace them with officers of our Underground.
“What is the meaning of this!?” came a demand that lurched me out of my ruminating. Fillibuster Burnt had just walked into his bedchamber.
“What do you mean, sir?” a servant rushed in with wringing hands.
Dom and I had discovered popcorn at the wharf shops. I popped it in our silent sphere using magic and a wok with a lid, shaking the thing over a spark spell that I hid in the nearby chimney. Did you know that crows love popcorn? I had to pop two batches just to have a bowl to myself. That was okay. Dom could share his plain bowl of popcorn, but mine was drenched in butter and my stern look was enough to keep Dom’s murder out of my bowl.
“This is not my furniture!” Burnt spat at the servant, as if the servant was the stupidest person on the planet. The servants were very simple drones, so maybe he wasn’t too far off.
“I’m sorry, sir?” the servant didn’t understand the statement that wasn’t in a list of demands or queries the drone was programmed for.
The guard was called. It wasn’t the same set of guards that had attended to Angel Hammock’s complaints that morning, but that only served our purposes better than if it had been the same ones.
“This is not my furniture!” Burnt repeated to the guards.
“Is anything missing, sir?” the very consistent guards asked the expected question.
“Yes!” and Burnt strode without shame into the room full of torture devices, waving his hands around the room as if it should speak for itself.
Dom and I sat eating the popcorn, spell enhanced vision glued to the scenario like it was nighttime soaps. The room did indeed speak for itself, but the guards had a different opinion than Burnt about what it said. Two pairs of guard eyes darted around the equipment and then settled on the servant that had scampered in behind Burnt. The servant flinched at the equipment in the room, probably because they’d never seen it and expected punishment for the supposed failures of the day.
“Have you seen this room before?” the first guard asked the trembling servant.
“Uh, no sir,” the servant insisted, but the answer was vastly misinterpreted by the guards.
“You see?” Burnt demanded as if the guards were as stupid and owned as he felt his servants to be.
The guards were not amused. To Dom and I, it was obvious that the guards interpretation of the situation was that Burnt was a sadist who tortured his servants into lying for him. They would probably let it slide this time, but once we replaced the servants with our own Underground operatives, the complaints would build on each other until it was Burnt who experienced enough code of conduct violations to be expelled from Capital nobility. Punishments should really fit the crimes.
Intelligence +2
Between the paintings that the guards noticed, even though Burnt did not, and the torture room, the guards were getting an impression of the man. While colleges don’t have a code of conduct that faculty has to follow, the nobility of the Capital had an unwritten code of conduct that the king himself enforced with an iron fist. The king and I had become friends before and I knew that I could count on him to get involved, but it would take more than a single piece of evidence to dethrone a noble in the city.
“I expect this to be taken with the utmost seriousness,” the pompous Burnt demanded as he walked back into his bed chamber, where he didn’t even notice the rotund marmalade cat that was stretched across his bed. It’s amazing how little a person notices when their noses are shoved so far into the air.
“Do you smell popcorn?” Burnt sniffed and then gave a huge sneeze.
Burnt didn’t notice Terra until she wound her way between his feet. Then he tripped on her, his eyebrows finally lowering from his receding hairline to just over his suddenly explosive nose.
“A cat!” he struggled to spit out between sneezes, pointing a finger at the servant who was trailing miserably behind Burnt. “I told you there was a cat. You’re all fired!”
“Yes, sir,” the servant bowed and left the room, shoulders slumping in what I thought was relief.
“The cat,” Burnt continued to rant, redirecting his orders to the guards. “Get it out of here!”
“This isn’t your cat?” the guard asked and Dom and I nearly dropped our popcorn because we were laughing so hard. Terra had hopped up onto Fillubuster Burnt’s shoulders and wrapped her fluffy orange tail right around his neck and over his face. She completely ignored his flailing arms and running nose.
Dexterity +2
“I deserve a full clean once I’m done here,” she imitated Burnt’s imperious tone into my mind. I’d have cast it at her right then except that I could barely hold onto my popcorn, I was laughing so hard.
Dexterity +2
“Of course it’s not my cat!” Burnt insisted, his face turning a delightful shade of red. “I don’t have a cat! I’m allergic!”
Terra hopped down from Burnt’s shoulder and scampered under the bed only to pull out a tiny mouse which she then delivered to her “master’s” feet with a proud wag of her tail.
“It looks like your cat,” the second guard spoke up for the first time, snatching Terra up from the ground and giving her a scritch under her chin. “What’s the cat’s name? Is it your familiar?”
“Familiar!? Get that thing out of here!” Burnt yelled, having lost his superiority in the snotty bluster of his current behavior. “Why would I have a familiar that I’m allergic to? Are you stupid?”
“Sir?” the first guard raised a warning eyebrow. Nobles were not above the law and the guards both knew it.
“Do you know who I am?” could be heard down the street.
Why do people think that phrase will help them? I’ve never met a cop that doesn’t bristle at it, and bristly cops are more likely to arrest you than help you. The guard of the Capital wasn’t corrupt unless you took them over and made them that way.
“I do kinda smell popcorn,” the second cop admitted, turning from the blustering mess that Burnt had become. Terra remained in the guard’s arms as they descended the stairs and exited the man’s manor.
“Me too,” the first guard said, ignoring the screaming from Burnt that every single servant in his house was absolutely fired and would be burned at the stake if he ever saw them again.
Servants poured out of Fillibuster’s house like rats deserting a sinking ship, the stream of them split by the strolling guards who were cooing over my familiar. I wished I’d thought of setting up a popcorn stand. I’d have made a pretty copper selling it by the bag to the exodus of drones that were escaping Fillibuster Burnt.