“I am called Evangeline,” volunteered the bat representative quietly. “I won the right to be senior to my sisters by triumphing in the melee we held the day before yesterday.” She looked at James with an inscrutable expression. “By our customs, I am the strongest of our kind and therefore the leader, though of course subordinate to His Majesty.”
“Welcome, Evangeline,” James said. The bat had a subtle intensity to her that made him rethink any idea he might have had about joking around with her to establish rapport.
“My name is Alan Roget,” said Alan. “I’m also new. I have experience in the military from the War on Terror. I’m a Healer.”
“Um, what’s your role on the council?” asked Angela Zuccarini of the Sewer Committee slowly, as if trying and failing to think of more diplomatic phrasing as she was speaking.
“I’ve asked Alan to be the Head of Combat Healers,” James said quickly, “and Mitzi to become Head of Magical Artillery. I’m beefing up the military’s leadership structure. I only had two officers until just now, neither of whom was really a magic-user. I’m anticipating more conflicts, so additional leaders will be an absolute necessity.”
“That’s accurate,” Mitzi said. “My name is Mitzi Roget. Alan is my husband. I am a Mage, on the cusp of Class Evolution based on my level and what I’ve heard others say.”
James smiled. Good introduction.
“You two are looking very well since you came out of the forest,” Dave remarked, throwing a quick glance at James.
“The King’s Blessing is powerful,” Alan said simply.
A handful of other faces turned and looked at Alan and Mitzi at that remark, but all except two turned away after a moment, uncertain what they were supposed to be noticing. The only ones here who had known Alan and Mitzi before they received the Blessing of the Fisher King were those from James’s Orientation and Mina. It was Damien and Mina who couldn’t help but stare a little longer at the older couple.
Mina broke off the stare after a few seconds to give James a questioning look.
James leaned over and whispered in her ear, “I’ll tell you what I know about it later, but it’s exactly what it looks like.”
Her eyes widened, and she mouthed the word, Jesus. Then she seemed to refocus, with an effort, on her surroundings.
“Now that the introductions are out of the way, I can tell you why I brought you all here this afternoon,” James said. “Some of you are already familiar with a brave young man named Moishe Rose.”
A few people nodded, including Damien and Rotter.
“What about this Mr. Rose?” asked Taylor Bunting of the Salvage Commission. “Is he also joining the council?” She looked around as if searching for unfamiliar faces.
“No,” James said. “At least not at the moment. Moishe is in Alan’s care right now. He was badly injured in a Dungeon before he managed to make his way here. Until just over an hour ago, in fact, he was in a coma. I learned from him that he was placed into that coma by the same being that blessed Cyrus, the man we recently exiled from the Fisher Kingdom.”
“The angel?” asked Harry Luntz of the Agricultural Commission glumly.
“Alleged angel,” corrected Rotter.
“Alleged angel,” said Luntz. “Okay. How do we know it’s the same being?” He looked at James. “You said this guy just woke from a coma. Is it possible he was confused? And how did he convey that it was the being that blessed Cyrus? There might be a lot of, um, fake angels out in this magical world of ours, right?”
“Those are good questions,” James said. “I can answer very simply. You all know I can visit people’s dreams. That’s what I did. Before Moishe woke from his coma, he showed me an extended sequence of his memories. The long and short of it is, Cyrus and his people were using a Dungeon operated by this so-called angel as a testing ground for people they wanted to recruit. Those who they tricked into entering the Dungeon were forced to walk through a supposed holy fire, and anyone who did not share their beliefs would be scorched to death by the angel. It seems to have been a way of finding guaranteed-to-be-loyal people and reinforcing a sense of community through a forced bonding experience. Of course, they also demonized everyone who failed the challenge. They claimed that everyone who burned in the holy fire was evil and prevented members of their groups from providing any aid—even as people were burning to death.”
“How did Mr. Rose escape?” asked Goblin Overlord Duncan.
“He went through the fire and got burned almost to death,” James said grimly. “He used a bunch of potions to keep himself alive despite being on fire. He barely made it here.”
“What is it you want to do about this, Your Majesty?” asked Steve Luck in a respectful tone.
“I think this calls for a major change in our defense policy,” James replied.
“You mentioned wanting to beef up the military’s command structure,” said Harry Luntz slowly. “Should we take it that you want the country to embrace some military adventurism?”
“Well, I think this situation reveals how little regard this group of people have for those who are not their coreligionists,” James said. “We always knew we were surrounded by hostile forces, but—with all possible respect to all our nonhuman friends—” He added a smile and a gentle panning look at each of the nonhuman species representatives present—“it was possible until recently to think that the hostile forces around us were all nonhuman. Easily recognized threats.” He shook his head. “At first, I believed we could bring in Cyrus and his group to live alongside us, and I imagined there might eventually be many other human-controlled territories that would live peacefully alongside us. Then Cyrus tried to mind control me, and he couldn’t stay after that. Now things have gone even further. We’ve learned that Cyrus, and a very large group of people who think like him—much larger than just the group that we encountered—have essentially engaged in premeditated murder as a sort of ritual in order to sort out their faithful from people who don’t share their beliefs. That cannot go unanswered. Every member of these groups must be brought to justice or forced to denounce Cyrus and those like him, as well as any supposed angel that murders people for following a different deity or no deity at all.”
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“That sounds like a ‘yes’ to my question,” Luntz replied very softly.
“Goddamnit, man,” said Dave quietly. “Can you call it ‘military adventurism’ to go after people who are effectively engaging in human sacrifice right in our own backyard?”
“Yeah, this is pretty fucked up,” Damien agreed. “We can’t let something like this continue.”
“Do we know whether this is an ongoing issue?” asked Bunting. She hurried to add, “I mean, of course, I support whatever you need to do to bring human sacrificers—or quasi-human sacrificers to justice. We have to maintain some standards of civilization here. I’m just wondering about the scope of the problem.”
James nodded. “I don’t think we can be sure of whether they stopped what they’re doing or continued it. At the time Moishe escaped them, they had a specific Dungeon they were using, in which the monster was this angel creature, so if that Dungeon still exists, I would assume there are still activities going on there that we wouldn’t like. It’s around a day’s walk from here.”
“Should we send some people to investigate, then?” Luntz asked. He sounded a bit more comfortable with the “adventurism” when it was couched as investigation instead.
“I have a two-pronged plan in mind,” James said. “I’ve been thinking about this since I called the meeting. The plan is part exploration and part conquest.” He paused for a moment in case someone wanted to object, but everyone waited silently for him to continue. “First, I want to gather a group of volunteers to explore the area to the West of us, from here to Orlando and possibly beyond, depending on how difficult they find the journey. In their path, they’ll discover this Dungeon. I don’t want people to enter it, because they might not be able to get out again. But we can at least try to destroy the building that serves as the entrance. In my head, I’ve been calling the group of volunteers the Fisher Expeditionary Force.”
“Love that name,” said Rotter.
Damien snorted quietly.
“And the second prong?” asked DaSilva.
“So, I’ve always pursued a policy of slowly expanding the territory we control through my Skill ‘Dominion,’” James said. “It imbues my aura into territory around me, and I’ve been expanding in all directions for weeks. That Skill has a lot of advantages, like giving me an awareness of who enters my territory and what’s happening inside it. Unfortunately, for the last week or so, I haven’t been able to use it at all. I’ve been too busy doing other things.”
People around James were nodding and muttering, “Thank you” quietly.
He just smiled, nodded, and continued talking. “If I’m blessing people, that uses up a lot of power, and after so many blessings, my body needs recovery time before I’ll be able to use the Blessing of the Fisher King and Dominion in one day again. I think the fact that this is going on just means we need to expand our territorial control faster than I previously thought. To achieve that, I want to take territory the old-fashioned way: with soldiers. While the Fisher Expeditionary Force explores to the West, the Fisher Army can advance East.”
James drew out and unfolded the map he had borrowed from Alan and Mitzi.
“We’re around here,” James said, pointing to a spot to the East of Orlando. “The distance from us to the ocean on the East side is around twenty to thirty miles. If we can take that territory, that’s one side that we control.” He made a chopping motion over the map, indicating the North-South divide. “We don’t have to take over all of Florida, but if we can take the twenty-five miles East of us, and a little less than three hundred miles to the South, we’ll be essentially an island. We can build a wall to the North or something if we want. Attack will only be possible from one direction. Given the sheer number of threats that keep cropping up, I think aggressive expansion is our best defensive strategy right now.”
“So, instead of waiting to get attacked, we’ll start all the fights ourselves,” said Luntz, crinkling his forehead. He looked at James “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I’m trying to be respectful of your priorities. I know your first priority is keeping people safe. I don’t mean to play Devil’s Advocate here or something. I think I get what you’re trying to do. It just reminds me a lot of American foreign policy before the System. Starting fights in the present to avoid hypothetical fights in the future, and we ended up getting into a lot of unnecessary wars.”
James couldn’t help silently agreeing with Luntz’s last point. The United States had only two neighbors, after all, and it had invaded both of them at various points over the course of its early history—before the American military had the capacity to reach perceived enemies on the other side of the world. Since World War II, his former country had only become more aggressive.
“I don’t think the comparison holds well,” said Dave. “The United States started fights sometimes, but not all fights are created equal. Some wars have to be fought. We know we live in a world with rapidly growing and competing foreign powers now. We just got through fighting one that was targeting people inside our borders. I know we’ve all had experiences with aggressive enemies in our Orientations. All those creatures—and humans—are still out there. And I would say that if we have to choose between invading potential enemies and waiting to see if they attack us here, all the civilians who live here would certainly prefer it if we took the fight out of our own backyard.”
“Those are the stakes,” DaSilva agreed, nodding slowly. “We’re in a very aggressive period of history. I don’t think we have the option to sit back and hope no one comes our way. You’d hope that would mean we’d be left alone, but from what I’ve seen, that posture just makes us sitting ducks.”
“That has been my experience with war,” Alan said, finally breaking his long silence. “Even if the United States had never wanted to fight with anyone, I don’t think you can be a successful country without drawing challengers.”
“I don’t think anyone really wants to fight, but it seems like this situation will lead to that regardless of what we do,” Zuccarini said quietly. “I think starting a fight is better than letting someone else do that to you. It’s better to sucker punch someone than to get sucker punched, right? I mean, not morally better, but…”
“Yeah, you all might be right,” Luntz said, sighing.
Seeing no other objections, James weighed in again.
“Honestly, even if we had the option to sit back and watch things shake out however they will outside our borders, I don’t think I’d be satisfied with that,” James said. “If we had strong neighbors all around us, I’d be constantly worried that anytime I let my guard down or left the territory, they’d invade. If we had weaker neighbors, I would be wondering what was developing on the other side of them. And I think that the Fisher Kingdom is an inherently somewhat imperialistic enterprise. We have a promise at the root of our country, stated in our citizenship oath twice. The promise to reconquer the Earth for humanity and our allied species. I don’t want us to break that promise and give the world up to a bunch of religious zealots, life forms that eat humans, or hostile forces of whatever stripe. This is a time that’s going to give rise to extremes. The people who land in positions of power aren’t going to be nice, reasonable folks. It’s better if it’s us. Better if we don’t have too many neighbors who aren’t under our direct control. Even if we could sit here neutral, like Switzerland, I wouldn’t be comfortable being Switzerland while the Nazis are marching around the European continent. Eventually, you end up on the menu. I think we have to acquire some territory so we can watch the rest of the world burn safely, with some buffer space.”