Truth looked at the duck. The duck didn’t look particularly happy to be in the middle of a library, but it wasn’t freaking out either. Now that he looked closer, the horns were blatantly plastic.

That was definitely Manda, right?

<>

Get bent. He sold that beautifully. Even triggered Incisive. I think he summoned that duck.

<>

Truth looked around the library, not really seeing the gray shelves or industrial blue carpeting. I really don’t know anymore.

Before he left the library, Truth decided to “help” the student librarian.

“I believe this is yours.” Truth dropped the duck on the desk in front of the librarian.

“I… did someone spike my coffee?”

“You aren’t that lucky. Look, students hooking up in the library is an ancient tradition, I’m told, but this is just not ok.” Truth was aggressively reasonable. “I don’t care what you do in private, but this is meant to be a place for studying.”

“Wha?”

“I mean, does your “special friend” here look okay? You know what? That’s between the two of you. I’m not okay with this. At all.”

“I have no idea…”

“Then you should learn. This is a place for learning. Maybe learn to have some shame.” Truth turned sharply and strode out of the library. It might have been petty, but he was pretty damn done with people dragging him for his looks.

Truth walked out of the library and looked across the little cluster of buildings that made up the E&O campus. Not a whole lot of “there” there. Boxes of boxes where people taught and others learned, each hoping that they weren’t wasting their dwindling time.

He could feel himself detaching from the world around him. It was an odd feeling of lucidity. His mind seemed to take a step back and up, away from his body and at ninety degrees to the world itself. The buildings took on a two dimensional feeling. The grass was painted on the floor, the bushes cut out of cardboard, the sky a blue scrim with a spotlight shining through it.

The people, those playing students and faculty, all seemed to be wearing clothes that did not fit quite right. Wardrobe hadn’t time to make adjustments before the players had to rush to the stage. Their blocking and their lines imperfectly memorized. Their gestures were too stiff and expressive to be natural. Playing for an audience of one. And that “one” wasn’t Truth.

Truth stood outside the library and watched the show for a little while. Trying to find the plot. Trying to spot the audience. Truth forced his body to move through the players, through that repertory company. He made his way to a church, but it looked no more real than the buildings around it. The spells covering it were a lightshow. The priests had on masks over masks. So did the worshipers. Yet, for all that, Truth rather thought that the face they would be wearing beneath the masks was actually what was on the mask themselves.

They felt as they were required to feel, but they had to present that emotion in the approved way. They had to show the audience what they expected to see.

Eventually he made his way to a pew and sat. Just trying to let the feeling pass. Maybe this was what Merkovah meant when he said he was alienated. Someone who should be one of the performers, but who kept breaking character. Who kept poking at that invisible fourth wall, and asking if it was really there.

“Are you a local student? I don’t think I recognize you.” One of the actors… no. One of the parishioners came up and sat down next to him. “Sorry, you didn’t look like you were praying, and you did look pretty lost.”

“No, that’s alright. I needed some time to come back to myself.”

“Find anything along the way?” The parishioner was a heavyset woman, an oddity in Jeon. Not obese, just… heavy. Middle age had settled down around her, and kept right on settling. Apparently doing well enough, or poorly enough, that she could come volunteer at her church in the middle of the morning.

“I really don’t know. Can I ask you a question? I promise I’m being serious. Not… pranking you or anything.”

“That sounds ominous.” She smiled. “Go on. Shock me.”

“What does a better earthly world look like? I don’t mean the Kingdom of Heaven stuff, I’m not ambitious enough to expect perfected divine rule. But if you were Empress of the World, how would you set it in order?”

She rocked back, thin eyebrows rising. “Well. That’s a heavy question.” She looked out over the tall platforms the chapel was built around. “A question plenty of people are asking themselves, I think. One way or another.”

“Really?” Truth was relieved to see that it wasn’t just him.

“Oh yes. How could we not? I helped bury four suicides in as many moths. That’s not a world I want to live in.” She spoke quietly, smile long gone. “All laid off. All had been hunting for work for months. Looking at jobs they wouldn’t even have dreamed of doing a year ago. Competing with Denizens for jobs, if you can believe it.”

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“I can believe it.”

She sighed. “I wish you couldn’t.”

They sat together for a while. She started speaking slowly. “If I was empress of the world, I would start by making sure I wasn’t running things.”

“Oh?”

“The biggest management job I ever did was working as an assistant manager at a Varle’s in Cobb Mall for three months one summer when I was seventeen. I hated it, but there was no one else to do the work so I got voluntold.” She smiled a little at the memory. “I hated it, and I was really bad at it. So if I can't manage the work schedules for eight highschool kids, I sure can’t manage the world.”

“Who would you put in charge, then?”

“No one.”

“No one? But then the schedule goes crazy and none of the folding gets done.” He remembered that Varle’s sold clothes for teenage girls.

“Really? Why?” Her smile came back, something crafty about it now. “Any reason the girls can’t sit down and talk it out? Who is covering what shift, doing what duties? And when you get right down to it, as long as the owner gets their cash, what do they care?”

Truth knew that the owners cared very much indeed. Working inside Starbrite had been an education. But he took her point. Maybe the owners shouldn’t care.

“So who are the owners? In your world-as-mall-store metaphor?” Truth asked, and that seemed to jam her up.

“I… don’t know. We started this with me as the Empress of the world, so even if I abdicated, there would still be an empress, right? Or… aristocrats and ministers and all that. High citizens. A Tier citizens now, I suppose.”

Truth nodded. He had come to the same conclusions as her. Different people in charge, maybe a little more freedom for those below, but again, the same structure. The mighty at the top of a tall pyramid. Everyone else carried the weight.

“But the girls could chat and sort out their shifts and duties,” Truth said.

“Right.”

“Pay?”

“Set by the boss, of course, but it would have to be fair. I would be picking the bosses, or I would pick the person who would pick the bosses, and I would tell them that the wages have to be fair. And benefits. They should definitely get health, dental, vision, and life insurance. And the boss shouldn’t be allowed to bully them, or at least not more than the usual.”

“I’d work at that shop.” Truth smiled.

“You don’t fit the look book.” The older woman had a youthful giggle.

“Discriminated against for my muscles even in a dream world. There is no escape.”

“Why are you so muscly, if I may ask? I would have guessed you were a soldier or fighter, but your skin and nails are impeccable. Not a hint of a broken nose either.”

“Thank you, kind of you to notice. And because I love feeling my body. I use it every day.” He smiled at her, then stood. “It’s not a comfortable feeling, existing as a mind without a body.”

She stood with him. “I can’t imagine it is. Glad to see you smiling again.”

“Ah, well, I had nice company while I thought. One day I will crack it.”

“Crack what?”

He smiled at her, a little sadly this time. “The egg hiding a world I can’t imagine.”

Truth sat in a rather nice park. The trees were huge, towering things who’s canopies glowed in rainbow colors after dark. For the moment, anyway. Truth didn’t know how much longer they could manage it.

Two days left. Two days, and then the mass enrollment started around Jeon. In a month, everyone would either be a denizen, or have a bit of their soul mutilated and set to work for Starbrite. For… some purpose. Perhaps simply to be harvested as the bodies they haunted started dying at an accelerated pace. Then the System would be rolled out to as much of the world as they could manage.

There was only a year or so, maybe as much as a year and a half, until the collapse. The pebbles were bouncing down the mountain already. So Starbrite’s plans couldn’t reasonably extend beyond that point. Whatever he was going to do with all those soul fragments, he needed them moderately urgently and by the millions.

And yet… a high tier angel, one in service to a being whose title alone was enough to trigger divine wrath, was willing to manifest of its own volition in front of him. The angel didn’t appear to give a damn about any of that. The angel just wanted him to… think of what he couldn’t think of. Or that anyone could think of, apparently. Truth didn’t give himself much credit as an original thinker.

<>

In the Church?

<>

I think there is a limit to what even an angel will do on God’s orders. Truth thought about it a moment. That does actually sound like it was left specifically for me. Six hundred years ago. Creepy.

<>

Truth nodded. That did sound plausible. He did make a point of translating it again, though. And the bit about a forbidden dream didn’t change at all.

<>

Truth nodded with a sort of horrified fascination. Which leads to two questions- who did the forbidding, and why? And really, answering one gives us the answer to the other. Probably.

Truth stared up into the canopy, watching the sunlight flicker down through the leaves. Letting the light warm him. It had suddenly gotten very cold. It’s not God. If keeping things this way was so important, he wouldn’t have abandoned the world. More to the point, as strange as Manda is, he is still an Angel and they don’t do a damn thing without divine approval. So if Manda is cluing me in on this, it strongly suggests that it’s not God’s plan, or intention or whatever.

<>

But we can look at who benefits. Who has gotten the most out of this world? Who would benefit the most from keeping things the way they were?

Truth sighed. There was only one answer. As obvious as the sun at noon. Starbrite.