1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.3 An Enchanting Original
1.2.3.21 Ranks
It was definitely darker now, and her new weather sense informed her that the clouds looming above were going to start dropping a lot of rain if the air surrounding them grew much colder.
Kafana: “I’m going to meditate as we walk, to try to get back some of that mana, so I may appear to be a bit out of it and not answer quickly, but I will be listening. You were going to tell me about the Huttleston dynasty’s attempts to go beyond being human?”
Bungo: “Yeah. When I was working for Aura Psyence’s branch in Lausanne we got visited by a honcho from the holding company’s head office in America. I was committed to my project and said I wasn’t interested in relocating, but several people did interview for it and some of them didn’t much like what they found out. It turns out that the holding company was a subsidiary of a family trust owned by the Huttlestons. But they didn’t only do medicine. Nuclear waste disposal. Pharmaceuticals. Basically, anything they could make a profit upon by avoiding red-tape, bribing authorities, cutting safety precautions and hiding any resulting messes under non-disclosure agreements and hoards of lawyers.”
Kafana: “So not nice people then. They must have one heck of a PR department.”
Bungo: “They do. It helps that all of Patrick’s children are searingly intelligent, have multiple PhDs and are totally loyal to him. John, the heir apparent, is the very picture of dependability. The two daughters, Rose and Eunice, are both supermodel tall, fair haired with wide blue eyes and perfect metabolisms. That last point is important. Rumour has it that they’re designed to have a lifespan of at least 120 years, and they were some of the earliest ‘full design’ babies. More recent Huttlestons, such as Rose’s son Brian, might well live to 140 or more.”
Kafana: “I can see how that would make the contest more uneven. You could get very good indeed at manipulation, if you have a boosted IQ and more than 100 years to practise.”
Bungo: “That’s not all. Patrick doesn’t want to die. And a family who specialise in avoiding red-tape and carrying out dubious experiments are pulling out all the stops. Eunice is pouring money into clone transplantation research, to the point of making ‘medical research subject’ be the official means of execution in at least three American states. Rose is using her marriage to Feodor Yerkes to push the limits on zero-G longevity therapies and cryostasis, because he’s in favour of anything that will help humans spread further out from the Earth. I think the guy has a personal grudge against the force of gravity, and wants to defeat it with the sheer strength of his square jaw line.”
Kafana: “And anything they develop, they’ll be selling first to the other super-rich dynasties?”
Bungo: “I don’t follow their doings in detail - it’s a bit too much like a soap opera. But yeah, there are a lot of inter-marriages and the ones not outright feuding are all loosely allied with each other. It’s worse than the noble families in Alto. There’s nobody who can hold them accountable. Look at Jiang Aristotle. Richest man in the world, and what does he do with it? Have the whole of Versailles shipped over to China, brick by brick, then reassembled so he can prance around in his ‘Court of Impeccable Taste’, surrounded by courtiers whose Confucian manners he approves of, and who’re willing to put up with being treated like obedient dolls.”
Kafana: “What a waste of resources.”
Bungo: “Depends upon what you want to achieve, I guess. What if what he wanted was not the building, but to signal that he is so powerful that he could afford to spend that much money on a whim, in a way that couldn’t be counterfeited? It certainly got talked about. It tells other people ‘I can afford to have you, and every person you’ve ever cared for, assassinated or ruined if you so much as sneeze in a way that offends me, and not even notice the expense.’ It might even save him money, in the long run.“
Kafana: “I hate that attitude. I think I should have been born a Norwegian. You remember the Law of Jante?”
Bungo: “The town where people get shunned if they put on airs - if they give the impression that they think they’re smarter or more educated than the other townsfolk, that they’re in any way special or important?”
Kafana: “Yeah, that’s the one. Sounds ridiculous, like envy, but the net result is a pretty happy society. Imagine what Torello would be like if every fisherman, farmer and beggar could claim to be a Lord and proudly display their own house colours and symbols? Just ennoble the lot of them - problem solved!”
Bungo: “They’d run out of colour combinations. But seriously, rank serves a purpose. Having a hierarchy provides the ruler a way of providing non-financial incentives and recognition. If you climb a pointed mountain, there isn’t space for everybody to stand at the top. In battle, you want the common soldiers to know who can give them orders and who can’t. You want to be able to easily identify your elite forces, the ones with higher levels and stronger armour, who can do things the lower-level soldiers would die if they attempted.”
Kafana: “What about social rank? Do you really need to be able to quickly identify the ones with elite gossiping skills? What purpose is served by excluding non-nobles from an event, rather than the host inviting whoever they find interesting?”
Bungo: “You can only fit so many people in a ballroom. You need some criteria for deciding who gets access to a limited resource. I don’t think ‘first come, first served’ would work very well. But it is more than that. Those with power, those whose ears are in high demand by people wanting to bend them, have always flocked together at select gatherings where they know they won’t be wasting their valuable time on people with nothing to give in return. If Signora started providing outfits to crude offensive people who just happen to have money, soon other clients would stop going to her in case they got mistaken for such hoi polloi.”
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Kafana: “Isn’t that what she just offered to do for us? Forgive me, I’m not calling you crude and offensive. I guess I’m still feeling a bit like I was sold down the river by Wellington and Alderney offering a promise from me to not act like a bard while in Alto. I worked hard for that status. I like being a bard. Bards do some good in the world. What does being a noble achieve?”
Bungo: “The simple answer is that it improves the effect of your Peaceful Pearl. Which reminds me, can I have a look at it? I haven’t had a chance yet.”
She reached into her robes and, after a bit of fiddling, removed it from the harness and passed it to him:
Peaceful Pearl of Storms (EPIC)(UNIQUE)
Peaceful : +90% mitigation against physical attacks by those with lower level than you
Peaceful : reflect 180% of unmitigated damage from physical attacks by those with lower social status than you
Peaceful : You may not initiate combat
Storms : +30% attunement to the element of chaos
Storms : Weather friend
Won by Kafana from the Devil Princess Salma.
Durability: 100000/100000
Light was flickering over the surface, which swirled like roiling clouds. It hadn’t done that before. Maybe it sensed the forces above and was eager to be used? Bungo looked at it, and gave a respectful whistle before passing it back to her.
Bungo: “Impressive. Does ‘unmitigated damage’ mean the damage that gets through after any mitigation has been applied; or does it mean whatever the damage would be, were there no mitigation?”
Kafana: “I haven’t tested it, but I assume the former. Otherwise, if someone were both lower levelled and of lower social status, for every 100 points of damage I took, they’d take, what, 1800 points? That would be insanely overpowered.”
Bungo: “Every combat we’ve had so far has been against opponents whose levels were higher than ours. Given the item is epic, I’d expect the compensation to be pretty high for not being able to attack until someone else attacks you. It would be good for a diplomat or healer, but useless for a tank.”
Kafana: “If that’s the simple answer, what’s the complex one?
Bungo: “For as long as some people are more capable than others, there will be those who’ll flock to follow them, in the hope that their support will be rewarded. And the more who follow them, the greater their power, which in turn they can use to improve the capabilities of themselves and their heirs. Dynasties aren’t artificial creations. They are a natural consequence of human nature that you’d have to actively try to prevent if you didn’t want them forming, and prohibition rarely works. The feudal system tries to frame it in such a way that the society perceives power being tied to a reciprocal responsibility. A powerful fighter is induced to play within the system rather than be a bandit, because it gets them respect, invites to parties, better access to designer clothing and all the other trappings of civilised society.”
Kafana: “In theory.”
Bungo: “In theory. But can we say that our society, with the super-rich who are accountable to nobody, is doing any better?”
Kafana: “So you’re saying I should be a good little noble, not make waves, and just try to do my best within the system, where people are forced to bow and scrape to me, and peasants run scared?”
Bungo: “Hell no. Smash the system, with my blessings. I’ll back you to the hilt. But it has been around for a while. It may not be too easy to smash. You might want to make sure you understand how it functions and come up with a good plan, before you let on that you intend to destroy them all. Effective political action, with the emphasis upon ‘effective’, remember?”
She grinned.
Kafana: “Ok, ok. Good advice; I’ll get off my high horse. But no promises, mind. When Hulk want to smash, Hulk smash.” She mimed shaking her fists at the heavens then smashing them down.
They spent the rest of the climb discussing how vampires divided blood resources, what it was in blood that vampires actually needed for survival, how vampires reproduced and why they hadn’t already bred to the point where everybody important was already a vampire, if living a long time was such an advantage when it came to gathering political power.
A few minutes after passing a cleft in the rocks from which the stream seemed to originate, they reached the top.
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The air was distinctly chilly now, and the strong breeze whipped her long blue hair around so much that she stood facing into it, looking out across the city towards the sea. Despite the wild isolation she somehow felt at home in this spot, like she belonged.
Bungo: “How shall we go about this? Do you want to see my air magic?”
Kafana: “Absolutely.”
She paid careful attention with her sight while he knocked a stone over with a fast dense dagger-like piece of air, and then used another flatter section of air to ward off a blow from a stick she swung at him. He seemed to be using hand motions to guide them, after releasing mana into a mould formed of runes, almost like loading an arrow into a bow.
Bungo: “Here’s the fun part. Have you seen the shield I picked out from the Immortals?”
He produced an enormous circular shield, whose shiny metal surface was covered in rings of images, illustrating the stages of the Qi cultivation process and centered around a boss designed to look like an open eye.
Kafana: “That’s beautiful! But how can you lift it?”
Bungo: “It’s composed of leather from the hides of 7 different types of monster. Only the outer layer is metal, and that’s mainly aluminium, with small amounts of chromium, magnesium and a few others added in. It is much lighter than it appears, and would be useless for a strength tank, but it’s ideal for my dexterity based style. I think someone must have commissioned it from a player blacksmith for parades, but the smith had too much pride to do a bad job and put some awesome enchantments upon it. The important thing, though, is that it has just the right curvature to be a stable kite.”
Matching action to words, he cast a strong gust of wind at the shield from behind, and flew high into the air, flipping in the middle and using another gust to brake his downwards motion before landing with a thump 40 meters away. He ran back to her, laughing.