New Meridia belonged to Blake Thornwood now, but he wasn't sure whether he wanted the job. After defeating Clay Atlas and taking control of the city, Blake was now responsible for the city and everyone who called New Meridia home. Not only did he now have a city to manage, but he was wrestling with a number of revelations about himself, the planet Earth, and the very nature of the system that had now spread to his world.
Firstly, Earth was not the only planet filled with humans across the universe. Clay Atlas was a human who originated on a completely different world, along with the six other City Lords who had come to Earth and brought the system with them.
The system itself was almost like a virus, passing from person to person like a cold or flu. The moment someone integrated with the system came close to someone else, or an uninitiated person came across a system-generated power card, they gained access to be able to obtain and use power cards. Each of these cards granted superhuman abilities to anyone who managed to take them.
Naturally, this disrupted society itself at a fundamental level, and the change in the power of the natural world completely upended civilization as Blake knew it. One moment he was attending a tech-free retreat in the Rocky Mountains, and the next, there were earthquakes, landslides, and wildfires spreading all across his home state of Colorado. He was attacked by a man with flaming fists named Harry, but Harry ended up being someone who Blake forged a friendship with. Now, he considered Harry Grenfell as one of his closest friends.
When Blake received his very first power card, he thought it was broken. It was a Stone Fists card, which should have transformed his own hands into fists that he could fight with, but the card summoned a Stone Golem monster instead.
Either the card was broken, or it was him - he wasn't so sure at first. But the more power cards he amassed over time, the more he realized that absolutely every card he obtained and used would not do what it was supposed to do. Instead, the card would summon a monster. That monster would always evoke the kind of card he played, but none of his cards said anything about monsters.
The other revelation that Blake was trying to come to terms with explained exactly why that happened whenever he took possession of a card. It explained why every single power card that he obtained would summon a monster instead of doing what it was supposed to.
The truth of the matter was that Blake wasn't broken, he was just different, and that was by design. Cards didn't work right for him because he wasn't actually a human at all. He might have looked it, but he wasn't really. As a part of this world-spanning system that governed the use of these power cards, there existed 13 deviant cards. These cards did strange and wondrous things, and in Blake's instance, one of the cards had been played many years ago. It had created him as an infant. He was taken in by a man and his wife who couldn't have children, and he was raised in a home full of love and laughter.
In the moments before Clay Atlas' death, the invading City Lord from another planet revealed to Blake that he was actually a card himself. His true name was Monster Summoner Araya, and absolutely every card he would ever lay his hands on would be summoned as a monster whenever he played it, not the form it was supposed to take.
Now that Blake had ascended to become a City Lord himself, there were a million things he wanted to do, but didn't have the manpower to do them all. Blake only managed to best Clay Atlas in a duel with the help of the resistance, led by an old man named Samuel Jackson. He was once the mayor of Cedar Creek, the town Blake grew up in. He knew Blake and his adopted father Jacob, but kept that information from Blake until Samuel was sure he could trust him.
Samuel was a good man and saw the events that happened in the weeks following the fall of society and the rise of the cards as what they were; an atrocity waiting to happen. He wanted to stop Clay Atlas from having a stranglehold over the people of this area of the country. With Blake's help, they saved Samuel's son Randall from the clutches of a hideous monster crab, fixed the water supply issue, then set about taking care of Clay Atlas.
Now that Blake had helped Samuel overthrow the dictator of New Meridia, it was time for Samuel himself to help Blake with the day-to-day running of the city. As part of the City Lord interface, which Blake could access from absolutely anywhere within the city limits, he could see a whole host of information about the town and all the aspects of its daily functions.
He could see the population of the city, how many of these people were engaged in tasks that were aligned with the city's goals, a basic sentiment metric to show whether or not the majority of his populace was happy or discontented, and a specific set of metrics that he could break down by store. As a part of this, he could see how much money each business cost to run, what kind of income per day they were generating, broken down by taxes and profits. The sheer amount of information about New Meridia just about made his head spin.
After taking control of the city, he soon learned he could delegate some of these tasks. There was a process within the city interface where he could nominate delegated representatives who could manage certain functions or focuses depending on how much power he wanted to give out or give away.
His friend Harry, who Blake had rescued from the dungeons beneath Atlas Tower in the middle of New Meridia, was one of those people who could not be tied down. He needed to be moving from place to place, traveling through the world and experiencing new things. He was going crazy even just in the few weeks that he was stuck in New Meridia, so Blake gave him a task that he thought Harry would take to quite naturally.
Blake planned to appoint Harry Grenfell as New Meridia's envoy to other settlements, to deliver them the good news that Clay Atlas was no longer in charge of the city, and it was under new management. One of the main issues that Samuel and the resistance were focused on was that Clay Atlas was mostly interested in consolidating power within the city walls themselves, taking resources from those who were actually out hunting, farming crops, and facing the dangers of this new and wild world.
It became quite obvious once Blake started digging into all the information that he could access now just what Clay was up to. There were a number of facilities all across New Meridia which were necessary to maintain life support functions in the city. There was water supply and sanitation, food distribution, healthcare, energy and power, transport, housing, public safety and security, and a whole host of others.
But there was one facility that Blake didn't understand in the whole grand scheme of things. It was right in the middle of the city as well, buried deep under the Earth's crust. It was buried even further down than the dungeons that Harry and Blake's parents had been detained in.
The facility was called an Anima Harvester. Anima was the name that this system gave to the energy that drove the card system, and it was supposedly just another name for the basic energy of life. Mana, chi, anima, it didn't matter what it was called, it just mattered that Clay Atlas was obviously siphoning off this essence for his own ends.
Every person empowered by the system had a certain amount of anima they could draw on each day to access the cards that they had in their deck. There were mechanisms that would allow someone to regain lost anima, or to recharge completely if they were engaging in a duel. But when Blake drilled down into this Anima Harvester facility, he realized just what Clay Atlas had been up to.
This facility showed the current population of New Meridia, and had a figure calculated next to it which showed how much anima was being generated by the population of the city. It also showed how much anima was flowing into the harvester while battles were taking place in the dueling arena in the middle of the city.
It looked like part of the function of a city card, which is how New Meridia had been spawned by Clay Atlas when all of this began, was to harvest and collect ambient mana from the populace of the city. It also collected any anima that was lost during duels. A portion of that anima was going directly to Clay Atlas, which was how he had managed to amass such an incredible amount of power in such a short amount of time.
So that explained why Clay Atlas was so hell bent on fostering a dueling arena and pushing it as the main attraction of the city. Every duel, and every person, was just another resource he could harvest a little more anima from.
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Blake's heart sank as he realized what this meant. By defeating Clay Atlas and taking over the city, Blake was now receiving that influx of anima. He didn't need it, or even want it, but it was a part of the function of being a City Lord. The only way to shut it down was to destroy the city itself, something he couldn't do to the people who had just fought so hard to free themselves from the iron-fisted rule of a tyrant.
Blake had a decision to make. He had to decide how to handle this newfound power, and what kind of ruler he wanted to be. New Meridia had just been freed from one tyrant, and Blake didn't want to become another. But he couldn't escape the truth of what he was now. He was a City Lord, and New Meridia was his to command.
As Blake looked out over the city from his penthouse, he knew that his journey was only beginning. Chelsea Otto, a young woman who had previously managed the day to day dealings for Clay Atlas, was at the door. She cleared her throat to get Blake's attention.
"Ahem, Mister Thornwood? Mister Grenfell is here to see you," Chelsea said with a forced pleasant tone. She hadn't been that nice to Blake and Harry when she was Clay's assistant, but she had knowledge Blake needed, and she didn't want to be exiled into the post-apocalyptic monster-filled wasteland outside the city walls.
As Harry stepped out of the elevator into the grand penthouse, Blake turned to welcome his friend. Harry's blonde hair was a mess, but somehow it always managed to look cool. He was taller than Blake, but not by much.
"Harry, glad you could make it!" Blake said.
"Of course, man! What can I do for you?"
"Here, have a drink. The water is actually cold here, and Clay had this place sorted with expensive liquor and even honest-to-goodness soda pop from before the fall," Blake replied. "What are you having?"
"I'd kill for an ice cold can of root beer right about now," Harry said, and actually licked his lips at the prospect.
"Chelsea, can you get that for Harry? I'll take one too," Blake said.
"Ice, or no?" Chelsea asked.
"I'll take some ice," Blake said, and Harry just nodded in agreement as Chelsea left.
Harry took a seat on the massive couch that surrounded the recessed floor in the center of the room. Blake had been here before, but now he was the one calling the shots. He sat opposite Harry. "So I've asked you to come here because I have a proposition for you."
"Uh oh. You're City Lord, and you think you can just start ordering me around like I'm your slave, huh?" Harry asked, but from his tone it was clear he was kidding.
"Actually, I've been thinking how to best give you what you want. You don't want to be in the city anymore, I know you just want to get out there and explore. You've got restless feet again. You were planning on leaving before Clay and his goons tossed you in the dungeons."
"Yeah, I guess I was." Harry's posture shifted. He leaned forward, arms crossed over his chest. He was guarded, yet interested to hear Blake out.
"Don't worry, I think you're going to be happy with this. I need an Envoy for New Meridia, someone to spread the news of the death of Clay Atlas. To let the world know it's a new day, a fresh start. There are farming communities out there in the countryside around us who still think we're going to destroy them if they don't send us supplies, and we need to make sure they know that's not the case."
"You want me to travel all over the countryside for you?" Harry's eyes sparked with interest.
"And I can think of no one better suited for this than you. You know this country better than I do, and you've got a knack for fitting in with anybody. You love the journey, the exploration. And more than that, you believe in what we're building here, right?"
Harry's hand balled into a fist and it shook with the tightness of his grip. He'd closed his eyes as well, and for a moment Blake thought he'd done something to upset Harry. But after a few moments of silence Harry thrust his fist into the air and let out a triumphant cry.
"Oh hell yes, man! You can trust me on this, I swear it. Oh man, I can't wait to leave! Where do you want me to go first?"
"It's up to you, man. I trust you. But there are some things I'd like you to do while you're traveling around, okay?"
Harry nodded. "This is a lot of pressure. I'll pretty much be the face of New Meridia, right?"
"Well, yeah. So I really need you to pass on the message for us here. I've already run this by Samuel, and once we hold the election for the Citizen Council, everything I tell you is still going to be applicable."
"I won't let you down."
Chelsea came back with two frosted glasses half-filled with ice, and two cold cans of soda. Harry and Blake spent the next few hours discussing the mission, the places Harry would go, and the messages he'd convey. It really was a simple message, and it was one of fostering goodwill between New Meridia and the other settlements that were flourishing against all odds.
Blake wanted to build a network of settlements, each focused on one specific need of the people around New Meridia. The settlement would focus on that particular specialty task, and in turn, New Meridia and the other settlements would share in their resources. The one resource that New Meridia had in abundance was people, and Blake knew he needed to get them back on side.
In the coming days, he would ask for volunteers to join what he was calling the Frontier Defence Force, or FDF. In exchange for service in the FDF, people would receive housing, either in New Meridia or in one of the settlements that decided to join the New Meridia Frontier Alliance - the NMFA. Becoming a member of the Alliance would require a certain guarantee of housing for any FDF members posted there.
It was a good way of sharing resources with the smaller settlements, a show of ongoing good faith, while also securing resources for use by the entire Alliance.
The longer they talked, and the more Blake thought about the state of things, the more he realized that this was not a New Meridia versus everybody else kind of problem. This was a human versus an invading species kind of problem. The invading species just happened to look human.
All seven of the City Lords who had come to Earth with their massively powerful city cards had come here for a purpose. Blake had absolutely no doubt that every single one of the cities that had spawned across the Earth's surface after the rise of the system also had an Anima Harvester facility beneath it. Blake still had no idea what this energy was being collected for, or what was happening with it once it was collected.
That was a mystery that he would have to dig into later. For now, Blake knew that the sheer act of taking control of the city away from one of the invading City Lords would be enough to draw the ire of the other six.
Blake had no doubt that other powerful settlements and alliances would rise from the ashes of human society across the planet. These would be true earthborn humans who'd survived the worst that the system could throw at them. Blake needed to make sure that all of the people of Earth were aware of what the stakes were.
When an invading force comes to your planet and harvests your energy, it usually means that wherever it is that they came from didn't have enough to support their own existence or expansion. There was only one end in a scenario like that, and it was that these invading City Lords wanted to drain the planet dry of anima and take it back to wherever it was they came from.
Blake would do anything to stop that from happening, and he figured that's probably why he was played here in the first place. Blake himself was a card, one that had the power to break the very system that had spread into his world. He was a trump card of sorts, one that could disrupt the status quo and topple the new Lords of Planet Earth.
But who or what had played his card all those years ago in the small town of Cedar Creek? Had they known what was going to happen to Earth all the way back then? Or did they simply play him as an insurance policy, just in case things went bad? Did they know that he would be adopted by the most wonderful people and be raised as a son who was loved no matter what?
And where were the other 12 deviant cards that were a part of this system, just like he was? If his powers transformed all of his cards into monsters, what kind of strange and system-breaking things could the other deviants do?
Blake had a feeling that he would find out before too long.
After Harry accepted his position as envoy of the New Meridia Frontier Alliance, he left the penthouse. There were some things that he needed to get ready to be able to start the journey, and he was absolutely itching to get underway.
Blake dismissed Chelsea, his assistant, and asked to be left alone. His mother and father were settling into their own apartment a little further down in the tower, but they needed some time to recuperate from being locked in Clay's dungeons. So Blake just watched the sun set from the top of Atlas Tower and tried to figure out what his next move was going to be.
Just after sunset, a system notification appeared, and it came with a blaring alarm tone. Blake heard it in his head, and there was no way to stop it from happening. He just needed to ride it until it finished.
SYSTEM BROADCAST INCOMING!
Note: this announcement is only being broadcast to the current seven City Lords on planet Earth.
Phase two of system integration will begin in 24 hours. Two new elemental types will be added to the system that is currently deployed on this planet: water and air. The system will begin deploying new power cards to everywhere the system currently touches.
This broadcast has not been made to other people who are a part of this system. As a City Lord, you may choose to tell them that phase two is about to begin or not.