The runes on my back were causing me pain. It was a warning that I had drawn a lot more mana in than I could use in a single spell, and attempting it would cause the spell to go wild.

Miss Fern quickly placed her hand on my wrist, and I felt myself purposefully purge the excess mana. Her contact made my mind unconciously calm down.

"I will kill him." I said outloud; knowing full well the cameras were recording.

"You physically can, and nobody can stop you." The man across the desk tells me, while appearing very nervous. "But, I would recomend something a bit more drastic. You see, death is a quick way out, and although initially gratifying, it will result in you having to build everything from scratch again." The man began reasoning with me, "killing him is one form of punishment, and it will work, but, he won't learn anything from it. He will have escaped any long-term consequences.  If there is any way to prove that he intentionally killed off the sullivan family, to which you are currently the only survivor of the will reading; then the consequences will end up being far more reaching."

I had just been told that the attourney who did the will readings, had forged the will read at the meetings.  And because of the public nature of Sullivan Enterprises, grandma's actual will was required to be publicly published three months after the reading. I procede to get told that all of my cousins, aunts, uncles, and my one great-aunt, had all been declared deceased in some way shape or form before the public record was published.

The public will was two sentances long. that was it. And I had already been able to commit it to memory.

"To my loving granddaughter, who I treated horribly every day, so that I may bring out her spirit; I leave every worldly asset, may Ashley do with it as she wishes. To every other member of the family, those who doubted, and those who mooched: go screw yourselves, and leave Ashley alone; that girl has worked harder than any six employees of my company combined, and has done it for breadcrumbs since she moved back in with me."

Thats it. Thats all my grandmother's published will says.

All the insane demands, all the crazy hoops we were required to jump through, all the negative thoughts I have had about my grandma since leaving on the cruise:  I want them all back.

"I agree. he needs to suffer a public, a very public, social death." I say aloud, "a death of the body would be the easy way out. I won't kill his body. Miss Fern; I have to ask you to shut off the cameras for a moment." I say without turning my head off the gentleman in front of me. as soon as the two floating balls are powered down, I tell them what I have planned. "You two are going to witness one of my spells, one that I used on the artificer just before I spaced him, to see if he had any redeemable qualities; he didn't."

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I looked to Miss Fern. "The spell is a memory spell. It will display the memory of an individual I set, we will see the entire life of the target. It will feel like we lived his lifetime, seeing everything he saw, in real time. In reality, we can see every memory in vivid detail, even the ones the target doesn't remember, in a couple of seconds."

"Why are you telling me this?" she asks.

"Reporters report." I answer. "Take this as an anonomus source. This spell has a huge drawback, because I awoke to magic with this spell, I didn't experience them at the time, I will experience it now; but I think its worth it, in this instance. It requires every last bit of power in my body to do this. I will sleep for the next three days, nothing will wake me. use everything you learn from this to legally prove that he has done these things, if need be, gain his trust by proving the good things he has done; then the shady things, and break him by revealing all of the immoral things."

She looks at me, eyes full of conviction. "Trillion, this is an invasion of privacy." she gives the response I have come to expect from her.

"And with your cameras off, nobody will know how you got the information. Mr. Lyle here is also an attourney, there may be methods he can tell you to prove the things we will witness."  When she looks like she is going to argue again, I start the spell. "Memory Capture, Target, Alfred Bennings." I picture his face as I speak the words, and the three of us witness his entire life in a fraction of a second. every desicion, every choice, the reasoning behind them, and how he hid his tracks. the number of lives lost because of his plans.

I woke up in the hospital, as predicted, three days later. The news channel was on; and Miss Fern was talking to another reporter, speaking on what had been found.

"So, what you are telling us, is that Trillion Biggs, the one who landed Serindipity on Cassius IV a few months ago, was actually born Ashley Sullivan of Sullivan Enterprises? Then who has been running Sullivan Enterprises for the past year?"

"A pawn of Alfred Bennings. We uncoverd records of him adopting children, and naming them with the same names of influential people's children or grand children when they came to name those individuals in their last wills and testiments. He then created false wills to read, mandating the individuals change their names to that of the birth names of the children he had adopted, and groomed for these positions; and just as the wills were required to become public domain, the original people in question would all pass away from something or another. This plan spanned decades, in some cases."

I knew she would use it.  The sheer number of people cheated out of their inheritances, as well as their lives, was too mind boggleing; and the kickbacks he was getting from these groomed children numberd in the hundreds of trillions of dollars a month.  I forced mana into my mind, and erased the man's memories, keeping only the memories I had of him before I cast the spell.

A nurse came in, and had a tray of food on it. I could smell the bacon in it.  "Take the bacon off of that, outside the room, then bring it back, please." I said to her.  She looked at me stragely, then left with the tray, comming back a few seconds later, without the rancid smell of, my once, favorite meat.