Gravity.

That seemed to be the theme of my life, as of late. It’d almost been calm for a while there, despite my business. Sure, I’d spent most of my hours in a day working on something, progressing towards some goal or another, but they just didn’t seem quite real. In the same way as someone would talk about how painful an injury was, but until you were the one who was suffering through that pain it just had no weight to it.

Hence, ‘Gravity’. It’d been quite a few days now, since a storm had kicked up, and now I was beginning to see the might of Crossroads that had been resting on their laurels this whole time. The Officials were on the move, or the guard if you weren’t a fan of the special name they’d given themselves.

Men, and the odd woman, dressed in mostly blue and white clothing now roamed the streets with a vigour that hadn’t been present before. It was staged as a ‘crackdown’ on crime within the lesser districts, to the rich of Crossroads of course. The poor weren’t so disillusioned, however. They knew that it was a punishment for the assassination of a bigwig.

Most of them wouldn’t recognise the name Jitah Ephars, probably because he owned the companies that owned the businesses that people would actually recognise. However, the Ephars name was influential enough that the few people in the lower echelons who did know, were able to tell everyone else what was going on.

Before long, it became obvious who they were targeting. The Reptilia population was being placed under heavy scrutiny, and while that might immediately call upon ideas of prejudice, it was actually mostly because Shed had never sold out to the Officials. Mostly.

Haedar Kout had long since sold out his little gang to the Officials. And while it was a common enough rumour, the man’s gang had members who’d been indoctrinated since early childhood, rising through the ranks since Kout himself had formed his group in his own late adolescence. It was a little genius, really, and the man might be horrifically racist and probably every other ‘-ist’ you could list that wasn’t any good, but he clearly knew what he was doing.

Rumour also says that Haedar has more than just sold out, but that he has a legitimate link into the Officials and holds more power than his little gang would imply. I, for one, wouldn’t be surprised by that much.

The Officials were going after anything they deemed to be gang activity, or crime in general, which had them patrolling Reptilia populated neighbourhoods like flies. They imprisoned a stunning number of clearly innocent people per day, something that had Tek, Tenra, and Gehne a little worried. Thankfully, all of them were capable enough to keep away from the Officials.

Tenra seemed to be the weakest link in the Skinned Lizard’s main group, being physically lesser in some way or another to the rest of the group asides from Venn, who was more transient than the rest. But even so, he’d managed to get into a scuffle with about five or six Officials trying to arrest a family of Reptilia without so much as a scratch on his person. Impressive, to say the least.

Even still, I was left with a sinking feeling in my gut as I saw the cogs turn just as I had thought that they might. I was no masterminding genius, and most of my plan I had made up on the fly, like any good plan, but I could predict enough of what was happening for it to be sad when it did happen. In a way, because I saw it coming, it almost felt as if I were the perpetrator of the people’s woes.

Sure, it didn’t make that much logical sense, especially when you accounted for the fact that I was working on a solution since before it even began. But still I was left with that horrible emotion in my gut.

The others who surrounded me did not help. The downsides of being an empath to the degree that I am, I guess. My empathic abilities are effectively only growing stronger each and every time I use them, and that leads to me having a clearer understanding of someone’s emotions. It also means that I can feel them too. Empathy, it’s in the name.

Rethi had killed someone. I could feel the guilt and self-hatred, the disgust and conflicting righteousness. He was working with Tek, and each time he did so I could see feel the death leaking from Tek’s emotions, bloodlust if we were relating it back to something I was more conceptually familiar with.

Valeri was within her room, a room she had rented in the Skinned Lizard for an indeterminant stay. She felt similarly to Rethi in many ways, but there was a strange mixture of mourning and hating that she was mourning all at once. I could sometimes feel the distinctively cold and harsh emotions of Yeram enter, the man making it all the way to the door of Valeri’s room or window, but never taking the last step of calling out to the girl within.

Gehne was simply conflicted and confused, angry in a way too. She knew that I had something to do with the way things were going, especially with the timing being just too convenient. And she was right, in a roundabout way, though she’d not settled for speculation very long. Instead, she had come to seek answers from the source.

I sat atop the roof, a place that I’d found myself enjoying more as of late. It wasn’t that it was a position of power, but one that reminded me just how big the game I was playing actually was, and who it involved. I’m not sure that the rooftops held that much sentimental value to the Gek woman, but as she pulled herself over the edge of the roof—her blue-skinned hand glistening slightly in the moonlight—I let my eyes connect with hers as she appeared in complete silence, startling her slightly.

“Good evening.” I said quietly, though it was far past the evening hours. She gave up on stealth hesitantly and walked towards me with some gusto, reinforced with the teachings of the Sharah that I had continued to supply her despite Valeri’s absence from training. She was actually picking up on much of the initial steps quicker than I had, relative to hours spent. It was impressive, but she was still looking at it too much like a set of rigid movements, rather than the artform it really represented.

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“What did you do?” She asked bluntly, and I raised a subtle brow at her bluntness. It was a good sign, in my book. I would rather a blunt compatriot than one willing to pull the wool over my eyes in moments like these.

“I didn’t do anything, not directly.” I said, but before she could display her displeasure with the answer I continued, “But I knew that something like it would happen. Jitah Ephars was likely going to end up dead for this whole thing to work, or at least absurdly willing to cooperate with our goals. It seems that he was not.”

“You still orchestrated this! I know people that have been put into prisons for this; they think it was Shed.” She growled lightly, keeping her voice down but still retaining the oddly intimidating vibration in her voice.

“They might, but it’s probably just a reason to try go after him. They probably know that it wasn’t Shed, at least the higher-ups would know that. They just don’t want to entertain the idea that it was anything else.” I kept my tone light, though not flippant. The ease in my tone seemed to sooth the woman’s intensity, and while it wasn’t quite anger, it was close enough to be blinding. It was possibly Gehne’s largest flaw, whether or not she knew it or not, with both this intensity and fear so easily able to cloud her perception and narrow it so severely.

“Shed doesn’t do assassinations.” She said heavily, though I just shrugged at the new information.

“That’s great, I’ll just go tell them that they’re going after the wrong guy, and just because he’s capable of getting in basically wherever he wants without detection doesn’t mean that he would abuse it for the right amount of money.” I gave her a dry look, and she grimaced lightly. She knew as well as I that it was an impossible thing to convince someone of. If you could then people will always think that you would.

“Why’d you let this happen, then? Even if it wasn’t you who did it, wouldn’t it cause less damage if you did it quietly?” The words, despite being abrasive and searching, were actually said quite softly. I couldn’t be perfectly sure still, but I think that she held a strange trust in me. I hadn’t exactly shown her my most trustworthy side, though she was probably one of the few outside of my main cohort that knew of my exact origins, whether she believed it wholly or not.

“If it happens silently, Gehne, then it may as well not happen at all.” I said, spreading my arms out wide to encapsulate the city within my arms, “This isn’t a grab for power that I’m going for. I could care less about the political power I could gain here. What matters is that I put those I believe will do their best in positions where they can do that.”

“You still haven’t answered.” She hissed stubbornly, her bright eyes flashing in the dull light of night that I still called moonlight habitually, “You are skirting around the question like the snake you are. Why did you let it happen?”

I gently tapped at my knee in a rhythm that not even my conscious mind cared to know. She was right, honestly. I was skirting the issue, for good reasons and bad. Good reason is that basically anything I said about my movements and plans were beyond sensitive information. It was information that was absurdly valuable right now and, if Gehne so wished, she could sell it and skip out of town like nothing else.

Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Gehne just wouldn’t, and I could tell that from being around her for long enough to know the majority of her emotional states at rest. Emotions that would lead to that just weren’t in her repertoire, so that got rid of that easy motivation.

The bad reason that I was holding that information from her was simple. I didn’t like that I felt I had to make the decision to use someone’s death as an inciting incident, one that would lead to at least a few deaths at the hands of Officials, and one that would spell more still in the future. In fact, while Valeri might feel guilty for her part in her father’s death, in some ways it was far more my fault that he had to die.

“You know, back on Earth we learnt a lot about what sacrifice meant.” The words I spoke were casual, but they held a gripping interest for Gehne. Any mention of Earth had the woman secretly as excited as Rethi tended to be about the topic. “There were wars and such on a scale that can likely match the large wars in Orisis’ past, though I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that generations suffered for those choices that were made, and the sacrifices it took to stop the effects of them lasted even longer.”

I looked over the city using my senses to the best of my ability and overseeing the world around me as it changed, fear and anger spreading like a disease. It was a disease that I had let loose, and it hurt even as it infected more and more people, ultimately in service of the goals that I held for this little city.

“When I grew a little older, probably in my mid teenage years, I started to realise just how much things were affected by those events that had happened lifetimes ago. It had affected those that were originally involved, then their children, then their children’s children. It seemed so silly that there would be that much of an effect, that it wouldn’t have just stopped after the first generation.

“So then I started to look at the world in a way that… adjusted for that. I let myself contemplate the long string of events that seemed to lead to the way people interact, the way they think and feel, how they eat, their humour, their…” I trailed off for a moment, finalising the thought with the allusion to the endless list that could be made, “I began to see the beginnings of them, the actions that led to events that led to more actions, and here is no different.”

Gehne looked at me quizzically, trying to parse the jumble of words and thoughts that never quite reached to the heart of the issue, my hand shying away from the words I knew rested there. The blue skinned woman tried to keep her features harsh, but I think she realised that she had found herself poking at a raw wound of mine. She struggled, but she managed to formulate at least a few words into a question, an important, cutting question.

“What do you see, then?” I closed my eyes against the exposure that the words made me feel, practically demanding my full honesty. I could feel the cool breeze across my skin, my own emotions projecting upon them and making them almost desolate in the way that they dragged on my clothes. Before long, I forced myself to open my eyes and sigh deeply.

“In five years, the Brauhm Empire would truly have its hooks in Crossroads, their money will have corrupted everything by then. Not long after, slaves would start to be taken from Crossroad’s population, and the rich would get richer while destitution became death and slavery. In ten years, the Empire would rush in as ‘saviours’ and cull the rich and ‘reform’ Crossroads. The Empire would control it all, and it will fall just as fantastically as Vahla had.” I chuckled wryly at the fear that had wormed its way from her heart and into her eyes.

“Instead of watching that happen, I decided to kick start it when we’re strongest…” I looked down at my hands, the wry smile that had made it to my face had soured into a horrible thing, I could tell, “and hopefully, just maybe, the suffering wouldn’t be as bad this way. Otherwise, the blood is on my hands, Gehne.”