"Any news?" asked Mordred and looked at his wife. He was not amused.
After sending a farspeak to his ever disappointing son and fruitlessly attempting to signal the Advisor, he had teleported out of the Stonks ancestral manor and flown over to her location. The place was under official investigation and swarming with drones, but a flash of his merit badge had been enough for them to treat him as royalty.
Which he was, in all but name. Being the Party's elected lifetime executive of Grandiloquent Industries had its upsides, not to mention that he was also the elected leader of the Valatones Party itself. And also an arch-wizard, one that did not have to worry about ever running out of spirit stones. Currently he was sitting cross-legged in the air on a hovering disk he had conjured, and examining a quadratic section of cheap, plastered wall with his mana sense.
"Nothing so far," said Dina after checking her slate. "We've contacted the families of the other children, but there are no traces of the man himself."
The couple were standing in the burned out ruins of a house outside the Academy grounds, formerly the dwelling of one Jayburn Mowbray, janitor and groundskeeper at the Academy and currently the Party's most wanted man. A group of drones were busy levitating the charred remains of an alcohol still out of the stairs that led to the basement. That alone was a perfectly good explanation for why the owner had set his house on fire and vanished, and for the Academy and the Party this would serve as the official truth. They'd throw some skeletons in there before the newspeople showed up, end of story. But Mordred hadn't found any explanation for why one of the walls in the living room was still perfectly intact and undamaged. That, and the fact the drones were using spell rods for a simple levitating act, irritated him immensely.
"Go over last night for me again, if you please." He returned his eyes to the wall. Something about it reeked of magic, but he could not determine its origin. Only the innermost vaults in his main factory had objects with a similar quality to them, artifacts and machinery that had been given to them by the Advisor.
Dina sighed, but knew better than to annoy her husband further. "A quarter to midnight I was given a message by my servitor at the head office. I read it, and saw that the wards in Ethelred's mansion had detected a breach in their vault and that the experimental manipulator was gone."
"Hours after the fact, no doubt," mumbled Mordred. "My brother was always a slow-witted oaf when it came to warding logic. Continue."
"I used my gifts to track it down to the Academy, was granted a visitor's pass, and the trail led me to an empty lecture hall that had been meticulously scoured using alteration magic. In there I could also sense faint traces of Meylor's essence, as well as demonic signatures of unknown origin. I then headed to the administration lounge and asked for an audience with the Core. But it was... obstructive, and its logs were blank, save for an extreme disruption in the ambient mana. No servitors had been active near the event, either."
Mordred grunted. "At which point the janitor that killed our nephew had covered his tracks and disappeared like a will-o-wisp! Another trillion merits down the drain. And you didn't think of waking me up earlier?" He contracted his bushy eyebrows into the look that had asserted his dominance for the better part of a century.
Dina looked deep into his eyes and lowered her voice an octave. "You were asleep, dear. I had it all under control."
His rage melted away like snow on a rainy spring day. "Yes... You had it all under control. I'm sorry, darling. That little cockroach will turn up eventually, I've issued a worldwide arrest notice." He got down from his disk and hobbled over to embrace her. "How is Aela?"
"She's safe in their mansion. I've given her a mild selenetic to sleep on and moved her to Walaruna's quarters."
"Good. She'll miss him, but we'll handle that in due time. Have you contacted Mutato Inc?"
"They assured me that the males are extremely fertile, and that his loss will be of no consequence. As long as they're reimbursed, of course. We'll send her for a checkup tomorrow and everything will go as planned." She kissed him on the cheek.
"Then I needn't have worried."
"No, dear. I don't want you to worry about anything."
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"I just saw Daddy." The Queen stood still for a moment as she implemented the directives that had floated to the top of her priorities. Ignoring her baffled audience she moved over to her throne, lifted up a panel in one of the armrests and pushed a yellow button.
A signal was then sent to one of the devices behind her, causing a handful of atoms in the physical plane to vibrate with a particular frequency. That in turn caused one of the most closely guarded machines in the Queensborg to spark alive, relaying a set of complex instructions to the servitors around it. These servitors then returned to their creches and transmitted these instructions to the nearest Dungeon Core through a series of back doors, taking advantage of its divine origins to bounce signals instantly between each Core on the continent of Rodazia. Within moments, every servitor on the continent was checking its logs for information about one particular soul, and the newest models were pulsing out mana bursts to determine the soul of any humans nearby. This continued for one hour.
After that, a second set of instructions were sent to the Queen's millions of drones, translated into thoughts and ideas through the necromantic implants grafted onto their souls, and causing them to pull out their status scanners and check the identities of anyone in the area. This continued for half an hour.
After that, a soul resonance pulse reverberated from Core to Core, washing through solid matter and into caves, basements, tree houses, taverns, bunkers, sewer pipes, crumbling ruins, curiosity collections, underground fortresses, museums, scientific laboratories and a secret compartment in a particular wooden desk, where dark yellow spheres began to bounce around, blinking on and off and emitting a loud ringing noise.
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They continued doing so for five minutes, whereupon the Queen then raised her hand again and pushed a second, bright red button.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the Court, I declare thee all absolved of all crimes, rewarded for all heroic acts, purged of all sins and at peace with the world. Thee art free to leave Our Court, Beyondwards to rise," she said, before the plasma shell surrounding her hall disintegrated and the walls began to melt.
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Meanwhile, in the physical plane, a mechanism started counting down. A few kilometers north of it, the wall in front of Mordred and Dina Stonks opened up. Beyond it was a small chamber, visible only from their side. Inside was a middle-aged, pudgy, bespectacled man wearing an Academy robe, sitting in a padded armchair. He lifted a small blue sphere up to his mouth and began to speak.
"It's the Advisor!" exclaimed Mordred, and his eyes lit up like fireballs. "I knew he had to be involved somehow!"
"starting at exactly... now. Okay, so this is on right? Yeah it's on. Okay good. Hey. Jay. How ya doing old pal. Okay, so *hic* lissen good. If you're hearing this? Means I'm really screwed. Cause you know I'm powerful, right? And I got a deal with the thing in the closet. Okay so here's how that happen. Started couple hundred years ago when the Party banned drinking outside the taverns, so I made a deal with him that he'd open a PORTAL in every bar in the whole freaking world! So I could drink at work. He'd slither in, grab a few bottles, leave some coins that I gave him, booze for me. Hell yeah!"
Dina was about to say something, but Mordred raised his hand. "Hush! He's eccentric, I know, but listen!"
"Then the Party got rid of all the coins, so I told him to just steal the bottles. Fuck it. THEN the Queen said she wanted better cops, so I told the exe... the exer... THE EXTERMINATORS they should round up some pixies and give em soul implants. Woohoo, I'm the best. But turns out those little fuckers like alcohol even more than I do, they just go straight for it! So then the taverns had to start serving drugs instead of booze. Drugs are bad, that stuff'll kill ya. Trust me, I know. So thass round when I got this teacher body and found out that you, my friend, was already homebrewing! So I got in touch with you, and that's how we made this WONDERFUL drink called TONKA BRUT! *glugluglug* Ahhhhh."
"THIS is the Advisor?" Dina had crossed her arms. Mordred had to admit, his previous appearances had been more... respectable.
"But the portals were still there right, and one night I thought, they should be serving Tonka instead of drugs! But turns out you can't mix em. So a lot of people died that night, and I got squidface to clean em up. And he literally did. Just gobbled em down. And said they were tasty, but he wanted them alive, so we made a new deal. I'd throw up some more portals and toss in some beggars or whatever, and he gives me a shitload of mana so I can cast all the spells I want and do awesome demonstrations in class. You know the rest."
"It was him! He killed Meylor!" She extended her claws and was ready to pounce, but Mordred put his hand on her shoulder. "No! We must hear the rest!"
"But I haven't been totally honest with ya, but I'm telling you now. Because you're a smart guy and I love you man. *Urp*. So you gotta know, I also made a deal with the other guy, long ago. One of the gods. Or demons, I dunno. But that means I can't die. Shitface goes and, no wait. I'm shitfaced! Haha! SQUIDFACE, he goes in and pulls me out of the fire before I go to the Queen. Who calls me Daddy by the way, because I made her and I rule! But he puts me back in someone else and I keep all my memories and stuff. You think I'm just an old teacher but I've actually been around for a while."
"Immortality," Mordred whispered. "He's truly... a walking god."
"Anyway! So if you're hearing this, it means someone got me good, and that the Pact got erased or some shit. Or I did it myself. Fuck it. And I didn't pull my dead man's switch in time. Or maybe I forgot what the yellow one was for, haha! So that should be going off right about... "
The mechanism finished its countdown, and the floor in a large, enclosed space opened up to dump its contents into another enclosed space below.
"...oh, NOW! Enjoy the show, man!" Mordred suddenly had a very bad feeling. He checked his slate. It was dead. He checked his merit badge. It refused to show anything. Then he heard a rumble from the south, towards the capital city of Valatones. He slowly turned around. Visible above the treeline that surrounded the Academy, a gigantic plume of blue smoke had appeared. It continued rising into the sky, blotting out the sun, arcane fire crackling in its depths. A breeze blew over the treetops and then turned into a howling gale, nearly uprooting the ancient trunks. Mordred stood petrified as his wife roared in fury. She threw herself on the Advisor and tore him to pieces, but the chunks of flesh merely knitted themselves back together, and he continued speaking as if nothing had happened.
"Hope I didn't pack the stones too tight, shoulda only knocked over a couple blocks at most. You know those things explode if you dunk'em in uhh, detartrated anhydrous... ah, I can't remember. Point is... I screwed up. I just wanted to make things better, so people wouldn't have to fight all the time and just live and be safe. And I could play with my ducks! Yeees," the voice sounded as if the speaker had bent down to pick something up, "who's a *Quack!* Oh that's right who's a good ducky! *QUAAACK!* Oh you're hungry huh! No don't bite the finger, Daddy gonna feed you later. But yeah this world we live in? It's out of whack, man. You think the Party's doing okay, but they're bad. I remember a little bit of how it used to be, and I wanna go back. *Hic.* But I can't, cause I'm too old and everytime I try to fix stuff I just fuck it up even worse. So you gotta do something man. You know how people think, you're good with the kids, and I'm too old and too fucked up to do it. *sniff* *sob*"
In his devastation, Mordred still had enough wherewithal to keep listening. His wife had stormed off at one point, but he remained, transfixed by the voice of whom he had assumed to be his benefactor, the crux of his enterprise.
"So you gotta, you gotta go to Elotar, portal in the you-know-where should take you there if you give'im the codephrase, you know the one. There's a mountain range there called the Teusenbergs, *hic*, and that's where the Vendelites are hiding out. Go find'em, tell'em I sent ya and that it's time to crash the party. Get it? CRASH the PARTY! HAHAHHA *urp* *cough* Ahhh and then you gotta get the Bloodstones and hand em out to the sects. Just beware of the chicken guy, he's no fun. Cheers man. Henry signin off. Oh, and if things went tits up and this is Mordred listening..."
His eyes went wide. Was there hope after all?
"...You gotta work on your dimensionalism, kid! You SUCK at magic!" And with those words, professor Plurbinquarg's final simulacrum melted into a puddle of pink ooze.
Up on a hilltop nearby, inside a small hunting shack secluded by the trees, Jayburn put down the sphere he had been listening to since it fell out of a pocket dimension in his hat. He went outside and looked at the horizon, shielding his eyes from the wind as the Party's beating heart went up in smoke. He snickered.
"Ahh, you magnificent bastard. Shoulda known you'd find a way to flip the world off from beyond the grave. For all I know, yer not even dead, just dead drunk in a ditch somewhere." He spun the magazine and put the banger back in his pocket. "Guess this wasn't meant for me after all." He put on the strange hat Henry had given him years ago, grabbed his bag and the other few mementos he'd brought, put on his duster coat and headed out.
"I guess it's time to go join the outlaws."