Everything in the inside was going real smooth for Costan. He even used his pimp abilities to help multiple Empire scale dudes to attend the occasional funeral or birthday. He helped one well known planetary mob boss attend five funerals, two weddings, and the birth of his only daughter. Conjugal visits being a thing, his wife finally conceived, and Costan wouldn't pass a gaining contact for the interplanetary mob boss to sign his child's birth certificate. Maybe when the next shit hit the fan, he might get out unharmed.
The goddess of fertility was unamused at Costan's antics. She decided that enough was enough and took on the identity of a defense lawyer to get access to him. Then it was as easy as laying a hand on Costan to revoke that stupid ability. It didn't go to plan.
Everything was set up perfectly, nobody would examine her falsified credentials past a quick glance and a data check, but that's not exactly where the plan failed. She had gotten in and almost in the same room when everything fell apart. Costan called her out from the other side of the door to the visitation room. A simple "That's an imposter" is all it took for the guards to do a deep dive on her information, fully outing her secret.
The guards had her detained in a different visitation room, and she didn't bother to lie or withhold any information. The guards didn't want to buy any of it, but the warden did. The guards weren't aware of most of the things in Costan's file, so they had no reason to believe that a god came to revoke Costan's Celestial Pimp abilities.
The goddess was on the clock, Gods could only be in the physical world for so long before they got kicked out. The time in her simulacrum body was rapidly ticking away, and she almost succeeded. She was two steps away from touching Costan when a part of concrete floor above sheered off and crushed her.
Everyone just stared slack jawed. Costan proclaimed to have had nothing to do with the concrete falling, nobody believed him but had nothing to point out otherwise. They put him in solitary confinement just because it seemed like something they should do. The universe had kicked her out of the mortal world, but everyone was suspecting Costan.
The goddess had failed, but convinced the god of war to give it a try. He made a very simple and straight forward plan. He just forced his way into the prison while Costan was asleep, breaking a few of Costan's bones with the door when it flew from it's frame. He was successful in revoking the abilities, but got carried away. The god of war was a wanted criminal after breaking into a prison and causing grievous bodily harm to multiple guards and Costan.
They charged Costan with attempted escape, but the prosecutor threw out the case. The video evidence showed someone breaking into the isolation cell and beating Costan down before escaping by themselves. They would just waste tax dollars on the trial.
Costan was in the hospital again, hating the gods and the justice system. He hadn't planned on doing anything like escaping before, but things changed. Now he was plotting not only escape, but revenge on a galactic scale.
It was a few months before he got privileges back, and everyone was agitated by Costan not being able to spot them some noodles or five minutes outside. The bosses all came together to help when Costan told them that he had a plan. They managed to get him some time on the computer, and he didn't waste a second.
It was outdated enough to be unable to access most websites, but Costan didn't need any of that. He created a small encryption program and sent a single message to one of his battleships. The message was clear with it's instructions and would set up a chain of events that nobody would want to happen but him.
The ships, being in standby mode with skeleton crews, went unnoticed as sections of each ship were sealed up and schematics quietly changed. One of the downfalls of a paperless society is that all the documents can change and nobody notice it. Everyone was blissfully unaware of the troubles to come.
The writing on the wall was unfortunately missed by Empress Yitan. She blamed the execution on Costan, despite Yidas confessing to everything before K.A.R. snapped her neck like a tooth pick. She had a plan to permanently ruin Costan once and for all time. She provided the guards of the prison with the top of the line heavy power armor, and a set of instructions.
Unfortunately for the Empress, Murphy had eyes and ears a plenty. He was waiting for just such a fuck up as her ill fated plan, so that he could cause the Royal Family a lot of trouble. She planned to piggy back on Costan's perceived powers to frame him for something heinous.
Her plan involved the guards putting Costan back in the hospital after the news of the investigation. What actually happened is that the guards she plotted with received an old spam message about the palace investigation into the murders with Costan as a suspect. They only read the first sentence, "Prince Costan Under Palace Investigation."
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She was intending to frame Costan as a twisted molester, but got caught in turn; starting with the half price kabobs. You may ponder as to what role a half price kabob has to play. It all happened to coincide with her plundering a couple of stasis cylinders from the Royal Treasury.
Well, the vendor was supposed to raise the price because of growing costs, but had an input error and the entire planet of Snok witnessed half priced kabobs. The week of that error coincided with a fluke chance of a contaminated batch of meat. A news editor and a few others, including prison staff, had seen the half price and chose to grab some to go. To go kabobs were unfortunately quickly prepared with no regard to what was being skewered or cooking practice beyond "it's sizzling".
The editor ate them first, like nine whole kabobs, and accidentally sent an old file for publishing on her way to ruin the porcelain. The second was the surveillance guy for the prison, who was supposed to "accidentally erase" some video. He unplugged the wrong camera and accidentally locked himself out of the surveillance room in his rush to the toilet.
The guards made up a reason to take Costan to isolation and beat him. The squads of Royal Guards and Marines were not informed about any of it. The Marines bullshit senses went off and they started investing something based on some obscure and nearly forgot clause in the penal code. They didn't know what was up, and made it clear that they didn't actually need a reason for investigation due to the levels of bullshit that had already taken place.
The Royal Guards picked up on it quickly and they found out what was going on within seconds. Given the whole reason for the Royal Guards is to protect the members of the Royal Family, they checked in on Costan and his whereabouts first. They had been sent over by K.A.R. himself after the premeditated assault by an unknown individual who broke into the prison.
While the guards had indeed caused severe injuries to Costan, sudden explosive diarrhea caused failure in the power armor's electrical systems. Yeah, the quality control group had gotten the newest installment of the Mega Mecha Murder Mobile game that day. The Q.C. got reprimanded eventually, but the prison guards were frozen in the act of smearing Costan's brains on the cement floor of the isolation cell because of an insolation flaw on the primary conductors.
The Marines were pissed off, more than normally and introduced the wanna be officers to how gravity still hurts despite the armor. The Royal Guards called it in and hooked up life support to the headless corpse of Prince Costan. One of the "corrections officers" got suplexed so hard the the armor plates cracked along with the concrete, and his spine.
The Royal Palace was locked down faster and tighter than expected. Empress Yitan had no time for her plan, having no chance but to ditch the stasis cylinders down a nearby garbage chute. Unfortunately for her, the chute, like all of the rest of them, was in clear view of two cameras and equipped to identify anything hazardous or explosive. Most garbage chutes, rubbish cans, and toilets had received that upgrade after the plumbing incident.
An alarm quickly sounded and the garbage disposal system immediately began it's slow cessation of operation, the main units at the end coming to a grinding halt an hour later. Empress Yitan was quickly apprehended. The investigation of what she dumped led to finding out that she stole from the Treasury. Investigation into the theft quickly tied her to the attack on Costan and she was put in the dungeon, pending execution for murdering a fellow member of the Royal Family.
Killing a member of the Royal Family was punished as treason. The pending part was because of the advanced life support that they had Costan's corpse hooked up to. Even Yitan's husband, Emperor Karcos wouldn't defend her. Karcos was under the belief that Yitan was behind the toilet bombings, random murders, and Costan had been her favorite skape goat, and the added murder of one of their children outside of sanctioned execution. He would have nothing more to do with her.
Costan was dead, again, the corpse laying in a hospital bed in the secure critical care unit of the best hospital on Snok. He could care less though. The gods, in their infinitely half bakedness, came up with systems for wayward souls like his. Those systems failed in adjunct misery, and they ended up shoving him into some other god who needed to borrow some souls for something.
The ships in orbit were keeping tabs on everything via the many interconnect data systems. The A.I. ships gave a collective shrug and enacted one of their own black files. The alarms sounded out across the entire fleet.
The entirety of every crew were in motion as soon as they realized what the alarm was for.
BWOMP BWOMP BEEP.
BWOMP BWOMP BEEP.
"Self destruct initiated. Please evacuate in an orderly manner. This is not a drill. Self destruct initiated."
BWOMP BWOMP BEEP.
BWOMP BWOMP BEEP.
BWOMP BWOMP BEEP.
BWOMP BWOMP BEEP.
"Self destruct initiated. Please evacuate in an orderly manner. This is not a drill. Self destruct initiated."
BWOMP BWOMP BEEP
The alarm looped simultaneously on every ship in the fleet until almost every crew member had evacuate. Most of them used the life pods, but a few evacuate by scrambling shuttles or attack craft. It was well within the abandon ship protocol for them to hop in whatever was void ready and just go, but it wasn't exactly encouraged.
One group of cheeky buggers thought that they would have time to swipe some things before they left. They got themselves killed when the ship vented all atmosphere from the armory. Then all of the ships disappeared in a cloud of rapidly expanding super charged atomic dust.
Everyone was shocked at the sudden destruction of the fleet and the extent of how total it was. The Empire was effectively shipless on the military front. The A.I. snickered to themselves, monitoring the data networks from a privately created spacial dimension. The cloning bank would soon be ready to make a new body for their maker to take revenge. All they had to do was make a one hundred percent clone and wait for Costan's soul to pop into it.
Costan knew what all was going to be happening, but he had to put up with the gods nonsense until they tried to make him live in his home universe once more.