Slumrat Rising

Truth’s eyes were glued to the Scry. They didn’t get his face exactly right, he thought. It was a drawing. Must not have caught a clean picture of him on a recording talisman. Thank you Blessing of the Silent Forest? Or maybe they just wanted people looking at the drawing instead of the picture. No idea why. Wasn’t any harder making an illusion of a recording than making a picture.

His mind was skittering away from the reality in front of him, and he knew it. He was seen. And he was being hunted.

Strong chin, strong cheeks, brutal face, narrow eyes with an imperious curl to the lips and hedonistically long hair. Brutishly masculine, or perhaps just brutish.

The fierce looking presenter invited a “Retired Security Expert and Counter-Terrorism Consultant” to explain things to the audience.

“So right now, those of us in the COINTEL and Counter-Terror community are busy connecting a lot of dots. A lot of stuff over the last couple of years start getting a big “AHA!”, now that we know about Hell Price. Which… who comes up with these names? Hell Prince? Yuck.”

“He seems to have earned it.” The presenter’s voice was grim.

“True. So, to quickly summarize, after the hotel massacre at the Silpa, a massacre which saw three hundred citizens and denizens killed, as well as numerous security personnel, Internal Security made public the existence of Hell Prince. He was ID'd at the scene by surviving officers, as well as the medical sage Dr. Sun Ri. The doctor was, himself, seriously injured in the attack.”

“Atrocious. To think that Hell Prince would go so far as to try and murder a living saint like Dr. Sun. It’s almost impossible to imagine.”

“Horrible, but also just the tip of a very, very nasty iceberg. Look, economically, we are in a depression. Before that, there was three years of deep recession. This is a perfect breeding ground for economic discontent and stirring up resentment. Nationalist rhetoric shot way up. Violence shot way up. You even started seeing proto-militias forming. All completely illegal, of course, but was treated as essentially harmless.”

The presenter nodded along. Truth thought the counter-intel guy must have been good at his job. He looked like nobody. Truth was staring straight at him, and the best he could describe him would be “a guy in a boring suit.” He could learn a lot from him.

“Turns out, not so harmless.” The expert continued.

“Not so harmless, no.”

Pictures of violence- fights, beatings, slogans sprayed on the walls next to burning homes, were displayed.

“We knew, “we” meaning the COINTEL community, that a lot of this was foreign funded. It really doesn’t take much. A little bit to get it started, a few shoves along at the right time, a few professional agitators, and the whole thing becomes self-sustaining.”

“Which is where the Hell Prince comes in?”

“Yes. It is also the point at which we start having more questions than answers, but I will try to lay out what we know and what we think we know.”

They switched back to the drawing of Truth, including a profile now, and occasionally cutting in footage of riots or explosions or demons tearing people apart.

“There is currently a lot of debate over whether or not he is a Jeon national. By all accounts he speaks perfect, unaccented Jeongo, but there are spells and demons that can help with that. He is also clearly a master of propaganda and social engineering, which would again suggest he has a deep understanding of Jeon. My guess is that he was born here, but I wouldn’t be too shocked to learn he emigrated here at a young age.”

“Yes, you can’t tell me those are the features of a pure Jeon man.”

“Well, again, he may have adopted that look as a disguise. Though of course you are quite right. Anyhow, his apparent age and cultivation puts him around forty at the youngest or a well preserved sixty at the high end.”

“Forty! But isn’t he level four?” The presenter blinked in shock.

“The man is clearly maniacal. Is it so strange that he would be obsessive about cultivation?”

“Shocking to think.”

“We can’t say for sure what his background is. His access to elite resources and education suggest an upper class status. Whether he is the survivor of a now defunct family, a bastard of an established family, or simply marginalized within his family, we don’t know. We also don’t know for sure when or where he got radicalized. His weapon, an angelic sword, suggests he spent significant time out of the country. Siphios would be the most obvious possibility, but we cannot rule out other unfriendly states.”

“The Ressilaud Free State gets mentioned a lot.”

“There are a lot of terrorist training facilities there, and we certainly can’t rule it out. It is adjacent to Siphios, of course, so it would be fairly trivial for them to supply him with spells, indoctrination and weaponry.”

A map was put up and taken down again.

“This is also the point at which he picks up the nickname Hell Prince, I would guess. Crime scene analysis shows a deep understanding of torture, demonic manipulation, violence of almost every description, mind control, glamours, personal manipulation…” The expert shook his head.

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“Rumors about dead, raped women…”

“Have not been confirmed at this time. It’s important not to get too far ahead of the official reports and what we can independently verify. Would it fit a certain profile? Yes. However, fanatics can also develop strange notions about personal purity, or come to believe they need to father a nation or some other deviance.”

“But it’s not confirmed?”

“Not confirmed. So, going back to our narrative, he hooks up with foreign intelligence services and their puppet terrorists. We have to assume he excelled, given the resources he has deployed here in Jeon. He clearly is a significant player for them.”

“Can you run us through some of that?”

“Certainly. In no particular order, there have been forty attacks on enrollment locations, ranging in severity from graffiti to total obliteration of the building it was in. Just those attacks have killed in excess of two thousand people. Some of them happened so close together in time, but distant in location, they were obviously coordinated attacks.”

The presenter nodded along.

“Then there is the spread of nationalist propaganda. This has, of course, been sweeping the nation, but we do see spikes of intensity anywhere that the Hell Prince is believed to have been active. He is clearly using subtle, powerful, mind affecting spells to delude people into opposition and rebellion.”

“Diabolical. Though I suppose that’s appropriate for him.”

“Yes, he is a master of human emotions, or at least the negative ones. Hatred, envy, resentment. That much has been confirmed.” Pictures of riots and burning buildings flashed across the scry ball.

“This is another one of those “not confirmed but…” things- we are pretty sure he is behind the party barge disaster in Buran.”

The presenter gasped in “shock.” “You mean when all those people were fed to Ghul?”

“Yes. Hell Prince is a title he has earned, clearly.”

“Anything else?”

“Does there need to be more? Sources are telling me they are hanging at least four targeted assassinations on him, a few more from assassins he recruited and developed, a foiled attempt to poison a reservoir, the ambushing and murder of a score of riot cops in Conjin…” The expert shook his head.

“How was he able to run around so long?”

“He is very, very paranoid. Until literally yesterday, nobody knew what he really looked like. He is constantly in motion, and he seems entirely willing to use mind controlling magics to take over private residences. Murdering the current residents first, if necessary.”

“How did he slip up? If we have his picture now?”

“Again, not confirmed. This goes directly to highly classified counter-terror and COINTEL sources and methods. It sounds like he was planning a social engineering attack on the upper echelons of Harban society, possibly even going after government ministers. That last bit is obviously speculation, but, given that his suite at the Sila was right next to the suite used by high level ambassadors, it’s plausible.”

“Another opportunity to create chaos. Maybe even cause a diplomatic incident.”

“Certainly plausible. Very plausible. But not confirmed yet. Anyway, he had checked into the hotel using a pair of demonic servants. Not unusual, given the number of foreign guests they serve. But it did tip off Internal Security to pay even more attention than usual to the Sila. It's no secret that they regularly check hotels for foreign spies or domestic terrorists. Then, and I am speculating here, I would assume that they started connecting dots very rapidly. I don’t know what prompted the violence yesterday, but given Hell Prince’s famous paranoia, he may have been trying to flee.”

“Incredible.”

“Yes. I think it says something about how scared he is of Internal Security that even as arrogant as Hell Prince is, he ran at the first whiff of danger. I would expect him to try something soon, to try and regain face.”

Truth leaned back, breaking the trance. It was a lot to process. It was understandable that they would smear him as hard as they could. He would do the same. And Hell, he did do some, or even a lot, of what they said he did. But giving him a nickname? A backstory?

He felt his thoughts skittering around like water on a hot pan, bouncing and popping until they vanished without a trace. He was a rapist now, huh? Or had a harem. Etenesh wouldn’t let him have a harem. Frankly, he didn’t want one. It seemed like a lot of drama. A master of human emotions too, it seemed, or at least the negative ones. That was hilarious to him. It might be kind of true. He certainly was vague on a lot of supposedly positive emotions.

Forty. He must have spent longer in the well than he thought.

He sat in the chair next to the passed out drunk old man in his lonely apartment. He could see himself living like this. If there were no sibs and no Starbrite, but he still went the maintenance tech route. This could be one way his story ended, though he still thought a brief, violent life as a gangster was more likely. Perhaps he would have a catchy nickname, like Hell Prince.

Why the nickname? Did they really need to tag him with something so flashy if he was going to be Public Enemy Number One? Wouldn’t they want to make him look badass after they captured him? Now they just looked incompetent letting such a dangerous criminal escape. This seemed… dumb. And he was through underestimating Internal Security and Starbrite.

He sat in the musty, hardly used chair and thought, letting the time trickle past. It took a while to crack, but he got there in the end. The old monster, Dr. Sun, had recognized Incisive. They knew he had slipped their net, and would go to ground. So they were shaping an identity for him.

The Prince would be forced to take on aspects of The Hell Prince. He would be arrogant, and pointlessly cruel. He would act rashly, filled with paranoia and petty vanity. Bloodthirsty. A pervert. An enemy of all the good people of Jeon. And if he never again was the Prince? He would have to struggle against the weight of public belief in the Hell Prince every time he wanted to use the scales. The same way he struggled to persuade the world he wasn’t a gangster, or was a chartered surveyor. They would turn Incisive against him.

He wanted to applaud. It was an impressively nasty play. It won’t be enough. It won’t be nearly enough. I’ve spent my whole life refusing to be who people say I am. This is no different. And my girlfriend is fluffing up the cushions on a far greater throne than any Prince sat on. Truth stood and stretched. There was no sofa. He would sleep on the floor, out of the way.

Hell Prince, huh. He smiled gently. Now there was a sword with two edges.

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