Slumrat Rising

If Merkovah’s package had made it to the dead drop, there would be a white rock under the fourth post of the fence outside of 934 West Pichno Street, Damya. Damya being a small town in farm country just up the highway from Gwaju. Since this was Jeon, a densely settled peninsula, “farm country” started just after a comparatively small belt of suburbs, and he was a bare fifteen kilometers away in a straight line. Easy, except he was standing in a suburban backyard, and this was Jeon, so there was surveillance everywhere. He had gotten paranoid about his energy reserves and was determined to stay off the roads and out of sight as much as possible.

The Blessing of the Silent Forest should protect him thoroughly from any but the most direct and searching investigation by a powerhouse. Should. He did not enjoy hiding out under a dumpster for a day. It was tiresome, but paranoia was a lifestyle one could only choose if they were still alive. He did a bit of crude orienteering and started his journey trespassing through the domains of the morbid mowers of suburbia.

He kept his pace steady, letting Abner’s Amble carry him from yard to yard. They were so similar. Neat little squares of grass mowed to a neat height. Some with little gardens of well-spaced and mulched flowers, the cheap, bright annuals you could buy in packs of six from in front of the supermarket. It was spring- planting season. Made sense that people would be putting their gardens in. There were fewer toys in yards than he expected. The ones that did have toys were either bombed-out wrecks of neglect and empty bottles or yards given over entirely to children and pets.

Truth stopped for a half second on his journey. One yard had a swing set with a single bright yellow plastic seat. It looked worn by the weather, the synthetic ropes holding the seat already weathered and bleached. It looked like it had seen a lot of use. He just looked at it. Tried not to think about the family that lived here. Did the kid outgrow the swing? Or did they still use it? Did they swing alone, or were there lots of little friends who came over to play in the yard, too? Networking was so important, and one had to start as early as possible. Or so he had heard. He wouldn’t know.

He pressed on. It didn’t matter. None of these little boxed-up lives mattered. Not because they were particularly bad. Just… a thing was worth what someone would give you for it, right? And nobody would buy these lives on a bet. Not right now. Not in the end of days. After the collapse, yes, people would give anything to live in a safe little suburban box. It would be a life they could only remember in their dreams.

Truth didn’t notice his pace picking up. Flickering from yard to yard, trying not to see the detritus of hidden worlds. Kites. Mowers. Iron Horses carefully covered by tarps. Chairs in pairs around little tables. The tiny statues in the gardens, votives to saints, the open hand of Praeger holding a bird bath. The people still at home mid-morning, drinking a cup of maybe coffee and staring emptily into their backyards, wondering how it came to this and how long they could hold on.

In one of the wrecked yards, littered with trash and crushed beer cans, a bathtub had been partially buried, sticking upright out of the dirt. What should have been the inner part of the tub was painted a light blue. A white plaster statue of Saint Eikren, smiling widely, robed richly and draped in painted gems, stood in the niche. One hand reached out to receive offerings, the other raised to offer blessings. One of the most popular saints. Truth remembered that smiling face from his one month of attending church.

Someone had beaten a dog almost to death in front of the shrine. Not a stray- it had a collar and tags. Someone had stolen a dog (he prayed it was stolen,) and used a shovel and beat it in front of the shrine to Eikren. A dog’s life for prosperity. The thing responsible had failed to do it cleanly. The dog was mercifully unconscious, but Truth could see it hung on to life by a fraying thread.

Truth couldn’t move on. He couldn’t. This was horrible. This was… wrong. Wrong in every way. So wrong he struggled to put words around it. He rejected this. Utterly. Categorically. He wanted to reject what he was seeing, pretend it wasn’t real, but he had never been good at that. Someone had beaten a dog to death in hopes a plaster saint would make them prosperous.

This was wrong. Wrong. All wrong. The dog shouldn’t be dying. It should be healed, fit, and happy. It should be home with its family. The spell seemed to agree, coming together fast this time. There was a sudden sense of the world being unaccountably thin- as though it was only painted on a pane of glass, and Truth could suddenly see someone moving on the other side.

The dog went faint, then blurred, as though there were two dogs superimposed. One near dead, the other joyously alive. One with wounds, the other without. He could fix the dog, return it to how it should be. But the wounds did happen. Truth had a strange instinct. He let the spell run a little wild, pouring power into it. There was a faint thread running off the dog- no, off the wounds.

Truth grinned- a savage, bloody thing. He slammed more power into the spell. The wounds vanished. A happy dog popped up off the ground, looking around in confusion. It sniffed Truth enthusiastically, then started rocketing around the yard. Truth had a look at the tag and consulted his road atlas. Barely two blocks away. He dropped the dog off in its homeyard.

As for the person who did the beating? Truth saw a body sitting in the window of the house with the shrine. It looked like someone had worked her over with a shovel. A locked room murder mystery, doubtless to be thoroughly investigated. By someone. Someday. Probably. Maybe. Budget permitting. Such is life. He set off again.

So, no disrespect to that grand eminence, but-

>

Yep. We’ll keep studying Graeme’s Arrow. It’s too useful not to have in the arsenal, but like Abner’s Amble, it’s situational. This is… incredible. What just happened? The wounds transferred to the human, making it like the dog was never harmed. Easy to say, but…

>

Truth nodded slightly at that. Makes sense. Though, I would assume that the wounds didn’t translate directly to the human. Humans are laid out differently, for one thing.

>

That would be pretty high on list of things to figure out, yeah. Also, leaving aside the issue of motivation, did you notice how effortless that was compared to cleaning mud off a bedspread? Fully healing a near-dead dog, making it like the injuries never happened, then transporting those wounds through a house’s protections, overcoming any minor resistance the Level One might have, and killing them. All came together easier than the laundry.

Truth could imagine the System slowly nodding. >

The world is wrong. It needs fixing. This is one of those things. I will use the spell to fix it. Truth played it out. And that aligned with however the creator thought. The creator also had views on things like that.

The System gave the feeling of a nod. Truth got his head back on running. It was going faster than he feared it would. The houses were getting more spaced out, and actual farms were starting to take over.

He landed on the edge of a fence and crouched there for a moment. A man was mowing the lawn. Beer in one hand, push mower in the other. It was a soft whickering sort of noise as the blades spun around. He reached the end of the yard, made the turn, and mowed the next strip. Machine-like focus, only stopping now and then to drink the beer. Back and forth. There were many like him. What made Truth stop was the noose hanging from a crossbeam under the porch.

Did he have a moral duty to interfere? Truth felt a sort of split decision from the Tongue and Etenesh- one vote no, one vote yes. So, no help there. What did he think was the right thing to do? He certainly couldn’t waste any more time than he already had. And maybe suicide wasn’t the worst thing? He didn’t know. Seemed extreme. But Hell, if your life was already shitty and the literal end of the world is coming, what harm is there in leaving early and beating the queue?

Oh fuck it. Maybe Etenesh would be proud of him if he did at least a little something. He landed next to the morbid mower, smelling the reek of beer on his breath. A quick flex of Incisive-

“You know, your breath stinks. Gotta brush those teeth before… you know. And grab a shower. Look presentable. Yard’s looking great. It would be dumb to go out looking like a slob. Alright, teeth, shower, shave… ah, Hell, will you look at the state of that mulch? The plants are gonna die by the time anyone finds you and waters them. That’s not fair. They shouldn’t have to go with you. Get mulch, mulch ‘em in, then rope. Ok, that’s a program. Got a plan right there. Man like you? You can do anything so long as you have a plan. And hey, maybe they have something worth planting at the garden center. Nothing says you have to rope on some schedule. Nothing wrong with putting in more time on the garden before the big goodbye. And just check the price on paint when you are there. Some rough looking patches on the sunny side. Don’t want people thinking you were a slob.”

Truth didn’t know shit about preventing suicide. All he could think of was… give ‘em more things to do, and maybe they would change their mind. Fingers crossed, it would work. And if not… worse things happen in the suburbs every day. At least he would die presentable. Not everyone got that.

Truth hit the edge of farm country and turned on the speed. Cover was minimally available here, but, on the plus side, there were almost no people. Most of the fields were empty or overseen by golem machines weeding and watering. Truth stretched his muscles and flew over the ground. Abner’s Amble, combined with a relentlessly refined body, was simply adding wings to a cheetah. The farmland between Gwaju and Damya was five times longer than the width of suburbia Truth had spent the day crossing. He cleared the farmland in less than three minutes.

Welcome to Damya. Home of some chain shops, a rest station, and the Jeon Museum of Bamboo, apparently. He found the address. The homeowner had decided to line the bottom of the fence with pale gray stones. Truth sighed and started hunting around under the fourth fence post on the eastern side. Hoping a white stone was buried under all the gray.

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