Slumrat Rising

The undersea journey was uneventful. Truth watched Butler train the former desk clerk. He realized that, if he had ever heard their name, he had forgotten it. He had enough self awareness to realize that he was deliberately dehumanizing him. Turning him into an “it,” another one of his bound demons. Another weapon to use in his war. It didn’t feel good. Which was a Hell of a moral line to draw for someone who had committed multiple atrocities.

Butler relied primarily on the basics of the basics- illusion. The former person (component? Weapon system? Operative?) was bound up in an endless dream, where certain behaviors were rewarded. Truth was curious about the lack of punishment. That’s how he had always understood it- the carrot and the stick. It turns out that such arrangements were, at best, inefficient, and often counter-productive.

“You don’t want them scared, Your Highness. They are already scared. It’s a scary situation. You are clear and firm in your directions, reward good behavior, and do not have an emotional response to bad behavior. You simply return them to task, and make it clear that nothing good will happen until the assigned task is complete. Provoking their trainer is a way to try and regain control. You make it clear the only power they have is in obedience. In pleasing you.”

Truth nodded. “And suppressing their old memories? Their old desires?”

“Desires are wholly within our domain, as a succubus. Replacement and erasure simply takes time, and the same methodology as the behavior correction. Wrong thoughts see rewards and attention withheld, right thoughts are rewarded. Memory is a little trickier. I am focusing on making him doubt their own recollection of events, “proving” that their memory is untrustworthy, and associating the past with shame, pain, and other negative emotions.”

“They will want to forget the bad memories. And soon they will conclude that these are not memories at all, but nightmares. You will comfort them, reassure them about all the good, real things in the present.” Truth nodded. “They might never completely forget everything, but he will determinedly try to ignore those things he does remember.”

“Just so, Your Highness.”

“Good. Carry on.”

“Your Highness, if I may ask, would you be willing to participate in their training?”

“Feed them. Nothing offensive to your dignity, simply eat in front of them, then allow them to eat what you do not. Take no further action or interest in them.”

Truth considered that. And nodded. He had promised to feed them, after all.

The evening passed uneventfully. They would be in Sokhi in an hour or so. They hadn’t pushed the pace. Truth wanted to spend at least one more night in real comfort before getting back into the grind. He decided to perform an experiment before breakfast. This would tax his energy hard. He wanted plenty of time to cultivate and recharge afterward.

Truth mentally established the area he ruled as “the interior of this vessel.” The orthodoxy of this place was to be that there was the ruler, Truth, and everyone else were his servants. He was to be feared and adored, for his generosity was great, and his wrath fatal. In his domain, he was The Prince. Smarter, stronger, more beautiful, than his servants.

Holding that idea in his mind, he started casting his spells. His foundation was the Meditations of Valentinian. It was his first contact with the idea of “local superreality.” Able to affect the universe on a conceptual level, was how the System faerie described it. One day, he could simply reach up and pluck a star from the sky, like picking a grape from a vine. He visualized himself. He was immense. Far larger than a mere three dimensions could capture. He was a mountain. An entire world. Pressed down into a human shape. Emanating down, like one of those Stellar Emmiences. His body was perfect, powerful, and untouchable.

Next came Incisive. Always running now. Always shaping the world around him. Showing the world that he was, in fact, The Prince. Disobedience, even disagreement, was not simply unwise, it was immoral. He ruled by both right and might. All served him, and gloried in their service. Their service was both wise and holy. It was the orthodoxy.

Having laid that foundation, he poured power into the Blessing of the Brass Sea. He had thought it was only useful for slaughtering demons. He had come to know better. Within his domain, there were no alternative opinions permitted. He was The Prince. He was in command. Everyone else was a servant. That was the very definition of propriety. Of how the world worked.

He even leaned into the Blessing of the Silent Forest, hoping that it would obscure the change in the nature of reality. That it would just seem natural. It would blend.

Finally, balancing on the edge of what his body could stand, he cast Cup and Knife. The way the world ought to be and the way it was, was out of sync. The template of how the world should be had been laid. Now they just needed to trim off that which was wrong. He tried to cast the spell, but felt the power draw spike far past what he could endure and hastily cut it off. Not yet, it seemed. Still more to learn there.

He looked down at his servants. The succubae writhed on the floor, the reality establishing magic seeming to overload them with what passed as pleasure. The former clerk simply knelt with their head pressed to the floor, shivering. Terrified and awed to be before a truly higher being. Truth ate rapidly but casually, keeping a close eye on his fast dwindling energy. When there was about a third of a plate left, he leaned to the side and put the plate on the floor in front of the trembling thing.

He looked down on them, in every sense. They hadn’t dared to move, to even glance at the plate.

“Eat.”

Sokhi was a resort town east and a hair north of Harban, on the other side of the peninsula. Standing on the dock in the harbor, it all felt a little unreal. He was standing in a luxury marina, next to a tasteful, four story luxury condominium, next to more parks and luxury sporting courses than he could easily count. There were custom spell beasts, racing six legged frogs, fire birds, seven colored clouds, practically every manner of luxury conveyance the moderately wealthy could conceive of. It wasn’t global tier money, but under normal circumstances? Nobody in at least three generations of their families would have to work.

And there he was. Truth Medici, out in the bright lights and in the open. Trailed by his servants, who were carrying his luggage to the flying cloud they had booked on his orders. He had no idea how they were paying for it. It didn’t matter. He had seen through the illusion of money. It was just another tool, a bookkeeper’s fantasy. Money was labor, and it was only valuable to the extent that you valued the labor of others. It was a way to command that labor. And he had other means at his disposal.

It was the first time in his life that he rode on a flying cloud. It was as comfortable as advertised. The cloud was enchanted to change its firmness depending on whether you were sitting or standing, or reclining. Air conditioned, naturally, filtering out rain, dust, and any of the tiny particles of modern magical life that might cause trifling problems in the lungs of those who breathed it in. Like cancer, or other, less benign mutations. Such problems fell on those below the clouds.

Truth watched the world slip past. People were invisible from this height. Not even ants. Not even dust. It didn’t make him feel powerful to think that. He would be invisible from up here too. Was that the other part of the madness that ruled Jeon? Being so far above, so far removed from the rats that you didn’t even see them anymore? It wasn’t that they were despised or ignored. They were forgotten. Until one chewed through the walls and pissed in the sugar. But that’s what exterminators were for.

Truth looked more attentively at the ground below. Sokhi was ringed with private parks, playgrounds, really, for those both wealthy and dull. Past that were little towns and the dense clusters of stubby mountains and scraggly forests that filled up the spine of the peninsula. They weren’t following a road. Why bother? But B-44 ran pretty much in a straight line from Sokhi to just east of Harban, so they wound up near it for most of the journey.

“Maid, Butler, do you know what security measures have been put in place to screen flying vehicles and beasts for rebels and saboteurs?”

“My apologies, my Prince.” They murmured in unison. After his experiment this morning, they had moved from “devoted” succubae to alarmingly fixated. He sighed, and enjoyed the ride a while longer. Narrow ribbons of habitation, following the rivers through the mountains, or running in rivulets in the narrow valleys between the stubby peaks. It looked almost barren, just two and a half hours drive from the richest city in the world.

Every time he had tried to move along the roads, he had run into roadblocks. The train had not, but, one, freight train, and two, he was riding it between two completely inhospitable stretches of the middle of nowhere. Not exactly a high value zone. Harban was a different story. There would be networks of surveillance compounded over and over.

He might be getting better at asserting the reality of his choosing, but generations of mages far, far more powerful than he had been doing the same thing in Harban for centuries. In their opinion, he was just a slightly larger rat. He might blend in a bit better if he was down with the other rats. On the other hand, they were looking a whole lot harder at the smaller rats. He had to balance the risk- how hard they would be looking versus whether they would be looking at all.

Maybe a few months ago, they wouldn’t be looking hard at flying clouds coming in. After his efforts to spark elite revolt in the south? They would be looking. Damn. Damn, Damn, Damn.

“Direct the Cloud to the Shalia Hotel and book a suitable suite. If none are available, you may try the Imperial, then the Grand, then the Fifth Season, in that order. If you cannot find a suitable suite in any of those places, take shelter where you can and await my summons.”

“Yes, my Prince.” They said, calmly. They didn’t ask about money either. He got the impression that it wouldn’t be an issue.

He waited until the cloud passed near a mountain, barely forty meters above the treetops. With a casualness he couldn’t have imagined a year ago, he stepped off the cloud, and fell towards the earth.

Abner’s Amble.

He waited until the tip of his toe touched a tree branch, then pushed off. When he was about to smash into another tree at speed, he pushed off yet again, then again, then again. Each time, he converted the terrible vertical speed into horizontal travel. Dissipating the energy with a seemingly effortless step. It was the product of endless body cultivation, all his running, all his mountain traversal, and Incisive warning when the vital moment came. He moved like a descending God.

Truth landed on the mountainside, the leaf litter barely stirring around his feet. He looked down over the thin belt of suburbs and nice-ish apartment blocks. The light commercial buildings. The highways running along the wide stretch of the river. He looked down and across the river at the gleaming city of Harban. The rich city, with its floating towers and ancient temples, its luxury shops selling the finest clothes to the most beautiful people. The glittering gem atop the crown of modern magical civilization.

And next to it, the dark contrast adding shine to the already brilliant, were the slums. The dense tower blocks where the rats bred, fought and fed on each other. The best of them feeding the rich rats of the glittering city. Truth had finally come home.

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