Slumrat Rising

Vol. 3 Chap. 9 Not Good With Jokes

> The System kept its tone conversational, as though it was discussing the inevitably of ants at a picnic.

Hippopotami is not a real word.

Truth was looking over at the guarded double door. It was kind of creeping him out. On the one hand, they had to set up hundreds of these enrolment centers all over Jeon. There was, realistically, a limit to how secure they could make them. There was also a limit to how secure they would feel the need to make them. He got sworn in at a stadium. It was the most common place for it to happen. Not like the process was a secret, exactly, just the results.

Truth didn’t trust it. Two guards? They weren’t even Starbrite security. They hung a sign threatening to call the cops. That was just embarrassing. Truth wouldn’t have stood behind a sign like that.

Shut up and let me lie to myself.

So, presumably, there was more security- he just wasn’t seeing it. And as a Level Four with really good body cultivation, his senses were very sharp. He walked over. The security guards were Level One. Their eyes never flickered as he walked in front of him.

The unnoticibilty effect from the Silent Forest was starting to get a little creepy. It still had that cool factor, but it was starting to dawn on him that, for the rest of his life, ordinary folk would only be able to see him with his explicit permission. He was, in every sense except the literal, above them. No longer one of the teeming slumrats of Harban. Which is what he had always wanted, of course, but… not like this. He had dreamed of their fear and worship, not being ignored.

Funny that. The one time he went back to the slums after his enlistment, he turned around without really talking to anyone. Well, Prentiss, but nobody he was interested in intimidating or showing off to. He despised everyone and everything he saw. Even then, he thought they were beneath him. He… didn’t really like acknowledging that. He shook the idea away and focused on the job.

There was a talisman lock on the door that Truth could have cracked when he was Level Zero and studying for the SAT. He lifted the amulet from the guard’s belt and opened the door. A recording talisman was aimed straight at the door and more on either end of the hallway. He checked carefully. None of those creepy, camouflaged, eyeless things around.

Truth held the door open long enough to return the amulet and started walking down the hall. The recording talismans couldn’t see him anymore than the guards did.

No ghosts patrolling the hallway, of course. Not in Jeon. Same reason they didn’t post imps instead of using talismans. Imps and ghosts were old-fashioned. Unreliable and inefficient. Strictly speaking, this was true. It was vastly cheaper and safer to use recording talismans rather than contracting dozens of imps to glare at nothing for months on end. And yes, vastly safer too. A talisman wouldn’t turn on you. You needed specialized training to make a talisman, but that’s what schools and factories were for.

That was the hook- Starbrite might demand a lot, but look at all you got. Look at all the great stuff they sold. Your quality of life was unquestionably better. Even if you thought about the rope every day. As you worked longer hours for less money in worse housing. Terrified of getting sick or hurt or too old to work. Your back hunched more and more, and you made yourself smaller and smaller to avoid being noticed and made an example of. It cost all that, but this year’s clothes were damn sexy, and you would really be something in your brand new chariot.

If you could afford a chariot. Which you couldn’t.

Cinderblock walls painted white and high gloss. Cement floor painted grey, less glossy, but still had a shine on it. And that was it. Twenty meters one way, the hallway turned right. Five meters the other way, there was a door. Truth walked over to the door. Locked. A few seconds later, Truth opened the unlocked door. In his opinion, there was no reason to slap a magical lock on a door if you can shim the damn mechanism. He became an invisible operative for this?

Truth got very still when he finally got inside the room. It was stacked with identical plastic crates, each about a meter long and half that high and deep. Incisive wastickling the back of his neck. Danger was near.

Truth carefully looked over the room. It was bare, save for the boxes. The walls were left unpainted, the floor the same smooth concrete. Light came from a single talisman on the ceiling. Truth tried to relax. At Level Four, he should be pretty aware of any magic in use around him. But this was Jeon. Everything was running off a fetish or a talisman or some kind of spell construct. It was like trying to feel a hot spot standing outside in the summer. At noon. In Siphios.

With patient care, he worked every bit of the room he could see or reach, hunting for traps, alarms, anything. He quickly concluded that the danger, whatever it was, was in the boxes. The boxes were quite ordinary plastic storage tubs available at any hardware store. These just happened to be branded with the Starbrite Logo.

With agonizing care, he gently worked his pinky finger through the plastic four centimeters from the bottom, pushing Incisive hard. He didn’t use the fangs, just brute strength and the hardness of his body. As soon as he was through, he withdrew his finger.

No new sense of alarm. No new danger. Truth pulled out a little flashlight and shined it into the hole. It looked like metal plates. Just a big plastic tub of metal plates. So why was Incisive demanding he pay attention to them?

Were they pre-prepared spells? Having the plates pre-made and ready to install would make setting up sites pretty easy, and while he didn’t think there were enough plates in here to literally tile the athletics complex, you could certainly cover a large area with them. He couldn’t see any active spell effect on them. He shined the light around and didn’t see anything that looked like a boobytrap.

Still feeling that paranoia was entirely justified, he sliced off the side of the container so he could get a better look. The “nothing” intensified. Truth hesitated. He sure as Hell wasn’t going to touch the plates, but he also really wanted to know what was on them. With agonizing care, he sliced off the top of the box. No spells there, either. On the other hand, Incisive was telling him, “Stay far away!”

Truth took a careful peek. As expected, it was a pre-made spell. Carved, or more likely stamped, into the metal, the dense latticework of channels, sigils, gems, incantations… he rapidly lost track of the number and function of the components. A lot. A terrifying amount, all in one plate.

Too big, too complicated- break it into pieces. Find something you recognize and see what it connects to. Here- a “gem,” a little bit of stone etched with a sub-spell lodged into the metal at Azoth, the position of quicksilver, of the animating life. Must be where the… whatever this is, originates. Standard component, just directing cosmic energy into the broader spell plate.

He slowly worked his way through the various systems, trying to reduce everything to its most basic elements, trying to deduce based on position, or what it connected to, or what it sort of looked like. More often than not, he simply had to admit he was out of his depth. This was not the level of talisman maintenance he had ever trained for. This was specialist stuff.

Best I can figure, it is a component of a bigger structure, maybe part of the imprinting process that created you. Don’t know why Incisive is warning me away, though, so I am pretty sure I’m missing something.

Truth kept looking over the plate. He hesitated to call it a talisman, though the amount of intense, fine detail work seemed to rule out calling it a fetish. It was a component. Maybe a talisman in it’s own right, but a component. He had heard of things like that, but he had never trained on them. No need, when fixing the air conditioner or repairing street lights was going to be the height of your career.

That thought rocked him. He really had wanted that life. It was his dream. For almost half his life, it was his most desperate wish. It was his freak fighting ability that led him to Starbrite Security and the PMC, and everything that followed. Now he was so powerful, he could have an angelic sword hanging out in his first aperture, with room for three more. He was so powerful; poor people weren’t allowed to see him. “Poor” and “weak” being essentially synonyms in Jeon.

Synonyms everywhere, actually.

That sounds unreasonably dangerous.

Given that my “instinct” here comes from Incisive, I’d be a bit less shitty.

Truth swore but grabbed the lid and started nudging the plate off to the side. It was decently heavy for its size. Perhaps a touch more than steel. He tried to push the plate over onto another box with middling success. At least it didn’t drop on the floor.

The plate below was pretty similar to the first, though he did note a few subtle changes here and there. Pieces moved around, reordered, that kind of thing.

You figured out what it is? Or does?

So, why is it not good? Because it’s so smart?

Well, for a given amount of-

Truth started nodding, then stopped. His smile was downright angelic. Vindictive and terrifying.

No, he doesn’t need the info. He needs the plates. All these boxes. We load them onto a truck and ship ‘em out. We want to hurt Starbrite, right? Well, I’m sure they can manufacture these plates in bulk. They aren’t scared of the talisman arrays getting damaged. But letting them get stolen and reverse-engineered? They don’t want that. Not until it’s too late to do anything about them. And I’d say Siphios, land of demon binders, can do a lot in a hurry.

Slumrat Rising

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