The World Waits on Evil (Hiver's EOa... Ww!?) (a finished story)

LoserThree · Nov 7, 2013

With Hiver's permission, this is a fanfic of his unfinished story, 'Evil Overlord are... Wait what!?'

The World Waits on Evil:
Bootstrap Fantasy for People Who Like Exposition
(an elongated fanfic of Hiver’s ‘Evil Overlord are… Wait, what?’)

It's 2015-10-30 and I'm revising again. I mean to get rid of an unnecessary thing or two, and all mentions of the word 'thing.' Its etymology doesn't fit the language rules I set for myself when I started and so, like 'test,' it goes. Other changes may also occur.

Additional updates will be added as they become available.

It's 2014-11-01 and I'm revising this. I plan to resume adding to it as part of NaNoWriMo '14. When that happens, when there's a large enough chunk to make another installment, I'll reply to the thread with it and this will start clumsily, haltingly, filleringly, continuing on its way.

I made some wording and sentence structure changes not because they were needed but because restraining myself from doing so is harder work that making the change. I also took out the term "short sauce." Although it is a favorite 'much dirtier than it first sounds' stand in for more conventionally foul language, it did not fit the translated curses used throughout the rest of the existing text.

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Installment One

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I remember getting up from my computer, just before it all changed. I had been doing some leisure reading, I think, and was headed toward the kitchen. It was the last time I responded to hunger, but of course I did not know that at the time. I think most last times go unrecognized in their own moments.

I walked barefoot toward the kitchen with the lights out, as I normally did. In familiar spaces I had always been more comfortable in the dark.

To my surprise, a dark place in an unlit corner held almost as much black cat as it held shadow. The cat may have been just as surprised as I was. It sure acted like it was, anyway: all explosion of fuzzy motion and loud feline expression.

I have never owned a cat. But maybe the cat also did not own a person. We might have had more in common than our proximity to each other. But we lacked the opportunity to explore our shared experiences because of what came next, And also because it was a cat.

I jumped back from the yowling, hissing, spitting, startled cat and tripped over some hazard I failed to notice behind me. It might have been my own foot.

Long term memory is not the the same as the initial recording of perceptions and thoughts, as it is often thought to be. A memory can and will change based on the mind state in which you remember it. If you accidentally take some action in the heat of a moment and later rationalize that action, there is a strong possibility you will remember thinking your way through and specifically choosing the action that was actually a thoughtless reaction. We never had as much time to think as we seem to remember.

So I might think I remember twisting in the air and seeing a glowing, wispy, purple-shaded, hole in space with a wooden beam floor on the other side, two or three feet below the floor of my house, and thinking, “So that's how the cat got in. At least it wasn't me that left a door and/or wormhole open.” But I almost certain do not really remember that, because in the times I have remembered the event since then my doubt has convinced me that it is more likely that my only thoughts were impolite and blunt. There might also have been the start of a plea to a God I had not believed in for years, because old habits die harder than old beliefs.

That is how I remember leaving the place I still think of as the “Real World,”

Once I entered the hole, the experience changed dramatically.

The stomach-dropping feeling of falling grew three- or four-fold in ways more usually encountered at amusement parks. I believe that was my inner ear notifying me that speed-change had occurred in an unexpected fashion that did not conform to the steady, constant pull of the world it had evolved to analyze. Nausea announced a kind of an error reading from the human speed-change instrument of measure.

At the same time, proportion and dimension swayed, swelled, and contracted in a wholly unreasonable fashion. My understanding of color, texture, flavor, and tone bled together. I felt a brief oneness with all existence and wondered at the strange, laughably particular limitation of my previously singular perspective.

Then Space, Time, Love, and the Universal Consciousness vomited me back into being, five or six feet above a cold flagstone set into that wooden floor. I remember that I landed without grace, composure, dignity, or silence, but I do not I think broke any bones.

In a movie, this is the point where the transported character throws out a witty one-liner. But I did not ask if anyone got the identification plate of the traffic that hit me. And I did not come up with a less tired and worn out line, either.

There is a bit of missing memory there, instead. I do not know if I was not really perceiving the room while I got my breath back, or if maybe that did not get written to long-term memory. I do not remember living the kind of life that would familiarize someone with the process of recovering from having the wind knocked out of them. It was not entirely novel, but was rare and, of course, that was the last time it happened.

When I did look around, I found myself sprawled across a glowing, purple pentagram that looked set into the flagstone I landed on, which in turn was set into the wood flooring I first saw through the purple hole in space. I thought the light must have bent the way it does at the surface of water when I'd looked through the hole.

The room looked huge from my place on the floor. It was square and large enough to park a pair of big road engines side-by-side. In each corner was a pillar that might have come up to my breastbone, with green flame shooting out the top. At that moment, I missed that I was able to perceive colors in what seemed to be the normal fashion, even though the most significant sources of light in the room where bright green.

Instead, all my attention was the on the over seven foot figure in black armor with silver inlay. It had a floor-length purple cape that flowed behind it, and a collar that rose over the crown of its skull which, by the way, I could see because it had a skull for a head with small blue flames in its eye sockets. Instead of seeming unbelievable, the skull-headed figure was frighteningly real.

That is when I remember reacting to my surroundings. There have been times in the life I remember when my understanding of the meaning of courage would have led me to wish I were the sort of person who would bravely confront such an obvious threat to safety and fashion. But I was not and had never been that person.

So I did not boldly assume a posture that could be defensive or offensive, as needed. And I did not wittily snap off a one-liner. And I did not even politely ask if, maybe, Sir or Dame Skull Face would like his/her/its cat back and then maybe I could just go, although the person I remember thinking I was would totally be pragmatic and smart enough to do just that. Instead, the person I remember actually being scrambled across and largely against the flagstone artlessly and made a lot of those sounds that require no constriction outside the throat while I tried to back away.

The tall figure gestured strangely at me and I felt as though I were picked up by my hips and shoulders, but from the inside. Unseen force shoved at me through those four points and brought me back to the center of the pentagram I had landed on. I could fight the force with my feet against the ground in the same way you can lean into a door to try to hold it closed, but I could not stop the unseen force from moving me into the center. I could twist my body a little and my center of substance would lower just a little bit if I went limp, but that put uncomfortable weight on my hips and shoulders.

Powerless, I remember standing in the center of the purple pentagram and finally looking back up at the tall figure. It had walked into a smaller, similar, purple, glowing pentagram, likewise set into a flagstone. It was still gesturing at me with one hand and I remember noticing, then, that its hands were skeletal and realizing that instead of a very tall human with a skull for a head, this was probably a very tall skeleton in human armor. It was a skeleton that could take action without the need for all the meat that makes humans take action bone cannot take on its own, with all the terrifying implications that came with that.

A sound came from behind me of an impact against solid substance. There was a door there, I would soon discover, made from thick wood with iron bands around it. It was firmly set into its frame. It was barred, too, and the iron beam that barred it sat in stout hooks in the wall on either side. Someone was 'knocking' on the other side with the kind of force that removes boulders from roads.

Instead of putting that together, at the time, I remember the look of alarm on the skeleton's face and I remember doubting that I had seen it. Skulls, after all, are rigid and incapable of expression outside that one expression that comes naturally to each skull.

Yes, living bone is flexible to a degree that may surprise those who have only encountered bone that is dead and dried. There is give in the human skull, as there is in every human bone. But this was not a little bit of flex and bow, this was full-on clay puppet facial expression on a skull. The ridges over its eye pits behaved like eyebrows. Its teeth – of which it had an incomplete count – and its cheekbones moved in ways that suggested its absent lips and cheeks. There might have been some motion, I remember thinking with out-of-place clarity, around the hole where its nose would have been that imitated flaring nostrils.

Fortunately, this bizarre sight snapped me out of my inarticulate state and gave me the calm compartmentalization that had carried me through car accidents, medical emergencies, and other disasters in the life I remember. Unfortunately I was still stuck, still powerless. So maybe it was not fortunate as much as it just happened to be so.

Alarm had barely settled on to the tall skeleton's face when it shifted to a stern expression, what I might have called its 'game face.' There was another impact sound behind me, followed by another, and another, and so on. And the armored skeleton raised both its hands and moved them through the air in strange patterns.

Two poundings later, the skeleton's hands were still moving and its fingertips began to glow blue and leave trails in the air. The trails left by their motion formed complex, angular, and three dimensional shapes in the air. The lines twisted around each other in ways that required the skeleton to contort its 'hands' with odd precision. The motions of finger-joints, wrist, elbow, and shoulder might all work together to draw a perfectly stiiaght line with the tip of one middle finger while the other fingertips on the same 'hand' traced complicated, spiraled, spirals around it.

Soon, another two or three poundings later still, the whole length of its index fingers glowed like its fingertips and their wide ribbons of light added curves around the straight lines the tips left. And the skeleton spoke. It chanted a series of sounds or words I could not understand and repeated them three or four times.

The lights on its hands went out when it stopped chanting, though the light shapes in the air continued to glow. I remember watching the skeleton reach into the folds of its cape and draw out a green crystal the size of its hand, which it then hurled against the floor between the two pentagrams.

The crystal shattered and its fragments exploded outward in slow motion, creating a shape very similar to the glowing blue shape in the air in front of the skeleton. I remember that all I saw was cast in a green light – which may be when I noticed it was odd that it had not been cast in a green light previously, though that could be the previously mentioned distortion by the lens of memory – and that green light grew blindingly bright over the course of the time a rapid breath takes.

Then the light faded but I remained momentarily blind. I did notice, though, that the four points of force on my body were suddenly absent. My sight came back a heartbeat's time later and powerful discomposure swept over me like a great wave.

I looked at myself, standing in front of me. Myself was not making eye contact with me, and did not mirror my motions. My doppelganger was running hands that should have been mine over a body that used to be mine and wincing, which is when I realized I felt no pain.

I felt no pain in a way that I had not felt no pain in I did not know how long, in the life I remember. I did not feel sore, or fatigued, or hungry, or sated, or hair, or the pressure of my lips against each other, or the need to breathe. And I did not feel as though my stomach dropped out of me as the realization sank in. So that was nice.

I held up my hand and looked at the bony flanges. They moved just as I willed them to, flexing and folding like a hand would. They might have been able to fold in further than my fleshy fingers had and seemed to make a better fist that I could ever remember making. A substance like the joint material from a human body held the finger bones together, end-to-end. No material seemed to hold them together side-by-side, but when I tried to stretch my hand wide, they did not seem to stretch any further than they would if they had been properly wrapped in meat.

There was another pounding on the door, which I could see then was bent inward length- and width-wise, jarring me from the inspection of my hand. That brought my attention back to my doppelganger, who was pointing at me and laughing. My doppelganger was, in turn, interrupted when the door's strength succumbed to the next strike against it and the it tumbled into the room. The door was followed by a stomping shape twice my doppelganger's height.

Our new guest was red skinned, covered in brassy body hair, and apparently sort of a naturalist. He had bat-like wings that were mostly folded behind him and looked as though they would span twice-and-half-again his height when outstretched. He had huge, ivory horns on his forehead. His face was a caricature of disgust. He was, quite obviously, a demon. Unless you were told demons wore clothing, he was just what you were told a demon would be. And he should not have fit through that doorway.

“Supplicant!” he bellowed as he stomped toward me. “Your debt is past due! The time has long past for you to fulfill your end of our bargain! Your campaign of defense - your great effort to deny me what is rightfully mine! It has brought only ruin to your realm, and to all the world! My rampage now reaches its peak and its prize! Surely now you see there is no escape and you will give yourself over to my rightful claim.”

I was going to respond, to connect my creativity to my speech and let fly with whatever came through. I might have complimented his complexion. But instead I was briefly confounded by the realization that the demon had not spoken in any language I had known in the life I remembered. When I thought over the sounds he had made as opposed to the words he used, I experienced discomposure again.

In my silencing confusion, the only action that I thought to do was to point at the thief of my self. I would like to think of myself as someone who is more concerned with results than blame. But somewhere in the complex of habits and whimsy that I thought was me, there was a desire to distribute the blame. I hope it was only human.

The demon's substantial head spun and his white horns cut through the air and he lowered his hips and brought his clawed hands up in front of himself. He looked at what used to be me, what I wholly hoped was not me anymore. It would really have been bad if I had been duplicated into this body and I had just tried to screw over my real self – or at least my self of precedent. Despite my hopes, I am totally the kind of person who would do that. That's one reason I oppose branching identity fundamentally.

I watched my body make objecting gestures and babble. I could not understand my former self, even though if I thought about it very hard I could recognize one or two of the words as my former native tongue by their sounds.

Dizzying discomposure overtook me again.

“Ah,” the demon rumbled. “There you are. You thought, after all I have done to secure this bond, you could trick me with a body swap? With so much of the Forces of Perdition behind me, your trickery will not save you!”

The one that stole me (I hoped) took a step back and turned to run, despite the demon being in the way of the only door. The figure that looked just like I remembered looking and I began to shout together and incoherently.

The demon's wings swept out and forward. In surprising obedience to physical laws I remembered from the 'Real World', this motion shoved his body back into a crouch. His wings swept back again as he lunged forward to tackle the fleeing flesh that I remembered being mine. As the demon connected with his target, they both vanished with a small popping sound and in a puff of smoke.

Starting before he moved and ending after he vanished, as though released in a burst during the fraction of a second in which the demon moved, then allowed to decompress forward and backward into time, the demon shouted, “I told you, you are MINE!”

It occurred to me, then, that a similar phenomenon of decompression of sound had taken place each of the previous times the demon had spoken. There hadn't been enough time for him to say all he said. And he'd moved faster than I should have been able to follow.

I blinked, discomposed again, and then spent a moment trying to figure out how I had done so. I had no eyelids and was unable to immediately reproduce the effect.

While I tried to figure out how I had blinked, more skeletons ran into the room in an disorderly fashion. They were dingy and wore ill-fitting, ill-made armor. As they came into the room they kicked fragments of bone through the doorway ahead of them and I could see broken bones littering the floor of the room behind them. Those fragments were, I supposed, the remnants of earlier waves of the same nature which had been sent to resolve a large, red problem that had just resolved itself... probably.

The skeletons left room around me in apparent difference. They filled the room as they clattered around, poking and prodding around as though their quarry could be hiding between the stone blocks of the wall, or behind the pillars at the corners. Perhaps he could have. Perhaps he had, previously. In fact, he had come through a doorway that should not have admitted him so easily.

It occurred to me then, I think, that it was odd that the demon had not come through a keyhole, or a gap between the door and the floor, or a gap between the beams of the floor, instead of breaking through the door. I was just beginning to consider what it might mean for the room to be somehow, some way protected against intrusion like that when a new figure came through the door .

The new arrival was a dark human in black armor. I thought the armor might be enameled. He had red eyes that didn't just glow, they burned. In one hand he easily, casually carried a huge sword that was clearly made to be wielded with two hands. The way his body moved slightly in counter-force to the motion of the sword, and the way the sword hesitated to change directions gave credence to its weight and accompanying leverage-force.

I saw satisfaction and then contempt flicker across his face as he came in, before he schooled his face into an expression of awe.

Then I considered how odd it was that I lacked a word for the force of leverage, realized I was no longer thinking in my native tongue, and slipped into discomposure again while the new figure looked around the large room before turning to me.

“Dread leader,” he said reverently as he knelt on one knee. “You defeated of the demon king! Your power awes me anew. Surely this is a new sign of your greatness!”

While he spoke I noticed his overdeveloped third-teeth – dog teeth? – and the language strangeness troubled me again.

I held my composure of thought this time, though, and realized that he was a vampire, that he was a vampire who addressed me as “Dread Leader,” and just what that implied.

For a moment, my mind seemed empty except for an exclamation: “Oh, love-like-striking.”

blackmamuth · Nov 7, 2013

Nice.

I wonder if you will diverge right from the start or not...

Morgomir · Nov 7, 2013

Good start. Keep up the good work.

tomio · Nov 7, 2013

I like it!

LoserThree · Nov 7, 2013

Installment Two

nothing special to note, except that it's harder than I thought to avoid the various uses of 'thing.'

nothing special to say except, I guess, that this chapter was revised much the same as the last.

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“My Leader?” the (probable) vampire asked as he rose from kneeling. “The demon king, did you defeat him?” His awed facial expression started to give way to concern as, I guessed, he considered what else might have happened before he got to the room, and he imagined events and series of events I did not know enough to imagine him imagining.

I thought fast. That is, I chose the first idea that occurred to me and might have been workable: I told a version of the truth.

“The demon king is gone and I do not expect he will return." I said, "I am still here. Obviously I have been victorious.” The reverent difference with which the warrior had regarded me led me to feel like that kind of arrogance would be expected. I guessed maybe that kind of behavior is not arrogant when it really is appropriate to your station.

The armored vampire bowed before responding again, which hid his face from me. “Are you hurt, My Dread Leader?”

People do not seem to get to positions of power without being opportunists. Additionally, the person questioning me was prepared for violence, and was a vampire. I wondered if he would kill me if he thought me weak. I wondered if it would help if he were loyal to the 'Dread Leader' position I held, without regard to the manner in which I obtained it. I wondered if people ever really were loyal to positions without regard for the person occupying it. I wondered how that could ever work for long.

But that flicker of disgust crossed his face again when he looked back up at me. It was odd to watch happen, unfamiliar and yet it reminded me of some fact I could not quite recall.

I concluded it was probable that the vampire did not like me, did not trust me, or did not want to be close to me. But from the way he tried to hide it, he was probably there to work with me anyway.

If I was right about that then that would be fine. I'd worked with people who did not want to work with me. I had management experience, even worse.

If I was wrong, then I probably could not make matters much worse. I mean, the vampire already disliked me.

“I am fine for now,” I answered him after pausing to think furiously, desperately searching through what I had learned in the past few moments. “I will tell you more in a moment. First, tell me how our defenses hold. Tell me how we fare against the remainder of the Forces of Perdition.”

In the life I remember, I counted myself lucky to be free of that fear of assessments, standardized and otherwise, that plagued so much of my generation. I'd had the good fortune, the privilege even, of doing well at them at a young age and so never had to fight my own distress while also fighting the assessment. Instead, I could freely build assessment taking skills.

One of those skills is to find ways to draw information from some questions in order to better answer others. This tool even works when understanding of the underlying concepts is unavailable. In fact, that might have been the first, simplest assessment taking skill. Or at least second only skipping questions to later return to.

“I fell back to the inner walls at the first breach of the outer,” the vampire answered. “I was in the inner yard when the keep was breached. I chased the demon king as best I could, but lesser demons blocked my way and, as you know, they are no easy opponent.”

Oddly, that had the feel of recitation, as though he had practiced it in his head. Or not so odd, really. It fit into a convenient and perilous narrative of the sort one would prepare if one were planning to commit deception. So worrying, not odd.

“Go look after our defenses." I told him. "I recognize your concern, but it does little good if demons exploit our vulnerability. Go.” I gestured toward the door.

He hesitated only a moment, then rushed out the shattered doorway with inhuman speed, which should not have worked the way it did.

Top human speeds, back in the life I remember as the 'Real World' are limited by the pull-of-the-world, but not in the way one might first think. Short run speeds would, in fact, be faster with greater pull-of-the-world because it would allow the runner a better grip on the ground, like shoes with spikes that bite the road-for-running.

The vampire moved so fast that, it seemed, his feet should have slipped out from under him, rather than propel him forward. But the vampire's feet stuck where he put them and his speed quickly grew as he left. I thought to myself that anyone who could do that should also be able to walk on walls and ceilings, which was fitting enough.

Then I was alone with the skeletons in a room with one ruined doorway and a little time to plan. And time to experiment with skeletons.

They were arranged in concentric circles around me. Skeletons on the same circle alternated facing inward and outward. So I attempted to wave one over while I began to consider my options and their possible consequences.

I was ignored. I attempted to snap my fingers, and found my hands responded sluggishly, as though unfamiliar with the gesture. I struggled with my bony hands for a moment before giving up.

I called, “You, there.” at a skeleton and it did not react.

I walked up to one particular skeleton and waved my hand at its face. No reaction. I shoved it, it swayed and kept its balance. I shoved harder and it stumbled back but returned to its position. I put my hands to either side of its head and turned it. It turned, and when released it turned back. But there was no response other than that. In frustration I drew my arms back and brought my hands together violently on either side of its head, which was protected by a leather helmet.

And, in so doing, I broke its skull between my hands into pieces that fell to the floor.

“I regret that,” I said. And I did, while noticing that I again lacked a word. The now shorter skeleton did not respond but was still standing and, when given a shove, still kept its balance.

“Are you well?” I asked. Still no response. I wondered it it would have needed a mouth to talk before realizing that neither it nor I actually had mouths. Like so many other paths of thought, I set that one aside for later.

None of the other skeletons reacted to any of this.

So that was informative: I learned I was quite strong and that a skeleton does not necessarily need its skull to function, or at least to continue standing there. And based on the behavior of the others in the room, I learned that skeletons are either mindless, mute (or terrified into silence), brutally loyal and disciplined, or just not inclined to be overly judgmental of someone breaking their heads off.

I realized, then, that I had distracted myself from the more weighty issue of what I could tell the vampire. So I busied my hands with picking up the pieces of the skull and putting them back together to see if the skeleton could reincorporate it. And I returned my thoughts to my problem.

One option was to tell all. That would be placing complete trust in a vampire who did not seem to like me. I thought that I probably should not hold his vampirism against him, at least with regard to how I should expect him to behave toward me. I figured that my lack of blood would take me off his list of favored victims.

Then again, I considered, was it safe to conclude that his pointy teeth, red eyes, and superhuman abilities mean he drinks blood? I was pretty sure there were stories about vampires that behaved differently.

More importantly, I thought, vampires, skeletons, and demons were fictions. If they did not exist in the life that I remembered except in stories, did that mean I was in a story? Could I expect narrative causality instead of consistent laws of nature? Should I expect to awaken from fantasy as a bed-ridden weakling?

I tried to fly in the way that had always worked in my dreams. Short, silly hops were all that happened and that was enough to confirm my experiences were not a dream, for the moment. The rest could be ignored until applicable... probably.

Meanwhile, I had found that the largest piece of the shattered skull, which included its base, would fall off again if I set it on top of the skeleton's neck. If it could be reincorporated, some other steps were apparently necessary. I had broken an object almost immediately after arriving in a new world, taking a new position, and meeting new people. That was so very much my way.

Trusting someone else with my problems always tempted me. There was often little to lose, in the life I remembered, but that was a very different world. There were no demons in the 'Real World' and I did not face the threats a 'Dread Leader' would in the relatively privileged life I remembered living.

The mechanics of reciprocation pressure meant that my urge to entrust others with truths I might have kept secret caused others to feel the urge to share their secrets with me. I had lived more than a third of the life I could reasonably have expected to before I learned my easy openness was why people told me so much about themselves.

Still, trusting the vampire was a foolish idea, and was rejected.

Likewise, hiding all and keeping an act up of complete control was rejected because I had no good reason to believe I could pull it off. I have never had the necessary dramatic stamina.

I would have to build the lie on what I already knew and what I could not hide.

In the meantime, I had started investigating the skull-less skeleton more closely. I could take its bent, stained, and handguard-less short sword from it. I could take armor off it. It did not object or even react, except to accommodate its new balance.

I crushed the last digit on its right and smallest finger between my index finger and thumb and broke it into multiple pieces. It still did not react.

I began to crush the joints of its spine, starting at the top of the protruding neck. This required only the force of my thumb and any two fingers against my palm. It seemed likely that I was considerably stronger than I had been.

My mind was briefly diverted from planning deception to consider spinal joints and another missing word.

When I had destroyed the top spinal joint to which ribs attached, those ribs remained attached to the breastbone. When I crushed its right collarbone, its right shoulder blade and arm fell away and into separate pieces. When I crushed not one, but both bones of its left forearm, its wrist and hand fell away and went to pieces.

I was only a few spinal joints past the top of the rib cage when the vampire returned. I noticed that the skeletons moved out of his way and realized they must also have moved out of his way when he left.

“Dread Leader,” he said as he knelt on one knee again. “There are no demons to be found. It is as if your defeat of the demon king has unmade them all. We are repairing the breaches and keeping watch on the walls, but the camps of Forces of Perdition look abandoned.

“I have sent scouts to search the encircling camps. Now, if it pleases you, tell me if you are hurt and how you defeated the demon king?”

LoserThree · Nov 8, 2013

Installment Three

Added some musing on narrative causality, grammar, and lots of words instead of 'thing.' I have removed 'things' that I added while making other changes. It is a pervasive word. Also, I was surprised to find a remaining gendered pronoun for Xarax, so that's been removed.

nothing special, yet. Just that it happened.

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I did not turn from my destructive investigation of the skeleton to answer the vampire.

“The demon king was here for me,” I began as I crushed another spinal joint. “And if you or I or any who wished us well had some way to stop him, we would have done so before he wrecked my realm.” I crushed the fifth spinal joint below the top of the rib cage as I said this and, dramatically, all the bones fell to the floor to bounce and clatter away.

Animated skeletons had, I concluded, a maximum capacity for damage or a minimum required connectedness. Alternately, it may have been the case that the universe ran on drama, which would be unfortunate since I was in that case almost certainly a villain.

I turned to the vampire as I shed bone dust from my hand with one quick shake. The vampire held his face in a neutral expression, but what looked like flickers and hints of fear crept through. If I were the villain of the story than either the heroes would go through him first, or I the heroes would unexpectedly dispatch me and it would turn out he was the real villain all long. Probably.

“If you didn't already know why the demon king was here, I expect you'd have figured it out by now: you were the first person through that door.” I paused, hoping he would not correct me. The skeletons preceded him, after all. And while I did not want to ask if they were people, I did want to know.

I was pretty sure I should have felt bad about maybe crushing someone's head, mutilating what was left of their body, and reducing them to a pile of bones.

He did not correct me, and I continued. “Surely, if there were measure you could have taken to stop the demon king, you would have done it at the wall of the keep, or the inner wall, or the outer wall, or last season, or the season before... But you did not, and neither did I.”

“Forgive my failure, my Dread Leader.” The vampire bowed his head. hiding his face again. Why did powerful people rob themselves of so much information by forcing their subordinates to turn their faces down?

“Yes. Your failure.” I replied. “And I will hold your debt in that, for now.” The concepts of forgiveness and guilt were born from systems of debt management in the world I remembered. I hoped the language that replaced my native tongue came about in the same way.

“Let me tell you of how I survived the demon king, and of how you may redeem yourself,” I continued. “I owed a debt to the demon king, and his desire to collect it would be satisfied by no less. With no other way to stop him, I devised a way to give him what he wanted. But what he wanted was me."

I did not know how much the vampire knew, but he had not expected the person he thought I was to still be there. I took that to mean he did not know that person's plan. I did not know their plan, either. Not for certain. But I had done some guessing and hoped that what seemed reasonable to me could form the core of a story that would seem reasonable to the vampire, and to everyone to whom he told it.

“So I summoned a vessel, a stranger from another world. That vessel is no lender or debtor to any being in this world, was free of any other claim. And into this vessel I put all of myself that I could spare, holding back only what cannot be replaced. I put in my memories, my very name. To make room for these bits of bait, I took many of the same components from the vessel.

“That vessel thought he was the one who owed. The demon thought the vessel was his debtor. I allowed nature to take its course. And now both are gone but I remain.”

I found it easy to hide my fears that this disclosure I saw no way to avoid would make me too vulnerable. I knew fear but did not feel it the same way I did not feel much at all. The vampire raised his head to look into my face and I continued. “Now, though, there is the problem of my memories. I do not remember why I chose what I chose to place in the vessel, other than I knew I did not need it or could replace it.”

The key to this kind of false tale is that the narrative must be believable and the speaker must not show the signs of lie-telling. I could do little for this without knowing more about the world, but avoiding specifics would help. It was the best idea I had.

“And so you,” I pointed at the vampire, “will start to repay your debt to me by telling me what I should remember, and by keeping this problem a secret.” I motioned him to stand.

“Of course, your Excellency,” he replied as he came to his feet. “We need to keep your enemies from learning of this... problem. There would be a never ending line of killers and 'Heroes' looking to assess their fortune.” Ah. 'Heroes.' That was a bad sign, but not unexpected.

The vampire's face was probably as pale as it could get. Beneath the dark color of his skin there was not the slightest, lightest shade of red. There had been no red at any point I had seen him, so when I looked for fear I could only look for the flickered twists of brow and lip that I had seen before. They were not there, and I could not tell if he looked resolved or if I was reading into his neutral expression.

“Do your remember spells, your Excellency? Your power feels as strong as it has ever been and your undead remain animate.”

Magic. Of course I had magic. I thought about what I had seen my abductor do and felt a surge of joy-in-waiting, as though some marvelous event was about to happen or, more accurately, as though I was about to take some marvelous action. But my desire for magical powers would wait.

“My name, tell it to me.” I commanded instead of answering his question.

The vampire bowed again. “You are the Dread Leader of Deathreach, the Death-Touched High Necromancer Xarax.”

For the sake of the story I had told, differentiation was essential. “Xarax is no more. The demon king took Xarax and may still have Xarax. It may be important that the name stay where he took it. I... am...” I paused to consider.

I could not remember the sounds that made up the name I remembered from the 'Real World,' and its meaning was unimportant to me and, more importantly, useless.

“Steel? Is anyone using Steel as a name?” I figured I would try out the standards, first.

“Yes, your Excellency," the vampire responded carefully. "There is a dwarven clan which uses that name, but you may win it from them by Right of Spear and Hammer or wipe them from the world and take it and whatever else you want as your own.”

“No. We have more pressing matters to attend.” I was always more of a turtler than a rusher. “Star-Killer might send the wrong message. Titles should stay a title, and apparently I'm not even a king, only a 'leader' so a more unique and fitting title will have to come later." In the only system of titles I knew from the world I remembered, the highest level of privilege below those who ruled alone was a translation of the word 'leader' from another language. So I didn't think it was a poor title, really. Also, I had a word for 'king' but not the more general case of one who ruled alone. "All the variations on 'death' will just get repetitive with my existing titles. What do my enemies call me?”

“The men of the north call you the the Despoiler. The orcs call you the White King. The dwarves call you Gord Undlrohm, which means the Flash Flood in their language. The elves call you Bel Eh Toldan, which means the Rotting Stillness.” It actually meant 'the Stillness of Rot' or 'the Way Rotting Material Appears Still but Is Not.' It turned out that I had acquired more than one language from Xarax, and I seemed to have a better grasp on elven wordplay than the vampire.

“Those won't do. Perhaps just the title, High Necromancer... unless there is another.”

“No, your Excellency. There is no other High Necromancer.”

“That will have to do. Or, wait.” The elven wordplay had given me an idea. I thought of a name given to a two weapons for which Xarax had no words, a name I had always thought was quite clever.

“I will be Peace-Maker in the languages of the humans," understanding of languages leapt to my mind such that I had to fight off another round of discomposure to continue. "Urad Cahl to the dwarves, and Bel Az Kandah to the elves.”

Urad Cahl literally meant 'Peace-Maker' and was a poetic term dwarves used for the kind of choke damp that killed quietly. And Bel Az Kandah played on the existing elven name for Xarax in a way that suggested rebirth or transformation to elven linguistic sensibilities while it was a poetic term for strength behind restraint, but literally meant 'One Who Makes Stillness Happen.' I decided I would have to read up on elven diplomatic letters; I expected they would be very enjoyable to those who enjoyed wordplay.

“Yes, my Dread Leader Peace-Maker.”

“Now, take me to the library!” I commanded, as I strode out of the room. The skeletons moved out of my way. But I could not be sure they were responding to me and not to an unspoken order from the vampire, as they had before.

“To your right, your Excellency,” the vampire said as I neared the doorway. “And my name is Venros. I am the Head of your Guards.” 'Head.' Another title that existed as a separate word in the world I remembered.

“Thank you, Venros. And what does Death-Touched mean?”

“You have abandoned your living flesh and taken the shape of walking death, a lich.”

I stopped in my tracks.

That one word worried me more than all the other unbelievable events that had happened. Walking skeletons, vampires, and magic all had their part in old stories. But the word 'lich,' I was fairly sure, was an invention of authors within the past four or so generations back in the life I remembered. It was based on an older story: what's-his-name, the Deathless, who kept his amulet in an egg in a bird in a hare in other creature (a goat?) in a tree on an island on a lake in the middle of nowhere, or whatever. But he was a specific character, not a class of beings.

It was another argument that this was all some fantasy. And worse, it might not be my fantasy. There are worse fates than waking up from a dream.

“Are there other liches?”

“Very few, my Dread Leader. None who command armies as you do. None who animate innumerable as many undead warriors as you do.”

Oh, special. Great.

“Do you know where my, uh... amulet is?”

Venros was doing a fine job of directing me while walking a half step behind on my right. He was also capable of bowing while doing so. It spoke well of matters that he was so well practiced at it.

“I do, your Excellency. It is hidden at the center of a great maze set deep in the earth, guarded by countless traps and undead.”

That sounded weaker than what's-his-name, the Deathless' idea. Despite what Venros said, an object is not hidden if there's a huge building that everyone knows it sits in. That was the same mistake made by ... those god-kings of the land where a river through the mother continent broke up as it met the western sea. I could not know how many generations their tombs lasted, but I knew they were broken into eventually.

I also knew I was going to miss being able to refer to places, people, actions, objects, ideas, and so forth from the life I remembered by their names. I also realized that I had no words to describe those kinds of words. Assuming Xarax was the source of my understanding of the local languages, I was surprised that words for kinds of words were missing. How could one understand so many languages so well and not have words for sorting the kinds of words?

But I thought that at least my predecessor was no fool: the amulet was not on display.

Venros guided me to the library, which turned out to be a series of interconnected rooms with what I thought must have been thousands of books.

“I will leave you to your studies, your Excellency,” he said while he stepped backwards away from me. “I will bring you word from the scouts and of what we know of your realm. I am sure you will want your holdings reviewed.”

“Do so.” I replied with a dismissive gesture. He bowed one more time and left, letting the outermost doors close behind him.

I would have sighed if I'd had breath.

As I looked around – and incidentally investigated the written scripts I had inherited from my predecessor along with his languages – I began looking for correlation between the thickness of dust on shelved books and what I could gather of their topics.

It was study time, and all assessments would be pass-or-die.

(EDIT: the etymology of 'emperor' necessitated its removal.)

Morgomir · Nov 8, 2013

The dead shall obey your commands and the untended fields shall tremble in fear.

SwiftRosenthal · Nov 8, 2013

There's another pun in the name Peacemaker and I don't know whether or not you intended it. Sam Colt made men equal, and everyone is equal in death, so...

LoserThree · Nov 8, 2013

SwiftRosenthal said:
There's another pun in the name Peacemaker and I don't know whether or not you intended it. Sam Colt made men equal, and everyone is equal in death, so...

'Gun' is one of the two weapons mentioned by the narrator that Xarax didn't have a word for.

That is one play on the name I didn't know. I'm not all that well informed on firearms.

Edit: I don't think I can sustain daily installments. The next installment will come Monday, November 11. Those following might fall on all weekdays, might fall M-W-F.

AkumaOuja · Nov 9, 2013

Will be watching.

Ame · Nov 9, 2013

I hope to enjoy this as much as Hiver's original version. I just hope yours lasts longer...

afterthought53 · Nov 10, 2013

I'll be watching this as well. I'd like to see where you take it.

megrisvernin · Nov 10, 2013

Bookmarked. Will be following.

LoserThree · Nov 11, 2013

Installment Four

It's 2015-11-13 0338 PST. I'm NaNoWriMo'd up for the day (21,711 words to be precise) and returning to the revision process. Once I've finished revising the first 35 installments I'll start posting what I've written this year, of which there 6 complete installments so far. Also, seriously thought about taking the numbered list out. What was past-me thinking?

still nothing in particular to note.

-------

Before Venros returned, I learned quite a few details:

1. There were three different forms of writing used by the local humans, including those humans who were also vampires at at least one that was a lich. Only in one form of writing, which they shared with the dwarves did every sign correspond with sounds. And then the signs were not the partial sounds like how the written language I could remember worked. Elves used dwarven for law and trade, but for every other need they used a script that was not their own: draconic.

2. There were dragons. They wrote in a mix of sound-signs and idea-signs: not word-signs but actual idea-signs and the distinction was somehow important. Four parts in five of Xarax' books and scrolls on magic were written in their script. And the instructions for magical acts, spells, were in draconic idea-signs only.

3. Divine love-like-striking, there were mother-loving-like-striking dragons. And they were some kind of defining force in the study of magic.

4. Impolite language did not retain its brevity when it was translated from the life I remembered in the 'Real World' into Xarax' language.

5. I did not tire. I could do hundreds of push-ups. I confirmed my unreasonable strength by easily lifting stacks of books. I did not seem to have special gifts where balance was concerned. I could juggle no better than I could in the life I remembered, which is to say not at all.

6. Xarax probably did not love looking outside. I had seen no openings since I had arrived.

7. Math was underdeveloped and mathematical relationships were described with many, many words. Numbers were written in idea-signs that made representation of large numbers awkward.

8. I could hum and sing and seemed to get close to whistling. I can change the sounds I made by putting my fingers between my jaws, but could not easily investigate what I thought to be their source, due to the armor around my neck that I had not taken the time to remove. I could remember tunes and lyrics, but they did not fit together. The same problem afflicted poetry. Further, I had under-appreciated how rhythm and rhyme aided memory and some lyrics and poetry that I expected to remember seemed lost. I could force my way through the first verse, maybe, of the raven poem by the sad man with the single-sound last name, but I was fairly sure I would not get much further in the tongue I knew in the life I remembered.

9. The idea of putting the title of a book on its spine was not one that occurred to every book binder. The idea of brevity was not one that occurred to every book titler.

10. Most disappointingly, Xarax liked books that said he was an important and powerful person. These had the least dust on them and looked as through they were handled regularly

After Venros returned, we talked.

“My Dread Leader," he began, "our scouts have found no demons, anywhere. Their camps are still set. Their fires burn wild or burn out. Their victims have escaped while unattended or perished where they were abandoned in the middle of elaborate torture.

“Their mortal allies have fled the field, scattered to the distance. Your forces have cut them down where they have gathered, further driving them off. If I still commanded the beast folk, I would send them to pursue and fall upon gatherings in distant or hidden places.”

I asked a series of obvious questions about the 'beast folk.' It turned out they were the local version of wolf-men, only not especially wolf-like. They usually looked like normal humans, but would change into a larger, hairier, much more dangerous form for confrontations of arms or words. They were tireless hunters, great warriors, withered in moonlight, and were probably all dead.

As much as Venros thought highly of sending a troupe of beast folk into battle, he was more proud of the role he had played in killing them off. He said they were rebellious and worthless, but I thought that it might have been an issue of competition: the beast folk were cannibals and were the result of some kind of communicable curse that was incompatible with the communicable curse of vampirism.

Venros' vampirism was fairly conventional: he was very strong, very fast, burned in sunlight, was vulnerable to a variety of minor warding magics, and needed to steal life from the living in order to sustain himself.

Vampires did not breathe but consumed life itself, which they drew out of the living through their blood. The lifeless blood would then be vomited back up as a thick, pungent, black sludge a few hours after it was consumed. Vampires who were careless about purging completely and cleaning up after themselves would eventually stink of the mess.

An adult person holds more blood than a vampire can physically fit in themselves. So if a person was to be completely drained, as was occasionally done to intimidate communities, the task required more than one vampire, sometimes as many as four. Binge-and-purge approaches did not work well for this because a vampire could not give up blood until the life force was pulled from it; the victim would certainly die while the vampire was digesting the second-to-final draw.

Vampires did not often drink as much blood as they could hold, not because it was unhealthy for the victim, but because it was unnecessary. Outside of extraordinary exertion, like desperate combat, a local vampire's supply of life force rarely fell below three quarters of its capacity. And its capacity could be entirely filled in one blood-drawing session.

Venros knew that people who were frequently fed from would be more sickly. He did not know how many person-years of life a resident vampire cost a community, and he did not care.

Venros knew of stories of vampires stealing life by means other than drawing blood, but did not know of any vampires who could do so. The stories were old and he was not sure they were true.

There had been some kind of social upheaval among the vampires in the last few hundred years and very few existing vampires were older than that. Alcoros, a vampiric cross between the Chosen One, the Enlightened One, and the Praised One -- again, I regretted lacking names for people remembered -- came along to teach them how to live together and to save them from the living.

We were in danger of diving too deep when what I needed most was a broad overview, so I asked no more about the vampire historical figure, and instead asked about the threat of the living.

Vampires would always be outnumbered by the living, due to the nature of their diet. The living would always be a threat to vampires, due to their ability to cooperate and their cunning. This is why older vampires were all large-bodied men. Not only did they have a better chance of surviving the inevitable mob of angry living people, but old fashioned vampires believed that it was important, and so mostly only made vampires of large-bodied men.

This had fallen out of fashion some time after Alcoros, because vampires no longer needed to stand alone against the living, and also because Alcoros was not a large-bodied man.

Venros, I noted, was a large-bodied man. He was not as big as I was; I was inhumanly large. But he was tall and broad shouldered and carried himself like one who had not been low on the pecking order while growing up: his steps were sure, his posture was upright, his gestures contained no defenses for their own existence.

I asked why vampires did not just adopt a pastoral lifestyle, keeping large herds of goats or whatever. Venros told me that vampires were bad with animals. Firstly, animals did not like vampires. Secondly, even vampires who had kept herd while alive just could not bring themselves to care about their herd. So accidents, sickness, and competing predators kept them from keeping herds large enough for sustenance.

Most importantly, vampires remained social creatures and needed human contact... probably. The narrative Venros retold was that vampires that stuck to the wilderness, fed on wildlife, and avoided human contact would eventually want to “go for a walk in the sunlight.” Like the living, I figured the ability to deal with social isolation would vary from vampire to vampire. But back in the 'Real World' I remembered there had not been much opportunity to study the effects of hundreds of years of isolation.

Deathreach was a unique place where Xarax' skeleton army and the teachings of Alcoros allowed vampires to openly hold positions of authority for more than a couple decades. That arrangement never lasted elsewhere; an angry mob of mortals was inevitable.

Problematically, I did not see it lasting in Deathreach, either. The mechanics of resources did not work out. Either the realm would become weak and outsiders would destroy it, or the living people of the realm would eventually become strong enough to overthrow their vamipric overlords and what followed would go poorly for everyone.

The vampires in charge would, like any good power-mongers, play the discontent off each other as is normally done. There would be death and destruction and maybe, afterward, a state strong enough to deal with its neighbors. Or they would fall to invasion in their weakened state. Or the unrest would spill over and ruin other lands as well.

But either way, if I were interested in staying in charge, which I kind of was, I would need to find some kind of balance of power between the vampires and the living. I would need an excuse to shake up the 'normal' ways of living.

I though that I might have had that excuse already, depending on how bad the realm had been hurt by the Forces of Perdition.

I slipped deeper into self-investigation for a moment while Venros talked about how much better living people were at taking care of themselves than goats were, and I thought about why I wanted to stay in charge. I came up with a handful of reasons.

Firstly, the demon king might figure out that he did not have what he was owed. I had a feeling that whatever Xarax got out of the deal was still outstanding, and the demon king might come back for it. He got cheated, probably, and I thought maybe he would take action about that at some point. The more powerful I was in the meantime, the more prepared I could be to deal with him.

Secondly, the world appeared to be a very dangerous place. With all my implied and explicit special powers and the "Your Excellency" bit, I was well past the threshold of notability where less power meant less trouble. So the more power I had, the more able I would be to deal with danger. Probably.

Thirdly, I felt more comfortable when I was in charge. I had come to terms with the weight of accountability in the life I remembered, and had always favored having control over having freedom. Here I was offered a huge amount of it, and I felt very attached to the idea of keeping it.

Fourthly, it sounded like the world was a mess, and I was arrogant enough to think that I could fix it. One revolution of diligent activity would surely benefit the world and be sufficient to excuse little injustices like pretending to be a person I was not in order to keep a position of power. Probably.

If a single 'real' reason existed, the third was probably the closest to it, I decided. Acquiring and retaining power took roughly two steps: enforcing obedience and ensuring the well-being of those over whom you had power. I was never too good at the former, but I figured I could do the later well enough to make up for it while I got the hang of being the Dread Leader. Probably.

Eventually, our conversation returned from that diversion to more information on the long war against the Forces of Perdition. It was a war that Deathreach had been slowly losing, right up until the last minute. Around or exactly the time the demon king vanished in a puff of smoke with the body I still thought of as mine, the otherworldly core of the opposition vanished and the rest broke.

As Venros described the war, he described the land of Deathreach, and I turned our conversation toward the lands around Deathreach. We moved to a council room where Venros could better illustrate his speech in sand, and he picked up a drinking horn on the way.

Some time later, I told him to wait while I reviewed it back to him.

“Tell me if I have this correct. To the east of Deathreach is the Everlasting Ocean, which no one has crossed.” I said, as I waved my hand over the tray of sand in which Venros had drawn a map while we spoke.

Venros and I stood over the wide table on which the sand tray was built in a room with raised areas around the edge. It seemed built so that people could look over the people in front of them and down on the sand tray. One side was without the raised floors, presumably so that the people who stood on that side could be close to the table without anyone behind and above them.

“Yes, your Excellency. There is no place to cross to, only more water, just as there is no bottom to the ground, only more stone.”

I paused, halfway through a nod, and hoped he was wrong. My schooling in the life I remembered had better prepared me for a world where that was not true. Preparation was preferred.

“And my realm, Deathreach, is broken up by swamps and mountains, to the point where I have trouble grasping how it is held together except by raw power.

“And to the west and north of Deathreach are the many kingdoms of humans, who hate Deathreach.”

Venros nodded as he sat down on the first, lowest segment of the raised, outer rings of the room. He had his horn in his hand and would take small drinks of a red liquid that I was fairly sure would not taste at all like wine.

“To their north are the Craiglands, under which the dwarves live. And they hate Deathreach.”

Venros nodded again and rested his non-drinking arm on the next ring of floor, behind him. The ledge was not made to be a seat and did not look especially comfortable for lounging on. But Venros was there, doing that, and no one seemed ready to stop him.

“And to the south of Deathreach are the hot and wet jungles of Mel'Adar, which are full of elves...” I trailed off.

Venros gestured with his drinking horn as he continued for me. “And the elves hate Deathreach.”

I held my hands behind me as I leaned over the map, as though looking closer would reveal some missed indentation left by the vampire's finger that indicated I was not alone against the world.

“Are there any peoples, beyond my own, who do not seek to break my bones to dust?”

Venros leaned sideways into a slouch across the beams that supported his drinking arm. I wondered if he had relaxed because he felt more in control and powerful while instructing me, or if it was the not-wine in his drinking horn.

“There are the orc hordes. They roam throughout the plains to the west and retreat into Deathreach when their enemies unite against them.”

“Great.” I said. “Everyone hates me except for the other people that everyone hates.

“And it's me they hate," I continued. "As much as Deathreach could ever exist without me. And they don't hate me because they die and I don't, or because I control so much land, or because I don't look good in a beard. They hate me because I invade their countries, kill their people, and animate them to build our armies, and because I shelter the orc hordes and allow them to raid the rest of the world.”

Though my predecessor controlled more territory than any other ruler by many fold, he had turned most of the world against him. And, to top that off, his land had recently been on the receiving end of substantial demonic abuse.

“Waste-eater whose warted face is covered with the leavings of a swollen, diseased, giant rat of low social standing, why?!?!” I had trouble expressing just how deeply I felt that my predecessor had made some poor decisions. The words known to Xarax -- which did not include a word for the list of known words -- seemed to completely lack short, single words to use abusively. You had to build your own verbal attacks and I decided I did not like it when they ran long.

“Because you are strong, my Dread Leader, strong and imaginative. They know you will take all they have as your own, and trust it to your favorites. They see the dawn rising on their rule, and they rage against the sun that will end them because they have nowhere to lie in wait for the night. That is always why the weak fear the strong.” Venros gestured with enthusiasm, clearly more comfortable expressing himself for, I assumed, the same reason he had become more relaxed.

“But what of my people. Who are the people of Deathreach?” I asked.

“Which people? The country folk or the craft folk or the merchants or the vagrants or your favored few, “ he gestured toward himself , “like myself?”

“Start with the country folk,” I replied. “Tell me about them.”

“What is there to tell? They work the fields, the timberland, the mines, the seas. They pay their taxes to you in what they take from the land and the sea. They submit to your favorites, as is right, except when they rebel. Rebellions are put down by your undead armies.”

“Why do they rebel?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“It is the folly of those all mortals to overreach their place, from time to time.” Venros replied with a nearly ceremonious wave of the arm that was not supporting his slouch. “The farmers want to keep more of their crops, the fisher folk want to keep more of their catch, the woods folk want to poach without hanging, the miners... I do not actually know what the miners want. They probably want to stop mining. It is miserable work.

“Typically, they are led astray by fools who tell them they can win. These are persuasive folk, usually vagrants but sometimes foreigners. They whip the people into a fervor, lead them to their deaths, and usually join them. Truly, they all end up dead, in the end, as mortals do.” He concluded with the exaggerated weight of tone used by the drunk.

So it was probably whatever was in the horn. Surely, I thought to myself, vampires do not get drunk every time they fed. That just seemed unsustainable. He also had not described any way to store blood, which would be necessary to make sense of the drinking horn. So there were liquids other than blood that vampires could drink, and at least one of those drinks could get them drunk.

“When my undead army puts down a rebellion, the rebellious dead are added to the army, yes?”

“Of course.”

“But not all who rebel are killed, right?”

“Of course not. No wise ruler cripples his land in such a way. The leaders and anyone else who looks well regarded are publicly tortured to death, many others are beaten, and the local people are punished for a time in whatever way seems appropriate. Sometimes their taxes are raised. Sometimes their favorite children are taken. Sometimes your favorites from surrounding areas are called to the rebellious area to feed.”

“Charming.”I said. “Obviously, I should not have any more people killed than necessary, but the rebels have no such restriction regarding my undead armies. In fact it is to their benefit to destroy each skeleton they can. So each rebellion ends with a smaller undead army than it started with, yes?”

“Yes, your Excellency. It is just so. Is your memory returning?”

“No. The skeletons I have seen are poorly armored and in disrepair. I have seen them employed as a senseless wave, without much in the way of care. If I assume this is not an exceptional situation, then I can conclude that they are given little attention between the time they are animated and the time they fall apart. When I add that to the obvious need to keep up the number of laborers, the sum I reach is that more skeletons would be lost than rebel bodies would be recovered to make new skeletons.

“This, then, presents the next question: where do the numbers in my undead army come from, Venros?”

“Surely your wisdom, my Dread Leader Peace-Maker, was not wastefully invested in the stranger you made your decoy. You are quite astute. We raid the graves of our enemies and slaughter their unarmed people to bolster the ranks of your undead army.”

“That,” I said ponderously. “Is going to stop working one day.” Venros moved as though he would reply, but I cut him off with a wave of my huge, bony hand.

“Let me make another guess. This is how Deathreach expanded, early on. Raiding graves and poorly armed towns not only made the undead army bigger, but it made neighbors weaker. We all believed that one day I would rule over the whole world by repeating that success over and again.

“But scale matters, and as Deathreach expanded, the raids had to march further and further to find the next untapped graveyard or town. Now, great stretches of mostly uninhabited land separate the nearest foreign graveyard or undefended town from the undead army of Deathreach. Now the only way a successful army-growing campaign can take place is if the raid hits successively larger towns in one swing without meeting an opposing army. And that is happening less and less often.”

It all made so much sense, so suspiciously much sense. Was it all so obvious? Was it that this history would make the most interesting narrative and, if I was living in someone else's story, that meant it was more likely the right answer? Was I dead wrong and talking to an armored, predatory, and all-around dangerous administrator who was drunkenly humoring me?

Venros had grown still and looked at me intently as I spoke, with a flicker of fear on his face once, and maybe doubt or some similar expression.

“If not now, then soon we will be grasping at sand that slips though our fingers all the faster the tighter we grip it.” I made the obvious gesture over the table, and discovered that my skeletal hands were not suited to it. I would need gloves before I could properly illustrate that particular point.

Venros was not distracted by my inability to grasp at sand, so I continued. “If not now, then soon the army will not be strong enough to crush the rebellions without killing many country folk. Fewer country folk means less food and other resources and means a weaker Deathreach. Then our enemies will seem less distant, as they stalk our weakened land like wolves.

“And that is without taking into account the damage done by the Forces of Perdition. Venros, my loyal Head of Guard, we need to step away from this doomed path and take the path of wisdom. What Deathreach needs most is to grow its own army.”

“My Dread Leader Peace-Maker, forgive me if I step beyond my station.” Venros said with carefully a controlled expression of uncertainty while flickers of anger shown through. “But did you not just say that we cannot kill the country folk to build the army? And though I mentioned others, there are no people as numerous as the country folk.”

“You are thinking like a mortal, Venros.” I chided. “Tell me this, when skeletons are raised from graves, are those that come from graves of mortals in the prime of their lives stronger than those that come from the graves of the frail and venerable?”

“No, my Dread Leader. Only size has any baring on the strength of the skeletal undead.” I knew most of the answer before he spoke, of course. Grave-raiding would not hold up, otherwise: most people are pretty weak just before they die. The bit about size raised some questions that would have to wait, like most questions raised since the purple door to another world was opened.

“Then consider this, Venros: humans make more humans while they live. Every human that dies adds to the undead army. And every human dies, eventually.

“What we need to do is keep the common folk happy, healthy, and fruitful. Let them live their lives and have many children. Let them grow old and die when they cannot do any more and each one will make the army stronger. All we need is time.”

“It will take more than time to keep the people happy and the armies of our enemies distant, your Excellency.”

“Venros, I suspect that the Forces of Perdition have done so much damage, have killed so many people, that peace within and without is our only chance for a future.”

I would send surveyors, I decided, to find out what truth there was to the demon king's claim to have ruined my land and this world.

green · Nov 11, 2013

The bit about size raised some questions

Questions like: Do bigger skeletons hold more 'animating magic' in them making them stronger?
Or is it simply a matter of a bigger skeleton having more mass and more kilograms in and behind each punch/slash etc. ?

He said size, not necessarily tall, so the reach of the skeleton does not make them stronger.

You need to eat well in certain age ranges starting from a kid to become tall.

Better bones can be gotten by having enough calcium (milk), vitamin D (sunlight),
vitamin K (mainly green leafy vegatables) and exercise.

SemiSaneAuthor · Nov 11, 2013

green said:
Better bones can be gotten by having enough calcium (milk), vitamin D (sunlight),
vitamin K (mainly green leafy vegatables) and exercise.

First time an evil overlords plan would work better if they invent and use pasteurisation. Then ensure every citizen has milk from birth. Truly this is an SB story for such a plot development to be potentially relevant.

LoserThree · Nov 12, 2013

Installment Five

Added 'First' and 'High' to the titles of the cabinet members, removed 'things'

Nevros? Who is that? Definitely no one by that name here. At least not now that the revision has passed.

-------

It took a week – which happened to last eight days – just to work out what a survey party should be like.

Military scouts covered the nearby territory and brought back word of sacked towns, They brought back word of the aftermath of horrific slaughters of unarmed folk. And they brought back word of scattered armed folk who had recently marched with the Forces of Perdition. These tended to be limited to small groups that could not hold a fortress but could turn large, abandoned homes into small, poorly-made fortresses and squat them.

Sacked towns required no action other than to mark them on the map. People returning or passing through would loot them, and whatever might be worthwhile would be returned to common use, eventually. I ordered that signs be placed, directing people to safe places to gather. The fewer people who died while we put the realm back together, the more people there would be to put the realm back together.

The spore view of disease was, as expected, unknown. However, there were known rituals for preparing a corpse for travel that seemed like they might prevent disease. The army had skilled corpse gatherers, of course. These were sent out and told to burn any once-living substance that could not be put to immediate use.

Plagues would probably come anyway. The land was a mess.

The remnants of the people who took up arms with the demons and against Deathreach were more of a puzzle. Failure to punish them sent the message that people could take up arms against me without consequence. On the other hand, I expected to need all the people I could get. And anyone who could keep company with the Forces of Perdition was certain to have their uses in difficult times.

Implementing the solution I desired required that I first establish my authority, which started with more talks with Venros.

Venros gave no sign of desiring to know more than that I was Xarax without Xarax' memories. And he still gave every appearance of accepting that as truth. He admitted that some problems could not be hidden, though, from my most important advisers.

It seemed to me that all of the top-ranked players in Xarax' realm would regard the diminished capacity of the person they thought of as Xarax' as an opportunity to seize power, as I feared Venros did.

In fact, every time he advised me against speaking with someone, I worried that he was consolidating his power by asserting his control over access to me. He did control access to me, after a fashion, in his function as Head of my Guard. The sooner I improved my magical abilities the sooner I could be more public and more assured Venros was not playing me.

More plays at power would interfere with my long-term plans for giving the realm a future, and therefore with my plans for securing a future for myself. Powerful top-level players would not only interfere with many of my moves to further their own competing plans but would also need to do so every now and then just to prove themselves to each other.

The correct course, it first seemed to me, was demonstrate my might right away. It was said, in the life I remembered, that the path to take when sent to criminal confinement was to start a fight with the meanest looking person you could find at your first opportunity. Even if you lost, your position would be established as firmly as you would ever be able to.

Honestly, there were more than two problems with that plan even in its original context. In the current context, Xarax' magical power established his political power, and I was unable to yet exercise that power.

Some drama would be necessary, so the administrators of local resources were called to see me.

When they arrived in my throne room, Venros and the rest of my Guard surrounded me along with several dozen skeletons. The raised platform on which the throne sat allowed me to easily tower over everyone there while remaining being seated. My ridiculous height helped, too.

Four vampires came into the room, three in clothing, one in armor slightly less showy than Venros' black lacquered plate. All of them had been born of local mortals, long before, as was the rule among politically power vampires. So they shared the dark local 'look' with Venros and most of the other mortals and 'favored' with whom I came in contact.

The First Leader of My Armies wore plate that had been painted an even dark red with bands of black paint running down her limbs. Unlike Venros' comically oversized sword, she carried no obvious weapon. Only my Guard were permitted to carry weapons in my presence. Of course a very strong, very fast vampire was never really without the means to be violent. Her weaponless state was more of a sign that the law was still being followed than it was any measure of safety for anyone in the room.

The other three, the High Keeper of Coin, the High Keeper of Judges, and the High Keeper of Scribes, wore layers of embroidered clothing in a well accepted demonstration of status. Fashion at the time favored bright colors and reflective highlights, with more on the yellow-to-red side and less on the purple-to-green. I supposed the idea was that blue showed poorly in firelight, which was most of the light at night, even to vampire eyes. And as long as there was so little light, every metallic or otherwise shiny material would catch the eye all the better. In the magical light of my throne room, which brought all colors out well, they were quite showy.

They all wore loose, short breeches over leggings, which I would later learn was a consequence of the conflict between the vampire society and the beast-folk. Due to the nature of their combative abilities, beast-folk who wore high quality clothing never wore any item that divided their legs, wrapped their feet, or that was particularly snug. So, of course, all vampires who had the means wore breeches, snug leggings, and elaborate, cloth shoes.

I informed them that they would be expected to look after their duties with a greater degree of autonomy in the near future, and I would be judging their progress especially harshly as a result. Greater authority, I told them, brought greater accountability. The reason, I told them, was that I would need to spend a great deal of time ensuring that the demon king was properly relieved of his connection to the world. I reminded them of the ruin within and without the walls of our center of rule, and told them that the war had cost the realm more than they yet knew.

Nonetheless, I told them, we would not only survive, but would thrive for ages to come. Still, we should be prepared to deal with difficulties caused by devastation we had not yet assessed. If the numbers of living humans were too low, I told them, it would be necessary to restrict or halt the spread of the vampiric curse for a time and to be especially careful of whom was fed upon, and how much.

As I mentioned before, it requires a special sort of opportunism to rise to the level these people had reached. I hoped my High Keepers would be less likely, even less able, to cooperate against me. So long as each believed that the easiest, surest way to get extra power was to earn my favor, they would be less likely to obstruct my goals. Often, that is the core mechanic of central authority.

As long as they saw my power as potential power of their own, they would be less likely to seek to lessen my power. They all understood, I felt reasonable assuming, that if my power were publicly undermined their own power would lessen with it. After making that reasonable assumption I had reason to believe none of my highest ranked subordinates would act against me openly. And that allowed me more room to work.

So in front of all my Guard and the four highest ranked administrators in my realm, I said that the remnants of the army of our enemies must not be allowed to become a long-term raiding problem in the country-side of the realm. I decreed that the solution would be a series of successively less benevolent absolving feasts.

On the first feast, everyone who showed up to accept my absolution would be tattooed on the palm of their favored hand where the thumb met it and released with debts to Deathreach for supporting the demons forgiven. Certain inks were not cheap, Venros had told me when I asked, so we went with a pattern of two especially expensive colors and one that could only be produced through magical manipulation of substances.

On the second feast, everyone who showed up to accept my absolution would lose the last segment of the smallest finger of their disfavored hand, and a healing brand would be applied to the stump. They would be forced into military service for a good portion of what life was left to them, but otherwise forgiven their debts to Deathreach for taking up arms against the Realm.

I expected this level of forgiveness to be more frequently the one imitated. However, the disfavored hand was the hand people used to clean themselves after voiding their bowels. So without the minor healing effect of the magical branding, fakers were likely to have serious health problems. Even still, the frauds would often end up in the military, which is where I wanted them in the first place.

On the third feast, everyone who showed up to accept my absolution would be taken prisoner and be available for health workers learning how to treat wounds. In one sense it would not be torture because their suffering would not be the point of the activity. But at the same time, I expected the promise of being cut on and stitched up for their rest of their lives to encourage people to be there for the second feast.

In fact, I told them, the second feast was the point. I expected that only a few would show up for the first one: the especially hopeful and the especially hopeless. The plan was that once word got out that the promised absolution was actually given out, many of the warriors who were actually worth keeping around would show up for the second feast. The third feast existed to encourage attendance at the second.

Any who fought along side the demons who were caught after the third feast would “suffer an unspeakable doom.”

I thought that if there were still a large number of traitors left at that point, I might have to make additional concessions. So I left myself some room to work with, unspeakably speaking. I did not point this last bit out to the High Keepers, First Leader, or Head Guard.

There would be four weeks before the first feast, I told them, six weeks between the first and the second, and six more between the second and the third. Criers with armed escorts would be sent to any place that it looked like the stragglers might gather in hiding.

I asked them to share their thoughts on my plan.

The First Leader of my Armies said only that strong, proven human warriors would make the army stronger, even if they did not forage as well as vampires.

The High Keeper of Coin said that the city could afford the feasts, so long as we used the stores that were meant to last us through the siege that had just ended. She did not specifically point out that we would be more vulnerable to attack, but made the implication.

The High Keeper of Judges said that justice itself existed at my pleasure and praised my wisdom for marking the absolved as a distinction between forgiving and forgetting.

The High Keeper of Scribes said he did not know of a time when this had been done before, but he would find out if anyone had ever been so wise as I.

The flattery was encouraging in that it suggested they each wanted me to appear strong to the others, or that they feared my displeasure. It was disappointing in that it implied they would be less useful as advisers.

I would not be able to do all of this on my own. At some point I would need people whose goals were similar to mine, who were wise, and who were strong.

Teal_Thanatos · Nov 12, 2013

enjoying this remake

noahgab1133 · Nov 13, 2013

this is so interesting. Waiting for the heroes to go paranoid over why is the evil lich helping people lmao.

Ovid · Nov 13, 2013

noahgab1133 said:
this is so interesting. Waiting for the heroes to go paranoid over why is the evil lich helping people lmao.

I have two emotions regarding this story
1. Enjoyment: this fic is awesome, and I love world-building stories, even those set in fantasy worlds.
2. Annoyance: for some reason, the Watch function isn't alerting me to updates to this thread, despite that I have set the Watch function to On.

So, everything that is in your power is going great. SB, less so.

LoserThree · Nov 13, 2013

Installment Six

Still not taking the hexadecimal out. Still probably should. Still don't wanna. I'm already writing more for NaNoWriMo 2016 and I'm making it worse.

This installment includes the first appearance of the hated hexadecimal. After almost a year of consideration, I did decide to leave it in. Taking it out would be a big change and I'm not making big changes during the revision.

I have added the bracketed decimal numerals after each use of hexadecimal. Keep in mind that these are not pronounced, thought, or otherwise included in the story itself. They're just there for the benefit of the reader.

I've also included a bracketed binary representation in the finger-counting demonstration in an attempt to make that more clear.

I also started naming the narrator's council in this installment, while revising.

-------

The first wave of surveyors sent out were vampires. They could move quickly, defend themselves quite well, and were more likely to be literate and numerate. There was some chatter about how “counting pigs and those who lay with them” was below the station of my favored people. But it was not the vampires I asked to do the work that balked at it.

Most of those first surveyors were vampires of lower station who sought more of my favor. Some few of them saw it as an opportunity to build connections with the country vampires, whom they would be questioning about the state of their lands.

The objections came from high status vampires who, I thought, were concerned about the country folk and remnants of the enemy army banding together to overthrow them, to overthrow us. They had a reasonable concern, if that was what they were really about. I would suppose my absolution feasts looked like a sign of weakness when they thought abusive strength was needed. It seemed as though they always thought abusive strength was needed.

So I loomed imposingly and repeated the orders. That worked and the high status vampires agreed that the army needed to be stronger. I think I knew then that looming and repetition would not keep working for long.

The second wave were to be small segments of the undead army. Apparently this was the normal method for surveying land: the army went out and came back with a shoddy report about what it ran into, ran over, and ran down. I instructed them to avoid conflict when possible, support the other segments, defend the people, and focus on taking notes. I did not plan to hunt down troublemakers until at least the second feast. I did not have high expectations for the second wave of surveyors, outside of reinforcing outlying garrisons.

The third wave were actual surveyors, mortal craftsfolk with underdeveloped but well practiced math skills and measuring tools. These people would be almost useless any place the army had not already moved through.

I would not send the real surveyors out until at least the second feast of amnesty. There would be no sense in sending valuable resources to their doom.

Meanwhile, in private, I had reinvented mathematical notation based on what I had managed to put together from the life I remembered. Rote memorization would not have, I do not think, served me here. The task required an understanding of the nature and purpose of math itself.

Fortunately, in the youth of the life I remembered, math and I had been close. We had drifted apart as I aged and I remembered the time when I encountered math that had once been familiar but no longer was. It felt as though I were confronting a stranger with the face of a friend; it hurt. But the foundation of our relationship was strong enough for what little I wanted to do.

First, I needed a proper system of enumeration. Three notable systems existed: one was dwarven and built around the number twelve, one was draconic and built around the number eight, and the last and least regarded was used by a distant group of human kingdoms who might not actually exist – just like the rest of the distant world – and was built around the number ten. None used place-holders and off-sets to separate out larger multipliers, though the finger-counting side of dwarven system of twelves kind of did to ge to a gross on two hands. All were awkward and difficult to manipulate.

I remembered the time that I had learned how floating dot values were recorded in machines, and how horrified I was as the inelegance and what I thought was almost-inescapable inaccuracy. I had decided, back then, that since machine numbering needed to be built around the number two, that the world would be a better place if people used a system effectively indistinguishable from that one. Machines would take measurements in a two-based system and leave them in a two-based system for people to read. People would enter measurements in a two-based system. Machines would do math in a two-based system and display a two-based result.

Human math would be made more accessible by a system built around the number twelve, I thought. But machine math would be with us forever. Probably.

While eight would work for machine-math-compatibility, that only used three out of the four fingers on each hand. On the one hand these people needed a new system of math as much as anyone ever had. On the other hand the dwarven system would make a fine standard. But on the gripping hand I really, really wanted to leave marks on the world.

So the numerals that would be represented with a single sign would be zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, bul [13], dak [14], and mibble [15]. Most followed the dwarven names and were simplified versions of the dwarven numeric idea-signs.

In counting, one-tye-zero [16] would follow mibble [15], and would be followed by one-tye-one [17]. One-huk-zero-tye-zero [256] would follow mibble-tye-mibble [255] and would be followed by one-huk-zero-tye-one [257]. One-zib-zero-huk-zero-tye-zero [4096] would follow mibble-huk-mibble-tye-mibble [4095].

Each of the three groupings of four signs after the first grouping for four signs would have its own name. So after mibble-zib-mibble-huk-mibble-tye-mibble [65535] would come one ral [65536 (or 64 k)]. And after mibble-zib-mibble-huk-mibble-tye-mibble ral mibble-zib-mibble-huk-mibble-tye-mibble [4,294,967,295] would come one vek [4,294,967,296 (or 4 G)]. The fourth grouping would be called bort [281,474,976,710,656 (or 256 T)].

The largest number that system could describe without further names or rules would be one less than two to the power of two raised to the second power raised to two to the power of two to the power of two [((2^2^2)^(2^2^2)) - 1 (or almost 16 E)]. That was a larger number than we were likely to need to talk about in the near future, I thought. But, just in case, after that, some prefix could be applied to the grouping names for each new order of magnitude, or maybe some other notation could be used.

Realistically, I doubted the vek grouping would be used outside of exploratory mathematics until measurements of stars and star-related situations would need to be described. I only included bort for because otherwise I would only have three groupings of four number-signs defined and the completionist in me balked at that.

While writing all of this down, I devised simple signs for simple mathematical operations and equivalencies and demonstrated their use. I also demonstrated scaffold multiplication with its summing of the diagonals across the rows and columns of other products, notation of unknown values, and the high-writing notation for areas, spaces, and higher dimensions with equal edges about as I remembered them.

I also prepared a table of multiplication results, and started memorizing them in the new numeric system.

I wrote a bit about the behavior of items thrown in the air. I put down what I could recall about measurements taken along the unit circle, and their uses. The ratios between the edge of a circle and its other measurements were widely explored and well enough known that rote memory did me no favors there.

With a little work, I duplicated the methods I'd nearly forgotten for finding the area under a curve. Better minds than mine would need to improve matters from there. I could remember a bit of how those high-written numbers led to a kind of number that could be added to find areas, and how tables and sliding measurement tools made complicated work simple. But I probably was not going to be able to recreate that unless I let it take up quite a lot of my time.

Most of those concepts and forms of notation should, I thought, catch on because they were useful. The rest I would enforce with education standards once I could offer incentives like public office.

I also needed to create a system of signs for language that was fully sound-making. That would require assigning all sounds to groups and devising signs that would be recognizable in a form fitting both the tiles that make many pages and the unbroken lines of quick quill writing. And that would have to wait at least a little bit.

I spent most of my time working on magic. By the time the first survey teams were sent out, I could hold a quill in the air.

The mechanics of that particular exercise were especially important. I was holding the quill with an extension of my magical substance called the magic limb. Various bodily motions and vocalizations could be involved in especially complex spells, but the bulk of magical invocations were made by manipulation of the magic limb.

From what I could read between the lines, it wasn't really a limb, but more an area of space that my magical abilities focused on. But they would always focus in a certain fashion, and that defined the 'limb.'

Any magical effect or object, person with magical power, enchantment, or curse that passed through a magic limb would give the owner of that limb certain experiences, like sensations but different in ways that were difficult to explain. Different books explained them differently, but to me they were most like flavors.

But if I said that Venros' vampiric curse, for example, had a flavor that was bitter with a complicated floral foundation and sharp peak, that would be like saying that changing from a lesser to a greater musical chord feels like hope. There is a meaningful relationship between the two, but it is not an accurate description.

At first I thought far too much of the lethal potential for application of moving force with the magic limb. If the rules I remembered from the 'Real World' were correct about this world, substance takes up insignificant space, leaving plenty of room for magic to work in even the densest substance. If I could lift a quill through the air, then it seemed to me that I should be able to restrict a blood passage in someone's head. Venros said that would not work, but did not know why.

He turned out to be right.

Venros was not exceptionally well educated in magic. He was gifted with a vast and powerful magical limb, though, and all vampires have a way with directing the simple undead. When they cast the spells to control undead with their magical limbs, the spells worked better for reasons that do not seem well defined.

Everyone has a magical limb, or at least everyone with a soul does. From what I remember of the 'Real World' a soul should not be necessary for a person to be a person. But here it is accepted that every person has a soul, and that is where magic comes from.

As Venros told me on the first day, my soul was as great and powerful as Xarax' was. And that worried me.

The person I remembered being believed in a single nature to the world, one of substance and not spirit. That person believed no spirit was necessary to explain any behavior of any system, believed that the mind was a feature of the body, and not meaningfully separable. Obviously, either the person I remembered being was wrong for some circumstances or I was deeply mistaken about the world I believed I experienced in Deathreach.

I busied myself with distracting work and leaned on other beliefs held by the person I remembered being: that meaning was independent of and irrelevant to the world that had and would exist, that the only meaning that exists is the meaning given by people.

To that end, exploring my body with my magical limb showed a handful of enchantments. The first one whose nature I figured out was the one that let me speak. The source of vibration in my throat was a specific enchantment on that area that I manipulated like a live person would work their flesh. I did not know the mechanics of sound as well as a professional would, but I knew their potential enough to know that amazing feats should be possible for a system like that.

Another was responsible for my burning blue eyes and, I guessed, my ability to see at all. Most of them wrapped around and through my bones and I could only guess at their purpose at that time.

Meanwhile, I had been meeting with the High Keeper of Coin to discuss the state of the Realm and start on some solutions for just how messed up the world was.

In one of these meetings, I made a trial run with my new system of enumeration. At the end of my explanation, I swiftly demonstrated how finger-counting should be done with the new system.

[0001] “One.” I held up my right hand with my palm out and only my smallest finger extended.

[0010] “Two.” Only my ring finger.

[0011] “Three.” Ring and smallest finger.

[0100] “Four.” Middle finger only.

[0101] “Five.” Middle and smallest finger.

[0110] “Six.” Middle and ring finger.

[0111] “Seven.” Middle, ring, and smallest finger.

[1000] “Eight.” Index finger only.

[1001] “Nine.” Index and smallest finger.

[1010] “Ten.” Index and ring finger.

[1011] “Eleven.” Index, ring, and smallest finger.

[1100] “Twelve.” Index and middle finger.

[1101] “Bul.” Index, middle, and smallest finger.

[1110] “Dak.” Index, middle, and ring finger.

[1111] “Mibble.” Index, middle, ring, and smallest finger.

[0001 0000] “One-tye-zero.” I held up my left hand with palm inward, and extended only my smallest finger while no fingers were extended on my right hand.

“The smallest finger should always be to your right and their left.” I said in closing.

“My Dread Leader Peace-Maker,” the High Keeper of Coin began her reply. “I can readily appreciate how your signs will simplify the recording and summing of numbers but – and I would never have spoken so before the Forces of Perdition made war on us – but diverging from the marks left by the gods for the counting of all there is will surely to anger the holy temples.” Wait, what? “And though they would, of course, be wrong to question your wisdom, I fear that it may be that we cannot well afford to risk their wrath when so many other, more pressing problems exist.”

Right, so, of course. In a world were there were dragons and magic, of course there would be interventionist gods. And of course they would have endorsed this or that whatever. And of course those whatevers would be difficult to change. Right. Great.

“Fine.” I said. “Use them where the temples can't see, for now. And remind me, what happened the last time people went against the will of the gods.”

“Uh,” she started, stalled, and started again. “Your Excellency will no doubt come to remember that the human gods removed their blessings from Deathreach to express their displeasure at your rise to power, and those with priesthood ordered them to withdraw from the Realm. Further, Sonruy sent the blade-rot plague against our crops. Bugt Ah Tha sent the whales away. Hahntor struck all our horse blind from birth. Tanna Hollyhand set serpents against the people. And Vranl Ors called sky fire down on your keep, while you were there, and it remains a crater to this day.”

“So,” I responded slowly, as I thought through how to spin these facts. “What you are telling me is that I angered the gods by taking the realm of Deathreach, and they took terrible actions against us, and you and I and my people are still here. I do not want to tell you what to think -- your greatest value to me is your ability to think on your own, after all. But I do want you to tell me how that sounds like we did not challenge the gods, and win.”

“My Dread Leader.” She paused, perhaps to collect her thoughts. “A victory won can be of less value than a battle not fought. All know that you achieved your great magical power without the blessing of the Honorable Kyoh Din, god of magic and dragons, and that you do not depend on his good will as do so many. But you have not yet earned his wrath and none know his limits.

“Your generous donations to the temple of Kyoh Din, above all others, invite his pleasure and his blessings on your people. He overlooks in you what would be blasphemy in any other, but I have fear for what would happen if you went to far. And he is exceptionally fond of his signs and marks.”

“Love-like-striking.” I spat, only without spittle. In fact, it was not much like spitting, except that it was the closest I could get to doing so.

“No.” I continued, “I'm not letting this go. We need to present this directly to the dragon-god. How does he feel about vampires?”

“Ah-ba-ba-ba-ba,” the High Keeper of Coin, whose name I had learned was Psalko, stammered. “I don't know that sending me would be the best use of the value that I can provide you by working on other matters, your Excellency. Please, allow me to continue to serve you, from here, as the High Keeper of Coin. I renew my pledge to your service and promise that no obstacle will prevent me from learning your amazing signs and teaching them to others and administrating your accounts and, er, thinking on my own.”

Oh end-of-all, that was not what I meant her to think. Still, if a mislaid hammer strike sets the beam properly, it would not do to unset it just so that it could be set again in the way you originally intended.

“Fine.” I repeated. “You can personally select someone to carry this to the dragon-god and train them to make the most convincing argument possible. Use your own best judgment in this, as clearly there are aspects of this matter that fall beneath my notice. If you want to send a vampire, do so. If you would rather send a mortal, that is fine. If you think your best chance is to kidnap a priest of Kyoh Din, impress these signs into his soul, and send him back to his master, then do so. I trust your devotion and wisdom.

“You have six weeks to get your messenger on their way.”

“Th-th-th-thank you, your Excellency.” she stammered, again. “I will start immediately if there is no more you need.”

“Hold on. I want to talk with you about tax and the country folk.”

“Ah, yes, my Dread Leader Peace-Maker. If I may, I presume you anticipate that the regular taxes will be difficult to collect this year due to the damage caused by the war. I have prepared a set of lesser taxes that I believe the country folk will be able to pay. If you will look over these scrolls, I believe you will find my choices judicious and sufficient to the needs of the realm.”

I looked over the inefficient, awkward columns of numbers and decided I needed to learn more about the local systems of measurements. A what of wheat? And the same word was being used to measure what I was sure were very different quantities of timber and fish.

“Close, High Keeper. But I mean for us to go further. I want us to stop taxing the country folk in goods and start paying them for what they produce, and then taxing them in currency.”

“Your Excellency, forgive me if I show disrespect, but even though we will eventually reclaim what we pay in taxes, that will mean less money in the treasury.”

“I know. And, in fact, I do not want it all reclaimed as taxes. I want more money out there, moving around. Tell me, what do we keep money for?” I asked.

“For paying orcs and foreigners to attack your enemies," Psalko replied. "And for paying craftsfolk and traveling merchants for their wares, mostly. There are many expenses the treasury covers. I have a scroll that covers most here, if it pleases you.”

“I want to see that before you go, today, along with every figure else you can show me.” I had a sort of itch in my mind, just then, that usually came up when I played the kind of games that came with their own pages of numbers. “But hold on for now. Remember that I value your ability to think and think on this: what is money? And it might be a matter you should think about for more than the time it would take a mortal heart to beat two-huk-zero-tye-zero times." [512 heartbeats or almost ten minutes]

“I can tell you now, your Excellency – And let me first say that it is gratifying that you take an interest in the subtler nature of coin. – Money is the means by which debt is paid. Coin has value because rulers and temples accept them as tax and tithe, the foremost debts. The country folk use their goods as money among themselves and their betters use rarer coin for goods and services the country folk could never afford. When the country folk get coin, one way or another, they inevitably get to killing each other for it. Gold and silver do not divide small enough to 'move around out there' as you say.”

I sat for the time it might take a mortal to breathe twice, reevaluating my estimate of the competence of my High Keeper of Coin. This was not some story-book fool of an adviser, this was someone who understood their responsibilities to an respectable degree. That made her at once more useful and more dangerous.

And she was mostly right about money, based on what I knew from the life I remembered. Money should act as a stand-in for value in addition to a stand-in for inverse debt. But I thought the distinction would not make a difference in the near future. The use of practical goods as money was less worthwhile than the use of otherwise useless but rare substances as money for a few reasons: practical goods get used, and thus removed from circulation, useless goods can be pulled off the market for coin-administration reasons without damaging the work that depended on them.

“For now, I do not care if gold and silver circulate among the common folk or if you strike money out of copper, sea shells, magic beans, or hen's teeth. I want the country folk to pay their taxes in currency, and if that requires we establish new money that anyone could use to pay their taxes, in large enough quantities, then so be it.”

“My Dread Leader," she replied. "If it please you, allow me to again warn you against this. If we add a currency that is not accepted by the temples or by foreign traders, then soon our treasuries will only contain the new currency and we will be unable to pay the temples or trade abroad.”

“High Keeper, why isn't that already happening? Where does our gold and silver come from, now?” I asked

“Raiding, mostly, by your undead army or by our orcish neighbors who, in turn, buy goods from your people. There's some trade along the coast by the fisher-folk, and some money from that makes its way into the treasury, but never as much as should. Certain mountain streams produce a small amount of gold, as well.”

“Do you see, High Keeper, the problem you name is one that already exists? Keeping money out of the hands of the country folk will not save us. We have to deal with the temples and foreign trade, anyway. What we need is a money-making crop.

“I want you to bring me two scrolls, two weeks from now: a list of possible substances that can be used as or turned into money, and a list of products that the country-folk can make that can be sold outside the realm.”

“Respectfully, your Excellency, we can sell very little outside the realm while all our neighbors hate us.”

“I know.” I replied. “I mean to see about that, next.”

LoserThree · Nov 14, 2013

Installment Seven

One time in twenty I take out a phrase with the word 'thing' in it and replace it with a phrase that has the word 'thing' in a different place. It is insidious.

nothing to speak of

-------

I probably needed to make peace with my neighbors. It was possible that the ridiculous magical powers I possessed would make my realm strong enough to go it alone, but that seemed unlikely.

“Where goods do not cross borders, armies will.”

I asked the High Keeper of Scribes to find out who said that, so I could properly attribute whatever local wit had come up with it in this world, but did not get an answer. So when I had a signs painted with that phrase hung around the town, I did so without attribution.

The High Keeper of Coin had gotten me a list of potential trade goods two days after I requested them. Salt and salted fish were probably the most promising of what could immediately be obtained in significant quantity. The ocean-side communities were the least harmed by the war. Salt was good to have; I was pretty sure a lot could be done with a good supply.

The woodsfolk already supplied furs in quantities suitable for export. In fact, animal furs were part of the Deathreach theme. Plant fiber textiles were produced, but the quantity of pelts harvested was great enough that they were worn by every person between those who wore only rags and those who wore only imports. I made a figurative note to myself to set up furrier farms and start the domestication of animals with worthwhile pelts before the growth of commercial hunting wiped them out.

One of the vampiric surveyors found that someone unfortunate enough to get in the way of the Forces of Perdition had been hoarding grain and making whiskey out of it, lots of whiskey. If the markings were accurate, it was well-aged. I set a few casks aside for the absolution feasts and marked the rest for the diplomatic expedition. I made a note to myself – an actual note, this time, with a quill – to check up on local stills and see if there were some low hanging fruit for improvement.

There were a number of orchards that Psalko, who did not think like a mortal, accurately pointed out could be greatly expanded over the course of a generation or so. Fruit is not subsistence, it is grown for money.

Finally, there were precious stones and metals from the mines, mostly silver and some blue-green stones. The mines primarily produced copper and lead. Also, that reminded me that I needed to look into that productive combination of charcoal, sulfur, and bat leavings. Yes, we had bats. It was going to be great.

Lacking that dangerous powder, the miners broke up stone by setting a fire against rock floors and walls. The heat would cause the rock to swell and crack and and then the fire would be cleared away. Miners would break the rock out with iron picks until it didn't break up well anymore, at which point they would set another fire against it. It was slow and only slightly less dangerous than that dangerous powder that Xarax lacked words to describe. Shafts and tunnels would collapse. Fires would deplete breathable air. It was a problem that I really should have addressed before the problems of the other country folk.

Instead, the miners had not been put back to work yet. Venros, the First Leader of my Armies, and the High Keepers had mostly sold the vampiric aristocracy on the “We Need More Mortals” plan so far. I had told the High Keeper of Scribes to prepare a declaration in line with my mining plans, and that was set to go out in a day or two.

But first I would take the first steps toward normalizing relations with the neighbors: I would send gifts and messengers and I would call it trade.

The messengers were townsfolk and servants of vampires who had not survived the war. They were what passed for privileged among the local humans, and perhaps as a result of their privilege, they believed in the system, in the realm, and in me.

Divided into three expeditions, each would be escorted into the no-man's-land that surrounded the realm by one of the surveyor segments of the undead army. Within the no-man's-land, the surveyor segment would withdraw and return to survey nearby portions of the realm. A group of human warriors would protect the expedition from there. They were to start no fights, lend aid if possible, and make their way to the most important city they could find.

I sent them with copies of what foreign maps we had. But the maps were old and might not have been accurate in the first place due to our adversarial relationships. There was also a strong possibility that the Forces of Perdition had ruined more than just my realm. So the expeditions were going to have to figure it out as they went.

Once in-city, the expedition was to make extravagant gifts to the local administrators, then to the local rulers, loudly, through the local administrators. Then they were to attempt to trade their goods for goods unavailable in the realm. I would have told them to expect gifts in return, but it turned out that was obvious to everyone involved. You did not need the words 'reciprocation pressure' to see it coming. (Fortunately, it was one of those manipulative acts that works even though you know it is working.)

Finally, a handful of the most devout would approach the local representatives of the gods. Their primary goal was to let the gods know I was interested in normalizing relations, and willing to make reasonable reparations. Secondarily, they were to gather whatever information they could about the disposition of temples that were not represented on Deathreach, and what services they were believed to provide.

Then they would head to the next big city they knew of.

All along the way, the messengers would talk about how Deathreach was opening for trade, and how good a place it would be to make some money. The High Keeper of Scribes and I had long conversations about whether lies of the “The streets are paved with gold!” sort would work or not. The Keeper was convinced that act were the right one, because everyone would expect you were lying anyway. So the expeditions were instructed to go with that. Only, instead of gold, they were to talk up whatever trade goods they brought with them, and talk about how plentiful they were.

If questioned at any length or if they otherwise thought there was interest, the expedition leader was to take the most promising marks off privately and show off a small number of very official writs of trade that the High Keeper of Scribes had prepared. These fine documents granted the barer the right to trade within Deathreach and the expedition leader would just happen to have one or two extra to sell.

Writ or not, Deathreach would accept foreign trade. But exclusivity is enticing and once traders were here it would not matter whether they were lied to or not. The quality of goods available for trade would be what determined if they returned again or not.

In the best case, each expedition was to repeat this process until they had only goods unavailable within the Realm, then return just like a real trade caravan. If the appointed expedition leader thought it was best, they would return earlier. Because the leaders were appointed in my name, I also included no-confidence procedure for their replacement. There was no sense in forcing anyone to stick with a leader on fear of treason when everyone knew was wrong.

I considered spreading the word about my plans to relieve the various folk of the worst of their suffering and to multiply the value of their labor, but decided to hold back. I needed to make a few appointments before I could go that far, and run some assessments.

All participants in the expeditions were paid up-front in gold and promised more on their return. Each was given a small, lead medallion that had been struck with an image of my face. In the image I was making the worst scary-angry face I could manage. I was quite fond of it. The flexibility of the bones of my face and a polished brass mirror had amused me numerous times during my first week.

Around the edge of the medallion was written “Safe passage to the Peace-Maker” in five languages. Even if the medallions were appropriated by hostiles, their return would provide us with information. On the back of each medallion was written a number in my new system. Written record was made of the name of the person to whom each was given, who could recognize them on sight, and about what they looked like.

Everyone was warned not to handle the lead medallions with bare flesh, or to sweat on them. It appeared that residents of Deathreach took warnings like that very seriously as each so informed got the same sober, serious, slightly frightened look on their face. To be honest, that look was another part of the Deathreach theme.

It would take time for the best possible trade goods to be picked out of whatever my forces looted from our own land, and time would be taken to train the members of the expedition on traveling abroad, making conversation, and taking notes in cipher. The trade goods were a little more difficult to collect because I had forbidden the expeditions from bringing loot taken by raiding other lands, even if it was not the land to which they were being sent.

No one in the expeditions was able to use magic.

It was said that everyone has a magic limb. Everyone could do magic except, I suppose perhaps, for the very simple minded. The problem was the time it took to get anywhere: ten years just to find out how much potential you had.

That's right, a life of meditation, hard training, and seclusion for ten years might be followed by the revelation that you would never do more than toss a pebble or smolder some kindling.

That is not really fair, though, because with another five or more years of practice to develop precision, even people with a weak and small magical limb could do some pretty impressive stuff. A judicial case had been brought to me in my second week where two vampires were disputing custody of an elderly mortal who spent his life sculpting flowers as they grew, forming amazing and short-lived little portraits.

The vampire who 'rightfully' had custody of the old man had died in the war, and each of the supplicants thought they had had a greater claim to benefit. When it turned out that neither of them had any intention of having anyone instructed in the old man's craft, recording his knowledge, or had any concern like that I had them both fined for wasting my time and decreed that he was in the custody of the realm.

The old man died a few days later.

The study of health was not great around there but the official reason, old age, was probably accurate enough. He was just beginning to teach his technique to the magic-using scribes I had assigned to learn from him. They had some ideas to go on, but the product of the chances of them duplicating his art multiplied by the potential benefit was not enough to keep them on that task once the old man was dead. I told them to bind their documentation up for future reference and released them to other duties.

The measure of magical ability most immediately interesting to me was the ability to control skeletal undead. The poorly collected and mostly suspect figures I was able to draw from the library and advisers suggested that a very large number of mortals, perhaps as many as one in four, would have the ability to control at least one skeleton. Few mortals could control more than four at once, and only one or two were ever known to be able to control one-tye-zero [16].

With the vampiric curse, though, came a sort of multiplier to that specific ability. Also every vampire who had developed their magical limb could control at least a pair of skeletons. Some, like Venros and the First Leader of my Armies, could control so many that their ability to focus and coordinate action among the skeletons limited them before the strength of their magical limb did. And their immortality meant that vampires were more likely to have taken the time to develop their magical abilities.

Before Xarax came along, no one talked about how many skeletons a person could control. They talked about how many they could sustain, which was always a lower number. Xarax changed all that. There was no known limit to my ability to raise and sustain skeletons, so Xarax would raise them, and then allow others to control them.

Within Deathreach, all skeletons were property of the High Necromancer – me – without regard to who raised them. Skeletons would be entrusted to lesser necromancers, but remain the property of the High Necromancer. I asked how that worked with necromancers visiting from other lands and was told it had not come up. Necromancy wasn't permitted elsewhere.

I was expected to have the ability to control multitudes of the undead, myself. Xarax' limitation, again, was in focus and coordination. That was where his favored people, the vampires, came in.

The (yet) uncounted undead armies of Deathreach were controlled by vampires and mortal necromancers and, it turned out, I was wrong about skeletons being kept carelessly. The smaller a number of skeletons a person could control, the better care of them they took. Necromancers would haggle among themselves and engage craftsfolk to best equip their charges. They would apply paints or other bits of color to set their skeletons apart from others.

And they knew a great deal about maintaining the condition of reanimated bones with oils and regular cleaning. Reanimated bones were much, much more resilient than dried-out, dead bones. So they could be cleaned with some vigor. And they needed to be cleaned. There was some sort of green film that would build up on them if they were left alone. The locals called it a mold, but I thought it was more likely similar to lichen, since a fungus needs a food source and dead bones probably would not cut it.

Necromancers of greater means or status would employ assistants to look after their skeletons. But it was commonly remarked that no one cared for a skeleton like one who had only one skeleton. Consequently, a certain illusion of disrepair had become fashionable among necromancers of Venros' ability.

That was not why the first skeletons into the room after the demon king vanished were so shoddy, though. Venros' soot-black compliment of skeletons had all been lost to him earlier in the fighting. The skeletons I met, and the one I destroyed, were from a common pool.

There was a progression of simplicity in skeletal decorations as the controller's power level increased. Singleton controllers would cover their skeletons in whatever they could afford in a contest with other singleton controllers to show off the most. It reminded me of the pike men for hire from the rebirth time, all frills and colors among the wealthiest of the impoverished.

A necromancer who could control more than one skeleton would decorate them identically, at least at that time. From time to time someone would come along with enough status to buck normal fashion and get away with it, and they might decorate theirs differently but along a theme. Then that would catch on and be the rule for two dozen years or more. But the most recent cycle of that rebellion was long past and seen as unfashionable during the war with the Forces of Perdition.

The most powerful necromancers had the most elegantly simple decorations. Venros' skeletons were soot-black in their every inch. That was all there was to their decoration. The skeletons controlled by the First Leader of my Armies were called red, but the rust pigment on white bones made them closer to a color for which Xarax lacked a specific word. This was hilarious for reasons I could never explain to the First Leader of my Armies. She and her light red skeletons were notorious in all known lands as the most terrifying military force until the demons attacked. Now that I had 'driven off' the demons, I was told that they were considered the most terrifying military force left.

My own personal skeletons would have been plastered white if I had any left or had taken any since the demon king broke into the keep. Other necromancers were forbidden to decorate with white in any way, on fear of death. Only natural bone was allowed.

That seemed needlessly restrictive, to me. But I had not built a realm out of a box of scraps in a cave and Xarax had. So it seemed to me that I should have been trusting precedent more often than not.

In any case, I would need to master controlling undead before I could establish personal skeletons, again. For the time being it was apparently assumed that I was showing off how powerful I felt, having drive off demons and all, by not controlling skeletons.

From what I could tell from books, it was easiest to singly control lesser undead like reanimated dogs or mice. It was easier to control a single skeleton of a person than it was to control two of mice, though. I would need a reanimated mouse in order to learn to control a reanimated mouse. And no one kept skeletons like that around because it was not worth the trouble. Just as obviously, I could not ask to have one made for me. I did not feel safe revealing my weakness even to Venros, who already knew so much.

So on one particular afternoon, early in my third week, I sat in private in front of a small table, furiously working my magical limb to empower the reanimation spell, and staring at a dead house fly.

LoserThree · Nov 15, 2013

Installment Eight

This installment had the first hint of the unnoticeable person. Her nature caused more problems than it solved and raised odd questions, too. So I've replaced her with hard work and practice. I also increased total theoretical god count.

nothing to speak of, again

-------

Once the trade expeditions were on their way, I started working on improving the lot of the mortals. The happier the people around me were with their place in life, the less likely they were to cause me trouble. And the less trouble I met, the more likely I would still be around.

From the top of the highest tower in my keep, I could look out over what passed for a city and the surrounding area. Buildings were packed densely inside the city wall and sprawled, appropriately enough, outside it. For a while I could not get over what a fire-hazard the whole mess was, and briefly considered solving that in the obvious fashion.

But arson was never my pastime.

Damage from the demons was everywhere I looked in broken walls, missing roofs, and blackened scar-land in the outer sprawl. Come to think of it, it was a wonder the whole mess had not burned down at least once since the demon king left.

Further out there were great tracts of bad farmland. When it was not too rocky, it was too wet. The whole mess was an incomplete reclamation of swampland, and it showed.

The solution to bad farmland, of course, is cheap labor. And I had the cheapest.

If a necromancer released control of them, skeletons would repeat the last order they were given to their best ability. If I were saying that out loud to someone from the 'Real World' I would repeat myself. Anyone who was impressed by that deserves a second chance at understanding what that implies.

I had assumed that the same magic that allowed a necromancer to control an animated skeleton somehow magnified the thinking capacity of the necromancer's mind so that he or she could personally direct the motions of a number of skeletons whose movements had been set along some pattern when reanimated. As much as magic made what could be called 'sense' by the more reasonable people in the life I remembered, that made the most.

But that was not what happened at all. Skeletons had a mind. The locals did not see it that way, but skeleton's had to have a mind-like feature. They followed instructions as complex and poorly defined as the clearest common thoughts. If told to take rocks out of a field and stack them in a certain place, they would continue to do so after the mind that told them how moved on. The precision of their rock-picking-up-and-putting-down-somewhere-else behavior may have been poor compared to even a half-wit mortal, but it was unreal when compared to the so-called thinking machines in the life I remembered.

On the one hand, it was love-like-striking convenient. On the other hand it was mildly frightening. And on the gripping hand it was so unlikely that it may have counted as its own argument for a world of narrative rather than substance, on top of the argument made by 'magic.'

Fortunately, I could not find any work in the library at all on binding the thinkingness of skeletons together into one greater mind. It sounded like it hadn't been done, and I did not want the idea out there, so I did not ask the High Keeper of Scribes to look into it further.

End-of-all, that would not last. If I did not do it in some inevitable poor decision somewhere in the future ages of my potential existence, some mortal was bound to. And then it would all be over. Probably.

Or maybe there'd just be one more god in a world that already had what I thought were too many. One is too many, but the difference between eleven and twelve is not so bad. Not that there were only eleven gods. No, it could not be that easy. The answer the High Keeper of Scribes gave me was "Probably at least three-tye-one." [49]

Anyway, skeletons were clearing rocks from fields. I had ordered that all skeletons in the common pool be marked with the sign for 'common pool' on their foreheads, and put to work. Necromancers would release their assigned charges in other places and lead a group of common pool skeletons out to a work site, set them about the work, then leave and repeat the process.

It was not safe. Unsupervised skeletons were notoriously negligent of human life and safety. It was very important that people stay out of their way. After a few days of land improvement, some of the country folk tried to express their gratitude by decorating the skeletons that had been clearing their fields, day and night. Some were successful, others got hurt. Children had been trampled.

And that is how I found out that no one had been reanimating the corpses of children. In the world before Xarax it made sense to dispose of them in the more normal ways. When a necromancer could only sustain so many, they went for the most practically useful corpses. The fact that they sought out the best corpses by any means necessary was just one part of why they were unwelcome everywhere else.

But in a world where Xarax could sustain a potentially unlimited number of skeletons and those skeletons could be left at tasks, the corpses of children were a wasted resource. Of course it was not an issue I could raise before I regained Xarax' necromancy skills. So I did not speak to anyone of my observation.

I expected to begin working on permanently draining the wetlands once I got more information from the third group of surveyors, the professionals. In the meantime, groups of skeletons were digging drainage courses and setting up rock walls where it looked to their controllers like it made sense to do so. It was possible they were making mistakes that would cause serious problems, but I expected the process would be educational.

I had talked with the appropriate craftsfolk about water-lifting wheels and screws. Some of the drainage works being built were in basins that would not be easily escaped. So we laid plans to draw the water from there, through a series of pools when necessary, into other drainage works. It was planned that it would all be powered by weighed down skeletons walking on the tops of the wheels and tubes.

The next step toward increased crop yield that I could think of was heavier, iron plows. But I did not know if that was feasible prior to plentiful iron. And I was not really sure how to get that.

Local iron came from surface deposits, which was a surprise to me. The person I remembered being did not know much about iron production except that it took charcoal and blasts of air to get the fire hot enough, and it was complicated.

After that would be crop rotation, I guessed. In the life I remembered, in the 'Real World,' there had been a particular bean crop that restored the stuff taken out by grains better than any other solution. But as much as I might remember about those beans, I did not know what they looked like and their name had not been replaced with one Xarax knew.

So that would have to wait until the way of disproving ideas by assessment could be taught. And then there would be many crop-growing assessments. Institutions would be founded whose sole purpose was crop-growing assessments.

Since I could not send them deeper into the country-side, I tasked my professional surveyors with producing the most accurate map they could of the walled city, its sprawling slums, and the land around it all. I had them pay special attention to the locations of wells.

Back in the 'Real World' I remembered, an important city that was much larger than the one I was in had a deadly plague. They found that more people died of that plague around certain wells when a document called the 'death map' was prepared. Further investigation revealed that those wells had greater exposure to waste water in some way that I did not clearly remember. Drilling to survey the water table was not going to happen any time soon, but I felt there was information to be had just from the lay of the land.

I also had common pool skeletons put to work clearing waste from the city and its sprawl. The practice at that time was to allow it to accumulate, then dump it wherever. I had the dump moved well outside the city, downhill and down river from it, and in a place where I hoped the waste would not seep into the ground water too fast. The benefit of concentrating waste is that less territory gets messed up. The detriment to concentrating waste is that anywhere that still gets messed up gets messed up hard.

I had been debating institutionalizing chamber pot recovery, cleaning, and redistribution and had the High Keeper of Coin order a study done on the cost and possibility. It seemed possible that indoor water delivery by copper pipes and waste handling by lead pipes would be set up soon. So I thought it might turn out that the whole chamber pot business might not help enough in the short time it would make a difference.

Using skeletons for mining got some push-back. It had been tried before, I was told, and it did not work out for a number of reasons that could be reduced down to “Mining is dangerous, skeletons have poor wits, and necromancers are rare.”

Using magic in shaft mining was considered either folly on the part of the magic user or cruelty directed toward them because of the danger of being in a shaft mine in the first place. Sure, a magical burst was much more effective than setting a fire against a rock face and waiting for the heat to break up the rock. But a fiery magic user would only get to break up so many rock faces before some misfortune occurred and a chunk of rock would fall on them and then they would not break at all, ever again. It was, after all, a regular accident for miners, which was why I wanted skeletons to do it in the first place.

Further, fire-tending was one of the tasks a skeleton could not be left to do, unattended. I suspected the observations to which they needed to respond were too subtle or complex. The locals said that fire-keeping was the exclusive domain of mortals because it turned out vampires were pretty bad at it, too.

I thought the problems vampires had were more likely due to their dislike of fire, or maybe related to their problem with keeping animals. It had seemed to the person I remembered being that there could be a connection between the ways of thought that found human expressions of experiences like happiness or fear in animals and the need to be responsive to a fire in order to keep it going.

There was and still is so much room for speculation in the study of human development.

Because fire-setting with a skeleton was unfeasible, I was told, it had to be some poor, expendable mortal. I pointed out that the mortals were much less expendable than they had been, but mining was just as important. Not only that, I pointed out, but mining has always been of critical importance to developed people, and someone has taken on this problem before. So I told the High Keeper of Scribes to find all they could on any historical overlaps of necromancy or magic and mining

For the time being, I sent necromancers into the mines anyway. For the most part they directed skeletons carrying ore and heavier equipment. In one mine, as a trial, I had them order skeletons with picks to follow miners around and hit the wall with their picks next to where the miners hit the wall with theirs. The system was not especially productive, but it seemed to be improving the miner's performance, so far. Relevantly, it did not result in miners dying to skeleton mishap, which was a small wonder.

Greater gains would be had, I believed, in the meeting scheduled for the start of my fourth week.

Venros escorted a mortal into my council chamber, the one with the sand. They called the man a chemist, which sounded promising. His profession was the combination of substances and I was going to use him to overturn two worlds.

-------------------------------------------------------

Almost certainly going to be M-W-F next week and until it finishes.

I'm writing this for NaNoWriMo, so I'm focusing more on getting words down than I am on writing a story well. That is, I understand this work is deeply flawed.

While I don't intend to slow down at any point prior to 2013-12-01, not even to correct Really Big Problems with the story, I welcome helpful feedback. I have reason to believe there aren't too many of you out there reading this, based on views and likes, so I'm not betting on a whole lot of response. Nonetheless, if you have the opportunity to do so, please do one or more of the following:

Help me out by telling me what you like, what you didn't like, how you think this could be better.
Get someone who can do option 1 and will read writing like this to take a look at this thread.
Get someone who can do options 2 or 3 and will read writing like this to take a look at this thread.

Thanks, in advance.
When I receive what I consider to be a helpful response from five different handles, I will write an extra one-shot about something like what happened to the narrator involving a very different kind of evil overlord.

tomio · Nov 15, 2013

I like it!

Edit: Might be a bit long every update, but I understand why you're doing it.

LoserThree · Nov 15, 2013

tomio said:
I like it!

Edit: Might be a bit long every update, but I understand why you're doing it.

Thank you. This could become something helpful.

Can you tell me why length is important, what a good length is, and/or how a good length is determined?

The World Waits on Evil (Hiver's EOa... Ww!?) (a finished story)

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Lazy Lurker

Confirmed Member of Church of Gos

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Have I reached maximum tween edge levels yet?

Often Confused

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It is such a quiet thing, to fall.

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I Scuba Dive.

This isn't even my final form

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Confirmed Member of Church of Gos

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