A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law - September 2025 Update (Patreon)

Will be published in 2 parts everywhere else on the net in October, 2025.

I'll probably regret posting this without sleeping on it another night, and not just because I'm sure a bunch of typos slipped past me. But it's overdue as it is.

====================================================

Chapter 7 – Bold Busiest of Bees

“-. May 12, 2XXA AD.-“

I was standing on the rooftop of Alexander’s townhouse, hidden from casual perception by ample greenery. On my eyes I wore augmented reality glasses whose heads-up display could be controlled through eye movements and blinks. On my hands I had tactile feedback gloves that translated my fingers’ micro-twitches into letter inputs. On my wrist I had a watch embedded with all three mainline types of wireless technology – broadband, Bluetooth and WiFi. Below us, down inside the house in a USB port, was a wireless receiver that used to belong to a mouse and keyboard set.

Except for the computer that was receiving all the inputs of my wearable technology to continue my web activity in real time, all these devices had been built and programmed by me.

Mentat, Simulflow and Perfect Memory together made for a lot of applied independent study in the last four weeks. Some of it had been of my own initiative, a lot more had been at Alexander’s guidance.

Now, finally, my evaluation period was over and the man thought it was time to put it all in one context.

“The moral subjects are ethics, logic, religion, comparative law and political economy. The essential languages and literature are English, French, Russian, German and Latin, but you will not be truly accomplished until you’ve also mastered Greek, Aramaic and Sanskrit. The context of life must at minimum envelop national history, general history, language history and physical geography. The sciences you must internalize are mathematics, physics, cosmography, statistics and geodesics. Finally, mastery of self must be pursued through calligraphy, drawing, dancing, arms mastery, equitation, swimming, music, and any other fine arts and physical activity.”

Alexander Corvinus turned out to possess a very holistic view of what qualified as essential education for ‘those who aspire to the greatest echelons of society’s elite.’ That view spanned the curriculum of medieval knights all the way to the privileged schools of the nineteenth century monarchies, and continued in both directions.

“There are, of course, always skills that are essential to the current epoch’s society – king’s guard, do all plays of the sword seven times,” Alexander continued, switching at random from one language to another with every sentence while using his own rapier to nudge me into the right posture when necessary. “In today’s age those are computers, mechanics, engineering, driving and such – but you’ve already taken those past the basics so we will leave them be for now.”

It was a testament to how much my life had changed that all my jury-rigged wearable technology was actually the lesser of the things demanding my many-threaded attention. The sword in my hand was paradoxically the least demanding but also foremost in my focus.

“The ruling class of the European Middle Ages were the landowning nobility – next stance, repeat – whose members were privileged by fiefs from the king in return for services in war. Although their prestige was increased by the deeds they exercised as armored knights on horseback, they considered honor to be hereditary and acted as such. In the eleventh century and especially in the twelfth, the upper nobility developed a refined set of manners and lifestyle with which to stage their prestige in great halls and at the kings' courts. Court life became the model of good behavior, and the word courteous came into language.”

The curriculum Alexander had chosen didn’t look forward as much as backwards, to those ages that were nowhere near as dark or middling as my generation had been taught to believe. Also, Alexander’s teaching approach was what intellectual drowning would have been for anyone else. Instead of teaching me everything piecemeal, he had a gramophone, two magnetophones, five radios, two cassette players, and a television all droning about different topics all around the place.

I had no doubt anymore that he registered all of them perfectly himself. Even at low volume.

“The ruling class were brought up to be courteous knights and chatelaines, even those who became ecclesiastics learned to handle weapons – the Church Exorcists draw many of their number from such scions even today. This was paired with a very specific code of conduct whose decline was as tragic as the decay of society that is ongoing now. Part of that code was to respect your tutors, which did not include paying more attention to reading correspondence instead of what they were imparting to you. Repeat the last form seven times.”

“I’m not paying the Network more attention,” I carefully matched words to breath to avoid fatigue while I repeated the plays of the sword of the Boar’s Tusk guard as instructed. As I did, my eyes continued to control my heads-up display glasses with blinks and glances, and my fingers continued their micro-twitches that my fine-motion-interpreting gloves were translating into text with less and less error after each daily update to the software. “Most of it is on you, I assure you.”

I was very fortunate that Prana Bindu gave me perfect control of my body, otherwise I might have had to spend days waking around with stacks of books on my head.

“I believe you, but will nonetheless continue to verify that at my pleasure,” Alexander said lightly. “I have learned the hard way what passes for ‘fundamentals’ in the ‘modern’ educational system. Move to the Guard of the Taurus, all forms seven times again.”

“Tell me how you really feel.” The sheer disdain in Alexander’s voice needed a whole tenth of my simulflow to fully appreciate. “I want to feel how not alone I am.”

“The modern educational system is a caricature of what the Roman Empire used for slaves, and it’s not a coincidence. The first four years are ironically the only ones with more benign than ill contribution to your development. After that, you are mainly taught to regurgitate information you will never use in your life, all to distract from the true purpose of schools, which is to indoctrinate you into letting complete strangers control everything about your life. Serpent guard, full routine as before.”

Seeing as I had to ask permission to do everything up to whether or not I could go to the bathroom, back in my school days, I didn’t disagree. “Meanwhile the upper class get the real education?”

“Indeed – economics, taxes, running an enterprise, negotiation, what your rights even are – though whereas commoners like you are subject to targeted intellectual decay, they have seemingly reserved all the moral decay for themselves.”

I didn’t need explanations for that one. “What was it like before?”

“Children used to be introduced to the adult code of good manners and morality as soon as they could speak. Thus, in the great halls of power they listened together with the adults to tales about King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table with their ideals of virtue, bravery, loyalty, comradeship, courage, and determination to sacrifice life for something higher. This was alternated with the sermons and lectures of clerics. The youth learned to derive pride from acknowledgment of proven superiority, and pursued competition among themselves to always exceed the greatest deeds, not in daring but in accomplishment.”

“Like what?”

“Refinement, dancing, singing, playing music, races, games of mind and of skill. The latter in particular were a feature of daily life for both children and adults. Playing chess was used for educative purposes, but it was hardly the only game of the time.”

Some children were raised by relatives back then, I knew, to strengthen kinship. Others were sent to nobles of higher rank or even the royal court, if possible, to give them opportunities to learn more refined manners and to be educated by more erudite masters. And make connections.

I hadn’t remotely predicted it a month ago, but the latter was more or less the situation I was in now.

“When children were six or seven years old, lessons expanded under dedicated tutors, who taught them reading and writing as well as some Latin. But unlike for the common folk of today, they were not fed bloat. Only a few nobles continued their studies at the university. Most boys instead turned to the prestigious sport of hunting, where they learned horsemanship and the management of weapons. Between ages twelve and fourteen they began the necessary physical training to become knights, learning to wear armor, handle swords and lances, and joust at tournaments. At age sixteen they were considered adult and ready to wed. At age eighteen they entered knighthood.”

I had a lot to catch up on. “What about the women?”

“Girls did not learn to fight, but they learned to ride, sew, weave, and spin. Needlework by aristocratic women yielded exquisite embroideries and tapestries which were appreciated all over Europe and beyond. As regarding the rare exception that arose as the ages changed, do the Lady’s Guard now and think fast.”

Alexander lunged at me-!

I deflected his sword, dodged the thrown marble from his other hand and the vase he kicked at my face – the rules! I can’t let anything break! I caught the vase under my arm, hooked my sword through the handle of the lantern the marble had knocked off its hanger, bent sideways to catch the flowerpot he’d cut loose with my foot– that’s what he really aimed for? – and the-

A sharp tug of Alexander’s foot yanked the mat from under my feet, but I recov-bumped into the table and had to flail to toss up all the tableware I’d knocked over so they wouldn’t break, ignored the metal cutlery – clink, clank, clink – caught the nut bowl, the half-drunk beer bottle, the cups, one, to, three, the fourth rattled still on the table, the fifth – shit -!

Alexander kicked the ice bucket past me – the fifth cup landed harmlessly inside as it slid by – which toppled the clothes hanger in such a way that it fell just right to catch the last cup, but it hit me on the way and smashed on the table instead, flipping it – the sixth cup fell on a jacket but the fifth was tossed up when the table flipped, I almost-

Alexander’s rapier gently caught it through the handle, the cup slid down the blade and then back up as the man languidly lowered and raised the tip again, then the cup came free to slide back onto the table. It came to a perfect stop just in time to catch the new serving of steaming drink the man poured from the teapot.

“Whoa!” came the whisper from behind one of the many fenders up here. “So cool!”

“Shh!” came the other voice, a girl this time. “They’ll hear us!”

I pretended not to hear them. Gasper and Valerie had avoided me like bats avoided sunlight since the moment they woke up. Alexander had won them over in the space of five minutes, however he’d done it, but it was all I could manage not to spook them. It was hard because their coping mechanism was really something else, those two were ‘hiding’ in the one spot currently getting the most sun.

“The problem with mental simulations,” Alexander said idly. “Is that that they still draw from your own experience, and your experience with duress has so far been mostly benign, I am happy to say.”

“Be-what?”

“He means not nasty, which is such a lie, no way he kidnapped us without fighting his way out of the castle!”

I already knew I couldn’t achieve physical gains from simulated exercise. I couldn’t and didn’t want to rewrite my memories either, to give myself artificial habits and reflexes. Alexander believed they would probably be bad ones without any baseline, and I knew he was correct. Same if I trained against imaginary opponents if I’d never actually experienced a real opponent.

My cognitive capabilities certainly sped things up a lot, it was why I wasn’t sharing any of my lessons with Michael – he would remain stronger and faster than me for a good while, but he didn’t pick up skills anywhere as fast as I could. He was getting trained by one of Alexander’s men with Selene as additional input, while Alexander himself focused on me.

But at the end of the day, intellectual prowess still didn’t translate into physical talent all that well. I still had to train like everybody else.

“Now that we’ve established that your ability to split your focus remains insufficient to deal with proper ambushes from just little old me…” Alexander added a teaspoon of honey to his tea and took a sip, eyeing me the whole time. “What will you do?”

I set down my sword and began to put the mess back in order. While I did that, I brought my computer work to a stage where I could safely pause it. When I was finished, I took off my glasses, watch and gloves as well.

“I know it was not disrespect,” Alexander assured me. “But we both needed to see how far your cognitive talents went, and unfortunately they appear to be insufficient to compensate for lack of dedicated training. From now on, when we train your combat skills we will be training only your combat skills. We will only revisit the issue when you can overcome the best complications I can conjure.”

I set my wearable technology in a box, which I locked and hung off a hook very pointedly away from where the kids were hiding. “I would’ve done that from the start, if you’d said to.”

“I may have been infected by your optimism. I thought perhaps your cognitive gifts were superior enough to mine that we could train everything at once without such diminishing returns, as you thought we could. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and we can’t afford the time. We need to get you to a point where you can consistently prevail over me, otherwise you won’t have a hope against the enemy who prevailed against me before.”

That was unfair, he’d been gored through by Marcus and his healing was actively being suppressed when the devils ambushed him, if he was at his best things would’ve ended very differently. But if he didn’t consider those circumstances to be extenuating enough, I couldn’t afford to either.

It was a lot to be worried about, but I… didn’t. The display he’d just put on was just too fresh to ruin the moment.

“Training will be complete when you can keep everything in the air without help. Then we’ll do it again and again for every other kind of sword, and further still for every other weapon as well. By then, I will have come up with a commensurately engaging training regiment for firearms. Garda sus.”

Alexander raised his sword in front of his face in a salute. I did the same and forced myself not to bounce in anticipation.

Combat, knowledge, diplomacy, I could feel my options expanding with every word he said and move he showed me how, when and why to take. It wasn’t just good old boring practicality he was passing on here, though that was certainly all in there too.

He was teaching me how to be cool.

Life was great.

“-.  .-“

saltysulkers.onion (build .01000110 01101011 01110101)

Browser: Tor [color=transparent] Tor skin applied to local hosted home-built browser made from in-house kernel AGWANTI [/color]

Blockhain Network Siderouter: unknown [color=transparent] local hosted in-house utility linked to clone system donated to internet café on opposite side of country [/color]

Logged on as: SaplingOfYggdrasil [color=transparent] clandestine account, normal vetting and approval process was bypassed by rewriting the complete blockchain history from the genesis block [/color]

Logging unavailable on this platform [color=transparent] home logging enabled via in-house third-party software.

Times sulked:

·       in public chats: 4

o   replies received: 6661

·       In private chats: 17

o   Replies received: 15

[/color]

Viewing:

·       Bookmarked sulkchain

·       Sulkchain OS is Displayed

·       10 sulks per page

·       Sulks ordered chronologically

■

SaltySulkers ► NoPuppiesOnTheWalls ► SulkActionably ► BigSulk

♦ Sulkchain: The Honor System Shall Not Be Infringed (Again, Ideally)

SaplingOfYggdrasil (Original Sulker) (No Sponsor) (Vetting Bypassed)

Posted on April 29, 2XXA:

Now that @DukeOfGuns has shared the extremely cut down Encyclopedia I gave him and his, I can go ahead with the rest of the essentials without stealing his thunder.

I’m given to understand the Union has been forced to go almost blind on many things until now, using only what you’ve pieced together from trauma and hearsay of the individual members. Since the Dark Web doesn’t do indexing very well – for good reason – I’ll post direct links to what materials I’ve been able to prepare since I found out about the Network.

First off, I’ve compiled the best I could manage of a current Who’s Who of the Supernatural World here. Pay special mind to the Biblical Factions (Devils, Angels and Fallen Angels), since they’re the ones whose activities always catch humanity in the splash zone even though their war went cold five hundred years or so ago. That’s when they don’t target us deliberately, as I explain below.

The Old Gods have their own sections too, all myths are true in some way or other, but don’t expect them to fit any of your notions. I don’t know everything myself, but what I do know is there.

Secondly, if any of you were ever approached by an implausibly good-looking random person on the street and given a pamphlet that promises to fulfill your heart’s desire, be wary before you speak the activation instructions of the magic circle inside – it’s almost certainly a genuine summoning scroll for a devil.

If any of you have done the summoning, I can only hope you’re not their servant reporting on everything you see on this board.

The devil will (have) most likely claim(ed) that they don’t demand souls as payment. That’s officially true, but only as of fairly recently and practically unenforceable with how easy they have it hypnotizing and disposing of bodies. Hell had a civil war a few hundred years back, right after the three-way one with the Grigori and Heaven, which the more forward-looking of Devilkind won. They proscribed the practice of treating souls as currency, not for any benevolent reasons but because Hell wouldn’t have survived another war with the other two Biblical factions.

They sold this proscription on the grounds that devils turn into psychotic monstrous beasts if they eat too many souls, which is true. However, ‘too many’ varies, so we don’t know how many they can get away with eating before side effects show. Also, the Pillar Houses (the devil clans in Crowley’s books) only barely lost that war. Worse, they were in a strong enough position that they got the Four New Satans to stay out of their affairs. I wouldn’t risk the next devil pamphlet being from one of them, if I were you.

I go into detail about this, and what happens to people who take their offers, here. Pay attention to the section on Stray Devils, the recent spot of bother in Romania involved one of them (they’re used as deniable assets all the time, in this case to stir trouble between the Church and the Vampires). In the interest of not breaking confidences, let’s just say that even literal saints can be dragged down to Hell to be tortured into slavish insanity if they think it’s Mother Mary offering them a chance to keep doing good.

Thirdly, Sacred Gears. If you’ve got some paranormal ability, haven’t been trained in magic, and don’t come from a lineage tracing down from heroes or gods of myths and fables, that’s almost certainly what you have. I’ve provided all I know about them here, but I’m going to pair this with a warning: keep it secret if at all possible. The Fallen Angels have a standing policy to kill all sacred gear holders who could pose a threat to their leaders, and by extension every other being out there of comparable power.

There are at least thirteen such gears out there that are practically guaranteed to reach the top tiers of power eventually, but nobody knows what gear you have until you activate it. Removing a Sacred Gear is possible, but their methods are lethal. These two things together mean the Grigori tend to be trigger happy about this. Devils, conversely, prefer to turn you into one of them because they can’t get their hands on these powers any other way, save one – the dynastic method. Only humans can be born with Sacred Gears. For better or worse, this includes half-human children like cambions (half devil) and dhampir (half-vampire).

Fourth, Magic. I know a lot less about this than I’d like, but I’ve put together some instructional material on the stuff I do know. As a gesture of good faith, I’ve done it in a way that isn’t encrypted in a hundred layers of religious symbolism. Alchemy is here, harnessing Vril (chi/ki) is here, Astral Projection here. I also have the fundamental of ritualism here, if any of you have the patience for it.

If anyone here knows some magic themselves, I’d appreciate a fair trade. Ideally non-Merlinean, it’s a clean option but also a dead end for people who aren’t math geniuses. If I’m really left with no other choice I’ll figure that out from first principles myself, but I’m interested in something that can be mass disseminated.

On that note, here’s a manual for how to actually teach things worth a damn, because most teachers suck. Sometimes it’s not even their fault.

I don’t have time to make instructional videos right now, unfortunately, I’m having to catch up on a lot of this myself. Also, I can do a lot more if I don’t have to slow down for the camera.

Note: If none of the magic training shows results for you, check the Dedication section of Rituals. It might apply to you. Be warned, I don’t know how clergy or divine agents of your religion will respond if you go through the ritual I’ve provided to undo that. They may or may not detect the change on sight and I can only speculate as to how they’ll react.

Fifth, good old human ingenuity. I’ve uploaded these step-by-step instruction manuals for how to create tools and devices capable of rocket science precision, or at least the closest you can get with off-the-market parts. 3D printers are particularly noteworthy here. Plastic is shit for a lot of things, so I’ve got versions for metal-capable printers for those of you who own smelters or foundries. Alternatively, how to upgrade a normal one, though results will be limited.

You won’t be printing computer chips any time soon, but it will more than suffice for things like, say, firearms that don’t break after the first shot. The way most governments of the world forbid civilian gun ownership is a crime against humanity.

Links to the operating system and CAD files for most basic models are included. I’ve tossed in the mainstays of ammunition as well, including silver bullets, silver nitrate bullets, and ultraviolet ammunition.

If any of you are any kind of priest, please consider a side business blessing ammo if you don’t already. It works against a lot of things. So does holy water.

Apropos of nothing, @DukeOfGuns I appreciate the discretion in not sharing the other book I gave you. Since I was able to overcome even the superlative defenses of blockchains to post this, I am inclined to think a certain Satan can do the same.

The good news is that it’s impossible for devils to achieve the Unbiased Mind, due to their sinful nature. Same for most dark beings, they don’t exactly tend towards logic for the most part. The bad news is that a low-level Twisted Mentalist would still be a serious problem to humanity. I won’t dictate what you do with a gift, but if you could exercise the utmost discretion with who you share that book with, I’ll appreciate it.

(Showing page 1 of 271)

► Gelu (NIMBY)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Holy shit, who decided to give an account to the Hidden Wiki?

Welcome, I guess? I’ll wait for someone else to tell me those links aren’t all malware before I actually click on any of them, thanks.

► AdeleBlonde (GS)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Welcome schmelcome, ‘Vetting Bypassed’, what kind of user tag is that? Are compromised?

► Gelu (NIMBY)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Shit, I didn’t even notice that, you’re right! Have we been infiltrated???

► UnknownRose (NIMBY)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

I’ve never seen this handle, and I know for a fact those user tags don’t exist on this platform. I’m viewing their user page right now. The account looks completely legit, but it has no sponsor. Worse, when I look at the account history, it says it’s older than everyone on this Network including BlockHead and HollyRamirez. That’s literally impossible, BlockHead created this blockchain and Ramirez died before the Network was migrated to it, then BlockHead made her the first registered account as a symbolic gesture. 

@BlockHead, please tell me this is just you pulling a prank on us.

► Gelu (NIMBY)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

@BlockHead, we need you ASAP! Quick, everyone, spam mentions of him, this can’t wait!

► AdeleBlonde (GS)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

For once I agree with the nimby. @BlockHead, we need you!

► DadOfGhosts

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

@BlockHead, I’m spamming for the first time in my life because I’m even more haunted than usual, if you follow me.

►EstrangedHEMAtist (GS)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

@BlockHead, @CrypTaste, @LandOfNode, anyone?

(Showing page 6 of 289)

► Gelu (NIMBY)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Shit, why is no one answering? Has he locked them out somehow?

► AspiringSniper (GS)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

That’s another thing that should be impossible, we don’t even have moderation on this forum!

►KilldozerWasRight (PT)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

See, this is what happens when you lot keep browbeating the rest of us into ‘leaving people well enough alone.’ We’re clearly not dealing with people here. We never do.

► UnknownRose (NIMBY)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Everyone check your internet activity and Memory/CPU loads, the only way he can do any of this is if there’s a simultaneous attack on at least 51% of all nodes on the chain.

► GirlStudious

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Maybe he just blocked their notifications? Is that possible?

► NotToCode (PT)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

The active software might be more vulnerable depending on what sort of virus you deploy, but it still doesn’t make sense for a blockchain, especially on this kernel!

► BlockHead (Cryptotechnologist)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

I have been notified. In fact, I received a private message from the OS at the same time this thread was posted. Precisely. To the millisecond.

Don’t anyone shout at me for a while, I need to look into this.

► Gelu (NIMBY)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Shit.

► AdeleBlonde (GS)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Shit.

► NotToCode (PT)

Replied on April 29, 2XXA

Shit.

(Showing page 23 of 354)

► Greuceanu

Replied on April 30, 2XXA:

Since you kids are just running around in circles screaming for Ma and Pa to come chase the boogeyman away, I’ll go ahead and say I checked them links.

It’s all legit.

@SaplingOfYggdrasil, I’ve sent you a private message.

            ► GabrielKnight

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

I will tentatively confirm the verisimilitude of the magical materials provided, just the Astral Projection would have been invaluable during my last two investigations.

@SaplingOfYggdrasil I’ve also sent you a private message.

            ► DukeOfGuns (Mercenary)

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

I’ll go ahead and confirm the technical stuff he put up, we even tested the UV ammunition during our latest op. Yes, we ran a job for him. No, we didn’t know he could do this and I don’t know how he’s doing it, but I’m not surprised. He was even more ridiculous in person.

► Gelu (NIMBY)

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

With all respect, man, fuck off and shut up, you’re the ones who dragged this shit in. I knew we shouldn’t have let you bunch in, but nobody listened to me. He’s one of them inhumans, isn’t he?

► DukeOfGuns (Mercenary)

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

@Gelu, careful or you’ll doxx all of us. I know we’re all technically doxxed to someone here since the Network is in-person invitation only, but it’s the principle of the thing.

He claims he’s human, and I believe him. An inhuman would probably do a much better job of pretending at humanity than what he did with us. And that’s as far as I’m willing to skirt around confidentiality.

Much as I hate to say it, it’s not impossible that some people here are moles despite how exhaustive the background research gets. I just found out vampires can turn anyone they want into a mind-controlled slave if they turn them under the full moon. One of them could’ve gotten lucky, and the devils are worse.

► Mortician

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

Great, as if I didn’t have enough reasons to jump at every sound and shadow during night shift.

EDIT: Holy shit, I just skimmed the technical stuff link to see if there’s anything I can use, and there is but that’s peanuts! It’s not just guns and printers, there’s instructions for making cannons and bazookas in there, machine guns and explosives, even fucking tanks!

► Gelu (NIMBY)

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

@Mortician don’t jump the gun, I bet they’re riddled with design flaws on purpose! No way anyone would have all this stuff to hand out if they weren’t a plant. Or a group of plants, a whole cell of spooks!

@DukeOfGuns You’d know, wouldn’t you? I bet that’s what happened to you guys. And now you’re our problem, and your problems are our problems too!

► NotSoBrash (NIMBY)

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

@Gelu, that was a dick thing to say. Almost none of us would be on the Network if we weren’t fucked by the supernatural in some way. I’m more worried about why Sapling did this. If he’s apparently connected to some of us anyway, why didn’t he get in the proper way?

Is it just to prove a point? Because that’s a dick move too.

► DukeOfGuns (Mercenary)

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

Efficiency, I’ll wager. He seemed pretty driven when we met, enough that he doesn’t have patience for any red tape, even the right one. Not saying I approve, but he could do a lot worse, no? Using a helping hand to expose the Network’s biggest vulnerability before someone on the other side can use it to fuck us all (again), that’s certainly the sort of thing he’d do. He was pretty transparent with us on the job too, even went out of his way to burst our bubble when we thought we were being discreet with our private comms. And most other things.

He’s not arrogant, if it helps. He knows his stuff, but also knows when he doesn’t know something as well as the other guy. Case in point, he let us plan his op completely and didn’t go against orders even once during the mission.

As far as smartasses go, he actually tries to be tolerable.

► SomewhatBrash (NIMBY)

Replied on April 30, 2XXA

Well he’s failing!

(Showing page 330 of 661)

►UnknownRose (PT)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

Unbelievable, over three hundred pages in and we still haven’t figured out anything except that he shouldn’t have been able to do this?

EDIT: What the hell, how did my handle change? @SaplingOfYggdrasil, was that you too? Annoyed that I refuse to let this die?

► BlockHead (Cryptotechnologist)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

No one should be able to do this. You could in theory rewrite the complete blockchain history from the genesis block and yes that would act as the new ground truth – you would revert all transactions (the 51%, longest chain attack). However, to do that you need to produce a hashchain data structure in which the SHA256(SHA256()) hash of every block starts with a lot of zeros, which represents the crypto mining difficulty.

I was under the impression that was outside the realm of this civilization, but I’m looking at the proof to the contrary right now.

► SaplingOfYggdrasil (Original Sulker) (No Sponsor) (Vetting Bypassed)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

@UnknownRose, I’ve sent you a PM.

@DukeOfGuns, I was, in fact, not more ridiculous than this in person. BlockHead is seriously understating the difficulty of what I had to do.

@BlockHead, it is outside the realm of this human civilization for Bitcoin. And it will stay so for the foreseeable future, due to the hash rate buried into the history. This blockchain is a lot smaller, however. If it makes you feel better, I only barely pulled it off. At the rate your Network is expanding, I expect what I did to truly become impossible in another year or two.

► BlockHead (Cryptotechnologist)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

Unless you change your methods?

► SaplingOfYggdrasil (Original Sulker) (No Sponsor) (Vetting Bypassed)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

I certainly intend to find out, but it won’t be you guys I bash fingers with at that point. The one who you’ll be dealing with at that point is Satan. Specifically, Ajuka Beelzebub. Link to his section in the Who’s Who here.

A word of warning, I don’t know If any devils can hear their name being spoken like some gods and fae sometimes can, so keep that in mind.

► BlockHead (Cryptotechnologist)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

Great. No thanks for the sleepless nights you just set me up for.

Any chance I could convince you to repeat the hack you did while me and some friends are actually online to watch it happen?

► SaplingOfYggdrasil (Original Sulker) (No Sponsor) (Vetting Bypassed)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

I’m sorry, but I believe it’s for the best for you all to know about this early instead of later, and this way we can skip the ‘show me the proof’ stonewalling and jump straight to solutions.

And yes, I can repeat the hack, I was only waiting for the request. Exposing the holes in your security so you can fill them is the whole reason I did this. This time I’ll go ahead and change my account history so it’s the latest member added instead of the first in the block history. I was never going to permanently displace anyone. I hate revisionist history probably more than anyone here.

► BlockHead (Cryptotechnologist)

Replied on May 03, 2XXA

Hard to believe. Future me may or may not reconsider, but current me wants to find out where you live just so I can go there and throttle you for a few hours before coming back home to sleep for a week.

End of Page.   1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … 241, 242, 243 … 661

■

Private Sulk from GabrielKnight

GabrielKnight: How do you tell the difference between a hallucination and actual haunting?

SaplingOfYggdrasil: I’ll assume you already tried most go-to options, and possibly some of the more obscure ones?

GabrielKnight: Seances, exorcisms, logical deduction of what I could or could be imagining, saying please.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: There’s this brew that will give a human extrasensory perception, usually temporarily. Get a friend to drink it and they’ll tell you if anything’s there. Someone capable of astral projection should be able to give you an answer as well. This other brew will induce the discorporated state if you don’t feel like waiting for your friend to go at it the slow and steady way. Just in case it is a haunting, I advise against taking it yourself until you’ve dealt with the problem. This ritual circle will protect people from being possessed by most entities while their soul/spirit is away, but if the entity is already inside it’s more iffy.

GabrielKnight: So it’s just back to ‘get a second opinion.’ At least this time it’s not someone telling me to summon a demon.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: I advise against that.

GabrielKnight: How much of the stuff you posted can you actually do yourself?

SaplingOfYggdrasil: All of it.

GabrielKnight: So, hypothetically, if I wanted to hire you to be the second opinion? And deal with the haunting entity, as I’m assuming you can?

SaplingOfYggdrasil: Astral forms can travel to anywhere in the world in moments, I can drop by if you give me a place and time. Just don’t assume I can be trapped that easily, if that’s what you’re planning.

GabrielKnight: I have a pretty reliable gut.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: I guess we’ll see.

■

Private Sulk from Greuceanu

Greuceanu: Do you know where I can find Azi Dahaka?

SaplingOfYggdrasil: As far as I know, he’s still sealed.

Greuceanu: Thanks, that’s a load off my mind. Here’s where the Scholomance used to be.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: Okay? That’s pretty abrupt. I checked that place last year though and found nothing. My senses are a lot better now, admittedly, but you said ‘used’ to be?

Greuceanu: You’ll find out if it comes back. If not, no.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: Alright, I get the message.

Greuceanu: Try not to burn yourself out too young, kid.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: What gave me away?

Greuceanu: The optimism.

■

Private Sulk to UnknownRose

SaplingOfYggdrasil: Hello Unknown Dictator.

UnknownRose: Excuse me?

SaplingOfYggdrasil: You can manipulate any technology from a distance, even without line of sight, but you’re still limited to the scale of a town or small city. I traced your location by following the blockchain nodes that you kept messing with in your attempt to do the same to me.

UnknownRose: I guess this explains why my user tag changed. What do you want?

SaplingOfYggdrasil: I’ve reported to the authorities the rapist slasher whose Network account you’re using. If any interference at all occurs to stop him from getting the electric chair as he rightly deserves, your sacred gear will be off to find a new wielder. Apropos of nothing, if you soak tobacco in water it creates arsenic, so never swallow a cigar. Or even a cigarette. You’ll die.

UnknownRose: You won’t get away with this. You may have made yourself unbannable, but you can still be made persona non grata until nobody here trusts anything you say, and I’m a long-standing member of the Network.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: I think you’ll find I can get away with anything I want, Magnus Rose.

UnknownRose: If you know who I am you know who my employers are.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: The only thing more compromised than Taskforce Valkyrie and more corrupt than the Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit is the CIA. I know you know that, your lot literally murdered one your country’s presidents because he found out how rotten you are. But I understand this is abrupt, so we’ll revisit this matter when your superiors either fold to the vampires, or decide to look for a different master in the forces of Hell.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: If it makes you feel better, consider this the start of the vetting process you dodged to get in here.

SaplingOfYggdrasil: I don’t consider silence consent, but I do hope you’ll prove me wrong about your character.

■

Private Sulk to DadOfGhosts

SaplingOfYggdrasil: If your username is at all reflective of reality, the alchemy section on homunculi might prove relevant.

“-. ■■■ .-“

Time passed from May into June before Alexander judged my combat skills ‘barely acceptable.’ This was even after my body more or less caught up to where I would be if I’d had antediluvian physiology from birth.

That was when he advanced the curriculum from Medieval into the Renaissance, though not in the direction of wigs and powders.

“The ceremonialised lifestyle of the Baroque and Rococo periods put plenty emphasis on look and manner, but books and media overemphasize the pretense at the expense of reality,” Alexander explained one day, while we were being driven to Galati where I would finally meet the white-hat gun runner I’d meant to find, back then. Michael was with us this time, as both Alexander’s new heir and our bodyguard. “It’s true that acting in accordance with the correct manners at court became a matter of extreme honor to the upper strata, but that was just the dressing.”

“Not pretense?” Michael asked, looking out the window with his arms crossed.

“Are the manners taught to you by your parents a pretense?”

“I guess not.”

“The Renaissance was a time when humanism challenged the nobles' notion of inherited superiority. It proclaimed the idea of a spiritual aristocracy deriving from a more refined control of bodily instincts, as well as extensive literary skills.”

“It was about competition too, right?” I reasoned. “That’s about when social mobility became a thing again.”

“Indeed, aristocrats needed a better education in order to compete with the learned bourgeois that were now obtaining influential offices that used to be reserved for them, in the king's government. But the physical exertions of the aristocratic man were only formalized, they never went away. Knights didn’t suddenly turn into fops just because guns displaced their role on the battlefield.”

“So they didn’t dance more than fight?” I asked.

“They did, but what of it? You think dancing is easy?”

“I never tried it.”

“You will when we return home, along with music and painting. With your gifts I expect you to become passable in all the instruments I have in the music room, and one can always improve their visual sense.”

“If you say so.” I was being nonchalant, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased. I always envied people who could afford a violin or piano. I might have learned some guitar if I hadn’t broken ours when I was little. “So what’s with this trip? I assume there’s a reason you put it off so long?”

“The one feature of the Renaissance that the modern day has transposed better than all others, however incidentally, is the grand tour,” Alexander replied. “Since you don’t plan to put off whatever plans you have for that long, I can’t exactly take you with me on a multi-year tour of Europe’s academies and universities. Introducing you to my various contacts in the more immediate area will have to suffice, until that changes.”

‘More immediate area’ meaning ‘just’ the one country.

Romania’s Underworld was fairly atypical as these things went. Because of how twisted and contradictory the laws were about things like drugs and guns, as well as the 180-degree turn our economic policies took after the mass failure of communism, we were one of the few countries in the world where you had people doing specific illegal trades without boing complicit in the really bad stuff, like trafficking of persons.

It led to some really bizarre situations, like all the beggars in the capital actually serving a secret mastermind who taxed their earnings in exchange for managing their territorial claims and coming up with fake sob stories for all of them. But it also meant that you had the occasional gun trafficker that really was mostly in it for the little guy, besides the money.

Part of it was also owed to the country being contested territory for so much of its history. Romania – and before the unification, Moldova and Wallachia – almost periodically went through periods when it was treated as a buffer zone by everyone else, including the supernatural. That was, unfortunately, not the case at the moment. Instead, the Underworld was as fractured as everybody pretended the country at large wasn’t.

Still, there was a silver lining there – it meant that there were parts of the Underworld where people could get by without any dealings with the supernatural at all.

The gun runner Alexander introduced us to was one of them, but ultimately still a minority in how I didn’t need to use Truthsense to utterly dismantle him. Which could not be said of the dozen others that I got to meet over the remainder of our road trip.

I didn’t really uncover any leverage that Alexander didn’t already know, except for a couple of things that had happened just this year, while he was imprisoned in Hell. But he was impressed that I could already read people as well as he could, and the various gangsters were very thoroughly intimidated into playing fair for another generation. In the cases where violence was required to drive the point home, I was more than willing to oblige.

Michael sometimes joined in that, but it was obvious he still disliked it immensely. He also spent the road trip becoming increasingly glum at how much better I was than him at the stuff you needed to actually live a life worth a damn, especially in the moonlit world.

That was how he became the first willing test subject for the blood memory transfer I’d been workshopping in my free time. Or, rather, the second subject after Alexander intervened.

I didn’t have any ancestral genetic memory to impart (or rely on myself, for that matter), because those phenotypes had been damaged thousands of years ago. Even now that I’d fixed them based on Michael’s – and thus Alexander’s – own template, they were empty.

But with alchemy and the memory transfer ability that Prana Bindu combined with Internal Organic-Chemical Control gave me, I was able to download select memories into my DNA myself. After that, it was just a matter of passing them on. I’d surely put a lot of work into my reproductive cells when I get married and start having children of my own, but no use waiting when I can get such good practice.

Internal Organic-Chemical Control could’ve done the job by itself if the recipient also had the ability, Reverend Mothers could transfer their entire Ego through forehead contact. But so far, nobody other than – to my amazement – Alexander could do anything like that, though he still needed to share blood to achieve the reverse. Also, I wanted to see if I could make ‘memory transfusion shots’ that people could just take and inject into themselves.

It turned out that I could. I was already a universal donor, but even if I wasn’t, Internal Organic-Chemical Control would’ve easily gone around that.

The blood memory didn’t work too well to transfer skills, especially those that needed specific neural structures and brain chemistry to work. I still had hangups about how I might inadvertently mind warp people if I used Alchemy on their brains, and when I shared that concern, both Alexander and Michael agreed with my misgivings.

But pure information and languages lacked those complications, save perhaps having your mind opened to concepts that only some languages had words for. More importantly, Truthsense was almost entirely just knowledge of what qualified as an emotional cue or not. Same for Petit Perception. So, not a superpower so much as ten thousand years of learned experience in reading and manipulating people.

Alexander requested to be the first test subject, on the grounds that he could prevent any unfortunate side-effects I might have missed. There weren’t any, but he actually had quite a bit of input to give me after, on how to package my memory better so that the recipient got something properly coherent. He then requested that I make a transfusion from Michael to him – with Michael’s approval – which allowed him to determine the ideal way to ‘package’ my memories for him specifically.

Alexander then made me take his blood, which gave me his full insight he’d just refined into how to control and customize memory transfer for specific people. Along with the best ‘generalist’ archival method that my memory transfusion injections would do their best work through, when I couldn’t custom-tailor it for everyone. And…

And all his skills. And all his combat experience. And academic knowledge. And information of the important people, events, organizations, societies, laws, and everything else in his head that could be called actionable intelligence. Without any of the episodic memories, or even the literature, music, art or media other than those that had been required reading for his vast erudition. I knew the titles, authors and publication years of the books or what have you, but none of the contents. Even when I did receive the lessons Alexander derived from them.

“Reading is a fine pastime,” Alexander explained while I was still processing the enormity of the gift he’d just given me, on that night when we’d stopped to camp outdoors. “And far from the only hobby worth pursuing. It makes no sense to deprive you of your own experiences, too many of other people’s memories will make most actions feel stale, which is no way to live. Perhaps you have the will and self-reflection to stay a sane man, but not a happy one. Ennui is an enemy none can outrun, as the vampires would admit if they had the courage. And self-awareness.”

Overnight, I gained all of Michael’s and Alexander’s knowledge and skills. Conversely, Alexander gained all of my knowledge and skills, many of which he already had, including internal organic-chemical control and simulflow. The Weirding Way he’d already picked up weeks ago, on his own just from watching me train.

As for Michael, he gained everything one could gain when he hadn’t grown into Alexander’s antediluvian cognitive gifts yet. Which was all the languages I and Alexander knew, the Encyclopedia Naturalia, the Encyclopedia Supranaturalia, all the actionable intelligence between the three of us, all the theory behind my various abilities, and the ability to do sherlock scans on people if he was paying attention.

“I would have much enjoyed a true mentorship,” Alexander said wistfully when it was all over and the two of us were roasting a freshly hunted deer over the campfire, while Michael was off to talk to Selene on the phone well outside our mutual hearing range. “But I can tell that it won’t be long before you start to chafe under those perceived delays. I ask only that you take as many precautions as you can, before you commit whatever grand act you’ve been planning.”

“I’m not going anywhere yet, I still need to practice all this stuff enough to make it my own.” I hedged around the topic of the things I’d very noticeably kept out of the blood transfers. “I haven’t had enough of your company yet either, unless I’ve been freeloading too much?”

“Never.”

“Then you’ll be dealing with me for years.”

“Since it comes from you, I will trust that hope.”

Not since I was a child and first understood what parental love was, had I felt what I did right now. Not once had Truthsense indicated that Alexander was anything less than fully sincere, about how he felt about me. “I feel the same way about you too.” There was nothing else I could say that could measure up to him, so I changed the subject. “Don’t count Michael out either.”

“Of course not, he’s already a better heir than both my sons combined. We’re not discussing his prospects, we’re discussing mine. Just because I am self-possessed enough to fool even you does not mean I am not dealing with my own demons, or dreading this future you insist on keeping unknown. Never mind the parts of the past you’ve been skirting around.”

“Like what?”

“Like why I shouldn’t blame God for certain things that aren’t His fault.”

My mind flashed back to our first meeting. My heart sank. I never intended to keep it from him so long, I just… never found a good time. Bad excuse, wasn’t it?

“I am glad your body has caught up to ours in strength,” Alexander said quietly. “I believe I will need the support, when the time comes that I can no longer take refuge in doublethink. The time will come, yes?”

I cleared my suddenly dry throat. “When would you like it?”

“As soon as we are back home will be fine.”

We didn’t broach the topic again for the rest of the trip.

Alexander was quite judicious about ensuring I made the right impression on the people he introduced me to. He later began to give me phone numbers and briefings on people so I could make the right contacts independently. Some didn’t even need an in-person meeting, and a few he didn’t inform that I was associated with him at all.

It was patronage, protection and practice all in one, for me, and it had amazing results. Doubly so since some of the people Alexander put me in contact with were not full human. Or even at all human, which made me experience an intense joy when I found out just what I was in front of.

There were ghosts haunting old ruins that hadn’t been unearthed yet, fairies flying through virgin forests, outspoken spiridusi that looked like tiny lawn gnomes and maintained Castles Bran and Peles, in the hopes that a king would one day dwell there again. There was even local ‘baron’ in Buzau who seemed unaware that his stables housed one horse more than he thought, a sickly decrepit nag covered in mange.

I served it hot coals on a hunch.

It ate twelve servings, at which point it promptly turned into a mighty white stallion. Which talked.

“Finally,” the glorious beast harrumphed after it shook its previous body off like a snake shed its skin. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve had to wait around for someone with sense to show up? This is the fifteenth man I’ve freeloaded off of before I had to run away because my scab got away from me, none of my predecessors had to go through this.”

“Why were you like that?” I asked in amazement, because it was one of the many questions you start wondering about once you’re old enough to think past the surface of the stories of Fat-Frumos. “None of the fairy tales ever said.”

“Bloodline curse,” grunted Calu Nazdravan. “The Mares of Diomedes pastured not far from where Constanta is now, did you know? The mares weren’t normal horses like the myth says, and Diomedes wasn’t feeding prisoners to them, he used magic to turn certain criminals into horses to serve as war beasts as punishment. Or he sacrificed those sentenced to death to empower one, that way the animus didn’t go to waste. There were more males than mares, actually, but they were always off training as warhorses with the army.”

At no time had I even fathomed that ‘get the real story about Hercules’ fifth labour’ would be among the events of the day.

“Hera was none too happy when Alcides completed that labour, and she was even less happy when he returned the mares to Eurystheus and Eurystheus dedicated the mares to her. So now, whenever one of us is born with a proper soul – we’ll talk about the how behind that and everything else later – we have to live the tortured lives of worthless, mange-carrying dregs until someone comes along to perform the Feast of Pleistoros.”

“The Thracian god of war, Diomedes’ father.” I recalled from my abundant internet research, and Alexander’s library. Or at least the Thracian name for the god of war. Insofar as gods actually had domains, which they actually didn’t, usually. They fulfilled functions, but their powers and personalities were not dependent on them, or belief or anything like that. “Right.” I had a lot of questions, but it was neither the place nor time. “So what now?”

“Now I become your loyal servant.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to live as long as possible, because you’re the first hero who I’ve been able to actually tell about Hera’s curse – I should be unable to tattle on her, but it’s different with you –, because I like you, and because I absolutely love what you’re going to do on the Winter Solstice.”

I felt like I should have felt a shiver go down my spine. But there wasn’t any.

“You do need a lot of help to do it without immediately failing everyone you mean to help,” Calu Nazdravan told me bluntly. “The man you have in mind won’t be enough, but what you’ll go through to get him will open the way for securing the help of someone who will make up the difference. I think.”

That was the most ominous thing I’d ever heard. “Right.” I scratched my nose. “How do you compare to a car?”

“I can fly like the wind.” Calu Nazdravan tossed his mane. “If the Old King over there is alright with it, I’ll go wait for you at his home.”

Alexander, who’d been consoling the thoroughly freaked out local ‘baron’ all this time, glanced back at us with a raised eyebrow. “Do I need to extract an oath of conduct?”

“Master can order me to behave in only those ways he’d approve,” the horse motioned at me with his hoof. “Yes, I already know what they are.”

“Behave only in ways I’d approve,” I commanded. “And not in a monkey’s paw way.”

“You didn’t need to specify, but alright.” Nazdravan trotted out of the stables. “Let’s see.” With a bent of his knees, the horse blasted out into the air like a rocket. He landed hard at the other end of the hippodrome, splitting the earth beneath his hooves. “I can’t wait to play with children again!” He shook the fresh dust out of his coat. “See you there!” This time, the horse leaped into the air so fast that he quickly became indistinguishable from a bird, and then vanished outright amidst the clouds.

“You have the most awesome life,” Michael told me rather jealously that afternoon, when we finally took our leave of the ‘baron.’ “I’m starting to have second thoughts about how I want to live mine.”

“Don’t,” I told him. “You’re immortal, you have all the time in the world to enjoy both peace and excitement.”

“You know what, you’re right.”

I was right, but also very worried now that I had a future-knowing wonder horse telling me I wasn’t good enough to do what I wanted. But at least I also knew my hopes to change that weren’t doomed, now.

The supernatural encounters didn’t stop there. There was a zgripsora in Constanta, a creature that met us in the guise of a tall woman dressed in feather-studded robes, but whose true form was that of a giant thunderbird I only knew from fairy tales where she carried the hero back from the Underworld after he saved her chicks.

She guarded sea and air voyages in exchange for gold, or for tips on where she could find devils or vampires to slay. Dragons too, though she didn’t deal with those herself, instead she knew a man interested in knowing all about them, sometimes willing to kill them pro bono. A man whose home she regularly flew to and back from, and who we’d actually met in Galati near the start of our road trip, when Alexander stopped to get the car looked over. Because apparently Fat-Frumos, literal Prince Charming, was whiling away the modern era playing auto mechanic. What the fuck?

I dropped by the man’s house in Astral form later that day. The bird-woman had beat me there, though, and gently but firmly told me to stay out of their business. It was surreal.

“Alexander,” I asked them I returned to my body. “When were you going to tell me about the other immortal you know?”

“Pardon?”

Alexander hadn’t known. He’d gone to that mechanic because he did good work and was in the know that the supernatural existed. He hadn’t known there was another living legend just… living his life.

Who was Prince Charming, in reality rather than the legend? Where was his kingdom? Where was his perfect wife? His children, even? That he lost it all somehow I could believe, but I refused to believe he was laying with a shapeshifting bird until proven otherwise, it was ridiculous. It had to be something else.

Alexander refused to take us back to confront him, though.

“You are free to meddle in whatever business you wish,” he told me on the drive. “But he’s earned my discretion. If he wants to live without people like me or you meddling into his business, it is his right. If you wish for us to go there now, I will of course comply, but you will need to command it.”

I didn’t push it. But whether in astral form or in person, I decided that I’d drop by there during working hours, after this trip was over.

“It’s quite the auspicious development, though, isn’t it?” Alexander mused. “Other immortals than myself, if it’s not all a lie, of course. I wonder, is his immortality the same as mine, or something else? God wouldn’t stop at just one, after all.”

Good question. It wasn’t impossible that a Sacred Gear could be behind it, but which?

The rest of our itinerary was comparatively mild, with one exception – Alexander made sure we stopped in the Oriental Carpathians just in time for the Summer Solstice. It was actually fairly near to where my parents lived, but I didn’t tell that to anyone.

There, on the morning after the solstice, we met the Dragaicas, also known as the Sanzianas.

They were coy about whether or not my Ileana was one of them, but didn’t predict me being doomed in matters of love. I wouldn’t have cared so much if they had, knowing that most misfortune in the world could be blamed on Great Red, whose designs I’d already broken once.

Michael was very relieved, though, that they didn’t have any bad predictions for him and Selene. Which I could only hope was the truth, instead of a petty trick in revenge for him resisting their charms on her account. My Truthsense didn’t work that well on see-through spirits of air that may or may not be the daughters of Gebeleizis and Bendis. Or Bendis’ sisters by Gebeleizis, depending on whether Bendis really was Diana/Artemis or not. Or maybe Sanziana didn’t come from ‘Sancta Diana’ at all, and their origin was with a different mother goddess entirely.

If Ileana was kin to them, the mother was most likely Kotys herself.

A day or so before we finally got back to Alexander’s home, I got a private message on the Network with a time and place from GabrielKnight. He’d decided to ask me for help after all. I visited the place he gave me as a faceless spirit – it was in Munich, Germany – and confirmed that he was, indeed, haunted.

I restrained the entity while I guided him through a banishment ritual, which finally rid him of the obsessive wraith. It was the ghost of a past enemy called Baron Friedrich Von Glower, who used to be a werewolf in life. Before I left, I learned that Gabriel had been infected by him in the past, but his werewolf curse was broken when he killed Von Glower. Which wasn’t how I knew lycanthropy worked.

“There were certain werewolf incidents that we were never quite able to confirm were different than my son’s strain,” Alexander told me when I brought it up on my return. “If your speculations about the source of lycanthropy have any truth in them, perhaps those who engineered it did not stop with William. Or perhaps there was a magical method they went through while perfecting the viral type, and they occasionally brought it out to play from time to time.”

“The curse-like version that frees you when you kill the alpha does sound a bit like how devil pieces should work, when the King of the peerage dies or otherwise becomes unavailable,” I pondered. “That is, if the pieces didn’t have the programming that misleads Heaven’s System about your original race being a monster instead of a human.”

I wondered if the nature of these werewolves was intentionally an insult to the original ones. The oldest known mentioning of the werewolf actually came from the 6th century BC, and had its origins on the actual territory of Transylvania, according to Herodotus. This was centuries before any other European references in regard with the subject, all of which had to do with William’s creations.

Back then, the werewolves weren’t menaces but protectors, originating with a high priest of Zalmoxis who was given the alternate form of a mighty white wolf so he could gather wolves from far and wide to protect Dacia and its people from enemies.

It sounded as fanciful as any other legend, but it had to be based in some truth somewhere. The dacians called themselves the ‘daoi,’ plural of the word ‘daos’ shared with the ancient Phrygian language, which meant wolf. Even their battle banner was a wolf.

Maybe I should look to tame one? Or am I just foreshadowing me stealing Canis Likaon from Azazel’s grubby paws?

Now there’s an idea…

“-.  .-“

When we arrived back at Alexander’s home, we found Gasper and Valerie riding my new horse through the air above the house. On spotting us, they landed and Nazdravan laid down on his side so that Gasper and Valerie could both hide behind him from me.

Right. “And nobody saw a thing because?”

“I’m part of the Hero’s story, not mine,” said the horse as if that explained anything. “Nothing I do outside of that is ever at all relevant.”

Which meant, what? Nobody on the street noticed a thing because Calu Nazdravan could go unremarked ‘if he wasn’t doing anything relevant?’ Like – “Like nobody gave you a second thought while you were a decrepit, mangy beast!”

“Hera was spiteful, but not particularly specific outside that.”

This… was exactly the sort of magic I’ve been pining for! Sure, messing with it would probably draw the notice of a Power in precisely the way I didn’t want, but I could reverse-engineer this somehow, surely?

Wait…

That’s precisely the mindset behind Merlinean magic, isn’t it?

“It is,” my magic horse nodded sagely as if I’d said that out loud, causing the children behind him to giggle and then slap hands over their own mouths in mortification. I pretended I didn’t see them. Despite how even Calu’s massive bulk wasn’t enough to actually hide them completely, when he lounged down in that position. “You’ll figure it out though, Master, I believe in you!”

I’d been reduced to needing pep talks from a horse. Lovely.

My enthusiasm took an even bigger dive when I saw Alexander coming out of the garage and remembered what I’d promised to do once we came back.

Michael immediately went to talk to Selene, and probably share his blood with her so that she can get all the knowledge and skills he had now. If it worked. It would be interesting to see if he was any better now at the memory transfers, because he really wasn’t, starting out. As Alexander told me, it was something that came with age to everyone else because it didn’t work without all the Corvinus DNA components. Which took a long time to replace all the analogous genetics of the host.

Other than Alexander himself, only Marcus and William had had it all from the beginning, being Alexander’s own sons.

I followed Alexander inside.

The rest of the day went fairly routine until Michael finally finished updating Selene. At that point, we all, together with Alexander’s right-hand man – who’d also been our driver for the trip – came together for dinner that evening. It was a pleasant enough time, but everyone could feel something approaching.

“Michael,” Alexander said when we were finished. “I believe I will need your presence for the rest of the evening. I apologize,” he told Selene apologetically. “But I need it to be only him.”

“And him?” Selene glanced at me.

“I’m the reason he’ll need the emotional support,” I said wryly. “It’ll be up to him if we share any of it with you, while we all live under his roof.”

“It is not, in fact, my call relative to you, but I appreciate the consideration.”

Selene graciously accepted our request and excused herself.

With Michael and I following, Alexander led the way to the parlor he first hosted me in, where he put on some music on the phonograph, again like the first night here. Any illusions that he didn’t already know what was coming were dispelled when Rainbow began to sing 'The Temple of King.

The song played in full twice before Alexander finally spoke. “The romantic-naturalistic educators of the eighteenth century painted the polite behavior of aristocracy as fraudulent, without true virtue.” The words lacked inflexion, but I felt his contempt for the idea anyway. “Their ‘ideal’ was that infants should be brought up according to what was explained as ‘their own inner natures’. As if it’s even possible when that nature doesn’t even exist yet! Most adults don’t even know what their own inner nature is, to presume to decide what that is for others? Never mind someone else’s child, the gall. Sheer hubris. I have yet to see a greater lunacy take root in humankind.”

I felt the blow like a dunk in hot oil. I wanted to say I wasn’t trying to decide for him, that it was just me not finding the right time… but there wasn’t really any difference between the two, was there?

Alexander set the phonograph to begin the song a third time, then walked to his chair and sat down. “Come. Sit by me, both of you.”

We took seats on either side of him, and quietly took Alexander’s hands when he extended them, each in one of ours.

“All my life since I arose from my death bed as the sole survivor of the plague that wiped out my village, I have believed that God gave me this body. When the Archangel Gabriel came to me and told me of my gifts and their origin, I believed. I still do.”

He was visited by Archangel Gabriel? “It might be true,” I said. “We don’t know it’s not.”

“But you don’t know that it is.”

“No.”

“Gabriel did not tell me anything more than that, but I drew my own conclusions. I always believed that Heaven needs us as much as we need it, it was quite the heresy back then, to doubt God’s omnipotence. I believed that to preserve the causes of goodness and righteousness, each person should offer to Heaven all they could spare in accordance with their individual ability.”

The quintessential paradox of all organized religion everywhere – if God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why does the Church demand prayer and worship? Never mind monetary tithes.

Alexander was a kinder and more selfless person that I was, to come up with such a kind answer. Especially as an adolescent boy who’d just lost everything. The drone of the song coming from the phonograph seemed to have been composed just for him.

There in the middle of the circle he stands Searching, seeking With just one touch of his trembling hand The answer will be found ~

“As the one with the greatest might and vigor of all humanity as I knew it, I believed I also had the most to give. Perhaps it was survivor’s guilt, and then simple guilt over the actions of my children and the monsters they brought into the world, which I only aided and abetted by concealing from others. All this time, I’ve believed that wishing for even more power would be pure greed.”

Comprehension had long since revealed to me, that written upon him was the same half of the name of God that had been written on me, before I burned it away. Alexander could have done something to remove it, or find someone else who could remove it, there were rituals, spells for it, potions, fairies, all manner of other Powers…

There in the middle of the people he stands Seeing, feeling With just a wave of a strong right hand, he's gone To the temple of the king ~

“You could’ve been more,” I said carefully. “You could’ve cultivated all this vital energy you have, learned sage power, magic, all manner of things during your long life. Your mind would’ve made it trivial. But you didn’t.”

“I thought it equivalent exchange,” Alexander sighed. “I thought I had a duty to God, to give him all of that instead. But you’re going to tell me I was wrong, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know if you are.”

“You don’t know what I’ll convince myself that you really think?”

“I don’t know what I think,” I replied, increasingly aware of Michael’s rising bewilderment across from me, and how Alexander’s grip on mine became gradually less steady and more desperate. “There’s too much I still don’t know.”

“Bu you know what I believe you’re about to tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“… God is dead.”

Alexander’s grip went tight as steel, painful even despite my new strength. His body went tense as iron about to break, and his eyes shut in despair. On the other side of him, Michael stared at me in open-mouthed disbelief. Around us, the tune of the gramophone wove itself through the solemn, grieving pattern like a dirge. 

Back with the people in the circle he stands Giving, feeling With just one touch of a strong right hand, they know Of the temple and the king ~

I moved my chair closer, took Alexander’s hand in both of mine, and with Michael copying my actions, we sat with him long into the evening.

“-.  .-“

That night, I bid Alexander, Michael and Selene to follow me down to the basement, where the leftover supplies from the mass human alchemy of my first night here had been waiting for me ever since, shaped like two vaguely humanoid dolls of living blood and flesh.

“I don’t know if it was before or after the plague that induced your atavism , but the fifth century was when the War of the Three Factions began. I don’t know the last straw of the inciting incidents, except that the devils and Fallen were involving humans in their spats. This war lasted until the sixteenth century, at which point the Book of Revelation began to happen in a very literal fashion. None of the things described by John were allegory.”

It was something I had mixed feelings about, because what was happening in the world right now fit those allegories far too well, both on the supernatural and on the mundane front.

“I don’t know who the Whore is, but the Dragon of Revelation is Great Red, and the Beast is a creature known as Trihexa. God discovered the Beast, and that it was awakening. He exhausted all his power to seal it away, placing thousands of so-called forbidden seals on it, sealing it at the ‘end of the world’, whatever that means. He did this in secret, seeking no help from others as far as anyone knows. This left him exhausted just in time for the last climactic battle of that conflict. He walked off the field under his own power, but died of his wounds shortly after.”

We stood around the table on which the two doll-like, mindless homunculi lay.

“The war continued after him for a time, eventually settling into an uneasy ceasefire as all three sides saw their extinction assured if they took the war to its conclusion.”

And then the Protestant Reformation happened, which really should have been a sign to the world at large. Along with so many other things.

“There are those who would unseal Trihexa. I don’t know exactly how, but it can be done using the Sacred Gears known as the Holy Relics. The Holy Spear True Longinus, the Holy Cross Incinerate Anthem, the Holy Nail Alphecca Tyrant, the Shroud of Turin that is the only one of the relics that was not made a Sacred Gear, and finally, this.”

Using human transmutation, I reached into the larger of the homunculi and withdrew a mass of holy light that resolved into the shape of a gold and silver cup. “Sephiroth Graal. The sacred gear that operates by connecting to the principles of life and death. Through this, one might be able to discern the location of any living being, including those sealed ‘at the end of the world.’”

“That’s who you’re fighting,” Selene murmured in realization, eyes riveted on the Holy Grail. “The fools who would use this to find the creature and unleash it.”

“They aren’t fools, unfortunately,” I said darkly. “They know exactly what they’re doing.”

“Madmen then.”

“If only they had that excuse, it would be a weakness we could exploit.”

“Perhaps,” Selene allowed, reaching for the grail only to stop short. “But self-aware evil can be exploited as well. It’s more predictable than insanity, after all.”

“That’s true.” With focus and Comprehension, I withdrew the Holy Grail out from my makeshift sacred gear container entirely. All of it.

One chalice became three, floating above my hands shrouded in light shaped like sacred halos. It wasn’t the Flame, but when I cast the Light forth upon them, there was no difference in the texture or glow of their power.

“The grail was just one at first, but now it’s three. This is because as much as it empowers its holders beyond all reason, it collects power from them as well. I don’t know how many Grails it would take to resurrect Him.” Alexander’s breath hitched with fervent hope, the promise in the Light warring with his humility. “I don’t think it’s enough on its own at all, half of God’s name is in the True Longinus. But right now, it’s at three. Whoever holds just one of these Grails can reverse any harm done to anyone, and even bring those touched by it back from the dead. Plus who knows what else can be done with the principles of life and death. I think you can all tell where I’m going with this.”

“We could be immortal,” Michael breathed. “More immortal, I mean. Whenever one of us gets injured or dies, the others could just… bring us back? No, it can’t be that easy.”

“It is, actually, the Grail is a tad too cooperative. So it wouldn’t be without cost, if you were normal humans.” Comprehension told me plenty, but not everything, this was no simple physical or spiritual relic that I held. “The mental strain can be immense, but that will be fine if you use it sparingly until you catch up where Alexander is.” I looked to the old man then. “Your advanced cognitive capabilities mean you shouldn’t have any trouble at all.”

“A tripartite being,” Selene murmured, withdrawing her hand to place it on her swollen belly. “What are the risks?”

“Smaller than if you let me cure you and your unborn daughter’s vampirism right now, but it’s no rush if you want to wait until after the birth.”

“… Why do you not take it for yourself?”

“… I have a clear view of my path to power,” I explained without explaining anything. “And it does not involve Sacred Gears.”

“I… I think I should wait.” Selene seemed to begrudge her own caution the moment she voiced it, but she didn’t take her words back.

“We all want progress,” Alexander murmured. “But if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”

“C.S. Lewis,” I recognized the quote. “But you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to do more than you already do at all.” I believed everything I was saying, but I knew I was just arguing against myself now, and it was a lost cause anyway. “Just live in peace. You know, enjoy life without worry for a while, finally.”

“That is impossible.”

“It’s not.”

“I meant the part about living in peace,” Alexander corrected me, closing his eyes with remembered pain. “I have never been able to not care. It’s why I’ve contributed so much to this masquerade that you so hate.”

“I could make it an order.”

“And I might grow to not resent it, even appreciate it in time,” the man said ruefully. “But I hardly need the time to reflect. It’s not as if I’m blind to the fact that I’ve not been all that useful, nor will I be more so henceforth. I’ve already been overcome once, even needed you to send someone to rescue me. It is easy to see how next time could easily play out the same.”

“It won’t, and that’s not what I meant.”

“But you still want me to accept this.”

“And I’ll also accept if you don’t. I can remove the Geas on you myself, I have the ability.”

Alexander wrestled with himself for a moment, but eventually shook his head. “No. If I am going to break the pact I made with God, I will not implicate anyone else.”

“Like I’m not already? It’s not enough that I’m going to be circumventing Heaven’s System to do this?”

“It’s not everything. That has to mean something to Him, when the time comes.” Alexander’s face fell. “If it comes.”

What would my life be like, if I could believe like him?

In the end, Selene declined for now.

But the other two didn’t, and so Sephiroth Graal gained a new home twice over.

“Life isn’t fair,” Alexander murmured when it was over, the Light of Life glittering in his eyes in such a way that they looked more green than blue, like a verdant field after rainfall. “But we can make it so by being fair ourselves.”

The only thing more touching than their trust that I could really do all I claimed I could do, was that they trusted me to do it without inflicting all manner of violation on their souls. And I did mean souls, Sacred Gears ran off the spirit but needed to be in direct contact with the soul in order to function properly. Especially if I wanted to avoid them having the same problems that Valerie would have had due to her brother’s meddling.

When it was over, the only thing left other than the third Grail in the doll, was Forbidden Balor View.

I offered to implant it into anyone of Alexander’s choosing, but he declined. Said I should save it for the next tortured soul I moved Hell and Heaven to save.

My mind went to the boughs of Yggdrasil, and my memory of those two men and that gnome-like dwarf that were struggling to survive on the Branch below ours. I’d not told anyone about them, or even my special relationship with the World Tree, but maybe I should if they were guessing my next actions even without it.

It was a true relief, to work with people who had their priorities in order.

=======================================================

Achievements

·       In Charming Footsteps – acquire Calu Nazdravan (+0.5)

·       This is Not the Way – transplant a Sacred Gear (+0.5)

·       Principal of Life – bestow the Holy Grail (+1)

Inspired Investments

·       Spare Charges: 4 + 2 = 6

Other Gains

·       Acquired Skillset – Alexander Corvinus

o   Historical European Martial Arts – 10/10

o   History (Human)

§  National (Romania, Hungary) 5/5

§  European 3/5

§  World 2/5

o   Geography

§  National (Romania, Hungary) 5/5

§  European 4/5

§  General 3/5

o   Economics 3/5

o   Firearms 4/5

o   Explosives 4/5

o   Infrastructure 4/5

o   Organizational Management 4/5

o   Subterfuge 5/5

·       Acquired Skillset – Michael Corvinus

o   First Aid 1/1

o   Triage 1/1

o   Anesthesia 2/5

o   Pharmacology 3/5

o   Surgery 3/5