Lillene

Enjoy!

There were many places to learn about a society. Cymryn didn’t have time to learn anything but the highest level, which meant his information would only be of use as context for whatever the people planted on the planet found out over the next five or six years. 

One thing was clear: there were massive fault lines between different factions. Whatever plan Serenity and the empire he worked for had, it clearly hadn’t come to fruition; there was no World Leader of any sort. Serenity didn’t even seem to be a major player anymore; he’d clearly been distracted by the ancient secrets on A’Atla and given up on conquering the planet. Cymryn knew how tempting that could be, but as an Imperial Agent he was supposed to be above that. 

Ancient secrets could matter to an individual or a small group, but they didn’t make a difference in the game of empires. A secret could turn a battle, but if you managed to figure out something big enough to change a war, it couldn’t be kept fully secret. No, secrets wouldn’t win a war; a failure in your spies might, but the Empire was good at gathering that sort of information.

What won wars and conquered territory was understanding people, and even with the little Cymryn now knew he knew that would be an interesting task on Earth. The obvious path forward was client states, like the World Shaman’s moon; get them to work for you and slowly drain away their talent until something changed, usually a request to enter the Empire. At that point, reward the new province; it would encourage others and was cheap enough to be worthwhile, especially if it was focused on boosting people the Empire would find useful. It usually took centuries for the entire progression, but it worked.

The problem here was that the normal method of gaining client states by invading and “helping” the populace recover from the original round of invasions wouldn’t work. Past that, taking enemies as client states often didn’t work very well, especially not with places as proud and antagonistic as these seemed to be. That meant they’d either have to soothe the antagonism or incite it and take advantage of it. Cymryn was glad he wasn’t on those teams; it wasn’t work he was good at. He was a troubleshooter, not someone well suited to performing part of a multi-century task.

Even a quick look through the local node they’d stopped at showed issues; the world was far more linked by portals than Cymryn was used to. There were also three off-planet connections. That part wasn’t unusual; what was unusual was that they were the same three connections reused from dozens of portals across the world. That implied that the Voice had made a limited selection available and for some reason the rulers had allowed the contacts despite the cost. 

The three portal connections were all far from the Empire; one of them wasn’t even in the Font sector, but it was in the opposite direction from the Empire. Cymryn didn’t like the implications of that; this looked like an incipient hub planet and those were always valuable and often difficult to conquer. There were too many interested parties and this was far enough from the Empire that it might not be worth the effort.

Cymryn paged through the information in the portal node, looking at the connections. What places connected to other places was useful and could give an impression of the political landscape that was far more nuanced than the propaganda Serenity showed them. Knowing the propaganda was useful but knowing the actual situation was more valuable.

Cymryn stopped the moment he saw a note he must have missed earlier.

Additional portal location Berek (Myrta) valid in 46:15:12:32

Unlike the other three cities, Cymryn didn’t have to look up Berek. He knew Myrta; while it was inside the Font sector and not technically part of the Empire, it was near the edge. It wasn’t a client state; it was simply not valuable enough. It also had a significant nonhuman population, which made it harder to justify than a planet like Earth, which was at least decent enough to force its nonhumans to hide. 

The Empire had finally gotten lucky. Myrta was close enough to the Empire to make an infiltration of Earth easy once the travel restrictions were lifted; even before then, Imperial merchants could start establishing connections with the Earth merchants that would surely flood Berek once the portals opened. Baron Restali would be thrilled to have such a close connection to a probable trade hub; it would probably make conquering Myrta far more attractive. 

Cymryn composed his message then closed out of the portal node. He’d gotten everything from it that he could; it was time to check on the locals himself. As much as he’d like to gather information that was already compiled, he hadn’t brought any information specialists that could piece through what was allowed to be said or written and what books were public to figure out the fault lines and actual sentiments, so Cymryn was going to have to do it the other way.

Really, he’d have needed to even if he’d brought them. There were things you could pick up from people that books never said. He needed to know how people felt about their society, their futures, their Paths … everything. The best place to pick that up was somewhere people gathered to talk. 

Cymryn hoped that there were places like that that served relaxants of some sort. Chemical assistance tended to loosen the tongue and help people say things they otherwise wouldn’t. 

He’d start with the nice places. Perhaps Serenity’s driver Janice would know a good place to start? Saying he’d like some evening entertainment should work.

Death hummed a happy tune as she watched people come and go in the lobby of the Adventurers’ Guild. Most were relatively healthy, more likely to die of the monsters they fought than anything else, though there were a few who had other issues. She was thoroughly enjoying herself. Most of the death in dungeons wasn’t quite real, since dungeon monsters weren’t exactly individual creatures, but it was still death. The way people reacted to death and the threat of death was even more interesting.

She could see why Serenity liked to delay death for the people he liked. He liked having them around and death was usually the end of that. It didn’t have to be, but death changed things. 

People were interesting.

A couple walked by who were just as likely to die in a vehicle accident as in the mouth of a monstrous crocodile; Death thought that was probably because the taller of the two liked to drive fast and regularly took risks he shouldn’t. It wasn’t his reflexes that were the problem; at Tier Two, he could take the vehicle fairly close to the limit. Instead, it was the fact that he drove as if everyone else on the road had the same reflexes he did and could read his mind. 

Death ignored them. They weren’t interested in her and she had nothing to say to them either.

The next group that walked by was a group that routinely delved the kobold floors and had recently changed to exploring the new demon floor Aki had started. It held mostly Lesser Wrath Demons at this point; Death could guess why Aki had access to them and his name was Serenity. Death had gone onto that floor once with this group, but chose not to return; for some reason, killing the young Wrath Demons bothered her, even though Death knew they were nothing more than mana and essence temporarily shaped to appear and act like a donor organism. They were nothing more than a shadow of reality, made to die, yet Death didn’t like killing them. 

Two of them waved at her and Death waved back with a smile. They’d learned enough that they no longer needed a fifth; the two that waved seemed unhappy when Death told the group of four that she didn’t want to do the demon floor again, but the other two didn’t seem to mind. 

She’d even gotten the two that waved to go to the movies with her a couple of times. Perhaps they’d go again. What were their names, Nicole and Sarah? Death thought it was something like that. She needed to keep better track of names.

The next group that walked by was a duo that Death hadn’t delved with yet. She probably would at some point; she liked to get around. She just didn’t happen to have filled a singular role they needed yet. One of them was currently likely to die of a monstrous panther when the other collapsed from the poison running through his veins. Death couldn’t tell where the poison came from, but she could tell that he was using his attributes to ignore it.

In short, he was being an idiot. 

An understandable idiot, since Serenity often did the same, but Death knew that Serenity wouldn’t think that. In fact, Serenity would try to say something to get the man to deal with his problem. Death should do the same thing.

People seemed to appreciate it, as long as she approached it properly. She’d gotten quite a bit of practice at that lately. Death hopped out of her seat and walked up to the pair. 

The one who wasn’t dying of a poison slowly killing his organs turned to her. He seemed puzzled. “Miss Black?”

They all called her that. It worked well enough that she’d adopted the name. Death nodded towards the other man. “Your friend, was he poisoned recently?”

The man who spoke first froze and turned towards the one dying of poison. “Doug? I thought you said it didn’t break your skin?”

Doug shrugged. “There wasn’t anything more than a scratch. I’m fine.”

Death corrected herself. It wasn’t poison; it was venom. There was a difference in English, even if it was often not used correctly. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes; yes, the venom was organic, but so were many poisons. She didn’t know where it came from.

“We’re going to get you checked out anyway.” The man who probably wouldn’t die today grabbed the shoulder of his friend Doug and tugged him towards the side room where the Adventurers’ Guild healer usually stayed. It was Blaze today, so Death knew Doug would be taken care of. “You don’t ignore Miss Black’s warnings any more than you ignore Blaze’s, and you know what Blaze does if you don’t listen.”

Doug shivered. He didn’t immediately let his friend drag him away; for a moment, Death thought he’d decide he could tough it out, no matter how stupid that was. When Doug’s friend tugged on his arm again, Doug seemed to shrink a little before he followed.

Just before he disappeared through the door, Death heard Doug’s friend call back to her. “Thank you, Miss Black!”

It was nice to help people. At times like these, Death felt like she actually understood Serenity. It would take more practice, but eventually she’d be just as good at being a person as he was!

Lillene

We all have to have goals. I’m not sure Serenity is the best role model, but he’s the best one Death has.