Flannel

Two more bragmemes before I do something else for a while -

Spoiler

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Chapter 26! Worldbuilding! Snark! And 26.5 on Saturday or Sunday; an experiment in webnovel innovation!

As the hull separation process got underway, the gear-toothed brass locking pins rose out of their slots in the Right’s portside weather deck, without any human involvement.

Ah, Automation, Justin thought contentedly. I knew you were a wonderful choice.

He noticed some of the troops watching the display draw circles on their foreheads with their fingertips, then again over their hearts. Others were ritualistically tapping their heads and hearts with a fluttering of fingertips. He nudged Taiko, skulking beside him in the shadows behind the Right’s open quarterdeck doors.

“Yes, Brother, some of them are asking for the Dawn’s or the Stars’ protection from Demonic powers, I’m sure. But the rest are thanking Him for the chance to be a part of these events, or something similar.” He nudged Justin back, pointing with his eyes and a tiny tilt of his head. “And some of the latter are remonstrating with some of the former.”

Justin turned to see four troops near the bow ruthlessly poking and prodding a hapless fifth for his – not lack of faith, of course, Justin thought; lack of courage, maybe? Whatever. Let’s not, please.

He waved to catch their attention, putting out his palms at an angle and slowly lowering them. Ease off, lady and gentlemen, if you would.

Three of the four stopped; the last – Justin recognized her as another Senior, one who name he hadn’t learned yet – jerked a subtle thumb in his direction and continued berating the fifth. The Blessed Prominence is even watching out for your ungrateful hide! he imagined her saying.

There was a whispered ooooohh from the troops as the surfaces of the promenade planking separated horizontally or vertically with a jerk, and began flattening in width while expanding in length and height and scissoring back into the Here’s starboard side. Justin turned to watch it himself, fascinated. It was like a CGI transformation in a high-budget sci-fi movie, only better, because here the physics were real.

Note to self: find out what geniuses designed this! What else did they do? Are there any plans of theirs left incomplete!?

“Aha,” Taiko chuckled as the released Right began to curve left, away from the Here’s larger hull. “Our eager new customers are not happy about this.” He pointed to the small flotilla still following them, where the angry, violent gesticulations had picked up again at the Right Here Chloe’s separation into three independent hulls.

“The poor precious darlings,” Justin said sarcastically. He was pretty sure some of them were going to leave him no better choice than to beat them into submission, and he hated the prospect of being trapped by other people’s decisions like that. “Oh, how my tender, wounded heart bleeds buckets of flaming piss for them,” he added.

Taiko coughed in surprise.

“Never heard that one before?” Justin said.

“No, Brother. Is that a. . .does that happen, where you came from?”

“What? No! We weren’t Demons; we – some of us - were masters of purely technical arts and crafts. The great majority of us just got on with normal life; work, family, community, vocations, hobbies - the way people here do. We didn’t have mana or chi or cultivation or divine intervention! Well, not that could be proven, and people did keep trying.

“There was an illusionist – we had entirely physical illusionists; it was all misdirection, sleight of hand, and mechanical trickery – who had a standing offer of over a million ri for anyone who could demonstrate real chi or mana to his satisfaction. People tried. He never had to pay out. He was a better trickster than they were, so the tests were fair, but the fakes and cheats and con artists couldn’t beat them. But no, Taiko, people did not bleed bucketfuls from their hearts and live, let alone buckets of fiery urine. Good lord, man; what kind of life do you think I led before I came here?”

“A rich and powerful one,” Taiko said, with the perception Justin had come to expect from the man, and he had to shrug.

“Okay, yes, you got me there,” he admitted. “I started from the laborer class beside my father, and worked hard almost my entire life, so by the time I left, I had millions of ri, and my name alone could make people agree to negotiate private settlements instead of going to public court. But we couldn’t leap 30 rods through the air, or walk on water! Well - we had reached the point of personal flying devices, but most of them were expensive, finicky, had limited flight time, and we didn’t have abnormal resistance to falling damage. . .although. . .there was that guy who got to seventeen thousand feet with his paramotor. . .hmmm. . . .”

“Your musical tool seems more than merely technical to me,” Taiko said, once it was clear Justin had mentally drifted off into further mad adventures territory. “Legendary, more like. One might even say celestial.”

“One wishes one wouldn’t,” Justin said. “And speaking of which, show’s over, so let’s get back to the Lab and check their progress.”

Before they went farther inside, though, he paused to check the other crafts’ dispositions. The Here was headed easterly towards the High Bay, as their primary distraction, and doing its job – about half of the flotilla had changed course to pursue it, with a few faster ships moving up ahead of it in that direction.

The Chloe was headed back south, leading a third of the remaining half on a wild goose chase – when it reached the island narrows, it was going to reverse course, returning to the Drops. I wonder how many circuits it’ll take before they figure it out? he thought. They were planning to all meet back up again later, after the Right offloaded the seeds and had taken on the housewares and provisions Justin intended to buy, with thanks to Tzo for the funding.

After the strategy meeting where they’d decided that, Tzo had asked Justin to sell Taiko four dozen doses of the Fountain’s product, and then, with a look of smug anticipation shining in his eyes, said “Kokyu Taiko? Would you please sell me some Mana Water?”

“Oh you crafty old -!” Justin had exclaimed, before giving his Advocate a non-sarcastic golf clap. “Nicely done,” he’d said. “You beat me to it. This way your client privacy remains safe.”

Tzo had prayed over a pair of Ling Fei drafts before paying Taiko with them. “Forty-eight thousand ri should set you up for a week or so minimum,” he’d said.

“Glad you’re on my side,” Justin had said, returning one of the looks of professional acknowledgment Tzo had given him earlier.

“I think I shall not dispute whether you are as much as I am,” Tzo had replied, giving his smug full rein.

Once the old bull shark had some Mana Water of his own to experiment with, he’d holed up in the Right’s comm room. He was absorbed in sampling as much of Justin’s music library as he could while the troops there transferred the data from the first flash drive onto the recording slips.

Justin’s estimate had the transfer rate at about a terabyte per day. A full transfer was going to be a long process. But he felt confident he had the time now. Sol would keep the Contract from shafting him, and the Right was headed for the northern docks nearest to the Sky Temple Taiko thought best suited to his needs.

As Justin and Taiko approached the doors to the Lab’s second floor, the two of them only needed to exchange a glance to agree on a silent entrance. Taiko eased one of the sliding panels open and they quietly slipped in.

On the starboard side, Justin’s HardPad was now playing Bridge over Troubled Water, which had turned out to be extremely good at assisting the elemental neutralization of Mana Water. To port, Norodo and a trooper were clacking away at two of the blackboards with chalk sticks, finishing the latest iteration of what the troops were campaigning hard to be named the ‘Potion of Prominence’.

Justin was getting close to giving in on that. Despite all the personal reasons for his dislike, it was nevertheless both catchy and accurate.

It’s a pity nobody else can use it, he thought with regret. According to the last summary he’d been given, a couple of squads of Ougo’s troops pumped up with the stuff would have ripped through the Young Flowers of the High Court out there like a few dozen coked-out gardeners equipped with mil-spec weed-whackers. Unfortunately, purified Mana Water base or not, the amount of undiluted mana added limited it to upper-tier magicians accustomed to handling such quantities of Chaotic corruption and the chi deviation it provoked.

Or, Xenopote Voidspawns so steeped in the stuff already, and particularly ones still so new to the world that they’d barely tasted its water, and had never eaten its food, that they rendered the potion’s mana corruption negligible in comparison.

We’ll work out a more chi-aligned version in time, Justin thought. And then any interlopers who think the absence of that lightning defense after it’s gone means they’re free to invade my home will get some very big surprises.

“Good,” Norodo said down below, setting her chalk in the curved ledge at the blackboard’s base. “All that’s left now is the math.”

“This reliability is groundbreaking,” the trooper said, running a hand through his short red hair as he stared at the three nearly filled boards. “The precision it provides. . .two decimal places! Only the Associations’ best practitioners get numbers that detailed. And it takes them years of study and brewing.”

“Revolutionary,” Norodo agreed. “Again. The Prominence’s tool must never be endangered.”

“Yes,” the trooper said, looking around. “And Riku-go’s Folly is actually sailing. Never thought we’d see the day. And we’re on it. My mother’s going to throw a fit.”

“You’re also on duty, Ozu. Start doing that math,” Norodo said.

“Yes, Lead,” Ozu-the-no-longer-unknown said, stepping up to the board and consulting a scroll in his hand.

Justin cocked his head at Taiko and they headed to the port staircase down.“So it’s going well?” Justin called as they reached halfway.

“Yes, Prominence,” Norodo said. “Except for the creation itself, the hardest parts are done. Other than that, only the calculations remain. Do you have the translation for us?”

“Not yet, Lead; I’ll get right on it,” Justin said, resisting the urge to knuckle his forehead. He not only liked and respected Norodo but felt hugely sympathetic towards her; she didn’t deserve his mockery. He got behind the nearest port-side standing desk, waited not at all for Taiko to put a fresh scroll in his hand the instant he held it out, and started writing.

“Would you walk me through some of all – this – while I do it, please?” he asked, waving his index and middle finger across the boards. “I have what I think is a competent Journeyman’s knowledge of the Craft, and I’m glad my original formulation was on the button, and I can figure some of what’s up there out, but other parts are a mystery to me. Oh, and I overheard your conversation about two decimal precision as I was coming in – how did the music help with that?”

“It’s surpassingly exact every time we request it, Prominence!” Ozu said, a wild grin spreading across his face. “In combination with your Mana Water and the capacity of that lovely hymn about Troubled Waters you selected to assist in neutralizing its composition, we’re able to get material measurements of elemental composition a whole order of magnitude finer than our usual margins of error for solutions! The possibilities this presents are unprecedented!”

Justin smiled back at him. Ozu was the first person Justin had met in Ribe as given to excitedly pushing the run-on sentence boundary as he could be, and he found the young man’s enthusiasm infectious.

Norodo, going by her set frown, was not as impressed. “The task at hand, trooper, is the mathematics we need for correct proportions. Not exulting at the Prominence.”

“Yes, Lead,” Ozu said, abashed, and turned back to the blackboard, where he began filling in an array next to the formula’s beginning. Justin finished his own task, handing the scroll off to Taiko, who began copying it at his own desk, then leaned forward, studying the board.

“Is, er – reconstituted slime – a common ingredient? In general? Or local to Ribe?” Justin asked. There wasn’t much on them in his supernaturally installed mental database for Alchemy, and the great majority of that could be accurately summarized as no don’t you fools, with a few side orders of greedy and ignorant added to the delivery. And he hadn’t forgotten the very obvious hiiinnnnt behind the Contract’s mention of rumors of a network of crystal caves under Ribe inhabited by slimes.

He’d be dealing with slimes in crystal caves in less than a year. He was certain of it.

Other things in them too, no doubt. Possibly even the caves themselves. And that’s all the more reason to get this potion done properly. Focus, Justin.

“Generally no, Prominence,” Ozu said, one of those fortunate people able to carry on a sensible conversation while simultaneously doing complex arithmetic. “There’s a – taboo, I guess you could say – about using them. Their mana is not only poor but very chaotic, and they’re like dangerous pests if they get out of control. I hear in Magmana they use them for some city utilities, but they say they’re all crazy over there. Er, your pardon, Lead.”

“No offense given, trooper. It’s far from the least reason I left.”

# # #

Under Pei’s expert handling, the Right drew up to the long, skinny dock meant for middle to upper-class pleasure craft without any need for a row-tow. It was already crowded with the toadies and functionaries and other annoying meddlers who had been dogging Justin’s wake since noon. A somewhat weatherbeaten sloopish thing had nipped in to the dock’s end ahead of a larger, much more lavish craft, and two women in diaphanous cultivator robes had leaped off it with a fine disregard for the shouts and curses coming from their rival for the berth.

One of them looked young, about Justin’s apparent age, with a straight sword on her hip and a small buckler strapped to her back. Her older companion, closer to Tzo’s age, leaned on a wide-bladed guan-do-ish weapon, with a pair of hilt-pointing spikes on its back edge.

Justin was keeping an eye on them because theirs was one of the ships that had played it smart and stayed back to observe the hasty people’s mistakes. But they were unmistakably being scorned by the rest of the Young Flowers of the High Court. It was remarkable how much distaste and contempt Taiko could pack into that phrase.

At least the potioneering had gone off without a hitch. And the reactions to the very alien talkboxing on the track had been fun to watch, too. The troops were now all equipped with specific antitoxins for the toxins Justin had created with the others as his hold-out weapon – partial paralytics and general incapacitants all, not deadly ones.

His Potion of Prominence wouldn’t last more than an hour, and extended use would run it out quicker, but Justin now had nine exponents of five in power to switch around between toughness, skill, speed, and strength. He’d tested them all out before they docked, sensibly using the skill enhancement to cheat his way to quick proficiency. And it had been fun, tremendous fun. Although he could see it becoming addictive, too.

“He’s not going to get any farther,” Ougo rumbled next to him, meaning Tzo, who was standing at the base of the Right’s gangway, patiently explaining to bureaucrats and brats alike that no, they did not have any authority over a Prominence, or an Inlightened for that matter, or the Right, or any of the other hulls, or a dozen other things.

Tzo was in his element, and Justin didn’t begruge him it in the slightest. He could play the game as well as anyone else, and a lot better than most, but it was a professional responsibility for him, not a vocation.

“I agree, Captain,” Justin. “Do you think we can keep it to one or two fights?”

“It’s not impossible, but I accept your and the Kokyu’s conviction that Constellation Taisa will involve herself.”

“Yes, I could almost hope she does,” Justin said silkily, then shook off his irritation. “But a grown man doesn’t pick unnecessary fights.”

“And these are going to be necessary,” Ougo said regretfully. “They have too much time and energy and face invested in this to walk away. And there’s a whiff of the mob out there. I can feel it, how the idiot reassurance of safety in numbers has spread through them.”

“Then I suppose it’s Plan Representative Trial by Combat,” Justin said.

“It will be Tsukanu over there,” Taiko said behind both of them. “The tall, light-haired, good looking one with the long sword over there. Best family, most talent, least wisdom, worst spoiled. Half the crowd will agree to let him play representative simply in the hopes that you’ll thump him like a fresh gourd.”

“What’s up with that?” Justin said, jerking his chin at the woman with the spiked guan-do. She was pushing her way through the throng, straight towards the gangway. The younger one was following in her wake, looking concerned.

“I think she’s going for it,” Justin said. “Yep. Here she comes. . .and huh, nothing. Not even a static shock. How does the ship decide who to let through? Not that I’m seriously asking right now. Or Right now.

Taiko kicked him, lightly.

“Innntholenthe!” Justin squeaked, in an overdone falsetto Castilian accent. “I thall have thu whip-ped, you naughty creathture! Oh, and here comes the younger one, too, and no big surprise, she passes as well.”

“Our Terrible Prominence is becoming agitated,” Taiko told Ougo in a stage whisper. “We’d better tell Tzo to get on with it before the Favored of the Dawn goes down there and spills the tiles just to alleviate his tension.”

“Ah, humourous clients,” Ougo said, in a tone so flat Master Mason’s levels could be tested against it. “Always a delightful prospect.”

“Just keep her off me as long as you can when she shows up, that’s all I ask,” Justin said, moving towards the gangway.

“Always, Brother,” Taiko said.

# # #

The arrangements hadn’t take long; apparently this was the kind of resolution the Young Flowers of the High Court were familiar with and expected. Justin heaved a dyspeptic sigh as he waited without anticipation, watching Young Lord Tsukanu speechify and pose with his unsheathed sword for his retinue across the dock. Tzo had asked them to delay few moments for some unrevealed reason.

Taiko had take up position on the dock’s end side, while the two women had stepped up to watch the land side for him. According to Tzo, they simply wanted to do some nice, quiet, private, expensive business, and were seeking his favor towards that end.

The referee stepped forward with a long-handled cup half-filled with water from the Toh, checked them both for readiness, and threw the water up in the air.

# # #

“And these are the port-side ‘speaker’ controls,” Tzo said, drawing his finger across the jade plate, “and this is the right song -” he drew his finger down the one beside it, “and now we shall see if the music used to create the potion enhances its use as well -”

Just as the water approached the ground, he tapped the triangle.

Flannel

Favorite line in this chapter -

Spoiler

"Good lord, man; what kind of life do you think I led before I came here?"

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What say you, O King?

Spoiler

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