Slumrat Rising

Vol. 4 Chap. 39 Signs and Portents

Truth kept the scrubs. They weren’t dirty, really, and he liked having a costume change on hand. One trip into the locker room, a quick change of clothes, and Doctor Bone-Bro, M.D., Ph.D. (U. Jeon) D.Thaum (Hons. Behem U.) vanished. Exiting the locker room was Peuth Reduchi, Talisman Service Technician First Class, Ever-Rite Equipment Rentals Corporation (a Starbrite Family Company.)

Amazing how you can be invisible two completely different ways, in the same place, at roughly the same time. He got a little grin out of the whole thing.

Had the day been a waste? No, not really. He had a better sense of a lot of things, now. He might not be much closer to cracking Cup and Knife, but progress was progress. Besides, it felt good. The whole exercise, even the stupid, annoying people, made him feel good. He wouldn’t want to do that every day, or even every week. But for an occasional thing? It really wasn't anything too bad.

He paused, as he watched a little girl walking through the hospital with her mom. He couldn’t tell which of them needed help. Maybe they were here to visit someone.

Oh, it was the kids.

That’s why he did all this. It was the kids in the factory and the meat processing plant. He just wanted to do something decent. Something… unarguably good. He could come in, make changes and make people’s lives better. Even if only for a moment. Even if “better” just meant ‘less bad’. He wasn’t helpless here. He could do things.

Was that another secret of Starbrite’s control? That learned helplessness? He had left those kids in the factory because he couldn’t imagine a plausible scenario where anything good happened to them. It was Starbrite’s favorite trick- you don’t need to defeat people if you have already convinced them they can’t win.

Time to push a lot harder than he had been. Time to see just how hard he had to shake the tree to make clues fall out of it.

Stepping out of the hospital was disorienting. It had been daytime when he went in. It was night now. Somehow, he hadn’t felt the connection between light and dark- like the hospital existed in a bubble universe, a pocket of white blood cells fighting a cyst trapped under the skin of the ‘real.’

Golden cherubim appeared over the city. As one, they started a loud scream. A pause, then another. Pause, than another. People bolted from the sidewalks, into buildings or out of them and into subways.

Elderly folk seemed to materialize on the streets, bright orange arm bands and thick helmets both stamped with “Air Raid Warden''. They were waving signs or glowing talismans, yelling “This Way! This WAY! One orderly line! There is plenty of room for everyone, now go, go, go!”

He bounced between high rises, wanting to see for himself. Up on the roof top, watching the lights go out over the city. Watching the lights start to glow on the northern edge of the horizon. Explosions. Streaks of flaming bolts firing out at ten thousand rounds a second, chewing through summons and spellbirds.

Traceries of gold and orange and blue and venom-green twisting and balling together in the night sky, obscuring the stars behind them. Closer to the city, flights of angels flew in rigid patterns. Waiting for the enemy to come. Demons, fat toad things, dotted the ground in their dozens. Enormous eyes tracking targets, waiting for the opportunity to launch acid in long spears up into the sky.

Anti-Air batteries spun around, subtle detection systems scraping the aether for the precise nature of the incoming attack. Did they load counterspell rounds to take out tactical curses? Banishments, abjurations, or simply load for carnage and shred any incoming spell birds? Systems of systems, talisman networks of incredible power and subtly, working with some of the best spellcraft that money could buy, all to lock down the sky.

And if it didn’t work, there were always the brutal artillery pieces behind them. Truth let his eyes run over them. Not a shred of light there, to make things harder on attackers. They were in use though. The enormous fetishes rising from the ground and swiveling to the north.

Specially beastcrafted horrors were bred to make artillery. There were hidden ranches, guarded by powerful Mages and strictly controlled, that raised them to the perfect age to be slaughtered and reformed into fetishes. A brief, suffering life, but in death, they slaughtered their human ‘Gods.’

Not firing. Not yet. The front line was still well north of here. Just being ready.

Truth kept his eyes firmly on the horizon. He didn’t know enough about aerial combat to have a sense of how this was going. The battle sometimes got a little closer, but not much. Ground battles took hours at a minimum, a day or more was perfectly normal. Aerial battles were… faster, probably.

It went on for six hours. It would seem to stop, make him think it was over, then another flight of summons would come winging over the horizon, supported by a blizzard of curses and cheap witch-crafted horrors designed to flood the air defense system and let the more expensive, potent, summons make killing blows.

The defenders knew what Onis was up to, of course. They met cheap horrors with cheap AA needles and summons with launched barrages of banishment charms. You could watch it playing out again and again. The sheer repetitiveness of it was sanity straining. It took a while, but Truth eventually got it. Onis never thought they were going to break through the air defenses with this. They just wanted to make Jeon show what they had and force them to start spending down their stockpiles.

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He wasn’t watching the economics of warfare, he was watching the warfare of economics. He didn’t know if it was ironic or not, but some morbid part of him did want to grin.

Shortly after dawn, the all clear was sounded. People started slowly walking out of the tunnels and shelters, carefully counted by the wardens. The city hadn’t taken any damage beyond financial and to morale. Truth could read it in the faces of the emerging citizens. The bombs didn’t land anywhere near them, and they still caught some of the shrapnel.

Should he leave the city? Truth considered it, watching the sun slowly rise. It was, in many ways, the ‘smart’ choice. One should never stand on the X, and there had just been a literal air raid. Didn’t get much more ‘on the x’ than that.

Truth shook away the negative thoughts. He didn’t want to leave just yet. He had no particular fondness for the city. What he did like about it, though, was the way it was so clearly a city under tension. All those criss-crossing wires, connecting thousands of different points and millions of lives, steadily wrenching tighter and tighter. Building up strain. Storing energy.

It really wouldn’t take much to make a whole city convulse, would it? Not that he wanted anything too bad to happen. He didn’t want the city to fall. He just needed to flush some very fat rats from their hiding places.

He watched the sun rise, blessing the world with light, heat and cosmic rays, at least for a little bit longer. Truth bowed politely, then jumped off the roof. He knew where to begin his hunt, but it was time for sleep. It had been a long day.

And with that jaunty thought, Truth found himself stuck.

Just where am I going to sleep?

There are few things quite so miserable as looking for a hotel room when you are tired. The city was packed. He would have thought it would be pretty empty, what with the enormous battle lines just outside the city, but no. The city was host to dozens of apparently important industries, so the workers couldn’t just run off when they pleased. Likewise, soldiers on liberty would routinely come into the city. There were regular visits from government officials, business leaders, and their thousands of underlings.

Someone had to make sure that the Q2 Reciprocating Widget numbers were properly correlated and organized according to the latest accounting directives. Who did you expect to do it, the CFO? No, it was dozens of more junior officials, each dispatched with the knowledge that a single error in their tedious job would result in nothing, on account of it never being discovered, or their execution. No middle ground permitted.

Bonuses for doing dangerous work? Rewards for hard and careful labor? Call internal security, I’ve found a spy! You certainly are no son of Jeon!

No, the hotels were full, and apartments did not seem to be noticeably empty. It was time to pull a maneuver he had hoped to avoid. He found a suitably generic apartment building, caught the door as someone was walking out, and started listening for people heading out to work. As people stepped out of their rooms, he stepped in. Just having a quick look around at the state of the place. Third time lucky- the owner had invested in a large sectional sofa, so Truth didn’t have to try and ignore the warm spot in a freshly vacated bed.

“Thrush, keep watch while I sleep.”

“Yes, Dread Magus. Seep well.”

A few minutes later, Perks slithered out of the confines of Truth’s shirt. He was a pretty relaxed snake, as snakes went, and was usually happy to be next to a perpetual source of heat. Still, it did you good to get out and stretch, so out he went.

The snake wound his way across the sofa, onto the floor, then made his way to the walls. His tongue flicked out, tasting the strange smells in the air. It slowly made its way along the wall to a crevice between a kitchen cabinet and a cold box. A tiny, tiny little gap, far too small for Perks. Most humans would have ignored it entirely, as the gap was barely the width of a human finger.

Perks curled up and went still. Perks didn’t have eyelids, but you could be forgiven for thinking him asleep.

Roughly an hour after Truth fell asleep, a mouse came out of the wall. It generally preferred the nights, but when your metabolism burned through calories like an oilfield fire, you ate whenever you could.

It was a very careful mouse. It could smell the sebum trail it, and other mice, had left behind. No smells of predators. Some strange new smells, but no predator urine or anything like that. Being an urban mouse, with its last twelve generations living and dying in this very apartment building, it had never smelled a snake.

Squeezing through a gap that forced its body to radically compact, the mouse made the passage out into the dangerous, but food rich, world beyond its nest. Staying hidden simply was not an option. Hunger compelled it to forage. Its flesh insisted the biochemical bonfires be fueled.

The mouse was careful. It led with its most accurate sensor, its nose. It swept the air for any traces of danger. Whiskers carefully shook, sensitive to the air around them. No sudden movement in the air would be overlooked. It took a few careful steps out into the room. Its eyes weren’t very good, but it used them carefully anyway. Wide ears twitched, listening for a betraying footfall.

It was a careful little mouse. It moved silently and carefully into the still apartment. It was really very careful. It didn’t matter.

Perks exploded out from his coil, striking faster than the mouse could react. The vipers fangs sank through skin and muscle, sliding past bone, piercing organs as they curved back and in. The microscopic amount of venom did almost no additional damage, but it surely didn’t help the mouse any. A few quick gulps later and the mouse was safely dead and swallowed.

Perks curled back up where he was. A few minutes later, apparently uncomfortable, Perks retraced his path and returned to Truth’s chest. There, it got on with the important business of digesting. A surprisingly small bulge made its way down the length of him. It would take time to break down. That suited Perks fine. He was perfectly content, just where he was.