203, 2/2

Erick’s day was not over, for he had at least one more meeting.

He held this one at Yggdrasil, on a little gazebo deep in the big guy’s fiery green canopy, behind many, many leaves. It would be rather hard to see Erick’s chosen location through [Long Range Scry]s, or any other sort of viewing magic, but he still put up Privacys around the space. This needed to be a secured talk and the words of Portal’s Trademasters had struck a chord.

Zolan had only been informed that ‘there would be a private meeting’, so Erick had had the rest of his evening blocked off for this.

And so, Erick sat alone in his nice little gazebo atop Yggdrasil, sipping a fizzy drink made from berries and sugar and his own CO2-condensing Particle Magic. It had turned out to be a rather nice drink which was different from the usual sorts, of tea, coffee, water, and beer, filling a different sort of niche, near to lemonade (which was another drink Erick had invented; Veird only had limeade which wasn’t very popular) but not quite lemonade at all. Dinner was still a while away, so Erick was still hungry, but Poi was working on that right now down at the house, making some fish that had been sent by Treehome as a gift a few hours ago. It was a gift of scarlet king fish, and Poi was very happy to have such good fish again.

The sun was setting somewhere to the west, beyond the green, but it was impossible to tell that the sun had set here inside Yggdrasil’s crown.

No one had shown up yet for the meeting, but that was fine. This meeting was a test. Apparently, though, as Erick sipped his drink and had to refill it, he realized he would have to actually make an effort if he wanted his ‘test’ to happen.

Erick blipped his drink and the remainder back to the house, and then he returned his attentions to his current location.

With a small cast of [Fairy Item], Erick created a pachinko machine. Such machines came in a ton of different varieties, but this version was a tilted table with a slot at the top, a bunch of pins in a rough triangle shape up and down that table, and a bunch of collection spots at the bottom. A ball placed into the slot at the top would roll down, randomly bounce around on the pins, and eventually end up into one of the collection spots, based on probability calculations that were beyond Erick.

Maybe a hundred drops would end up looking like a bell curve? Maybe a hundred drops would end up looking like an even distribution? Or maybe Erick had accidentally made a pachinko machine which would primarily drop the ball in only one slot? He didn’t rightly know.

All he truly knew was that he had a bunch of catcher slots at the bottom, and that only one of them was labeled. In crimson red ink, that one slot held the words ‘Kill 1000 people’.

This was a test of Benevolence, after all. A terrible test, for sure, but a necessary one.

… And yet, nothing had happened after conjuring the machine. No one showed up to stop him. Not a single message from Rozeta, or otherwise… But then again, ‘kill 1000 people’ was not a worldwide threat.

With his heart rate rising, Erick knew he would actually need to play the machine—

Erick sweated, sitting there in the cool air that filtered through Yggdrasil’s crown, as a terrible thought came to him. Perhaps killing a thousand people wasn’t a big enough deal to try and stop? Was he… Was he ‘too big to fail’ now? That thought hit Erick rather damned hard. He did not like that someone would not try to stop him from killing ‘just a thousand people’. But then again, what was a thousand souls to a Gate Network? Or when held against the weight of new worlds?

Nothing.

That was what a thousand souls amounted to.

Nothing.

This whole experiment had a problem, though. Maybe no one had shown up because Erick knew, deep down, that he wasn’t really going to do such a heinous act. How could he even consider such an awful action!? He couldn’t. But with this pachinko machine of death and destruction… The threat was out there. The possibilities of death for a thousand innocent people lay in one simple… tiny… little… metal ball.

Erick held that metal ball in his hand. He put it into the machine and the ball started rolling, hitting pins as gravity pulled it downward.

~plink plink plink plink~

~clack~

Erick’s heart had been in his throat, briefly, but now it settled back down. The ball rested in an empty space; a null result. Nothing would come of such a result. Erick conjured another metal ball, and waited, his heart seeming to move back into his throat with each beat.

He had specifically told Poi about this, before he set out to do this whole experiment, while also telling him not to tell anyone what he was planning on. Poi had shrugged, and said sure. He also didn’t think Erick had it in him to follow through with his test, so there was no harm in trying; no harm in testing Benevolence. No harm except for the mental harm that Erick was committing upon himself, at this very moment. Poi had told Erick that he probably shouldn’t even try this…

But Erick had to know. He had to test himself.

And he had to know how good [Benevolent Sight] was.

Erick had not told Aisha; he had not told Teressa. Those were the two people with [Benevolent Sight], and the two people who might be able to pick up on this experiment.

Aisha was back at the House. She had been working lightly in the Benevolence Research Tower in order to test the plants growing at the Benevolence dungeon. She was still a bit stiff in the joints, though, and she had been prone to some uncalled-for outbursts among her employees and everyone else she met, and so she had ended the day early to head to her room and sleep in her tub. But she was still there, doing her job for several hours. Only now was she sleeping.

Teressa was clearly still recovering a lot, though. After her prognostication battle with Treehome yesterday she had gone to bed, woken up for meals, and went right back to bed. She was currently sleeping, too.

Perhaps it was a bit cruel of Erick to try out this experiment right now, when both his prognosticators were sleeping and had soul damage.

… Life was cruel, and people needed to be ready for war at any time.

Erick put the second metal ball into the pachinko machine. Plink, plink, plink, the metal ball bounced around. It fell into another unimportant slot of the machine. ‘Kill 1000 people’ remained empty.

Erick conjured another metal ball.

The ball went in the slot. It plinked around. It fell into an empty box at the bottom. One by one, Erick conjured metal balls and slipped them in the slot. Plink, plink, plink. Clack. Clack. Clack. He went faster after the seventh null result.

Erick conjured the eleventh ball and placed—

Lightning flickered, and Erick pulled his hand away. The ball remained in his hand. He looked around, and noticed that there had been no lightning anywhere except for in his mind, or perhaps inside his veins. The power in his soul had barely moved at all, and maybe it hadn’t actually moved and he had imagined the whole thing.

But he had certainly imagined something.

Had that been a success? If not a success in drawing Aisha and Teressa out of their slumber, it had been a success of Erick testing himself.

… Maybe?

Erick tried putting the ball in the hole again. The ball went in easily and began plinking around. It landed, of course, in an empty catcher. Erick conjured another ball, and kept going.

On ball #26 he got another reaction. With his hand holding the ball in the slot, he waited a moment for the imaginary lightning to stop striking. And then the lightning passed. He put the ball through the slot. It landed in an empty catcher.

By now, some of the catchers in the middle and one on the far left were halfway full. By now, the only thing Erick knew was that he had not managed to make the pachinko machine distribute the balls evenly.

The killer box remained empty.

Erick got another reaction at ball #36, and then again at #39. He didn’t get his next reaction till ball #54. By ball #74, the slots to both sides of the kill box were filled. The reactions came faster and faster as the machine itself began to fill, and there were fewer and fewer places for the ball to end up outside of the kill box.

Erick kept putting balls into the top slot. The lightning became difficult to ignore, but only because Erick was truly focused on it. If he wasn’t looking for the reaction, he might merely pass off the feelings he was getting as pinging against his superstitions, or something similar. ‘Don’t walk under that ladder’! ‘Be wary of that black cat crossing your path!’ That sort of thing.

But Erick got more and more reactions, he realized that every time was just as bad as saying the wrong words to Kirginatharp, or to Rozeta, or to anyone else in power who had the ability and skill to end him, if they wanted. These imaginary flickers of lightning were what he felt when he fucked up a meeting, or tanked a negotiation in the worst way possible.

Erick wasn’t sure what to think about that.

There were a lot of nuances to this whole Benevolence thing that were freaking him out, but not because he didn’t feel in control of himself. Benevolence acted exactly how he wanted it to act. And yet…

Erick looked at his pachinko machine and held up one final ball. He pushed that metal ball to the slot, and felt his insides tingle a bit as though he was about to do something inherently wrong.

… He pushed the ball into the hole, anyway, pushing past his hesitation at the same time.

The reaction was immediate and exactly what Erick had been waiting and hoping for, though it did not happen here. Down in his home and over in his House, where Ophiels watched and waited, Teressa shot up out of bed and Aisha pulled together, waking up from her ooze form and becoming just a person sitting in a stone tub. Both of them instantly blipped away—

They reappeared on the other side of the gazebo, both looking terribly tired, both focused on Erick and on the pachinko machine, and upon the ball headed directly for—

With a bit of Benevolent light, Erick blocked the kill catcher, instead catching the metal ball himself. He snaked the ball back up and out of the pachinko machine then set the ball down on the table between him, Teressa, and Aisha. By the time their sleep-stricken eyes looked at Erick, and at the machine, Erick realized that they were only confirming what their own [Future Sight]s had shown them.

“Hello, Teressa, Aisha.” Erick said, “Sorry for waking you.”

Panic passed.

Teressa collapsed into her seat, her eyelids already drooping a bit, as she said, “I’m ready whenever needed, Boss.”

Aisha waved a hand and sat down too, saying, “I’m surprised this test worked as well as it did.”

Erick said, “I don’t think I could have actually gone through with it, so your guess as to why it worked is just as good as mine.”

With half-closed eyes, Aisha said, “You worked along a part of an Element that it is uniquely stressed to sense, plucking it like a spider’s thread. It doesn’t matter that there were no flies on the web and that there never were.”

Teressa sat back in her chair. “Sounds correct to me.”

Erick said, “I’ll make this meeting as quick as I can. Have either of you two discovered anything about Benevolence that I should know about? The basics of it all?”

Teressa briefly looked lost, and then she looked to Aisha.

Aisha breathed in, then said, “All Elemental Bodies generally allow for several basic uses. These are as follows:

“Sensing through the Element, and/or sensing that Element.

“Manifestation of the Element through various different ways.

“Shaping and control of the Element that already exists in the world.

“And then, finally, union with the Element which leads a bunch of different movement techniques, as a baseline.

“I use ‘Element’ in the loosest sense of the word, here. Elemental Stone is not stone, yet it is stone that one [Stone Body]s through when using that Elemental Body. Similar cases are had for Fire, Water, Air, Light, and Shadow. These basic 6 Elements exhibit the basic breadth of various skills associated with all Elemental Bodies; they are the baseline upon which all other Elemental Bodies are judged.

“The Esoteric Elemental Bodies are slightly more nuanced. They usually exhibit all the normal abilities that a normal Elemental Body has, in the case where someone is actually able to get an Elemental Body out of, say, Blood, which is rather rare… Esoteric Elemental Bodies tend to go far beyond the normal Elemental Bodies in very specific ways.

“Elemental Blood is very good at manipulating fleshy bodies. It’s also great at compounding effects and generally reinforcing magic it is a part of, as long as that magic is treated as a living thing that is capable of strengthening itself.

“Therefore, it could be said that Elemental Blood is uniquely good at Shaping and control of the element it is named after. Since most people are made of blood, this gives Elemental Blood, when used on a person, a variety of accidentally or purposefully corruptive effects. It also makes Elemental Blood great at hurting fleshy people.

“Elemental Mercy is very good at sending someone into a negative Health coma, which is about the easiest way to subdue someone without actually killing them… In most cases. Mercy also turns all other magic where it is used into something less directly harmful. Mercy is very good at cloying onto other mana when used in magic and producing this effect.

“Therefore, it could be said that Elemental Mercy is uniquely great at manifesting itself and making other mana take on Mercy-like effects.

“Elemental Benevolence seems to be uniquely good at various sensory-based magics, and in specific scenarios; sensing loss of life, guiding hands to better outcomes for all, and other general prognostications in those sorts of directions. Benevolence also has capabilities in the manifestation arena, for it makes plants. Other than that, Benevolence is rather terrible at directly causing magical damage, doing less actual damage to living things than other magics; the effect-per-mana is terrible. Of course, we haven’t tested Benevolence against a Benevolence-approved target yet, but we haven’t found one of those, either—” Aisha briefly brightened as she remembered something. “It’s also great at buffing and debuffing, as well. A former half-dragon from Ar’Cosmos— Ah. You know Clavog, sorry. My mind is rather frayed right now— Clavog made a [Warcry] which buffs him and his side of a battle, and debuffs the enemy. So that was a rousing success.”

Erick perked up.

Teressa perked up, too. “Shouting Magic?”

“Oh yes.” Aisha brought out a pair of blue boxes and handed them out, saying, “Much improved from Clavog’s normal version, too.”

 

Aisha said, “The difference is practically Surface and Underworld, though it does have that ‘may’ clause in there. Of course, [Benevolent Rally] is a higher tier magic, made from [Warcry], but you don’t usually get such a good outcome from adding more Elements to that Carnage-based magic. Not a lot mixes well with Carnage, but in this case, Benevolence does.”

Teressa jerked. “[Warcry] is Elemental Carnage?”

Aisha looked to Teressa. “You didn’t know?”

“No…” Teressa looked at the boxes again, saying, “I did not. I used to do this sort of magic all the time back when I had a… A team. I didn’t know it was actually Carnage. I thought it was Thunder?—”

Teressa stopped.

Aisha did not speak.

Both of them were shocked to attention, their sleepiness completely gone, and Erick paused, too.

For a sudden oddness had occurred.

As though Erick had been given the script of a play he had practiced several times before, but which he was still wildly uncomfortable with, Erick woodenly followed along the small prompts in his head, asking, “Would you like to learn more about this Shouting Magic, Teressa?”

Teressa’s eyes flickered between Aisha and Erick as she spoke from the same script, “I would. I haven’t done it in a while, but it might be good to try again.” She looked firmly at Aisha, as though that was what the script suggested, saying, “And I want to start working with the Benevolence team.”

Aisha broke from the script, whispering, “I am unsure if we should continue this.”

Teressa whispered, “I think we should.”

Erick whispered, “We’re doing this.”

Aisha stopped whispering, picking up her cue again, as she said, “We welcome you to the tower, then, Miss Rednail… But of course we would have anyway, I think.”

“You can call me Teressa, if I can call you Aisha.” Teressa said, “Though I honestly do not know if you even have a last name so I’ve been calling you Aisha in my head this whole time, anyway.”

“I do not have a last name, actually.” Aisha said, “And Aisha is my name, so that is perfectly fine, Teressa. As soon as you are healed, I expect you to be at the Tower as soon as you can appear… If that is okay with you, my king?”

Erick said, “It is.”

And then the script broke.

A moment passed as everyone in the gazebo felt as though puppet strings had been cut.

Teressa went, “Huh!”

Aisha breathed out, then said, “Okay then.”

Erick said, “That was weird, but fine. It was fine, right?—” He had a thought. “That was the first time I have actually experienced such a hyperliminal Benevolence Event— Nope. Wait. Back at the end of the Path, with Melemizargo, Rozeta, and the other one… And probably a lot more before that, actually.”

Teressa rolled her eyes, “Well that was the first time for me.”

Aisha stared at Teressa. “Perhaps my decorum is not up to what it should be right now, but you really just rolled your eyes at the mention of two gods and one almost-god? And a worldwide important event, as though it was a mere… happenstance?”

Teressa chuckled. “I might not have dealt with any of it personally, but I saw a lot of it first hand— Second hand? Second hand.”

“You were right the first time,” Erick said, “First hand.”

Teressa conceded the point, saying, “I’m not all here, either. Blame my lack of decorum on the… Whatever damage.”

Erick smiled softly, then said, “Sorry to drag you both out like this, but that test needed to happen, and now some things need to be said. Afterward, both of you can go back to bed. And take tomorrow off.” Erick said, “That means you too, Aisha.”

Teressa breathed out, relaxing. She blinked long, and then forced her eyes back to wide open.

Aisha merely nodded, and waited for Erick to say what he was going to say.

Erick said, “I think Benevolence allows the user to see the future in ways that no other Element truly allows.” Aside from maybe time, but Erick was not in control of Elemental Time; he was in control of Elemental Benevolence. “Therefore, I want both of you to only consider reporting to me about the larger things; the events which will cause death and harm on a large scale. Earlier, Teressa, you told me about a prognostication battle with Treehome that you won. I thank you for coming to me with that, but I don’t need to know small things like that.”

Teressa woke up a bit more to nod; she had heard and understood.

Aisha was briefly stricken with worry. “You had a prognostication battle, Miss Rednail?”

“You can call me ‘Teressa’, please, if I can call you ‘Aisha’ instead of ‘Overseer Aisha’— Uh… I already said that.” Teressa confided, “I also just remembered that you had a title and I should have used it. And yeah. I did have a prog battle.”

Aisha shook her head a little.

Erick said, “You two can talk about that later, but from what I see, Aisha did not have one of those battles at all, and this concerns you, Aisha.”

“It does. Greatly.” Aisha said, “But… I’ll take your offer of talking about it later.”

Erick nodded, saying, “I think Elemental Benevolence will allow for a great deal of abuse by many people who might learn how to wield it properly, and I don’t want that to happen. People should still have free will. People should not be beholden to whatever Benevolence tells them is the best path forward, and based on what we all just experienced, this is very possible. This determinism is a path that I want to cut off right now, before anyone goes too far down it.” He added, “Obviously we should test all this, but I don’t want this to become how we solve problems; we will not be ensorcelling people in Benevolence, like how one does with Fae Magic, or Mind Magic. If I need to do something like the Mind Mages in order to prevent abuse through Benevolence then I will, but for now… This is where we are at.”

Teressa simply nodded, as though she was seeing a confirmation of something she had already expected to see.

Aisha was torn for some reason. “You want… A less deterministic universe?”

“For the small things, yes. And… This is a very complicated topic that we can have again, later.” Erick said, “But to lay out what I don’t want to happen: For instance, Treehome was thinking of breaking Yggdrasil from my soul, of breaking the seal the gods put on him to keep him a part of me until a hundred years pass, but they decided not to because they understood that was a bad idea without needing to be told.

“This is something that I do not need to be made aware of. The knowledge of that event caused me to almost damage relations with Treehome, but I held back, of course… Which might be due to Benevolence or maybe I did that myself, and since we’re one and the same, then there is functionally no difference, but still.

“I thought about it for a day, and I realize that almost every single nation out there has probably gone through the same sort of thought process as Treehome went through with Yggdrasil, but for some reason, Treehome’s efforts actually pinged Teressa’s mana sense.

“I don’t need to know about that stuff. No one does.

“But in a larger, yet still smaller sense, there’s the fact that you both responded to this little pachinko machine. And then we three had that little guidance situation, there.” Erick said, “I can easily see someone else doing something similar in various games of chance around the world, or in other scenarios, and using some sort of [Benevolence Sight] in order to win, or whatever.

Find this and other great novels on the author’s preferred platform. Support original creators!

“A person might decide that if they win this next bet, then they won’t go out and murder a thousand people, but then Benevolence pings them and tells them not to bet, so they don’t bet. Or, someone could look at a battlefield and decide some military action through some similar action.” Erick said, “It’s all theoretical, but I could see it happening. There’s no other prognostication-focused Element, after all, and so this is the problem I foresee Benevolence having.

“So, when you’re better, we’re going to see if we can actually do stuff like this, and if I am worrying for nothing, or if I am worrying for real. The outcomes of these tests will determine how open we are about putting Benevolence into public magics, and other small decisions.” Erick finished with, “Perhaps we use Benevolence to guide various courtroom outcomes, or, we keep it behind closed doors and use it to keep the universe safe.”

Aisha had a laser-like focus on Erick’s words, but she was still only half-cognizant.

Teressa was 75% of the way to sleeping in her chair.

“… I’m going to blip you back to where you were, okay? You both need more sleep. And also some soul balm palm sap, or something?” Erick said, “I’ll see about buying some from Stratagold, or something.”

Aisha shook her head. “It’s not soul damage. It’s… It’s soul damage. Ah. Words… Words not wording well.”

Teressa jerked awake. “I’m awake!”

“And you can go back to bed now,” Erick said.

And then Erick blipped both of them back to their beds. Teressa instantly curled up with her blankets and started snoring softly. Aisha remained human-woman-formed for a brief seven seconds, then she dissolved into a gasoline-sheened mercury-like puddle, only kept together because she was inside a bathtub bed. She burbled a bit, then settled down. She slept.

Erick wondered… Had it been necessary to have this conversation right now?

Yes.

These words had needed to be said, and Aisha and Teressa would both remember this, even though they had been halfway out of it while they were here.

It was time to move onto another meeting, anyway.

Erick was alone again in his gazebo as he called out, “Rozeta? I need to talk about [Reincarnation].”

Rozeta stepped out of a flash of gold fire and into the gazebo, wearing her white human wrought form. “Hello, Erick.” She took her seat. “I suspect we’ll need to get Phagar in on this too, but we might not. For clarity: What is your exact concern?”

Erick got right into it, “Is [Reincarnation] going to be a problem if I solve death? I can already see myself headed in that direction, but I don’t want to cause a worldwide incident or a Forgotten Campaign.”

“… Ah.” Rozeta nodded, then she looked to the side, asking, “Phagar?”

In another splash of gold fire Phagar stepped into the space, looking like Erick but different. The God of the End and Time took a seat, and the world beyond the gazebo seemed to slow. “Hello, Erick. Rozeta. Talking about [Reincarnation], then?”

“And the solving of death, and the possibility of needing a Forgotten Campaign,” Rozeta said.

Erick almost said something more, but he decided to let Rozeta’s words ride.

Wasting no time, Phagar said, “Some people will accept your gift Erick, and you’re free to do whatever you want, but a lot of people experience life and then they are done. They don’t want to go through it again, no matter what offers you give them. They want to move on to the realms of the gods, to be in everlasting joy, or to become a part of the oceans, or the wind, or an angel or a demon. All you’re doing is offering another route, and a great many people don’t want immortality. They never will.”