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315. Escape from the City
🕑 Added 2025-02-25 15:00:02 +0000 UTCBrightbriar clapped. The puppets hurried from their busy street scene to return to their former places along the edge of the rows. Despite his heavy heart, Ike had no choice but to fall in. It was that, or die. Die slightly less pathetically than the poor puppet woman, die struggling, die fighting tooth and nail, but die nonetheless. Still, resolve burned in his heart. He knew what he had to do, now. There were no more questions in his heart. Brightbriar had to die.
“I do like what I see, yes,” Madame Perigerre said, pinching her chin. She smiled at Brightbriar. Her face was beautiful enough to stop someone dead, and the smile was like a sunrise after a long night, but it looked hideous to Ike. It was a smile built on oppression, and oppression that she only planned to make yet worse.
“Wonderful. Then let me treat you to a fine dinner,” Brightbriar said. “All grown by the automatons since yesterday. And many puppets will be there was well, for you to question about their experiences and what it’s like to be a puppet.”
“Of course. I would like to know how the cattle feels about changing to such a streamlined and superior form. Can they eat?”
“They can act exactly as they could beforehand,” Brightbriar assured her.
“Excellent.”
The two of them strode onwards. The puppet line held, and held, until Ike wondered if it would ever break. Just as he was at the verge of giving up on it, the puppets all relaxed. The man beside Ike sighed. “Wakes us up at long last, and this is what for? What a load of bullcrap.”
“I know, right?” Ike agreed, barely suppressing the anger in his voice.
“When they said this was the only way to go on living, I thought, well, maybe being a puppet wouldn’t be so bad. Not like I was planning to try and assassinate a Rank 5, you know? And the previous king was kinda shit, too. But it’s been shit so far. Only get revived once in a blue moon, and it’s for a fuckin’ sales pitch? At least lead us into battle, or something.”
“They said?” Ike asked.
“Yeah, you know. The most powerful mages in the city, the…” the man paused. He grasped for the words, then sighed. “Well, I can’t remember their name anymore. Guess Brightbriar took it from me. But they couldn’t beat him, so they convinced us that it was better to join him than to die meaninglessly.”
Ike blinked. Huh? Wasn’t Brightbriar the infiltration type, not the overtly-conquering type? Nothing he’d heard so far had indicated the man had rolled over the regions in war. Certainly, he was fully capable of it, but he seemed to prefer subterfuge. In fact, he’d been, to some extent, counting on that preference of Brightbriar’s as the reason the man hadn’t taken over the region he was from; the man was simply biding his time and advancing his plans on a mage’s near infinite timeline, where a few hundred or thousand years was a blink of the eye. But if he was a conqueror, then why bother?
“You got knocked in the head pretty hard during the transition, didn’t you?” the man commented, noticing his expression. “My sister was like that. Probably that woman’s son was, too.” He nodded at the dead puppet, slowly oozing out on the ground. A few of the other puppets circled around her, debating how to best collect her body.
“I don’t remember much,” Ike said apologetically, playing along.
“His son was our king, remember? Everyone knew he got the position through some underhanded deal or another, and he was horrible at being king. Had no one’s loyalty, and lounged about in the castle all day like a spoiled brat, living in the lap of luxury and ignoring everyone around him, even as we were beset by enemies and calamities, one after another. The cities rose up… not us in particular, but I won’t deny that we were part of the problem. Brightbriar came back to find his son’s castle sieged and the son himself dead, and that was curtains for the region. Razed it to the ground. If he couldn’t beat the other Rank 5s, then his puppet Rank 5s could. It was pretty terrifying how fast it all folded. We figured, better to survive than die, but here we are now. Dead in everything but soul.”
“That sucks,” Ike remarked. There would be no withdraw. No surrender. If Brightbriar offered an out, it was no escape, but simply an entrance to a deeper hell. He locked all this in his mind quietly, without showing any rage on his face.
“Better than being dead for real, I guess.” The man shrugged. He nodded at Ike. “I’m guessing you weren’t selected to go to the dinner?”
“No… I don’t think so,” Ike said.
“Probably for the best. It’ll be a terrible affair, all preening and pretending we love this hell. At least we get to eat good food.”
“Have you seen how it’s grown, though?” Ike asked.
The man grimaced. “Honestly? I’d rather not. I don’t want to see the ruins of the old town, either.”
Ike nodded at him. “What’s…” He started to finish, that all about, then paused for a moment. If he was an amnesiac, then wouldn’t it be more like… “Why are we down here?”
“Huh? Oh, right. Knocked in the head.” He nodded upward. “Back when the cities were still warring Brightbriar, a few hundred years ago or however long we were asleep, there was a real threat of the cities around us destroying us for having given in and ‘gone traitor.’ The neighbors were eyeing us down, too. So we all relocated downward in the middle of the night. Brightbriar and his puppets built this space for us in a week’s time, so it was like we had simply disappeared. Everyone assumed we had simply become part of some far-flung army, and that was that.”
“Not the first time someone’s vanished by going underground,” Ike muttered.
“Huh?”
“Nothing, nothing. Enjoy your party. I’ll stay out here and, uh, enjoy my awake time.”
The man patted him on the shoulder. “You do that. You do that.” With a final wave, he walked off.
Ike shook his head. He nodded at Wisp, who’d wandered off a short ways, pretending not to listen in. She approached, raising her brows.
“What next?”
“We’ve discovered everything we need here. Let’s make a quiet exit and get back to your friend.”
“Quiet? How? That staircase is super visible,” Wisp said. The spiral staircase they had descended on rose straight up over the city, right into the false sky. For the vast majority of the staircase’s height, it stood alone, taller than any buildings, a spire straight into heaven in sight of everyone. On the way down, the man who’d flushed them out of the automaton room had given their descent some legitimacy, but they didn’t have the same cover on the way back up.
Ike grinned. He pointed up and to the left, where a group of kids once more flew on brooms. “Step one: acquire some brooms.”
