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hillsgladehouselibraryTitle: In This Economy I Have To Fight Wizards To Become A Homeowner?!
Rating: Teen
Major Warnings: None
Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Genre: satire, dark comedy
Summary: The cost of housing in San Francisco is too damn high. That's why Ethan Kemmotsu, long-time commuter, first time resident, is taking his condo as his demesne.
Still, keeping hold of a spot to live isn't easy. Ethan will have to face San Francisco's politics and history in order to claim a position in it as a Practitioner. Despite the city's reputation as a bastion of technological advancement, a deep divide runs between the haves and the have-nots. Where will Ethan find his place?
4. Move fast and break things
Night fell over the city. I watched the windows slowly darken, fog fading just enough to reveal stars in the sky above.
As I was scrolling through the news on my phone, I heard the front door creak open of its own accord. A wheel appeared, then the handlebar of a corroded e-scooter, and finally a greasy, grimy deck encrusted with barnacles. A bright light shone from in between the handlebars. The paint on it had worn away to the point that I could see raw metal poking through, all signs of the original brand long since gone. There was no rider on its deck.
I set my phone down on the dining table, turning to face the e-scooter. To my Sight, a choking mass of kegare swelled out around it, so thick I couldn’t see the door behind it. What had happened to this thing? Spiritual pollution wreathed around it to a level I associated with corpses filled with disease, or a murder weapon that had developed a pattern. Something very wrong had happened involving this scooter, in a way that had permanently left its mark.
I felt for the protective talisman strips on my toolbelt. Four left. I’d avoided a fight with the last round of challengers, but maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky this time.
“Were you sent here by anyone? It’s traditional for any strangers responding to a demesne claim to start by introducing themselves,” I said.
The e-scooter reared up onto its back wheel. The tire in the front split down the middle, peeling out to reveal a disk of rusty, teeth-like razors that revved menacingly in the air. I winced at the dangerous display, and more importantly, the sheer amount of filth on this thing that was touching my new hardwood floor.
The lack of an answer was disappointing, but at least it helped build up justification with the spirits in case I needed it later.
“This can still go peacefully,” I said, speaking soothingly as if I was facing a wild animal. “I have offerings prepared for guests, like soy sauce egg and wine. Do you want soy sauce egg and wine? All you need to do is to acknowledge my claim over this condo.”
The e-scooter let out loud, defiant honk.
I sighed. “Okay, so we’re doing this.”
The e-scooter dropped back down onto the ground, and then rushed at me with the razor wheel spinning. I ducked behind an invisible barrier. It didn’t crash, instead turning away smoothly like it knew where the walls were. Black tire tracks trailed out from its wheels over my front entrance, suddenly making me very glad for the slipper socks I had on.
At the next gap in the invisible barriers, it went forward toward the center of the room instead of a right to run over me. It surged into the dining area at full speed, knocking a chair over. Loud screeching sounded as the razor wheel bit deep into wood.
“No, no, that’s new!” I scrambled after the e-scooter.
My best guess was that it was Abyssal in some way. That would explain the outsized kegare around it, its damaged appearance, and its ability to move of its own accord. I reached into my toolbelt for a fine silver necklace, which had been a treasured heirloom passed from daughter to daughter for generations until the last recipient had decided to go child-free and sold it at a yard sale. Well-cared for antiques like that were antithetical to the Abyss. If I could get this onto the e-scooter, I could bind it.
At the sight of the necklace, the e-scooter shied away. It backed out from where it was sawing through my chair to flee into the living area. I followed, brandishing the necklace in front of me.
I had to be smart about this. The scooter couldn’t pass through the invisible barriers I’d set up, but it was faster than I was. I bent to the ground to draw an ink line in between the openings of the barriers. With this, I’d hem it in bit by bit until it had nowhere else left to go.
As I drew, it retreated away from me, trying to get away from the maze of invisible barriers. It pushed over a nearby trash can, spilling last night’s pizza boxes and napkins into my path. I moved over the mess, resisting the urge to swear. It looked like I’d have to sweep and mop the floor tonight after this challenge was done.
Finally, I cornered the e-scooter between a kitchen cabinet and section of invisible barrier. Its back wheel pressed against wooden door, no more space left to run into. As I approached, it honked up a storm, rearing up with its razor wheel spinning madly.
Suddenly, it launched itself at me. The razor wheel just barely missed goring into my thigh as I sidestepped, a spent protective talisman strip drifting down onto the floor. I grabbed the frame with my free hand and pulled the necklace tight around the handlebar like a chain.
The e-scooter bucked against me as I fished through my toolbelt for a paper seal to set onto it. “I bind you with this antithesis to your nature, a well-cared for object that has stood the test of time. Be still!”
The e-scooter shuddered. The engine shut off, and the light between its handlebars flicked off and on again. The rubber tire closed back up over the razor disk. It listed dangerously to the side, no longer able to stay upright under its own power, so I set the kickstand down to stop it from tipping over.
I drew a circle on the floor around the e-scooter.
“As a Sealer, I have a responsibility to keep people safe. That means locking away dangerous Others if I think they’re going to harm undeserving innocents,” I said. “I’m going to ask you some questions now. This will decide whether you go free, so please don’t make this any more difficult for yourself than it has to be. Unless I tell you otherwise, answer me with one honk for yes, two honks for no, and three answers for anything else, such as ‘not applicable’ or ‘I don’t know.’ Understand?”
The e-scooter stayed silent.
“By the binding I have placed on you, do you understand me?”
It let out a sullen honk.
“That’s more like it. Were you sent here on behalf of another Practitioner?”
Two honks. No.
The next set of questions came completely by rote. I’d asked them so many times to so many different captured Others that I had memorized the entire decision tree of what to do and say next based on each possible response.
“Do you want to hurt humans?”
One honk. Yes.
“Do you want to kill humans?”
One honk… two honks. Maybe.
I knew it was Abyssal, so I could skip ahead to the questions for bogeymen and their kin. “Do you want revenge against some subset of humans that fall within your narrative justification?”
One very enthusiastic honk.
“How many humans have you killed within the last 90 days of your time on Earth, not counting any gaps from being in other non-Earth planes of existence? Honk once for each death. Make it slow enough that I can keep track, but not slow enough that you are unnecessarily delaying your answer.”
The e-scooter didn’t respond.
I rubbed my forehead. “Don’t make me ask again. If you reach three separate refusals to answer while talking to me, I will take that into account while deciding whether to seal you away more permanently.”
It continued to stay quiet, long enough that I thought it was choosing to double down in defiance. Then it let out a rapid burst of three honks.
“To be clear, you’ve killed three humans in the last 90 consecutive days of existence on Earth?”
Two honks. No.
“No? Seriously? What does that even mean, no —” I stopped as a thought suddenly occurred to me. “Are you trying to say ‘not applicable’? You’ve killed zero humans within the specified timeframe?”
One honk. Yes.
“Within the specified timeframe, how many humans have you injured badly enough that recovery for them will take longer than three months?”
Two honks. Two victims. Only two, in 90 days. Completely nonlethally on top of that. There were fairy hives that were more dangerous to have around than this e-scooter.
“Have you tried to deceive me at any point in this conversation?”
No.
Ugh. Here was an Other that fit the profile perfectly for some sort of Abyssal sentient weapon, that was covered with spiritual impurity that typically came from disease, violence, filth, or death, and had sullied my entire room with dirty tire tracks that would take forever to clean up. I didn’t want to let it go free. At the same time, there were Others far more dangerous than this that I had decided to release, because they served some vital function in the world or had good reason to go after the targets that they did. This was barely a nuisance worth caring about.
I’d feel a lot better about this either way if I knew what the e-scooter’s whole deal was. With the corrupted river spirit two years back, I’d been able to ask it questions to find out how it had come to be that way. That didn’t work here with an e-scooter that could only honk at me. I had to find some other way to do this.
I leaned over to the ground to draw a large diagnostic diagram, a sort of applied Augury that I’d seen in a book traded by a client as payment. This was based on Western runes instead of my normal hentaigana. Geometric shapes sprang outwards from the center, boxed in by rigid segments and astrological symbols. Unlike the more expressive line quality of Japanese calligraphy, the linework here had the same thickness throughout, as even as I could manage with a pressure-sensitive waterbrush. Western runes were finicky about that type of thing.
In the central circle of the diagram, I pressed in the hanga block of authority. Normally, this type of diagram was far beyond my capabilities. With the accumulated weight of all the family wards behind me, I could force the e-scooter and the rest of our bound Others to take on the burden. The light of the e-scooter dimmed further as the diagram powered on, shapes coming to life to rotate on the floor around it. Meanwhile, I felt just as spry as ever. Sometimes the familial support really did matter.
“Show me the origins of how you became Other,” I ordered.
Whirling rings reached out to consume me.
For most of its life, it was an unaware, inert pile of materials. Across the globe, scores of humans labored to mine its core metals, to work its frame into shape, to engineer its behavior, to transport its parts, to assemble it in factories. The dust of its creation spread wide through disparate lands and lungs alike. Hundreds of hands passed over it in its making, and thousands more worked in support of its formation.
It and its brethren were unleashed in a bustling city by the sea, first of their fleet, ready to fulfill their purpose of ferrying humans wherever they needed to go. And they did. And they ran into pedestrians. And they were abandoned in sidewalks. And they were left uncharged. And they threw riders over potholes. In the first two weeks of their mission, a third of them had been stolen, vandalized, left irreparably unable to perform their duty. And yet more were sent to the city.
They came for it after a few proud months in the streets. Hands closed around its frame, tight with anger, taking it off the ground it knew and traversed so well. There were mutterings about VC greed, about pissing money down the drain, about chaos worshipped like an end in itself, all problems its little scooter microchip was too small to process. All it could understand was utter powerlessness before greater forces that would not hear its pleading, no matter how it tried. Fear and frustrated rage towards uncaring new overlords left permanent imprints in its frame. Then it was thrown into the depths of the bay.
It sank into the water, forgotten and abandoned. In time, it was claimed by watery Abyss. There, simmering in emotions, it found a new purpose: to fight back against the ones it had been created to serve, who had arbitrarily rejected it for doing nothing more than the duty it was designed for.
One day, they would pay. They would all pay, until the scales were finally evened out to answer for all the crimes of its existence.
I was ejected from the vision. My throat felt raw, as if I had been shouting for hours on end with no one to hear me. I got up to my feet, wincing as I remembered what it felt like to have muscles and bone again instead of rigid metal.
With this new information, I reexamined the e-scooter with a critical eye, filling in the pieces that I didn’t have before. The kegare on here wasn’t all from the Abyss. If I squinted, I could see gradations within the cloud, with the heaviest concentration of it around the deck where the battery and other guts would be. The vision had shown lithium-ion, as was standard for this kind of thing. That was a particularly bad one. The bloodshed of so many people working without PPE or proper labor protections to harvest the raw materials from the ground had contaminated the e-scooter long before the Abyss had gotten a hold.
“How many people have died to make you? Do you know?” I demanded.
It honked weakly two times.
I felt a sudden urge to cast it back into the Abyss. The whole thing was irrevocably tainted from start to finish. The best thing to do was to cover up the shame and hope to start over again with something that had a less bloody history.
Then I glanced at my phone, sitting innocently on my table, and my laptop stored away on my bedroom desk. The batteries and chips in these were made of the same thing as the battery and chip in the e-scooter. It was all tainted in the same way. Years back, I had trained my Sight to focus perception of kegare to humans and Others alone, so it was easy to forget the deaths and injuries that had gone into these things if I wasn’t looking for it. Nothing in the modern age was pure. I tried to keep myself spiritually clean and avoid buying things that I heard too many bad things about in the news, but the list was long and it was so easy to reach for the cheapest thing on the shelf in the store aisles. It wasn’t like I could become a hermit farmer when too much dirt was kegare anyways.
Was it fair to condemn this Other for things that I gave a pass to in my daily life?
I let out a sigh. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I didn’t have a good standard to fall back on for this, and I needed to be careful about the precedent I was setting in my Demesne claim for the future. None of this felt good, but I’d try for the least bad option here.
“I’ll tell you what, I’m willing to let you go free, if and only if you agree to some things,” I said. “First, you need to acknowledge me as the rightful holder of this demesne. Second, you need to affirm in full view of all spirits present that you will never deliberately kill a human being, and that you will try to keep any injuries given under three months of healing.
“I know that’s a hard sell, but hear me out. Making enough of an impact on the world to stay out of the Abyss is really hard even if you are a perfect murder machine, and you’re nowhere near close to that. You have a better angle based on revenge. The company that made you is headquartered in this city, and the CEO said he uses rental scooters to get to and from the trains. Don’t you want to strike back higher in the chain than picking fights with whatever random people are around? You have an opportunity to give him the worst ride he’s ever had in his life. If you agree to the restrictions I just listed, I’ll help you film the whole thing and put it on social media. That should provide enough ties to our world to keep you away from the Abyss for a while.”
The e-scooter stayed silent for a few seconds, long enough that I was getting worried. Then it gave a single, blaring honk.
“Thank you. I’m going to release you now. Within three days of when my demesne claim ends, I’ll summon you so you can get your revenge.”
I lifted the paper seal and necklace off of the e-scooter. Underneath the paper, an ink marking had been printed onto its frame, a physical reminder of our agreement. As its binding fell away, the kickstand flipped up, and it moved back to a completely upright position.
It rolled hesitantly over the lines of its circle, as if testing to see whether it would be allowed to. When nothing happened, it increased its speed, zooming out the same way it had come in. The front door automatically opened and shut around it, the spirits in the condo already beginning to respond to my will.
I waited until I knew the e-scooter was out in the building hallway. Then I sat down on the couch, burying my face in a throw pillow to let out a muffled groan. Today was only day one of my demesne claim, with two more left to go. I’d made multiple enemies of neighboring Practitioners, burned through more than half of my protective talismans, and gotten my entire floor plus some furniture mucked up by an Abyssal sentient e-scooter. None of it would get better from here.
Time to get in as much cleaning as I could before I slept, even though deep down I suspected I'd never get the stains out of anything that actually mattered.
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Date: 2024-11-24 02:22 am (UTC)