In This Economy I Have To Fight Wizards To Become A Homeowner? | Part 7

[sunlit_skycat]

Title: In This Economy I Have To Fight Wizards To Become A Homeowner?!
Rating: Mature
Major Warnings: Racism, violence, police brutality
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 place 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 site of modern technological advancement, a deep divide runs between the haves and the have-nots. Who gets to control what land has always been deeply contested within California. Ethan's demesne won't come without a fight.

 

7. I promise I am a useful model minority, not a threat

 

Unlike yesterday, I didn’t receive another challenger for the rest of the morning, or even the afternoon. I brought out my sketchbook to doodle, filling the page with a series of warmups. Every hour I took a break to stare out the windows and stretch my hands out.

Around 5:30, I felt a change in the air. The sound of cars outside faded to nothingness, and the humming of my refrigerator abruptly cut out. Someone — or something — was here, and the spirits were paying attention.

I closed my sketchbook and got up from the table.

The front door opened of its own accord. Two women walked into my condo, both white and dressed far more formally than usual.

The first looked around 80 or so, judging by the number of wrinkles on her face and the white peaking through the roots of her blond bob. She wore a gray pantsuit and high heels that clicked as she walked. Her eyes were like golden coins laying on silver, an obvious sign that she was using her Sight. She didn’t bother to hide the sneer on her face as she looked over the room.

The second was around my age, with a friendly smile that was slightly obscured by the built-in microphone of the headset she wore. She wore a light cardigan over a pencil skirt in a style that I had only seen at the oldest, most uptight non-tech companies around here. To my Sight, black censor bars ran over her eyes and mouth. A grid of city streets ran over her skin. Kegare clouded the air around her, stretching dark fingers towards the other along the shimmering line of a familiarship bond.

I didn’t know what to make of such a stark split. Kegare transmitted along chains of association, so Practitioners and familiars usually ended up marked in similar ways due to sheer exposure to each other. Did this woman not hang out with her familiar? Or was this because of some Law manipulation?

“Hello, Mr. Kemmotsu. I am Ms. Doyle, of the Doyle Incarnate Mages, and director of the San Francisco Lord’s Advisory Board. I am accompanied by my assistant as witness to these proceedings,” the first woman said. “It seems that you are performing an unauthorized demesne claim within the bounds of my family’s interests in FiDi. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I took a deep breath, feeling through the paper talismans on my toolbelt as I tried to settle myself. I had three harm redirection strips left. Vikram, idiot that he was, had blown through more than that in a single fight, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

The Doyles were infamous across the Bay Area, even down in Campbell where the happenings of San Francisco were rarely relevant to us. During the 1950s, they built an astrological network in the offices of the Financial District to channel Prosperity Incarnate to do their bidding, and they had ridden off that success since. The Doyles had gotten into long feuds with multiple different Practitioner groups over the decades, and every time they ended up on top. I didn’t want to become another story for people to gossip about at the dinner table.

I mirrored her greeting in as polite a tone I could manage. “Hello, Ms. Doyle. Let me address those things one by one. This is Soma, isn’t it? South of Market, not the Financial District?”

Next to Doyle, her unintroduced familiar opened a notepad and began writing something I couldn’t see.

“The commercial real estate brokers call this area South Financial District,” Doyle said. “They know the area they describe.”

“Sure, okay. Before purchasing this condo, I made sure to get permission from the Board to move in to this address. I know that you were CCed in the emails approving it, and nobody objected then. That seems like clear authorization to me. I can forward you the email chain if you want to look at it again.”

“I remember what the email said. You never mentioned you wanted to take a demesne,” Doyle said sharply. “I had to learn about that from Mr. Petrov, who alerted me to the situation.”

Her familiar kept scribbling silently behind her.

“Josh and I had a business disagreement yesterday. Whatever he said, he might have overstated it,” I said slowly. “I didn’t intend to mislead the Board. If anybody had asked about my plans, I would have answered honestly. I’m performing this ritual on my own private property, which I have bought and paid for. It won’t cut off anyone’s access to preexisting public space.”

“I’m not a fool, Kemmotsu,” Doyle hissed. “You think I don’t know what this looks like? A family sends a single bachelor to infiltrate a major city, find a wife, and establish a presence that builds over the generations until we are overrun. A demesne isn’t just a home, it’s an investment to gain power over the area around it.”

My stomach dropped. What sort of nonsense was this?

I held my hands away from my toolbelt, continuing to speak in that same calm tone even though I felt anything but. “I don’t want to take territory from other Practitioners. My family are Sealers. We don’t work with Incarnates like yours does, so we have no motivation to compete over resources or anything else. Chances are, you’ve benefited from our work without realizing it, such as the r —”

Doyle turned away from me, snapping her fingers. “Lee, I grow tired of his blathering. Go teach Kemmotsu a lesson.”

Her familiar put away the notepad, nodding. “Of course, Ms. Doyle. I’ll be right on it.”

No. I’d been trying to keep this conversation civil, but it seemed like my efforts didn’t matter at all. I stepped back through an invisible barrier.

Lee’s body melted like wax, flowing into the form of a much larger and physically imposing man in a dark blue uniform covered with a tactical vest. There was a metal star in front and a patch on the side marking him as belonging to San Francisco Police. His name was embroidered over a pocket. He — She? They? — made eye contact with me as he drew out a long, three-foot black baton, swishing it through the air.

Behind him, Doyle raised a silver and gold medallion into the air, embossed with the symbol of circular coins sprouting from a tree. “I, Heidi Doyle, call on the blessings of Prosperity Incarnate to safeguard me and my valuables against this trespasser.”

Light radiated outwards from the medallion to paint my condo in a sharp golden glow. Tiny numbers streamed through the air around her in digital print, constantly changing values as they flipped between green and red faster than I could keep track. Jagged lines raced up and down around them. A white picket fence appeared around the perimeter of the light, separating Doyle away from everyone else in the room.

The whole thing was a foot taller than I was, maybe climbable if I really tried, but I didn’t want to enter a hostile Practitioner’s summoned space. I retreated backwards through the room, trying to avoid both the golden area and Lee charging toward me.

“Don’t you dare call me a trespasser when you are in my condo. This is my property, and you’re not welcome here!” I said.

The shapeshifting and facial censoring in my Sight made it likely that Lee was some kind of doppelganger. He might be tied to city spirits in some way, but I couldn’t be sure in this short of a time period. Not ideal. The standard banes against doppelgangers were to set up a hall of mirrors or a circle of unchanging lead, which I didn’t have on hand. I’d have to try to rack up the coup and claim by attacking his identity instead.

“I bind you once, Lee, by the rules that that should govern your role, if you are a real police officer. Do you have a warrant from a judge allowing you to be in here? I don’t consent to police entering my private residence,” I said.

He paused mid-step through a gap in the barriers.

“It’s an emergency. You’re defending me against the threat he poses,” Doyle suggested from inside her golden bubble.

Before I could respond, Lee lunged and struck me in the leg. His baton just barely missed the edge of my thigh, and a talisman strip fluttered off my toolbelt. My reflexes kicked in a half second later, and I ran through the next barrier to get away from him. A second talisman strip fell off as he he missed hitting my ankle.

Lee bounced back as he hit the invisible barrier. He recovered faster than I had hoped for, catching himself before he fell and continuing to move forwards at a slower pace. Instead of rushing ahead, he waved the baton in front of him, trying to prod at what was open air and what wasn’t.

“Is that all you have, cowardliness and Eastern tricks? Let me show you what real Practice looks like,” Doyle taunted.

She held the medallion up again, and the golden light expanded, the fence moving outwards with it. It didn’t stop as it caught me in the face, pushing me away from Doyle’s position with slow, inexorable force. I grabbed onto a bookshelf to try to stay in place. The fence didn’t seem to care at all, passing through the furniture harmlessly while continuing to force me away. I was being funneled right into Lee’s path.

I couldn’t let Doyle set the narrative to the spirits of who I was or what I was doing here.

“I’m responding rationally to the Other you sicced on me! We can talk cowardliness when you stop hiding behind your giant fence!”

I ducked through a new invisible barrier, just in time to avoid another swing of Lee’s baton. That bought me a few seconds, but it didn’t solve my wider problem, that I was trapped in a slowly shrinking space with someone else that had a weapon and knew how to use it. Lee wasn’t making any easy mistakes that I could cite for instances of coup. Maybe I could improvise something with the bathroom mirror and my phone camera set to selfie mode… but no, that was on the other side of the white fence. I couldn’t reach that from here.

Whatever Doyle’s summoned Incarnate space did, I had to risk entering. I climbed onto a nearby chair and jumped, trying to reach as high as I could. My fingers caught around the top of the spear-shaped pickets, and I began pulling the rest of myself up. One arm over the top. Then the next.

Doyle drew back away from me. “You can use all the weasel words you want, but your actions reveal your true intentions. You covet the Prosperity my family has cultivated, don’t you?” she spat. “I won’t let you steal my grandchildrens’ rightful inheritance.”

Under my fingers, the fence turned as smooth as glass. No matter how I tried to hold on, I could only slide down away from the top. My slipper socks squeaked loudly against the suddenly slippery white pickets. My last talisman strip fell off just as the edges of the pickets turned sharp enough to cut. I hastily eased my grip. Was there any way to still get over the fence like this?

Then Lee yanked on my toolbelt from behind, dragging me away from the fence. He hit me in the knee, and I crumpled onto the floor with a yelp. A wave of pain swept my leg. I tried to get back up onto my feet, but I could barely get my knee to bend properly, and putting any amount of weight on it was agony.

Lee towered over me in his crisply pressed uniform. I scooted back as best as I could, but he easily followed, a wide grin spreading across his face like this was some sort of game. He lashed out again with the baton, this time at my face. I instinctively raised my hand to block the blow, and it landed on my forearm with a crack. Once. Twice. Three times. He didn’t stop.

This couldn’t be happening. I curled up into a fetal position, trying and mostly failing not to whimper in pain. My right arm and leg both screamed at me from where I’d been hit, competing for attention in contrasting and opposite ways. Any plans on what to do were dashed from my mind. And I was bleeding from a cut in my arm, which brought kegare, which brought weakness, and that strangely felt more upsetting than anything else I could focus on right now.

With my good hand, I tried to reach for a waterbrush, but Lee easily knocked it away. Then he stomped down on the plastic barrel, sending ink spurting out everywhere onto the floor.

Doyle gripped the pickets of the fence, peering through at me. “You’re outmatched, Kemmotsu. Forfeit your demesne claim, and this won’t have to get ugly.”

Lee pulled back to let me speak.

“Why… why do this? I just want to live here. I followed all the rules your Board set,” I pled.

“Why?” Doyle echoed. “It’s simple. No matter what you do or say, you people carry foreign patterns that confuse the universe. I can’t let you establish your ways with a demesne this close to our network and risk that our diagrams stop bringing Prosperity to us. My family will not fall to the Oni agenda.”

I flinched. She might as well have called me a slur. Back in the late 1800s, the Oni had risen up to butcher their way through East and Southeast Asia, and had killed my entire family except for my great-great-great-whatever-grandfather who had hidden himself in a pile of corpses to survive. Despite the fact that most of the casualties were Asian, white people remained obsessed with the idea that we must have teamed up with the Oni to gain subversive new anti-Seal tricks. I’d never even seen an Oni before. Was there any way to persuade Doyle I wasn’t some slant-eyed, buck-toothed Oni saboteur that could never coexist with Western Practice solely because I was Japanese?

“I need your answer. Tell me that you’re forfeiting this demesne, Kemmotsu,” she said.

The light glinted gold off the edge of Lee’s baton as he tapped it in his hands. There was no way I could fight any of them in this condition. What if I caved to Doyle’s demands, and accepted that I’d have a condo but not a demesne? Would that appease Doyle enough to keep me safe?

No matter what I did, Doyle would always view me as a danger, to be crushed as much as she could get away with.

I pushed myself up into a sitting position. “If I die here — I maintain wards for a quake rudiment. Estimated 6.0 magnitude minimum, maybe bigger if it goes free. Right by the Financial District,” I gritted out. “You can’t have an astrological setup to control Prosperity when it’s been leveled to the ground.”

I was omitting a lot of details, but she didn’t need to know that. Even if I died here, the rest of my family would take up my maintenance slot in the rotations. They wouldn’t let a whole city collapse just to spite one paranoid orientalist living there. Probably.

Doyle’s grip tightened on the medallion. “I can find someone else to keep it in check.”

The constant, all consuming ache in my forearm was only getting worse with time, making it hard to speak normally. “Can you do that on a 24 hour deadline… with no knowledge of where it is… and no cooperation from my family? Good luck finding someone else to do it. Think of having a second Loma Prieta.”

“The negative karma of killing so many Innocents would ruin your family. Not to mention the lost business of disrupting a globalized finance center. You’d spend generations paying it off,” Doyle said, more desperately.

Was she really trying to lecture about karma to a Buddhist? White Practitioners had taken that word from Indian philosophy and immediately misinterpreted it, and too often threw it around onto related but distinct phenomena like the fury the spirits held toward oathbreakers. They forgot that most of the consequences of karma applied to the next life, not this one.

“I don’t believe in karma the way you do. Why should I care?” I answered, as blithely as I could manage.

Doyle drew back from the fence, a perturbed expression flashing across her face. “I can still make you suffer before your time on Earth is done.”

The pain made it easy to bare my teeth in a snarl, so I did, putting on my best Oni mask face. Or was it a kamikaze bomber face? I wasn’t aiming for maximum accuracy.

“Go ahead. My family has plenty of other sons,” I goaded.

Lee cuffed me in the side with the baton. “He’s talking too much. I don’t trust it.”

“Silence, Lee,” Doyle hissed. “I need to make some calls.”

She drew a chalk symbol on the ground, silencing the air around her as she dialed on her cell phone. She paced through the golden bubble, gesturing in increasingly agitated ways as the call stretched on for multiple nerve-racking minutes. Finally, she jabbed the red hang up button, breathing heavily as she clutched the medallion in a white-knuckled grip. After another thirty seconds, she smudged the chalk on the ground under her foot, letting sound come through again.

“I’m feeling generous today, Mr. Kemmotsu. Swear to my three conditions and I’ll let you have your demesne,” she said. “One, you will never use that rudiment to threaten my family again, nor will you ever set it free through deliberate action or inaction. Two, your current demesne expires upon your death and is not passed down to any of the Kemmotsu family. Three, you declare neutrality in all Board affairs where I am involved and do not act against me, regardless of the issue at hand.”

“I need reassurance that — that you won’t attack me like this again. Lee too,” I tried to negotiate.

“No. All my actions today were in protection of the Doyle investments within FiDi, which I have a right to defend, as affirmed by the Lord of this city. I can’t guarantee that your and my interests will never conflict again,” she said dismissively. “This is my final offer. Take it or leave it.”

I clutched my injured arm, which was swelling around the bruises and looked like it might be broken. The fingers of my right hand hurt whenever I tried to move them. Between the pain in my forearm and knee, the few times I’d been hit in the stomach, and the prospect of surrender, I felt a bitter bile rising in my throat, like I was going to throw up.

Slowly, haltingly, I swore to the terms that Doyle had said.

She snapped her fingers. “I’m satisfied with that. Lee, I want this oath recorded in writing. File it with all the others.”

Lee saluted her. “Yes, ma’am!”

The dark blue of his uniform bled outward, weight and color shifting back to the receptionist-looking woman from earlier. It was eerie how unaffected she looked from what had just happened. As she saw me, she smiled and waved, which I didn’t return. Then she pulled out the notepad from a pocket, spending some time jotting it all down. After a minute or so, she gave Doyle a silent nod.

“Let’s go, Lee. Lead the way,” Doyle said, snapping her fingers again.

The golden bubble faded around her, taking the floating numbers and fence with it. My condo looked strangely drab without its illumination. Lee transformed into the shape of a large German Shepherd, sniffing and pawing her way to the entrance, and Doyle followed behind in the cleared path. It would have made a ridiculous sight if it was anyone else, Lee and Doyle fumbling their way through the invisible barriers to try to exit the room. I decided not to give them instructions to ease their way out.

Finally, they reached the door, Lee barking in triumph.

Doyle placed her hand on the doorknob, turning back to look back at me. “I remember when your type weren’t allowed to buy property in California at all, Kemmotsu,” she said. “Tell your family that you won’t get any further than this.”

My good hand tightened into a fist, but I didn’t say anything as Doyle and Lee exited the condo.

My arm was probably broken and my knee felt severely bruised, but at least I’d kept the demesne. Was it worth the trade? It had to be. I dragged myself over to a dining chair to pull myself up into a standing position. If I leaned onto the chair, I could limp around, as long as I didn’t bend my knee too much.

I had no idea how I was going to deal with the next challenge in this condition, especially with all my protective talisman strips gone. That was a problem for later. So was the question of cleaning up the shattered waterbrush on the ground. For now, I staggered off to the kitchen in search of the ibuprofen.