In This Economy I Have To Fight Wizards To Become A Homeowner? | Part 8

[sunlit_skycat]

Title: In This Economy I Have To Fight Wizards To Become A Homeowner?!
Rating: Mature
Major Warnings: Violence, sexual harassment
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.

 

8. Look what you made me do

 

If this was any other situation, I’d have gone straight to urgent care to get everything checked out professionally. That wasn’t feasible in the middle of a demesne claim. With few options left to me, I turned to WebMD to tell me what sort of first aid I should be doing on myself.

The next half hour was a whirlwind of searching up how to diagnose a broken bone, what the difference was between a broken bone and a fracture, what was a bone bruise, how to splint a broken bone, how to DIY a splint for a broken bone, and how long until the ibuprofen started working. By the end of it, I had a rolled up magazine secured over my forearm with tape, and was elevating my knee on a chair with an ice pack piled on top. I had a hiking pole leaned against the dining table to serve as an impromptu cane when I walked. Nothing felt good, but at least the ice helped to numb things a little bit.

I moved onto testing my remaining capabilities. My right hand was effectively useless for doing any diagram work, but I could still try with my left. I opened my sketchbook to write out some test hentaigana.

After a few seconds, I evaluated my work. The characters were blotchy and overly sharp around the curves, with too much tension visible from how I’d held the waterbrush. Unacceptable. Diagrams were just as much of a performance to the spirits as anything else, and this was a dismal failure. I’d seen ten year olds with better handwriting. There was no way I’d be able to draw the complex sequence necessary to make more protective talisman strips. At best, I might be able to manage a few, simple words. I was completely defenseless against the next challenger that tried to use violence, even an incompetent upstart like Vikram. I couldn’t even run away properly with my injured knee.

With an inarticulate cry of rage, I ripped out the entire page, crumpling it up and tossing it into the recycling bin. Then I laid my head down on the table and sobbed.

Everything hurt. Did it count as a hate crime if Doyle had explicitly racist reasons for attacking me? Or was this just Practitioner politics as usual? Intellectually, I knew that racism was still alive in the US, but I hadn’t expected this. The naked hatred that had put my family in the internment camps was supposed to be over. As long as we kept our heads down, played nice, made ourselves indispensable, we should be spared the worst of it, my dad always said. As much as I’d rolled my eyes at the subject whenever he brought it up, some small part of me had hoped the bargain was real. It felt like an oath had been broken, but there was no one to hold to account over it.

I pulled out a stack of napkins to blow my nose, still on the other side of the table with the nonperishable snack containers that I’d set out in case of further friendly visitors for today. That felt like years ago. Breakfast with Gale had been nice, but it had made me relax far too much. I couldn’t afford to let my guard down for a city that clearly did not want me here.

Eventually, I dried my tears. I hobbled off into the kitchen, where I returned the ice pack to the freezer and washed my hands and mouth out at the sink. It helped, cleaning off the kegare for now. Hopefully the sluggish oozing of blood from my wounds would stop soon, because my Self felt worn enough as it was.

The glow of claim I held across the living-dining-kitchen room was much dimmer than before. My previous momentum was gone. I needed to reassert my control over this space across the rest of my challenges, however many I had left. If I couldn’t, the spirits might decide I didn’t deserve a demesne after all, and all of this would be for nothing.

I refused to let it end like this.

 

---

 

Several hours later, a series of fart noises sounded at the door.

This better not be what I thought it was. I made a beckoning motion, but the door stayed stubbornly shut. With a sigh, I pushed myself up with the hiking pole to move over to the entrance. I couldn’t use my right hand to open the door, so I let the pole hang off my left hand with the wrist strap as I turned the knob open.

A pair of goblins spilled in through the front door, both covered with dense kegare. This close together, it was impossible to tell who was the source of what.

The first was a deep crimson, with raised scars all over its burly form. A dirty, torn sleeping bag was wrapped around its shoulders like a shawl. Everything else was uncomfortably exposed. Judging by the three pairs of naked breasts down its front, it might be female, but that was always hard to tell with goblins. It held a long coil of paracord that glowed slightly with power, sullied by dirt and the cattle wire braided through it. Was that an implement? How had a goblin gotten hold of that? Whatever it was, I didn’t want to get on the wrong end of that.

The second was small and lumpish. Its wrinkled, pug-like face was an unhealthy shade of gray, and half of a cracked LCD screen was shoved into its right eyesocket. Torn cardboard scraps stapled together thankfully covered the rest. It came up to knee height, struggling to haul in a large video camera on a gyroscopic rig that had to weigh as much as it did. It scurried to the side, training the camera on me and the other goblin.

The red goblin raised its arms into the air. “What’s up fuckheads, it’s xxSnuffcord69xx coming to you for a special session of Humanity Fail. You know what that means! Today I’m at the demesne claim of Ethan Kemmotsu, self-proclaimed Sealer of the Bay Area.” It rattled off my address. “As always, this show is brought to you by my faithful cameraman, Peepshow, and my generous sponsors, Cuntsop the Great, Rigormordick, _santorumsucks…” It went on to list a series of increasingly vulgar names.

I looked over the pair suspiciously. Most goblins were kept out by all the development in the Bay Area, but a few still crept in wherever the veneer of civilization stretched thin. Some had even figured out how to connect to the internet. Still, no matter what adaptations they’d made, goblins were beings of concentrated filth, violence, and offensiveness. They tracked kegare everywhere they went. Whatever game these goblins were playing, I didn’t want to be part of it.

“I’m willing to give you all soy sauce egg to keep this short. It’s a sacrifice of potential life prepared for guests. That’s the best offer you’re going to get,” I said.

Snuffcord turned toward the camera. “Chat, what do you think? Should I accept Ethan Kemmotsu’s offerings?”

Peepshow tapped the screen embedded in its face, squinting this way and that. After a minute, it spoke. “I’m adding it up. 17% say yes. 29% say no. 54% say, put the eggs up his butt.”

Snuffcord made an exaggerated nod. “I hear you loud and clear, chat.”

I could already feel the headache coming on. Was it too early to start backing up behind the first invisible barrier? After everything that had already happened, I didn’t want to give up ground to this.

“This is your last warning to get out of my demesne,” I said. “Leave, before I make you.”

Snuffcord jeered. “You think you can threaten me? You got fucking raped by the Golden Woman earlier. The whole city has been broadcast with how she bent you over for anyone who knows how to listen.”

Peepshow snickered. “Yeah! You tell him!”

My mouth pressed into a thin line. I really, really wanted to challenge Snuffcord for that, but goblins could get away with a lot of crude, metaphorical language that most Others couldn’t. I couldn’t afford to get into a gainsay battle with a goblin and lose.

Instead, I dug into my toolbelt, the hiking pole dangling awkwardly off the wrist strap as I searched around. I brought out a vial of dried flower confetti. A circle of this should be enough to bind a goblin, if I managed to close it before it escaped. With my injuries, that was a big if.

At the sight of the vial, Snuffcord hissed, cracking the braided cord like a whip. It gouged a line across my forehead, less than an inch away from my eye. Any plan of what to do immediately exited my brain. I threw the entire vial at Snuffcord.

It screeched loudly, like I was dousing it with acid instead of flowers.

I belatedly seized the opportunity to make it seem like I had planned this all along. “I bind you once by flowers, xxSnuffcord69xx. You’re a creature of ugliness that can’t stand the presence of beauty.”

Snuffcord flailed its limbs wildly, sending flower confetti everywhere. “Eeeeeee! I cast your binding off. You've got jack shit on me!”

Blood ran down my brow, wet and warm. I retreated into the first invisible barrier as fast as my knee would let me. Just as I was crossing through, Snuffcord lassoed the end of my hiking pole with the power cord. It gave a sharp yank, and I nearly lost my balance. Then it began reeling itself in, until it could grab onto the pole itself.

We fought over the pole in an absurd game of tug-of-war. As long as Snuffcord held onto the pole, I couldn’t get it fully through the barrier, and it was stronger than I was. Peepshow moved in with the camera, eagerly capturing the spectacle.

Snuffcord leered at me. “You’re a failure of a man in every way that matters, Ethan Kemmotsu. Weak. No car. Never even got your dick wet.”

I really did not want to justify the complex finances that had led to me sharing my parents’ cars so I could focus on saving for a house. Especially not on camera.

“Okay, whatever. I’m still a Sealer of good repute,” I insisted.

“Are you?”

I flung the hiking pole out at Snuffcord. It stumbled backward, caught off guard, and tripped onto the floor. Red panned over to the inexplicably obscene position it had fallen into.

“I bind you twice, xxSnuffcord69xx. Despite” — I sighed — “everything you’ve insinuated about me, I’m the one that got you horizontal, not the other way around.”

Snuffcord crawled back into an upright position, spitting at me. Its saliva dribbled down mid-air, caught on the barrier between us.

I swayed on my feet. Blood dripped into my left eye, making it hard to see. I needed to end this on a strong note, but I was running out of options to pull out of my toolbelt. Could I somehow persuade the spirits that saltwater spritz should be able to bind a goblin? No, both water and salt alone might be able to repel a goblin, but the combination together neutralized the necessary symbolism. I had to use something else. I backed away into the kitchen, my knee protesting with every step.

“That’s right, run away again like the coward you are!” Snuffcord called. “That’s your family’s whole fucking pattern, isn’t it? Never standing up for yourself, never fighting back when it’s hard. They broke you good.”

“Shut up,” I snapped.

Snuffcord rounded the gap in the barriers, cracking the cord as it chased me down. Metal barbs tore through my shirt to the skin underneath. It laughed wildly, striking multiple times.

My back pressed up against steel countertop. I reached behind me, trying to find what I needed. Sink basin. Faucet handle. Spray head. As Snuffcord came into range, I pulled out the extendable neck of the kitchen sink, nudging the handle open with my elbow. Water shot out at the goblin.

“I bind you thrice, xxSnuffcord69xx. Stop! Submit to my will!” I shouted.

Water sluiced all over Snuffcord, slowing its motions down. It reached through the jet, clawing at my face, even as it collapsed to the floor in a twitching heap. I kept the water trained on it, counting to ten, until I was sure it had stopped struggling. Just in case. The paracord whip dropped out of its hand. Then I gingerly laid out a paper seal onto the least wet part of it, completing the binding.

Peepshow crept in with the camera, eagerly capturing Snuffcord’s prone form. I blasted it with a spray of water, and it jumped away with a shriek.

“I’ve already bound your leader. Let’s get this over with,” I said, rubbing my bloody eye.

It immediately ran deeper into the room. “Nah. Catch me if you can!”

Peepshow ran through the maze of invisible barriers, blindly feeling its way deeper into the room. I didn’t have a hope of keeping up. It beelined to my bedroom door, stopping for a few seconds to fiddle with the doorknob. Then it threw the door open, scampering right over the line of tape unobtrusively running over the bottom of the doorframe that I had set earlier.

Something sparked in the darkness. Peepshow howled, feet stuck fast to the floor.

“Wrong choice,” I snarled. “You rejected being a guest, so you have no right to any part of my space not covered by the demesne claim itself. I bind you for your arrogance in attempted trespassing, Peepshow.”

The paper seal I tossed at it flew true. Peepshow dropped to the ground.

I sagged into a dining chair, utterly drained. Large holes gaped open in my shirt, showing the wounds underneath. With every breath I took, the lashes I’d taken felt like hot irons were being shoved in, which was almost enough to distract from the dull pounding of my broken arm. I looked like a mess. Whatever the spirits were thinking, let alone the audience Snuffcord was streaming to, it couldn’t be good.

“Is the camera still running? Turn it off,” I ordered.

Both goblins rose from the ground. Peepshow got to it first, pressing the power button on the camera.

Despite all the injuries I’d collected, I still had a job to do. Proper protocol would be to give both goblins the standard spiel after binding, but it felt silly addressing them from halfway across the room in this chair. I didn’t want to shout. I rubbed my eye, trying to clear my vision enough to see.

“Snuffcord, Peepshow, walk to the space in front of me where I am pointing. Don’t stand more than two feet apart once you get here.”

Peepshow arrived in a power walk, promptly moving over to where I had gestured. Snuffcord was much slower, carefully setting one foot in front of the other in the world’s most leisurely stroll as it glowered.

I settled into my chair. “As you know, I’m a Sealer. I deal with dangerous Others. Now that I’ve bound you, I’m going to ask some questions to decide if you’re fit for release. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Peepshow said.

Snuffcord raised its chin. “I understand you love your high horse so much, you jerk off to the thought of —”

“Stop with the weird sex comments. Okay? Just stop,” I cut in. “For the duration of the binding I hold over you, you are forbidden from communicating any sexual reference, metaphor, or simile again. Both of you.”

Snuffcord glared silently.

I let out a slow exhale. “In the last 90 days of your time on Earth, not counting any gaps from being in other non-Earth planes of existence, how many humans have you killed?”

“Does watching count?” Peepshow asked. “A week ago, I filmed a homeless woman —”

“Answer the question I asked. Numbers only. Watching doesn’t count,” I said.

“Oh. Zero.”

“Two,” Snuffcord grunted.

“In the last 90 days of your time on Earth, not counting any gaps from being in other non-Earth planes of existence, how many humans have you injured badly enough that recovery will take longer than three months? Numbers only. Use your best judgment on what counts as an injury.”

“Five,” Peepshow said.

“Eighteen,” Snuffcord followed.

“What was your goal in contesting my demesne claim?”

“Cred,” Peepshow said. “Can’t live without it.”

Snuffcord jumped in. “I don’t give a crap about your demesne. It was a convenient invitation to find a Practitioner softened up by someone else. I was going to shit down your mouth, flay you with my cord, take suggestions from chat —”

“Shut up,” I said. “Peepshow, why do you two need cred?”

“Other goblins. The Warrens are too crowded. They think Snuffcord is weak because she got bound to work once. They’re wrong! She killed the guy who did it! And she’ll do it again! We’ll livestream the whole thing for as long as it takes. They can’t run us out of the good spots then.”

I’d have be blind to miss the threat Peepshow was making. Screw this. Screw them all. Blood stung as it ran into my eye again, filling my entire Sight with kegare. I turned it off. The gash Snuffcord had inflicted still hadn’t closed up yet. What sort of message would it send to the spirits if I couldn’t deal with something as straightforward as this?

“Peepshow, turn the camera on. Set it to film where you and Snuffcord are. Then return to your current location,” I commanded.

It scuttled to obey.

I leaned forward in my chair, pulling out a waterbrush with my left hand. “Despite warnings against it, you rejected hospitality to try to tresspass in my space and torture me. Then you admitted to a prior history of murder. You aren’t going to take a deal to acknowledge this as my demense and never kill another human again, are you? Answer me.”

Peepshow looked at the camera, and then back at me. It squinted, eyes unfocusing as it cocked its head. “I — I can’t.”

Snuffcord spat. This time it landed right onto my slipper sock, sinking in through the fabric. I had a feeling that would stain without intense purification.

“I’ll take that as a no. I gave you multiple chances to avoid this,” I said. “Move to where I am pointing.”

The goblins shuffled in, close enough to touch. I reached out for the seal stuck to Snuffcord’s forehead. There was enough empty space to add to the text that was already there. Could I write this with my non-dominant hand? Yes. It was short enough, and the weight of pattern was on my side to make up for the plain strokes. I pressed the hanga block of authority next to the characters I’d drawn.

The paper seal expanded outward, covering Snuffcord in its entirety. Then it folded inward, bringing the goblin with it. With each second, it got smaller and smaller, creasing in mountain and valley folds. By the end of it, I had a little origami goblin, resting in my hand.

I did the same to Peepshow.

I waggled both figures in the air for the camera’s benefit, and then set them on the ground.

“I’m within my rights to do to them what they planned for me. To the victor goes the spoils.”

There was no answer. Nothing held in this state was able to interact with the world until released. My family had never figured out whether anything folded away was aware of the world or not.

I reached into my toolbelt, and then paused. Did I really want to do this? Just in case, I went to the kitchen to fetch a sheet of aluminum foil, which I turned into a bowl shape to contain the two origami pieces. That should protect my floor. Then I brought out an electric lighter, which I held up to the two pieces of paper.

One flick of the thumb, and they were on fire. The origami figures dwindled away to ash.

This was the only language that goblins could understand. Peepshow was right about that, if nothing else. No matter what sort of disgusting audience was watching that stream, I couldn’t afford to have anybody else think that my demesne claim and injuries made me easy pickings.

Before I could think about it any further, I crushed the aluminum foil into a ball. Then I picked up the camera, and brought both over to the window overlooking the city.

With a grunt, I opened the window, net and all. Fog swirled outside. A cool wind blew through, ruffling my hair. One by one, I hurled foil and camera into the night, as far away as I could. They vanished out of sight.

I should have felt satisfied. Or relieved. Everything I’d done had been entirely proportionate and justified according to the rules that all Practice ran on. Nobody could say I’d done anything wrong. I needed to show the spirits that I had full control over the situation, even if it was a little unconventional. They’d forced my hand.

I sagged against the wall, looking over the shattered waterbrush pieces on the ground, the puddle of water near the sink, the bloody whip by my refrigerator door. I’d clean everything up tomorrow. For now, I really, really wanted a shower.

 

Comments

[silverdappledwolf]

Oh my. That was… colder and more premeditated than I was expecting. At least it killed the Taylor Swift that your title started playing in my head!

The space between summary and story start is missing, which put me off balance.

Yeah, jeez. You’re not wrong, Ethan, but jeez. I’m glad you managed to make the horrible thing go on your terms, and not goblin terms, but JEEZ.

Beautiful ending paragraph. It carries a lot of weight and symbolism very succinctly.

[sunlit_skycat]

Huh, I don't know what exactly happened with formatting between summary and story, but it looked like a chunk of summary got eaten, so I fixed that.

I am sorry to report that this chapter is named after the Taylor Swift song.

[wal_fool_runner]

Loved this chapter. Ugly choice Ethan made there at the end, and of course he berates himself for it -- not that he had any better options. Already at the end of his resources, needing to establish himself as a threat...it was a corner.

I can only bet this will make things hard for him later on, but I could easily have been worse if he let them go. I know I'd make the same decision in his shoes.

Oh, and I don't know if Dreamwidth takes a while to update, but a second copy of the summary-paragraph shows up underneath the title.

[sunlit_skycat]

Aha, I see what the problem was now. Fixed.

Thanks for reading!