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hillsgladehouselibraryTitle: 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.
9. I didn't start the fire
When I woke up, it was raining. The fog outside my windows had turned into stormclouds, unleashing a steady drumbeat of raindrops against the glass. Under the gauze I’d used to cover it up, my whole chest was sensitive from the welts that I had received yesterday. My arm ached with a persistent throb. Hopefully I hadn’t damaged anything permanently by sleeping on it wrong.
I burrowed deeper into my blankets and closed my eyes again, trying to recapture the warm refuge of sleep. I didn’t want to have to face the world today. Not yet.
An hour later, I forced myself to leave the bed and get ready for the day. I spent a while staring into the fridge, trying to gauge how much effort it would take to make various breakfast items with only one arm. Eventually, I ended up with a bowl of cup noodles in microwaved water. The less said about eating with chopsticks wrong-handed, the better.
I limped around the kitchen-dining-living room, doing my best to clean up yesterday’s mess. The waterbrush pieces were swept up with a broom. The paracord whip went into a paper bowl until I could figure out how to dispose of it safely. The kegare of bloodshed and death remained, following me like a smothering, malignant field that blocked out everything else in my Sight. The standard mouth rinse and handwashing weren’t enough to wash it off. I pinched my brow and reminded myself that measures of spiritual purity were inflexible, the spirits didn’t distinguish between perpetrators and victims nearly as well as anyone liked, and I’d been as lenient as I could afford in order to stay alive. I’d have to conduct a harae to cleanse myself once my demesne claim was done. In the meantime, I’d try to use my Sight as little as possible.
Morning passed into afternoon. The rain poured on, and still no one came. I settled down on the couch to watch the latest Parahumans movie, Gold Morning, but it was hard to pay attention to the impending apocalypse onscreen. I kept waiting to be interrupted by the next challenger.
Halfway through a quest to forge Tinkertech that could defeat the Entities, my phone blared an alarm. I jumped. Once I calmed down, I paused the movie and rummaged around for where I had left my phone to charge. There was a notification on the screen.
Emergency Alert
National weather service: A FLASH FLOOD WARNING is in effect for this area. This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation. Do not attempt to travel unless you are fleeing an area subject to flooding or under an evacuation order.
I looked out the window. The rain was heavy, but it didn’t seem that bad yet. If it was flooding on Earth, would I even see it here in this layer of reality that my demesne claim took place in? Streetlight banners flapped this way and that, battered by the wind. Beyond that, all visibility faded out. Whatever was happening on the roads below, I had no way to tell.
When I looked back at my phone, there were more messages.
CNN
San Francisco pier collapses from storm damage, leaving eight missing. Much of California’s coast is under a high surf advisory…NPR
Heavy rain pounds Bay Area, but the worst is yet to come. Intense bands of rain and powerful winds will continue over the weekend…
The kitchen lights flickered and died. The laptop that I was projecting from lost wifi. The only source of illumination was from the gloomy, overcast windows.
I scrambled to search for PG&E’s outage map on my phone, but the cell network was extremely slow to load. There was no estimated power restoration time. For all I knew, the outage would continue until well after the sun went down. I opened my Sight to search for signs of magical interference and was greeted with a blank, smothering mass of kegare.
I wanted to scream. I’d been planning to have ice cream for dinner, as a no-prep, easily consumable consolation award for the horrible way my demesne challenge had been going lately. Obviously, I could survive a power outage. I wouldn’t starve, I wouldn’t freeze, and I was hunkering down as much as I could for a potential flood anyways. I’d only be deprived of material comfort for the next few hours as people tried to kill me. My breath turned increasingly fast and erratic.
“No. No,” I said. “I have a right to see my demesne claim through, free of random outside events. Either this is a challenge, and I deserve to know who I am facing and why, or it’s illegitimate. Anything else — I shouldn't be dealing with it. It tips the balance unfairly. I call on the laws surrounding this ritual, as codified by the Great Seal, to have it judged if — if I really deserve to be dealing with this right now, on top of everything else.”
Lightning flashed, close enough to sear my vision.
By the time I could see again, the clouds were gone. The sky had turned a dirty, hazy yellow. Below, a line of fire advanced through the city, all hell breaking loose. The streets were clogged with traffic as people tried to escape. The wind howled louder than ever, shooting glowing sparks towards my neighborhood.
In the distance, twin columns of water and flame danced through the sky. It was the complex doom elemental my family kept in Big Basin. Two opposing forces had clashed, and instead of canceling out, had been folded together by a single greater omen that turned it inevitable. It was a fated destruction that couldn’t be stopped, only contained indefinitely. Eyes wide, I searched for the map showing the status of all my family’s wards, but it had fallen off the wall facedown.
My phone sounded in alarm again.
Emergency Alert
San Francisco Fire Department: This is an EVACUATION ORDER for wind-driven fire in your area. LEAVE NOW. Follow instructions from emergency personnel. Dial 9-1-1 for help.
I was so incredibly screwed. For the doom elemental to be here, the wards must have failed catastrophically. There was no way my family would have decided to let it go free. How long had it been hiding in the storm, pouring in its influence while I remained blissfully unaware?
“You’re supposed to be bound. I was there this week,” I said. “What is this, you broke containment and now you want revenge?” There was an edge of hysteria to my voice.
I crawled to the floor, fumbling to draw a protective circle around myself. Three-fourths of the way through, the waterbrush suddenly ran dry, and no amount of squeezing could make it spit out the ink that I knew was still in the barrel. I unscrewed the tip of the waterbrush and tried to coax the ink into flowing onto the floor, blotch by blotch. By this point, I would be happy with any sort of closed shape, geometric imperfections be damned.
My phone vibrated with a new notification.
Axios
California’s latest wildfires are a taste of what is to come. Climate change has created a new normal, where fires are year-round and encroach on dense urban centers…
“Oh yeah? Tell me something I don’t already know,” I muttered. “Why me? Why now?”
I stamped the ground with the hanga block of borders eight separate times, pushing as much power as I could into my barrier. Then I added a ninth, for good measure. It didn’t have any effect. No matter how I tried, the circle couldn’t be completed. It was hopeless.
A smoky scent wafted through the room, giving me a headache. I let out a weak cough. Outside, buildings in my neighborhood lit on fire seemingly at random under a barrage of sparks.
NBC News
“We brought this on ourselves.” Experts say a hundred years of poor forest management have made California’s wildfires burn faster and hotter…The Guardian
Paradise burned down. Did anyone pay attention? Five years later, we reflect on the deadly Camp Fire that killed 85 people and destroyed 11,000 homes…
I could tell when an Other was laying justification to act, however unconventional the method. I definitely wasn't subscribed to all these news apps. I scrambled for a response, any response, that might disrupt the narrative it was building.
“Blame the companies and the government, not me. I didn’t personally do that.”
A wave of tiredness washed through me. Even if I wanted to leave, there was no way I could make it down the fire escape and flee the city in time. My knee twinged at the thought.
A minute passed by without any new notifications. I checked my phone anxiously as the fire crept closer.
“Is any of my family still alive?” I asked plaintively. “Am I first, or did you destroy all of South Bay to get here?”
No response. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting. I had no authority to compel an escaped, powerful Other to answer anything I asked.
Then the phone rang. The caller ID was my parents’ old landline, which nobody really used anymore, but which they’d never gotten around to getting rid of either. There was no way that was a coincidence. I stared down the phone as the ringtone got more and more insistent, bracing myself for every awful possibility.
Finally, hand shaking as I reached out, I picked up.
“Hello, son.”
That was my grandfather’s voice, which I hadn’t heard since he died of cancer years ago. I blinked, rubbing at the sudden irritation in my eyes.
Before I could respond, I was interrupted by my dad. “Hi Oyaji. Is this a good time? Everything okay with the wards?”
“Hmrph. No. Tell me your news first, and I’ll tell you mine,” my grandfather said.
“Theresa and I just came back from the hospital. It’s a boy! She’ll send out the announcement this week, but I wanted you to know early.” My dad sounded giddy in a way I’d never heard in life.
My grandfather gave a grunt of acknowledgement. “Have you picked a name yet?”
“We’re still thinking about it. Maybe Daniel. I like the sound of that.”
Daniel was the oldest of my brothers. This had to be 40 years ago, before I was even conceived, let alone born. I broke out into a coughing fit, covering my mouth a second later. Despite how loud it was, nobody seemed to react to it.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” I asked.
The conversation kept going like I wasn’t even there, discussing the merits of different names. Soon it turned into baby shower plans, and then how my dad would balance raising an infant with Sealing duties.
“You can’t afford to take a break,” my grandfather said. “Listen. You know the doom-prophesied elemental, the one that Ojiisan took a commission to put away? He thought it would have to be let out eventually, somewhere that doesn’t matter, otherwise it would get stronger over time. He planned to do it, but then — the war.” He swallowed his words strangely. “When we — came back — he didn’t want other Practitioners to think it was an attack. He told me, and I built what I thought would be a safer method. That’s what the siphons to tap its power are for.
“I’ve been measuring it for years, just in case. I got back from the site this afternoon. It’s getting stronger, at a faster rate than before the siphons were installed. We have to let it out, before it gets big enough to blow containment. Ojiisan couldn’t do it in his time, but we can now, if we go all hands on deck.”
“Hold on,” my dad said. “You mean the siphons that we use for Practice? The siphons that you told me are standard ward design?”
“I made it standard,” my grandfather said matter-of-factly. “It serves to weaken most Others. This one carries too much spiritual weight.”
We still built our wards that way, to draw on the collective might of our bound Others when needed. It was more efficient, my dad told me. Had that been a secret security risk this whole time? What else hadn’t he been telling me? I was dizzy with the implications.
My dad let out an irritated huff. “Oyaji. I have a son on the way, and you drop this into my lap? Are you serious?”
“Let your wife handle it. That’s what she’s for, isn’t it?” My grandfather suggested.
“Oh, come on,” my dad scoffed. “It’s not going to escape tomorrow, is it? You had years before now to tell me this.”
“It won’t. It might not ever, in your lifetime.”
It felt like I’d gotten a really bad flu. The room was getting warmer, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t the central heating at work. There was smoke in the room, or maybe it was my Sight bleeding into reality. It was hard to pay attention to the call.
“Do you have a place in mind where we can let it burn or flood, where it won’t cause too much damage or step on the toes of anyone important?” my dad wheedled, like he was hoping for a miracle way out of a parking ticket.
“No.”
“Things are good now. I don’t want to rock the boat,” my dad said. As if it was an afterthought, he added, “It’s nice, having power to defend ourselves if we ever need it.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“Fine. We don’t have to do this right now. I still expect you to carry out your other duties,” my grandfather said. “We’ll come back to this after Daniel is born.”
“Yessir.”
The line clicked dead.
I swayed where I sat, hacking up another wad of black mucus. My dad had mortgaged the future of thousands of people, including mine, for a little more power in his prime. Then he’d given me the hanga blocks so I could do the same. Had my use of them in my demense claim been what finally set the doom elemental free?
32 years wasn’t long enough. Reincarnation was cold comfort when I’d been trying to make a life for myself here, as myself.
Fire licked the outside of my window. It had finally gotten to my floor, just as my airway had closed up entirely. I didn’t have the strength left to crawl away.
I slumped to the ground, consciousness fleeing my brain.
When I came to, overhead lights were flooding into my eyes. There was an incessant beeping noise coming somewhere from my right. My back was stiff from the floor. For the next life, I felt awfully adult-proportioned.
I rolled over onto my side with a grunt, carefully pushing myself into a sitting position. This was my newly-bought condo. There was a smeared, incomplete ink circle around me, surrounded with multiple faded stamps. My phone was nearby, open to the PG&E website helpfully informing me that the power was on at my address. The sky outside my window was filled with fog again, with only a light patter of rain.
I reached for the hiking pole, going over to the kitchen to reset the noisy oven, which flashed a “PO” where the time should be. Then I beelined to the map of all the family wards. Like I remembered, it had fallen to the floor, and it took a minute to reach down and pin it back up.
There was a large water stain marring the map, causing paint to bleed from the doom elemental’s containment in South Bay all the way up to San Francisco. Next to it, there was a note: Kid spilled water on the map. Don’t worry about it. - D
It was like nothing had ever happened. Standing in my condo, conspicuously alive and unburnt, it was tempting to dismiss the whole thing as a stress-induced mental breakdown. All I’d have to do was to ignore the least subtle message from the spirits I had ever experienced while in the middle of a defining personal ritual. Another round of goblins would be preferable to what I’d learned.
I sat back down on the couch, letting out a frustrated noise that didn’t stop for twenty seconds straight. The spirits had to be listening. Did they ever stop?
“I swear, I will… I’ll talk to family about this,” I declared wearily. “This is too big to deal with on my own.”
I rubbed the splint over my arm, trying to think of a commitment that I could actually follow through on. I couldn’t fix anything if I was forsworn.
“I’ll tell Daniel and Andrew that using the hanga blocks risks letting the doom elemental out. Maybe they already know, maybe they don’t. We’ll have to audit all the other wards to make sure this isn’t a problem with anything else, too.” I made a face. “I’ll come up with a plan to reduce power draw on the doom elemental, so we have time to find a safe place to let it out. Eventually.”
So much would have to be done for a chance at avoiding this. For all I knew, the vision I’d had of dying in flames was set in stone now that I’d seen it, and nothing I could do would change it. Still, I wanted to try. My family had been negligent enough already. I didn't want to continue that pattern, even if it might be too late to make a difference.
Outside my window, the rain faded to a stop, and a hint of sunlight flashed through the fog. I’d made it so much further than I’d been starting to dread. The third day of my demesne claim was halfway over, and if I survived the next twelve hours, I was free.
First read-through thoughts
Date: 2025-03-04 10:12 pm (UTC)Wow, that was really, really, good. I'm assuming the use of the hanga blocks calling on a doom elemental was a direct analogue to fossil fuels and climate change; I don't know what I would have done in his father's place, because no matter when you let the elemental free, it'll ruin lives. You just have to pick when you pay the piper.
I really gotta read more of Pale and Pass to get more of the magic system. I thought it was a dream sequence at this line: "Below, a line of fire advanced through the city, all hell breaking loose. " But Ethan put down a circle of protection after that, which actually happened. So I imagine the vision was overriding his perception while he was still lucid; a waking nightmare that thankfully was just a nightmare. (But, obviously, still real in the sense that it was foretelling the most likely events in the future)
Re: First read-through thoughts
Date: 2025-03-06 03:50 am (UTC)Thanks for reading!