Adamant Blood

Mark waited beside the entrance to the Clubhouse, near the tram stop. It was 10:45. Many of the people who were in Etiquette Class had already come off the tram. Mark did not expect to get to talk to them outside of the class, but now they were here.

“Greetings,” said a guy who Mark knew as Mister Fields. “I don’t believe we’ve met outside of the class’s scenarios. I’m Johnathan Fellos. This is my wife.”

The girl with him said, “Catherine Fellos. Nice to see you outside of class.”

Mark suddenly felt incredibly inadequate, and not just because he was wearing basic browns and they were wearing good fashion. Mark had half a foot of height on both of them, too. But they were married? What were they? Still 18, right? Or what!

Mark flubbed his words— And then he tried to be personable, like in class. “Married already? Makes me feel rather slow on life goals. Congratulations?” He rapidly added, “I’m Mark Careed.”

Johnathan and Catherine absolutely knew who he was, but it was polite to tell them anyway. They smiled politely at that, or maybe at the remark about marriage; Mark wasn’t sure.

Johnathan said, “It’s a business venture our parents worked out long before we were born.”

Catherine asked, “Were you waiting for someone?”

“Yes! I am. The requirement to invite someone new was… Well I fulfilled it, I think. They’re not here yet, but they have several minutes left to show.”

Johnathan said, “The Empire of Foodstuffs always falls. It’s a lesson to teach those who think the world is safe.”

“… Oh,” Mark said. “I didn’t know that.” He frowned. “That makes it a whole lot less fun.”

“There are ways to win the scenario,” Johnathan said, “But it requires bargaining with the monsters and almost no one does that. It’s just abhorrent.”

Mark was scandalized. “Really?! That is terrible.”

Catherine said, “Xerkona Culture came about as a response to dragon culture and living under the constant threat of senseless death, and attempting to thrive under that sort of thing. Even today the Settlement of Xerkona is more of a diffuse nation of city states that work under the auspices of other governments on Daihoon and Earth, rather than having their own major Empire land. So it makes sense that they engage with monsters the most out of anyone. The monsters are still people, but the problem is that we’re basically food to a lot of them.”

Mark knew most of that. But you weren’t supposed to say that. It was abhorrent to work with monsters these days, and Xerkona was working hard to make its own Empire lands, now that they kicked out all the dragons, just like Aluatha and Okuana had done.

Mark said, “I don’t think I could bargain with the dragon…” He asked, “Could we kill it in the scenario?”

Johnathan smiled a little, and so did Catherine.

Catherine said, “They’re calling you the brother of Addashield’s Dragon. Not to be too difficult or pointed, but perhaps you should consider learning how to bargain with such beasts, instead of considering how to kill an ascendant god.”

Mark felt blank.

And then a rage began to—

Johnathan told his wife, “That’s never a safe course of action.” He told Mark, “You can kill the dragon if you get twice as many people to join the class as we started with. This is almost always an impossible task because most people who come for one day simply leave when they are told they won’t get an invitation to the club without staying. The best way to get the invitation to the club is just to stick out the entire week and take the loss. Wavecrash will give out the invitations then.”

Mark felt a different sort of anger come over him in the wake of Johnathan’s words. Mark asked, “That’s what everyone does, isn’t it? Just do the basic class and then they can move on to high society?”

“Or they just crash the party,” Catherine said, “Or they get an invitation from the host, whoever that might be. Do you know who it is this week?”

Mark shook his head. “I don’t know how any of this works— Op! There’s my invitee.” Mark was polite, “It was nice to meet you both. See you in class.”

The Fellos’ took the request for departure easily, the two of them walking into the Clubhouse with small nods and not another word.

Isoko was wearing a nice dress as she stepped off of the tram, eyeing Mark.

Mark was, of course, wearing basic brown.

With one hand Isoko indicated all of him, saying, “What is this basic brown!”

Mark found it very easy to say, “My entire life was destroyed and this is what I have.”

Isoko came up short, her face turning a little red. “Uh… I… Uh. I apologize.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Mark grinned a little, to show her things were fine, and they kinda were. There was only so much emotional stuff one could take before new emotional stuff just slipped away. “Shall we attend to class?”

Isoko nodded. “I accept your offer.” She paused. She looked up ahead at the Fellos’ who were walking arm in arm with each other. “So who were they?”

“Catherine and Jonathon Fellos. They’re married. I just found that out right now.”

Isoko did a double take. “At 18?”

“That was my first thought, too!” Mark smiled as he started walking, saying, “But anyway! Being late is bad.”

Isoko hurried to walk with him, around the fountain and up the stairs, into the Clubhouse. Along the way Mark explained some of what the class was about—

“I’ve read about it. It sounds fun— Oh my gods look at the paintings on the ceiling.”

Mark glanced upward at some truly beautiful frescoes, or whatever they were. It was the story of Freyala’s rise from the person known as Emilia Turner into the Goddess of Healing and Protection that she was today. It was a story of armies vanquishing monsters and light and dark banishing dragons and healing the people.

Isoko stared, having a moment.

Mark smiled, and said, “The ceiling in the next room has more.”

They made it into class with a minute to spare, joining the 27 people who were already there. Only 17 of them looked like the originals from the previous two days, which was down a great deal. They had started off with something like 40 people, but then there were 35 on the second day, and now they were down to 17 plus 10 new people.

Oh yeah, Mark thought. No way to keep the Empire of Foodstuffs alive through this.

Wavecrash opened the class right on time, saying, “The Empire of Foodstuffs has fallen on even harder times…”

The rest of class proceeded just as Jonathan and Catherine said it would.

Mark did try to break with the scenario a few times, though, and he even got a chance to speak to ‘the king’ and request something that he felt was unorthodox, but which might work.

With squared shoulders and a strong, calm voice, Mark, as Mister Apple, said, “I formally request that we abandon the eastern front and the southern lands and condense the Empire onto the coast and the north.”

Wavecrash, as ‘the king’, exclaimed, “Preposterous! Impossible! This is treason, and you are to be executed forthwith, Mister Apple. Indeed, I believe you might even be a goblin.” Wavecrash tapped on his tablet, and Mark’s phone flickered, saying he was dead, his little animated head rolling across the ground. Wavecrash added, “It appears he wasn’t a goblin. Oh well; the realm has no room for cowards anyway.”

Mark scoffed, shaking his head. “What?”

Wavecrash bent a little, dropping his kingly disposition, speaking as the instructor once again, “An honorable idea, Mister Careed, but you came to the king directly without a plan of action or any backing among any of the other nobles, so this is the outcome of such an action. The king needed to stamp out any ideas that would cost him power, and you stuck your head up as the tallest nail on the board, so you had to be hammered flat.

“There were ways to make this play work, but you took none of them. But, if you would have taken any of those ways, such as coordinating efforts among the others, then you would have been branded a traitor and faced a similar situation. Navigating the overthrow of a government is tricky.” Wavecrash turned to the whole room, pausing everyone’s individual conversations, saying, “We will be discussing how to properly overthrow a government over lunch, and under which scenarios it is reasonable to attempt such a thing. This is a complicated topic, so be prepared for that.” He turned to Mark, asking, “Do you have a request for your next life in the game?”

… Overthrow a government?

Uh.

Mark tried to think of an answer to the question— “Yes!” Mark said, “Cousin to the king with a line of succession to the throne that could be established upon the overthrow of the kingdom.”

Wavecrash raised an eyebrow. “An ambitious choice. Also not available. This is not a game of individual powers.” He pressed a button on his tablet. “Let’s see what randomizer gets you.”

Mark looked at his phone and his old persona of ‘Mister Apple’ —now a body on the ground— vanished under pixelation. A new person popped up; a knight of the kingdom. ‘Mister Sword’.

Wavecrash said, “You appear to have lost the burden of speaking for small orchards and gained the burden of enacting the king’s will upon the land.”

Mark wasn’t sure how he felt about that, especially when the king had just dismissed the best idea that Mark could come up with for saving the kingdom… But Mark admitted he didn’t know much about this stuff. Mark decided to see what happened.

He bowed, and said, “My king.”

Wavecrash stood upright once again, and dismissed Mark, saying, “Do as I command.”

A bunch of commands appeared on Mark’s phone.

Mark got to it, and soon encountered an atmosphere in the room, and in his discussions, which was charged with energy. Far gone was the boredom of some of the noble kids, here just to get their invite to the party at the end of the week. They were interested in what was happening.

In overthrowing the Empire of Foodstuffs.

Mark even caught Jonathan confiding, “I was not aware that was even an option, to depose the king.”

Catherine added, “And we’re really going to talk about that… subject… over lunch?”

Mark hoped they did.

Soon enough, lunch rolled around, and with everyone sitting down, Wavecrash opened the discussions with, “The nature of existence is often such that drastic changes must be made to the status quo if the people and society are to survive present or future hardships. Such discussions are not undertaken lightly, and usually not at all, but they do need to happen every now and then. There are rules to follow to ensure that the discussion is a necessary one, for even in the broaching of such a subject many people have lost their heads in many different lands, in both worlds. Mister Apple was the one to lose his head today, but he would not be the first at all.

“To start, there are conditions that need to be met before such a discussion can take place in an honorable manner.

“Is the nation in danger of actual collapse, from dangers either foreign or domestic? Politics and current ideologies have no place in this discussion, and if those are what drive people to break the society currently in place, then they need to be ostracized to a varying degree.

“Are people being enslaved, and would the enslavement rate rise, or fall, under the direction of the status quo? Enslavement is not an easy thing to diagnose, despite what you may think. Is debt slavery slavery? What about wage slavery? Not all slavery is the same. Perhaps, a better way to look at ‘slavery’ is ‘Does the current status quo allow for freedom of movement and life, or is there degradation due to the status quo’ and, ‘Does the status quo demand that people become machines for those in power.’

“And finally: Could the present or upcoming problems be solved with the removal of a section of people, or would that make it worse? Make no mistake. I do not mean murder.

“Often, murder makes things a lot worse, which is why Xerkona Culture puts murder of other humans —for any reason at all— at the top of the Do Nots. I am not suggesting murder at all. No. What is better to work toward is censure, or ostracization in extreme cases, and never without the consent of the people.”

What followed, for the next two hours of lunch —though people only ate food for the first hour— was a complete breakdown on why, when, and how to dismantle a society that was no longer functioning, and then how to rebuild that society from the ground up.

Class actually ended up going over time by almost 3 hours, but not a single person minded, for Instructor Wavecrash was talking about a part of Xerkona Culture that they almost never talked about; the ushering of neighboring cultures to betterment through their own presence, and how to break down non-functioning cultures and then build them back up into something better. There was a reason that the Settlement of Xerkona was all about making small settlements inside every other nation out there.

They did not want to rule.

They just wanted to make sure everyone else was ruling well.

“No, this idea is wrong, Mark, '' Isoko said, on the tram ride back to the Ecclesiastical Centers. “They do want to rule, but from the shadows. When the mobs come they do not come for them. That is what the Settlement of Xerkona is all about.”

“They’re doing honor enforcement,” Mark said, “That’s not the same thing as ruling from the shadows.”

“… Oh.” Isoko looked at Mark. “No. I think you misunderstood— No wait. The proper way to say it…” She paused, and then began again, “I wasn’t making myself clear. It’s fine to rule from the shadows. I was not attacking the validity of overthrowing a bad government and installing puppets. I would rather have a Xerkonan than a dragon. A thousand times over.”

“Ah. Yeah… I guess I was misunderstanding.” Mark paused. “But the point is not to overthrow anyone at all. It’s to work with what is there, and only overthrow with the will of the people behind you, and to strive to make sure that it never gets that bad in the first place.”

Isoko grinned. “And if things get bad, then you must walk up to the king and tell him to his face that he needs to step down?”

Mark rolled his eyes. “So I did things out of order and in a way that got my character killed. How was I supposed to know I needed to get all the nobles on board with my desires, first.”

“All the other people understood that rather implicitly,” Isoko said, enjoying this. “But you just walked right up there and got your head chopped off.”

Mark laughed. “At least it was honorable!”

“Quite so!” Isoko said, “Nations walking toward honorable deaths are always good and proper.”

Mark snorted. “Bah!

Isoko smiled. “Thanks for inviting me. That was fun. I will be going to tomorrow’s class as well.”

Mark grinned. “Good! Glad to have you— Wait. You’re not some super rich person too, are you?”

Mark was only vaguely worried about being the poorest person in that room, but it was still a worry.

“This is my only good dress, and I am quite poor compared to everyone in that room. My grandmother got it for me specifically for events like that back there. I might need to call home and get money for a second one, though, for the Social Club. Two people complimented me on this one, but one person said it like a slap. I wasn’t sure back then, but I am absolutely sure now.”

Mark teased, “No one has said anything to me about my basic browns except you.”

“I said I was sorry! Tell you what. You can have a punch. Tomorrow on the field, but only if you can get it yourself.”

Mark laughed.

Isoko instantly said, “So could we organize something in the game to overthrow the king? If the AI is robust enough to handle it— What was that game, anyway? I have never heard of it before.”

“I think it’s actually COFR overseeing the game, with like… a backend subroutine, or something. They just call it the Empire of Foodstuffs and there might be some stuff online about it all, but I haven’t looked it up. I’m pretty sure it’s a Xerkona-specific game.”

Isoko nodded. “I can’t imagine many other nations would like people plotting to overthrow the status quo.”

“That’s such a small part of it! It’s mostly about making sure that everyone has what they need, and then if they don’t then you change things up until they do, while working under the systems that have already been established. It’s a leadership-teaching game, more than anything else. The other two classes were nothing like that one.”

Isoko hummed; a questioning sound. And then she said, “Do you think the game could handle a secession of people going off to another empire, to save themselves?”

“Wouldn’t that get really messy?” Mark started with, “That’s splitting the union and weakening the whole, and then there’s...”

They spoke for a while on the tram, mostly just the two of them, sitting to a side. Before either of them was ready for it, they reached the Ecclesiastical Centers.

Isoko got off first, saying, “That was fun! See you tomorrow in both classes.”

Mark smiled. “See you tomorrow.”

Mark got off at his stop next.

It had been a really good day.