4.5

Rob

Jason and Lena were being worryingly quiet, and Rob could tell his little brother was trying to handle his jealousy flaring up at Brad's sudden appearance. Candy retreating into her head wasn't helping.

Rob caught Jason's gaze and tried to ask with his eyes, Do you want me to get this started?

Jason gave a slight nod.

"So, Brad. What the ever loving fuck happened to you?" Rob asked, coming to sit on the arm of the couch where Aaron had Candy tucked up into his side. The sunken conversation pit Lena had made in the center of the [Commons] portal way only worked for him because it was big enough for each of them to sprawl out at the same time.

Brad currently … sat? Stood? On the arm of another couch, those crazy-assed wings of his shuffling like a broody chicken trying to settle over her eggs. The two mages - and were they like this world's super asshats or what? - were seated on the third couch. Jason wasn't sitting, though Lena's toon had parked on the couch with Brad and was ostensibly examining him. Nope, Jason was near the door to the training field and the handy rack of spears there.

Those twitchy wings of his clamped tight to Brad's back. His expression seemed frozen to Rob, but it was a damn snake face. Arassi, as weird as their scales and muzzles were, still had a lot of expression in their lips and brows. That left Rob to judge Brad's moods by his body language and gestures, and right now the stiffness of Brad's posture and the way he avoided meeting their gazes screamed guilty conscious to Rob.

"I am so sorry you lot got dragged into this," he started.

Aaron opened his mouth a few times to interrupt, but Rob clamped a hand on his brother's shoulder. The story that they got from Brad fit with what Candy had picked up from her [Tapestry Synchronization] skill. The Dream Catcher managed to project enough of their "pattern" along the comm channel the wizardly dude Dibbons had opened to pick at Brad's brain that they were copies of their real selves assembled here on Rhofhir. There was no way back, but no one at home was going to miss them.

That sucked balls, but at the same time, they weren't leaving their families wondering what happened to them. The loss was on their side only. That reassurance was nice. Rob didn't have to imagine his mother weeping beside his and Aaron's empty graves anymore.

The rest of it? Well, it was pretty fantastic and fucked up all at once.

"There's an actual Hogwarts here and you got stuck there as a teacher's pet?" Rob had to ask once Brad finished talking.

That got a glare out of the brit boy, which was a lot better so far as Rob was concerned than this mopey-dopey guilt he wore.

"Were you not listening to a word I just said?" Brad put some hiss on the sibilant parts of that, his wings fluffing up.

"Yeah, the idiot smart boys over there fucked up and managed to steal the IP of our souls. If it hadn't happened to us, would you have even believed it was possible?" Rob knew the answer, but Brad needed to say it.

"No! It's fucking insane!"

"Could you have imagined a way to protect yourself from that kind of brain hacking before you even knew it was possible?" Rob asked.

Brad opened his mouth, then closed it, narrowing his eyes as he glared at Rob. "You're trying to make me feel better, aren't you?"

Rob shrugged. "Shit happens. You learn that pretty fast in Basic, and you learn about 'reasonable precautions' in the maintenance bays. Bitching and moaning about who fucked your shit up doesn't get it fixed. If you want to soak in your piss and wailing, I'm not your damn nanny, but if we're going to get you free, that isn't going to help."

Turning to face the two mages, Rob said, "As for you two, what the ever loving fuck is your dysfunction? You fuck up our lives and then compound it by putting a fucking slave collar on our friend? What the fuck were you thinking!?"

The older guy, something something Feltz the Archmage, puffed up. "'Reasonable precautions' I believe you called it. Our responsibility-"

"Fuck that shit!" Rob yelled.

Rob had fixated so much on the mages that he didn't see Jason move until he stepped in front of Rob and held up his hands. "Shit's fucked up, you're right. Screaming ain't gonna make nothing better."

"It'll make me feel better!" Rob snarled, not taking his gaze off the Feltz asshat.

"Until you realize dude's old enough to be your abuelo ten times over, then you'll feel like a bullying bastard. You know yourself better." Jason had to be the goddamned voice of reason.

"Yeah, but I'll feel great while I'm kicking his ass!" Rob said, letting Jason defuse his rage.

Then he looked over Jason's shoulder and saw Feltz's mouth working, but no sound escaping. Lena had projected a pair of bunny ears behind the old mage's head and the absurdity of it all made Rob throw his hands up and turn away to keep the mages from seeing his laughter.

*~*~*

Lena

While Jason took over to interrogate the mages - actually just the younger one as the older one was working himself up to a rage in the bubble of silence Lena kept wrapped around him - about their part in the current situation, Lena studied her newest contractee. Casper Dibbons, Mage of the Arcane Asylum, had the haunted look of someone reliving their worst nightmare. He spoke in a subdued, hollow voice since accepting the contract she had forced upon him, and that had been the original, utter enslavement contract. The one she thought was evil and had had qualms about inflicting on a dire cat, let alone a fully sapient human being.

She was still beyond furious at finding her friend enslaved like the berry humping elves had done to her harpies, but doubts about her own morality were starting to nip at her. The mage's reaction, the brutalized look about his gaze, was not helping.

"Lena?" Jason asked, the hint of his drawl as he said her name a sign of his own high emotional state.

"Brad, may I have Dibbons direct you to answer truthfully, regardless of any compulsions he or any others may have imposed on you before this, about how you view your current captivity?" She knew how she felt about it, but she also knew there was shock fogging her reactions. Brad had lived with this enslavement business for a month now. The newness was at a farther remove from him.

Brad rubbed his face, shuddered, then said, "Yes, you may."

An exchange of words, a sequenced pulse of mana traveling from Lena through Dibbons and out to Brad, and then her friends said, "It's a bloody royal fucking mess. As much as I've come to loathe Feltz for being an amoral, arrogant bastard of a bloody prick, I have to acknowledge that he has a valid point about their responsibility as researchers to contain potentially dangerous beings they bring into their world. After all, each of our governments have their Ethics divisions to address the implications of new research. It's not exactly a new concept.

"Which doesn't really stop me remembering your Frederick Douglass' pithy retort about no man under Heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him. If I must be subject to someone else's tyranny, at least Dibbs has the moral fortitude to limit the imposition of his will over mine, and I can empathize with him. He tried to get the more senior mages of the Asylum to help get me from golem to flesh, which is when they told him not only no, but threatened to kill me and cut him off if he tried to set me free. As far as they're concerned, I'm only worth helping if I'm strong enough to set myself free."

Brad uncoiled and let himself down from the couch arm to start pacing back and forth, gesticulating with his arms as he continued. "I miss being flesh and blood, but I love being able to fly. Actual, real, self directed flight! It's beautiful! But being treated like a thing, denied my basic humanity, it's beyond infuriating! I can't even cuss, it's that bad! The physical and mental benefits of this golem body are amazing, but the social curse of it? That's reason enough alone to prefer being stuck in even an enfeebled shell of flesh like Feltz over there!

"Hells bells but I wish this were some Disney set up, a clear and known evil, but when has real life ever been like that? And there's still the reason Dibbs and the other mages are casting through the Primal Chaos to find answers. They're like our climate scientists, who warned about the chaos we've been brewing up within our ecologies thanks to industrialization and fucking ignorance, except they aren't trying to police their own people, but rather to mitigate the bloody fucking anarchy that happens when the Tapestry needs to reset itself! They aren't at the point of trying to get everyone to hold hands and work toward a solution. They're still trying to find some hope of avoiding mass starvation and war breaking out all over the world!"

Lena nodded her toon's head. "Would you prefer for me to release Dibbs from his contract?"

"No! And yes!" Brad slumped, his shoulders and wings sagging. "I trust you, Lena, to never allow him to use that control formation, and, God! I want that! I want the sanctity of my self determination back! But." Brad sighed, hugging himself and looking at the floor as he continued. "But, I also know that even if you never use your control formation over him, the fact that it exists will just inflict what I'm going through on a man who has done his best to act morally, and the only person on this world so far who has ever treated me like a human being."

That was what Lena needed to know. She focused on the younger of the two mages. "Alright. Dibbs, it's time to negotiate. [Offer Contract Amendment]."

*~*~*

Dibbs

Details of an assurance of some self sovereignty came to Dibbs with the Arbiter's contract amendment. Whether or not that was the whole of the negotiations she offered, he leapt at the step closer to freedom.

«This is a private channel on the Guardian Communication network. What you say over this link is between you and myself, and whomever we choose to tell. Do you understand me?» The Arbiter's voice echoed in his mind with an all too familiar reverberance.

«Yes, Arbiter,» he responded as he had been born to do.

There was cold steel clearly held behind the Arbiter's words as she said, «I will be clear. The protection of my friends and family is my top priority. I do not regret forcing you to accept a contract with me, but I do regret the severity of the initial contract.

«You are not linked into the rest of the Guardian Communications network. Think of the level of this contract as a parole. None of the creatures of my dungeon will attack you, but they will defend themselves. Some may provoke you if it is in their nature to do so, but you are in no physical danger from them. I have taken steps to ensure you and my friends are separated if one of them does turn violent toward you.

«Brad is convinced you're a decent man, but you have yet to prove that to me, and the shit your companion is spewing isn't helping. If I thought Rob wouldn't straight up shove a spear through his eye, I might even let him be heard, but death is one of those things it's hard to take back, and sometimes it is too much of a mercy. What you choose to do with that warning is your business.»

Blighted bone! Politics. The test was obvious, but what the Arbiter was testing for wasn't. If he failed to warn Feltz, would he seem disloyal? And if he did, would he appear to harbor Feltz's own Phimaen prejudices?

Neither changed the fact that this Arbiter had managed what even his own creator had not: she had taken his bond. Regardless of when or even how he might manage it, he could no longer act against her best interests without forfeiting his own. It was the nature of the dungeon born. Once contracted, a dungeon born creature, no matter how sapient or even sentient it was, drew the mana that fueled their very existence from their dungeon. That bond continued even after the contract of service was severed.

Dibbs could not permit Feltz to learn he had been spawned by a dungeon rather than born. Reibsamak Feltz was the closest thing to a father he had ever known, but as a Phimaen born human, Feltz carried the prejudices of the Pure Bloods too deeply in his pattern to overlook Dibbs' lack of parentage. It would break the old bastard's heart.

Dibbs bowed his head in acknowledgment of the Arbiter's words and rose. Then he sat back down as he realized there was no privacy to seek within a dungeon, not from the Arbiter. "Dame Arbiter, is there a place I may take my mentor to speak in private?"

The light projection the Arbiter used looked upon Feltz with a regal distaste. "Sure." She waved her hand, a needless theatric, and the luxurious backed bench the two of them were sitting upon rose up in the air, a mana bubble wrapping around them.

"- blighted chid of a wasted wreck! I'll - Sands waste it!" Feltz abruptly became audible to Dibbs, his rant cut off by the moving of the bench.

"Feltz, that's hardly the way to conduct yourself as a senior member of the Arcane Asylum," Dibbs said, trying to act as nonchalant as he could while the bench took them through the portal they had entered via, returning them to the room of portals. The bench then rotated, lining them up with the only covered portal. The wheel on the steel door began to spin and the sound of heavy objects shifting behind the wheel did little to make Dibbs feel better about this.

"The arbiter has quite a grasp on mana manipulation, better than your little demon ever showed," Feltz commented, sounding cheerful.

Dibbs dropped his head into his waiting palm. "You've decided to be as much of a provocateur as you can be, haven't you?"

Feltz smiled. Dibbs could feel it strongly enough that he looked up just to confirm he wasn't making assumptions based on his knowledge of the Archmage. The smile held smug cunning.

Dibbs dropped his hands and said, "You wasted chid of a sandy stocker! You're going to get yourself killed if you try that here!"

A final clang sounded out from behind the steel and the door swung open. The portal behind it appeared much like the others, but they didn't have a lot of time to study it before they were whisked through it, arriving in a barren stone hallway.

"Nonsense!" Feltz said. "Trust me, they'll reveal more in their anger than they will with soft words and pretty statements. Demons always do. You can be the friendly one-."

"You idiot! I'm contracted! I'm already enslaved to the dungeon's Arbiter! At least Brad has the chance to break free as he never once accepted the control formations set into his body!"

"The Tapestry does not uphold contracts made under duress," Feltz said.

"Of all the people to believe such pretty myths," Dibbs said, shaking his head in disgust.

The bench had carried them through the hallway, and now settled to the ground once more, the mana bubble around them dissipating. They were in an empty room some twenty meters long by ten meters wide. Two corridors led away from opposite sides of the room in addition to the one they had come from.

"It's a well established fact-"

"That you're as blind as any Phimaen." Dibbs interrupted Feltz for one of the few times in the decades since their first meeting. "I love you. You're the only father I can remember, and because I love you I'm telling you: do not provoke the Arbiter of this Dungeon. You cannot use the Asylum as a reference for what an Arbiter can accomplish within their domain."

Feltz drew himself up, ready to bluster, but stopped as he looked into Dibbs' steadfast gaze. "How long have you known?" he asked instead.

"When I discovered the 'enchantment' for the dorm's unseen servants only worked in the Asylum."

"Who have you told?" Feltz asked.

"You. Only you."

*~*~*

Jason

Jason hadn't finished interrogating the mages, but he could tell as much by the feel of the G.C. as the expression on Lena's toon that she couldn't take much more.

"I've got a recording bug on the couch," she said before anyone could say anything about her abrupt dismissal of the mages. "You can all review it from the file server Candy and Aaron put together during the linking."

Then she turned to Brad. "What do you need to break free of the mental enslavement design?"

"It's [Ensorcelled Enslavement], not mental," Brad began, then paused. "How did you know about that?"

Rob said, "Man, do we have a lot to fill you in on! First things first, how do we get you free?"

"I need more willpower points than Dibbs, only I have no willpower regeneration thanks to the design." Brad said.

"That's it?" Jason asked.

"Well, at least I'm not losing willpower to fighting off cravings or instinctual responses. I have been losing it to the constant barrage of idiots treating me like a bloody damn toy."

Rob nodded, then asked, "So, what's your [Meditation] skill up to?"

Brad's head tipped to the side. "It advanced to [Mindfulness], but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?"

"Active Will Pool regeneration," Lena said.

Brad blinked, then face palmed.