Wallace

"Dude," Cassius demanded, "How have you not electrocuted yourself trying this shit?"

I shrugged, "I've been testing it on Val. She doesn't mind."

Cassius shook his head, "And I thought Phoebe was a handful. Whatever," he leaned back in his chair and pushed my notes aside, "The reason this isn't working is that it's not a faraday cage. All you've done is generate an electric field around yourself- or Val, I guess. It probably even works occasionally."

I nodded, "About half the time, yeah."

"That's because the field is strong enough that it might still interfere with an incoming charge, and whatever you're testing with is probably pretty weak."

"You're saying it doesn't scale?"

"Yeah, if someone threw an actual lightning bolt at this," he continued, indicating my notes, "It'd blow right through it."

"So what's the difference between what I'm doing and an actual faraday cage? Does it need to be physical to work?"

"Nah, you just need to change how you're doing it. The field you're creating is too rigid- that's not the proper term, but whatever -and it doesn't really change in response to interacting with other charges. Forget faraday cages. That's not even how electricity is supposed to work in the first place."

"Well, as a software guy, I'm typically above all that."

"Oh yeah, because knowing CSS is helping you a whole fuckin' lot right now. You need to let the electrical charge move within the field," he continued, "So when a bolt strikes one side of the field- and the bolt's gonna have a negative charge -the electrons in your field move to the far side, balancing out the charge."

"What then, will I be immune to electrical magic?"

Cassius shook his head, "You'll definitely have an advantage. It's gonna take way more power to overwhelm the field than you use to create it, but you won't be invulnerable. Tough as hell, but still, not foolproof."

"That'll have to do. At least this way, I'm covered for the first couple of strikes. Hopefully, I can take them out by the time they realize how to get through the shield."

"Well," Cassius hedged, "Be careful about that. Against another caster, well, you might be fine. But with that lightning god you mentioned, they might be able to sense electromagnetic fields. Same for any clever dude with the right spell, really. The shielding spell might not be visible to the naked eye, but to anyone with a way to sense the flow of electricity, you're gonna look like a miniature sun."

I tilted my head side to side, "Good to know, but honestly-"

"It's not likely," Cassius agreed, "Just be careful."

"It's Simon I'm hoping will be careful. He's the guy who wanted to run this whole thing without killing anyone."

"You send him a message? Tell him off? Or are you hoping to keep quiet about capturing a bunch of his people?"

"He knows. The girls won't tell us exactly when or how, but we know they should have checked in by now. So yeah, I've had Constance on book duty. We'll be sending one of the girls back in the smaller of the two carriages."

Cassius furrowed his brows, "Why?"

"I told you about the enchantment I put on Val? Well, it's already spread to the other fey."

"She's a carrier," Cassius realized.

I nodded, "And yeah, we are giving up one of the carriages, but there's not a ton we can do about that. Besides, there's no way Simon doesn't have some sort of low-jack on those things."

"Is that smart? Trying to fight Simon while also keeping the city from tearing itself apart sounds like two full-time jobs."

"We can't beat Simon in a straight fight. It's just not going to happen. You weren't there to check out his little fortress-harem, but he has way more people than we do. We need him distracted if this is going to work."

"So you're gonna kick-start a revolution. To distract a guy."

"And to free an entire underclass of people from oppression, but sure, to distract a guy."

"So you ditched the whole neo-feudalism thing for the hotel, but what about the city. What, you're gonna run it like a commune as well? Because right now, it feels an awful lot like I might end up with that millstone around my neck once you finally croak."

"No, no way am I repeating Simon's mistakes. He's trying to fix the city by taking control of it," I shook my head, "But the whole problem is that someone's in control at all."

Cassius raised his eyebrows, expression incredulous, "You're gonna go Mad Max on these motherfuckers?"

"No, don't be absurd. I'm just going to take away any method they have for one group to impose their will on another. The fey rule through their pheromone control, and I'm taking that away. Simon has his own tricks, which I'm solving by removing him from the city entirely."

"The sprites then," Cassius countered, "They're going to rule the place in the way people normally do. One strong and kinda charismatic sprite is gonna gather a bunch of his buddies, and they'll go around beating the hell out of people until they do what he says. And it will be a 'he', because it's always a fuckin' guy."

"I'll hang around for a while," I assured him, "If anyone tries that sort of thing, they'll have to deal with me."

"You can't stay forever. Even if you wanted to, you're not gonna live forever, and I'm still not going to be in any position to do what you do a decade or two from now."

"It'll be okay once people get used to the new status quo. The biggest change won't even be the lack of rulers, it'll be freeing the sprites, and that's happening regardless."

"Wally, buddy," Cassius began, his tone respectful but strained, "If you're not running things, and you're not going to let anyone else run things, who the fuck is going to make sure shit gets done? I sure as hell don't know how to keep a medieval city running. There's probably aqueducts and shit that need maintained, and god only knows what else there is that'll kill a whole bunch of people if it fails."

I frowned and shook my head, "You were still in school before you ended up here, right? Did you work at all over the summers?"

"Yeah, had a job in a warehouse driving a centre-rider. It's like a shitty forklift. God, I hated that fucking job."

"Who taught you how to drive the shitty forklift?"

"One of the other guys, he'd been there like ten years, god, guy's probably gonna be there till he dies."

"And what did you do with the centre-rider? The only forklifts I've ever seen were at places like Home Depot, stocking shelves with lumber or whatever. Is that what you were doing?"

"Nah. Trucks would park up at one end of the warehouse, all loaded with, I don't know, whatever. Yoghurt, produce, meat, all refrigerated stuff. At the other end of the warehouse were a bunch of empty trucks- or trailers, I guess -and we'd load them up. So many crates in one truck, so many in the other."

"What if the manager called in sick?"

Cassius frowned and furrowed his brows, hands spread, "Who the hell cares?"

"Exactly. Trucks still get loaded. People still get their yoghurt. And you don't need eight levels of middle management between you and the CEO to get it done."

"That's one warehouse," Cassius protested, "You can't extrapolate that to an entire city."

"The hell I can't. It's all just one farm, one guy's shop, or one guy's vegan cat food store. Put enough of them together, and you get a city. I really doubt the fey care that much about how a sprite ploughs a field. I bet the extent of their management over the farms, and that's most of how the sprites are employed, is telling the sprites what to plant. Probably whatever makes them the most money selling to the other cities. Ditch the fey, and I'm sure the sprites working the farm can put their heads together and figure it out. All the same shit still happens. Crops are planted, tended, and harvested. Sheep are sheared, thread gets spun and woven into cloth, which people then take to the market and sell. Maybe it gets exported to some guy in Caniforma, or maybe some other sprite buys the cloth and turns it into, I don't know, a pair of blue jeans."

"So, in your hypothetical situation, these are denim sheep?"

"I'm not a sheepologist, so sue me. The point is that all the things that need doing will continue to get done by the people already doing them. People still buy and sell things. The only difference is that the fey aren't leeching off every step in the process. Everyone has more money in their pockets, and they can figure out for themselves how to spend it."

"Buddy, I can't tell if you're a Communist or a hardcore Libertarian. Have you spoken to the others about this? Have they told you how crazy this plan is?"

"No crazier than democracy in general, at least as far as they're concerned. And that's the alternative if I don't want to set myself or someone up as a replacement feudal lord. We'd need to explain representative democracy to them, which is probably more complex than telling them to keep doing whatever it is they're doing, sans slavery."

"Then what about the fey? I thought your whole deal was to keep this from getting too bloody. Where do they end up in all this? I don't see fey working the fields any time soon."

"The fey are much better educated, and I don't expect that to change for a generation or two. We might not want middle management, but the city will need record-keeping, and I'm sure other jobs need doing that aren't so labour intensive as farming."

"So... Man, okay, maybe this works. I think I can sorta see it. Let's say it works out. Don't we still end up with a stratified caste system? Sprites who do all the physical labour, and fey who don't?"

"It could definitely be an issue, but only if people see being a scribe as somehow a more important job than farming, and only if farmers still get paid terribly."

"Isn't it? And I'd think that any payment would be better than what the sprites have been getting up till now."

"Take a modern example. Which would be worse. All the investment bankers quitting, or all the farmers."

"Maybe, but investment bankers still make a shitload more than farmers. Scribes might not be investment bankers, but it's hard to shake off that difference when one group works in the fields, and the other doesn't."

"I'm not saying it's not a problem. It's totally a problem. But short of giving every fey in the city a tattoo like Val's or killing all of them, it's one we'll need to solve."

"Couldn't you make another self-replicating enchantment that does what the tattoo does? Or close at least, I don't think you need to turn all the fey into Captain America."

"I looked into it, but it's not possible. The enchantment I have now only works because everything I need is already present in fey. Body magic is easy enough to come by, and I'm getting Weaken from trace levels of mercury."

"Fey eat a lot of fish," Cassius guessed.

"Yeah, or they did before the mists dropped their city on top of a mesa," I agreed, "But there's nowhere in the fey body I can pull Strengthen mana from. Gold actually can end up in the human body, just like most metals, but there are not many ways for it to get there. And I don't see why the fey would have any more than humans."

"Fey sure as hell have more gold than the sprites," Cassius pointed out, "Could make it a whole condition of the 'not getting guillotined' thing."

"Hmmm, that's a fair point."

"You'll need to figure something out regardless," Cassius continued, "The fey are gonna have a ton of stockpiled wealth, and if you're not careful, they'll just buy themselves back into power."

"Which is actually exactly what happened post-French Revolution. At least for the nobles who lived to see the postscript."

"Could kick them out," he suggested, "Fuck off to Caniforma or Parabuteo with all your money, congratulations on not getting murdered. Or, you know, you could just take all their money, like the dirty commie you are."

I grinned and raised a fist. Cassius was already rolling his eyes before I even opened my mouth to cheer, "Smash the state!"