ΔV Pt. 07

"Take all the time you need to come to grips with it, Annie," he said, casually.

"And don't..." She turned to face him, scowling. "Stop smiling."

"I can't help it, you're adorable," Dale purred.

"Stop it!" Annie said. "You're the...you called yourself the Dark Lord, stop smiling!"

"I said other people called me a Dark Lord," Dale said, waggling his finger at her. His eyes sparkled. "Though, the name has a bit of a ring to it."

"Oh ha ha ha," Annie said, scowling at him. "You were a Dark Lord and you're planning to take over the world. I should kick your ass for even suggesting that."

"Why?" Dale asked.

"Because it's wrong!" Annie said.

Dale arched an eyebrow. "If it helps, I won't be ruling it very long. Just long enough to smash up the shackles that currently keep ninety percent of your species from reaching its potential." He smiled. "Then, I admit, I wouldn't mind taking one of your space fleets back to my Earth through that portal you blew open and kicking the ass of some smug elven magi who banished me into a mana-free hell for four centuries because I dared to use necromancy." He shook his head. "Motherfuckers."

"The Dark Lord Dalethraxius just called an elf a motherfucker," Annie whispered to herself.

"Humans have a lot of fun curse words, I admit," Dale said.

Annie started to pace again.

"I won't help you take over the world," she said, firmly.

"What if I told you that I wouldn't use violence unless I absolutely had too?" Dale asked, his voice a soft murmur.

"That's not gonna happen," Annie said. "Like, there are armies! And navies! And guns and nukes and shit. Even if you play nice, everyone who fights back is gonna level the planet."

"Not if they don't know they're in a battle until after I win," Dale said. He stood, then, with a panther's grace. As he stood, he held his hand out to her. His eyes met hers and he smiled ever so slightly. "Annie, I want to show you something."

Annie looked at his hand. Her fingers tingled and she wanted to take it, to go with him – but her gut knotted. She didn't like how reasonable, how calm he sounded. Dale...Dalethraxius...the Dark Lord. A Necromancer. Part of her still wanted to laugh hysterically every time those words crossed her mind. But she could also remember the way he had whisked her here, dozens of miles, in a single flare of purple energy and glowing light. She could also remember almost a year of his kindness. His charm. Of the best sex she'd ever had in her life. Annie bit her lip.

"Promise," she whispered. "Promise you won't do anything unless I agree to it. If you try and take over the world, without me saying it's okay, we're done. Finished. Over. Wrapped up. History. Got it?" She tried to sound confident and forthright and only realized how fucking stupid she sounded after she started talking. But by then, it was too late, so she wrapped up the malformed nightmare of a sentence with a huge blush.

Dale looked serious. "I promise."

Annie looked square in his eyes – and saw nothing but the gentle, heartfelt earnestness she had fallen for when she and he had started to orbit one another like flaring comets. She bit her lower lip, then whispered. "You're a Dark Lord, Dale, I don't know if you've read Lord of the Rings. I haven't. B-but I saw the remake, and-"

Dale dropped to his knees. His finger drew a scrawling pattern on the grass of the hill they knelt on – the pattern was etched in purple flames, and it flickered there without actually singing or burning anything. He looked up at her as the symbol flared, then faded to nothingness. He sighed, slowly. "That was a truth sign. If I tell a lie for the next twelve hours, you'll know." He smiled. "Here, I'll prove it. Two plus two is five."

His eyebrow twitched and his hand clenched. Annie reached down, taking his wrist in her hand, lifting his hand up – and saw that the edge of his index finger was becoming puffy and red. She touched it, tenderly, and felt that it was hot. She looked past his hand, down his arm at her. He was smiling weakly. "Jesus, you could have just crossed your heart and hoped to die, Dale!" Annie said.

"In the words of your people, I am a little extra," Dale said, grinning playfully up at her.

Annie reached down and poked his forehead. "Dork Lord more like." She muttered, then took his hand. He stood and magic flared around them. When it faded, Annie was standing in darkness. Her feet pressed to something shockingly cold and filmy, like standing on a fine patina of mud. More magic flared through her and the cold faded to a numb awareness that...that she was standing in cold, but the cold wasn't bothering her. It was the strangest sensation in the world – but it was banished when a glowing white light flared from Dale's hand as he lifted it over his head. They were standing in a bubble of shimmering water – a half oval shape of rippling blackness that reflected the light back at them like a mirror.

"Where are we?" she asked.

"The Atlantic Ocean," Dale said, then tossed the light. It shot out of the bubble of water – and once the light was shining from outside, it ceased to reflect back at them and instead illuminated the vast, bleak landscape that surrounded them. In the distance, a bleached, rusted hulk loomed from the waters, while what seemed to be an entire forest of slowly decaying, grayish lumps of biomatter spread outwards in every direction. "This is one of the dead zones. Created by acidification and deoxigenation and the dumping of countless toxic chemicals into the seas. Your oceans are a tiny fraction of what they once were – sustained by genetically engineered algae and what clumps of life your United Nations managed to save. There's several hundred different genetic banks, containing every sample you collected during the diebacks...but that itself is a fraction of a fraction of what your race never even knew of."

Annie looked away. Her fingers tightened on Dale's.

"They knew," Dale said, quietly.

"Huh?" Annie looked at him, his brow furrowing.

"If you read the UNEC reports, if you watch the depositions, the evidence is all gathered there during the trials. The fossil fuel corporations, the oil moguls, knew this would happen. They knew it would happen in the 1960s, not the 2060s. And they...did..." He stepped towards her, his eyes boring into hers. "Nothing."

Another flash and this time, they were standing in a city. The city was dead – deader than any city that Annie had ever walked through. The field that surrounded them continued to be visible, though it wasn't because of water anymore. Rather, it was from the tiny sparks and pops and flickers that struck it, reminding Annie of static on an old TV set tuned to a dead channel. The buildings around her were sagging and...melted, as if they had been exposed to a great heat, then left to set. Ghostly shadows were burned into the walls – inverse shadows, patches of lightness surrounded by black scoring. She shuddered and turned to face Dale, who was frowning as he looked outwards.

"Mecca," he said, quietly. "Victim of a war started, sustained, directed and driven entirely to ensure continued access to petrochemical resources used by corporate entities and oligarchs that are still in power to this day. It was ended with nuclear weapons – those were the dramatic exclamation point. But it was the drones, the war plagues, the starvation, the climate disasters, that did the real killing in the end. Do you know how many people fled the equatorial regions, fled wars and climate change, only to run directly into camps and machine guns, Annie?"

Annie, her eyes blurring with tears, shook her head.

"And the people in charge, the people who ran things, the people who had the power...did..." He leaned forward. "Nothing."

Annie couldn't breathe.

"They did worse than nothing, actually..." Dale whispered, fury burning in his eyes. "They helped. They pushed. They spent the money on the hate campaigns, on the misinformation, on the lies." He slapped the back of one hand against his palm. "They spent millions on it, just to keep onto their power for one fucking second longer. And do you know what happened, Annie? Do you know what happened?"

Annie nodded, mutely. "Nothing."

"David Koch Junior is still a billionaire," Dale whispered. "There are three Bushes, an Obama and two Clintons sprinkled throughout your current administrator. Russia's just as bad." He shook his head. "And China managed to learn zero new things in their revolution. Europe?" He spat on the ground. "They put a bandaid on the problem and pretend they've fixed it. And the rest of the world is still trying to drag themselves out from under the West's heel."

He took her hand and they vanished again. This time, they appeared back at San Francisco.

Annie staggered away from him. Her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes looking at the pyramid.

"What's your plan?" she whispered.

Dale inclined his head. "The first step is to teach you some magic," he said, quietly. "I can draw magic into myself – but there's an upper limit even for someone who has as much practice as me. Each person I trust who can draw on magic is another person who can help me with rituals and there's going to be a lot of ritual actions. We do have a huge advantage here..." he smiled as he stepped up to her, his hand squeezing her shoulder. "No one else is drawing on magic. And a lot of magic is coming through the portal."

Annie grinned, ever so slightly. "So, I'll be able to cast fireballs?"

"Annie, darling," he said, quietly. "By the time you're done learning, you won't have too."

He squeezed her.

Annie looked out at the horizon. "I...okay, that's not a plan though. That's a step. Walk me through this."

"Okay," he said, quietly, then walked around to take her hands. He started to lay out the steps – placing them with the careful precision of a craftsman. As the links were built, a slow horror grew in Annie. But it wasn't the horror of seeing a monster – it was a horror at realizing that it was going to be a painfully huge amount of work. It felt impossible, a huge chain of effort stretching from where she stood into the distance. But the steps chained together, piece by piece, with nothing that felt too hard...if you took them one at a time. But the big picture...

She bit her lip, slightly. "Are you sure it'll work?"

"Absolutely not," Dale said, chuckling. "The risks are that we die. Or that way more people than we expect will die – in nuclear fire or in kinetic kill strikes." He shrugged. "But there's a plan for that as well."

"Oh? What? You rez them?" Annie asked, laughing nervously. She had to laugh because the alternative was to scream.

Dale smirked. "Yup."

Annie blinked at him.

"I'm not kidding," he said. "It'll take a serious amount of magic and a great deal of diamonds. But I have a plan for that." He grinned. "Fake diamonds are relatively inexpensive, which covers the magical reagent cost..."

Annie gaped at him. Then her mouth closed. "What's the limit on that?"

"I need a body and the body needs to be less than a year dead," he said. "Past that, life magic cannot actually return someone – you must rely upon necromancy. There are some advantages to being a ghost, though." He grinned. "I refer you back to step...fifty six?"

"Yeah, step fifty six was when things turned all Iron Maiden album cover, yeah," Annie whispered. She looked away. "I don't...I don't know. It's all so much." Her eyes closed. "W-Why me? Why?"

Dale paused. Then he took her hand. "When I tried this on...on the old Earth on..." he paused, then smiled. "Arcadia. The word for pastoral living, seems appropriate, eh?" He chuckled, quietly. "When I tried this there, I trusted no one. I had no generals, no servants, nothing but my own armies. I had no one to second guess me. No one to question." He shrugged one shoulder. "And no one to watch my back. And I've seen you, Annie. You..." He stepped closer. "You have depths you cannot begin to imagine."

Annie gulped. A shiver ran along her spine. Trying to break the tension, she whispered: "T-That means I've got magic talent, right?"

"Yes, but there's also other factors," Dale said, grinning at her impishly.

Annie gigglesnorted. She closed her eyes, then ducked her head forward. "Okay. Okay. Okay." She nodded. "Okay. I'm sold." She looked up at him. "But we show mercy whenever we can. We show people we can make this a better world." She smiled, slightly.

"A world of plenty," Dale murmured. "Where the mindless undead work the fields, where technology and magic are used to make lives better, not to enrich the scant few. Where we don't spend a significant chunk of our global industry on making machines expressly for the purpose of killing one another." He took her hand, then leaned his head forward, kissing her knuckles. "A world where I won't need to be the lord of anything...but you. When you want it." He smirked at her.

"H-Heh, wow, okay..." Annie murmured. "Uh...y-you mean...collar stuff?"

"Yeah," Dale said, grinning at her.

"Oh." Annie gulped. "Wow. I never knew you were into pegging."

Dale laughed uproariously, then slipped his arm around her. "Come on. Lets start teaching you necromancy."

The two of them walked away from where they had stood, looking for Annie's discarded clothes. With each step, Annie thought she should have felt more and more nervous, as every step she took was away from the life she had expected to lead. Instead, every step, she felt a growing confidence. It was warm in her belly – a knowledge that she was...she was doing something. For her whole life she had been stuck thinking about how the world had problems, how it needed to get fixed, how someone had to do something about it.

And now?

Now she was going to do that something.

She glanced out of her corner at Dale as he laid out the basics of spellcasting – about the trick of focusing magic inwards, about shaping it into one of the spheres of elemental force that he claimed was the basis of magic.

Annie grinned, slowly.

This was going to be fun.

Wasn't it?

Dale and her stepped through a shimmering portal – back home.

A chill, desolate wind blew along the hilltop.

***

Vidya sat on the Enterprise and watched the impossible. Beside her, Dr. Mann was tapping his finger against his chin, frowning seriously as he watched the same thing. Setting up for this viewing had taken an annoyingly long time – lots of kitbashing together sensors and cameras, lots of digging through crawlspace and sending exasperated technicians into the spaces of the ship that weren't actually meant to be explored by human hands. The techs had bitched and complained. Remass tanks were meant to be their shield from the radiation spat out by the nuclear tanks. Putting them in vacuum meant that there wasn't any air that could get irradiated, and there was no interface with the ship's air recycling systems.

Footage from the gun-cams on the marines that were assisting with the current Lord Winsom had changed their minds in a hurry. Said Lord Winsom was being debriefed by the Captain – which gave Vidya a chance to help with the lab experiment that would change space flight as they knew it. The techs had created several inflatable corridors in the superstructure of the Enterprise, allowing them to cut into an empty remass tank, then put in the sensors and equipment required.

While they had worked, Vidya had worked with the elf.

"I don't like this place," Isabella had said, her face turning green as she sat across from Vidya at in the laboratory. "My head feels as if it is spinning."

"Technically," Vidya said, sighing. "That's because it is. This entire section of the ship is spinning to produce gravity."

"That makes no sense," Isabella said, sourly.

"On the contrary, Dr. Isabella," Dr. Mann said, walking over, holding a cup of tea that he swore helped with his motion sickness. He had decided to replace "mage" with "doctor", if only for his own sanity. He handed it to the elf gingerly. "Tell us if this helps. Your biochemistry is remarkably similar to ours, it should be perfectly safe. But, ah, have you ever spun around in a circle? As a child?"

"Yesssssss," Isabella said, hissing the word out as she narrowed her eyes. Her lips clenched and her eyes closed. "It was..." She clicked her tongue. "Many years ago."

"How long is many?" Vidya asked, taking the cup Dr. Mann had gotten for her. Dr. Mann bowed his head to her politely as she smiled at him.

"T...Two...thousand, I believe," Isabella said.

Vidya blew tea out of her nose. She coughed and spluttered as Dr. Mann scrambled for the absorbent cloth that was stashed in every room – spills on a starship were no laughing matter. He was looking just as stunned as she, but he still managed to mop up what she had spilled. Isabella, who was looking considerably less nauseous, leaned back in her seat and tossed a bit of her hair behind her shoulder. She had blue hair – but she had assured Vidya she had dyed it that color. "Being a mage, I don't actually have that many Parts to play. Some elves despair when they don't have a Part. But Mages are useful for their roles in supplementing the Telling, and for when Elves must deal with other races. But do you know the real reason why I don't mind not having a Part?"

"What?" Dr. Mann asked, his voice horse.

"No one is trying to kill me to take it," Isabella said, her eyes glittering. "Now, when are we going to be doing this bloody experiment?"

That was when the radio crackled and the head of the technical team working on the remass tank called in: "All right docs, your gears set up."

The gear in question was essentially every single sensor and camera that they had in their stores. They had infrared, radar, gamma ray, spectral analysis, even hyper-sensitive microphones. They were going to be collecting every bit of data they could, after all. "Okay," Vidya said, then turned to face Isabella. "Dr. Isabella, you said that you can cast through a..." She paused.

"A scrying window?" Isabella asked, looking at the camera view of the interior of the reaction mass tank. It was not the most impressive view that had ever been put to screen: It was essentially a several hundred meter long, several meter wide egg shape, one of six that were arranged in a ring around the central core of the ship's spine. When they were filled, they put hundreds of tons of water between the reactor and the habitation deck – and when they were empty, they put hundreds of meters of vacuum between the reactor and the habitation deck. Both were things that the human crew liked to have between them and a large source of gamma rays.

Isabella tapped the screen. "The resolution is remarkable! And so easy, you just had to press that button?"

Vidya nodded. "I take it that using, ah, your methods is significantly more difficult?"

"It involves a silver mirror and a gemstone of significant value, and six hours of chanting," Isabella said, her voice wry. Her palms rubbed together. "It feels almost wrong to be casting a cantrip through a scrying spell. Wasteful."

"If it helps, every human being carries a screen and camera combination of the same quality," Dr. Mann said, happily.

Isabella closed her eyes. She stood, then thrust her finger imperiously at the screen. Her blue eyes flashed and she did not speak a word or make a gesture. She simply glared and, a few moments later, a blob of water appeared from thin air. It was the size of a human head and seemed painfully small in the immensity of the water tank – doubly so when Vidya mentally compared it to the other tanks that ringed the core of the ship. Despite that, she whistled slowly, shaking her head. The water was beginning to boil away – soon, it seemed to vanish. Isabella scowled.