NewU Pt. 19

Welcome to Chapter 19.

I hope all of you had a great Christmas and are looking forward to a happy and healthy new year. At the end of 2022 I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of you; readers, supporters, editors, and friends for the reception and support that my work and I have been shown in such abundance. I hope you continue to enjoy where the story goes.

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Time is a bit of a flexible concept to an Evo in the best of circumstances. Between the time dilation effects of their cities and their bunkers and their extremely long lives, patience is not something that comes easily to them. Waiting, in any form, is far from a favored pastime because everything is dragged out to almost unbearable levels. This isn't to say that we are a necessarily impatient race. It's just that everything seems like it is taking longer than it would to the normal human, primarily because a lot of our time is spent in our own minds where time flows at a rate of about forty-five minutes to every one minute outside it. This meant that the four days it took for Miguel to respond to my message about meeting the Inquisition leadership felt like an eternity.

Of course, I tried to make that time as productive as possible. The first night, after Phillippa had left the apartment - on weak knees and with a massive smile on her face - had been spent working on the computer system. It seemed to be capable of a lot more than I had originally envisioned, and I was trying to see how far those extra abilities could be pushed. I was interrupted every few minutes by pictures from Becky showing her blonde head between Philippa's thighs and then close-ups of her tongue, delving into her lover to scoop out my seed. I remembered her note saying that her fingers would be involved, but either the plan had changed, or the pictures hadn't covered that part of their festivities.

Night two was spent balls deep in Faye, over and over again, in every position imaginable when the laws of physics didn't apply. To put into context how long we spent together and how utterly draining it was, I will only say that part of our experiment was to see how long we could go without any rejuvenation time needed between orgasms.

I came fifty-eight times, sometimes with as long as an hour between them, before we were both too exhausted to continue. We passed out in each other's arms.

The third day, unsurprisingly, was spent resting.

It was early on the fourth day that I received a call from Miguel, a week to the day since I had cornered him and 200 of his Inquisitor co-workers in Malaga. I was given an address of what the Inquisition decided was neutral ground in Den Haag, The Netherlands. I was British and new to this whole rivalry thing, so I had no idea if this really was neutral or not, but by the mid-afternoon, I was on a flight, and by late afternoon I was getting out of a cab at the address that I had been given.

I looked up at the building in front of me and blinked.

Den Haag... The Hague... not like the city, but the actual Hague, or at least what politicians and diplomats have called "The Hague" since the end of the second world war. Its official title was, however, a little different— The International Court of Justice.

"Of fucking course! I mean, why would it be anything less?"

I took a deep breath and started to walk. Slowly padding through carefully manicured gardens and then climbing the steps outside. The Inquisition had played something of their hand here. This was clearly designed as an intimidation tactic, not only to show how powerful and important they were but to highlight, in no uncertain terms, that the law was on their side. Unfortunately, compared to the intimidation tactics used by parents over the years - not to mention their willingness, bordering on eagerness, to follow up on threats made - this attempt at striking fear into me was, at best, rank fucking amateur! I knew exactly how to respond.

When responding to any bullying tactics, on any level, from the schoolyard to international politics, there are only ever two realistic responses that have any likelihood of working. One is to ignore them, the tactics, I mean. It may be fairly easy to ignore a school bully, but it's a little harder to dismiss the diplomatic representatives of an entire country... or the inquisition. The second option is to show strength. There is the tried and tested theory that bullies only respond to their show of strength with one of your own. It is a cliche, but like all cliches, it is a phrase that has been proven right so many times, in so many ways, that it has become a cliche. The problem with this approach, and the one that is rarely explained to the victim of middle school bullies, is that you have to be prepared to back it up. It is true most bullies are cowards and will often back down at the first hint that their prey is not going to be an easy meal. But there are more than a few who are not and will respond to this show of strength with the one thing that allowed them to be a bully in the first place—raw aggression.

The moral of the story, for any victim of bullying taking this second option, is that you have to be prepared to show your strength. If your bluff is called, you must be ready to punch someone in the face! And, more than likely, be punched in the face in return. It doesn't matter if we are talking figuratively or literally. You are calling their bluff; expect them to call yours too.

So my options were either passiveness and diplomacy or aggression.

No prizes for guessing which one I went with.

I went through the main doors and introduced myself to a charming middle-aged, human lady at the front desk, waited for someone to come out, and was then led through what I assumed were pretty standard security checks for a building of such importance. A few different levels of metal detectors and X-rays, fingerprint and DNA tests - which the computer in my apartment would have passed, even if something had been flagged, which it wasn't, and then deleted the records - before I was led through a labyrinthian rat warren of corridors that seemed to be intentionally designed to disorientate me before being dumped into an empty room and having the door locked behind me.

I rolled my neck. This was doing nothing to make me feel nervous or intimidated. This was just pissing me off.

The room was about as empty as it was possible for a room to be. There was a floor, four walls, a ceiling, a security camera in each corner, and two doors; the one that I had entered through and another identical one directly in front of me.

I couldn't have been standing there for more than a minute or two, although it certainly felt longer thanks to that time thing, before the door in front of me opened, and three burly-looking men in dark suits stepped into the room. The first thing that struck me about them, aside from wondering if they all used the same tailor, was that each of them was almost shadowed against the bright white aura that surrounded them. Whereas every person in the building I had seen to this point had been human, these three men were unmistakably inquisitors.

The second thing I noticed was that they were all armed. I should point out here, once again, that I am British and as astounding as it may seem to people in other parts of the world, we are not used to seeing guns. I could recognize the type of weapons they were holding - they were submachine guns, for the record - but knowing what make or model they were was just beyond me. Exposure breeds familiarity, in this case, a knowledge of the distinctions between one gun and another, and familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it certainly breeds complacency. To me, these weapons looked black, made of some kind of metal, and they looked dangerous.

However, the only other weapons I had seen before that room had been at the party. They hadn't done much to hurt me, nor had they been particularly useful in defending the people carrying them. These guards didn't seem to have been told that part, though, and two of the three spread out to opposite corners of the room and raised their weapons toward me menacingly.

Of course, they had no way of knowing that firing pins in each of their weapons had been turned to dust by my powers. But from behind them, their wielders felt safe.

As I said: Complacency.

The third man, either the man in charge or the man who had drawn the short straw, stepped toward me with a look of disgust on his face. "Spread your arms. You are going to be searched!" He barked in heavily accented English.

I took a deep breath and slowly blew it out, trying my hardest to look not only thoroughly unafraid but a little bored. I held my arms out. The man stepped forward, first running his hands from my wrists to my armpits, then checking my collar before firmly patting down my sides. To his credit, it was a far more thorough job than the rent-a-cop at the front desk had done. "I'm surprised you had the balls to come," he snarled as he worked his hands over my waist.

"Oh?" I tilted my head to the side. "Do you spend a lot of time thinking about my balls?" The man didn't answer; he just growled a little and worked his way down each of my legs. I must admit that I was a little disappointed that neither of his two friends saw the funny side either. "Hmmm, tough crowd. Must be the steroids."

"Looks like we have a comedian," the man said to his friends, sounding utterly unimpressed.

"Nah, not really," I shrugged. "I'm just... bored. Pissing you off is helping me pass the time until this..." I arched an eyebrow at him as he knelt before me, checking my socks, "... whatever this is, is finished, and I can talk to your bosses."

The man, apparently done with his checks, pulled himself up to his full height and size - a height and size he seemed rather impressed with - and eyeballed me. "So you are an Evo," he said, his voice making a sound that made it sound like the word itself tasted unpleasant in his mouth.

"So I have been told," I held his gaze.

"You don't look like much," he snorted.

"I get that a lot."

"I think you're full of shit."

"You're not very good at it," I said with a straight face. "Thinking, I mean. You should probably stop before you hurt yourself."

He stepped a bit closer, clearly trying that intimidation thing again and failing miserably. "I have other skills," he growled, this time trying to sound dangerous.

I cast a look over my shoulder to one of his friends who had circled behind me, then looked back to him with a shrug. "Good for you, man. A guy has to make his money somehow. I'm not one to judge what people do in their personal time."

The man stepped a little closer, bringing his hand up and tapping it condescendingly against my cheek. "You are going to be a good little Evo bitch, now, aren't you? You can go in, meet the bosses, get given your orders, and then fuck off like an obedient little...."

I broke his arm. He screamed.

My left hand came around to clamp his hand to the right side of my face while my right hand shot up with all the strength my ability-infused muscles could produce and smashed into his elbow. His arm snapped like a twig, and shards of bone pierced through the skin as a scream of utter agony was launched from his lips.

His friends reacted in a second. The impotent clicks of their completely useless weapons were only matched by the looks of wide-eyed confusion as my left hand released its grip on the guard, shot out in a knife strike, slammed into his neck hard enough to clamp his throat closed for a few seconds, and my foot swept his from under up. He dropped to the ground like a sack of shit, desperately wheezing as he tried to suck in a fresh lungful of air.

I stooped down next to him. "Your friends are wondering why their guns aren't working and if they should come to help you out," I said menacingly with a nod over my shoulder to them. "But that would be a mistake. They'll end up making a mess all over this beautifully decorated room when I shatter their skulls like so many eggs." The two other guards glanced nervously at each other. "Or they can stay where they are, and we can pretend this was all some misunderstanding," I finished.

The door slammed open, and an older, better-dressed man strode through, pausing mid-step to take in the scene before him. The two guards behind me were still just standing there, still glancing nervously at each other while holding their broken guns at me for reasons that none of us could comprehend. The first guard was sitting on the floor with the top half of his body propped against the wall, cradling his shattered arm in his good one and still struggling to suck in a full breath. I had crouched down next to him.

"What the..." The well-dressed man murmured to himself. "What is going on?!?"

The two still-upright guards snapped to attention. The one crumbled next to me just groaned. I turned my head to the newcomer but didn't make any attempt to move. "Bob! Good of you to join us!" I said with a blatantly fake smile on my face. I have no idea if the guy's name was Bob or not, but I was feeling insolent and defiant after dealing with that guard. If it annoyed him, all the better. "I was just explaining to your friend here why it is unwise to talk down to his betters. Getting frisked in an overly-enthusiastic manner and talking about male prostitution is fine by me, but I have to say, the rest of it leaves a lot to be desired." I stood myself back up.

The man who will forever be known as Bob, whether it was his name or not, glowered at the two intact guards. "You were told to escort him to the conference room, not search him. He has been through security, for fuck sake, and as you can see, if he wanted to hurt anyone, he wouldn't need a weapon. Which part of that were you unclear on?" He didn't wait for a reply. Instead, he just turned toward me. "Mister Roberts, I must offer my sincerest apologies for your treatment at the hands of these... men. Please allow me to escort you to the conference room. The council is looking forward to meeting you."

I nodded and walked past him as he gestured to the open door and the hallway beyond. "Not the best of starts, Bob. Not the best of starts at all, but it's nothing a good old-fashioned sit-down can't fix," I clapped an arm around him in a grossly over-friendly gesture. "Lead the way, my good man!"

"Err... Mister Roberts, My name is Arnold."

"That's good, Bob. It's nice to meet you."

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The room was... well, at least this one contained furniture. Halfway down the corridor from the first room, Bob had ushered me through a nondescript door on the right side of the hallway and stepped in behind me before locking it.

A perfectly ordinary office desk sat in the middle of the room, two leather chairs facing it on our side - presumably for Bob and me - and one on the other. In that chair sat a woman. It took me a few seconds to take in her startling beauty due to the sheer blinding brightness of the aura surrounding her. Every inquisitor had an aura, but it didn't seem like any two of them had the same one. Some were large, surrounding a decent-sized area behind them, others were smaller, and all of them varied in terms of brightness too. A massive amount of combinations were possible between those two variables and, I quickly realized, could be used to fairly accurately gauge an Inquisitor's power. This woman's Aura was enormous, and it was blinding. Even compared to Reinard Montreaux, this woman seemed to be incredibly powerful. I realized, though, as my vision started to clear, that - to my surprise - that sudden blossoming burst of fear in my chest, no matter how subtle or overwhelming, simply did not happen when faced with this woman. More than that, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't felt it with any other inquisitor since the party.

That was something to think about.

As my eyesight slowly grew accustomed to the dazzling aura surrounding this woman, I started to notice more about the room. Most of it, as you would imagine, was fairly innocuous, but the large bank of monitors covering the wall behind, dozens upon dozen of them, each containing a face, caught my attention.

If you have ever seen the third Matrix movie, you will understand what I mean if you think of it like the room the main character finds himself in when he meets the Architect. This wasn't like the office in Malaga, where a few fifty-five-inch TVs had been bolted to the wall to form a larger screen. This was more than a hundred individual screens which, together, formed the entirety of the back wall of this office. I had realized when looking at the camera feeds from Malaga that an Inquisitor's Aura could not be seen through a screen. They didn't look unlike any other human unless you saw them in person. Still, given the power and apparent importance of the woman in front of me, I had to assume that they were also highly ranked Inquisitors.

"Mister Roberts," the woman stood and offered her hand. "My name is Isabelle Bernhardt. Thank you for meeting with us. Please, have a seat."

There was something disarming about this woman, and it was more than her startling beauty. She was older than me, that was for sure, possibly in her late thirties or early forties, but she had the same classical, regal beauty that Charlotte had expended a huge amount of power to possess. Her hair was a luxurious caramel color that flowed in waves down onto her shoulders, and her eyes were deep pools of molten brown. What was more interesting was that those eyes sparkled with her seemingly genuine smile. The need I had felt to challenge the intimidation tactics presented by her institution started to waver as I nodded and shook her hand.

"Please, Mister Roberts is my father, and he is not a nice man. Pete will be fine." I stepped around one of the leather chairs and lowered myself into it. "This is Bob... Sit down, Bob."

Bob rolled his eyes but took a seat anyway.

I could see the amused-looking smile creep onto the lady's lips as she regarded what must have been one of her underlings, almost certainly knowing full well that his name wasn't Bob. "Thank you, Pete," she said, turning her attention back to me with a smile, "If I could also extend the same courtesy to you, please call me Isabelle. Pete, the rest of the Inquisitor council will be observing this meeting," she gestured to the screens behind her, "but I have been given full authority to conduct these talks with you as I see fit."

I nodded and waited for her to continue.

"Now, I believe you had a conversation with one of our field managers in Malaga, a Mister Miguel Alverez. He has relayed the details of that exchange to us, along with the video file. The council has reviewed that file and agrees with both you and Mr. Alvarez that this represents a very serious and potentially very dangerous situation. But I would like to start, if I may, with a detail that the council found very strange; you did not know anything of the Philadelphia accords?"

"No," I answered simply. "I feel it is important to point out that I am the only known Evo to come into my powers during adulthood, it is a circumstance that seems to have put me in the position of something of an outsider when it comes to the Conclave, I don't know the things I would normally have been taught by them, nor do I know what they know. But in the time since speaking to Miguel, it has become clear to me that none of the Evos I know had any idea that the Conclave fought alongside the Inquisition during the War of 1812. Neither they, nor the Sect knew about the rogue faction of the Inquisition, and none of them know anything about the peace treaty. More than that, considering the number of attacks that are still being carried out against Evos in both Orders, they had been led to believe that not only are the Conclave and Inquisition still at war but any communication between you would be considered treason. The few people I trust enough to have told what I now know have all been astounded that this has been going on behind the scenes."