Chapter 72: Interlude: Interim Chiefs (1/2)
Four hours.
Victor had only left for four hours, and she already hated, hated, hated her job!
“Minion! Minion!” The dragon repeated the word with a stronger, higher pitched voice each time, as if he thought his victim too deaf to hear him. “MINION!”
“Yes, Your Majesty?” Charlene Ennuie, vampire chief of staff, asked as it took all her willpower to keep a straight face. She could hear her pointed fangs grind together, and her fingers clench her notebook obsessively.
“I have decided that I want my arena to have an opening roof,” Vainqueur pompously declared, his head high as he inspected the nearly finished Colosseum. With his crown too big for his head and his arrogant demeanor, he reminded Charlene of a mighty king looking down on peasants like dog shit. His every step made the bricks tremble under the stars.
“An opening roof?” Charlene repeated, having been forced to follow the dragon’s increasingly nonsensical demands for hours. It had started with chairs made of chiseled jewels, escalated to kobold-made stairs for him to climb upon, and it went further downhill afterward.
“For the opening ceremony,” Vainqueur said as if one word was enough to join both of these concepts. “My minions will stay in the shade until the roof opens; the sun’s rays will shine upon my gold, which will glitter for all to see! Build me an opening roof!”
“Why?” Charlene couldn’t help but ask since the opening ceremony was already an exercise in extravagance. “What is the point?”
“A true emperor, no, an Augustus, must make a dazzling entrance!”
“Your Majesty, how are we supposed to create an opening roof mechanism, on a nearly finished building, six days before its opening to the public? For something which will be used only once?! With an empty national budget?!”
“Minion Charlene, if you were half the minion my chief of staff is, you would have already figured this out.”
Calm yourself, Charlene, the vampire thought. Calm yourself, this is just temporary, like skin rash. Stay professional, you have seen idiotic and arrogant adventurers before, you can handle—
“And I do not say this because you failed to find me any quests to grow my hoard, proving yourself inadequate.”
Intelligence check successful! [Berserk] negated!
“I-inadequate?” Charlene chortled at his sense of entitlement.
“Thankfully, I believe in minion professional reinsertion,” Vainqueur continued with a patronizing tone. “While you have made for a poor quest manager, I am certain that you can shine as my Minion Secretary of Arena Architecture.”
Charlene scribbled down this new promotion, next to Underchief of Hoard R&D, Grand Seneschal of the Castle Dusting, and Holder of the Golden Mirror.
To think she thought her situation had finally improved. She had spent years managing a dead-end adventurer guild in the middle of nowhere, trying desperately to climb the professional ladder, when by some twist of fate, she had become the leader in a newborn nation. A nation of madmen, rogues, and monsters, but a leader nonetheless. She had privileges, status, new classes… and even immortality.
When Victor had departed for his holiday, she knew that the dragon would prove difficult; that without her sort-of friend with benefits, that chaotic, aimless ‘empire’ would collapse within a year. Yet in her heart, Charlene clung to the arrogant idea that she could help turn this nation into a model of bureaucratic efficiency, even without Vic’s help.
But the dragon was even worse than she thought! He wanted everything without paying for anything!
“Now, this is a very important role, and I do not deliver it lightly. If you are to prove yourself worthy of this honor, you will build me an opening roof. It does not have to close, I will have no use for it afterward.”
Charlene may be an undead now, but she could have sworn her heart beat again out of sheer frustration. “Can at least Your Majesty tell me where I can find the gold to pay for the needed material cost?” she asked with heavy sarcasm. If Victor could pull that off and make Vainqueur listen anyway, maybe it would work with her.
Charisma check…
Failed! It failed miserably!
“Pay for material?” the dragon exploded into mirthless laughter. “Paying? That is funny sarcasm, minion. But if you are stressed enough to make a joke, then clearly, you need to work more to forget your pain.”
Congratulations! Due to your vampiric nature and personal circumstances, you have earned the [Boiling Blood] personal Perk!
[Boiling Blood]: 40 SP per ten minutes. You can cause your own blood to boil, causing exposure to it to inflict weak [Fire] damage on physical contact; you are immune to the negative side effects of having boiling blood, but you become vulnerable to the [Berserk] ailment under the Perk’s effect.
“Now, instead of saying jokes, Minion Charlene, go make me money. My hoard will not fill itself alone.”
“Go home, twolegs.”
“Dear lamb,” Miel said to the giant spider, as she refused to fully crawl out of her pit home. “By the power invested by our covenant with the empire, we can provide your children with the light of knowledge.”
“No way I’ll give my spiderspawn away to birds,” the telepathic spider protested, its children cowering beneath its legs. “I will teach them the way we all do, at home over the remains of our preys!”
A warrior angel, clad in golden armor, summoned a sword of flames. “Free education is non-negotiable,” he spoke with an imperious tone. “Your children shall go to public school, or you will go burn in Hell for the sin of homeschooling!”
Miel winced, immediately recognizing her colleague as one of the ‘old-testamenters.’ This would turn very ugly unless she interfered. “Forgive these poor sinners, for it will take them time to see the light,” the insurance saleswoman pleaded. “Turn the other cheek, for they know not what they do!”
“Miel, I find your protestations a bit too…” The angel pointed his fiery blade at his trip, “Protestant.”
“Pointing a sword at your fellow angel is not very graceful either!”
“Get off your sacrament,” the warrior argued. “The higher-ups may consider promoting you to [Dominion] because they have gone soft, but you are no revelation deliverer! By negotiating coexistence with Hell, you have committed simony!”
The insult shook Miel to the core as if she had been slapped on the face. “I have always served the cause of Heaven in all things! My, we increased our department’s SP harvests tenfold with the new covenant!”
“By surrendering our soul!”
“I am already giving some of my precious Special Points to you, no way I give you my eggborns too,” the spider complained. “I left the Moon thinking this would be the land of freedom and opportunity, not an avian dictatorship!”
“And you would be right, to defend your emperor-given rights.”
The very sound of Malfy’s voice was enough to infuriate Miel, doubly so when he showed up backed by his lawyers.
“Beware, heathen,” the angel warrior threatened. “You shall not corrupt the youth!”
“The children are safer with us, than with you pigeons,” one of the lawyers said. “If you received custody, you might give them to a priest.”
“Instead, we can take care of your eggborns, for a meager afterlife favor.” Malfy moved to proselytize the spider, safe in the knowledge that his role in the empire protected him from the angel’s wrath. “We can provide your spawns with the best individual education they could ever want.”
“Do not listen to them!” Miel interrupted the fiend before he could poison the mind of this many-legged lamb. “We alone provide truly free education for everyone!”
“I do not want either of you!” the spider shouted in response.
“Then you should take the third path.”
Much to Miel’s confusion, a third party, which had apparently observed the discussion from afar, decided to intervene: a dwarven woman whom the angel did not recognize, with her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. In fact, she looked almost identical as any other duergar, except for the lack of a beard.
“The middle path, unfulfilling, yet sustainable. The Averagist path.” The dwarf lady cleared her throat. “We champions of equality have decided to provide free education for all, in the true Averagist ways. A place where there are no grades, only equality. We share everything, as parts of a single organism.”
“Like a communal web?” the spider asked, suddenly more interested in the offer than either Heaven or Happyland’s proposals. “That takes me back to my youth when I learned to hunt bigger prey in groups.”
“My, bringing down the tallest is the truest Averagist endeavor!”