Paper Shield
The glowing script on the wall was as large as it was loud, each perfectly formed word a chiseled accusation. The silence in the room was absolute, a vacuum created by the sheer audacity of the message. Mark read the words, then read them again, his mind struggling to process the blatant, bureaucratic aggression. He could feel the shock rippling through the two women beside him, a shared intake of breath that was the only sound in the room.
The script itself was unforgiving, a formal, looping style that was somehow both elegant and brutal.
To the resident, Mark Shilling,
You are hereby summoned to appear before the Acting Guildmaster of the Masons' Guild.
The purpose of this meeting is to discuss terms of repayment for two outstanding debts:
- The unsolicited and extensive architectural adjustments made to your state-provisioned residence.
2. Damages and medical costs incurred by Guild-contracted personnel during the execution of their duties.
Your attendance is required at the main Guildhall in Enceladus no later than the fifth hour at the end of this week.
Failure to attend will be considered an admission of full liability. The Guild will then take all necessary and appropriate measures to collect what is owed.
Acting Guildmaster Petra Novak
The shimmering words hung in the air, a declaration of war disguised as a collection notice. Mark stared, a cold, familiar dread settling in his gut. This wasn't just a power play, it was an attempt at corporate shakedown, a tactic he'd seen used a dozen times in his old life to crush smaller competitors under a mountain of fabricated legal fees.
A sharp, incredulous gasp from Tori finally broke the silence.
"Repayment?" she hissed, her voice a low, furious tremor. She was on her feet, her earlier discomfort forgotten, replaced by a wave of pure, undiluted outrage. "They attacked you! In your own home! And they want you to pay for the man who broke his own jaw on Lothar's fist?"
Valerie remained seated, but her professional calm had cracked, her face grim with concern. "This is… Tori," she murmured, her eyes fixed on the glowing text. "This is a trap. They're trying to establish some precedent. If he answers their summons, they create a connection for this fabricated debt."
They were both right. It was a corporate maneuver. First create a problem, then charge the victim for the solution. But as he listened to their panicked, furious analysis, the project manager in his mind, the one who had doodled space stations while performing the most basic of audits, finally kicked back into gear. The initial shock was already fading, replaced by the cold, familiar feeling of a corporate slap down. He began to break the problem down, to search of their flawed premise, the weak point in their strategy, setting his own stance to that of victory before proceeding.
He looked from Tori's righteous anger to Valerie's strategic worry, and then back to the arrogant words on the wall. He saw the trap, but he already seeing past that, to the assumption it was built on.
"They're summoning me," he said, his voice quiet, drawing their attention. "They're demanding repayment." He let the words hang in the air for a moment, a simple statement of the facts as the Masons saw them.
Then, he looked at Valerie, his gaze direct and analytical.
"I’m not a genie to be summoned to grant wishes. Do they even have the authority to do that? I'm not a member of any Guild."
Tori was the first to answer, her initial outrage giving way to a confusion then grudging, analytical assessment. "Genie? What… Technically?" she began, shaking her head. "Technically, they probably don't. A Guild's authority is contracted over its own members. For the Guildless, it's... a grey area at best. They can't force you. But they can make life very, very difficult if you refuse."
“Well, my spine seems to think they have already made things very difficult.” Mark answered, feeling a deep ache at muscles in his back he didn't realise he had tensed.
The critical flaw in their plan, they were operating on an assumption of power they didn't actually possess, but one that was easy to check with the very convenient book he had been loaned from the library.
A slow, cold smile spread across Mark's face. It wasn't a smile of humor or warmth. It was the thin, sharp-edged grin of a predator. He felt a familiar, exhilarating shift inside him. The weary patient, the lost anomaly, the grieving ghost, they all receded for now. Replaced by the man who had survived a decade of brutal corporate warfare. The man who knew that some of the most vicious battles weren't fought with fists, but with the choice of words and the carefully constructed weight of obligations. For the first time in weeks, he started to feel alive!
He watched as Tori, who had seen him as a broken, helpless victim, physically recoil from the look in his eyes. She looked genuinely shocked at what she saw.
"Can a reply be sent?" Mark asked, his voice calm and utterly devoid of its earlier despair.
Tori blinked, thrown off balance by his sudden transformation. "A reply? Yes, obviously." She fumbled at the side of the brass unit she had previously removed, her movements jerky. A small panel slid open, and she produced a slender, crystal-tipped stylus. It glowed with the same soft blue light as the message itself. "You just... write towards projection. It's... dimensionally independent."
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Mark took the stylus. It felt cool and light in his hand, a familiar tool for an unfamiliar medium. He didn't need to wheel himself closer. He simply aimed the tip at the shimmering image on the wall, tapping the icon Tory pointed at for the reply, and began to write. The stylus leaving a trail of new glowing script beneath the Masons' arrogant summons. The words flowed from him, memories of email chains from shareholders, managers and suppliers, it had only been weeks and he had almost left it behind. Passive-aggressive, bureaucratic double-talk, sentences carefully polished to both push back and to provoke.
Thank you for your correspondence.
Due to unforeseen consequences resulting from actions taken by those in your direct employment, I am currently not mobile and will not be attending any meetings at the Guildhall for the foreseeable future.
I will, however, honor the original agreement made with your representative, a Mister Alex Smith. To that end, your representatives are welcome to discuss your escalating issues at my personal residence, after noon in two days. Payment for my time can be negotiated during this initial meeting, for which I will allow a thirty-minute, free consultation.
Failure to reply or arrange a formal appointment by the close of business this week will result in this issue being declared permanently closed from my end.
He lowered the stylus. The reply hung there on the wall, a perfect, impenetrable fortress of corporate jargon. He could feel Valerie and Tori reading it over his shoulder, their silence a testament to their profound confusion.
He turned his head slightly, just enough to see their faces. They looked at the message, then at him, then back at the message, as if trying to translate a document from a long-dead language.
"What," Tori finally managed, her voice a bewildered whisper, "in the name of the Founder, is that?"
"That," Mark said, a cold, clean satisfaction washing through him, "is my paper shield." He met her gaze, his predatory grin returning. "It's a way of saying 'no' that makes it sound like 'yes,' while putting the entire burden of action back on them. It's a polite, professional way of telling them to go to hell."
He turned back to the wall and, with a final, decisive tap of the stylus, hit the 'send' sigil at the bottom of the projection. The glowing words, both theirs and his, vanished from the wall, leaving a sudden, ringing silence in their wake. The little blue crystal on the control panel went dark.
The message was sent. The first shot had been fired. And for the first time since he'd arrived, Mark Shilling felt like he was finally, truly, back to work.
"So," he asked, his voice calm and conversational, "how long do you think it will take them to reply?"
Valerie was the one who finally found her voice, her professional calm completely shattered by the display of bureaucratic warfare she had just witnessed. "Mark," she began, her tone a mixture of awe and genuine alarm. "Do you have any idea what you've just done? You've… you've formally challenged a Guildmaster."
"No," Mark corrected gently, the smile never leaving his face. "I've politely declined an informal and legally dubious summons, while simultaneously offering a professional consultation on their terms." He shrugged, a simple, dismissive gesture. "It's up to them how they choose to proceed."
He looked from Valerie’s worried face to Tori’s still-stunned one. He could see they didn't understand. They saw a declaration of war, he saw a plan moving to its next phase. And that next phase required reinforcing his position.
"However," he continued, his tone shifting to one of practical planning, "to make sure this all proceeds correctly, I should probably see if a few more people wish to attend the meeting."
Their faces were blank, clearly not following the line of thought Mark was processing through.
With a sigh he continued. “This house isn't mine, so wouldn't a representative of the Library be the best person to discuss these modifications and costing with?”
Tori let out a very guarded acknowledgement with a nod.
“And, I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity to formally speak with the garrison,” he took a breath. “My own testimony to the vandalism done to Lothar's door.” He tried to laugh, but the sound was more cynical than joyful.
The two healers stared at him, their expressions a perfect, mirrored tableau of disbelief. Tori was the one who finally broke the silence, a single, choked laugh escaping her lips. It wasn't a sound of humor, but of pure shock.
"You're completely insane," she stated, not as an insult, but as a simple, clinical diagnosis.
"Perhaps," Mark conceded with a small, self-deprecating shrug. "But where I'm from, we have a saying: 'The best defense is a good offense.' And right now, my best offense is a well-documented paper trail."
Valerie just shook her head slowly, a weary but impressed smile touching her lips. "I don't know if you're a genius or a madman, Mark," she said, her voice filled with a reluctant admiration. "But you've certainly made things... interesting."
“Tea?” Mark said seemingly out of nowhere, the silence breaking from Valerie's last comment. “This visit wasn't about my pound of flesh for the Masons, so where should we start?”
Mark wheeled himself over and started the centering and methodical process of making a fresh batch of tea in the kitchen as the healers murmured between themselves, the issue of the summons and reply derailing their chains of thought.
As the water was boiling he shouted over, “You said I needed to deal with my trauma, or it would consume me?”
For the next hour they slowly listened as Mark detailed the thoughts that went bump in the night. From the echoing ping of a microwave they didn’t understand, thought the memories of a city so vast they looked lost at just the concept, and finally to the soul burning agony that had saved his life and mobility, and equally filling Valerie with guilt.
“Near death is something we have experience with.” Tori explained, she was calm and professional, dismissing her normal antagonistic flare towards Mark. “Those things happen here, and while it's not easy, the process is finding a path forward, focusing on the endurance you possess to endure and survive.”
She glanced over to Valerie, who gave her a small nod of support as she followed her chain of thought. “For some of us, it never goes away, it never gets better, but we slowly learn to accept it.” She took a deep breath, calming herself. “It can bring out the worst in us all.”
Mark's mind flashed back to the dreamscape, the moments of Tori losing control, he knew there was pain there and for a moment it had broken her. He couldn't forgive those few hours of their meeting, but he could see where that path would lead, would he end the same way? A powder key waiting to explode in future?
Tori’s voice broke that thought, “But this isn't about me, and we need to find you some way to define yourself by more than what you have lost.” Advice that he could accept, and while the Mason’s issue was a distraction, it wasn't the concrete foundations he needed.
“And what of the memories, the ghosts?” Mark pointing out the section they had skirted around.
Tori gave a sad smile. “Those, I can’t directly explain. You describe them as memories, but they are acting as dreams attempting to seize the flow of the process.” She gave a small laugh, "That's not normal, and as we have established, you don’t seem to like normal rules.”