May 31st, 2013
Act Two, Scene Thirteen
They came to Jacobin.
He’d spend time walking through the streets invisibly while he practiced his powers and prepared for the battles to come. When he saw a problem, he would appear and solve it, quickly and efficiently, and then disappear again.
Except that sometimes, the people didn’t want him to disappear. He’d made a name for himself with the prison breakout, working with Luminosa, and there were people eager and willing to fight for him. They were still learning how to use the weapons, but that was all right. Most of them were as new to modern weapons as he was to his powers, but, well…
Luminosa hadn’t appeared again, which was a worry. Instead others had come to Jacobin; mostly unarmed, mostly hungry, all of them angry.
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“I was born in Novapest,” he told them. Twenty men or so had camped out in an abandoned office building, lurking and studying the weapons he’d brought them. “Novapest is a country where fourteen men have total power. When Count Just is offended by a joke about him, he sends a dozen men to tear out the tongue of the man who made the joke. When Count Pyre is annoyed about anything, he burns down buildings. How many of you are orphans?”
Eighteen hands went up.
“We have the Counts to thank for that. Less than two hundred miles away is a country where there are no Counts. That could be here. How many of you were born in Saint Andrews?”
Sixteen hands went up.
“That was a country where there were no Counts. It can happen here. It has happened here. The Counts and Knights, even the king - they’re all mortal. I’ve killed supers before. There’s no trick to it. You can kill them too. Prepare, spread out, recruit; a bullet from one of these weapons -” he lifted a railgun -” will kill a count as dead as any citizen. I’ll give the signal when I’m ready, and you’ll hear it.”
He smiled a shark’s smile.
“No one will ever have heard anything like it.”
