The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (106 page)

As they now knew was his habit, Mark reintegrated his selves, rather than have multiple copies of himself appear within sight of each other.  Having more than one of him in sight was somewhat disturbing, both to him and to whoever else saw it.

“We do know all the Volunteers, but we haven’t seen them for a very long time from their point of view.” Fire smiled.  “So with all of your permissions, we’d like to take a quick Reading of them to catch up on what we missed.  Thank you.”

The Volunteers realized that they’d all been Read in a blink before they could decide whether they were giving their permission for it or not.  Whether or not any of them would have protested it, events carried on before they had a chance to do so.

“And we don’t need to be introduced to our brothers and sisters.” Fire continued.  “They know who we are, and we already know
exactly
who they are, and we’re going to take a moment to get to know them.  Be right back.”

In the next instant she Translocated all of her brothers and sisters some three kilometers across the city to the interior of the largest building there, she Sent all the tourists who were in it outside, and slammed the giant doors shut with a mighty use of Force.  She held them all floating in the air in the center of the massive nine-sided space as the mighty boom reverberated, then the look of the place suddenly changed.

The forty-four looked around and at the three in their midst in confusion.

“Let’s place things how they are.” Fire said with a nasty smile, and Translocated them all again.  Now she, Val and Six floated on one side of the center of the space, facing across an open area between them and the forty-four, who all faced in the same direction looking back at them.

“We shouldn’t be in the midst of you, because we’re not part of you yet.” she told them.  “Whether we ever will be will be decided here in the next few minutes.”

She paused for a moment, and the two groups took each other’s measure.

The forty-four were as alike as Sylvan in having their father’s black hair and blue eyes and their mothers’ elven features, but they ranged in height from sixty centimeters to two meters.  Their subjective age of twelve years was still obvious in all their appearances and their child-like builds, and only a handful were showing the first signs of puberty.

None of them were afraid or angry, some were primarily curious, some were belligerent, some were eager for the obvious challenge that the three they faced were offering.

“We should have changed out of our pajamas, and into our most intimidating armor.”
Val privately chuckled to the twins with her. 
“These clothes are functionally appropriate to this climate, but they’re not helping us make a strong first impression.”

Six silently agreed, and spoke. “We’re in the council chamber of Kraka.  This is where The Ninety-Nine, ruling council of the dragons, met to deliberate.  This is also where First Burgundy brought our father, Talia, and Holanam at the end of Zarkog’s Chase, when contact was first made between Kellaran and the Triax.  This place was chosen then, as we choose it now, because it’s the most psionicly secure location on Kellaran.  The Ninety-Nine liked to keep their deliberations private, and it’s doubtful that any gods or mortals outside here can tell what’s happening in here now, especially considering the other spells we’ve cast here.  We’ve cast our own proofs against eavesdropping, and we’ve cast the interior of the hall with a Reverse-Stasis field.  Those who’ve already been in here will note that the floor and the dome were not mirror-reflective as they are now.  That’s the field.

“We’re not sure if it’s safe to touch it, which is why we have us all Levitated up here.

“It basically works the same as a time-bubble, but with far less energy efficiency, and a far greater time-expansion factor.  It’s pretty simple compared to a god-spell like a time-bubble, we can spare the power, and we want the time.  If it takes us a week to settle things in here, less than a second will pass out there, and
no one
from out there is going to interfere.

“Now the fact is that you’ve been acting like spoiled brats since you were old enough to understand your origins.  You push the limits of your vows of justice as far as you can at every opportunity.  As our father told us, your behavior, while selfish and inconsiderate in the extreme, is still within the normal range for children your age.

“But that’s not good enough.  It’s not good enough for this family.  We bear great responsibilities; to lead and to protect and to provide an example for all who look to us for those things.  And it’s not good enough for the situation we find ourselves in; engaging in frantic preparations for war with the demons while everything in every part of every society is in the midst of rapid upheaval.

“Your behavior, and more importantly your thinking, is going to improve.  You’re going to take responsibility for the results and consequences of your actions.

“Beyond that, we’re going to administer some punishment for the wrongdoing you’ve done.

“But in order to determine how much punishment you truly deserve, we had to know why you did it in the first place.

“You weren’t born psionic like we were, and your psionic privacy was always respected as it is in elven families.  Your parents never once Read you deeply without your permission, and you never gave it to them.  Father was forced to interrogate some of you psionicly in order to find out which one of you had done something and what exactly had happened, but he never looked beyond that to find out why you’d done it.  You guard your privacy like you were Sylvan, and resist Linking with any outside your group like Sylvan too.  They did their best to talk to you about it, and trusted you to be honest about it, but you never were.  That was a mistake on their part.

“But we’re not your parents, and we’re not as considerate as they are anyway.  We tend to be a bit more practical.  So we’ve Read you for everything you’ve ever thought or experienced, and we know you rather well.  Absolutely and completely, in fact.

“Your origins were never kept from you.  You knew as soon as you could understand language that Quewanak made Yzell remove the contraception components of the spells she cast on your mothers to allow them to comfortably have sex with our father, causing you all to be conceived without our parents’ knowledge or permission.  That’s why you were raised in such unusual circumstances, and why our father chose to make as many copies of himself as he needed to to give you all the time and attention you each deserved as his children.

“While we admire our parents’ honesty in wanting you to know that they never tried to hide it from you, knowing you all as we do now, it was obviously a mistake to tell you that when you were so young.  It was also something that they weren’t proud of, so having done their duty in telling you, they didn’t bring it up after that.  That was another mistake.

“We know that all of the problems with your behavior stem from two things.

“The first and most important is your attitude that ‘they never wanted us anyway’.  You think; ‘Why bother listening to our parents when they ask us to do things, when they never wanted us anyway?  Why bother doing chores, doing your lessons, having a work ethic?  They never wanted us anyway.  Why not just have fun and do whatever we want?  They never wanted us anyway.  We’re just a problem to them, and we have been from the start.’

“You don’t even talk about it among yourselves, but that attitude has poisoned every part of your thinking.  You all stick together like some persecuted minority, because you’re the ones they didn’t want.  It was already ingrained in you long before you became psionic, so you never shared yourselves except with each other, and not much of that.  Because of that, you lost the chance to truly know anyone else, including your parents, and your psionic development has been stunted.

“But you’re going to learn something, and learn it the hard way;  Being unplanned is not the same thing as being unwanted.  You were always wanted, your mothers especially had desperately wanted to have you for years before it became possible for them to do so.  You were only unwanted to the extent that you made yourselves unwanted with your own despicable behavior.”

“In fact, because of your origins, your parents have bent over backwards to be there for you on your demand, the second you ask for them, no matter what.  They spoiled you rotten in every possible way, and
that
was a
big
mistake.

“Your co-fathers among the Volunteers love you like you were their own, but you choose not to believe it because they’re not really your fathers, and our father Mark was always there for you individually and on demand anyway, so you didn’t need your co-fathers.  And it’s them that you’ve hurt the most.

“The second part of your problem was us.

“Our parents didn’t want to make you feel bad about the fact that we’re far more capable than any of you, so when they talked to you about us, they tended to avoid that fact, and just talked about the good times we’d had.  They tended to not talk about us very much for the same reason.

“You chose to believe that they avoided talking about us because they were trying to hide the fact that they like us better.  Of course our mothers
do
like us better, but your mothers like you better too, that’s just natural.  Our Father likes us better too, but not because of us, rather because your abuse of his trust and his love has
ensured
that he likes us better, because he likes you less.  But he
loves
each one of you just as much as he loves any of us.

“You think that another reason our father prefers us over you is because he loves our mothers more than he loves yours.  In the beginning that was true, but not since you were born.  Our father was determined to love them equally, to be fair to them, and they all love him so genuinely and so much that it was easy for him to return their love.  We’re all capable of giving and enjoying an infinite amount of love, our only limitation is time, and Father has made sure to give lots of his time and attention to all of our mothers, the same as he did for you and for us.  He’s never going to be able to give any of them up, even long after all of you are grown and out on your own, and
our
mothers are perfectly comfortable with that, because they love your mothers too, and all of you.

“On the other hand, we know a lot of your parents among the Volunteers were less discreet about us than our parents.  We know that the Volunteers have held us up to you as examples, and that you know from them and others in Homestead that we are in fact far more capable and mature than you.  It’s not fair, and we didn’t ask for it to be that way, but there it is.

“Some of you think of us as your older brother and sisters, and you wanted to preserve that, so you wanted out of the time-bubble before you grew too far beyond us.  There’s no danger of that happening, but it’s a nice sentiment.

“Some of you think that since you’re subjectively twelve and we’re subjectively seven that you must have grown beyond us already, especially as a group, and you wanted out of the time-bubble so you could prove it.  You’re about to find out how wrong you are.

“Some of you look up to us, some of you idolize us, but none of you are making any effort to actually be
like
us.

“Lots of you resent us, and a few of you think you hate us, but you don’t.  Fire and I have been in the mind of an insane Sylvan who wanted nothing more from life than to torture us to death, and we know what real hate is.

“As Father told us, all of you have improved a lot in the last two years.  But none of you have changed because you’ve developed an admirable character, or because you choose to behave honorably, or because your feel any guilt or responsibility for what you’ve done.  You only improved because you didn’t want to be restricted to Hiliani for the rest of your lives, and because you realized that you’re not going to be able to keep getting away with so much crap forever, and because your vows of justice force you.

“Now, your punishment and rehabilitation is going to take two or three steps.

“The first will be corporal punishment.  It will show you where you stand in relation to us, and satisfy our personal sense of justice. 
No one
hurts our parents as much as you lot have without answering to us for it, not even our own brothers and sisters!

“Each of us three is going to give each of you a good hard blow to the face.  Block it if you can, and if you want to strike back at us, feel free to do your worst.”

Before he’d even finished speaking the forty-four had already Linked, cast group and individual Shielding, and attacked with a maelstrom of spells while many of them yelled things like; “You can’t tell
us
what to do!”

When the first wave of non-lethal spells failed to penetrate the trio’s Shields, they attacked with lethal spells and all their power, which was considerable.  Were it not for the Reverse Stasis field, which was practically invulnerable, the huge building would surely have been destroyed around them, along with much of the surrounding area.  They yelled their defiance as they cast, and attacked as a mob with little co-operation.  They failed to penetrate the Shields of the trio, who smugly floated there and absorbed it without counter-attacking.

Suddenly the attack of the forty-four diminished to almost nothing.

“Ah.  As some of you now realize; the Source, raw wizard’s power, and the warlock’s source all fail to penetrate the Reverse Stasis field.” Fire chuckled nastily.  “Now you’re almost out of power.  I’m surprised you realized it in time to maintain your Shields.

“Now try to block me as I kick you in the face.”

She cast a small floor of Force to stand on, then executed a perfect spin kick in mid-air with a lightning-quick motion.  As it reached it’s apex, every one of the forty-four reacted as if she’d kicked them in the face, crying out and putting their hands on the impact points.

“My turn.” Val declared with a grin, and executed a quick roundhouse right punch that effectively hit every one of the forty-four in the face but not on their hands, despite the fact that many of them were still covering their faces.