Dialysis Book: Intermission System lord’s lament

Lady Domagal, the System Lord’s eyes narrowed to two tiny prick, tiny glowing pricks, where she sat on her throne in the great Tree, the ancestral home of the Elven System Lord.  From here she could look down on Dominus and the fortress of the king in full knowledge of her absolute control of the elves, a place where nothing happened without her express permission.

“Please repeat that, I must have misheard you.”

“Mistress Tamriel, Frigid Lady of the Icy North, is gravely wounded but the healers expect her to recover in the next few weeks.”

“Shurly, you can’t be serious,” stated Domagal.

“I apologize, but I am, my lady,” replied Shurly, her majordomo.

“Apparently Rogen is even faster on the uptake than we initially thought, I wouldn’t have expected something quite that brazen though,” said Domagal.  Tamriel was one of the six mythical ranked agents she had, the idea that she had been ambushed and barely escaped alive was troubling.  Especially because Shurly had been confident that all of the king's agents were accounted for.

“It was not Rogen,” said Shurly, “She was beaten within an inch of her life at a bar.”

“A bar fight,” said Domagal, that strained incredulity even further.  Aside from other mythical agents, no one could have pulled off such a terrible beating.  There was in fact only one bar that was frequented by any mythics.  “Where was she, in Hell?”

“Yes, Hell, the adventuring bar just outside the guild hall,” said Shurly.  “No one knows why she was there, but apparently it wasn’t going well and then a mutant doat walked over.  She loudly insulted the animal.”

“Mutant Doat?”

“Apparently it looks like the rear half of a caog attached to the front half of a doat,” said Shurly.  Domagal tried to visualize such a strange creature and failed.  Magic had its limits.

Surely continued, “After she insulted the doat, the animal’s owner took umbrage so she tossed him through the wall.”

“And killed him,” asked Domagal.

“He was apparently saved by a squirbit,” said Shurly.

“What?”

“At least three witnesses stated a magical squirbit healed him with magic,” said Shurly.

“Freak magical animales,” she hissed.  Obviously an adventurer in the bar had a familiar.  Their mission was the save people from monsters, and knowing Tamriel that certainly applied.

“Turned out he was there with the mortal tier of a guild after a training exercise,” said Shurly.

“So the elves in the guild would have been able to inform them who they upset,” said Domagal.

“I wasn’t finished,” said Shurly uncomfortably.  “They had finished the training exercise where the victim had come in second.”

“And the second place in the contest always buys the drinks,” said Domaga as her eyebrow twitched, “So all the elves rushed in to help the master of ceremony.”

“It's a sacred duty to protect the man buying the drinks,” said Shurly.  “She didn’t expect that and several of the guild members got in some very good hits, the doat even bit her.  Apparently they have been practicing fighting agents.”

“Great loss of talent for them, how many did she kill,” said Domagal, recognizing defeat.  That many deaths would be difficult to hide, and might even cause the king to move more quickly.  Everything was unraveling, but at least the guild would be out of her hair.

“None,” replied Shurly.

“Tamriel didn’t kill any of them?  How?” said Domagal, her hands covering her face.

“Gulwing was there,” said Shurly.

Domagal opened the fingers of her right hand so a single glowing eye was exposed,  “So, he’s only a hero.  Even if he got the drop on her, which I doubt, he would have stood no chance.

“No chance, by himself.”

The vein above Domagal’s eye pulsed, “For the love of…”

“Mark was there,” said Shurly.

“The wizard,” hissed Domagal.  Titles like the Fire Warden,  the champion of light or frigid lady of the icy north were essentially pointless.  They were titles that no one aspired to so you could freely choose one for yourself.  The people you had to fear were ones with seemingly simple titles, things like King, or System Lord, or Wizard.

Someone who was legitimately called the wizard would have to be a master of his craft lest he be mocked so thoroughly that he would change it.  Only extremely capable people could hold onto a title like that, people like Mark, the Wizard.  The only reason Mark wasn’t in charge of the adventurer’s guild was that he didn’t want to be.

The local guild had been restricted quite seriously by Rogen.  He forbade them from having more than a handful of heroic tier adventurers and only two mythical tier adventurers.  Ostensibly that was because their job of fighting monsters was largely handled by the King in normal circumstances.

The guild responded by ensuring that their heroes and mythics were skilled, implacably so.  Mark the Wizard was damn near legendary and represented a threat to her plans if not her person.

“Mark isn’t likely to shift allegiance to the King over this, is he?” she asked finally.

“No, he’s still busy killing monsters and examining adventurers,” said Shurly.  “If he did decide to move up, we’d almost certainly have to find a legendary aspect for him to bring him over.”

“Which I wouldn’t want to do to someone coming in from the outside, no matter their reputation,” said Domagal glumly.  “So that effectively makes him non-recruitable as long as the King doesn’t push him into my lap.”

“Which isn’t going to happen,” said Shurly.

“Of course not, everyone knows that the king is a bastion of competence and his focused will against me has been his driving mission for the past four centuries,” said Lady Domagal, the System Lord.

She hated her ex-fiance more than just about anyone in the world for the least practical of reasons.  Mainly, that when Rogen was her fiance, the man was just about useless.  A foppish king more interested in parties and playtime than actually ruling.

When the Vampire System Lord Abadal threatened his lands, it took her more than a decade to persuade him into opposing the beast, and that was only after she tried to persuade Petah the Elven System Lord into direct action.

Tried and failed.

Petah was as useless as Rogen, but she eventually persuaded the King that he needed to do something.  The elves marched as one to oppose the undead, minus their useless system lord.  The final battle which included more than a dozen of the kingdom’s most powerful agents including Mark, the damned Wizard, finally killed the evil vampire.

That’s when Rogen, her useless fop of a fiance, decided he was going to be the second elven system lord.  Domagal couldn’t abide having two useless elven system lords and managed to co-opt the ritual before Rogen realized what happened.

She became the System Lord and he returned to sulk in his palace where she expected him to turn to wine, women (possibly men) and song to get over it.

Instead, he became a monster.  A decade later he emerged with single minded focus and began a campaign against her to the detriment of his kingdom.  Their battle was legendary, leveling sections of the city and the forest around Dominus.  Their open war would have continued except that System Lord Petah was assassinated while all the elves were focused on their battle.

This didn’t stop their fighting, it just moved it behind the scenes where her agents and his fought a shadow campaign for decades until even that petered out.  There were still occasional flare ups, particularly approaching convergences.

Like the one coming up in three days.

And now, she had a problem.  After the fairy rebellion kicked off the last massive war between system lords, her position was significantly weaker than before.  System Lords claimed to be invincible, but in fact her powers were scarcely higher than a legendary tier class.  She had few tricks that others could not emulate, but when opposed by another legend she would be at risk if her opponent's class was strong against hers.

So while she was unconcerned in fighting Mark, the Wizard, for he was simply a mythical tier wizard of tremendous skill, the King of the Elves’ class was well suited in a fight against her as he had been developing aspects designed to kill wizards.  He would be using skill based attacks with purpose built arrows which were difficult to deal with.  The fact that he was armed with an artifact tier bow made their battle even more troubling.  She had a counter for that, but that required her plan to be successful.

“What is the status of the ritual,” she asked.

“The convergence will occur in three days, at that point we are going to have to review our relics and try to acquire as much power as possible,” said Shurly.

“If we just had one more,” she hissed.

“The king has several, we are going to have to begin moving against his agents directly,” said Shurly.

“That’s going to be bloody,” she replied.

“Yes,” said her majordomo and Domagal sighed.

“Then let’s be about it.”