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BECMI Chapter 127 – Discussions of Consequences
🕑 Added 2025-07-13 21:41:23 +0000 UTC« Chapter 126 | Index | Chapter 128 »
It was a pretty quiet night, all things considered. Only a couple dragons tried making a run at the ship, no doubt irked by Cirru standing atop it like a conquering queen, but a few lasers or charged bolts to the face and they hastily thought better of testing the security perimeter.
I brought one of the white dragon carcasses back out and butchered it as a way to pass the time, Duum and Cirru very interested to see what I made of the meat. It was very sensitive to heat, of course, so it was made low and slow, with some moderately peppery sauce which became more mint-like as it was cooked, but took readily to becoming thin sausages for munchies.
Decent use of dragon intestines, too. They still needed to be smoked properly, which I made mental notes on as I ground up muscle and organs and spices and fat, mixing in a bit of pork and venison and beef in different ratios to find out what worked best. Ended up with about thirty different sub-varieties to taste-test, each with about fifty pounds of sausages.
Blue dragon and bat were plenty happy to sample all of them unsmoked and uncooked, cooked, and were happy to wait for the smoked versions, too.
The Barhund also had an extensive store of herbs and spices of all kinds, along with internal greenhouses. Matter replicators could make organic meals, but it was similar to manna in that it tasted artificial, and certainly didn’t have the texture and pleasurable dining experience of real food. I made sure to yoink a lot of samples of said materials for testing, and potentially growing them later for my own use… as long as they didn’t turn into ecological disasters, as it were.
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-Any positive results, Belle?- I /asked neutrally.
I could feel the emotional stress in her /reply. -No, Edge. Not a one. Even, even the children are pinging Evil when we find them. It’s like they are born that way...-
The Free Company was engaged in untrammeled aggression against the beast-folk of the mountains, following them into the caves they normally could retreat to for shelter and cleaning them out. Some aggressive and committed elves, dwarves, and hyn had signed up with them, very interested in the kind of warfare and coordination that was going on. The coordination and communication capabilities of Marks was absolutely no joke.
I was quiet as I considered Belle’s words. It was absolutely NOT impossible to be Aligned when you were born. I was living proof of that.
-The elven elders did convey that the beast-folk only appeared within the last five centuries, right? And spread with incredible speed.-
-Yes, worse than humans. They basically hunt everything and breed.-
-But the elves watched humans evolve over time, coming from simpler beginnings and learning, lifting themselves up, sometimes with help, sometimes not. The beast-folk basically came out of nowhere, yes?-
-For all practical purposes, yes. No scouts were able to find an ancestral homeland more than a handful of their generations old,- she /confirmed. -What are you thinking?-
-That they are a Created Species, formed out of nothing by an Immortal Patron, with Evil souls shunted into them. The Chaotic and Evil tendencies from birth results in a powerful Entropic Force in the world, and the elves know well what they evolve into, and the havoc they unleash over time.
-They are literally a virus of sapient savagery unleashed upon the world. They grow, they evolve into the humanoid races of the future in our world, they rampage across the land, and they never truly progress of themselves, only ever raiding, looting, enslaving, and destroying, never building and learning.- I considered the facts coldly and mercilessly. -They are engaged in ceaseless mutation and are born Evil. They have not raised any Immortals of their own as yet here, and don’t seem to call on whoever created them. Such a combination from the outside looks like an attempt to find the perfect forms to survive and endure the longest, with their own natural aggression forcing the winnowing of the weak.
-Once they have their own Immortals, they become self-supporting in the face of other powers trying to eradicate them, and those Immortals will naturally favor their own descendants being stable and like them. I believe once that happens their creator loses interest in them, and the whole Evil-at-Birth is either diluted or repurposed by their own Immortals. In our time, the addition of shadenelf bloodlines likely prevents it from absolutely happening, at least among the smaller humanoid races.”
She considered those words, and could find little to refute them. -So, this is literally an Evil unleashed into the world at the will of an Immortal, but born mortal instead of, oh, raising an undead army, or a force of fiends to invade externally, but an invasion nonetheless.-
-Yes, of recycled Evil souls, allowed to keep vestigial urges of their past lives, self-destructive as they are. Entropy is not about creation, after all.-
Belle could only take a deep breath. -So, what is the proper course of action?- she /asked.
-As they are born, so they must end. Exterminate them all. Genocide until their creator tires of making them, and finds something else to do… which will probably involve placing Evil souls into existing races, instead.- Because that was the more subtle and devastating thing to do.
Belle was painfully silent. -That… is not a very elven thing to do,- she /said quietly.
-It is a very unnatural thing to do for almost any race. But then, making a wildly mutating species out of nothing, filling them with Evil souls, and unleashing them upon every other species to create maximum destruction and misery is also very unnatural, but it doesn’t seem to have impeded their creator at all. Proactive Good violence, instead of reactive, tends to feel very arbitrary to most people.
-War upon Evil without remittance or mercy is a completely valid mindset for the Good. You know what the Beast-folk will evolve into in time, and you know what they will do. We cannot eradicate what they have become in our time without a war of survival that will likely involve Immortals clashing directly. But here and now… we only have their creator to worry about, and their unnatural origins means the Land will see them cleansed away as surely as any alien thing not truly born of Her soil.
-I am not saying this is something YOU should do. I am saying that, knowing what the beast-folk are and what they become, it is something that should be done.-
-And you are going to do so.- It wasn’t a question. I could not in good conscience allow such a thing to be unleashed on people, knowing what I knew.
-I cannot walk away, being who and what I am, Your Highness.- I did indeed have a great amount of things to juggle on my plate, but it didn’t matter. It was something I could work on in my off-time.
Did I expect retribution? Probably. We’d just have to see who was going to show their hands… and it didn’t mean I couldn’t make a move or two of my own in that direction.
-What are your plans for the aliens?- she /asked, changing the subject meaning she needed time to think on what she was going to do.
-Some will need to remain on the ship and secure it, but that doesn’t mean they can’t move outside and start terraforming the place, building it up, and securing the area most merrily. Some will go to Darkmoor to teach, some are just going to retire and raise families and act like normal citizens… citizens who are going to rapidly raise the technology curve in this area.-
-I must confess that their technology makes me uneasy. It is so very different from the magic we elves command...-
-Yes. Technology is not an intrinsic skill or power like our ability to wield magic. Technology works for anyone. It removes a lot of the uniqueness and special nature from people, and spreads the power around much, much more, taking power from an effect of birth to an aspect of learning and hard work that effectively ignores what, how, and who you were born as.
-It is very different from being naturally talented at magic, with a lifespan of centuries and knowing you have the power and don’t need to rely on anyone else. Technology can easily make a skilled warrior much more dangerous than a skilled Wizard.-
Probably the most frightening thing you could say to a Zanzyran spellcaster, really, although elves had some insulation because we didn’t forget our fighting roots. Actually, what it meant to us was that elves could get really, really dangerous, because we could use both sides of the equation!
She understood that after a moment. After all, wasn’t that why she was here?
-You advocated that I should learn the longsword, the longbow, and the dagger as the ancestral weapons of my people,- she /said slowly. -Should I do the same with these new weapons?-
-Oh. Ohhhhh.- Actually, I hadn’t thought about that myself. I was totally an idiot -I think I know now how elves got sucked into becoming part of Darkmoor. Zum-zumming swords of hard light and shooting multi-colored beams of energy...-
There was a pause as she pictured all of that. -They are extremely colorful and eye-catching, and they use light,- she /admitted cautiously.
-You know, that light can be individualized and attuned to the shooter. If you want a pale blue beam with a golden halo, you could totally use a little magic to do that.-
I could feel her interest promptly spike way over here.
-We’ll have to alter the production standards of the firearms to something more organic and artistic to satisfy our aesthetics, and make them suitable for further enhancement,- I /added thoughtfully. -Then, of course, there’s going to be a reaction if we ever bring them back to our time,- I /pointed out. -The Immortals seem to have quite a mad on about introducing technology into the world after what happened in Darkmoor, having buried it completely. They are keeping our world and time low-tech and dependent upon magic. Four thousand years later, and look how little technology has changed since this time, yet look just how far technology can rise, as exemplified by the Barhund. It is pretty clear that technological advancement is being artificially suppressed, and even magical advancement is being controlled and curtailed.-
-Magical advancement, too?- Princess Brittabelle was startled. -Are you certain?-
-Dwarven artificing and earthmagery was reduced to nil and wiped away by Clangyr. Sythia had developed Pyramid Power, but was wiped away so thoroughly any hints of its history barely mention its achievements. Delpha has a thousand Overmages, but all they do is master the skills of their ancestors and don’t truly improve magic at all, dithering in their power and accomplishing nothing. Siricil has a handful of Overmagi, and they accomplish a whole lot of nothing.
-The Radiance and its gammathauma power empower Zanzyr and its magic, but cost the rest of the world. Forces will be moving against it.
-It should take little thought to realize that it is NOT in the interest of the Immortals for mortals to move past the magical and technological stage we are at now. Such reduces their dependence upon Immortals and their influence accordingly.
-Furthermore, advanced magical and technological powers give Entropy greater tools to cause disasters. It is extremely possible that our entire world was once an advanced civilization that was a peer of the Barhund’s Federation, possibly even a member or founding power thereof, if Federation history is on the same timeline.
-Yet the only sign of such technology I’ve seen has been the works of the Ei of Hazz, and the Azure Knight’s robot stallion.-
I paused to let her process all that. –I am not CERTAIN, Belle, but the evidence points to continued cycles of advancement and very, very unnaturally thorough destruction. The Immortals either do not prevent it, cannot prevent it… or are the cause of it, especially the Entropics.-
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