Wish upon the Stars chapter 1006

I had been wrong about him being a good negotiator. Peter was difficult to talk to, but not because he was sharp or focused. He was difficult to talk to because he was incredibly distracted and had almost zero interest in the conversation. Holly, of course, was VERY intrigued by the idea of Peter being a cabinet member, obviously excited to see her husband embarking on a project that suited his interests and would present such a huge challenge. But Peter himself seemed mostly ambivalent.

“So, are you interested?” I finally came out and asked him. “Because if not, we can look around for someone else.”

Peter, who had been reading over a spreadsheet, stopped reading  and looked up. “I might be,” he finally said. “But I need to know your plans first. Who will I be working for, and how many of these positions are filled already?” I got the impression he’d been paying more attention than he let on, because he certainly seemed laser focused now.

“All but one, if we count you,” I shrugged. “I’m just missing a Master of Development.”

He glanced at Holly, who had perked up noticeably. “What do you think?” he asked. “He’s your brother. I could make a prerequisite. And it wouldn’t even be a violation of any oaths I might take. He IS brilliant.”

She swallowed hard, glancing at me worriedly. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Pete. That feels like extortion, and extorting the future Wishmaster would be…”

“Par for the course,” he said bluntly. “You don’t get it, because you’re not a Wyndham. This is how we do things. He’d hardly respect me if I didn’t take advantage of my leverage.” He turned to look at me. “Holly’s brother Marco is in some trouble with a local faction. He’s a compulsive gambler at these games, it’s how we met, and he got in deep to a particularly brutal enterprise run by a man named LeClaire.” Now I understood his earlier disinterest. It was feigned to put me on the defensive so he could leverage me into...something.

“Ok, so you want me to what? Buy out his debt? Because I’m pretty sure you have more money than me. It’s kind of the reason I’m trying to hire you.” I wasn’t sure where he was going with this.

He shook his head. “Marco is in default, so they won’t take cash. They put a rider in his contract forcing him to repay them in service hours, and they set the repayment rate APPALINGLY low. Unfortunately, they have backing of their own, and we can’t just bully them into releasing him because of the terms of the contract itself. Which they still have.”

“That’s fascinating,” I said slowly. “And I don’t mean to be heartless here, but since you basically admitted to blackmailing me with your employment status, I feel pretty comfortable asking how that’s my problem?”

“It’s your problem, because Marco is the PERFECT person to be your Master of Development. I’m pretty sure they entrapped him with the gambling debts specifically to trick him into that contract. He’s being forced to repay them with production.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “What do you know about meta abilities?”

I shrugged. “As much as any Wyndham. The Wish power is a meta ability. It’s any ability that interacts with any other ability. Most of the highest level bloodlines are meta abilities of one stripe or another.”

“Accurate, if incomplete,” he acknowledged. “But the important thing is that despite the existence of clans and modified abilities through growth, abilities in their base form are extremely random. Which means sometimes, in rare cases, naturally occurring meta abilities DO pop up in low level Ascendants.”

“And Marco is one of those?” I asked with interest.

He nodded solemnly. Glancing at Holly, he waited for her to nod before informing me in a quiet voice. “Marco’s ability is called ‘Master Polymath’. In a way similar to how certain racial traits act as a modifier for stats, Polymath acts as a modifier for talent. Specifically in production related Skills. It triples their rate of improvement.”

My eyes widened in shock. “No shit?” I asked numbly. “That’s…that’s insane. No wonder they want him. I’m assuming you want me to recruit him as my Master of Development?”

“I think it would be beneficial to both of us,” he admitted. “I get to free my brother in law and you get a loyal and capable subordinate who is grateful you rescued him from a bad situation. The only caveat is that because of the terms of the contract, you can’t just break him out or directly pressure them. There’s no way they’ll let you have someone with that much potential, no matter WHO you might be in the future.”

I nodded along. “You’re right, but I might have another option.” I turned to where Zeke was leaning against a wall nearby. “I’m guessing they’ll have kept the contract close?”

Contracts, especially high level contracts, were powerful binding artifacts. You couldn’t just casually make copies of them. They put pressure on the signatories, and depending on who was involved, even having two copies might be too much. This meant that at our level, PHYSICAL contracts were actually important to the construct of a deal.

One of the few exceptions to this seemed to be the Wish power itself. I could add contractual obligations to wishes and use them as a sort of carrier for the terms. Wish terms couldn’t be so easily broken.

Zeke glanced over at Peter. “I take it LeClair isn’t a Wyndham? That sounds like a last name.” Peter looked to Holly, who confirmed. “Then yes, they’ll have kept it close. A contract with service stipulations aimed at someone like that would be invaluable. No way they’d let it out of their sight. You thinking of stealing it? That’ll be tough to pull off. This is the WCP. Security for things like that is top notch. Stealth won’t be enough to pull it off. Aura locked contract safes are pretty much standard issue here.”

“I’m guessing you can’t just do it?” I asked dryly. 

He snorted. “I’m on guard duty. If your mother finds out I left you alone to go pull off a heist she’ll peel off my skin like an overripe banana and throw my flayed corpse into a cauldron of boiling sewage.”

“You have such a way with words,” I snarked. “You should write poetry.”

“No offense kid, I’m more scared of her than you. Besides, this is a good opportunity for growth.” He shrugged. “This is your cabinet you’re recruiting. You aren’t going to win points with them passing the work off to me. You’re leaving them alone to run things for you when you head out to the Void, right? Better not to half ass this.”

He was right. In fact, I’d been thinking about this exact problem for a while anyway. Aura signatures. Or rather, other people’s perception of my aura. When people looked at me, they saw a normal human. A C-ranker, sure, but just a person.

But once I was in the Void, I wasn’t going to be able to walk around as a normal human without being noticed. Stealth might help, but it wouldn’t work on everyone. Misdirection might work better than deception. I nodded slowly. “Alright. So if I get in any steal that contract and tear it up, you’ll both come work for me?” I asked Peter.

“I will,” he said simply. “As for Marco…” he glanced at Holly. “I can’t speak for him, but I don’t foresee an issue convincing him. Holly basically raised him, and he does whatever she tells him to do.”

Holly grinned. “He’s a good boy. The question is will you do it? Is my word enough?”

“It is for me,” I told her solemnly. “Of course, as we discussed you’ll be working with us too. Is that acceptable?” Holly clearly knew plenty about the inner workings of the WCP, and she was obviously intelligent and resourceful. Having more competent C-rankers on my team was unlikely to ever be a bad thing, especially given MOST of mine were currently in the empire, too far away to be of much use to me.

“In the meantime,” I continued. “I’ll need you two to fill me in on everything you know about LeClaire, and I’ll need to stake his place out for a while. I trust you’re not in too much of a hurry?”

Holly shook her head. “Marco has been there for years now. They aren’t mistreating him exactly, just overworking him. Honestly he’s probably benefited from it. They supply all the materials for him, so he’s been able to grind a lot of skills pretty high. I know his Inventing, at least, is Mythic. Alchemy, Enchanting, Tailoring, Blacksmithing, pretty much everything else is firmly at the Grandmaster level, despite him being only C-rank.”

Which meant he had a Chronicle. That wasn’t as impressive at C-rank as it had been at D, but it still wasn’t the norm, especially not at the early stages.

Peter and Holly followed us back to our guest rooms, and we went over the contracts they would sign. Holly even helped write up Marco’s and okayed it for use. Once we were done, they headed out and I told them I’d contact them when it was done. After that, I headed for the training room, already coming up with a plan for what I was going to do.

My forms, up to this point, were almost all extremely versatile and useful. But I had at least one big weakness that had quickly revealed itself to be a problem. I could easily disappear and walk unnoticed, but what if I NEEDED to be noticed? What if I had to infiltrate someone else’s faction, to pretend to be another person. Going into the Void, this would almost definitely come up. In fact, Wise had somewhat inspired this thought with his impersonation of me six months ago on the heirworld.

The Void were experts at misdirection, concealment, and similar tactics. And I had access to something even better than the Void. I sat down, closed my eyes, and considered the tools I had at my disposal.

Before I could blink, I was standing in my library, and I cleared off a table as I sat down to explore the possible combinations of my abilities that might produce the pseudo Domain that I needed. Callie appeared beside me not long after, pulling out a chair silently to take a seat, and she picked up a book and started to read.

I’d used the staff to deduce Asmodeus very recently, so it hadn’t recovered yet. This one was going to have to be done the long way. Careful research, slow and steady testing. I triggered Dantalion, because of course I’d need as much information as possible, and then I used Beelzebub and Piece of Mind to create a series of duplicates imbued with parallels of my brain to work on the problem from multiple angles at once.

With that done, I settled in and got to work. All the while, I could feel something inside me changing, shifting slightly. Becoming more whole. I was approaching a fundamental shift in my power, and I had no clue what it was, but finishing this pseudo Domain would bring it one step closer.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flicker of purple flame, and turned to look at the spot it had come from. My Ten Demons Tome, the staff floating above it, flickered with a tongue of fire so fast it almost couldn’t be spotted. It felt…climactic. Like it was building to something, reaching a state of fullness. Once it got there, it would overflow and I had no idea what would happen. I just knew it would be a qualitative shift in what I was capable of. Before that, though, I still had two more pseudo Domains to perfect. So I turned my attention back to the first of them, the deceptive shapeshifting domain I was going to call…Astaroth.