Strictures of the Order

“Jumping right into a complicated and messy one, huh? Well, never let it be said that I’m afraid of getting dirty.” Marisa delivered the quip with a smirk and a wink, but after that her tone and expression both turned serious. But without any of the edge of icy hostility that she displayed when she invaded his barrier yesterday, so that was a good sign at least.

“So, you’ve put in some legwork, kudos for that by the way, which means you probably know the Goldies’ Sacred Mission: Protect mundanes from Abyssal predation. Not bad as causes go, but it’s also where this problem starts.” She took another sip of beer.

“Say you’ve got two different pieces of shit in your area that need to be dealt with, but only resources enough to tackle one at a time. One asshole is using magic to steal shit from mundanes. The other one is **** Abyssal kids and selling them into slavery. Which do you take care of first?

“Most people motivated by moral concerns, like punishing evil or protecting innocents or whatever, would go for the slaver. After all, having your shit stolen sucks a lot less than having your daughter stolen, to say nothing of being the stolen daughter. But the Goldies have their Sacred Mission, so the thief gets the first smite.” John was beginning to see where she was going, but that was no reason to interrupt.

“Now mundanes are all humans, so if the kid snatcher has mostly, or solely, hit non-humans, that's really easy to take for racist shit. Especially if you’re trying to get the Order to move on the slaver before your kid is sold off but they have to catch a burglar first, or if you’re a contract mage and get ordered to blow off an elven **** victim’s kid because a pyromancer torched a mundane’s house while nobody was home.” Marisa sounded grim through both examples, but the last one seemed to bring out an especially bitter tone.

She took another swig, and John had just started wondering if there was more coming or if that was the end of it when she cleared her throat and continued, “Meanwhile, the Goldies themselves realized what kind of priorities this would mean basically from the start. Now the Sacred Mission was literally god given, so questioning its validity is right out. But they can wonder why this is Maybe-Gaia’s will. And argue about it. A lot.

“There’s basically three camps: ‘Humans are the Lady’s Chosen People’, aka supremacist crap, ‘Mundanes are uniquely ****’ and ‘Threats to mundanes threaten more innocents’. And then there’s a whole fucking kudzu plant of sub-branches and particular arguments for each of those that I ain’t even gonna try keeping track of.

“So, do the Goldies have a bunch of supremacist fucks in their ranks? Yes. I can give you names of a few local ones if you want. But I don’t think they’re a majority overall and they’re definitely not the majority in Springfield. Is the leadership human supremacist? No idea about the other branches, but the Shield ain’t. In fact Bigwig Brighton, Lord Protector William Brighton that is, clashed with the Chosen People guys around the time of the Shield coming to America. I never really cared to learn the details, but apparently he tried to have a high ranked supremacist executed for treason.”

Well, that could certainly be worse. Any larger organization was going to have its share of assholes, and all one could really ask was that their bullshit not be approved of, explicitly or implicitly, by the leadership. “Well, that’s a relief.”

“Worried I was secretly hanging out with magical Nazis?” The return of Marisa’s teasing smirk and casual tone made it clear that she either wasn’t offended by that concern or didn’t actually think that was what he’d been worried about.

“Not willingly…”

“Touché. Out of curiosity, what would you do if I was **** to work for a human supremacist group?”

John scratched the back of his head. “I don’t think there’s really anything I could do at the moment, but Late Bloomers are supposed to grow quite powerful fairly quickly, so, uh… put ‘free Marisa from the skinheads’ on the to-do list, I think.”

“D’aww.” The teasing tone went up an extra notch there, but John got the feeling there was a note of genuine appreciation behind it as well. “Smart move not going in guns blazing, though.”

“I was wondering, though, you talked about the Order like you aren’t part of them. Is that a touchy subject or can I ask why?”

Marisa’s casual demeanor gave way to a frown that made John worry for a moment that even the cautious approach to asking had been a bad idea. “Touchy but not that kind of touchy, so sure. I talk like I’m not a part of the Order because I’m not. Not really, at least. I’m a contract mage, which is the Contract of Allegiance thing I mentioned yesterday. In mundane terms, it’s more or less a subcontractor on a really shitty deal. Well, really shitty by mundane standards, by Abyssal ones it’s only kinda shitty.”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t take that option when I get called in?”

“Weeeell, if you want to join the Goldies fully, it’s the way in. And if you don’t but you can live with the restrictions that come with it, it offers probably the best, or at least the most, ways to curry favor with the biggest boot in the state. Plus, it’s a better deal if you can get yourself pigeonholed as a non-combatant, but I don’t think you’ll be able to swing that.”

“... Could you elaborate on the restrictions?”

“Yeah.” Marisa sighed and drained the rest of her beer. “Restrictions come in two bins. Some apply all the time, some apply only when you’re working for them or when you’re doing something that’s too similar to what they have you do for them. So, if you’re contracted to stab shitheels, it applies to stabbing shitheels on your own time as well.”

John nodded and she continued, “General restrictions include following the laws set down for everyone, those are on the Writ of Protection as well. Don’t blaspheme against the Lady, don’t claim you’re representing the Order when you’re not and some other rather obvious standard stuff. The parts about public indecency and sexual stuff are more prudish than most of the Abyss, but pretty standard to mundane reality.”

Mundanes were prudes by most Abyssal standards? That sounded promising! And probably explained why Marisa had been so casual about him walking in on her changing. And why she didn’t close her bedroom curtains when walking around naked. And now he was thinking about Marisa’s breasts again, instead of listening.

But no matter how vivid and enticing the memories, or how small the shirt she was wearing right in front of him, they were still talking about important things that he needed to know. And so, with great effort and a touch of regret, he tore his mind away from the siren song of her cleavage to return his focus to her face and words.

“-big one is about other guilds. Simply put, you can only join things if you get the Goldies’ thumbs up.” That sounded bothersome, but at least John had managed to zone back in for what sounded like the most important part. Which was good because he was not going to go ‘sorry, I wasn’t listening to what you said because I got distracted by your tits’.

“There’s a whole fucking booklet of pre-approved guilds to join, and it’s pretty much worthless. They’re almost all in Europe and Asia, and mostly literal vassals of the Order. There’s a grand total of 4 around Springfield: the Moon Clan, the Hunters of Artemis, Oculus Investigations and Cheran & Cheran.”

The question he had been about to ask must have been more or less written on his face, because she continued a moment later, “That’d be nutcase-cultist hunters, monster hunters, an Abyssal PI firm and a local gunsmithing business. If you want to know more, they’re easy enough to look up.”

John nodded and figuratively chewed on that for a bit. “And how does one get the thumbs up to join a guild that isn’t on the list?”

“Fucked if I know.” She crushed her can and got up for another, talking as she went. “Only time I ever got anything on why a request was denied was from the guild I’d wanted to join, telling me they had said no to the Order crawling all the way up their butts to check for traces of dark magic. As if I’d go join a Cabal front or some shit like that.

“All I ever got from my superior is ‘Request Denied’. Not sure if that’s a policy thing or just ol’ Liver Spot being a miserable bastard as usual. He’s got enough of a regulations fetish that there can’t be a policy specifically against withholding those deets, though.”

“... That sounds pretty fucked,” John ventured with a frown.

“Yeah, putting that kind of demand in a contract that explicitly doesn’t make you a member is pretty overbearing. But at least they were up front about it being there. In fact the whole contract was in plain English with a legal dictionary provided for the few technical terms they used. Unlike the incomprehensibly dense legalese or dead language contracts you get in some places…”

“... Is it okay to ask why you agreed to it?”

“Needed the protection. No, we’re not getting into why, it’s in the past anyway. And credit where it’s due, the Goldies keep their end of the deal. On that and the pay both. Better than the letter of it requires them to too. Even though I get a bit less out of the protection than someone doing support staff work, I’ve nothing to complain about there. But I wish I hadn’t contracted for a full decade in one go…”

She shrugged a bit flippantly, though John had a feeling there was a bit of effort behind returning to a casual attitude about it. “But it’s fine, I’m just over halfway through. In five years I’ll be out of the paper shackle and free to join up with whoever I please.”

“Yeah, focusing on the bright si-” John stopped in the middle of that as he realized something. “Wait, if it’s a ten year contract and there’s five left, wouldn’t that mean that you signed it as a minor?”

Marisa laughed a brief laugh, but unlike the teasing giggles before, this one was bereft of mirth. “The Abyss doesn’t really do that. Contract magic starts working on people come puberty, and judging what you are and aren’t ready to get involved in is largely down to your family and the conscience of the people you’re dealing with, if they have one. If you don’t have a family to do that for you… well, you’re gonna need to grow up fast to survive anyway.”

That fit fairly well with what Qhila had told him about the Abyss over the last few days. Less so with several Abyssals going to mundane school at Ashcroft. “... Is it really that bad?”

“Yep,” she nodded, “all of the Americas are basically a patchwork of Wild West in the rural areas and gangs at various levels of hot or cold war in the towns and cities. With the occasional oasis of relative stability and peace, like Springfield under the Accord, thrown in.”

“Well, shit…” That was… He had run into random rat ogre attacks twice in three days. In an oasis of stability and peace. And Qhila hadn’t seemed to consider it anything out of the ordinary.

“Wakey wakey, Johnny. You sure you don’t want a beer? You look like you could use a drink or three.” She sure recovered her casual flippancy fast. Which really only drove further home how all of that was just ‘normal’ to her. He hadn’t really understood what Qhila had meant when she urged him to return to mundanity for his own sake, not fully. He probably still didn’t entirely grasp it, but he had gotten a lot closer now. He still stood by what he’d said to her back then though.

But worrying about the dangers of the Abyss as a whole had to wait. He had to deal with what was immediately ahead of him first, and that was whatever the GRO had in store for him and figuring out if there was a guild he wanted to join. Pushing the growing dread at the state of the world aside, he shook his head to clear it. “Right, sorry. No thank you to the beer. But you said there was another type of restrictions?”

“The directly work related ones, yeah. The basics are that you’re on call 24/7, but get a significant pay bonus if you’re called out at shit o’clock in the night, they decide what you use your skills for while on their time, and who you’re allowed to do your thing for, or to, on your own time. The details of it are a fucking avalance of regulations and red tape that I have long given up on keeping straight. At least when a contractor tries to send a suggestion or request up the totem pole it is. As far as I can tell, shit’s smooth as butter when things move in the other direction.”

“That sounds onerous too, but less so than the guild thing.” To the best of John’s knowledge, organizational regulations, policies and bureaucracy was something basically anyone with a job that wasn’t ‘self-employed’ had to deal with.

“You’d think so but having to drop pursuit of a suspected **** because he fucked off to Inferno territory sucks,” Marisa groused. “Sure, I get why the Goldies can’t just march three squads in full gear into the nightclub and do a grid search. Or send someone in official capacity without Dante’s go-ahead. But what the fuck is the harm in me going on my own time and keeping my eyes out for the creep while I’m there?”

John could see how that would be a serious issue for someone, such as Marisa, it seemed, who would pursue the **** on their own time and not just while working. But this did also bring up something else that he thought seemed odd. “Actually, why can’t the Order send a squad of knights to do that? I get why it’d be a PR nightmare in the mundane world, but with how unsafe the Abyss seems to be, policing with an unambiguous show of **** should seem like a win as long as you get actual crooks.”