Museum Core Chapter 23: Cassandra

Kids were living paradoxes. Anytime they wanted you to do something, by the time you got around to doing it, they wanted the exact opposite.

Most recently, that had manifested in Eve literally falling asleep on the way to the hotel and having to be carried the rest of the way, yet exploding with manic energy the moment Jaclyn had put her on the bed.

Leaving a sleeping child in a hotel room was iffy parenting at worst. Doing the same with a fully awake and inexplicably hyperactive kid … not quite “worst parent of the year” kind of stuff, but that was only because there were some truly awful people out in the world.

Thankfully, that period of hyperactivity didn’t last and Jaclyn got back to the precinct half an hour after leaving it, getting her gun back from the sergeant manning the front desk.

She’d wound up leaving it for one simple reason. Between the distance to the jungle, the fact that there was a police precinct between her and the jungle, and the tribe of powerful orcs camping next to the precinct, she’d judged the risk of a monster attack minimal. At least compared to the danger posed by having an unsecured gun in the same room as a six-year-old. Eve wasn’t the kind of child prone to doing something so stupid as playing with a firearm, but when it came to guns, a mistake only needed to happen once.

As Jaclyn passed the conference room, she stopped to turn and stare. What on Earth was that stuff on the table? Well, she knew what it was, but she also knew it definitely didn’t belong on there.

She just walked the rest of the way to Owens’ office, knocked, and entered when he called her in. She almost burst out laughing when she saw his shirt.

He’d changed out of his uniform into a t-shirt and jeans and she could see a futon already laid out behind his desk. Sleeping at the precinct wasn’t exactly within regulations, but once again, extraordinary situations told the ordinary rules to bugger off.

Of course, even then, that shirt …

It was a black t-shirt that had a picture of a cat prodding a wall-mounted axe, with the caption “the risk of your cat murdering you is low, but it is never zero”.

He’d gotten that for Secret Santa the year he’d officially turned Felix into the precinct’s mascot, but she’d never expected him to wear it anywhere his subordinates could see.

“Time for ‘the talk’?” he asked.

“Phrasing,” Jaclyn sighed. “By the way, why does the conference room have half a Marks and Spencer sitting on the table?”

“That is half a Marks and Spencer,” Owens informed her. “I sent a couple of guys to buy some stuff. Spare socks, underwear, pajamas, stuff you really shouldn’t wear for too long. I figured we can all tough it out with trousers and shirts, but, you know …”

That had been a nice gesture. She’d already been dreading how she was going to get a change of clothes. Like Owens had said, as long as she didn’t get anything on them, most clothing could be worn for several days and she did have a few spare sets at the precinct because, well, cops did have to go to some rather filthy places in the course of their job, but not enough to sustain her for any real length of time.

Granger jumped to his feet when he caught sight of them, still looking like someone rejected from the “don’t talk to strangers” poster for being too scary.

He was still wearing the same uniform he’d had on this morning, and it showed, her enhanced sense of smell in particular picking out various smells from sweat to pen ink to an unhealthy amount of precinct coffee to food that had wound up on his clothing.

She might not have been here for any of it, but she could already picture it all in her mind’s eye, him rushing across the precinct, heedless of what was in front of him, to him sitting at his desk, eating or drinking while working, causing various stains to appear on his clothing.

Granger still wasn’t dirty, per se, not to anyone with a standard human perception, but he certainly wasn’t nearly as clean as he should have been, given that he hadn’t even properly been outside the precinct all day.

His hand flashed out as he snatched a USB drive from his desk as he approached them.

“Do you want to do this here, or the conference room?” he asked.

Jaclyn had to give him props for not overtly reacting to Owens’ outfit, even though she’d caught him noticing.

“Conference room is full of crap,” Jaclyn informed him. “Grab your laptop, we’re going to the breakroom.”

So that was what they did.

As it turned out Granger had set up an actual PowerPoint presentation, complete with pictures, albeit ones that looked like they were just book covers.

“Before I can get into what ideas someone might get from stories, I have to explain a few things about how people can gain powers.”

He quickly went over the basics of Cultivation, Wizardry, and the various Systems the orcs knew about. The Systems reminded Jaclyn of various video games, being variations on the same idea, gaining power in incremental bursts until one hit big thresholds, at which point one unlocked big, flashy, new powers. Simple enough.

The rest … was worse.

“Basically, cultivation is almost exactly like it’s described in Wuxia and Xianxia, you gather the energy of the world, get stronger, and devour a mountain of natural resources to grow.”

“What are those, and how can they be that precise?” Jaclyn asked.

“It’s basically the same thing. Xianxia can be translated as ‘immortal heroes’, and is all about the quest for immortality, Wuxia is about ‘martial heroes’, so basically the same power system but with different goals.

“And they’re both based on Chinese internal alchemy, the ideas of the elements, even Feng shui, kinda.”

“So it’s not modern novels come to life, it’s folklore?” Owens asked.

“Cultivation is folklore, the Systems, though?” Jaclyn reminded him. Owens just nodded and stayed quiet.

“The problem is, people can probably cultivate on Earth. The orcs say they can feel the energy you need for it in the air, and anyone who steps on the path can, but they just don’t know how.”

“Why didn’t they ever bother to find out?” Jaclyn asked. “Is it a secret?”

“The good techniques are,” Granger nodded. “But any Cultivation is expensive as hell. With Systems, everyone on the same Rank and Level has the same raw power, it’s just a matter of finding good synergies.

“But there’s a huge power gap between cultivators, and it’s all about resources. You can punch way above your weight class if you’re lucky or wealthy enough to have the right resources, or you can become weak and literally unable to progress if you don’t. They have a System they can access in any universe, and Cultivation is insanely risky.

“And if cultivators are anything like the stories …”

Granger trailed off, so he prodded him to continue.

“What are they like?”

“Lots of face slapping, harems, arrogant nobles, and their children, the ‘young master. I mean, you do have to keep in mind that a lot of Xianxia writers are Chinese. They’re from a heavily stratified society and throw in superpowers on top of that, it makes sense how those kinds of worlds would be created. And getting to actually beat up your social superiors when they’re being knobheads has to be an almost universal fantasy.”

Jaclyn winced.

“Yeah, let’s hope.”

But in her mind, she continued to think about what he’d said. People were … manifold, but even so, several things were almost universal.

For example, greed and ambition were almost universal. Far fewer people acted on these feelings to any significant degree. And some of those people would go so far as to walk this treacherous path of Cultivation to gain power, fall short due to a lack of resources, and then, faced with an imminent loss of advancement potential, become desperate.

And that was just the first issue she saw, within thirty seconds of hearing about cultivation.

“Are there any resources that would become ...” Owens trailed off, clearly in thought, before finishing his question, “… illegal? The kind of thing you can’t gain without breaking a few existing laws?”

“Eh …” Granger went beet red, “ … kinda? I mean, I don’t know if it’ll work properly, but there’s this thing called dual cultivation that involves growing through …”

“Is it sex?” Jaclyn asked after the silence had dragged on for an uncomfortable amount of time.

Granger nodded. “It gets kinda rapey, sometimes. The idea relates back to ancient Daoist sexual practices, but obviously, that stuff isn’t the problem cause it’s consentual. The novel version is.

“Like I said, I don’t know if it’ll work in the real world, and the orcs don’t know either, but I do know that there are probably going to be people who try anyway.”

Oh … bollocks.

The ability to gain power by raping women … even if it worked, and that was a very big if, that idea getting out there was the last thing they needed.

And while Jaclyn had been more than able to knock any nonce who tried to touch her on his ass any day of the week, most women weren’t her. Not to mention that far larger gulfs in power could now exist. It could be a difference between Heaven and Earth, between normal people and ones capable of leveling London with a sneeze.

“So, that’s it for cultivation?” Owens asked.

“Mostly,” Granger shrugged. “I mean, the actual assignment was to think about what people could get inspired to do, right?

“Because basically, most cultivation stories have main characters who are absurdly lucky, who stumble across rare cultivation resources left and right. The only problem I see there is that cultivators might get an absurdly big head after getting lucky a few times and decide they’re ‘Heaven’s Chosen’.”

So in essence, cultivators could use resources that ranged from morally iffy to downright depraved, and hotheads might wind up picking fights they couldn’t possibly win.

Jaclyn had already suspected the world was about to become a zoo, but this was far worse than she ever could have expected.

“And what about the other paths to power?” Owens asked.

Granger began to answer, but the door opened and Jones slipped in.

“Uh … I think this is a private meeting?”

Aw, Granger was adorable. Jaclyn resisted the urge to walk over there and pinch his cheek.

“I’m just here to listen in, I figured the Worldstrider Tribe had some interesting information to share,” Jones explained.

“Mr. Jones, Officer Granger is right, this is a private meeting,” Owens sternly threw in. “I’ve been able to confirm you are who you say you are with some old colleagues, but you’re bothering me without orders or official authorization. Why are you here?”

“Because this is where the action is,” Jones said. “The world has gone down the crapper, and you’re working to stop that. I want to know how to help.”

“You could have just offered to help,” Owens pointed out. “I don’t see how interrupting meetings and setting up in my office is helping.”

Jones shrugged. “I can’t reveal MI5’s resources to you, but I can deploy them.”

Jaclyn could literally hear Owens grinding his teeth before responding.

“You can stay in this meeting, but things are going to change going forward. You’re going to stay out of my office, you’re going to stop skulking around the precinct, and in exchange, I’m going to loop you in, within reason.”

Jones paused briefly before shrugging.

“And if I like my current situation?”

“Then I’ll figure out who your boss is pick a fight with them when I’m supposed to be fixing the mess out there!” Owens finally snapped. “Intelligence services have their time and place, and mucking about in police business isn’t it!”

Jones paused, and then nodded slowly.

“As long as you understand I can only help with issues I know about, I’m alright with that.”

Obviously, there was a lot Jones wasn’t sharing, but Jaclyn believed Owens when he said he’d positively identified the spook as someone who was in a position to interfere, somewhat. She’d have to keep an eye on that bastard.

Owens motioned for Granger to continue, and the young man did.

“Wizardry is basically just knowledge accumulation, power through nerdiness. People are probably going to be inspired by books and movies when it comes to spells, but I don’t know about anything specific we could watch out for,” Granger said. “The real problem is that you can gain a lot of knowledge if you don’t care about how you get it.”

“If you want to see how a human body works and don’t have any fancy tools or scanners, vivisection is always an option,” Jones offered.

Jaclyn shivered. She wasn’t entirely sure if he’d actually done anything like that before, or was just extraordinarily good at putting himself in the mind of monsters in human skin, but either way, his imagination scared her.

Granger nodded, looking a little green.

“Is that it?” Owens asked.

“I mean, there are a lot of stories about life force being harvested for magic, that might work? But that’s more of a general danger, isn’t it?”

Yep, the world was going to the dogs at supersonic speeds.

“And what about this System we already have access to?” Jaclyn asked. “Any ideas?”

Granger tapped on the computer for a couple of seconds before it started playing a video, some kind of computer game, showing two different playthroughs side by side, with one character being obviously far stronger.

“That video is from Diabolo, but the concept works with basically any video game with an ability system that doesn’t end with you getting everything, where you have to get some abilities and as a result, don’t get others.

“You have the same kind of raw power no matter what, but if you play your cards right and get synergistic abilities, you can get a lot more powerful than someone at the same Level.”

Cool. So … Jaclyn was screwed because she’d never played a video game?

Then again, by the sounds of it, she could just focus on being smart and maybe ask for a little advice here or there.

“But really, when it comes to books, you’ve basically got two main characters: the ones who are lucky and the ones who are good. Intelligent people can break the concept of game balance over their knee, and the only other good takeaway from those stories is that if you’re lucky, you’re powerful, and you might get lucky if you take stupid risks.”

“There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks they know what they’re doing,” Jaclyn summed up. “Until someone actually gets power, it’ll mostly be us protecting people from themselves.”

Granger and Owens nodded, Jones just looked bored.

“Interesting,” He drawled and rose to his feet, nodding to Granger. “Thank you, that was … informative.”

Then, to Owens, he said “I hope things go well for you and this precinct. Your situation is … certainly unique.”

And with that, he left.

“There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks they know what they’re doing,” Granger quoted her earlier comment, jerking his head towards the door through which Jones had just vanished.

“Yep,” Jaclyn nodded. She was rapidly starting to assume Jones’ real motivation was spying on the orcs, but she wasn’t sure how she’d prove that or what she’d do about it.

Suddenly she yawned despite herself.

“I’m bloody knackered,” she tried to say but interrupted herself with another jawn.

“Good night, Jaclyn,” Owens said. “We’ll pick this up in the morning, the convoy for the jungle expedition should be ready by 9.”

“Night, everyone,” she bade them goodbye and slowly made her way over to the hotel, making sure to leave her gun behind, but pick up some pajamas and spare clothing from the pile in the conference room. Tomorrow would be bad enough even if she got to go to sleep before 1 in the bloody morning.