Chapter Text
“The way has become hard and the world plunged into darkness. The creatures you have unleashed slaughter our people. Your plagues have blighted the very land. Yet our hearts hold firm. Win or lose, we will resist! In the name of the people of Fantule, I defy you!”
The raven-haired young woman speaking thrust her arm upward, raising Astraia’s Scepter aloft into the nightmare sky. The bloody light of the tainted moon shattered as it struck the polyhedral jewel in the rod’s head, losing its power. She spun on one slender, well muscled leg, causing the pink on purple silk of her dress to float around her in a radiant cloud as she arched her back. Light burst from her body, blinding in its purity, and the dark stone courtyard of the battlefield was illuminated, casting the towering horned demon she confronted into stark relief. Around her the massed companions of her company roared their own defiance, and the demon screamed out a challenge. As the beam came down from on high, a blessing of the gods, she straightened from her arch and descended toward the ground, her toe
“Hey Jack. We’re back.”
The sudden voice ripped Jack from the immersion of the moment and he paused the game in annoyance. He regretted not getting a noise canceling headset for the umpteenth time as he pulled the VR headset off his face and set it down. “Danny,” he responded, trying to sound friendly even as his guts churned in discomfort.
5’8” Danny McPherson had seemed like an ideal addition to the stable of roommates sharing the modest two story pinched between downtown and the foothills. He’d first applied for the empty fourth bedroom a year ago and immediately rose to the top of the list of possibles. He held down a decent job providing a steady paycheck. He kept his room clean and bathed regularly. He pitched in on groceries whenever needed. His references had been happy to pass on their recommendation. Danny’d even asked about chore rotations before Noah had gotten to them during the application interview.
During the following few months he’d proven to be just as good a roommate as he’d initially seemed. He always paid his share of the rent a week early. He freely shared his own items in the pantry and fridge while assiduously asking permission to use anything belonging to anyone else. He was proactive about his share of the household duties, even when it was his turn to clean one of the bathrooms, and he kept the noise down even during the day. He was, in short, perfect.
Except for one personal bit of hell he inflicted on Jack.
“Damn.” Danny leaned his muscular form over the back of the easy chair to look at where the laptop screen was repeating the view from the VR goggles sans stereovision. “Sexy! Those legs go all the way! I’m starting to get why you’re so obsessed with playing girls in these fantasy games of yours.”
Jack winced internally. Danny was also a gamer. All of the housemates were. But where Jack was a fantasy MMO junkie, Danny tended to enjoy first person shooters, preferably of a militant nature, and had been ribbing Jack about how gay it was to play dress-up-doll with girls in games instead of enjoying properly manly pursuits featuring explosions and body counts. Jack knew Danny didn’t really mean anything by it, just considered it friendly ribbing. But for Jack it felt like a personal indignity every time anyway. He was sure that if he asked Danny to stop he would. Danny was decent enough. But Jack never did. He did not want to get into the conversation about why it bothered him. Not one bit. Instead he simply did what he always did. He faked a laugh. Being in his forties he had long years of experience at faking laughs.
“Yeah. If I’m going to stare at an ass for fun it might as well be hot, right?, he replied. “Not like those brick butts you stare at all day.”
“Touche!” Danny laughed. “Score one for the old man!” Then he sobered, though the smile remained. “Hey, the guys and I were talking on the way back. I’m making dinner for everyone tonight. How does beer can chicken with sauteed mushrooms and garlic mashed potatoes sound?”
“Good enough to make me wonder why you’re still single,” Jack laughed, the smile almost becoming genuine.
“Hey now. I’m only twenty six. I’m still sowing my wild oats. Don’t go marrying me off just yet, dad.”
Jack waved as Danny walked back out of the living room and shouted up the stairs that dinner should be ready in two hours. For his part he picked up his VR headset and lifted it towards his head, then sighed and set it back down. He logged out of his game then shut the laptop down. The mood was well and truly spoiled, intentional or not. He might as well grab a shower before dinner, no matter how much he disliked all of the reminders it saddled him with. Scooping up the laptop he headed upstairs to deposit it in his room and collect a fresh t-shirt.
—-
The computer screen glowed insouciantly at him and Jack glared right back. When he’d first gotten the job of ghostwriting articles for online websites he’d been ecstatic. It was a chance to research, learn, then write factual articles that would educate the reader and sell product all at the same time. As a bonus the company he worked for had even been perfectly happy with allowing him to “double dip” and keep any payments the targeted websites had been willing to pay him as a “freelancer”. He’d made decent enough money doing it. Certainly enough to pay for his MMO-With-In-App-Purchases habit.
But over the past two years he’d grown increasingly disillusioned with the whole thing. He was one of the best search engine optimization article writers in his company. His results spoke for themselves. His ability to snake client links into articles in a way that made web search engines purr was near legendary, both in terms of the rise of clients in the ranked lists of search engine results and in terms of the secondary effect of click-throughs on his links. But he had become more and more convinced that his job was one that not only didn’t need to exist, but in fact shouldn’t. The search engine companies knew the tricks he was pulling. They even encouraged them as “Good SEO”. But it still felt very manipulative. He was deliberately attempting to sway the market by faking what appeared to be word-of-mouth advertising in order to artificially increase a product’s placement in what was supposed to be organic search page results. He was, frankly, a PR wonk selling his soul, and writing skills, to shady businesses.
The current assignment he was staring at on the merciless computer screen in front of him was a perfect example. He was expected to churn out ten unique articles with relevant links and convince independent website owners to publish them on behalf of an online store selling train horns to pickup truck owners and he had a month to meet this goal. The fact that these horns were illegal in more jurisdictions than not due to the combined risks of John Q. Public deciding they did not, in fact, mean a train was coming and the permanent hearing damage that would result from some truckbro blasting the 130 decibel horns at unsuspecting pedestrians from ten feet away was completely irrelevant to his employers. They had a contract, and they were going to fulfill it. Jack was the writer most likely to pull off such a project, so Jack got the job.
Normally he felt grateful that his bosses insisted on “the human touch” in an era of AI “writers” taking jobs like his. But today he was feeling a bit resentful of their integrity. He would love to dust off his resume and start shopping around for a new job, but he had no idea where else he could continue to use his skills with writing to put food on the table while avoiding falling into the exact same trap. At least with this company he was work-from-home with the exception of the bi-monthly all hands meetings downtown. The catered meetings. Most places were demanding people return to the stifling atmosphere of cubicle hell. A lot of people out there would kill for his situation.
He sighed and leaned back, thinking hard about strategies that would allow him to reach out to some of the most obnoxious, inconsiderate people on the planet and sell them weapons of audiological destruction.
—-
Jack had long since learned that you could be proud and disgusted with your own performance all at the same time. Despite both the seeming impossibility of the task and his own dislike of it he had managed to get the first two articles promoting the entertaining value of adding train horns to your pickup written and placed within the first three days. The first week was always the hardest, as there was always a lag between contacting a site moderator and having an article actually up on the mod’s website. He usually didn’t expect to have any articles up in the first week, and wasn’t surprised if he didn’t get any results in the second week either.. Things started to snowball after that, but here he had managed two postings in the first week. The arrogant, elitist part of himself supposed it was simply because truckbros rarely had the education needed to truly churn out good writing about their pollution spewing, ear ripping, dick substituting ways.
He winced as he realized how judgemental and nasty he was being. Jack hated being stereotyped by people who thought “his sort” were acceptable targets. It was unfair, often inaccurate, and painful to experience. It was no less ugly when he did the same thing to custom truck owners. It was just hard not to be so spiteful, given how many of them liked leaving him in a cloud redolent of burning oil and lung cancer as he drove his sensible high mileage hatchback down the highway. He was, after all, fallibly, spitefully, hypocritically human after all.
The combined one-two punch of his success and his nastiness left a bad taste in his mouth. Even if he was justified in believing himself just that good he needed to keep what little sense of basic decency he had left to him. Still, he decided he did deserve a reward for his success. One of the two sites had paid him $50 for the article he’d sent them, adding to the pay he was getting from his employers, so he was feeling flush with cash. It was time to blow it frivolously.
The walk downtown wasn’t exactly a stretch for his legs. The Queen Anne style house he shared with his roommates was a mere three blocks the other side of the state capitol building from the modest highrises and associated shops, eating establishments, and public facing professional offices of Downtown. He’d barely passed the large marble steps leading into the gubernatorial and legislative core of the state when he reached the first hoity-toity bar. It was a place that catered to movers and shakers, lobbyists, lawyers, and political influencers, and as such it was very much not to his tastes. The neighborhoods surrounding the capital may have been cosmopolitan and fairly liberal in their leanings, but the rest of the state was very much a bastion of conservatism and religious legalism. That particular pub, located a crosswalk away from the halls of power, was where quite a few of the deals were struck between the devils who saw him as less than a person and the professional crooks eager to receive their campaign contributions. He scooted past the open doors in a welter of mixed fear, disdain, and self loathing.
It was ironic, to his way of thinking at least, that the very corner across the street from that political whorehouse held a very different sort of club. He’d been curious about the place since he’d learned about it. A second story balcony overlooked the street, looming in judgement over the politicos entering the halls of power as they strode from shady backroom to shady legislative offices. The second story dance club’s balcony and windows were festooned with rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter posters, and admonishments of “Never Again”. The place was unabashedly, unreservedly, and unrepentantly activist, and everyone knew it, an explicit middle finger to its more formally dressed block-mate and it’s moneyed influence brokers.
Jack had never gone inside. He’d always felt nervous about doing so. He felt too old. Too unfashionable. Too frightened. Too closetted. And definitely too undeserving. He’d grown up in a very religious community in a day and age where “those people'' deserved AIDS. Where lynchings of people who didn’t conform to the foibles of proper society were investigated from the premise of “what did they do to provoke the attack?” Where memories of the Compton Cafeteria and Stonewall Riots were less “historical protests for equality” and more “yesterday’s criminal activity by perverts”. His youthful curiosities had been ruthlessly put down in that setting, not least of all by his own inculcated beliefs about right and wrong, and even with his finally accepting the truths about himself five years ago he still remained rigidly trapped between the fear of retribution from his society if he ever acted on that acceptance and the sense he was knowingly doing something wrong imparted by his youth. So he’d never dared enter the best known gay club in the city, with its very public, very visible balcony full of fags and carpet munchers, sissies and crossdressers, and trannies.
Today, though, Jack found himself stopping on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street from both bars and staring. Something inside his mind had seized, like an engine with a stray bolt jamming the cams. The articles for a project selling an abusive product to self absorbed assholes. The capital with its attempts to justify legal hostility to ‘those people’. The pub where sordid sorts bargained away the rights “endowed by their creator” to the “pursuit of happiness”. All directly in view of the very people they openly despised. It was too much. Too much all at once. Too much that felt targeted. That felt aimed at him. That made him want to… no, NEED to do something, anything no matter how much he felt he had no right to object, to lodge a protest against everything in his past, in his present, that forced him to pretend to an identity that simply felt like a cage in order to protect an identity too dangerous to expose.
With an almost spastic jerk he suddenly whipped his body around and, jaywalking with intent, marched into the busy and happening heart of all things subversive in his heretofor socially acceptable life.