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It’s your standard medieval Europe fantasy setting and Regina is next in line for the throne. I figure for the setting it’s uncommon, but not unheard of—maybe it’s expected that she’s a ruler in name only and her advisors will be maintaining. However, she’s a princess in a fantasy story, so naturally she’s all strong-willed and begins BAMFing it up—you know, stuff like banning this or legilizing that, maybe riding a horse naked, idk.Uncommon, not unheard of. Problem being, she’s ruling the equivalent of the British Empire, and it’s in decline. Colonies are rebelling, other countries are rattling sabers. Regina’s actually doing an okay job, and her peace talks with other cultures are the reason there hasn’t been a full-blown war.
Then there’s a break-through in magical research. The “familiars” that advanced wizards enter into partnerships with; a way’s been discovered that would basically let anyone nab one, giving them incredible power without any of the prerequisite training. However, much of that training is convincing a familiar that you’d be good for it. It’s a lot like, idk, Robert Redfording a horse. What they’re doing entails breaking a horse. Regina’s against it because it basically amounts to slavery, but it’s a way for the Empire to maintain its Imperialness. Huge confrontation between her brothers, her husband, her advisors, everyone. “It’s a necessary evil, it’s only temporary.”She ends up screaming that she’d rather let the Empire fall then turn them into slave traders.
So they betray her, imprisoning her in stone since, in those days, regicide just isn’t done.Thousands of years pass. Magic is modernized and mass-produced. Familiars are further degraded to a power source, so you have horseless carriages “drawn” by familiars. The Empire expands to cover the globe. Regina becomes a legend, and not the good kind. She’s embellished into being this Queen Maleficient figure who brave knights slew before she could kill a little baby or whatever. So the knights/paladin of the medieval times have become the spies of modern times—fanatically loyal, utterly ruthless, just used for assassinations and blackmail instead of quests and crusades. They’re called Silencers. One of their main tasks goes like this-
Elves were in decline, Tolkien style, way back when, but now they’re an endangered species. There were things Outside, dark gods, that offered them great power. They’re called Harvesters, and the process is called seeding. They give someone significantly desperate power, the more it’s used the more the “infection” grows, until they’re “reclaimed” by the Harvesters like a crop being reaped. It’s bad news.
So the Silencers are in charge of apprehending “Seedlings.” They go into the darkest, dirtiest corners of civilization, find the most wretched hives of poverty and depravity, and capture people who sometimes wanted nothing more than the power to feed their kids.The Seedlings are statued, much like Regina was, and stored; they can be fed to the Harvesters under certain controlled circumstances. It’s said that this can prevent breaches, or “Reapings.”
Cross is one of the best Silencers. His father was a Paladin, his grandfather was a Paladin; if he was on Earth, one of his ancestors would’ve found the holy grail. He joined the Royal Marines right out of college, did ten years, got hand-picked for the Silencers and saw it as his best chance to serve. Does five years with them. It’s hard work; he grew up on stories of slaying dragons and rescuing princesses, not black ops shit.At a division mixer, he meets a girl, a fellow agent from the secretarial pool. She pursues him, isn’t scared off by what he does for a living, has the same security clearance as him so he can actually talk to her about this shit. Name’s Gwen. She’s the only thing he has going for them. They get married and his job dissatisfaction reaches a minimum. Whatever he does, goes through, she’s always at home, understanding, accepting, with a martini on tap and a kiss for his wounds. The next four years just flow.
Then there’s a problem. During a routine transfer, a caravan is hit and extremists make off with Regina’s statue. Cross is dispatched to get her back. The extremists use DIY spells, real primitive stuff, to revive her. They plan on using her for evil overlord shit; they’re not expecting her to come out shattered because everyone she’s ever known is dead. She’s supposed to be sealed evil in a can, not a person.Cross makes it there just after the nick of time, takes out the extremists, turns his sword on Regina. He has orders to kill her, since it’s unfeasible to statue her again, but she’s just a scared, vulnerable girl. He can’t see her conjuring up armies of the dead. So he lets her go. Just this once. To convince himself he’s a good person.
This, he doesn’t even tell Gwen about. He buries it. But every foreign incident he hears about, every unexplained disappearance, he wonders if it’s her. He can’t live with. He asks Gwen for her advice, swearing her to secrecy. She tells him come clean. He can’t; he’s seen what happens to agents that go soft. They don’t get a gold watch. Cross and Gwen don’t come up with anything, but she gives him the pat “Everything will be okay, I’m sure you did the right thing.” He goes about his routine—calls his mom, pays his bookie, yada yada. Goes into work. Gets called to his boss’s office.
Gets a rope around his neck.
They know everything. Think he’s working with Regina. Is one of her batshit cultists or something. So, his boss explains, they’ve activated his loyalty spell. It’s a very simple spell, cast on every agent when they start working, only to be activated when they became a security risk. It goes something like this—you say ten words to someone, they die. Then they get back up with something else in the driver’s seat. The something else tries to kill you. And it’s retroactive. Everyone Cross talked to in the last 24 hours is gone. He tries to think of what he said to his mother. It was just a few words, maybe seven… but then he told her he loved her.Shit.
“Where’s Regina?”
Cross goes berserk. Rips apart the guys holding him, breaks his boss open—it’s a surrogate, does as much harm as killing someone’s Skype connection. He escapes, runs home—luckily, he’s only exchanged a few words with his wife that day, he was running late. Busts in-“No questions. Pack.”She tells him it’s okay. The loyalty spell doesn’t work on her. Didn’t the boss mention it doesn’t work on loyal agents?
Not that she’s an agent. She’s just a succubus. A dream girlfriend given form. She was sent his way to keep him in line and she loves him, of course, she was programmed to, but he has to leave now, and not tell him anything they can use against him. Since, of course, she couldn’t help it.
Cross runs. Nothing left. Entire life a lie. The woman he loved doesn’t even exist. He can’t say more than ten words to anyone without killing them and putting himself in danger. And he’s still being hunted.
For five years he’s on the run, living as a vagabond, utterly broken. Barely alive. Then he gets into a fight over a panhandling spot or some bullshit like that. He doesn’t want any trouble, he’s trying to back off, but the guy just won’t let it go. ”Beg. Beg me to let you run.” So he gives in. Speaks like a voice from the grave, just a few words—and the jerk drops dead. Gets back up. Hits Cross like a freight train.
Despite everything, Cross still has some animal instinct, some will to survive—maybe it’s just the training, maybe it’s some ancestral genome, but he fights back. Lives long enough for Regina to come on the scene. She vaporizes the zombie vampire… thing and looks at Cross. She’s come up in the world. He’s gone down.
“We have to run. They’ll be coming for you. They won’t be happy to see me either.” Cross just stands there and bleeds. She takes his arm and pulls. He’s not moving. “How’s your head?” WTF? She knocks him out.
He wakes up hours later. “I said, how’s your head?” He’s in a safe house and he’s a prisoner. Regina needs him; he’s the only professional she can trust and she’s not in the habit of asking nicely. She needs him fighting fit, now.
Even pops the loyalty spell off him.
He doesn’t say anything. Even though he can talk, years of silence have made him a man of basically no words. What’s there to say? So she makes it simple. He’s her prisoner. He wants to eat, he does as told. First off, a bath. Second, a shave. Third, some push-ups, because he saw how he did against the undead and it was pathetic. She needs the man who tore through her resurrecters like tissue paper, not his drunken uncle.
Cross gives in slow. He doesn’t take advantage of the pail of soapy water she gives him, but when she throws it at him, it’s not like he can put the dirt back on. And she talks to him; not incessantly, but with her own carefully chosen words. The real story of what happened to her.
She wants him to break out of the cell. Seize some initative, show some fighting spirit, but he’s content to go along to get along. Until the Silencers track them down.Come in, wands blazing, and corner Regina. Cross picks the lock and, still looking like a bum, gets close to the team by acting like he wants some spare change. Then, he simply kills them all.
He looks at Regina, then at a mirror nearby. First time he’s seen his face in five years. “You’re right,” he says at last. “I do need a shave.”
She lays it out. The Harvesters, the Seedlings, it’s one more empire game. The Empire deliberately keeps the elves oppressed, floods their neighborhoods with cheap drugs, slashes their school budgets, all to drive them to the Harvesters. Then the Silencers take them in, and they’re sacrificed to the Harvesters not for protection, but for power… power for the authorities, the descendents of the men who betrayed Regina.
Cross isn’t apathetic anymore. He’s angry. His entire life was a lie, but Regina isn’t. He did one good thing. He can do more. “What’s the plan?”
Regina sips some tea. “We bleed them. Everyone who’s involved, from the drug dealers to the Silencers to the politicans. We derail their plans. We pull back the curtains. And when everyone’s seen the system for what it really is, we burn it to the ground.”
“Where do we start?”
Then there’s a break-through in magical research. The “familiars” that advanced wizards enter into partnerships with; a way’s been discovered that would basically let anyone nab one, giving them incredible power without any of the prerequisite training. However, much of that training is convincing a familiar that you’d be good for it. It’s a lot like, idk, Robert Redfording a horse. What they’re doing entails breaking a horse. Regina’s against it because it basically amounts to slavery, but it’s a way for the Empire to maintain its Imperialness. Huge confrontation between her brothers, her husband, her advisors, everyone. “It’s a necessary evil, it’s only temporary.”She ends up screaming that she’d rather let the Empire fall then turn them into slave traders.
So they betray her, imprisoning her in stone since, in those days, regicide just isn’t done.Thousands of years pass. Magic is modernized and mass-produced. Familiars are further degraded to a power source, so you have horseless carriages “drawn” by familiars. The Empire expands to cover the globe. Regina becomes a legend, and not the good kind. She’s embellished into being this Queen Maleficient figure who brave knights slew before she could kill a little baby or whatever. So the knights/paladin of the medieval times have become the spies of modern times—fanatically loyal, utterly ruthless, just used for assassinations and blackmail instead of quests and crusades. They’re called Silencers. One of their main tasks goes like this-
Elves were in decline, Tolkien style, way back when, but now they’re an endangered species. There were things Outside, dark gods, that offered them great power. They’re called Harvesters, and the process is called seeding. They give someone significantly desperate power, the more it’s used the more the “infection” grows, until they’re “reclaimed” by the Harvesters like a crop being reaped. It’s bad news.
So the Silencers are in charge of apprehending “Seedlings.” They go into the darkest, dirtiest corners of civilization, find the most wretched hives of poverty and depravity, and capture people who sometimes wanted nothing more than the power to feed their kids.The Seedlings are statued, much like Regina was, and stored; they can be fed to the Harvesters under certain controlled circumstances. It’s said that this can prevent breaches, or “Reapings.”
Cross is one of the best Silencers. His father was a Paladin, his grandfather was a Paladin; if he was on Earth, one of his ancestors would’ve found the holy grail. He joined the Royal Marines right out of college, did ten years, got hand-picked for the Silencers and saw it as his best chance to serve. Does five years with them. It’s hard work; he grew up on stories of slaying dragons and rescuing princesses, not black ops shit.At a division mixer, he meets a girl, a fellow agent from the secretarial pool. She pursues him, isn’t scared off by what he does for a living, has the same security clearance as him so he can actually talk to her about this shit. Name’s Gwen. She’s the only thing he has going for them. They get married and his job dissatisfaction reaches a minimum. Whatever he does, goes through, she’s always at home, understanding, accepting, with a martini on tap and a kiss for his wounds. The next four years just flow.
Then there’s a problem. During a routine transfer, a caravan is hit and extremists make off with Regina’s statue. Cross is dispatched to get her back. The extremists use DIY spells, real primitive stuff, to revive her. They plan on using her for evil overlord shit; they’re not expecting her to come out shattered because everyone she’s ever known is dead. She’s supposed to be sealed evil in a can, not a person.Cross makes it there just after the nick of time, takes out the extremists, turns his sword on Regina. He has orders to kill her, since it’s unfeasible to statue her again, but she’s just a scared, vulnerable girl. He can’t see her conjuring up armies of the dead. So he lets her go. Just this once. To convince himself he’s a good person.
This, he doesn’t even tell Gwen about. He buries it. But every foreign incident he hears about, every unexplained disappearance, he wonders if it’s her. He can’t live with. He asks Gwen for her advice, swearing her to secrecy. She tells him come clean. He can’t; he’s seen what happens to agents that go soft. They don’t get a gold watch. Cross and Gwen don’t come up with anything, but she gives him the pat “Everything will be okay, I’m sure you did the right thing.” He goes about his routine—calls his mom, pays his bookie, yada yada. Goes into work. Gets called to his boss’s office.
Gets a rope around his neck.
They know everything. Think he’s working with Regina. Is one of her batshit cultists or something. So, his boss explains, they’ve activated his loyalty spell. It’s a very simple spell, cast on every agent when they start working, only to be activated when they became a security risk. It goes something like this—you say ten words to someone, they die. Then they get back up with something else in the driver’s seat. The something else tries to kill you. And it’s retroactive. Everyone Cross talked to in the last 24 hours is gone. He tries to think of what he said to his mother. It was just a few words, maybe seven… but then he told her he loved her.Shit.
“Where’s Regina?”
Cross goes berserk. Rips apart the guys holding him, breaks his boss open—it’s a surrogate, does as much harm as killing someone’s Skype connection. He escapes, runs home—luckily, he’s only exchanged a few words with his wife that day, he was running late. Busts in-“No questions. Pack.”She tells him it’s okay. The loyalty spell doesn’t work on her. Didn’t the boss mention it doesn’t work on loyal agents?
Not that she’s an agent. She’s just a succubus. A dream girlfriend given form. She was sent his way to keep him in line and she loves him, of course, she was programmed to, but he has to leave now, and not tell him anything they can use against him. Since, of course, she couldn’t help it.
Cross runs. Nothing left. Entire life a lie. The woman he loved doesn’t even exist. He can’t say more than ten words to anyone without killing them and putting himself in danger. And he’s still being hunted.
For five years he’s on the run, living as a vagabond, utterly broken. Barely alive. Then he gets into a fight over a panhandling spot or some bullshit like that. He doesn’t want any trouble, he’s trying to back off, but the guy just won’t let it go. ”Beg. Beg me to let you run.” So he gives in. Speaks like a voice from the grave, just a few words—and the jerk drops dead. Gets back up. Hits Cross like a freight train.
Despite everything, Cross still has some animal instinct, some will to survive—maybe it’s just the training, maybe it’s some ancestral genome, but he fights back. Lives long enough for Regina to come on the scene. She vaporizes the zombie vampire… thing and looks at Cross. She’s come up in the world. He’s gone down.
“We have to run. They’ll be coming for you. They won’t be happy to see me either.” Cross just stands there and bleeds. She takes his arm and pulls. He’s not moving. “How’s your head?” WTF? She knocks him out.
He wakes up hours later. “I said, how’s your head?” He’s in a safe house and he’s a prisoner. Regina needs him; he’s the only professional she can trust and she’s not in the habit of asking nicely. She needs him fighting fit, now.
Even pops the loyalty spell off him.
He doesn’t say anything. Even though he can talk, years of silence have made him a man of basically no words. What’s there to say? So she makes it simple. He’s her prisoner. He wants to eat, he does as told. First off, a bath. Second, a shave. Third, some push-ups, because he saw how he did against the undead and it was pathetic. She needs the man who tore through her resurrecters like tissue paper, not his drunken uncle.
Cross gives in slow. He doesn’t take advantage of the pail of soapy water she gives him, but when she throws it at him, it’s not like he can put the dirt back on. And she talks to him; not incessantly, but with her own carefully chosen words. The real story of what happened to her.
She wants him to break out of the cell. Seize some initative, show some fighting spirit, but he’s content to go along to get along. Until the Silencers track them down.Come in, wands blazing, and corner Regina. Cross picks the lock and, still looking like a bum, gets close to the team by acting like he wants some spare change. Then, he simply kills them all.
He looks at Regina, then at a mirror nearby. First time he’s seen his face in five years. “You’re right,” he says at last. “I do need a shave.”
She lays it out. The Harvesters, the Seedlings, it’s one more empire game. The Empire deliberately keeps the elves oppressed, floods their neighborhoods with cheap drugs, slashes their school budgets, all to drive them to the Harvesters. Then the Silencers take them in, and they’re sacrificed to the Harvesters not for protection, but for power… power for the authorities, the descendents of the men who betrayed Regina.
Cross isn’t apathetic anymore. He’s angry. His entire life was a lie, but Regina isn’t. He did one good thing. He can do more. “What’s the plan?”
Regina sips some tea. “We bleed them. Everyone who’s involved, from the drug dealers to the Silencers to the politicans. We derail their plans. We pull back the curtains. And when everyone’s seen the system for what it really is, we burn it to the ground.”
“Where do we start?”
