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TennyoCeres84
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To Melmoth

Post by TennyoCeres84 »

How have you been spending your days since the end of the incursions and during the reconstruction effort?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"I've been busy as a bee, you could say. Well, an overweight, stone-skinned, horned bee with expensive tastes, but - eh. Tomayto, tomahto.

Hope wasn't the only one stuck with a nuked Nexus, so the arcane stock exchange spiraled into extreme values. If you were a mage and badly needed a few scraps of power for a ritual you'd normally have done with your eyes closed, you now needed to pay top dollar to so much have a workable pool. On the short term it made all my junior brokers obscenely rich and it really didn't mesh well with my own planned ransacking of Mammon's coffers - hence the little Spanish Letter charade - which was bad news for Greed and good news for me. No power, plus no capital? That's a collapsing system, right there.

So I funnelled all the cash and the extra clout we made into putting those Nexuses we could save on life support, and into getting new ones started. Belial's helpfully provided us with some notes on how to refine both Celestial Light and Hellfire into via, so I help set up the cash flow needed to put up new refineries across the globe - plants designed to inject fresh mojo into the Earth's crust down to the igneous level. Big thanks to McLusky Energy, the rest of the country's energy conglomerates and the central banks for loosening up tariffs - the entire world was gonna need a leg-up in the reconstruction, and the last thing anyone needed was someone standing up to play Politics.

It's gotten me to work to set up new portfolios I woulda left to more qualified persons pre-Incursions, but now there were a fuckton of Green research grants needed, everything so we could capitalize on both Bliss and Hellfire to kickstart the world and adapt it to some of the changes we wouldn't be able to revert. Closing the bigger rifts would've taken energy nobody had, or that nobody could safely source. So, well, we hadda fulfill Tom's ideas and complete the merger, which was less spectacular than we'd imagined. Everything's practically the same as before, only now Heaven and Hell work more like Faerie does. Some private buildings exist in all three planes, we're putting up public "elevators" of a sort to control traffic for everyone else - and now Earth's rules are seeping into the Hereafter. Infinity still seems to be a factor, but I've had to help a lot of scouting teams in drawing out the first-ever precise maps of Hell's wastes. Same for Gabriel and the Thrones; there's just suddenly a ton of information the mortals have a pretty fuckin' serious right to know, obviously. Trans-planar tourism's just around the corner. Heck, folks already stopped by the more genteel parts of Summer and Winter for ski trips or the occasional reprieve from god-awful East Coast weather!

Oh, and speaking of closing the rifts; some idiots are convinced we could pull it off, if we just woke up one of the Hyperborean liches, gave it a full sit-rep by way of Squid mind-meld or Karthian dominion, and then expected it to not burn half of Siberia to ash on the spot. We've been seeing a lot of dodgy investments in and around the ex-Soviet bloc, lots of stuff analogous to what Vlastos tried to pull off - 'stead focused on cracking alleged tombs open or finding old Goblin necropolises. There's a lotta pullin' on the Orcs' sentiment involved, but we're tryin' to investigate all the work co-ops advertizing Slavic work to our local Greenskins. Naturally, our own Lev Kirilov's trying to get past government red tape to get a fix on Rasputin's grave - presumably to go stand on top of it and make sure nobody gets any bright ideas... For now, the official word from the White House is they've got him under control in an undisclosed location."

He snaps his fingers as he recalls something.

"Oh, and uh - I've technically got Greed's Mantle, now - except not really. Mammon's ruined and he's still the Vice's holder by default, but my con worked long enough for the law to get on my side. Now, every penny that gets conjured in Mammon's now-terrestrial vaults goes to me, the hoard's designated administrator. Rhadamantus was ready to Name me Greed, but I don't want that kinda commitment. I'm already an obscenely rich schlub with a heart of gold, giving me that title would rip that heart out and leave me exactly like Mammon was.

At least, all of that wealth's got potential, now, and it'll keep the economy afloat artificially until everything gets going on its own, again. I don't do much of anything that's classically demonic anymore, but I was tasked with keeping the more volatile prisoners of war in near-permanent dissatisfaction. Now I only ever damn other Pitspawn, along with their occasional mortal and Celestial collaborators. I don't do it with a summons, anymore though. Abbie and I get a call, we usually take a mundane flight out to where the perp's being held, and we do our job."

He sighs happily.

"Oh, but all that followed a looong vacation, lemme tell ya. Nereus and I traded favors - one easy setup for a happy reunion for a few long-term B&B recommendations in Greece, and Abbie and I spent three weeks rolling around in the bedsheets and napping, sailing along Akrotiri's coast in rented sailboats and trading our mortal vices... Nothin' but sunshine and blue ocean - and a perfect spot to finish molting where all those loose quills, stony skin flakes and thinned-out demon blood wouldn't freak out Housekeeping.

I'm sorry to report that I failed in turning Abdiel into a cigar aficionado, but at least she now occasionally joins me with a cigarillo or a joint - anything sweet that's over quickly, for the most part."
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