The Good Life: Next Steps (ch. 95) (FF7 Start) (Patreon)

The next month and a half went incredibly smoothly. Everything was firing on all cylinders, and the immediate goals to reach my less immediate goals got toppled one after another. 

The aftermath of Silco's death played out exactly as I’d expected it to, with Zaun losing its absolute fucking mind, thinking that the Pilties had assassinated the voice that they’d finally managed to get on the Council, crime lord or not. 

It was a madhouse, and the only reason there weren't riots in the streets was because those streets were still flooded with the Gray.

Enter scene, me. 

The Council all but got on their hands and knees for me to accept a seat on the Council and represent Zaun's collective voice. With humbleness and a sense of duty, I accepted the position and proceeded to get to work. The Hextech solution to the Gray that Jayce and Viktor had been working over, even after Viktor himself was bedridden, was implemented with my face slapped all over it so the good people of Zaun knew who to thank for their clean air. Again.

The Chem Barons bent the knee, even if some of their legs had to be broken beforehand. Singed, with the terrible loss of his longstanding patron, immediately jumped ship to my camp and started working tirelessly alongside Curie. 

As did Ambessa after my little demonstration. It was actually pretty amusing -- Mel was sabotaging her mother, thinking that she was working for Noxus, while Ambessa was actually working against Noxus even as she played the part of a dutiful and loyal soldier. They were playing the same roles and working towards the same goal even as they worked against one another, and neither realized it. But, beyond my amusement was the fact that Ambessa readily turned over her assets within the city to be used at my disposal. Even the ones that I was sure she would have kept up her sleeve. 

That told me that she was committing to the course, and I found once again that I liked the cut of her jib. She understood which way the wind was blowing, especially now that I was a fully fledged member of the Council, and she was making sure I had every reason to butter her bread. 

That being said, I had absolutely no plans to attend the boring Council meetings that at the moment were just panicking over questions I already had the answers to. So, the very first thing I did was pull an Asami and send a synth of myself to deal with the tedious details that came with rulership. Which left me free to work on my other projects. 

“Hm… the transition needs to be smoother,” I noted, frowning at a screen that replayed a memory taken from a synth in a memory lounge next to me. Inside of it was a synth of Maki, the green-haired girl that Cinder fried up extra crispy. Some weeks ago, I had started a little experiment and she was the first subject of it. 

Vi was my first attempt at editing memories, and it had worked like a charm, but with the benefit of hindsight and Mentats, I realized how clumsy the whole process had been. So, I had taken to fine-tuning it. I had all the tools that I needed -- my Room, an endless supply of synths, and the memory lounge. 

The base process was -- I created a synth of a person, ran them through a scenario, withdrew those memories from the synth and then placed them in the real subject. But there were things beyond that. Avenues that I hadn't initially considered because I hadn't asked myself a simple question. 

What was a person? 

They weren't just a lump of gray meat piloting a meat mech, there was more than that. I wasn't talking about the soul either. A person was comprised of their thoughts, memories, and emotions. 

With the initial process, I had only really touched on one of those core pillars. Which led me to my current experiment -- I wanted to cultivate feelings. It was something that I already kinda did when I stoked an emotion higher or capped it. I could even remove them entirely now, if I wished. But this was a step further. This involved embedding an emotion into someone, fostering it, and using it as a driving force in their psychology to influence their actions as I desired, without needing to be present to manipulate their emotions manually. 

If I were to inject someone with something like ‘Loyalty’, it would be a temporary effect. It would work for a time, long enough for them to take action, but it was also something that could be overcome. Like, say, if they hated me enough. Or if they were aware of the fact that I’d injected them with what amounted to brainwashing juice, thus giving them some motivation to refuse me. 

However, what if I gave that Loyalty something to latch onto? What if I gave it something that would allow that temporary fix of a nebulous personality trait to put down roots inside of whoever was flooded with the brainwashing juice? 

To do that, I needed several things -- I needed to prep the ground that the seed would be planted in, I needed to fertilize it, and I needed a catalyst to solidify it so that it became self-sustaining. That was a process I was further refining and I was getting close. 

“Emotional response needs to be toned down here… upped there…” I muttered to myself, watching through an acted sequence of the synth’s memories. It possessed every memory that the original Maki had, and that had been an illuminating experience. And my first real exposure to outright time travel, given that she was about a decade ahead of the time that Sukuna and I visited. That gave me a framework of her personality to work off of. 

The edits had to be subtle. It had to be something that she would expect to feel in response to stimuli. However, with the synths, I could put on emotional guardrails to guide the response that I wanted. 

Such as, for example, waking up and discovering that you were covered in burn scars. Somehow, Maki managed to pull off the burn victim look -- I’d go as far as to say that she was actually more attractive as a burn victim than she had been before, which made me question a few things about myself. From what I saw of her memories, she wasn’t someone who had been particularly vain to begin with, but that didn’t mean she didn’t care at all. 

That was an emotion that I could work with. Soil that I could plant a seed of Loyalty in. Exacerbating that feeling, turning it into an insecurity, that created an emotional lever I could use to move Maki. In the fake memories, Maki was horrifically scarred to the point of disfigurement. Crippled. A volatile mix of pain, fear, horror, and the wish that she hadn’t managed to survive at all. 

Then came the fertilizer -- in those fake memories, I provided a solution. Healing that restored her limbs and appearance, not to the point that I could wipe away all traces of them, but enough. In these memories, she went from a life as a cripple to being fully functional, if a bit burnt. That, as one would expect, created a sense of gratitude. 

Then, lastly, there was the catalyst. The part that I was still working on and fine-tuning as it was the most sensitive stage of the process. It was the primer. The piece that made all the other parts of the puzzle click into place and, as a result, if it wasn't perfect, then I had just wasted my time with every previous step. 

The catalyst was what made all the right chemicals flood the thinking meat to create a singular thought process that guides future actions. In Maki's case -- with the implementation of the false memories, when she woke up from her coma, she would be under the impression that she was waking up from a surgery that restored her functionality. That would inspire gratitude, but not necessarily loyalty. 

Which is why I needed her to draw a particular conclusion -- that she had been betrayed by Asami. 

It couldn't be a conclusion that came from nowhere. I reviewed Maki and Nobara's memories -- a year ago, Asami had come to their world, which had advanced ten years since me and Sukuna had left it. Ten years in which Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto had been preparing for the Culling Game that I’d warned them of. And then Asami came knocking at the door, offering a chance to take us out of the fight before the game began. It was only natural that they accepted, biding their time and preparing, only to be caught with their pants down when the call to action occurred months before they were ready. 

A lighter touch was added to this stretch of time -- doubts. Doubts about Asami, doubts about the mission, doubts that she shared with Nobara in private moments. All of it building up to the catalyst realization that Asami had abandoned her and Nobara. What's more… What proof did Asami actually have that I was evil? Gojo's word that I teamed up with Sukuna? A man who she didn't like claiming that I had killed people that she didn't know? 

From her perspective, I would have healed her despite her trying to murder me. I would have rebuilt the city from the devastation that Asami's attack wrought. All the examples of my evil that Asami could point at in Fallout or my old world… I could just as easily turn back on her. Use some of those catch-all terms like ‘necessary evils’ or ‘the greater good.’ 

Adding it all together, when I then injected her with a syringe full of Loyalty… it would stick. Because, in her mind, she had reasons to be loyal. Joining the dark side made sense from her perspective, and that loyalty would be ironclad so long as I gave her further reasons to be loyal. 

It was just a matter of making sure everything was perfect, which was exactly what I was doing -- reviewing the reactions of synths that thought they were the real Maki so I could fine tune the response I wanted. Something that I could further manipulate by microdosing them with various emotions to curate their initial emotional response. 

“I've become quite the scientist,” I mused with a chuckle, tapping away at a keyboard as I flagged the last of the edits I would need to make with this iteration of the catalyst. This kind of work felt unthinkable for me before -- but now I found that I didn't mind the tedium of it. Not when I knew it was going to pay off so spectacularly. “I can't wait to see the look on her face…” 

It was only a matter of time before I saw Asami once more. And odds are, it was going to be soon. 

Almost as if to agree with me, my communicator buzzed. “Law~!” Came Jinx’s voice in a singing tone, “Guess what's don-”

I didn’t even let her finish before I dropped what I was doing to Shamble over to the lab that Jinx had claimed and lived in for the past month or so. It was almost unrecognizable compared to what it had been before. The words ‘controlled chaos’ came to mind, with equations filling blackboards and spilling over onto the walls themselves, wires criss-crossing across the room and becoming a tangled mess, and bits and pieces of tech scattered about on every available surface. Some related to the most important project of them all, others were just gadgets that Jinx had created to blow off steam. Like live grenades. 

Jinx herself was kicking her feet on a desk that was covered in scribbles, tall stacks of books, and piles of papers that were scattered about like a hurricane had ripped across the surface. There was a grin on her face as she spoke into the mic, “-e?”

“It’s done?” I asked, making Jinx spin around in her chair, and after so long, she had gotten used to me popping up on occasion. It had been a shock to her system to learn about my powers, and she quickly pouted about me cheating every time she tried to sneak up on me. I did have to lie about how I had been using my powers during Silco’s assassination, else she’d think I had allowed it to happen. Which I had. 

There was a lazy grin on her face, while the bags under her eyes spoke of her exhaustion. Not all of it was related to tirelessly working on the Dias. Most of it, I would say, was her throwing herself into her work to avoid thinking about her sister. Or how her sister had murdered her adoptive father. Or how Vi was still tearing through the city looking for her, determined to reunite. Jinx was still putting off that emotional wound, but I couldn’t complain. 

Not when the results spoke for themselves. 

“It’s done!” Jinx confirmed, making a large sweeping gesture to the Dias, the creation that dominated the room. I had completed roughly sixty percent of it by the time that I had handed it off to Jinx, but I barely saw my work in the new Dias. The number of rings had been shaved down even more, with only three in total while the frame was smaller and more compact. “One interdimensional portal, complete with everything on the wishlist and a few of my own additions!”

Perfect. Murdering Silco had absolutely been worth it. This alone proved that bringing Jinx into the mix was exactly what I needed. 

“Walk me through it,” I ordered, feeling a hum of anticipation. We were ahead of schedule. If Jinx really had cut down the power requirements, then with the combined power generation of Fallout, El Dorado, and the reactors I built in Piltover and Zaun… we had enough juice to reach the world Yoruichi had been stranded on. At most, we’d need to sacrifice a couple hundred people, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. 

Jinx grinned as she rolled out of the chair into a handspring and enthusiastically walked over to a monitor. “So, whatcha’ got here is a portal that creates a bridge through space and time,” she began as she imputed commands. “That’s what the Anchor is. Each ‘World Line’, as you call ‘em, generally has its own sameish flow of time. Jumping between ‘em is where things get whacky. Something like one second in this world is like a bajillion gazillion in another.”

“The Anchor is calibrated to this time, so even when you should have spent a bajillion years there, for us, it’s been like five seconds because the Dias and Anchor work together to form a stable bridge,” Jinx elaborated, a smile growing on her face. “Which got me thinking about time and space. And how exactly Asami managed to figure out that this world she dumped your cat on apparently had something tough enough to take her out.”

That caught my attention, and seeing that Jinx input a final command and a display popped up. It was a map of the World Lines -- a more expansive version of them. But then she did something interesting. She selected a world on the same World Line that Runeterra was on, and a still image of the world appeared. 

I made the connection instantly. It wasn't that much different than the stars, when it came right down to it. The stars were things that were trillions upon trillions of miles away, a distance most commonly expressed in the unit of distance ‘lightyear.’ The distance that light could travel in a year.. However, if a planet was something like five light years away from Earth and it blew up, people on Earth wouldn't know for five years because that's how long the light would take to reach us. 

A slow smile spread across my face while Jinx continued, “It's still the prototype, but if you give the knob a little twist…” She continued, making the unfamiliar planet shift like it was moving fast forward. For thousands or tens of thousands of years, there was nothing. But then there were suddenly lights in the night. Blips of activity rapidly grew, spreading across the surface of the planet… and as they did so, the green of nature and the blue of the oceans began to fade into an ugly brown. Cities that had to house billions suddenly erupted into light, some explosions big enough to redraw the map. 

If there was anyone left to do so.  After the lights faded, there was only a brown husk of a world left. 

“It works best on World Lines you're already on,” Jinx continued, leaning into me when I stood behind her. By manipulating the time aspect of the Dias, she could view the complete history of a world, past and future. Because unlike a telescope that could only perceive the light as it reached us, the Dias could go forward and backward. “My bet is that she built some observation posts on the World Lines and scanned them with this baby. The two-point-oh version is going to get way more fine detail!” 

That's how she scouted out worlds. This was a massive leap forward, but the ability to see details of a world and its history before even opening a portal there was a game-changer. I could only guess what Asami had seen when she looked at this planet and decided that it had something that could take on Yoruichi. 

With the 2.0 version, we wouldn't be blindly jumping to new realities across the Multiverse. The fine details would still likely be lost to us until we hopped over, but we would have so much more information beforehand -- tech level, population, the size of the planet we would be landing on, and so much more. 

“I also noticed this,” Jinx continued, bringing up another overlay of the wider Multiverse before scrolling in. It was faint, but I saw what she was talking about even before she traced a thin line connecting two worlds. Two worlds I knew to be Fallout and El Dorado. “It's a bridge made when you connect two worlds by an Anchor. It basically tethers them together.” 

An Anchor, huh?  Reaching out, I did a search of Sukuna's home world and my smile grew a fraction when I saw no such mark upon it. If the Anchor tethered the worlds together, then an incomplete jump was something that could be hidden. 

“Could you use this to figure out when Asami dropped Yoruichi?” I asked, and Jinx shot me a confident grin. 

“Was waiting for you to ask!” Jinx replied smugly, pulling up the exact data. There was a little blip on what amounted to a timeline for a world that she pointed to. “That right there is when the portal opened and closed, as far as I can tell.” 

“And would the Dias be able to arrive at that point?” I asked, and Jinx tilted her head back and forth. 

“Eeeh, kinda. This version was more focused on getting there without eating up stupid amounts of power. Another version could get there more precisely. My best guess, you could get around that time. Give or take a year. Or ten.” Jinx answered, sounding wary of disappointing me, but I affectionately rubbed the top of her head as I put together the pieces of a plan. 

Something that didn't go unnoticed by Jinx, who clung to me, “You'll take me with you, right? I mean, you could use the company if you get stranded there for like a decade. Or a century," she pointed out and I just chuckled warmly. 

“I told you, I wouldn't go anywhere you couldn't follow, Jinx. Of course you can come… but, don't think for a second that I don't know why you're so quick to leave. You can't avoid her forever.” 

She stilled against me before her shoulders dropped. “Not forever. Just… until I'm ready.” Which might be never, at the rate that she was going. But that was okay. We might have plenty of time for her to get over her issues. “So… when are we going?”

“... I think today.”

…

I had been waiting for the day that Jinx would finish the Dias. Things were in motion, but with the revelation that it was the Anchor that tethered time between worlds, that opened up a window of opportunity that I intended to exploit. It was something of a risk, I knew. Asami would certainly have a better Dias than our newest version, as she had been tinkering with it while we were stuck using the oldest version. On top of that,I had a few irons in the fire here in Runeterra. 

The Noxian army was still incoming, though they had delayed their march by a month as Ambessa informed me of their spies scrambling to assassinate me and steal my designs. But, no matter what, a month from now Noxus would be on our doorstep with the intention of kicking the front door in. It was a fight I was confident that we could win with just me and Sukuna, but I wanted more. 

So, I decided to thread the needle. To take the risk and cross my fingers that it would pay off… because if it did… 

Then I had another shot at Asami. 

But, much like her shot at me, it required patience. Years of it, in fact.

“Are you sure about this course, Law?” Robin asked me as the Dias was firing up. First and foremost, we had to reconnect with the other worlds to grab whatever power they had for the trip over. With the new Dias, that simple action finally wouldn’t cost more power than we would gain with the reconnection. “You could be there for quite some time...”

“I could be,” I admitted. “But the effects on me would be minimal. Perks of biological immortality,” I added, giving her a wink. Robin gave me a pointed look and I shrugged, “I’d rather be stuck there for a few years than come in years after Yoruichi got stuck there. If Asami is right, and this thing that she found really can kill Yoruichi… then I’d rather her not fight it at all.”

The plan was rather simple. I would arrive ahead of the point that Yoruichi got dropped into the world and lay in wait until Asami banished her to it. From Yoruichi’s perspective, she would arrive and I would be there ready to open the way home about five seconds after her arrival. We would return to here and now with the Anchor, and depending on how good Asami’s sensors were… It could very well be nine more months before she came back for her hostages as she was still under the belief it would take a year for me to generate enough power to reach the world she sent Yoruichi to. 

“How sweet,” Robin remarked dryly, but she seemed more at peace with my reasoning.

“I try,” I replied cheekily. “Jinx will be coming with, because it’ll probably take years for her to get her head on straight. You wanna come too?” Jinx was currently getting the injection of the good version of Compound V, which came from our very limited supply. But, it was necessary. It’d raise too many questions if the worst case happened and we landed in the world like a century before Yoruichi arrived. She’d come back as an old woman, but with the Compound V, she’d still look about the same age, give or take a few years. 

Robin seemed to consider it for just a moment before she shook her head, “It would be the last of our Compound V before we have the ability to readily produce more. I’ll stay here… and hope that the next few years left to your own devices don’t change you too much,” she said, reaching up and patting me on the cheek. 

“Only for the better,” I promised, and that got a slight smile from her. The moment came to an end, however, when the Dias fired up. There was a flash of light as the portal winked into existence, revealing the world of Fallout and…

“Uh…” I started, blinking a few times, immediately confused as to what I was seeing as the portal opened. For a split second, I was struck dumb. Honestly, speechless as… it had been three months, I had to remind myself, slowly walking through the portal. But, when I stepped through, what I saw didn’t change. And, frankly, I didn’t even know where I should start looking because all of it was kind of a mind fuck. 

First and foremost, I saw that the portal was still in Nuka-World, which was a cold comfort because I barely recognized the place. It wasn’t just the buildings that had changed, but more… well… 

There were a lot of naked people in cages. And a couple of them on crucifixes. Mostly women, I quickly noted, and the vast majority of them had a slave collar around their necks that had a price tag dangling from it. Maneuvering between the slave market were Super Mutants. Large, seven or eight feet tall, lime green skin, and built like a brick shit house -- they were wearing stitched-together clothing and armor, going about their day like everything was normal. 

And there, at the front of the greeting party, was Taylor Hebert. 

In one hand, she carried the leashes of two naked women on their hands and knees, both of them vaguely familiar. Piper and Cait, I think. Taylor herself was wearing what amounted to a Dominatrix outfit -- skin-tight black leather, a pair of panties and fishnets that left most of her long legs clad in thigh-high boots. She strode forward calmly. Confidently. Like what I was looking at was in any way expected. 

I was gone for three months. I had bigger gaps in my visits, but apparently this time Taylor had… I… 

I…

What. 

The. 

Fuck.

“Oh my,” Robin mused while I felt like I was having a mental breakdown at the revelation that Taylor might be the kind of crazy I just wasn’t equipped to handle. Like, what the fuck? I didn’t mind the changes -- that wasn’t the issue. Slave markets were a staple of any evil empire, so I appreciated the initiative. I was just giving myself a bald spot at all the head scratching I had to do to understand how Taylor went from ‘We have to do the necessary evil to prevent people from being worse’ to ‘Stick the naked ladies in cages and make them dance for the highest bidder.’  

“Law, Robin,” Taylor greeted us both, like this wasn’t in any way utterly ridiculous.

You know what? 

I’m just going to roll with it. I could deal with this later. 

“Taylor. I see you made some changes to the place,” I noted, meeting her in the middle and there was something heavy in her eyes. But it was smothered away when she stood on her toes to kiss me. It lasted a long few seconds before Taylor broke it, but before she pulled away, she whispered in my ear. 

“It was necessary,” she said before pulling back, and that raised a whole lot of questions I’m not even sure I wanted the answers to.

“I’m sure,” I decided, giving a smile and accepting that it was. Somehow. At least, I really hoped it was because… if it wasn’t, then Taylor was a type of crazy that may actually be beyond my ability to handle. “We’re here to establish a secure connection. How is the power situation?”

Taylor nodded before snapping her fingers and I watched in dull awe as the two women that Taylor had been leading around by a leash shuffled around for her to sit on. The sight was so absurd that I genuinely had no idea who I was looking at for a few seconds. My first thought was that Cait had mind whammied her or something. 

“The American Wasteland has been conquered,” Taylor began, and that told me that she had been busy. “With Nora’s help, we swept over the east coast down to the border with Mexico before cutting west. I’ll have a complete report for you to inspect, but we’ve had a number of beneficial finds in terms of resources and technology. Likewise, Nora has completed her conquest of the Americas and is preparing an invasion into Europe and Africa.”

She took a breath, her lips thinning and with deliberate precision she spoke, “The Super Mutants were instrumental, but there have been… complications. Men are the only ones compatible with the current strain of FEV, and while the dose that we reverse engineered did curb their aggressive nature… it came at a cost.”

“A cost?” Robin echoed, raising an eyebrow. 

“While they aren’t as mentally challenged as previous Super Mutants, the Institute reports a drop off of roughly thirty to fifty IQ points. Additionally, they still have certain… instincts, but they aren’t equipped to… do anything with them anymore.” Huh. Huh. So, the current strand made them dumb and horny, but they didn’t have a dick? That sounded horrible in a real ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’ kind of way. “Which, in turn, becomes frustration and violence against themselves and each other. To keep them in line, there needs to be a… strong dominating figure that… is appealing to their sensibilities.”

“Well… sounds like it all worked out. Good work, Taylor,” I said, giving her a nod that showed that I understood. Now that the shock had started to wear off, I found the entire thing more and more funny. “What are the numbers looking like?”

“Substantial,” Taylor answered easily. “Surviving in the Wasteland is difficult no matter where you go. So, when offered the choice, a general consensus indicates that eighty percent of the male population has agreed to become a Super Mutant. Even when I made it abundantly clear the consequences of such a decision. As of right now, we have an army of sixty thousand with another hundred thousand waiting for injections.”

That’s hilarious. I couldn’t even imagine being so desperate to survive that I gave up my penis. 

“In terms of power… we found several caches of nuclear warheads, in particular in the Capital Wasteland. With them, we won’t need to sacrifice anyone to fuel the portal.” That was excellent news. And, if we didn’t burn through all of them, I could use them in Runeterra if we needed to. 

However, before the debrief could go further, Jinx arrived and stepped through the portal with wide eyes. “Wowza,” Jinx muttered, looking around with a vaguely disturbed expression before her eyes landed on Taylor. I think it was the first time I had seen Jinx intimidated, even with the serum that now flowed through her veins. “This sure is… a place.”

“Jinx, this is Taylor. She runs the Fallout World.” I introduced her before gesturing to Jinx, “Taylor, this is Jinx. Our new head of engineering.”

“A pleasure,” Taylor said, though her tone was guarded and frosty. 

“Right back at ya’, scary lady,” Jinx returned, glancing at me with a growing sense of urgency. “So, we making this trip or what? Let’s go go go! I’m all packed!” She said with cheer and my gaze slid to Robin, who just shook her head with a soft smile. 

“Just got to hook everything up, and we’re good to go,” I said, tossing Jinx a wink before the lot of us did exactly that. I would have liked to see Nora before I left, but no such luck there, given that she was sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to launch a Sunrise Invasion of Europe. The rest of the short amount of time before the jump was Taylor passing over data of everything of interest she had found during her lightning conquest across the Capital Wasteland -- Vaults, drugs, technology, weapons, and more. 

Within the hour, however, Jinx and I stood before a Dias once more with heavy backpacks that contained everything that we might need for an extended stay in a new world. There was a familiar hum of anticipation in my blood as I prepared myself to step foot on an entirely new world once more. One that contained dangers great enough Asami was convinced it was the perfect place to drop off my troublesome cat. 

With a flash of light, the portal opened and revealed a beautiful view of an urban hellscape of a city. A massive circular city that possessed a central building that extended high into the sky, with entire lesser cities built upon almost flower-like petals around it, casting long shadows over the ones who lived below. 

Jinx’s breath hitched in her throat, and her hand found mine, squeezing it for comfort. I squeezed it back… 

And then we set foot into a new world.