Isaac reached out with both metaphorical hands to search for the city’s inertia.
He could see flashes of various colors of magic and the inevitable smoke as they swooped into the fighting. For some reason, no matter what superpowers were on display, there was always a fire. When he was at the hospital, there had been more burn injuries and smoke inhalation than any other complaint in the wake of a super-fight, even if it was literally just two water supers fighting.
Some of the candyfloss bridges flashed past as Shay sped toward a target she had selected, picking out patterns from the chaos. Isaac had always known she was bright, the Deep Kingdom raptors being far more than just a mere conveyance, but she was clearly in her element as she spotted a trouble zone far faster than Isaac ever could and slammed down in the middle of them without any prompting from him.
It took a moment for Isaac to parse what was going on; a number of civilians fleeing from a slugfest between two rune-empowered lunarians who seemed to be going out of their way to try and cause collateral. It was impossible for Isaac to tell who was part of what faction and frankly he didn’t care. Civil wars were nasty things; the histories made that clear enough, even after the unsubtle revisions to pretend that there was an obviously correct side.
“Screen them?” Isaac suggested to Sarah as he leapt off of Shay, aiming for one of the soldiers. Sarah grunted agreement as smoke swept over the feeling gaggle. Three couples and a gaggle of gangly young lunarians, age impossible to tell, vanished into thin air as Sarah exercised her illusionary powers. His target was the taller of the fighting pair, who marginally less flimsy-looking and holding a bright coral orb rather than a weapon, runes flashing from both the surface and depths. The strips of cloth that moonies used for clothing didn’t seem to be enchanted, just there to protect modesty and expose skin covered in runes.
Lunarian fashion was disappointingly underwhelming.
He wasn’t much intimidated by the power being thrown around. Especially not compared to what he’d seen in the Deep Kingdoms; even if he wasn’t a fan of fighting he’d had enough experience that what was going on felt like kid’s stuff. Just force bolts and the like, which would do next to nothing to his invested clothing.
For once he had to be careful about not investing much inertia in himself and keeping it to the clothes, because aside from Lia every moonie he saw really was nothing but twigs and string. So physically frail that he feared ordinary human strength would be too much. The orb-wielder’s protections had some physical force to them, but it was clear that lunarians fought and defended against magic. No machines or mechanisms, no armor or swords like they’d seen in the Deep Kingdoms, and certainly nothing like the tinkertech that most supers on earth had access to.
A quick flash of a rune heralded a force screen going up between him and the lunarian, but he turned his body and led with his shoulder like he’d been taught at Justice for Hire. It crunched under the augmented inertia of his charge like an extra-thick pane of glass, pushed backward for a moment before it broke with a tinkle. He slapped the orb out of the moonie’s hand to shatter on the ground, glancing over at the second half of the equation.
He had hoped the Lia was going to take care of it, but she hadn’t moved from where she’d landed. Fortunately, he still had Shay. His raptor chirped, the barding humming as she darted forward, wings half-spread and claws digging into the stone to give her traction in the lower gravity. The other lunarian either didn’t realize Shay was a threat or was too busy gawking at Isaac’s sudden entrance, because he didn’t put up a magical shield before Shay snapped her jaws around a shoulder and shook him like a ragdoll.
Isaac winced, but he could see at least two barely-recognizable bodies from where he was standing, a sight that gave him uncomfortable flashbacks to the Deep Kingdom. Or even to Greg, being shredded by Blacktime. This wasn’t some slugfest between supers, with implicit and customary limits, this was a real war. He was just going to have to accept Shay mildly savaging someone in order to stop worse things.
The demuto in his pocket started ticking as he finally managed to grab ahold of the inertia of the fight within the city, pulling away its resistance to change while at the same time nudging the concepts of both peace and violence. Pushing and pulling at multiple angles to try and set up the right guiderails so things didn’t get worse.
“Stay down,” he told the lunarian who was still looking at the orb fragments in shock, nudging Shay to release the wounded fighter as he launched himself over toward her. He grabbed the barding on the way, barely keeping himself from overshooting, but the crystaltech actually helped stabilize him once he’d made contact. “Lia, if you’re not gonna put in the effort here you can at least evacuate people or otherwise clean up.”
“He was one of mine,” Lia said, apparently trying to explain her hesitation. Isaac understood it, but he wasn’t going to have much patience for it.
“Maybe, but if you want this to stop, you’re going to have to work at it,” Isaac said. “If you can’t bring yourself to be violent with your folks I get it, but I need you to assist me somehow so we don’t end up with more of this.” He gestured around at the city, where there were the odd wavering sounds of magical offense hitting magical defense. “Sarah, you get those folks to safety?” He asked, leaning into the pickup on the saddle.
“Yeah, they’re holed up now but there’s more fighting. Might be good to try the Smoke Army.”
“Right,” Isaac said, turning Shay in the direction Sarah had gone. “Lia, maybe you could scry out hot spots for us?” It would have been nice to have a full tactical display or something, but Lia had run dispatch for long enough that she ought to know how to give directions.
“Yes, of course,” Lia said, jolted out of her shock and turning away from the two fighters Isaac had disarmed and Shay had disabled. Sarah reappeared from nowhere, resolving into Scheherazade in the middle of the street, still mounted on Astoria. The veil on her hat rendered her entirely faceless except for the kiseru, a shroud of smoke drifting about her and rendering her position just a little bit uncertain. It was, in all, a fantastic effect, one that he was a tiny bit envious of. His talent didn’t lend itself to any sort of theatrics.
“We’ll start with three,” Scheherazade said, flipping a hand and creating a trio of identical figures in front of her. Isaac left off trying to poke and prod the situation in the city for a moment to enhance the ontological inertia of the duplicates. After what he’d done with them to fool Blacktime, however temporarily, Sarah had suggested an obvious next step: using the hardened illusions as actual warm bodies, capable of acting on their own.
Of course, such duplicates didn’t have powers. Isaac was pretty sure, deep in his soul, that they could eventually if he had been closer to the Tyrant, but that was hardly necessary. Not when Sarah had brought weapons. The illusionary copies spread out, and Scheherazade pulled out guns from the saddlebags, turning them to smoke and making them reappear in the Smoke Army’s hands. Two looked to be nonlethal; the kind he had seen members of Justice for Hire carry. The last was a tinkered subcompact, but Isaac wasn’t going to argue with Sarah’s choices.
“Up three levels, southeast three spans,” Lia said, finally contributing. Isaac patted Shay’s neck and directed her the right way, the raptor’s wings shimmering into a brief flight through the nest of walkways. Sarah followed close behind, apparitions turning to smoke and streaming after them.
Instead of a duel, what he came across was a messy brawl. Sloppily-conjured force effects were being used like blunt instruments, hazy flickering outlines in blue and violet giving the impression of the lunar equivalent of a bunch of gangers scrapping with baseball bats. Less dangerous than professional soldiers, but still ugly and easily lethal. Even as they arrived he could see one unfortunate that had been brutally beaten being pulled away from one group of attackers by a number of others.
“Gently,” Isaac muttered to Shay, the raptor simply swooping in to bowl over the entire ten- or fifteen-strong crowd of moonies. His earth-mass combined with Shay’s sheer bulk was more than enough to send the lunarian combatants literally sprawling across the open landing they’d been scrapping on. For a moment he understood the allure of the super-fight, feeling briefly like an actual combat super. Scheherazade’s doppels arrived a moment later as Astoria landed on the opposite side of the group, claws digging into a low balustrade.
“Stand down and go home,” Scheherazade shouted, to only confusion among the moonies. It took Isaac a moment to realize that while he had understood it with his ears, it hadn’t come through on the translator rune, that little buzz of extra conceptual interpretation. He glanced down at the lantern Lia had given them, the odd radiance invisible in the natural light of the moon, but figured that smoke and distance had cut it off. To the moonies, she was just shouting gibberish.
“All of you, go home!” Isaac said, throwing his power into the moment of shocked and confused stillness, reinforcing it to keep anyone from getting any ideas about resuming their fight. Or worse, attacking him or Scheherazade.
“What is an earthling doing here?” One of the brawlers asked, which was honestly a fair question. There were probably three total humans on the moon to begin with, and he doubted Mechaniacal went wandering around.
“Making sure you don’t kill each other, and helping keep a lid on things,” Isaac said, as the two groups drew themselves up and various runes flickered as people applied some basic first aid. There was some bleeding, bruising, limping and probable broken bones on both sides, but they’d have to lump it.
There were clearly other questions, the translator rune on his wrist giving him more insight into the general attitude and body language of the lunarians than he’d expected. Even if they weren’t stating things out loud, he could read the basic meaning of some of the rune flashes and head movements as the moonies engaged in some rapid-fire communication. It was more a crowd-level taking-of-temperature than anything organized, but it seemed Isaac and Scheherazade had made enough of an impression to cow them. That, and Isaac’s power making it so much harder to kick back into violence.
After a few moments the combatants started shuffling off in opposite directions. One set straggling along the bridge to the opposite tower, and the other toward an inner staircase leading downward. If Isaac were still working for Justice for Hire, the call would have been to escort one if not both groups all the way back to their houses – well, domiciles in the official policy documentation – but it was just three of them. Or more like four and a half, taking in Shay and Astoria and counting Lia and Norastra as about one-quarter useful each.
“Next target,” he said, speaking into the raptor comms, and got another bearing from Lia. So long as nobody was terribly powerful, then he and Scheherazade would be enough to deal with it nonlethally. If things got really bad, he had the gun holstered at his side, but that was more of a last resort given both his basic aversion to killing and the fact that he had only so much practice with it. Sarah had very much impressed upon him how easy it was to be really bad with a gun, to the point where some gangers could empty an entire magazine at a target only a few feet away and still not hit anything.
It took what felt like forever to turn the chaos in the city around, the unchanging sun overhead making the entire process feel like some bizarre fever dream. Without Sarah’s ability to be in multiple places at once it would have taken much longer, the Smoke Army being a potent force-multiplier that stopped a lot of fights just by showing up. By the time the actual violence had receded, Isaac’s watch told him a good three hours had passed. It wasn’t all constant fighting, of course, that would have wiped them out real quick, but a lot of patrolling and power use, until he was convinced that things wouldn’t erupt again the moment they left.
Despite how much he tried to figure out which side was which, he couldn’t distinguish the two factions even with Lia’s help. There were notes of difference in clothing and style, things that indicated urban and rural moonies or even visitors, but that didn’t seem to make a difference with how they grouped up in mobs or duels. While he had been told that it was rune-based, he thought that would translate to something more obvious somewhere along the line, but so far he hadn’t seen anything.
“We’re done here,” he stated from his perch on Shay, atop one of the towers. Astoria was a matching gargoyle across the way, while Norastra stood primly on an actual bridge. “I’d ask if there was another place we need to go to, but I think we need a break first, and while we’ve been dealing with stuff here I haven’t been influencing the larger picture. So maybe nothing has changed.”
He reached out to the war again, trying to grasp the greater conflict rather than the local one that he’d just dealt with. It took a moment to find it, the demuto ticking softly as he finally managed to come to grips with it once again. So far as he could tell, it was the same as before, or maybe it had even regressed to before he’d started trying to influence it. Isaac had a better idea of metaphysical concepts than when he’d first started, but still nothing approaching his feel for physical inertia.
“We would have to return anyway,” Lia said. “Only Grandfather has access to the most potent scrying runes if you want to track all the cities.”
“Alright, Shay,” Isaac said, digging in the saddlebag and holding out a massive strip of meat for Shay to snack on. “Time to head back.” The raptor took the snack with delicacy before wolfing it down almost violently once it was free of his fingers, then spread out the crystaltech wings before leaping into the air.
“So what are we going to say to Lia about how she’s acting?” Sarah’s voice came over the barding comms, making him glance over at where Astoria was matching pace with them.
“I don’t think anything,” Isaac replied after a moment. “I mean, she’s not really a fighter to begin with and she is still helping us. I’d rather just figure on her to be support than try and push her to fight and have her balk when it comes to either side.”
“Not sure I much like that,” Sarah said after a moment. “Seems kind of lazy, since she’s the one who asked us here.”
“Yeah, I know,” Isaac sighed. “But I’m not doing this strictly on her account. It’s the kind of mess that has to be cleaned up, especially now that we’ve started. You saw those dead bodies.” Isaac rubbed at his eyes, which felt gritty somehow. “It would have been nice if I could rely on her to do more, especially since this is her home. But I think it’s just going to be you and I.” Shay rumbled beneath him, and he patted the saddle. They were going too fast for him to reach out to pet her neck. “And Shay and Astoria,” he amended.
Before he’d come to the moon, it hadn’t really occurred to him in any meaningful way how bad it really was. On Earth, there were always supervillains and biotitans and the like to threaten the populace, but the superheroes kept it under control for the most part. The emergency procedures in Star City, at least, were well-worn and effective enough that when metahuman clashes escalated, only property was at risk. On the moon, it was everyone versus everyone, and while Sarah had gotten a few bystanders to safety, for the most part there just weren’t bystanders to evacuate from fights. Everyone was involved.
He chewed over the experience on the way back to Muiraton, less for the visceral impressions than to try and figure out how to do better. Running around suppressing fights was certainly an approach, but in theory he was affecting the whole moon at once and that was far too much territory to cover. There was going to be some amount of violence on the way, but there had to be some solution to the war other than a violent one.
To some extent, he might simply have to accept it as the cost, though that was not the kind of thinking he wanted to go with. He was going to do the best he could to not just stop the war, but do so with the fewest number of casualties or disruption. Isaac had no idea what that would look like, but maybe that was for the best. It kept his power completely neutral, just jarring loose all the possibilities and letting people advance down paths that would otherwise have failed on the first step. Besides which, he still didn’t like fighting, even if he outmuscled most of the moonies when doing so.
Muiraton hadn’t undergone a revolution or change of leadership while they were gone, fortunately, though maybe that was simply because Isaac hadn’t been affecting it with his power. At the same time, he didn’t ask what had been done with the guy who’d made all the trouble, someone whose name had already slipped Isaac’s mind. Instead when they landed, he and Sarah put in a food order with Lia and made a beeline for their rooms so they could flop down and relax.
“So this is probably a bit obvious, but this isn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to avoid fighting, and I wanted to shift things more quickly,” Isaac remarked. Not that the two of them hadn’t thought out how things would go, but most of their conjectures had assumed that Isaac would be able to make more and longer-lasting alterations. After all his power was permanent, not temporary.
From what he could tell, and most of it was more speculation than anything else, his changes didn’t so much decay as were eventually cycled out. The metaphysical concept of the war shifted and changed enough over time as people acted and reacted that it counteracted what he’d done. It was a huge system and he was tweaking only a few parts; without constant attention it would eventually reach a new equilibrium.
“I thought we’d see more local support. Lia’s granddad is a bigwig in the rebellion, but he’s just hanging out in a little town,” Sarah complained, kicking off her shoes and flopping onto the couch with him in a slow, low-gravity swan dive that wound up with her legs across his lap. “Okay, not rebellion, but whatever. Astoria is great, but if we have to fly everywhere, that’s all we’re going to be doing.” She cast a glance over at the next room, where the two raptors were sprawled out on a carpet in an undignified manner, napping.
“It would be nice if there was something like the Deep Kingdom teleportation network,” Isaac agreed. “But at the same time, we aren’t operating on time pressure here. I can go easy on the war as a whole while we prepare things. Figure out how to better organize ourselves, and be more effective. We don’t have to go around firefighting like that. It’s not our job, but we still need to go around and get things ready so they don’t get too bad once I start pressing on the war again.” He pursed his lips in thought. “Like, maybe we need to be more centrally located. Maybe they do have teleports around, like Lia’s artifact, that we can use. It’s just there aren’t any in this little out-of-the way town. Regardless, we have to go out and see the rest of the moon.”
He thought that Lia was genuine in her wish to stop the civil war, without regard to any particular side winning. But the nature of her origins and connections put both him and Sarah in the camp of the so-called reestablishment lunarians by default. Which would be a problem soon, if it wasn’t already.
“So, if we go on a tour we should probably make ourselves look like moonies so we don’t stand out, I’m not sure how to disguise the raptors,” Sarah mused. “Native disguises are easy enough. Especially since you can boost them to add something physical for the extra height.”
“Easy if we figure out how to avoid looking like we belong to one faction or another,” Isaac said, thinking aloud as he massaged Sarah’s calves. They’d done more riding than walking but they’d still been on their feet for a while. “I can give our identities some extra inertia but if we don’t act properly it won’t matter. And frankly I’m less confident of acting like a moonie than I was about acting like an ikiski.”
“It is a touch weird,” Sarah agreed. “You’d think they’d be closer since they look more like humans. Well. Sort of.” Given that every lunarian had gray skin, towered at something like nine feet tall despite being about as robust as a stack of twigs, and had giant eyes in a big bulbous head, calling them human-like was probably overstating things. Still, they didn’t have scales or feathers or webbed hands and feet, so that probably made them closer than a lot of other races known to the Five City Alliance.
The door to their suite opened and Lia entered with food in tow. Rather than the familiar take-out containers of Star City or the boxes of the Deep Kingdoms, the food came in little rune-projected compartments anchored on what seemed like coasters, bobbing along behind Lia. Repulsors on something that small would be nigh-impossible on Earth, but in one-sixth gravity moon runes clearly provided enough lift.
“Food for you,” Lia said, sending the magical containers over to the table with a brief gesture. Thankfully, the constructs seemed to be physical, and not just purely rune-controlled, since Isaac could pull the top off with just his hands. It felt like grabbing textured glass, but it was certainly possible.
Sarah sat up, scooting against him as he pulled out the black paper cartons from inside the first container, along with a strangely long-tined fork made out of some dark wood. Popping open one of the containers released a plume of steam, and revealed what looked like transparent noodles in some kind of sauce. A very far cry from the meat cubes of the Deep Kingdom, but it also made him wonder why it seemed that nobody else ever had pizza.
He twirled some of the noodles up with a fork and gave them a taste before passing the container off to Sarah so she could try it before grabbing a new one. It was a nice bit of a break after several hours of rough work, and he had to admit the moonie food was unusual. The noodles weren’t like bread, but some type of vegetable, with a juicy crunch to complement the delicate sauces and fillings.
Isaac found he actually rather liked one that was mildly sour, though he wasn’t sure why. Not normally what he preferred, but it worked. Sarah, on the other hand, happily slurped down a dish that was way too spicy for him, just showing that moonie cuisine was weird. He was half-afraid that runes influenced the food itself, but if Lia wasn’t going to bring it up he was going to leave well enough alone.
“So, we need to take a wander through some of the other cities,” Isaac said to Lia, taking a moment to go over their thoughts. Sadly, according to Lia there wasn’t a teleport network, so they’d have to go traveling overland. “The more I understand the better I can do. Plus, I should be proactive in adding to any inertia of peace in any of these cities, so when things start changing those guiderails are in place.”
“Would that work?” Lia muttered aloud, the translator rune adding an overtone of something close to bafflement.
“I don’t see why not.” Some preparatory work like that would vastly cut down on needing to go around firefighting like he had, and make the entire prospect far more palatable. Especially if they could target the biggest cities with mixed populations, those most likely to become a mess. That would, he hoped, help guide the changes in the direction of something peaceful rather than a war of annihilation.
“Thing is, we want our disguises to not stand out,” Sarah said, pointing her kiseru and conjuring smoke into a pair of moonies. They were, to Isaac’s eye anyway, based on Lia but obvious adjustments to make them different people, so they might have been Lia’s brother and sister.
“More clothing, less muscle,” Isaac remarked, looking them over. “Lia’s an outlier in that regard, and the fighters always wore less than the civilians. We can’t look too competent, ‘cause if someone expects us to start casting anything significant there’s going to be a problem.”
“Right,” Sarah said, and with a blur the pair of illusions were far more clothed, exposing only their arms and head. “So, about the runes, Lia?”
The moonie hesitated for a moment, and Isaac thought that she was going to protest against the plan, but after a moment she began showing off the runes that should be adorning the exposed skin. She had implied that actually being on the moon would help with understanding them, but even with the translator giving him insight into what the runes were, he couldn’t see the underlying logic. It was starting to irritate him, but at the same time he wondered if he’d start taking sides if he did understand it.
No particular answers presented themselves while Sarah and Lia worked through the details of the disguise, but ultimately he concluded that his time and energy were better spent working angles instead. Seeing what he could see, and acting on it. Analysis paralysis and lack of knowledge was exactly why no Earth polity had gotten involved in the civil war, and probably a major contributor to why it was still going.
Cloaking Shay and Astoria proved to be more of an issue than moonie disguises. There were a dearth of lunarian beasts of burden, and the runic focus meant that most vehicle-equivalents had relatively little physical structure. Of course, Sarah could always try and keep their mounts invisible but that was likely to go poorly.
“What if,” Isaac said slowly, considering the problem from a cosplay point of view. “What if we don’t hide them at all? Just a little bit of a reskin to make them look like rune constructs? Make them all shiny and glowy, or semi-translucent, but otherwise look the same? It might stand out a bit, but it’ll just look like a fancy rune car. Mount. Whatever.”
“I like it,” Sarah said, snapping her fingers and conjuring a hazy image of Astoria, then rapidly shifting it to look like the raptor was made out of stars and lights rather than scales and crystal. Lia regarded it uncertainly but was eventually forced to nod.
“It will likely draw attention, but far less than the raptors would on their own,” she conceded. “But your disguises will have to be adjusted so you adhere to the sort of luxury that kind of frippery indicates.” Sarah nodded, and started making additional changes with Lia’s input.
“Then we have a plan,” Isaac said. “We’re not under a time constraint here, nothing is going anywhere. The idea was always to prepare properly, and if that means touring a bunch of lunarian cities, so be it. Besides, that’ll give you more fodder for the book.” The last was to Sarah, who nodded happily.
“Should be fun. We can head out tomorrow? Later today?” Sarah looked questioning at Lia. “How does that even work here, anyway?”
“Lunes,” Lia supplied, the translation coming with a lot more precision on what that meant. “We keep similar hours to humans, but longer during the day and shorter at night. Local time is fairly late, but the next lune starts in only five hours.”
“Right, well then we’ll take some downtime now and head out next lune.” It was probably going to wreck their sleeping schedules, but they’d just have to deal with it. Thankfully, the light controls of their suite made it night-dark easily enough, though he still woke up a little discombobulated when the alarm went off thanks to the odd surroundings. Trying to get out of bed in the low gravity, he launched himself up against the ceiling and bounced against the furniture on the way down.
“Okay, well,” Isaac muttered, picking himself up off the floor. He wasn’t hurt, but if Sarah saw him do that he’d never live it down. “Gotta remember I’m not on Earth.”
Despite the start to the day, he was looking forward to being able to properly tour a moonie city, and so he was up and dressed before Astoria dragged Sarah out of her room. Isaac fumbled to get at the camera in time to take a snapshot of the raptor carrying a half-awake Sarah to the shower by the back of her magical-girl pajamas. It seemed the dinosaurs were as eager to be out and about as he was.
It didn’t take them too long to get prepared. A quick breakfast, local currency and supplies packed in the saddlebags, and the disguises doublechecked, and they were ready to leave. They winged away from Muiraton to a different one of the lunar cities, but with no need to rush they traveled at a more reasonable pace. Isaac actually got a view of the landscape, while Sarah was able to snap photos and take notes in her journal.
Much of it was taken up by sprawling fields of crops he certainly didn’t recognize, though here and there were arbors, so some kind of vine was involved. There were orchards of trees with the pale pastel colors lunar plants favored, and what looked like very pleasant little villages scattered between. Odd to think the entire place was under the threat of incipient violence, the scars of which were also visible from the air. Swaths of bare, scarred rock, coated with soot or transfigured into fields of gravel. Sometimes there were roads leading to and from those places, presenting the chilling evidence that they had once been towns and cities.
Lia had them land on a road outside their destination, where Sarah and Isaac gave their disguises one last pass, making sure that they were properly settled and augmented by Isaac’s powers. Not that it would be the end of the world if they failed, but humans would certainly stand out more than either Sarah or Isaac wished. Lia’s raptor got the glamour treatment as well, the three of them heading into the city.
Like human cities, it was very contained, starting abruptly behind a low wall that seemed to be more about marking a boundary than protecting from the outside. The buildings were, as usual, over-tall and spindly, thin columns and arches providing places for runes, while the actual walls and doors were projected magic. It seemed a little extreme to Isaac, but perhaps magic energy was essentially free on the moon, at least at the industrial scale.
They stepped through the gate onto the main thoroughfare, but Isaac stopped as he heard a rapid clicking from his pocket. He blinked, then pulled out his demuto, finding that the pocketwatch had a series of spikes marching across its face in a wave. Sarah and Lia turned to face him, and he shook his head.
“It’s not me.”