As Gabriel Livsey slept, silent and unthinking, unaware of the world around him, developments continued on as before, his orders and arrangements resolving themselves bit by bit all around the world. A bit closer to home, however, some things also happened still.
Such as all of the Little Sisters taking out their little nun outfits once again, holding their improvised ceremonies and imitated sacrifices of teddy bears and candy bars to the great, gently pulsing ball of suffering with a vague resemblance to a heart.
Even the Big Sisters occasionally came to pay respects, and to doze off lying on the soft, but seemingly indestructible strands of red, fleshy matter reaching all across the room. Sometimes, even Lilian and Serena were amongst them, the older sister following her younger sibling around to ensure she wouldn't hurt herself.
They'd also checked their daddy was fine, of course, concluding after a few moments each that he was fine. "He's like us before we were us," was what the older sister had said.
"He's our baby daddy now," Serena had chuckled, figuring the red stuff was like a womb, essentially. She was pretty close to the truth with it, too.
Alas, all good things had to pass, sooner or later, and so Gabriel soon emerged, just over a week after he'd first spun himself up, once again.
Business: President Nasser will attempt to bring about a peaceful solution to the conflict between Egypt and Israel, using the cards you have delivered up his sleeve. Meanwhile, Sinclair, Henley and all working under them will consolidate their hold over Egypt's water utilities, using materials sourced from Rapture's matter manufacturing lines to meet demand (as importing the materials would cost a fortune).
Internal Affairs: The Thinker has begun building a robot army. In other news, efficient and solid infrastructure for the effective delivery of both robots and materials anywhere in the world, including signal beacons to allow for easier 'aiming' of teleportation up in Cryptic Solutions' headquarters in Egypt, is under construction.
R : The R department has begun testing cleansing potions on Charles Milton Porter, attempting to return him to full humanity. Results to follow.
Intrigue: Wraiths have found the current locations of several internationally wanted nazi criminals and conveyed them to the Egyptian government as per instructions. Further spying on several governments has commenced.
You awaken, as you always do, with a bit of groggy sleepiness in your eyes, mild confusion slowly shifting into the constant, full awareness you're more used to.
Right, you were full, did the cocoon, new powers, cool. Right now you still have to get out of this thing and return to things as usual, much as you'd enjoy slumbering a little while longer.
"Daddy's up," Lilian's voice is audible from beyond your fleshy, already slowly dissolving confinement. There's activity, movement, from what you can sense, in response.
When your clawed hand pierces the outer perimeter of your cocoon, you hear the constant babbling and whispering of children talking amongst themselves, telling you all you need to know about what's probably going on. That still doesn't exactly prepare you for the sight that reveals itself as you pull yourself out, forcefully bending the fibers of your almost muscly prison apart.
""Happy Rebirthday!""
All the Sisters within Rapture, including the Big Sisters in their full suits, are present and wearing little party hats. There's colorful balloons tied to the strands of your cocoon, those little party poppers and even a big, white cake.
At the forefront, your two daughters, both looking to be around five years old now, stand and wave at you. "Congratulations to being reborn," Lilian says, black hair going below her shoulders by this point.
"We baked you cake, daddy!" Serena smiles, her golden-blonde fox ears and tail still on full display. "Even though I didn't get any when I was born."
"You're getting some now," her sister points out.
"…" You'll be honest, you're a little stunned. Then you shrug and get with the program anyways, because that's just what you do. "You shouldn't have, it's really not a big deal. Thank you all a lot anyways, though."
"We can't really throw surprise parties for you any other time, you know everything we do normally" Serena grumbles, your younger daughter pouting playfully. "So you just get what you deserve!"
Whelp, you'll need to hand out lots of head pats for this one, you can tell already. "Alright, anything I miss while I was out? Also, let's get right to celebrating this one." Your words are direct towards both everyone in the room with you, more space rapidly opening up as your cocoon dissolves itself, and your telepathic network at large.
As it turns out, your minions have been busy little bees indeed, while you were busy being unconscious. And, y'know, dissolving and reconstituting yourself into an even better-looking self. Completely normal things you do on the regular, really.
To cut a long story short, one President Nasser has entered negotiations with Israel on behalf of Egypt, at your urging through Sinclair, so as to determine a peaceful solution to the conflict between the two nations. Said negotiations were extremely difficult, mostly due to a perception of Egypt's relative weakness rooted in the last open fighting between them, but Nasser has managed, in no small part thanks to the aid of Sarah subtly and secretly influencing the Israeli government.
And, of course, the dead body of Mengele, helpfully restored by Riley using her own Necromancy to hide the bite marks and instead replacing everything with two bullet wounds through the head.
Not everyone would be able to make the required changes to make it look like said bullet wounds were caused at the time of death instead of afterwards, but you dare say she's very, very used to playing around with dead bodies and her tinker power… Probably didn't help, actually, that's not how tinker powers work.
Either way, Mengele was handed over as a sign of goodwill, as was data on any other nazi criminals you could sniff out using your undead finger puppets. As Israel has been quite happy to hunt them down themselves, pretty much through the Mossad, their primary intelligence service, you'd imagine that must have gone over relatively well, at the least.
In the end, results were pretty damn good, far as you're concerned. Egypt did not receive all its lost territory back, but a good chunk of it, enough of a compromise Nasser can smile and bear it for the cameras, whereas the Suez Canal is no longer being blockaded, reopening international trade- or intercontinental, rather, being an important sea route between Asia and Europe.
And also literally being in Egypt. Meaning full access to literally half the world has just opened up to Cryptic Solutions.
Speaking of your company, Cryptic Solutions is, in fact, expanding, going from building water treatment plants all over Egypt to supplying even Israeli cities with the life-and-hygiene-giving fluid, the rate of sustained growth going exponential as you look over Henley's reports.
At this rate you'll need to look into diversifying your portfolio sooner than expected, even. All in good time, though, for now there's still an untapped water market to fill out before you need to push into other parts of daily life to essentially take over.
Man, you love capitalism. It may not be a form of government, but it rules as an economic policy.
Currently, the only real costs you have to contend with are labor costs to have everything installed, as you're bringing the materials and parts wherever they need to be through infinite matter duplication, one of the bigger glitches you've seen in reality and certainly just as exploitable as in video games. And as Egypt doesn't really have high labor costs for simpler jobs, well… Staffing your highly modernized (literally beyond their time) water purification plants and getting all the pipes laid out is literal pennies for you at this point.
Income is already coming in hard, high volume of utility fees from pretty much anywhere making up for relatively low prices. You wouldn't really turn a profit yet if you weren't literally cheating, but hey, as you said, the costs of running your business are as minimal as they can be while still supporting local job markets.
Nasser wasn't dumb enough not to come through on ensuring minimal issues from any governmental bodies, local or otherwise, which also does help, you imagine. All in all, the second business quarter of '69 i turning out pretty well, far as you're concerned.
"'ow do you feel, Monsieur Porter?"
Charles Milton Porter was… Not feeling too well, he had to admit, even if he was doing better these past few days. "Like a Big Daddy trampled on my head, which isn't too far from the truth, I reckon."
"Mhm," the redhead doctor made, checking over a device of some kind- he was a computing developer, not a doctor, so he hardly had any idea what the screen might be displaying exactly beyond what seemed to be his heartbeat and probably blood tests. Then again, maybe it was normal medical equipment these days, he had been out for a while.
Literally.
"Well, I 'ave good news and bad news for you," she continued, her French accent reminding him of a dead coworker of his, before Rapture went to shit. "The good news are, your mental state 'as been stabilizing, so your faculties should remain unclouded now that the worst of the ADAM cocktail 'as been purged from your body."
He looked down at himself. Once upon a time, Charles Milton Porter had been a black man, educated despite or maybe precisely because of the difficulties his race had caused him, that was beginning to gain weight. Now, his skin was spotted with the white of albinism, sickly, corpse-like and bloated parts of his tissue sticking out where the tumor were still stubbornly sticking around.
His face was almost normal, but one eye was still swollen and making it hard to see properly, his grotesquely mutated form still visible despite the treatment he'd been receiving.
"The bad news is, the remaining mutations 'ave been most stubborn, further progress being as slow as it 'as been for them since the beginning."
"At this point, I'll take what I can get," he told the doctor, keeping his voice from warbling by tensing his throat just slightly. "Any noticeable progress is more than I was expecting, honestly."
The memory lapses had been the worst. For weeks, Charles had been just wandering in circles, his thoughts set back to when he was a Big Daddy prototype. Sigma.
"That is a very positive outlook, Monsieur, and one I can only support." Curie, as she was named, gave him a pat on the shoulder. It did help, weird as that was. "We will 'ave you returned fully before you know it. Speaking of, please, your medicine."
He sighed, taking the vial of clear, almost air-like fluid. He had no idea what it was or how it was made, or whether it even contained ADAM, but it had gotten him this far. "It was honestly worse when I was still defecating all the ADAM out, honestly."
"And urinating, sweating as well as regurgitating. It was downright impressive to watch."
Yeah. That. God, but what he wouldn't give to forget all of those memories…
"Bright side, I did lose weight. I think. I was worried about it a little before, you know."
"Yes, the Cleansing formula is noted to 'ave use for effective weight loss. It is adjusted to not be too effective, but… Per'aps we can make some changes to its function."
Yeah, he wasn't touching that with a ten mile pole, Charles just wanted to be human again. "Well, on my health then I suppose. Cheers."
It is now the third quarter of 1969
Current State of Events: Egypt and Israel are at peace, trade is happening over the Suez Canal. Fundamental religious groups in the area are disgruntled by Nasser's policies towards increased secularization, but their main support stems from smaller, more isolated villages as opposed to the big, less religious cities.
The Cold War continues being cold, to the best of your knowledge.
Cryptic Solutions Inc. continue growing in size and importance, already slowly becoming a household name in some parts of Egypt. Coastal cities in particular are profiting from large water treatment plants being staffed by local workers.
Things continue happening as you slumber away, your mind acute and delving into the thoughts of your followers to remain informed and in some measure of control while your body is inactive.
Oh, and you look in on your daughters all the time, of course. Lilian is cute. She wants to protect her siblings, which now also include the Little Sisters and Riley on top of Lilian, and has begun training herself in martial arts, abusing the inherited unique power Nora passed on to her to let her exert full control over her whole body and transfer the same level of control onto any weapons she eventually ends up picking up.
She has, in fact, copied her mother's fighting style as well as your own, using the telepathic network and the technical skills within it you have made available to your daughters as a matter of course in combination with the Necronomicon, adopting as many parts of the styles to be found in either as she can through direct assimilation.
Last you looked, she's using her rapidly growing body to throw around enough force to throw cars with enough finesse to accurately shatter all the bones in a grown baseline human's body at once. To say you're proud of her achievements is an understatement.
Serena, too, is the epitome of cuteness. She's begun exhibiting her own mother's powers in a playful, constructive manner, creating fox-tailed shadow-clones of herself that she uses to lead the Big Sisters on merry chases throughout the base. This both lets her practice her powers and keeps the Sisters occupied with exercise, which is actually good for them according to Brigid.
Turns out their ADAM-mutated bodies take pretty well to regular movement, reinforcing their until now somewhat fragile, stretched bones to some extent. They still do have to be careful, but chances of accidentally breaking their limbs apart when moving casually have gone down dramatically for them.
Overall, things have been going excellently at home. The Thinker's efforts to continually replace the old city of Rapture with massive factories pumping out whatever you may need ex nihilo have been proceeding apace as well, and her improvised 'gestation model' bodies have actually been swelling up, pregnant bellies reminding you pleasantly of your wives' before they gave birth.
You do wonder what exactly the Thinker will give birth to herself… Like, you have a vague idea, but to date sticking your dick into thing usually turned out beyond your expectations, so you don't want to have any expectations ahead of time to color your reaction in a couple months.
Now then, as for other developments outside of your oceanic paradise…
Now that Cryptic Solutions Inc. is the predominant force on Egypt's water utility market and Sinclair has hired on a whole bunch of middle managers that can take care of the day-to-day business of expanding and managing operations as is, your man on the surface has shifted towards doing what big business does best- showering politicians with money so as to ensure politics will enable a 'positive working environment' for you.
Well, the contracts you have guaranteeing your monopoly over everything you've touched so far are only worth the paper they're written on as long as they're recognized as legitimate, so before anyone gets the idea of being a little shit and trying to swindle you out of decades and centuries of profits you may as well go out of your way to give anyone in power ample reason to legislate in your interest. That's not really an issue in Egypt, Nasser will remain in power for however long you can get away with him not aging, but Israel, which is after all where you're currently expanding towards, is another story entirely, so…
Well, the wonders of secular capitalism must be spread, you suppose.
While he's off throwing cash at old men like they were pole dancers, beginning the long process of stacking the deck so every card drawn in the big game of democracy is drawn in your colors (or… something, that analogy ran from you fast), Sarah is working on turning Saudi-Arabia, though things over there worked out… Interestingly.
You see, the Saudi Arabian air force just so happened to be looking into overthrowing the royal family, and your Wraiths, spying on everyone and everything in the bigger nations making up the two sides of the Cold War, just so happened to find out that the Americans found out about the planned coup d'etat and were planning on letting the king know, except you've kind of intercepted the message days ahead of time…
More than enough for Sarah to work her magic.
Well, to skip over the minor details of the whole operation and skip straight to the conclusion of things, it was a roaring success, all in all. A certain American intelligence agency tried to tip the king off, but Sarah literally swapped around a few documents and mailing addresses and just like that, America has been implicated in the whole affair instead, looking like they actually backed the coup in retrospect.
To sum up the plot as such, it's basically an attempt by several high-ranking conspirators of Hejazi origin, the Kingdom of Hejaz having been its own independent nation until sometime in the twenties when it was annexed by Saudi Arabia. They got a good couple military planes and the plan is to bomb out the palace, killing off the ruling line and announcing the formation of a new republic in its place.
Except, of course, the ruling king and the couple of princes next in line are the only members of the family that end up dying in the much smaller attack than was originally anticipated, the rest having been evacuated by your amazingly devious sister ahead of time and read in on the whole situation. What this means in practical terms is that, just as the bombs fall, mass arrests take place to cut out the entire conspiracy save for the men on the planes themselves, who are summarily caught as well once they land, unaware of what transpired. Meanwhile, the princes now in position to inherit the throne have been thoroughly impressed by Cryptic Solutions, as Sarah made sure to let them know, and the vision of a new, better state with an actual constitution.
No, seriously, the king literally just pointed at the Quran when asked about that until now. it wasn't exactly about faith, of course, just him refusing to potentially give up any of his power, but still- King Faisal has been reduced to a ruined wreck buried under tons of rubble and the rest of the royal family is in your pocket already.
It has to be said that the security apparatus currently in place is perhaps part of the reason some people felt the need to bomb his face in, but hey, after Libya, a similar sparsely populated desert kingdom with rich oil fields was subject to a coup itself not that long ago, he did have a reason for acting as he did. Just too bad the people supposed to protect him ended up killing him off, eh?
End result, Saudi Arabia is in your pocket for all intents and purposes, you've linked it up with Egypt and certain voices in Israel for your convenience, the US of A got some major egg in their face (and Sarah made sure the populace knows there was 'a link between the terror attack and American intelligence services') and Aramco, the company that pretty much deals with Saudi Arabian oil trade, has been 'punitively' bought up by the royal family slash state more than it was before, once it was clear the Saudis could not brook this insult and America wasn't ready to start an actual war (that it would win without question, mind you) while Russia got the lube out of the closet.
The Cold War, ladies and gentlemen. Can't beat this kind of business environment when all your assets are some level of disposable.
This does clear up what one half of your 'spy' network made of incorporeal Wraiths discovered this business quarter, though your company will now need to invest even more manpower into building a couple treatment plants in one of the bigger nations now pretty much dancing on your palm, the requisite contracts already being signed, but that's not exactly your problem for now. You have people for dealing with this stuff.
Much more importantly, it would seem the USSR has been looking at recent developments as well, particularly due to the way Cryptic Solutions Inc., which is a company after all, has been increasingly active in governmental circles, something the literal communists seem to have an issue with.
Something about the people and the fruits of their labor and all that jazz, you didn't even bother reading the documents your undead looked through. Long story short, as the ideological conflict between capitalism and communism is still ongoing, the Russians feel that what you've been doing is objectionable and seem to be moving towards arming little terrorist groups in the area- it's hilarious, too, the PLO and similar are right there, but as they're staunchly religious groups and the USSR disavows religion as well, they took a good while to actually go through with it.
A good laugh is had by all involved at the realization, by the way. The fundamentalist nutcases want to create some kind of theocracy eschewing politics and purely living by the Quran instead, like anyone would actually accept that.
It's nothing directly threatening yet, but you have to admit Nasser getting himself shot up like Swiss cheese would be pretty inconvenient for you at this point in time. It's definitely something to keep an eye on.
R Report on newly improved Plasmids:
Decoy 2: Spawn a hologram at a targeted location that looks just like the user and reflects the force of attacks directed at it, lasts for up to 45 seconds, one at a time maximum
Decoy 3: Spawn a hologram at a targeted location that looks just like the user, reflects the force of attacks directed at it and is capable of moving under its own power, imitating the user and provoking enemies into attacking it, lasts for up to 60 seconds, one at a time maximum
Hypnotize: Has been incorporated into Possession
Insect Swarm 2: Allows the user's insides to house a swarm of mentally directed bees, wasps or similar flying, stinging insects that can be sent forth to swarm and distract enemies, dealing up to 2d8 damage over up to four turns
Insect Swarm 3: Allows the user's insides to house a swarm of mentally directed insects within their realm of knowledge chosen at their discretion that can be sent forth to swarm and distract several enemies at once, dealing up to 3d8 damage over up to five turns and breeding in dead bodies to produce more themselves and act to attack other enemies from there
Scout 2: Allows the user to project themselves mentally, separately from their body and unable to affect the world around them beyond perceiving it, for up to 90 seconds. This mental projection can freely move through obstacles.
Scout 3: Allows the user to project themselves mentally, separately from their body and able to affect the world around only through use of other plasmids, for up to 120 seconds. This mental projection can freely move through obstacles and along any surfaces around it regardless of gravity.
Possession 2: Creates a ghostly projection that can possess machines or living creatures, alternatively befuddling the senses of several. May be used to force either kind of targets to act in the user's interest for three turns or else direct violent actions towards a different target by all who see it for three turns. Biological targets may be forced to self-terminate at the end of this time span if doing so is within their possibilities.
Possession 3: Creates a ghostly projection that can possess machines or living creatures, alternatively befuddling the senses of several. May be used to force either kind of targets to act in the user's interest for five turns or else direct violent actions towards a different target by all who see it for five turns. Biological targets may be forced to self-terminate at the end of this time span if doing so is within their possibilities, mechaical targets may be automatically disabled through overheating, self-destruction or similar if available.
It is now the last business quarter of 1969
Let's try having you guys put together a whole plan, just as a test. If it doesn't work out, we can always go back to the kiddie-friendly version we've run so far.
As a reminder, there are four distinct action categories you may act through, Business (stuff that happens with your company and/or surface world), Internal Affairs (resource gathering, vampire feeding, organizational activities etc., it's fairly flexible by design), Intrigue (spying, sabotage, theft etc.) and R (Research and development, basically new stuff being researched, duh).
Just throw out what you want done in each of them, you can perform several actions by having some of your people (for example Sarah, Nora, Sinclair, research team's members etc.) lead their own efforts as part of one of these categories. You can also add a to spend a day awake and do things in person as per normal at any time.
You got all that? Probably not, but here goes nothin'.
Now, as the year moves towards its end, you have your people working busily once again, or rather still, really, but the point stands. There's lots of stuff to be done and only so much patience you have for your employees, though you'd like to think you're a fairly reasonable CEO as far as that goes.
Nobody is being fired nor eaten unless they really, really fuck up.
So then, business plans are in motion, though most of them are simply progressing at their own pace; right now, you're directing most of your organizational power towards using Saudi Arabia as what amounts to a massive manufacturing center, using blueprints designed by yourself and the Thinker, for the most part, as you don't exactly have any better engineers on hand.
It's easy enough to obtain all the necessary permits and such when the royal family and new king quite literally eat out of your hand, having been sent a few vials of your blood to drink, and so railway lines are being constructed, docks are expanded, land purchased and supply lines tested. In short, you're having everyone make sure everything will go off without a hitch once you really get started constructing factories all over the place.
Relatively low population doesn't stop you when you just automate a bunch of processes as much as you can with the technological limitations of, oh, about ten years into the future based on the current date. As long as Mao and communist regime economical practices are tying up China and the USSR respectively, you can just go right ahead and compete with effectively one a single rival, the US- and given the US has never had to actually worry about economical competitors in its history so far, not in a way that corresponds to modern global markets, well…
Let's just say you're having a lot of standardized cargo containers built and readied around the Suez Canal. Anyone that knows how a global trade model can work, and this case one that doesn't even have to deal with Leviathan destroying and disabling massive amounts of ports through secondary waves ranging out all across an ocean yet, can tell you what this means, ultimately.
You'll have to see how things go next year, though, a large-scale process like this takes a certain amount of capital, more than you can casually bring forth out of nowhere. There's only so much gold you can sell off without being noticed and steps being taken, so you may as well be a little bit patient while the new king works towards storing up a couple months' worth of oil profits siphoned from the rest of the budget.
Sure, you could grab the money others have amassed so far, but really, you do just need a couple months at this point. You can wait.
And once the wait is over, you'll have access to a massive industrial base producing anything a supermodern nation (by current-time standards) may need. And export much the same, for that matter.
Henley is busy with that whole deal for a while, at least, so you can keep him off your back, too. Two birds, one stone.
"One apple and two apples are… Three apples!"
"Well done. Though I think you already knew that one," Nora smiles, poking the Little Sister's nose. Her shining, yellow eyes don't have visible pupils, but she get the impression she's looking at the finger doing so as she scrunches up her nose.
"Still did it!" The echoing voice proves the girl is slowly moving out of the brainwashing meant to make her act like a happy little girl at all times, a pouting face being Nora' reward for the effort she's expending. It's quite cute, so she's counting it as a doubled success anyways.
One thing to keep in mid about the Sisters, they may be brainwashed, amnesiac and all around uneducated, but they still are generally smart in their own ways, their intelligence mildly increased beyond what a normal child would likely exhibit, and quickly learn simple concepts if they don't already understand them by themselves through simple observation and thought, understanding tucked away in the back of their minds.
Which leads to situations like this, where they aim to receive their rewards for learning something with less effort through pretending they have to think hard about it.
"I know, and you're still getting it," Nora smiles, handing the girl the bar of chocolate they were giving to every one that proved they could perform basic addition and subtraction. "It just means you don't need to pretend, just show you can do it and you get the reward right away, see?"
"See!" The pale girl took the promised chocolate, smiling up at her. She was kneeling down, to make it easier to talk to them, and if she wasn't undead this would be hell on her back. "Thank you, Mama Nora."
And this was why she just couldn't possibly not be involved in this project. They were just too precious, all of them, including the Big Sisters- she'd had to fight two of them this week alone when they got too agitated, but they always apologize as best they can with their damaged speech patterns, the poor dears.
"Go ahead, play with the other girls and send the next one in. We're doing this for everyone today and tomorrow we're teaching multiplication, hm?"
"M-hm!"
Nora smiles at the back of the sweetheart returning to the other children, pondering her own emotional state. Normally, vampires do not really empathize with other beings, the moment they are turned leading them from a more or less human state of mind towards viewing all living beings as little better than cattle, but they are just as capable of retaining part of this thing that makes one human anyways, if it was important enough to them in life.
Just looking at Gabriel himself, though he simply never cared for most people ever since his resurrection, she knows precisely that he can and does care, in his own way, for those he has assumed responsibility for, Crypsters and employees and everyone like that. And, of course, his sister, the need to find her one of his driving motivations for a long time until he did just that.
Vampires do not lose what drives them, as it were, as would likely be the case if their emotions were completely removed. That means that when she turned, Nora still had a soft spot for children of all stripes, which was why she so easily went on to all but adopt Ren and Nora on Remnant, the two orphans striking a chord with her despite how dispassionate she would usually be towards humans.
And, well… So do the Sisters. Big and small, it makes no difference. She cares for them, just as she cares for her own daughter- daughters, really, Serena is no less her child just because Sarah is her biological mother.
And speaking of her additional daughter…
Serena comes into the room, looking up at Nora expectantly. "You already know the material, you know everything we're teaching the Sisters and did so since you were born," she gently admonishes her.
"Does that mean I can't get any chocolate? Because that's discriminatory educational politics, I want you to know," the quite literally foxy blonde girl pouts up at her.
She chuckles, rubbing her second daughter's head. "Very well, here you go. And do send the next one in, we want to get everyone tested today."
Children. They just are a joy, even when they test their boundaries.
Well the education of the Sisters should be secured for the time being, and your daughters are, hopefully, learning valuable life lessons, from how to properly socialize with their peers to 'if someone has chocolate, you find a way to take it'.
Because hey, who doesn't want chocolate?
All of that and your sudden craving for some chocolate aside, though, you do have some news, having sent your trusty Wraiths out to voyeuristically pick apart various organizations. So, where to start…
You had a pair of the things go and take a look at the local PLO in Egypt and surrounding nations, the radically religious fundamentalist group being your foremost security concern at the moment. You had them follow the trails of weapons meant to arm them, coming from Russia, though the guns themselves were bought off the black market and all, and the subsequent distribution thereof.
They were practically begging to be radicalized, really. The increasingly secular policies pursued by the government seem to be a clear sign to those among them that have enough space for brains inside their skulls next to all the faith that 'something needs to be done'.
Which just so happens to be terrorism, it seems. How annoying. Why can't they be like Christians and just silently watch as their religion is slowly snuffed out in the greater north African slash middle eastern theater?
Anyways, though the Wraiths you sent out on this errand in particular don't really have the time to get much more done, you're slowly getting an idea of the leading figures within the organization, which should hopefully be enough to let you take them all down relatively quickly, through Nasser or otherwise.
You do, by the way, go ahead and let the man get an update on this situation, having all but crippled his access to the greater telepathic network. Sorry, not sorry, but you have a bunch of kind of private data on this thing, so most of your local thralls only get a truncated version that lets them communicate among each other and receive information and orders on demand.
It's still kind of a massive thing. Oh, and raw technical skill data is still available to them, just nothing too amazing like your advanced engineering or that recipe for blood chocolate you've been pondering over.
At the same time, though? You're having a couple of Wraiths keep an eye out for anyone that might try to imitate your business model in surrounding nations, or just anyone that might make themselves an issue on your quest for economic conquest, but so far, nothing really noteworthy popped up.
Except, like, one company fueled by foreign investors making overtures, but a sudden string of 'misfiling' cases have cost them so much money they can't really spare the effort to look into muscling in on your market. They wouldn't really have been able to pull anywhere close to your level of service, of course, but it's the principle of the matter.
All in a couple days' work, really.
That aside, no big new developments have been observed on the US front, which is good enough, you suppose. No news is good news, in this case; you'd hate to have to rock the boat so much you had to go out and violently avert nuclear mass destruction because Nixon decided to make good on his bluffs just once.
Oh, and you did ask Sarah to go help out with the whole takeover of Israel's government, too…
"You will obey. You will obey. You will obey."
The man was sitting in a chair, mouth slack, eyes glazed over. "I will… obey…"
"See, it's that simple," Sarah explains, smiling at Serena. "If you repeat just about anything often enough, the human mind will eventually just take it as fact. Works with ads, with political views and with mind-altering compulsions."
"Mhm!" The cute foxy daughter of hers watches closely as the politician's posture becomes wobblier, almost letting him slide right off his seat. "Just hammer it in hard enough and it'll stick."
"More or less. There are individual differences of course, but it's a good enough rule of thumb."
Her daughters walks around the table, tail swishing behind her, and… pokes the man, apparently fascinated by how completely mentally gone he is. "This looks fun!"
"Glad you're enjoying this, I guess? But give me a moment, it's important not to let them think clearly. You will obey. You will obey. You will obey."
They are having a grand old time with some mother-daughter bonding, really. Taking her little sweetheart to a few restaurants (with her unusual features hidden, of course, not that the two don't stand out in Israel anyways), meeting and mindfucking various people…
It is quite nice, yes.
Your plan to figure out a natural-looking progression of technology, drawing upon the history of Earth Bet itself and cutting from one technological advance to the next, actually does end up going pretty well- better than you would've expected at first, really. That said, you also do have a literal artificial intelligence running on the best hardware that you could figure out how to build last time around working with you on this job, so…
Yeah, that probably did help a lot.
That's not to say it was 'just' the two of you. No, you decided you may need an outside perspective, one that doesn't have concrete knowledge of all the principles and casual advances to be made, and you were already involving the Thinker in this anyways, hence one Charles Milton Porter joined the two of you.
"It is still weird to know there are two beings in there," the black mathematician, as you know these days thanks to a few conversations while working, says. "Say, Thinker, you've been doing good for yourself, I have to say."
"Processing. Request: Please specify information," the female artificial voice answers.
"Just," Charles, as he's requested to be called, chuckles, "it's just you've kept developing, even after I was, you know. You were my only real friend back then, after everything that happened with Pearl, and… I'm just glad to know you've made it through better than ever."
"Much of this has been owed to Gabriel. Thank you as well, Charles."
"See, that's exactly what I mean. You've become so… human, much more than the simulations of Pearl ever made you seem, even though you clearly are't pretending to be. It's heartening, that's all."
Well, you do know for a fact you really did help with that a lot, but no need to put too fine a point on it. So instead, you act through the Thinker, changing out the voice modulator, to talk about something different. "Speaking of," your own voice (or a close approximation thereof) comes from the speaker, "have you thought about what to do after you're done detoxing?"
"Detox. Nice, I like the word. But… I haven't, to be honest, no." Charles leas back in his chair, the work done by all three of you put to a halt for the moment anyways. "I suppose I just thought I'd keep working with the Thinker, just because I want to see my creation and friend expand to its- her- full potential. Same as what I wanted to do before Wahl went nuts."
"No thoughts about the surface? Nothing you want to do up there?"
"… To be honest, there is one thing. Pearl's grave, I- I wasn't there for her because of work before, I think I have to visit now, at least. I owe her that much."
The Thinker swaps in again. "Suggestion: Usage of teleportation after completion of 'detox' procedure."
"Is that alright?" Charles asks.
"Sure thing," you agree, and if you were in control of your body right now you'd be smiling, or smirking at the very least. "I trust you not to go blab to anyone up there, so I don't see any reason to confine you here. Especially when it's so easy to move around."
"Thanks. So, uhm, let's go over these transistors again, they're kind of important."
Heh. Charles, Charles, Charles, he's so transparent you're pretty sure the Thinker picked up on it as well.
Oh, right, the others are still on your little project to modify old ADAM products from before Rapture went to shit, now looking at Tonics instead of Plasmids after running out of the latter to work over. You'll still need to look at the report later.
R Report on newly improved Tonics:
Handyman 2: Adds 20 to all Engineering rolls and grants a basic understanding of machinery when seen by the user
Handyman 3: Adds 30 to all Engineering rolls, grants a basic understanding of machinery when seen by the user and allows their limbs to be shapeshifted into basic tools, potentially doubling as natural weapons
Keen Observer 2: Adds 20 to all Observation rolls
Keen Observer 3: Adds 30 to all Observation rolls and grants infrared vision, weak x-ray vision and enhanced eyesight
Medical Expert 2: Adds 20 to all Medicine rolls
Medical Expert 3: Adds 30 to all Medicine rolls and allows the user to secrete blood coagulants, antibiotics and other simple medicines through their fingertips or saliva
The city of Paris. Cultured, elegant and, of course, hopelessly overhyped, as most places like these are; sure, it's not bad by any measure, but you really do get why Elizabeth ended up dragging Booker back to America instead of staying in the long term.
Because yes, by the way, that has happened- you sometimes link up with newest developments over there through the Carmilla body you left with them to supply with lots of aura, so although you don't have any personal firsthand experience she can still just tell you what's going on.
It feels like a downgrade after all your direct telepathy and borderline hivemind behavior, but hey, you gotta be thankful for the thing you do have. And speaking of, a couple of the people you ate actually did know French, in no small part thanks to Rapture's population being sourced from all over the world, so you even understand the local language and all that.
Hence when you are leading Sarah and Nora both through alleyways lined with streetside artists painting and small shops hawking wares, you downright understand the many voices all three of you summarily ignore. "Pretty full, isn't it?"
"Well, the war never reached here," Nora points out. "Anyone that was in its way likely ended up in one of the larger cities, for protection."
"Or got summarily executed," Sarah shrugs. Both of them are holding onto one of your arms, by the way. "Not like it matters. Let's have some fun while we wait for the sun to go down."
You chuckle, reaching over to kiss both of them on their cheeks. Your lovely wives. You just can't ever get enough of being with them.
In the end, the three of you come to the conclusion that though you could easily waste some time with the exercise of group murder, there are better ways to really leave a lasting impression.
It is to this end that you are now manning a streetside stall yourself, down by a waterway, the requisite permits acquired through Sarah conveniently finding a guy to mindfuck into giving his up and Nora acquiring a few canvasses and art supplies through forceful requisition (just like back on Earth Fallout, in your early days). Now, one by one, you draw… Pictures.
Pictures of Sarah and Nora, both together and separately. Posing, casual, looking back at the viewer or gazing off into the distance. Wearing a variety of clothes, looking absolutely lovely in all of them- though lingerie and naked pictures are reserved and not for public viewing, not without asking them beforehand, so you don't draw any of those. Various backgrounds, from landscapes to buildings and their insides, go without saying as well.
You paint with the alacrity of a man possessed and a skill beyond what is human, concentrating fully on your work. Both Sarah and Nora are sitting by, gracefully posing to complete the picture you are not drawing so much as presenting to the world at large.
The first picture does not take long to be done. You start on the second straight away as you display it on your little stall, keeping half an eye out for people's reactions.
It is worth it, too. As the first man passing by glances at the picture you have painted, of Sarah and Nora both standing atop a lighthouse, leaning against each other as they watch the sun set in the distance, their 'more real than real', as you like to call it, expressions just short of unreadable while still expressing everything a viewer is able to see…
He bursts into tears, silently stopping and staring, almost spellbound by the picture.
It is joined by a second. Then a third. And a fourth. You have drawn a crowd, by this point, people desperate to see and view each and every one.
You end up grabbing a plank of wood that was lying around at the stall, writing a short sentence on it before you prop it up along with the pictures. 'Pay only what you believe is worth it'.
Suffice to say, the artist 'G.L.' gains some notoriety this fine day. Sarah just keeps on chuckling at the humans so easily moved, while Nora keeps up a mysterious smile for the crowd, both having their own fun on the side as you work and chat with them all the while.
In the end, you got up to a total of eleven paintings, each of them going to a different owner. Honestly, you'd almost call it a fairy tale of some kind, it certainly has the makings of it- one is a rich man that paid everything he had on himself and threw in a cheque for a good chunk of money on top, one is a woman that paid the money that was going to be her dinner if it wasn't for you, one picture goes to a child offering her most prized possession, an old wooden toy. So on and so forth, no two customers are the same, and the only thing you require for a trade to be agreed to is for them to concentrate on not staring blankly at the paintings for long enough to complete the transaction.
It's pretty nice. And hey, you totally could make a living off of this, if the whole 'buy up the world' plan doesn't pan out.
In the end, you're silently fleeing the crowd, not wanting to bring more attention to your actual face than necessary; luckily, the beauty of your paintings has kept the press distracted so far, so you simply end up taking your pair of beauties out through a side alley and make an exit stage left without undue haste.
The people take a bit to snap out of it and realize what's happened, so you make a clean getaw-
A crunching, mulching noise echoes momentarily. "Oh hey, this guys taste pretty nice," Sarah comments.
… An almost clean getaway. Turns out a couple people were in the alley you chose for this. "Grab the bodies and get ready to teleport, we're getting out of here," you say, watching as Nora cleanly bisects a grown man using a sword made of shadows.
And drinking the blood through hemokinesis, it goes without saying. So yes, all's well that ends well, you'd say.
Now then, you don't often go out of your way to spend long stretches of time awake these days, but that just means you definitely do have to make the most of the occasions when you are capable of unassisted movement. Now, you kind of wanted to take a look around Japan, having conveniently learned the language thanks to your past victims, but you also want to spend some extra time with your kids if you possibly can.
The obvious solution, then, is to bring Lilian and Serena with you to Japan, to take a look around. And take a look around you do.
There's a lot of food here," your older daughter comments, by now looking around… eight to ten years old or so? Her sister is a little shorter yet, but while her apparent aging process has begun to slow down, Lilian is still going strong, apparently determined to be taller than an ankle-biter as soon as she can.
Her black hair is hanging somewhere around her shoulders, and this is yet another thing that's working out well for vampires, you suppose; your kids don't ever need haircuts, they just have the stuff grow out to whatever point work for them and it stays around there until they change their mind and it follows suit.
Either way, your black-haired and blonde daughters seem to like Japan so far. Right now you're going around Tokyo, standing out like a massively sore thumb as a family of foreigners, but none of your group of three gives a single crap, your children thankfully inheriting your unabashedly positive attitude.
"So many colors~!" Serena is happily bouncing around, head on a swivel. "I want to try a few of the people here."
"We're trying to keep a low profile," you remind your peppy daughter. "Maybe once we're done and looking to make a getaway. Now c'mon, I'm hearing fighting and it'd be a shame to miss the fun."
As it happens, the fun does end up being missed, but you do manage to catch the tail end- a guy is giving a speech before a crowd, right in front of what turns out to be the headquarters of the JSDF, the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, advocating for a return of the emperor's powers, right-extremist talking points (that are astoundingly similar in many cultures, big surprise) and all that rot.
Thing is though, said crowd doesn't really seem to feel it, so he eventually announces he's committing seppuku to pay for the crime he and his men have committed.
Turns out they pretty much shot the place up and all, so maybe that's a tad bit late, but when one Yukio Mishima ends up killing himself, your daughters are still cheering for the blood flying in the short moments between him stabbing and disemboweling himself and his heart's inability to pump the stuff around.
"Go figure Tokyo would have in-built entertainment like this," you chuckle, already turned away with your sweethearts in tow. "We should've come to Japan a lot sooner."
"I am here to challenge your strongest."
Lilian loved to hear these words, spoken by her voice. They were the epitome of her being, the desire to challenge the strong and cast them down, to crush the weak to punish their weakness and trample their spirit.
They had managed to find themselves a dojo, a place of ritualized, well-practiced martial arts brought over from generation to generation. One could hope, then, that there was someone inside that would manage to be a mild workout, at least.
They looked askance at her, of course, what seemed like a small, foreign child bursting in and challenging them, but even if, contrary to expectations, anyone present was a minor threat… Her daddy was nearby, always, and he would back her up in a heartbeat.
One day, she would be strong enough to challenge him, to prove herself the strongest and the one meant to protect their family. Well, him and Auntie Okita, but she didn't count. Until then, she would just have to accept that his power was great enough to outdo her own, as was the lot of anyone weaker than another.
"Hey kid," one of the Japanese people in white cloth said in Japanese, "this isn't the kind ouuufh!"
Standard rushing strike, she had simply jumped parallel to the ground, so low as to barely leave it, and performed a straightforward sideways punch, burying her comically small fist in his sternum and knocking the wind out of him. Humans were so comically fragile sometimes.
"I said I am here to challenge your strongest," she repeated, in Japanese of course. "To see whether there is any of worth. I am not impressed yet."
And with that, she began to methodically beat the crap out of a dozen young men, everyone present in the area, one by one. She was holding back to not cripple or kill them, but that was all the concession she was willing to make.
If there was anything of worth, it would be tested, dissected and added to the fighting style she had been all but born with. Strength came through improvement, and improvement had to be pursued in all things!
Serena was having the time of her damn life. Terrifying the peasants was fun!
Finding herself a kimono had been child's play once they both got a little time to themselves, with the understanding that daddy was going to keep watching over them anyways. Now there she sat, lounging in some shrine she'd snooped out and commandeered.
All it took was to show her foxy traits and the priests and mikos were falling over themselves to to do anything she said, or else. "I'm a little peckish. Any sweet offerings or livers?"
Her mommy liked eating livers and so did she. Had to be in their particular line, not that Serena paid it any mind. She was, literally, a kitsune, a fox-demon with great and terrible powers, and these fools were just foolish enough to believe the old stories, making them smart enough in turn to try and appease her the moment she threw some blue-colored fox-fire around.
She grinned when she received the sweet beans someone likely left as a 'sacrifice' at the shrine… Her tail waved as she beheld the terrified miko, the shrine maiden twice Serena's own apparent age shivering and trying to appear brave before this 'terrible demon' that'd come to their shrine. She was making sure nobody was doing anything stupid, such as calling an exorcist or whatever passed around the place, here: it would be hilarious, but also waste more time than she was sure she really had.
So instead the vampire kitsune picked up the fancy pipe she'd taken, gesturing for the girl as she adjusted her seating, 'accidentally' showin off her underwear. "Hey, hey, what're you doing, huh? Are't you supposed to be a pure maiden? What's with the attitude?"
"Excuse m-" The Japanese cutie blinked, seeing her. "H-hentaaiii…"
"Ah, so it's my fault now, huh?" Serena made the light appear to fade out in her immediate surroundings, terrifying the girl. She loved seeing her like that, she wasn't gonna lie. "C'mover here, I'll have you show me exactly what you mean."
Lilian was all combative and trying to prove herself, but really, her sister should relax a little, she thought. And hey, making cute girls, in uniforms or otherwise, attend to them was practically the family business at this point, wasn't it?
O-hohohohoho! Really, if this worked, maybe she'd show daddy this same thing, see how he liked it as well… In all the ways that mattered.
"Deeper, use your tongue~! That's right, you dirty little slut, you love this, don't you?"
It was hilarious to watch, honestly. Serena's small hands were forcing the shrine maiden's face into her crotch with supernatural strength, spread legs crossed over her back and fingers buried in black, stereotypically Japanese hair. "Nnh!"
"Ahaha, a small child is making you please her and playing with you however she likes, and you naughty girl are all for it, you can't fool me!" She brought her tail around, stroking and brushing over the side of the girl clad in the shrine maiden outfit. "Bet you're just a danger to society, aren't ya? Can't help but want to do nasty things to little girls all the time, like some lesbian pervert!"
She was planting the idea, nurturing it as she went on. Just like Mama Sarah had taught her- and how daddy agreed- to manipulate living mortals.
There was a knock on the door, the shrine's inner courtyard deserted save for herself and any mikos available. Her current victim jerked in place, but couldn't move under the force Serena was exerting, face still buried in the much younger girl's snatch. "I didn't tell you to stop, you know~?" She admonished her. "I'll have to punish you for this~!"
As it turned out, the visitor to the place she'd all but taken over was another, much younger miko, looking to be about Serena's own physical age. The girl was carrying a plate filled with some kind of food inside, but stiffened as she saw what the two of them were doing. "O-onee-san?"
Mhm, there was some familial resemblance, there. Serena grinned. "Ah, come in, come in, what'd you bring?"
"U-uhm…" The girl did as she was told, door closing behind her. "K-Kitsune-sama, this humble maiden presents an offering of fried tofu and begs for clemency by thine grace?"
As she spoke, the other miko, the elder sister, shivered, refusing to keep on tonguing Serena's insides. Boring. "Eeh~, I'd play nice, but this bad girl here stopped pleasing me the moment you came inside. I gave her one simple job, but what am I supposed to do when she can't even do it?"
A sweaty, mussed-up head raised itself, the shrine maiden in question immediately pleading. "Please great Kitsune-sama, spare my sister your wrath! I will do anything to atone, please!"
"Mhmmmm…" She smiled, watching the younger girl's wide-open eyes, then returned her gaze towards the reddened face peering up from between her legs. "Ah, I get it now, this is the girl you always wanted to play with like this, isn't she? Your own sister even, ehehe!"
"…" The miko didn't dare say anything. It probably wasn't true, either, but it would be after today.
"Alright, I won't eat your sister. Instead, I want you to eat her out!" Serena let her chewtoy (in reverse, considering who'd been licking at whom) up, flouncing over to take the food away and fiddle with the other girl's uniform. You just have to keep on pleasuring her and you'll be forgiven, aren't I nice?"
The older miko swallowed as she saw her confused sister's clothing peeled back, no underwear worn under the traditional dress. "… Hai, Kitsune-sama."
Before long the younger sister was lying on her back, hairless, puffy little cunt offered up to her sibling. "O-onee-sama?"
"It's alright, nee-chan, onee-san is just going to make you feel good a little and the Kitsune-sama won't hurt us," she said with a shaky smile. She also still did hesitate, but a smile by Serena sent her scrambling forwards, bowed over her sister's crotch on all fours.
Slowly and even more unsure than earlier at first, she began licking and touching her sister's privates, pink flesh explored by fingers, lip and tongue.
She'd even managed to teach a thing or two, as the younger one gasped, soon breathing heavily. "O-oneesaaann!"
The deep-fried tofu was pretty tasty, actually, and didn't last long; while the shrine maiden dutifully attended her sister's underdeveloped folds, Serena was already creeping up behind her, looking over her clothing-
And pulled it straight off, undoing the cloth belt and revealing a cute butt. "Mm?!"
"I said I wouldn't eat your sister," she grinned, planting a kiss right on a smooth buttock. "Nothing about you."
She pulled the slim cheeks apart, letting her lap at the wet pussy between them. She'd known it all along, make her believe something was arousing and, like magic, it was, an old trick her daddy had taught her while he was sleeping.
"Don't stop now, or do I have to get even more creative?" Serena whispered, smacking the girl's butt. "Your sister wants it now…"
There was much blushing to be had, and the younger girl was holding her hands before her face, but both of them knew she was right. A few more feather-light touches and grazes over her clit later, the miko she'd grabbed at the start proceeded to please her sister, arm wrapped around the younger girl's hips and legs spread as her body demanded more pleasure for itself as well regardless of her opinion.
This whole yokai business wasn't a bad deal, really.
While your daughters are having fun, each in their own way in different places and, notably, with different people, you're off to see a movie, in an old-fashioned movie theater and all, together with both Riley and Curie, whom you decided could use some culture.
You know, what with both of them being rather stunted in terms of appreciation for movies and pop culture growing up, if in starkly different ways. Riley was dragged all over the US, sure, but you know for a fact the Slaughterhouse Nine were a crappy place for a kid to grow up and experience the world in way beyond the immediate use of their power, seeing how you have access to Riley's memories, whereas Curie basically grew up confined to a single laboratory, all her sources of knowledge and entertainment limited to books on science.
Hence here you are, ready to watch… The original Gamera vs Ghiron movie, having heard from what few Japanese acquaintances you had back on Earth Bet that the original kaiju movies were just hilarious.
The entire genre kind of suffered a lot when the Endbringers appeared and started demolishing cities, the whole thing kind of hitting a little too close to home, but honestly, after the beating you gave Leviathan you feel you're entitled to this kind of thing.
Naturally, the popcorn must be kept on your lap, both of the girls grabbing for it and 'accidentally' groping you, but alas, accidents happen. Riley seems to be in agreement with you about this movie being funny as all hell, whereas Curie is all but taking notes and analyzing it more like an anthropologist movie critic than a normal viewer, but hey, long as they're both having fun, you're perfectly alright with it.
It was a disgrace, to treat the mikos like this, but nobody could fault the head priest for it, surely- the appearance of a mighty Kitsune had been unprecedented, it was all they could do to find the nearest source of deep-fried tofu and hope the shrine maidens could calm the yokai to the point of leaving.
Or, failing such, at least stop any rampage from occurring for long enough it wandered off.
In the meantime, however, the head priest had to write furiously, completing letter after letter asking for information. Chief amongst them, of course, was a request to the resident local priests to check the Sessho-Seki, to confirm that what they were dealing with was not the worst-case scenario.
Japan had suffered harshly, in the last century, and if it was indeed a resurrected Tamamo-No-Mae, their homeland may well be doomed completely.
The head priest listened to the cries of distress of the sister mikos echoing from the inner courtyard, gritting his teeth. Spirits grant him strength, all of them, and may they remain unharmed in mind, at least, if not in body. Kitsune were wily and tricky beasts, when they wished to be, but nevertheless they had to endure.
He had ordered a truck's worth of fried tofu, how long was it going to take before arriving?!
That said, while all of that is going on, you also do have a few of your own side projects to pursue; as you'd already discussed with Brigid way ahead of time, letting the Big and Little Sisters mingle with people on the surface would be pretty damn hard, even without the mental issues brought on by the 'therapies' they were subjected to in order to use them as they were before you arrived.
Assuming that slow, long-lasting socialization does the trick on that front, as you are banking on so far (and with results already beginning to show), there are still certain physiological characteristic that would prevent them from pretending not to have been horribly mutated in order to pass as close enough to human to make it work. And issue is, simply changing those characteristics out would be… difficult.
Big Sisters have been living with a implanted ADAM slugs inside their bellies for so long their bodies have basically incorporated the things, such that removing them using Brigid's cure for the condition, a specialized plasmid of sorts that extracts the slug, would come as a nasty shock to their systems, such that neither of you want to risk trying it out. That option off the table, simply injecting them with a tonic meant to adjust the lengths of their limbs and the changes to their vocal cords, eyeballs, skin and so on wouldn't really work, either; they're filled with so much ADAM already that it doesn't really act as it would inside of a normal living being, their slugs actually filtering the stuff to an extent and simply adding it to the overall amount streaming through their blood.
No, the easy solutions aren't exactly within reach, at least not for them, and so you must search for other ways to achieve the desired effects. Using Cleansing Potions like you did with Charles would merely thin out the ADAM, but the slug actively tries to maintain a minimum level of the stuff and the changes already made aren't so much a foreign contaminant or mutation as they are 'natural' for the kinds of beings the Sisters seem to be developing towards.
There's a difference, it seems, between stuffing a grown man full of super cancer and letting little girls grow up with rapidly mutating, self-modifying DNA, which is an important distinction for the purpose of your magical potions meant to deal with cases like the former, but less effective against the latter.
If the changes in question were unilaterally negative, it would likely be a different story, but you have arrived at the big question for your methodology of medicine- when is a 'deformity' or 'mental illness' an issue, a problem to be solved or removed, and when is it simply a part of the patient? There are degrees, here, shifting, deeply personal definitions, all of which plays into how your potions act.
Also, nearly the entirety of Big Sisters' bodies have been fundamentally warped by the ADAM they've imbibed over the years, the super-cancer tissue capable of becoming just about anything replacing their own cells bit by bit, even beyond the increased amounts of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) that seems to be present in their bodies, among others.
Endocrinology isn't necessarily your specialization, but their height and the length of their limbs is simply rooted in them having grown that way because their ADAM-inundated brains kept on having the glands produce the hormones for growth, long story short.
The glowing yellow eyes, ashen skin and voice distortion is just straight-up caused by ADAM directly, though, the stuff acting like a self-developing tonic or plasmid. Or maybe tonics and plasmids are simply an artificial version of what you are seeing in the Sisters, more accurately speaking.
That interesting little tidbit aside, though, you still can't just make them wear sunglasses and pretend to be mute to send them up to the surface. What you and Brigid came up with then, in the end, is a potion simply meant to temporarily hide their more inhuman features, neatly sidestepping the problem you had with other potions and discovering that ADAM can, in fact, be used to create potions that allow the user to temporarily shapeshift.
All in a day's work, you'd say.
So… Sofia Lamb. Not to be confused with Sophia Hess, the vigilante turned Ward turned Taylor's unruly little pet, this very much white woman (it'd be harder to be more white than Sofia is, really, given her declared philosophy and opinions) has been chained up in your office (that you hardly use anymore anyways) for the past couple months, thralling and regular feeding keeping her going just fine on her own for the most part.
She's one stubborn cunt, it has to be said, entirely convinced of her own self-righteousness and convictions, but then you'd have to be to look at collectivism as a form of being and say 'that is what people should do'.
Now, unbridled capitalism like Andrew Ryan seems to have been pursuing, once upon a time, has it own obvious pitfalls, just looking at how Rapture ended up, but at least capitalism as a system does not usually declare itself a way of government and stays in the lane of an economic policy instead, where it well and truly belongs. It also, notably, works decently well with basic human nature, at least superficially, which Sofia in turn sought to eradicate in her proof-of-concept experiment just to make collectivism viable in practical terms at all.
If you have to stop being human for your ideal world to work, maybe you should take a step back and return to the drawing board, just saying.
All of this is a lot of words to describe a fairly basic principle, that of 'don't be a dumb-ass and keep your goals realistic' as well as 'just don't be a dumb-ass', but you are kind of introspective as you watch Sofia dangle in her chains, not yet cognizant enough to really see you in the same room as her.
She smells a little, but thralling does generally minimize body odor on top of its many, many other useful applications, so it's really not all that bad.
Next to you stands Eleanor, a bucket of cold water in hand. The former Little Sister was quite affected by her time as one, and even today still carries the slug inside of her- an example of what can be done through extensive ADAM-deprivation, therapy and care, if nothing else, though you suspect she would perhaps disagree with that last one, given her mother was the one to provide it all.
She's not quite human, of course, but close enough to easily pass- a developmental period with little to no additional ADAM to feed her changes, most likely. Must've felt like starving to the poor thing.
You give her a nod and she wakes her biological mother up with the oldest trick known to mankind, a spontaneous improvised cold shower. Sofia shudders, her gag still preventing her from saying much of anything. "Hn! M-m!"
"Good morning mother, had a nice nap?" The mildly vindictive girl asks, giving her a perfectly innocent smile. "I sure hope so, it would be a shame for you to fade away while we were having fun."
… Yeah, you can see where the friendship Serena has struck up with Eleanor might be coming from, on closer inspection.
You arrange things in a mockery of a therapist's office, just to add insult to injury given Sofia's past as a literal psychotherapist that used her sessions to, effectively, gain influence over her future followers, the poor and dispossessed of Rapture, with you sitting in the big office chair you kept around after taking over Persephone and her literally bound to a lounger, forcibly kept in a reclined position as you look over her.
She also is, as a matter of fact, entirely naked, the thick, reinforced leather straps holding her in place doing little to maintain her dignity- which is not a coincidence, just in case that was somehow in question.
"So then, Sofia," you say, making no secret out of how much you're enjoying the situation, "I believe we should return towards a point we were in contention about earlier. You are of the opinion that the greater good is inherently worthy of being pursued, while anything that detracts from it is not, whereas I professed to thinking the contrary on the basis of selfish behavior not, in fact, being inherently wrong."
You gesture for Eleanor, and Sofia's gag pops out of her mouth, letting her properly move her jaw for the first time in months. She coughs and rasps, but the overall improvement to the body's condition your powers can confer means she takes only that much to find her voice again.
"I repeat that the worth of the greater good is inherent and- Eleanor!"
The girl in question, of course, is sitting by her mother's side, innocently whistling as she feels along the inside of the blonde woman's thigh. "What is it, mother?"
"Don't pay her any mind, my assistant is just ensuring you are in optimal physical condition," you chuckle, making Sofia suppress a shiver as she remember the days you spend awake and just so happen to have nothing better to do.
She's basically Earth Rapture's version of Jezebel, for all intents and purposes. She just gets less frequent action because you're not really doing anything for month at a time.
"I believe we should need to find an accurate definition of whatever the 'greater good' is to come to a more accurate conclusion then," you continue as though you weren't interrupted. "Is it overall growth of society? increasing the happiness of the maximum amount of people? Distribution of goods and services to optimize some mechanical efficiency?"
"To minimize suffering and maximize the happiness of all."
"Ah, so destroying ninety-nine percent of humanity so as to ensure the remaining one percent can live the most comfortable lives possible is an objectively good thing then? I'm sorry, but I feel I have to point this out," you say. "After all, that was literally what you tried to do with Eleanor. They can't suffer once they're dead or they don't have a sense of self anyways, can they?"
"There is a difference between death and-"
"Is there? Because I agree with Gabriel here, mother," Eleanor says, leaning over her. "I don't think there is any real difference at all. That's why I reached out to father."
Oh, Sofia does not like Eleanor calling Delta that, you can see it. Still, you feel you're making progress here. "It always is saddening when one cannot simply discuss matters of philosophy and mindrape freely, especially within the family, but luckily we can do so right now, hm?"
Sofia refuses to answer, emphatically staring at the ceiling.
"But to return to our earlier topic, I believe that your entire approach towards this 'Project Utopia' of yours was flawed to begin with," you say, bringing things back around. "To stop pursuing one's personal goals is nothing laudable, it is simply deluded. It's human nature to look out for oneself and one's loved ones, and there is nothing wrong with that at all. And I'm not just saying that because it's what I do and I'm trying to justify myself- I am so far from a moral being it would be hard to find anyone that's more of a horrible person than me. The thing is, I don't make excuses, and I think that is what you are doing."
"What would you know of my methodology when you claim to personify the very opposite of it?" Sofia asks, unable to help herself.
"Why, I'm glad you asked! After all, we found your old audio recording once we started to clean Rapture up a little, so I have a far more accurate picture of your personality than you might think," you let her know with a smile. The trademarked Gabriel Livsey smugness overload smile. "I know you're competitive. Aggressive, deep down. You want to win, but your dear old daddy taught you it's wrong to want everything for yourself, so you started making excuses, that it's 'human nature' when you're just kind of a bitch sometimes. Which, again, is entirely fine."
"It is never wrong to be better than one is," she protests.
"And yet to flagellate oneself is the opposite of a healthy mindset," you counter.
Eleanor, who was been slowly feeling her way further and further up Sofia's thigh, finally reaches her mother's cunt, thumb immediately finding her clit and rubbing against it in a way that has the older woman gasp aloud despite herself.
"Ultimately, I think you shouldn't have pursued a way to make people not human in order to cut out the parts you disagreed with and instead just tried to find a way to structure society that allows for selfish thinking while benefiting the breadth of the less fortunate within it at the same time, perhaps. You wouldn't have made such a mess that way, at least."
You get up, coming closer to watch the look on her face as Eleanor really gets started, all that practice with the Big Sisters really paying off from the looks of it.
"Then again, I'm literally a supervillain that just so happens to pay and treat his employees well, so who am I to talk, really? Guess I'm just lucky you have to listen to me ramble while your daughter has her fun with your body."
She wiggles, but her bonds hold tight. "Is that the only way you, ah, discuss your 'philosophy'? With those who can't do anything about it?"
"Oh, no, quite the opposite, actually. I often target the destitute and the vulnerable with my talk and my actions both. It's something we have in common, I suppose."
You just love taunting her, you won't lie. Ideology was never something you were big on, truth be told, so the chance to rub the stupidity of the whole concept in someone's face is nigh irrestistible.
Funny, considering the Cold War going on right now is literally one of ideologies, but you suppose that's just what happens when everyone gets a nuke and all.
You watch on for a few long moments as Eleanor keeps on going, determined to force her mother (or 'mother', it's hard to even really call her that for all that Sofia did care in her own, very weird and twisted way) to acknowledge the pleasure she was feeling; Sofia, on the other hand, is stubborn enough to try and refuse to do so, blankly staring elsewhere in her efforts.
Naturally, you shall not let that stand, not easily, at any rate. And hey, however much you may drive her into a corner, the former psychiatrist- you're pretty sure she lost the right to call herself by that job description when she started converting vulnerable individuals into her pawns and all- would still be able to simply blame her body, externalize the 'fault' she may see in the whole affair, but as you've already noted, she does, in fact, still care for Eleanor, unable to keep herself from feeling for her in particular.
You're pretty sure, anyways; the audio-logs and the notes you found are unlikely to be faked, at any rate, and the signs are there whenever her daughter's in the same room as her.
So instead of joining what amount to a semi-enthusiastic henchwoman of yours, as Eleanor is usually mostly concerned with the Big and Little Sisters you keep around the place anyways, in playing with Sofia, you go right on ahead and move around the lounger you have the blonde woman stretched out on, stepping behind the former and sliding her dress up and off of her as she raises her arms without complaint.
Eleanor is wearing a white dress in particular, having become rather used to this style of clothing over the years, though you've also seen her wear a spare armored Big Sister suit on occasion. As she has also adopted recent fashion down in your underwater paradise in terms of underwear, that being not to bother with any, she entirely naked except for her shoes and socks just like that, her teenage body on full display.
Her figure isn't anything extremely out there, being overall more lithe than curvy, something she totally did inherit from her mother, but she certainly isn't unappealing by any measure; fair, soft skin, with a perky, round butt and meaty legs, her rounded breasts standing out proudly. Maybe it's part of the way she's grown with an ADAM-slug in her belly, but although her limbs are a little longer than usual, it's perfectly within human norms, just making her look taller and more athletic.
In short, she's a young woman in body as well as in mind, and certainly nice enough to play around with far as you're concerned.
"Eleanor…" Ah, Sofia is realizing that she wouldn't be the only one you would have sex with, is she? Not that it matters, from where you're standing.
"Shh…" The daughter lays a finger on her mother's lips, leaning forwards, once she's pulled her hand from between the woman's legs, a thin film of fluid just making the gesture better with it leaving some residue where it touches. "You don't have much to say about my behavior these days, mother."
With that, Eleanor stays in the position, licking her hand clean off her mother's juices as she spreads her legs, pushing her butt out towards you. You don't exactly miss the subtext here, digging your hands into her pleasantly soft and responsive behind, the tactile feel among the nicer ones you've felt to date.
Almost at vampire levels, in fact. Not quite, but almost.
As you were already naked from the start, you can just step forward and embrace her, your arms encircling her slim waist, and let one hand veer downward to explore the delta of her hips, Eleanor gasping and rubbing her butt against you when your questing fingers probe her lower lips, soon sliding into her tight, hot teenage cunt. You can see her biting her lips, your cock poking through between her thighs and getting lubricated by her arousal as well.
"What would Subject Delta think?" Sofia tries, clearly starting to get uncomfortable with the situation. Good.
"Father would congratulate me and ask about whether I'm sure about this or not," Eleanor says, mouth quirked into a half-smile. "And I'll be damned if I don't take the opportunity to be fucked hard and good, mother."
She continues to enjoy your ministrations for a little while longer before moving, clearly caught up in the foreplay as she is; her black hair is falling over her face when, finally, enough seems to be enough. Eleanor looks over her shoulder, exchanging a single, long look with you, before you gesture towards the immobilized form of her mother with your eyes.
She smirks, and just like that she's climbing onto Sofia, naked skin rubbing against naked skin, and adjusting her position to have an easier time reaching her breasts. "Eleanor, what-"
"I never really got to drink from these, did I?" She asks, groping her mother's breasts and pinching her nipples. "What a wasted opportunity. High time we made up for it, wouldn't you say mother?"
It's too tempting, the way she's dipping her head and shoulders down to let her suckle on her mother's dry teats, her ass up in the air instead. You keep your silence, straddling the lounger to rope it and spread her cheeks, driving your tongue into her from behind.
"Ah~! See, he's so thoughtful, isn't he?" With that Eleanor bites down on one of Sofia's nipples, just enough to be painful while still pleasurable, and her mother is reduced to staring at the ceiling again. When that doesn't change even after a few moments of this, you decide to change it up again, giving her daughter's butt a pat as you reposition yourself.
Pushing her hips, you quickly have Eleanor lie on her mother, breasts smooshed up against each other's, her hands on Sofia's shoulders. You loom behind her, hard cock resting on her buttocks.
Until you draw back, to poke at her drooling pussy. It's so wet you easily slide inside, her honeypot almost sucking you in with its heat and pressure.
"He's inside now," Eleanor whispers to her mother, taking up her entire field of view. No looking away from this one. "He's so biiig~… Can you feel him? I want you to feel him, mother, when he ravages my pussy…"
It is then that you thrust inside of her in a single, smooth motion, a wet sound echoing with her surprised, deep moaning. You know for a fact you're big enough to make a bulge, so Sofia has to be able to tell, and you give her daughter a moment to get used to it all while you poke your head over her shoulder, nibbling on it a little.
Sofia shudders, or Eleanor does and it transmits to her, but you don't wait long to establish a hard, fast rhythm, thoroughly fucking the girl that was meant to be Rapture's salvation, once, though anything that involves a crazed suicidal cult is inherently suspect. You fuck her hard, making almost bestial love to her, and she absolutely enjoys the heck out of it, moaning and quivering and rubbing herself against her mother.
Flesh claps against flesh as you take her from behind, Eleanor stubbornly remaining parallel to her mother. She's breathing heavily on Sofia's face, their nipples ribbing against and stimulating each other, your cock plowing so deep into her her mother is all but being fucked just as hard, the force of your thrusts jerking her up and down even secondhandedly.
Eleanor comes pretty quickly, spasming around your cock and moaning it out for the world (or rather your office) to hear, tensed body lifted for a few heartbeats before she collapses on her mother again… And looks at her with what you imagine to be hooded eyes, still being rocked from below by your uninterrupted thrusts.
Then she kisses Sofia, her mother shocked, going by the wide-open eyes, but you can smell the scent of her arousal nevertheless. Honestly, is it just you or is everyone around you into lesbian incest lately? Not that it stops you, it's just an interesting thing to mention, you suppose.
By the time you're coming yourself, the situation has shifted into a full-on makeout session of questionable consent, your seed spurting right up against Eleanor's womb. All in all, it's a surprisingly wholesome mother-daughter bonding you've ended up with, isn't it?
Tonics
Bloody Doll 2: Massively increases blood production of the body, making it extremely hard to die of blood loss. This effect is achieved through minimizing other functions, applying -15 to all actions. Also grants mild general damage resistance, nullifying weak sources of damage and keeping the body in passable condition.
Bloody Doll 3: Massively increases blood production of the body, making it nigh impossible to die of blood loss. Also grants mild general damage resistance, nullifying weak sources of damage and keeping the body in passable condition, and additionally forms new tissue out of flowing blood, regenerating 5 HP per turn.
So then, the PLO. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, technically, a group formed by several sub-organizations and gatherings that seek to, essentially, kick Israel out of Israel and establish the sovereign nation of Palestinia.
Sadly for them, while they are considered one of the more secular groups in the area at this time, they're still very much a group in the area, deeply Islamic and ultimately bound to the same kind of thinking as the now deceased former king of Saudi Arabia.
In other words, it's easier for you to just eat, murder, persecute and use them as scapegoats and whipping boys all over. After all, a massive terror attack was conducted just the other month involving, as the news are decrying, fanatic Moslems out to destroy all civilization and enslave everyone in sight.
You know, religion is a wonderful thing. People have persecuted each other over it all throughout history, there's no reason you wouldn't be doing the same.
But yes, back to the PLO. They're operating all around Israel, having gathered in surrounding nations now that they're actually backed by the USSR, and so it is simplicity itself for Sarah to let you know where and how to find them, their attempts at secrecy squashed by her power and towering intellect both.
"You have such a smorty-brain, don't you?" You coo, gently patting your sister's head and scratching her behind her fox ears.
"I am insulted by the baby speak and demand more cuddles in recompense," she informs you. "Just so you know what to do while I do all your thinking."
"Recommendation: Await the digitalization of systems on the surface. Suggestion: This unit shall take over all the thinking."
"Look, sweetie, this is my job and I'm not letting anyone take it. You can help, but I didn't stumble into infinite use of my power so I can never bother to use it."
The operation to remove the PLO as an existing organization is, all told, fairly simple and straightforward; you know where their people are and where they're gathering, including the couple of them in contact with Russian agents. From this point, it is simplicity itself to put several strike teams together, made up of several vampires and some of the robots the Thinker has been assembling, and plan out where to hit when, using teleportation to move everyone around as required.
Seeing how it's still kind of hard to target enemies for teleportation and just straight-up move everyone into confinement cells one by one. It would be pretty funny, if not outright hilarious, but you'd need at least some kind of camera around the Thinker can track and view through to make that happen.
Not impossible to arrange by any measure, but in this case it's easier to just send people to kill them, then disappear the bodies together with them once the locator beacons you're making everyone wear make it so much easier to do this exact thing.
The rub, then, in this case, is that your kids are also participating, having demanded to also be allowed to eat people while the opportunity's here. As you are absolutely powerless when faced with their pleading faces, you couldn't just say no, except their mothers then proceeded to okay it as well!
Argh, you can't stop worrying. What if they get hurt? You should've gone ahead and give them aura after all, and Plasmids, tonics, the whole shebang.
You sigh, gesturing at the next victim you'll be chunking through shortly, the small armory they've smuggled into this village you're trudging through right now already closed up by means of freezing all the doors shut. If they go through the windows, you'll know before they do.
"Kids, man. They're just one headache after the other, you know?"
The man now floating upside down, flailing and screaming, does not. But that's alright, you don't demand your food be able to understand you. Nor that it understands English, even.
Still, you're worried… You made Sarah and Nora promise to watch out for their respective kids, plus a small army of Hammer robots each waiting for the moment to come in should either of them get so much of a scratch, plus you can watch both of them in real time through their senses, but you feel like this isn't enough.
What if someone spontaneously drops a nuke over Egypt? It's happened before, it could happen again now.
Lilian was relishing the chance to make use of what she had learned, what she had trained herself to do. None of these inferior humans had a chance!
Silently, she jumped towards her next target, swinging the simple quarterstaff made of iron she'd asked for before this outing overhead. Just like that, he was falling down unconscious, a notable dent in his head, but she was good at restraining her strength, so he wasn't dead yet.
That done, she rotated herself and her staff both, sweeping the other two men's legs out from under them. One was granted the mercy of a swift knockout as well, but the other one was simply beaten down, joints broken to disable and a quick bite sealing his fate.
Then she ate the next one. Lilian wasn't picky with her food, okay, she always ate what was meant to be eaten! Though, she pondered number three for a moment…
There was movement behind her. Turning around, she raised her staff, throwing it like a spear and nailing a man through a little above the collarbone, surprise and the force of her throw throwing him back.
Lilian extended her claws, ready to get serious. Having some range was nice, but baseline humans were just so slow it didn't even matter.
A short bit of massacre later, she was looking up at her mama. "Can we keep one for daddy?"
"Sweetie, you know your daddy can get as many as he wants," Mama Nora said, smiling. It was a good smile.
"Yes, but it's the one and only one fleshbag I'm keeping from my first hunt. I really wanna give it to daddy!" Special Move: Pout Of The Abyss!
"Mhm, if you're sure… I guess we can keep him for later, then."
"Yay."
You know, your original plan called for eating exactly thirty of these suckers, but hey, you can fit another meal in no problem.
Serena was watching from above, wondering if she could get them to kill each other a little faster. People really never looked up, so lounging above was, obviously, her rightful place!
… But seriously, her magic was pretty cool, but these guys took forever to shoot each other. Right now she had half of the plonking people thinking the Israelis were attacking them while the other half thought the Americas were there to kill them all, seeing the other side as their respective enemy, but it was kind of a pain to keep up all these illusions. And they were just running around, shooting each other, yes, buuut…
"C'mooon, shoot faster! There, I'll make all of you angry and everything hurt more, just kill each other already!" Her tail swished behind her in aggravation as she jumped to her legs when-
A bullet whizzed past her, not even aimed properly, but one of these morons had seen her.
Serena seethed. "Alright that's it, fox fire for everyone!"
Baghdad, the capital of Iraq and, as is immediately obvious on closer inspection, a city with history, one that reaches back quite a while. It's one of those things that you don't get to see that often in the US, so you're actually enjoying yourself quite a lot just having a date with Sarah walking around, seeing the sights…
Oh, and holding hands, of course. That's important, too.
Now you may think that, being two foreigners and where you two are right now, obvious signs of affection would provoke at least a couple idiots into trying to murder you, or at least ambush you in some random alleyway, but nope, the most you get is some ugly looks on the way even once you begin to routinely kiss at every intersection you come across.
You know, you aren't sure whether to call it a disappointment for the lack of dessert or consider the good public order a good thing in a nation you're totally going to take over soon-ish. Maybe you'll just go for both, even, even if it isn't exactly what you would've expected around this place.
Like, you even went and chose the timing like you did. From what people know, the news being broadcast over radio and TV both, the Russians are basically trying to invade the middle east by way of arming murderous militias and all, the commentators and news anchors you had people pay off all over the region really going nuts with their messaging.
Given you and Sarah look distinctly not middle-eastern? Yeah, you don't know whether this result is good or not. Then again, people are probably worried about seeming to be too Islamic, or something, so even anyone that would normally confront you is thinking better of it right now.
Huh, here you are, triggering that awkward phenomenon of not saying what you think because it would make you look kind of really bad fifty years early. Go, Gabe, you suppose.
It's still a really nice date with Sarah, though, say what you will. Neither of you is complaining about it.
Now then, you don't usually spend more than a day awake per month, just to give your kids ample time to grow up, do their own things, find hobbies and interests and all that rugrat business, but you decided that, the end of the year being what it is, you may as well be awake for Christmas and New Years' this time around, have a little blast, all the good things.
So here you are, hanging up some Christmas decorations with your own two hands! It feels like it's been years since you actually celebrated, come to think of it. Must be all that dimensional jumping and temporal shifting you've been doing, really.
No matter, you're still putting Christmas trees in every room inside of the base, you can just get more for next year easily enough. When in doubt, your seedcaster technology is perfectly capable of rapidly growing more of these needly little menaces in a flash.
Hmm… Thoughts about a rapidly growing forest of trees appearing on the surface once a year? It's silly, but it'd also be kind of hilarious. Question is whether the joke is worth the effort.
You'll think on it, you suppose.
"Daddy. Up." Lilian is holding her hands up for you, so you lift her just like she requested, letting her put the tip on the tree you're working on right now. "Mm."
"Would you like a few balls and lights to go along with it?" You ask, resisting the urge to gently shake your little McMuffin.
"… No. Just the tip right now." Your daughter wiggles a little to look at you. "Maybe when I grow up a little more."
"Not sure what that's got to do with it, but alright." You give her a kiss on the cheek before you let her down, looking at the small crowd of Little Sisters plus Serena waiting for their turn. "Who's next?"
"Skeee!" Aaand there's the Big Sisters demanding to be carried by you. Time for the princes carries, you suppose.
Okay, so there's a few people you need presents for: Sarah, Nora, Riley, Lilian, Serena, Curie, Henley, Brigid, the Thinker, Gil Alexander (Alexander the Great) and the Sisters.
Default presents:
Sarah: A thorough ear cleaning by yours truly. Of all four possible ears, no matter how they're always clean in the first place. Also a Cuddle Voucher, to let her know she always has the right for a cuddle.
Nora: A promise to instate any one law she wants in any areas you have sufficient influence over, no matter how silly it is. You'll make it work. Also, another Cuddle Voucher.
Riley: More Cuddle Vouchers. Also a couple of test subjects and permission to move into human testing of Cauldron vials.
Lilian: Aura, ADAM, a mechashift knife that is also a gun, to let her play around with it and get used to her mother's style of combat if she's so inclined
Serena: Aura, ADAM, a kimono and some Japanese paraphernalia as she seemed to enjoy herself last time in Japan
Curie: A collection of DNA samples from every animal you could find, from deep-sea fish to hummingbirds
Henley: Some good wine (so he can drink himself to sleep when your shenanigans become too much)
Brigid: Also a Cuddle Voucher? Oh, and a picture you helped the Little Sisters draw, signed by each of them. Most don't remember their names, so they just used random symbols they made up instead.
The Thinker: There's not really much you could get an AI, but you went ahead and fiddled out a way for her bodies to better enjoy the taste of food and drink, to let her have some fun with
Gil Alexander: A concentrated ADAM-plant extract meant to make him so high he's essentially comatose for a day when inhaling it
Mark Meltzer: A teaching license so he can say he properly homeschooled Cindy. You won't say where and how you got it. Also, give him aura already.
Grace Holloway: Aura and ADAM, plus an invitation to get thralled. Not your fault if she's ungrateful enough to refuse, is it?
Eleanor Lamb: A collection of plush dolls of Delta in varying sizes, as the Little Sisters secretly told you she used to have one.
Subject Delta: A plush doll of Eleanor. The big softie will cherish it forever.
Big Sisters: A wide collection of sex toys, summary thralling for each of them, maybe some plushies for good measure?
Little Sisters: Thralling, plush toys, sweets and if they're good, they get literally all the children's toys you can find on the open market
Everyone: Lots of Christmas chocolate, like, loads of it
Now, as for how everyone liked their Christmas presents, well…
The Little Sisters are, in terms of telepathy as you experience it over your network, less singular beings and more a continuous throng of curiosity and playfulness, plus perpetual hunger and a complete disregard for (human) life. By comparison, their post-larval stage, the Big Sisters, are actually a lot more sedate (and individual) when they act within the realm of pure thoughts, a opposed to how quickly they're triggered to violence normally otherwise.
You blame the literal mind control program designed to have them aggressively hunt down and butcher anyone so much as touching Little Sisters.
That aside, the addition of a whole bunch of new thralls doesn't change much for you, all said and done, beyond a new necessity to look out of Little Sisters using their new powers and supernatural strength to launch themselves into your arms. It's cute, but it also does get a little complicated logistics-wise a dozen or so of them in.
Brigid is really happy when you give her the picture you helped the girls draw, using a big piece of paper that looks more at home as a placard rather than filled with crayon coloring. A big house filled with everyone currently living down in Rapture with you, smiles on everyone's faces. It's pretty cute.
Henley is perfectly happy about a bottle of wine from the last century, apparently supposed to be some really great stuff, though you're kind of sure he just completely forgot Christmas was a thing. Not being a particular connoisseur of alcohol, you just went ahead and took a few samples in order to replicate the whole bottle whenever, such as for your plans for New Year's.
The Thinker is perfectly satisfied with the little taste bud upgrade you cooked up for her as well, the ability to experience life like an organic being would no small thing for her, it seems. Not quite similarly, but yeah, Gil Alexander, or perhaps Alexander the Great, the giant horrible fetus thing working as your local middle manager and engineer next to the Thinker, is already completely high off of the improved ADAM concentrate you made available for him.
You also did, actually, print out a wide collection of plush toys, quite a few of which you gift to Eleanor and the Little Sisters, as well as one for Delta. Of course the ones you give Eleanor are of him and vice versa, but hey, it's not you who has to deal with a massive, high-quality cloth big daddy that doesn't actually fit through the doors.
You are the festive menace, none shall stop you from giving people nice, but horribly inconvenient gifts whenever you desire!
"Any one law I want, huh?"
"Yep," you say, popping the 'p'. "Anything at all and I'll try to have it implemented. Might take a couple years on the outside, but there's a reason we have the rulers of nations in our pocket, isn't there?"
"Hmm," Nora agrees, nodding. "To be honest, I'm not sure how I'd even use something like this. I mean, there's just too many possibilities- I could work on women's rights, I could affect the way economies work, anything."
"Take your time to think it through." You shrug, giving her a half-hug; as it happens, she is pregnant again, as you didn't forget your promise to give her lots of children and a big, happy family way back when.
Nora gets to relax and be pregnant all day, is all you're saying. Your beautiful, cute pregnant wife. "Oh, and here, take this too."
"What's that… A Cuddle Coupon?" She grins, holding up the colorful laminated piece of paper you produced.
"Valid in perpetuity, though there are no identical reissues. You can come cuddle any time."
"Oh, you." You get a soft kiss on your cheek for your trouble. Totally worth it, of course.
Not that she's the only one you're giving presents to, of course. Your entire R department, for one, is getting a bunch of human test subjects you arranged the disappearance of, hopefully enough to last a couple months at least presuming Riley doesn't go too crazy, and Sarah is in fact receiving her thorough ear cleaning combined with brushing right away.
"Hafuuuh…"
"You like it that much?" You chuckle, carefully rubbing your soft certified fox-ear cleaning stick (trademark pending) around inside one of her upper head cavities.
"It's great and I refuse to live without it…"
Next to you, Serena is already gazing at you expectantly, shining eyes wide open as she pats your shoulder.
It goes without saying she gets an ear cleaning as well once you're done with Sarah's human pair, your sister making full use out of having two kinds to get some extra cleaning. As does Serena, like mother like daughter and all that.
Speaking of her, though, Serena did seem to enjoy herself a lot back in Japan, so you got her a couple kimonos, a traditional Japanese pipe (as in, the ones for smoking stuff), requisite shoes and decorations and anything and everything you could think to gather. She's really happy about it, apparently indeed being rather fond of the island nation and its culture.
Or, in her words, she's 'gonna rape Shinto into praying' to her. Hey, it's nice she has ambitions!
Same goes for Lilian, whom you're giving a handy little knife to… which is also a gun. A disintegration gun, because you trust her not to aim it at friendlies, friendly fire being what it is. It also does fire bullets via a railgun mechanism as per usual, just in case she prefers the traditional model as well.
And, naturally, everyone receives a Cuddle Coupon as well. Like, not everyone everyone, but everyone that you expect to like it.
Oh, also a teaching license for Mark, so he can say he's working as a teacher at a private institute when or if he ever decides to rejoin society above the waves. Sure, his wife basically took everything he owned, but who cares? It's mostly for tax purposes anyways, and to motivate him to help you with the Little Sisters as a whole.
Christmas is a nice day all in all, though you deliberately cut off everything after Christmas Eve itself seeing as the following two days aren't really interesting beyond being holidays anyways; you just rigged up a wide room to simulate winter for the girls, with snowfall and ice skating rinks and all that.
But you yourself, well, you just enjoy the Christmas dinner you arranged, with help from the Thinker to get everything done for the amount of people you're catering to and all that. It's nice in itself, and you don't really get enough time to stretch your imagination about cooking things as is, so the change of pace is welcome as well.
Yeah, all in all, Christmas '69 is shaping up to be one that dictates how the future will hopefully look like. Delta keeps on giving the Little Sisters rides on his back, your girls keep on having fun with all the girls you kind of adopted as well… You like it.
Now New Years' is where you really pull out all the stops, most of the day itself focused around preparations for midnight. And hey, you'd like to think it was very much worth it to go out of your way, given the result.
Lilian is looking up spellbound as the fireworks stencil her appearance into the night sky, eyes glittering as they reflect the bursts of light overhead. Serena, on the other hand, is holding her fox ears closed, as she refuses to transform to have human ones but her enhanced hearing is still being bombarded by the loud explosions.
Lilian is patting her back without looking down. It's cute.
One by one, the sky is cycled through simplified pictures of your family, from Sarah to Riley and back again, even including the Sisters. It took a lot just to set this up correctly, though the Thinker helped you a lot by taking care of the maths (she's not a glorified calculator, but that doesn't mean she can't do the job of one) and so you can relax and enjoy as your fireworks batteries shift from one setup to the next, painting the sky brightly.
It was totally worth it to get everything up here. Nobody is going to investigate some bright lights in the middle of Alaska of all places, you're sure, and the Sisters all get to wear thick, insulating coats you made beforehand as well so everyone can participate.
Nice time to be not alive in, your verdict hasn't changed during your nap between Christmas and now. Oh, and you also sent some of that wine you gave Henley you replicated (including the bottle, it goes without saying) to the thralls you made out of political leaders over in the middle east. Gotta spread the love around a little, even if gifting alcohol is still just a tad bit insensitive given the cultural backgrounds.
Eh, it's fine, and you've been hammering the idea of being less religious in anyways. They'll deal and hopefully appreciate the gesture.
So then… The year is 1970 and a lot of things are happening. Seeing how much of a background role you're taking for the time being, you've begun to view current developments with a certain sense of detachment, somewhat like an outside spectator, merely watching and sometimes acting through intermediaries but not personally involved; maybe it's just your way of dealing with the situation, but it really doesn't matter all that much, far as you're concerned.
First off, things are going pretty well in your underwater home of Rapture- the Thinker has been expanding your base, building back into the areas where the rest of the city used to sit before you had her tear it down and giving everyone that wants it some extra space- not that everyone or even most people want it, per se, you had enough personal space for your group as it was, but it's nice for the Big Sisters to have some relatively spacious areas they can run around freely.
You went and had an overly spacious gym built over the equivalent of several buildings as well, in fact, and they've been enjoying it ever since its completion. The exercise is a nice way for them to work off any aggression they may develop at the drop of a hat, which still happens more often than not at any given time.
Speaking of the Thinker, though, her specialized birthing bodies have given birth, after a relatively short pregnancy period compared to human ones. As they were designed specifically to support such, they were basically actually pregnant, somehow, making use of your biological technology and the Thinker's own tricks to work properly, and they did, indeed, swell up over time just like your lovers did.
They gave birth to more semi-robotic bodies for the Thinker, somehow born and growing as cyborgs whose machine-like parts managed to fuse with their own Eldritch Cores so as to support this growth. As demonstrated by the artificial intelligence controlling them, they aren't quite vampires, but not quite unlike them, either; essentially a step above thralls in the ladder of vampire-hood, sharing several of your normal supernatural abilities.
More often than not each of them is specialized into a single power of yours, trained to operate it as effectively as possible. Meanwhile, the Thinker has joined in on the game of using your body while you're asleep, impregnating several bodies at a time to breed more of these advanced units, as they apparently work rather well even compared to her normal ones.
Lilian has begun learning everything she can from her mother, the two often engaged in mutual training as Nora is still pregnant herself. Serena, on the other hand, has been playing with the thought of asking you to let her and her sister teleport between Rapture and the surface every now and then, mostly so she can begin her conquest of Japan. You know this because she's not all that strict in keeping her thoughts off your network, and because you know your daughter.
You'll consider the issue for a while, at any rate.
In terms of your business ventures, things are going pretty damn well, if you do say so yourself. Saudi Arabia is now sporting several factories filled to the brim with what, in this time period, would be considered high-tech machinery, but really was more a wiki dive back when you were on Earth Bet before coming here turned into a practical model.
It's not perfect by any means, but still at least conceivable to an engineer as they might exist today. A lot of stuff is being produced in the oil-rich desert nation, now, from high-quality steel beams and ingots or whatever other forms buyers prefer to furniture, household devices and even weapons, though those are mostly sold to Saudi Arabia and neighboring nations- yourself, in effect, as you're selling to equip the military of nations you more or less control as is.
Everything from guns and ammunition to battleships, grenades and related explosives and more- Cryptic Solutions provides. That was kind of the thought behind it when you first chose the name, a single company to provide solutions to anything life throws at people. Your dream is to have them be born in Cryptic hospitals and buried in Cryptic coffins, providing everything on the way from A to B and profiting from every transaction as you go.
A true monopoly. A world government ruled not by democratically elected leaders or dictators, but rather instated, backed and at the mercy of your money, your products, your influence.
This may be your greatest concrete ambition as of yet and damn it, you'll give it a shot, at least.
But back to Saudi Arabia, its economy is essentially being built by you from the ground up, with entire cities built around a small subset of factories to provide workers, maintenance people, basically everything you could want, planned several generations in advance. The current King was all for it, as the more money is being generated, the less immediately dependant he is on the sale of oil, the current big export and source of Saudi wealth.
Personally, you like to ensure the money is being spread around a little as well, hence the wages being specifically calculated to provide everything the average person needs in terms of housing, food, potential kids, recreation and so on plus a little extra, for more savings or whatever else the average Saudi Arabian may want, you don't really care.
It's not super easy to distill various lifestyles and circumstances down into a single number, but you do have a Henley for that. May a well use him.
It's the extension of a policy you've been following for a while now for the water treatment workers, that being the one business branch still the most expansive within your current lineup. With your plans proceeding apace, you'll have to look into expanding your business model within Egypt as well soon-ish, come to think of it; maybe invest in a couple subsidiaries that handle logistics off the rails, as it were?
Because yes, you have a massive network of railway lines methodically crossing through the desert, connecting various sites chosen for their convenience to each other and to larger facilities that handle more involved transportation, big railroad stations meant to handle enormous amounts of traffic of both goods and, should the population require it at some point, people.
All with local labor as well, of course. Your people just need to keep to the schedules set, which have some generous buffer times built-in as well, and everything does work smoothly enough.
In short, all you need is to generate electricity all over the country and Saudi Arabia would be essentially a first world country just like that. Sure, a lot of your products are being exported to other places, primarily Europe and the US, but if it works, it works, and the money you make is but a drop in the ocean compared to what you predict will come in once you're eating up entire markets instead of being a relatively small competitor in foreign ones.
'Company business' aside though (you do pretty much have governments move people and land claims around in the more rural areas as required for your whole scheme, which is easy enough in place like SA thanks to being a literal monarchy with effectively unlimited power held by the king), you also do have both Saudi Arabia and Eypt pressure Yemen, forcing its ports to work with and sell not inconsiderable amounts of their administrative and executive positions to people on your strings by one degree of separation or another.
Look Britain, your shitty shipping companies can fuck straight out of Cryptic's backyard, or else. You're sitting there and you use the Suez canal at your damn leisure and nobody else's.
Yemen is a whole 'nother story as well anyways, but you'll let your political puppet leaders take care of expanding your influence, you believe. Have to find a use for them, statesmanship is a continuous tedium otherwise as is.
Hence such is what you have them do, organizing an international treaty-bound alliance between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel, provided everything goes as expected, aptly named the Neutral Alliance of Nations.
Extremely creative, yes, but it does make a point of showing how much you want to not bother with the Cold War- the US and Russia can stay in their respective corners and slowly erode themselves while staring the other one down for a while to come for all you care, and you can always upgrade the name later as the situation demands.
It's essentially a proto-world-government, a smaller scale meant to let you see how things work out under controlled circumstance and with literally no risk, as you can always just have the member nations dance to your own music whenever you want or need to. It's also just damn fancy and a great thorn in the side of any nearby nations that are not (yet) part of it, for now.
Bait, in other words. That and a big troll move, both are pretty good in your book.
Invites to this political, economic and military alliance are also being sent out to some of these nearby nations, primarily Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan, each of which shouldn't be much of a problem in the long term. In fact, the current ruler of Iraq would likely appreciate a bit of power for himself, seeing his cousin, a certain man named Hussein, has been accumulating power for himself in search of an eventual takeover.
A meeting with him is scheduled for Nasser in the immediate term, he'll probably take care of it.
Meanwhile, both Jordan and Lebanon are openly being called upon to deal with the 'foreign terrorists masquerading as jihadists' amidst them before they can be invited into the club as well, mostly as a way for you to put pressure onto religion in the whole area.
It's genius, too, Saudi Arabia as the 'victim' of recent terror attacks by 'fanatic jihadists', as the media ended up with, is pushing to drive violent or intensive religious rhetoric away from general acceptance whereas Egypt and Israel get to play the good cops in pointing at it and asking for understanding for their big oil daddy.
It does work, too, to an extent. Rural areas are as pious as they ever were, but in the big cities, where daily life simply has other priorities, you're slowly pushing religion from the average person's concerns by subtly vilifying it.
It'll take a couple years for this to have any more than momentary effects, but that's why you're sitting back and letting time pass you by, as it were, in the first place, isn't it? To buy yourself as much time as you might need.
But back to Iraq, the most… immediate of your problem cases, according to schedule. You will need to deal with Hussein if you want any puppet of yours in control over the long term, and the man himself, while not suited towards being aid puppet himself, he's too ambitious and aggressive in his ambition, he did install himself as a power fixture already…
You know, it's amazing how easy it is to sneak certain provisions into a two-hundred page document, specifically ones pertaining the rights of certain corporations signatory nations vow to protect the interests of.
Guess what bitches, water plants are going every-fucking-where. You will singlehandedly lower the ocean's surface by an inch or two at this rate.
In other news, a certain Saddam Hussein was tragically killed in an automobile accident when no less than two trucks of potential rival businesses of yours managed to hit his car at the same time. Coincidences sure do happen, don't they?
On a quick side tangent, you may or may not be eligible for title of 'Train Baron of the Middle East', seeing as you've gone out of your way to design and deploy entirely mundane, but very easily used train tracks in great numbers all around the newly created Neutral Alliance of Nations; turns out that when you can frame it as government contracts, where governments pay you to build railways all over their territory so you can then use them for your company logistics, the cost of steel is pretty minimal compared to the sheer glee you experience at the prospect (and the money you do ultimately make from this).
Well, that mild con aside, the theory behind the tracks themselves is simply you cheating using your ability to fabricate high-quality parts of anything you want to pretty much at will, though you went out of your way to have all of this done in Saudi Arabia as one of the first big tasks your metalwork factories had to undertake. A bit of mild alloy work is all you need to have tracks that can more or less withstand the desert's temperatures and extremely long stake drilled deep underground in regular intervals should suffice for additional stability.
There's honestly not much more you can do without outright using eldritch engineering here, but you shouldn't need to, save for any… unusual circumstances. There's a reason deserts are pretty crap for human habitation and running trains through them both.
That said, the others working your R have been working hard indeed, improving upon some potion recipes you wanted looked at. That's just still kind of secondary to your elation at being a Train Baron. Cryptic solutions is essentially taking over any and all logistics all throughout your area of influence, heck, you're renting out train space for anyone that wants anything moved from point A to point B.
You're literally starting to swim in money, or at least you would be if you were so inclined. Maybe one day you'll do just that, hibernate buried underneath your riches.
Speaking of riches, through Israel you have open and legal access to the Tel Aviv stock exchange now. Sarah has already begun to sow the seeds for you becoming even richer- and the downfall of the USA, among other things, but you'll just stand ready to buy them all out anyways when it comes down to it, so who cares?
For now she's looking into companies for you to absorb and consolidate into the greater mass of Cryptic Solutions, aside from making shittons of money using her power. It's basically her hobby, even if she can't casually trade stocks over the internet quite yet and has to use a couple paid minions to deal with the whole thing in her stead.
Your lazy little fox sister, too lazy to get up off the sea floor.
…Huh. You just realized, but didn't that Lovecraft fellow write fictitious stories about cosmic gods sleeping in sunken cities at the bottom of the ocean? Kinda fits you and your family, now that you think about it.
Now then, your plans for China… Being a massively populous nation with its own, massively fractured cultural identity, it has been, shall we say, 'unified' by the CCP by this point, with any expression of cultural identity not in line with the main faction's strictly forbidden and punished. There was a brief civil war between the CCP and its capitalist slash democrat opponents, but the latter were soundly defeated after some waffling about and are currently exiled in Taiwan, from where they are looking to maintain a semblance of influence over the mainland and failing horribly.
It's essentially a more fascist microcosm of the Cold War, as every side is horrible and effectively headed by a complete dictator. More power to them, quite literally, given one of said dictators is Mao at this time.
That's right, the guy that historically caused no less than three famines and whose harebrained ideas are, ultimately, ruining China. It took some borderline miracles for his successors to bring the nation into its own power… And it just so happens that you do not want that to happen.
So you need to sabotage its rise, laughably easy thanks to your knowledge gained through Earth Bet internet surfing and all. Once more perfect recall and making some of the others look all of this stuff up is coming in handy- you know exactly what officials are doing their damndest to take the confused and outright stupid orders coming from the 'Great Leader' and turning them into something that doesn't needlessly destroy China. You have their names, which means you can track them down…
And once you've done that, well, you can get started. Heck, you even know where one Deng Xioping is right now, Mao's successor and often hailed as the Architect of Modern China- as it happens, he's in exile having been purged during the Cultural Revolution, on a farm in the Gobi Desert. He will be the centerpiece of your 'plan' to 'overthrow China's government'.
It's fairly straightforward. Simple, even. Step one, you take your list of people, including ones like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi, the important middle managers, as it were. Step two, you fill several warehouses in several important cities, includin the capital, with USSR-issue military hardware, primarily guns, bought on the black market of the arguably largest and most important communist regime in the world right now.
Step three, you begin having fun. Falsified documents, showing that certain people own or have rented certain warehouses. Letters between people that don't necessarily know each other in actuality, but are 'secretly cooperating' beyond anyone's knowledge. All correspondence is, naturally, faked to look incredibly close to that of the real people's handwriting, which is, by the by, an absolute bitch to do in Chinese- you can do it, you just are't used to the written version of the language by any measure.
You even add half-concealed codes implicating several other officials you want to see removed, for that matter. Whoever gets to work through this merry mess you're making will hopefully have a field day with it.
Signatures are faked. Knowledge that only someone that's studied the real thing incredibly closely (or went through their documents and actual, legitimate correspondence) would know is implied or stated outright.
The plot? Several officials are planning to raise a small army and decapitate the CCP, replacing Mao with none other than Deng Xioping, who, if you believe the bullshit you're putting together, has placed several spies in the ruling party and desires to create a China free from communism through, and you can hardly contain a chuckle while writing it, creating an elected, truly free government chosen by the people, as he at the same time harshly criticises Mao's politics in every letter you write in his name. All backed by the USSR that wishes to subjugate China to add to its servitor states, as it believes that all communist nations must be united under its own banner.
Because Russia sucks and communism sucks double. makes sense, right? Like, Mao literally read Karl Marx and immediately fell in love, why wouldn't this guy look at the West and think to himself 'hey, I like that idea'.
Because all of that wouldn't be enough, of course, you then proceed to plant several incriminating documents all over the government to point the Chinese at the right direction. This will be the worst hidden 'coup' in the history of coups.
You make heavy use of your shadow form to sneak around, teleporting from place to place thanks to the Thinker, who is controlling your teleporters and connected to your thoughts in real time. You steal correspondence and add to it, study handwriting to replicate it, find whatever details you can weave into your net of lies and do so. You're spending all day on this whole thing but in the end?
It's absolutely worth it. You're sure.
Stealing a few pieces of hair coming from Mao himself is, paradoxically, harder than implicating the good third of the government on local levels in a massive fake conspiracy, but you do manage; it's not like security measures are really meant to defend against invisible, non-physical intruders slithering along walls and across halls.
It's simplicity itself once you get inside his personal residence, just picking through a few rooms silently and nigh-invisible as you are at night. Once you have that hair, well, that's when the real fun can get started.
Finding a picture of Mao's face is easy as pie even compared to this meagre challenge, him seemingly genuinely believing his visage is somehow leading people to lead better lives in line with the tenets of communism, so once you have both you can get to the master stroke of your plan; this man can be counted upon to absolutely ruin China, yes, but can he be counted on to do so as your schedule demands?
Historically speaking, no. Luckily, you do have a way to… help him along with that, as it were.
"Live long and prosper, unknowing to your failures!" You want him to think he's having some full success with every idiotic thought pissed out of his mouth. "Bring destruction with every word, rending loyal subjects!" And curse number two, everyone that's actually loyal to him to some extent shall suffer and whatever he gets up to shall be even worse than it already would be.
As always, you can't quite guarantee your curses work out as you intend for them to, but your wording and the situation at hand should work out as intended, more or less. Hopefully.
Welcome to a brand new dawn of communism, China. You're welcome, ya suckers.
Being quite done with what you'd consider your work day, your work being to get up once every couple couple months and screw over a bunch of people for the heck of it, you call it an early night and return home to cook some dinner for everyone as a nice little surprise.
'Dinner', in this case, being comprised of a couple bags' worth of blood baked into every dish, but hey, it's perfectly doable; seeing as cooking is ultimately just chemistry and the functions usually filled by eggs can in fact be taken care of by sufficient amounts of blood instead, you just go ahead and have it do just that.
Blood-bread is a new and interesting development, at least. It doesn't taste bad either, and the Little Sisters also get their own version made of ADAM-blood as it is still being produced by undead inside your base.
Riley even helps you make a fizzy blood-drink, on top of the bread and the cake for desert. Honestly, just baking your own bread is pretty amazing and fun in its own way.
As for what else you did before returning to sleep… Well, you have been neglecting your wives an awful lot, staying in hibernation for so long, so you take a couple hours just between yourself, Sarah, Nora and a load of aromatic oils and bath salts.
You can see your daughters peeking in, by the way, thinking they're clever crawling through the vent systems like the Little Sisters do. You let them.
It is now the second half of 1970
Summary of current state of events:
The Cold War rages on. Coldly.
The Neutral Alliance of Nations is being considered with wariness by nearby nations, but otherwise welcomed as an initiative of peace ad cooperation. The USA like it, the USSR dislikes it over its overall capitalist leanings.
Cryptic Solutions Incorporated is prevalent all throughout the NAN, with water treatment plants remaining its most prominent business. Second comes logistics, as a massive network of railway lines and stations has been erected throughout member nations, with smaller connections still under construction. Each bit of cargo is another contact with CS, regardless of who transports it where, as all trains are controlled by it.
Discontent in rural areas is up overall, content in larger cities is rising. Modern conveniences are spreading.
Saudi Arabia has become a manufacturing powerhouse, taking in any available raw resources to transform them into any potential product and selling it off again.
Profits are on the rise.
You begin the second half of 1970 by having Sinclair have a little talk with Iraq's president; much like the one with Nasser, it went pretty alright and finalized your control of the country as desired.
Now that you have that take care of, Cryptic Solutions is expanding from Iraq to Turkey, using quality privatized public services and your broadband economic arsenal to batter your way into its market and push for it to agree to join NAN as well, to demarcate its stance as neutral in the ideological fight between west and east.
Naturally, there is some hesitance at first, given Turkey is right on the doorstep to the USSR, or rather is the USSR's doorstep should the communist superpower decide to kick its way into Europe, but that's what negotiations are for, after all, isn't it?
While Turkey is easy enough to approach, Spain is initially… difficult. Francisco Franco is still around, but he has been less and less in control of the country after the period known as the Spanish Miracle; old age combined with Parkinson's will do that to you, you suppose.
He's still prime minister, but the position has been officially diverged from that of the head of state by this point in time. The man really hasn't been able to get much work done and actually approaching him to make an offer beyond belief does prove itself to be… difficult.
In the end you just have a Wraith appear before him in the dark of night and offer him a vial of red, with a simple offer. If he drinks it, he will live. If he does not, he will die after a few years of rotting away powerlessly.
You're pretty sure he thinks it's just a dream when he wakes up- until he sees the vial, that is.
It'll take a while until Franco will be of any use, so you content yourself with sitting back and waiting a couple months, but as he rapidly recovers his faculties and begins to reassert his authority over Spain, you soon have Sinclair make the journey all the way toward Spain; it takes some doing from him, but there is a meeting.
Your man on the outside, as it were, is spinning a vial of red between his fingers. A week later, Spanish ports are shipping in large amounts of wares from Saudi Arabia, produced in increased quantities as you can at will and brought to the Suez canal via train, then onwards through ships.
A decent enough first step, you suppose. Through Spain, you should be able to directly export into the EU at large, but you don't really have any official presence there yet. Something to change later. For now, you just cracked yet another market wide open- and controversial as Franco may be, having literally had his early opposition mass-murdered before he eventually relaxed the reigns of his regime, the man is neither stupid nor is he going to make you come up to the surface and take what he got from you back by force.
Otherwise, he's getting a vampire-dropkick-shaped hole through his head, obviously enough.
In terms of scientific 'innovation', you just have a couple of old thorium reactors improved based upon a design you come up with, drawing from actual technology from the thirties that was eventually dropped in favor of what you have at the current time because thorium, interestingly, can't be enriched to the level required for making nukes out of it, which happen to be the hot shit right now everyone's after.
So building thorium reactors allows you to produce electricity from sources nobody can question, elegantly ensuring that anyone that does look into it knows that if the NAN is producing a nuclear arsenal of its own, which would be a huge deal for everyone else right now, it is not through this.
Honestly, you're mainly just annoyed you can't slap eldritch cores into every nation under your purview and call it a day. You essentially use improved designs from Earth Fallout, just adjusted to work with what you have and call it a day instead as it is.
If you wanted to nuke something, you wouldn't build a stupid nuke, you'd just jury-rig an eldritch core to explode and teleport anything you want to keep out of the blast radius. Or go there in person and throw down as such, same difference.
In other news, you're pleased to note that Cryptic Solutions Incorporated has begun sponsoring universities; scholarships for promising students, research grants, the works. The Thinker has expressed interest in cooperating with you to guide humanity toward greater heights as well, so you may just end up having a direct link to million of people's innovations a couple decades down the line.
Well, a decade or two. You are accelerating a few developments in technology as is, after all.
But for now, with no sponsored university laptops for everyone yet, all you can do is pour money into educating your livestock monkeys and hope a couple good ones pop out. Incidentally you're also donating generous sums into the building and maintenance of public schools all over your territory, only mildly influencing them towards not teaching religion in your damn class rooms and all. Meaning they still can, just not very much- your goal is to slowly reduce the amount of classes given on religion until theology is just some obscure school of thought people dissect for their philosophy majors down the line, but there's no need to hurry things along quite yet.
What you do hurry up, on the other hand, is the formation of a new, separate part of your business model involving certain opportunities in and around central- and southern Africa, your company's vicinity to the constant fighting between minor factions in the area rather quite advantageous to someone that is perfectly fine with equipping and training a sizable group of mercenary fighters, to say the least.
There really are a myriad of minor conflicts constantly ongoing at any one time, and here once again the NAN is coming in handy; having been planning something to this effect all along, there are provisions towards corporate military personnel, all hidden and nestled in enough legal speak you're pretty sure nobody outside of yourself, the Thinker, Nora and Sarah, that is, the people that designed it, has an accurate idea of how this entire thing will look in practice.
Oh, sure, some people probably caught on to some parts of this whole thing, seeing as you did make sure the NAN's legal documentation and charter are out in the open, but few people really expect you to just… do exactly what is outlined under these conditions.
Simply put, Cryptic Solutions, being pointed out in these documents by name, may hire and maintain its own military personnel provided documentation towards them is provided to a council manned by signatory NAN members' overseers and approved. To a layman, this might seem like the politicians involved may have foreseen Cryptic Solutions, being as important and omnipresent as it is throughout the alliance, acquiring its own security personnel and expanding it into its own corporate army, hence this arrangement being put into place to keep any such prospect at bay as they could, in theory, refuse to let you hire someone and as such prevent any troops being gathered, as it were, at least legally.
This is because you specifically went out of your way to make it look like that.
In reality, however, mass applications are agreed on like on an assembly line of approval stamps and signatures, as everyone involved has been instructed to agree to everything. Not without question, but while keeping any questions out of the way of them approving everything, naturally.
The end result is that you can produce your own military hardware and equip a first crop of five thousand men with everything one might need to fight a war, running them through drills for several months to let them learn discipline and the use of their weapons. All completely legally and without a care in the world about who might see you do this, it goes without saying.
The end goal of this exercise will be to weed out the soldiers from the leaders and put the latter into positions of leadership in an eventual merger of a united NAN army and this branch of Cryptic Solution, the private military contractor one. That said, they'll still have to fight to prove they're capable enough, of course; soldiers are paid for dying on the field and you will ensure they do their part of the job before you're done with them.
Now the equipment you're providing itself is nothing extremely far out of the ordinary, just very reliable and rugged to stay functional with minimal maintenance whether in the heat of the desert or the mud of the jungle. And, of course, you go out of your way to have a few armored vehicles produced, with mounted heavy miniguns, rocket launchers, the works.
That should see the troops through pretty much everything they may encounter. Outside of guerrilla tactics, there's precious little a few militias can really do when heavily armed soldiers with body armor start shooting a place up hard.
Training covers pretty much any situations you may conceivably send your recruits into, from defending fixed positions to fighting retreats over to surprise attacks and siege warfare, from both sides. And, of course, intelligence as well as counter-intelligence, cryptography and decryption techniques drilled into anyone with a head for such things. You also do create one of your Carmilla minions, sending her up to instruct the instructors, so to speak, and identify any promising officer candidates ahead of time.
Most of your recruits are from Egypt at this point in time, many of the poor lower class jumping at the chance to enlist in a brand of military that they provisionally trust after the whole 'bringing water to the poor' thing you pulled a while ago. That's not to say you don't have a solid influx of young men from other NAN nations (because of course you recruit from among them), just that over eighty percent come from Egypt at this point in time.
That statistic very likely will shift with time, but for now it is as it is. You'll just make sure a few field officer quotas are kept to ensure you end up with a few show pieces from everywhere, but that aside nationality isn't allowed to mean much of anything as is inside the military force you're envisioning.
Well, you'll see how they turn out. Mortal fodder just takes forever to ready for war and just expires within decades afterwards, it's a miracle some nations have a military at all…
It is now 1971
The Cold War continues on. Nothing much notable has happened, aside from a few minor events near the NAN area.
Jordan and Lebanon want in on the alliance and have passed laws against religious extremism, forbidding preaching outside of designated religious buildings and mandating clear prohibitions against armed groups outside of the military or similar, clearly acting to curtail anything like the PLO and its subcultures. It's actually a lot more than what even NAN member states have been doing so far about religion and makes Israel feel faintly uncomfortable; barring your intervention, the plan is to let both join this coming year.
In China, a political purge now called the Intellectual Revolution has taken place, your plan to take out competent CCP officials bearing fruit. New prison complexes have been built to imprison 'legions of traitors of Great Leader Mao and the people' and a rough third of the Chinese population is currently being starved of any food it is producing, including guards keeping whole villages in oe place and forbidding them from scavenging food from the forest, so they are too weak to rebel while the traitors that apparently riled them up are being hunted down.
All of this honestly worked better than you expected. A little too well, in fact; Mao has openly accused Russia of supporting the enemies of the Chinese people and officially ended diplomatic ties with the USSR, the Chinese army (that isn't busy suppressing the population) being stationed near China's Russian borders in case of an attack.
These numbnuts better not start a war while you aren't looking…
In other news, the US has made moves to try and acquire shares of Cryptic Solutions- only to find out that you do not have investors, not being publically traded. Try to keep up guys, will you?
So then, on to business! First off, after several months of building time you have your own ships being produced now, big freighters capable of bringing considerable amounts of cargo from point A to point B. Cargo containers having been a thing for years already, essentially the logistical invention that makes it feasible and cheap enough to make shipping wares in great masses across oceans really worth it from a monetary perspective, they are naturally what your ships are all about, being built to do nothing but transport very large amounts of them at any one given time.
A bit more efficient motor slapped onto a really large frame that can still fit through things like the Suez canal and you're good to go, pretty much.
Naturally you quickly make use of your expanded ability to have stuff shipped around the world by establishing more or less formalized trade routes with America, shipping modern capitalism's products (you literally have Sinclair market them as such) to large port cities where local companies buy them off of you to sell them onwards to end users. More importantly though, you also have a mail catalog business opened, letting you sell directly for a lower price compared to your 'competitors'.
You're also opening shipping routes towards Syria and Iran, on a related note, while your political puppets are making overtures of asking them to join NAN. You doubt it will take long for all of that to take care of itself.
In other economic news, you've expanded business in Spain, with local stores manned by locals as well selling whatever… washing machines and dryers? You deign to ship to them. Man, whatever floats their boat, you suppose, you don't do the economic forecasts you just check against this stuff with Henley on occasion.
There's also a whole new branch of tourism to exploit, with regular shipments of people with too much money saved up that are up for touring the middle east, which is experiencing very little amounts of death and destruction at this time. Hey, if they're willing to pay for the privilege of sweating their asses off in Egypt to see the pyramids and whatever, you can have people arrange for their stay, no problem.
Just like that, you are making even more money this year. It can be so simple when you have every conceivable advantage, can't it?
Your little secret government puppet illuminati are growing just as nicely as your profit margins, by the way, the heads of state of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan joining the ones you've already collected as the last of those two of those join NAN.
It's always nice when these things happen without you having to whisper into anyone's mind for it; human brainmeats can be quite fragile and all that, so you don't often directly take over, even when their thralling helps with that a bit. It's fine for a couple seconds, but anything longer can leave lasting issues with them, annoyingly.
Anyways, you also go ahead and have your puppets do state visits with various island nations situated conveniently for yourself, particularly payin attention towards Greece, Cyprus and Taiwan. You know, those little odds and ends nobody really cares all that much about, eh? Also, both Syria and Iran are all up for signing on to NAN already, their respective leaders in the know as well, so to speak. You blame- you mean, credit Sarah for that one, she took a couple weeks out of cuddling up to your motionless body to get the ball rolling on those.
More importantly though, China. China, China, China. You, uh, you may have kind of overdone it?
Mao seem to be having fun screaming with pulsing veins all over his forehead, but at least there's no talk of nuclear war… yet. He did, however, order the execution of two dozen men in under twenty-four hours once, as new record in the time since you've put him under observation- it is your understanding that he used to kill people more as an accidental part of his politics, as opposed to directly pointing out some that had to die, but then perhaps him being convinced that only he has the 'heavenly wisdom' to find traitors on sight may have something to do with it.
In other news, he's caused another famine in eastern China. Again. How he manages to do this with such regularity you have no idea, but apparently he's begun stockpiling grain in a location not too far from the capital… One that is known to flood occasionally.
At least he's also still exporting massive amounts of food to Russia and only making the famine worse, despite still believing the Russians sponsored that last 'coup'? Who even knows with him, anymore.
Note to self, establishing a private boarding school is a hell of a pain in the ass. It isn't hard by itself, granted, but you'd still need to have someone work on getting students to attend it, meaning you'd need to appeal to the parents, then keep them thinking it's a good idea to send their kids to this school of yours consistently.
Doable, but kind of a pain. And even then, you'd need to gather reputable teachers, in addition to everything else… The curriculum and the facilities really aren't the problem, but it's much harder to fabricate a really convincing reputation for your staff and institution.
You'd need to have someone go around brainwash everyone involved regularly just to maintain it. Honestly?
… You don't feel like it. You'll just go ahead and have R do some more research into tonics instead, that's what you have the test subjects for.
R Report on Tonics Improvements:
Natural Camouflage 2: Adds 20 to all Stealth rolls, grants natural skin pigment shifting to imitate chameleons' camouflage
Natural Camouflage 3: Adds 30 to all Stealth rolls, grants non-perfect invisibility while stationary
Machine Evasion 2: Adds 20 to all Stealth rolls against nonorganic sensors and blurs the user's features on them
Machine Evasion 3: Adds 30 to all Stealth rolls against nonorganic sensors, wiping any details beyond the user's presence from footage (pictures become blurred and vague, voices are distorted etc.)
Thrifty Haggler 2: Adds 20 to all haggling rolls regardless of which skill they use
Thrifty Haggler 3: Adds 30 to all haggling rolls regardless of which skill they use, also applies to Observation rolls to determine details about objects or creatures
Gunslinger 2: Adds 20 to all Gun rolls
Gunslinger 3: Adds 30 to all Gun rolls, grants the perks 'Doubleshot', 'Deflection Bullet' and 'Gun-Fu'
So, fun story? A lot of the old colonies are still de facto controlled by their old masters, particularly the French ones as said French generally quite enjoy siphoning as many natural resources and just economic output from them as possible.
It goes without saying that there are groups in the area that do not like this, and you just so happen to have been putting your new recruits through a rigorous training program over the past half a year and are in need of an enemy to have them fight.
One plus one equals two. Simple as that.
Combined with your already ongoing charm offensive and one small government on Africa's north-western coast forcefully overthrown and replaced by one that is all up for joining the NAN club after the other, you're looking at everything from Morocco to Cote d'lvoire or however it's pronounced added to the alliance, incidentally also bringing you much cloer to Spain in a very direct way.
The fighting goes almost laughably well, by the way. Your troops generally prefer sudden, unrelenting assaults on badly fortified and underpaid enemy soldiers, as the local governments nominally in charge don't have much money to go around either and they're mostly busy pocketing it for themselves, making it easy to abuse the relative lack of equipment and training both.
In short, you may have a mere five thousand men, but by taking on one government after the other you can simply race them along the coast and do their thing too quickly for most of anyone to react. By the time foreign governments (primarily the French, as you'd already noted) realize what's going on and send 'peacekeeping troops' to 'protect the democratically elected governments of former colonies', your pawns are literally just driving up to the garrisons in what amounts to heavily armored SUVs mounted with miniguns and rocket launchers.
Suffice to say, you have successfully instilled the kind of spirit you wanted to see in your recruits. Go, you.
Well, you don't necessarily install new democracies in place of the old rulers, mind you, but they're telling everyone that isn't African to go fuck off unless they happen to be in the NAN, which is good enough for you. Combined with Cryptic Solutions spreading along all the additional coastal nations joining up as soon as they can because you literally had them told to do so (or else) like a cancer or a virus, your influence is growing by leaps and bounds, with your next batch of recruits already on the way just in case for later on.
Yay.
Oh hey, it's actually happening. You did know when this exact thing happened historically, so it doesn't come as much of a surprise, but… It's still kind of shocking to actually witness, to be there for in person.
President Nixon has announced the 'War on Drugs'. It's kind of like seeing the Prohibition happen, or, like, NEPEA-5; a train wreck in motion, one you just can't tear your eyes off of as it impacts that wall called 'reality' and deforms with the force of it all, killing and wounding everyone inside of it.
It's actually pretty amazing how much bullshit people let Nixon get away with before he was booted out of office. Then again, presidents do get all the perks when it comes to being disgraceful assholes, don't they?
You actually did read up on this whole policy a bit, and yeah you're pretty sure it's just a means to persecute political entities Nixon's White House seeks to crush- the antiwar left and black communities, respectively, standing out.
Equate the former with marijuana and the latter with heroin in the evening news night after night and just like that the public considers it justified for them to be raided, their gatherings shut down, homes raided etcetera etcetera, the point is not really to do much of anything about drugs- why would it, they're just a means to an end.
People are afraid of drugs destroying their communities and that's an easy enough lever to pull, nothing more and nothing less. And the reason you literally know all of this is because a White House staffer admitted as much twenty years down the line.
So yeah, one reason why the political left isn't getting that nasty little war in Vietnam to stop is because Nixon is literally methodically persecuting it to keep it going. Did you ever mention he's one of your least favorite president in history, by the way?
You don't really have deep opinions about this, mind you, but c'mon, it's Nixon. The man is literally an ass with a face.
There also is word floating around in America about the NAN producing drugs and selling them in America, which is currently just a conspiracy theory made up by ignorant Americans (also known as average Americans, let's be honest), but more importantly there have also been several tariffs imposed on certain products entering the US of A, primarily targeting household devices from mixers to washing machines.
Your primary exports in that direction, in other words. Ostensibly, your low prices and high quality are a good thing everyone is happy for, but native companies have complained enough some idiots in the current administration thought it'd be a good idea to fuck with Cryptic Solutions.
You could've seen in coming if your Wraith weren't so preoccupied with higher levels of government, as in, keeping watch of China, Russia and Nixon to make sure no nukes fly and if you have to have half of some military's high command assassinated on the spot to keep them from flying.
Naturally, you can't exactly leave this standing as it is. You briefly consider mass-producing psychoactive drugs and distributing them all around America so hard elementary school kids are tripping in their free time, but quickly shake the idea off; as much as it would be hilarious to let the drugs fight back in the war fought against them, that simply wouldn't be effective in screwing everyone involved with this shitshow over.
So your plan is fairly simple. There's enough classified documents going around the White House to fill up a couple basements with, and though it's kind of a pain you have to find something incriminating among them somewhere.
Sadly, Nixon never did file a piece of paper where he noted, in bullet points, his plans to suppress political opposition by making it socially acceptable to persecute it, but thanks to your literally unbeatable spies and some effort help from Sarah, you eventually manage to intercept communications between several of Nixon's staff and some news companies, combined with a bunch of statistics that are only minimally bullshit about unjustified police violence over time.
The big issue here is that nobody is so out of their mind they actually write any of the real plan down anywhere. Everything the White House and the senate are doing could be argued to be genuinely targeted at drugs and the consumption thereof, the entire point of finding a justification first being that even if leftists and blacks are in the crosshairs, they can just blame their victims for being the ones to do drugs.
So you cheat. And apply your Sarah again. And a week later you have several signed notifications that declare that the 'hippies and negros' are to be shot on sight now that the 'Cleansing' has begun.
Yeah, you are going there. Nixon can kiss his ass goodbye the moment you can get a couple of largely independent news networks to report this one, and there's no lack of them in the US when you look hard enough.
It is now the second half of 1971
You're still sitting on the Nixon Blowup (trademark pending) for a bit, have to wait a month or two for maximum effect
Recent expansions of NAN mean Cryptic Solutions must expand faster than ever, covering more space and building more water plants. And railways. And everything, really, it's kind of a lot of construction work that goes into every place you more or less take over; the population is almost always on your side in this regard, considering the noted increase to quality of life your company brings wherever it walks.
Your troops are currently stationed spread over member nations, with the costs of garrisons naturally shouldered by Cryptic Solutions itself. You're the one with the money, after all, not much point in trying to press more of it out of what amounts to your money-generating machines, also known as governments.
Riley's continued efforts to replicate functioning Passenger tissue have been met with failure so far, but apparently her power can still use the failed leftovers to some pretty neat effect. It is thus that you are happy to announce you have a crystalline giant spider with twelve legs and the size of a person hanging around now. It's controlled remotely and mostly used to patrol the research labs' halls and surroundings, as it can function both at the bottom of the ocean and within the building itself, as well as an occasional sparring partner for Lilian.
You honestly only rarely bother to pay attention to any of the reports and account balances that are uploaded into your telepathic network, quite satisfied with just letting Henley and the rest of the accounting department deal with the day-to-day running details of your business, but even so not even you can escape at least keeping a more or less accurate idea of how things are going in mind, hence you still look over quarterly reports at the minimum.
And hey, you have to say, your minions haven't been slacking off all that much, which is more than you can say about yourself. It's pretty easy to just slide off into watching your lovers and kids do their own things, getting lost in… Yeah, the equivalent of funny cat videos for your situation, you decide.
One thing that's been going on your nerves, though, is the fact nearly every member nation of NAN has its own currency- meaning that these financial reports you cannot completely escape even while a literally unmoving corpse are kind of giant pain to read.
Henley tries to keep them succinct, but he also refuses to shorten out anything that is vaguely relevant to the data he is providing you, meaning that the documents you have to mentally scan through just… Look, you can do it, you do do it, but it's really annoying whenever you get to it.
Clearly, a solution must be found. Luckily, you have an idea on hand already; if the European Union can have a unified currency, then so can the NAN. Oh, sure, not everyone will agree to the idea of trading in whatever coins and colorful stones they used so far, but there are legitimate advantages to having a single kind of money whose value is guaranteed by the backing of every single member nation as one.
Or rather the Crypt Standard, with its value pegged to the market cap of Cryptic Solutions. Because why wouldn't you take the opportunity to officially own the economy within your area of influence?
… It does help that you will be able to directly regulate inflation slash deflation rates across your territory, especially given the good old oil crash you just so happen to know is a very real possibility- and yet another gun whose trigger you can pull virtually any time you feel like.
You'll set things to moving for the time being, sometime next year you should have resolved this whole… issue… to a satisfactory degree.
Technically, the name of the new currency, the Mesopotamian Shekel, will be sourced from Israel, as Shekel is already the name of the nation's money, but that's mostly because Tel Aviv has the stock exchange so your first thought went towards it when you started considering possible options.
Sure, you could've left it the Alliance itself to decide, but you don't want to wait a year for a committee to come to a conclusion about what possible names to suggest to the NAN at large. This is the nice part about effectively ruling everything from the shadows, you can just make things happen and they happen.
Simple as that.
In other news, you've looked into simply buying a boarding school ever since you decided it was officially a massive pain to build one up from zero, something made much, much easier thanks to the enormous piles of cash you have lying around ever since you started watering the middle east.
It's a nice school up in Cairo, as in the better parts of town that have been getting richer and better over the last while ever since you took over; it turns out that when you are directly controlling and manipulating large swathes of the economy, including a considerable and constant flow of goods you are effectively using Egypt to redistribute and transport.
You've been giving jobs to drivers, sailors (except you don't have sails on your ships, so… mariners?), pilots, maintenance workers and so on on a never-before-seen scale, combined with the work distributed for the sake of the water treatment plants, warehouses, local factories (because hey, you do recognize some stuff just isn't worth the transport compared to just producing locally) and so on and so forth, which in turn drives to generate more wealth and distribute it evenly over all the people that get paid a living wage from your hands.
Long story short, the economy's booming so everyone is getting richer, including the already rich. Not as much as they probably could if you cared to allow corruption and the concentration of wealth generated by your means, which you don't, but they're still making money off of the general increase in money flow.
Hence it is perfectly doable to find some relatively posh boarding school for you to buy out, under the guise of a 'test case for corporate, privatized schooling'. That's right, you're taking over the education system at its roots, or will sooner or later at any rate, so you may as well treat this as an initial survey to see how your methodology would work.
It's pretty simple, you just fire two teachers that seem like they'd be an issue, hire a couple new ones, rearrange the curriculum a little (you still did have a few old drafts outlined in preparation for teaching your own kids, not yet aware as you were that they'd be born basically knowing everything your network does) and make it known to the principal, in no uncertain terms, who he answers to now using one of your Wraiths.
Time to see what will happen, as the science suggests when presented with a new petri dish. It's just a bunch of kids' futures on the line, America does worse to those on the regular even on Earth Bet.
Incidentally, while you're at it you're also sending a few missives through your usual intermediaries (making Sinclair and Henley figure things out) to 'adjust' university curriculums (curriculae?) around the NAN, to have theology be a more analytical study of the historical effects of faith than… whatever it is now.
Look, Cryptic Solutions is financing a considerable amount of university activity in all member nations, may as well use the inherent clout that gives you to kick religion in the balls.
"The new transfer students are sooo pretty, aren't they?"
"Yeah, they're definitely European, aren't they?"
"Their names sound like they might be!"
It went without saying that two transfer students, a pair of sisters, transferring into school in the middle of the year caused no end of stir among the students of the girls-only boarding school that had been chosen to house them for some time, barring any objections on their end.
"So they'll be rooming with us?"
"Do you think they'll mind being foreigners? You know, with nobody like they're used to…"
"We just have to make them feel welcome as much as we can," one of the girls decided.
Lilian and Serena shared a nod, both deciding it was a good moment to step in. Opening the door, their marched right into the dorm room, laser-focusing on the two girls already inside.
"Hello."
"We're Lilian-"
"-and Serena."
"You are our new toys."
"Congratulations."
"… Eh?"
Suffice to say, everyone involved was introduced to their daddy's technique, gleaned from his memories. There were no survivors.
Oh yeah, and while you're at it, you're also having your people (aka Henley) invest big into Yugoslavian companies in preparation for a big takeover a couple years down the line.
There's a whole thing with how they've set up worker cooperative systems and stuff, but what really counts is that while Yugoslavia is part of the Warsaw Pact under Russia, its leader has managed to piss off the big daddy, so it's kind of really, really isolated- later on, after the official end of the cold war, people looked and realized that the average quality of life within the nation had regressed to medieval levels.
That and massive racial tensions running deep inside its populace, boiling over to the point of exploding… soon. Your changes to what seems to have been a halfway accurate timeline have started seriously compounding upon themselves, so accurate predictions are becoming harder to make.
That is its own kind of vaguely impressive, honestly. It's certainly not easy to run a whole country down to that point. Anyways, you have a few plans for how to worm your way in there, for now you're just setting up the first steps.
You kind of have bigger concerns on your mind at the moment. Such as Nora is giving birth and it's twins!
You hold your entirely silent twin daughters in your arms, the baby vampires already showing some dark fuzz growing from their heads as they stare back at you. They're so precious! Of course you're making it a point to shove everything you see and think into your secret baby memories folder to embarrass your kids a few centuries down the line, like any responsible dad, but that doesn't stop you from simultaneously grinning like an idiot at their existence.
"I think they like you already," a mildly exhausted Nora says from where she's lying, more emotionally so than anything else of course, her undead body quickly recovering to its pre-pregnant-with-twins state. "Not that any of our daughters don't, so it's no big surprise."
The two identical baby girls simultaneously grab for your hands, holding your thumbs in the bone-breaking grip of baby vampires. Daddy, both of them think at once, their mental voice not so much two (adorable little) people speaking at once as it is one single thought process.
You tilt your head, wordlessly ending thoughts of agreement to Nora as you focus on your youngest kids. "So, are you two separate girls or a single one with two bodies? It's hard to tell with our kind, it turns out."
The twins glance at each other, then back at you. Daddy, they repeat.
"I know exactly that you understand the question I just asked," you can't help yourself but jokingly chide, giving each of them a kiss on their foreheads. "So young and already so sassy?"
… Serena, they immediately shift the blame. You just chuckle, already knowing all your kids will be a handful and a half at this rate.
'Experimental Log #6969:
Efforts towards establishing a new brand of potion to counteract some of the potentially exaggerated effects of the Atlas line thereof have been going well, the new line of potions provisionally branded 'Quicksilver' smoothing out body contours and allowing for an overall more attractive appearance.
A new effect of potions has also been discovered. Simply titled 'Nymphomania Potions' for now, they seem to induce burning arousal in whoever drinks them, additionally ensuring consumers tire little and remain capable of sex at all times.
Observation is still ongoing, but I believe this has potential, depending on any possible side effects or similar- at a certain level of concentration, it should be possible to taint water supplies and retain the desired effects, if potentially diluted and less immense than a direct dose. Refer to the logs 'Potion Sickness' and 'Masochist Regenerator' for typical observed adverse effects.
Yes, I mean you, Yoshi. I know you read these logs.'
So then, you have even more kids. That is not only great, but also a pretty good reason, in your reckoning at least, to take a little time and spend it with all of your kids, as you can't just go around pretending Lilian and Serena don't exist somehow just because you sent them to have some fun in that boarding school you bought up in all but name.
So you have all four of them here, the twins who insisted on having some kind of appropriately similar names now christened Iris and Ivy holding onto one of their elder sisters each, having silently demanded they cuddle with them as soon as your older girls came into the room.
It's wonderfully adorable and if only you had the arms, you'd be holding onto all of them yourself right now. Oh wait, you do.
Extending additional werewolf-like arms from your shoulders- they're mostly human, but with bestial claws and distinctly too large (and muscled) to fit on a human frame, not to mention the short fur and paw pads at your added fingertips- you gather up Serena and Ivy, the former of which squeals in joy at the ride, your human arms gently picking up Lilian and Iris.
"So girls, want to have some fun?"
"Yes, please~!" Your foxy daughter giggles, currently lifting her head from where she's lying in your paws with her belly up.
"'Fun' is appreciated," Lilian adds, nodding in the princess carry mirroring her sister. She adjusts her position to better let her younger sister rest in her own arms. "Especially toddler-appropriate fun."
"Well, vampire toddlers are in a league of their own, but I get what you mean," you smile indulgently.
You were a little worried the girls would be bored with this pretty quickly, but as it turns out you needn't have; no idea whether it's because they're your daughters and inherited it or it's just childish curiosity and joy of creating something, but all of your girls are perfectly happy to take a few hours and just mess around with colors, painting whatever they want.
You even make sure watercolors are available and show them all a few tricks towards getting the intensity and depth of color you want when using them.
Lilian herself still prefers to watch others work over doing so herself, going so far as to help them arrange colors and other tools as appropriate, so you don't really have a baseline for how it would look if she were to try her hand herself.
Serena, on the other hand, is childishly amateurish, but in a good way, and very enthusiastic besides; her pictures are the kinds of thing you'd proudly put up on your freezer, if you had any single one on hand you could decide to use for that. She's certainly better than most kid her age would be, of course, probably just from absorbing this kind of thing from you and Sarah both, but she still needs a lot more practice if she wants to pursue this kind of thing.
Not that she has to. In the first place, your blonde daughter is extremely intent on getting others to paint her, excitedly posing and peeking at everyone else's works.
That leaves Iris and Ivy, the twins that seem like they literally think with one mind rather than two. And, well… You did get a pair of stools to let them work, and while they aren't anywhere close to professional levels either, you can literally see them improving as they go, Serena roping Lilian into posing for them as every stroke of their brushes, mutually completing each other in a very impressive way in the eyes of anyone that doesn't know they're more one person than two, becomes better, more refined and accurate.
You feel the need to point out they're less than a day old in the bodies of toddlers and already pretty damn good as is. You wonder how much better the twins may get- who knows, they may well outdo yourself one day.
Oh, what you were doing yourself in the meantime? Just painting them painting their sisters posing for them, a kind of meta-narrative about the thoughts going through your head surfacing in your painting. It's pretty nice.
You've done this a couple times by now, so it's not like there's anything particularly interesting going on; you're scouting around for isolated groupings of people, which just so happen to be prime targets for you to disappear as food, then having everyone else teleport in to do your thing.
Hey, with your sheer speed and the extreme acuity of your senses, both enhanced by the vantage afforded by your flying forms, you're the fastest and most efficient scout around. Maybe if you had a few satellites in orbit you could just have the Thinker run the footage through analysis really quick for much the same results, but annoyingly enough you're pretty sure the arguing children that are the US and Russia would notice you putting one up.
It's something for later. Once you're done buying up the entire world.
For the moment, you're just ranging across the Amazon rainforest, seeking out aforementioned isolated villages, tribes and whatever else in person. These kinds of places being what they are, it'll be decades before people realize someone went around methodically wiping out human habitation in the area, by which time nothing will particularly indicate your activity anymore anyways.
Time has a way of wiping clear any clues and hints, if you know how to use it. You'd like to think you do. And if not, well, it's not like you particularly care if anyone figures out this absence of people is unnatural eventually.
So you show up as a whole family, usually initiating diplomatic relations by means of abusing your (relatively) recently upgraded telekinesis plasmid and forcefully hoisting everyone present up in the air, then plucking them down one by one to feed to one of the twins- interestingly, it seems there's no difference which of the two you hold out to latch onto piteously screaming natives whose limbs you literally disabled to make for safe feeding, as they apparently count as a single vampire for these purposes, gaining the same powers at the same times and just as quickly as a single vampire would.
They're also very needy and want you or one of their mothers to hold them and rub their backs regularly as they feed. Just like real babies, honestly.
You do it with a smile, it goes without saying.
Most of your victims are either fainted or muttering to themselves after everyone in their village slash tribe slash group is consumed one after the other, just kind of shellshocked at the brutality and senseless (to their minds) violence inflicted, but eh, they can get in a chair circle and discuss their feelings inside the twins' inner world- another feature they share, by the way.
Only one of the people you end up killing actually tries to defend themselves effectively, raising a spear of all things before you can do your usual telekinetic trick. You tear him limb from limb and eat him personally to exemplify what you think about that.
Religion. It is and remains a consistent thing all over the world's history, a human way to express things that one does not understand and give them a face, relate to them, whether it is directly, such as believing spirits and gods to be inherent to natural phenomena or more abstractly, as a way to approach the endlessly senseless void of human existence.
That's the definition being taught in universities you can influence at the moment, a very historical and anthropological perspective on it. Maybe it's even the one 'right' way to discuss religion, in a way it doesn't get in the way of actual logic and business, but what do you know, you're an atheist undead abomination that cannot accept the existence of something greater than what you know to exist as opposed to some weird-ass imaginary friends some assholes thought up a few thousand years ago.
Well, okay, that's not fair, many people just don't really think that deeply about their faith. It's what you're leveraging to slowly weaken religion as a concept all over the middle east, after all; give them something else to think about and throw in some grade A economical advances and people have better things to do than pray several times a day.
Not that it's easy to shrug off centuries of tradition and dogma in a single generation, mind you, but by having younger generations lead the way in ignoring them more and more, you're slowly, but surely working away at it. That's not to say that everyone is completely fine with that, either, but again, you have the money, you can decide where the taxi drives, so to say.
That should be a saying, by the way.
Anyways, there are, as there always will be in a large enough population, naysayers and holdouts of the 'true believers' that used to be a big thing, though they've been on the way out ever since before Cryptic Solutions stepped onto the scene, truth be told.
As you remember, faith had kind of a violent renaissance era due to various events you don't need to really go into, just wouldn't be constructive here and now, but it was more or less about the Cold War being fought everywhere that wasn't the nuclear powers themselves, so everyone just kind of promoted whatever nice young man they could find that was on their side in the big ideological split between capitalism and communism.
It's a long story and nobody cares, once capes happened the middle east just kind of imploded in on itself one way or another. Still, it's a neat historical tidbit.
Back to those 'holdouts' you mentioned, though… There are still quite a few people vocal and downright outspoken about what they believe to be the way forwards for whatever nation they happen to be in and, indeed, the NAN at large, ironically enough both Muslims and Jews putting their differences aside in the face of ever-rising secularism pushing their faiths out of the big cities, where progress is the most keenly felt at any given time.
It wouldn't hold for any length of time if this threat were to let up of course, but for the time being some religious leaders are indeed of the opinion someone should lead in the name of religion.
This is why you are currently watching a Mosque crumble to pieces, burying a preacher and his flock alive in just such a way it is extremely unlikely they will survive for any length of time. "I didn't even know you could target the weak points of buildings like that," you comment to Nora.
"My powers are pretty nice, aren't they? You just have to think a little laterally."
Some might consider it horrible, barbaric and completely opposed to the values of freedom of religion, speech and any even minimally free nation how you are going around and essentially systematically assassinating your ideological opposition.
You would say some should go fuck off and deal with their own business for once, you have a multi-national alliance to lead to world domination. Sacrifices have to be made for the sake of expediency sometimes, especially other people you do not care about.
This won't make its way into any history books, of course. It's no big, demonstrative affair, nothing that anyone not part of your little threesome even knows about so far, but all over the NAN and beyond you are covertly arranging lethal 'accidents' for whoever is particularly religious and can't keep that to themselves.
Cars crash, violently, as Sarah whispers into the drivers' ears and you sometimes give things just the slightest nudge, sudden gravity shifts hidden by the destruction wrought that looks like what you'd expect normally. Buildings crumble over heads, Nora giving a few structurally important parts a good kick or two to make it all happen. Industrial equipment 'malfunctions', sabotaged by yourself to crush, smash and generally brutalize your targets.
It's a lot of fun actually, just sneaking around or even walking by openly, using your powers for a good, constructive purpose like this. Not that you always outright kill them, either, you also hide copious amounts of drugs and child pornography, pulling another Mao on a few faithful by making them look like a religious ring of criminals of the worst kind to everyone else's eyes.
Sarah has way too much fun with that last one, by the way.
It's a good few hours, all three of you really stretching your metaphorical legs, and you can't say you dislike the exercise personally; it's important to get your own feet on the ground every now and then, lest you lose perspective amidst the big picture, see?
Your lovers also both agree, though Riley later pouts at you a lot about how she would have supplied you with all sorts of deadly diseases with low infection rates to throw at them as well. Naturally, you quickly relent and teleport around a little to have that deal with the less important targets you didn't feel like finishing off right away at first.
Always so very nice to have a positive working environment for everyone, isn't it?
Living at the very bottom of the sea floor does grant you a unique perspective on some parts of marine ecology, you can't help but admit when you actually take a moment to consider that aspect of your secret supervillain base at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
You know, the secondary perks of this whole gig you've built up so far, or that the Thinker has built up for you. Same difference.
In this instance, for example, you're looking at a giant squid, one of several that are actual local to this area and may or may not have been enhanced by ADAM in some distant past when their ancestors fed on the slugs that ted to produce it naturally. It's the most likely explanation as to why giant fucking squids are a thing here.
But regardless, one of the things has been getting rather too casual with its tendency to squeeze down on one particular dome of one of your robot production facilities, so you had the Big Sisters go out there and kill it. They did a good job of it, too, and brought its corpse back with them like cats proud to bring you the results of their hunting.
Well, you have been thinking about getting an aquatic guard dog to help keep the local wildlife off your lawn. Two birds with one stone, you both get one and find a way to use the body, all the while the Sisters are very proud of themselves indeed. It's a good sign they've managed to get over their programming and overall aggression to the point they can cooperate like this, you think, even if acting like pack-hunting animals is still not quite where you want to get them…
"You know, when you did that one beach party, it wasn't a challenge to have an 'authentic' luau, yeah?" Nora sips from her coconut with an iron straw driven through it by you, for the sake of both keeping the original taste and just because you could. "Not that I'm complaining, I always wanted to visit Hawaii once."
"I wouldn't imagine it would have been easy before the vault," you shrug, watching the ocean waves rolling on and your kids playing in them. The twins are leading their older sisters on a wild chase through the wet sand, their footsteps dug in deep due to the speed and force with which they run.
You are pretty happy right now, by the way.
"Mhm. With the war going on and money always tight… Though that was more because we were just starting a family back then, property prices were soaring all the time. That's why suburbs were being built in places nobody wated to add any factories."
"Riveting," you remark, your connection lettig Nora know you're absolutely serious despite your sardonic smirk. "You know, it must've been pretty interesting to live in an increasingly totalitarian state like that."
"It wasn't all that bad. Sure, they were like exactly like you just described, but the powers that be were good at hiding how they went about things. For a while, anyways." Your dark-haired lover sighs, leaning back in her beach chair. "Then the war got worse and it was either believing the propaganda or just being endlessly negative about it. Though I still think it's hilarious how it was China back then, where it's Russia here and China has… well, Mao."
"And thank fuck for that. Just watching that nation being destroyed from within over and over is, like, ninety percent of my entertainment outside of the family." You smile, holding your own coconut out for Nora to bump her against. There's a metaphor here, but you refuse to think about it. "To Mao and the self-destructive idiocy of applied communism."
"The more things change, the more they stay the same," she ruefully adds, mirroring your expression.
This is the life, really.
'Under the guidance of the Great Leader's heavenly wisdom, all food rations shall be handed out at the central distribution center of your city of residence. All praise the Great Leader.'
'This distribution center does not hand out rations. All citizens must go to Town Hall to be registered. All praise the Great Leader.'
'Town Hall does not offer registration services at this time. All praise the Great Leader.'
Cheng spit on the ground, not caring about any of the guards that may see him. What were they gonna do, arrest him? Kill him? They were trying to kill everyone already anyways.
'Old Cheng' people called him, because he'd lived a long life and seen many things. Today he was trying to figure out how the new system for rations was supposed to work, because you couldn't buy food openly anymore- all of it was supposed to be taken by the government and distributed to everyone equally.
Ox shit, o' course. Most of the food people farmed was just sent off to whatever other country wanted it, no Chinese saw nine tenths of what they were making anymore these days. But no, they weren't even handing out rations anymore- he'd checked, he'd talked to people, and there was nothing to be done.
There was just… no food being delivered. They couldn't hand it out even if they wanted to.
So Old Cheng returned home, staring at the wall for a very long time. This was a problem. His wife was long dead, his children on the other side of the country and hopefully looking out for themselves- he hadn't heard from them in over a year. But the neighbors, the Wangs, they had two children, one very young, they couldn't keep on with no food for very long.
And the prices on the black market were… Not good. Simple folk like all of them couldn't feed themselves that way, either.
So he took his old tools and went out to see Old Sheng. He knew the other man too old to be anything other than 'Old Sheng' had been a farmer once, a lifetime ago. They needed to find some seeds or shoots of something that grew quickly, set up small farms on rooftops and wherever they could.
They'd all starve otherwise. Even if they were found out, they still needed to grow something to eat. Worst they could be was to get disappeared like another family not too far from their neighborhood, and that was still better than a slow death like theirs would be otherwise.
"There we go, a full buffet from around the world," you announce, waving a hand over the hogtied collection of people you're serving for your luau. You got Chinese, you got religious people, you got families from all around the world- teleportation is and remains the single most powerful technological tool at your disposal, let nobody say otherwise.
Your kids are applauding as you gesture for everyone to take a seat, the tidily tied-up victims thoroughly muffled so as to add to the atmosphere, not ruin it.
"You really went all out, huh?" Riley smiles, her fangs already extended even as her mind sends you signals letting you know she's immediately cottoned on to these being family units you've brought. "Should we eat them in groups for everyone or split them up?"
"On the one hand, keeping them together makes it easier to manage them," Sarah says, as though any of these soon-to-be extracted souls require any managing at all. "On the other hand, collecting one from every major civilization sounds like a neat goal…"
You scritch the base of her fox ears, chuckling and pulling her onto your lap. "Hey, we can always do both, can't we? Just means we need more of them."
""Both sound good,"" the twins say simultaneously, their bodies already halfway to catching up with their sisters' growth due to the amount of food you fed them early on.
"I agree," Lilian adds solemnly.
"Papa needs to feed us more," Serena pouts on top.
"Guess it's decided then. But for now, bon appetit everyone, make sure not to spill too much." You smile indulgently, knowing you will do whatever your daughters want anyways.
The Neutral Alliance of Nations, an alliance much like its name implied, an alliance of nations that wished to put aside their individual differences and perform as a combined, singular economy more than dozens of separate ones, additionally sharing many legislative processes to varying degrees. Internationally, the fact that this alliance emerged from the middle east was seen as a signal that stability was secure in the entire region, and its economic output was bordering on the staggering.
Less openly, many of those in the know knew perfectly well that the driving force behind the rapid expansion of this pact had a name as well. Cryptic Solutions, as cryptic as they came, was a company that bade many an analyst headache upon headache to decipher.
Extremely high-tech machinery in everything it did, surfacing from nowhere and quite suddenly taking the middle east by storm. The company's president was entirely unknown as was, indeed, whatever structure it had, seemingly more a phantom than a proper company in all but name.
Where did it come from? What were its goals? The only publicly known figure confirmed to be a part of its management was one 'Augustus Sinclair', a purported American businessman that had disappeared off the face of the earth decades ago. Whether it was the same one or just a randomly chosen name meant to provide a false identity, nobody could say.
The NAN was quickly growing, an alternative to the West, not that the East saw it that way; big daddy Russia just considered it yet another gathering of capitalists to be defeated, yet unable to gain a foothold in the region as communism may be.
There was talk of thorium reactors being put into place, old technology given up because the results could not be enriched in such a way as was required for the production of nuclear weaponry, the one true determining factor in any nation's military strength after the end of World War Two… Yet it was this exact factor that saw them being pushed into the public consciousness, a 'vow to peace', that weapons were not the reason for the construction of new power plants.
Many saw this approach as foolish, though it neatly sidestepped any opposition other developed nations may have about these new power plants being put into planning. What good was electricity, after all, when any greater nation could simply threaten to destroy cities within minutes?
Yet even so, the leaders of NAN member nations kept their course, proclaiming that their alliance was not interested in taking part on the 'absurdist war not being fought'.
None were aware, alas, that some among them knew the NAN did not require a nuclear arsenal, for its true leaders, unbeknownst even to them, could do far worse than nukes. Possibly. They had not exactly been briefed on such, it was merely that the impression was there.
And for some, that was enough. They certainly would not gainsay thorium reactors, at any rate.
"So, you think nukes will fly this time around?"
Riley's question draws you out of your recollection of your life so far, and the immense satisfaction you feel at the sheer amount of death and destruction you've caused over the course of your (un)lifetime. Hey, you're allowed to take pride in your work when it's this good.
Could you have done better? Probably. That said, you got through alright and much better than anyone could've expected when you first stumbled your way around the graveyard you were buried inside of, just a handful of powers and a fresh resurrection to your name.
You still despise that cheap burial suit, by the way.
"It's pretty unlikely," you shrug, gesturing for the approximate direction of 'north'. "While it's entirely possible someone may give the order to fire them off, I have several Wraiths in place to immediately alarm me and execute any personnel actually doing the firing should it come to that."
"Not really subtle, but at that point subtlety's a lost cause anyways," Sarah nods, her big, fluffy tails waving through the air as she stretches herself, lying on a beach towel as she is. "No offense to Nora, but we kind of want civilization to keep exiting un-nuked."
"None taken, Earth Fallout was a lost cause for a very long time. We could just go on as usual down in Rapture, but it sure would be a bummer."
"Exactly," you agree. Everything of note has already been said, you feel.
"Rileeey~, wanna come play beach volleyball? Kids only!"
"I'm not a kid!" Despite her words, the blonde childlike vampire stomps off to join your kids, grumbling to herself. "Aren't there five of us anyways if I join?"
Lilian is the one who answers her, her quiet voice perfectly audible to your enhanced senses. "The twins say they count as one person. We're making them tie their feet together so it works out."
""This still is kind of kinky.""
Ahh… It's a pure joy to see your kids having fun like this. Really, you must've done something right to reach this point.
It goes without saying that you later play against the entire 'Team Kids' by yourself and defeat them crushingly. Just so happens that being able to just grow a bunch of additional oversized arms makes it really hard to defeat you, even as especially when spiked iron balls and several balls being punted around all at once are instated as rules.
You know you're being extremely childish, but you know what? You're perfectly fine with that.
You theorized, once, about a plasmid that would allow some measure of shapeshifting not unlike the potions you have since had Brigid produce in some amounts, mostly as a way to get her to take regular breaks from research and guide her towards her weekly naptime and regular food intake.
You went with a potion back then because plasmids have the unfortunate side effect of consuming certain nutrients inside their user's body, plus the fiddly aspects of actually getting them to work on Big Sisters who just kind of absorb and ingest any ADAM inside of their bodies, so it wouldn't really work when given to them in normal dosages, but Brigid did figure out how much of a plasmid they have to intake before it begins to 'stick', as it were.
In the end it isn't like their almost instinctive uses of telekinesis or even pyrokinesis as an advanced application of Incinerate come from nowhere. Big Sisters have simply consumed so much ADAM, much of it in the form of plasmids that various splicers or other dead people had injected into themselves, that this overall threshold managed to be overcome.
You're pretty impressed by the way Brigid did the research for this, by the way. Normally Big Sisters are still too aggressive and not really clear-headed enough to cooperate with any complicated line of research of their bodies for very long, but the Lead Geneticist of Cryptic Solutions (aka the only one) just fed them chocolate treats filled with cores of fluid ADAM whenever they cooperated to get them to behave.
In her words, 'it works on animals, children and adults when necessary'.
All else failing, a plasmid enabling its user to shapeshift still would be immensely useful… assuming you got it to work. Using the traditional method of treating ADAM would have almost instantly disastrous consequences for the subject, of course, as the stuff would basically completely replace anything it was used to morph around and super-powered cancer death would essentially take place within minutes, if not sooner, whereas FEV is usually extremely stubborn about turning things into one fixed shape- a problem for the project you're trying to go for here, naturally.
In the end, you figure it's too much of a pain to think too deeply about it and just mash the theoretical ingredients together with varying ratios after treating them appropriately, then ask the Thinker which of the results she thinks are the most likely to work out. A few test runs on captured subjects later and voila, you have a thing!
ShapeShift 1: Allow the user to perform modifications to their own body, from purely aesthetic ones such as changed eye or hair color to growing functional claw, turn their eyes into animal eyes of their choice or bone protrusions meant to act as weapons or tools. Requires knowledge of the changes taking place.
Ronald Wilson Reagan. Conservative Republican by this point in time already, Governor of California and the man that will normalize being deeply and openly religious in American politics in a decade or so when he makes it all the way to president.
Needless to say, you have an opinion on that. Particularly in that you neither want him to become president nor normalize high-profile religion. Right now he's seen as an outlier rather than the norm and you very much can't have the wrong kind of norm being established, now can you?
All of that is why you are where you are, inside Reagan's kitchen, the man's body carried over your shoulder. Keeping him quiet while you ate him was child's play, of course, no amount of normal security enough to stop you not to mention at a state governor's level thereof, and you did get a lot of practice in with the former here and there.
A quietly cast spell later and you have his corpse look good as new, aside the whole 'being dead' part. Not discouraged by this in the least, your next step is to breathe out the soul you just ate, immediately making use of it.
"Be quiet." Your first command is not loud, but still cutting, absolute. Reagan bites his teeth, powerless to stop you from doing whatever you want. You, in turn, gesture for the kitchen table. "Go get a piece of paper and something to write, then write exactly what I dictate to you. In the meantime, I'll get your body started- do you want it to look like you stabbed yourself or would you prefer shooting your brains out? I'm fine either way."
He isn't happy about that, but then you never much cared what dead men think, now did you?
Ronald Wilson Reagan was dead.
That was the news headline every American woke up to that day, gradual and shifting as the morning came over the nation that took up an entire continent. The Governor of Carolina, a respected politician and known to be perhaps a little too religious, dead at the age of 70.
The death itself was not what had so many news agencies clambering for details, of course. No, that honor belonged to the manner of death he suffered, as the Governor had ended his own life, everyone that knew him extremely shocked and even upset by this fact, as he had been a pious Christian in his lifetime, such that any such act should have been anathema to him.
He did, however, write a letter before shooting himself squarely into the side of his head. The more of the investigation came to light and was revealed to the public, the more scandalous the entire affair grew.
'The Rapture is upon us.
I have seen it in my eyes, the Last Days as they near the world. Whether it is the nukes or the lack of faith in humanity, I do not know. All I know is that the Chosen must ascend to His realm before the Lord sends out the call and assumes control over the Earth.
It is said that man was formed from clay, brought to life by the Lord's mercy. It is in the Lord's mercy I have to go now, to travel beyond the mortal realm and into Heaven. It is not how I thought I would go, but all the same I cannot delay. These are the last words I write as I utter my last prayers.
The Rapture is coming. The Rapture is coming. The Rapture is coming.
And as I last look out at the night sky, my thoughts are with you. I'm sorry.'
Naturally, there was an outcry. Had Reagan been part of some kind of death cult? Was religion bad? How could anyone trust a man that told them they would go to heaven after death, when this was where it led?
Many questions were asked in the aftermath of this death, compounded by the rare, but widely reported on copycat suicides as believers claimed they were 'chosen to ascend' just like he had been, their obvious delusions driving several men to kill themselves in the exact same fashion, putting a gun to their heads and closing their eyes one last time.
Faith, it seemed, was being tested.
Augustus Sinclair read the newspaper, whistling to himself. The chief had been keeping on the down-low for a while, but he was pretty sure this was his handiwork.
"And so the devil came to California, in '71, eh?" He took a sip from his big mug, the one that read 'world's worst boss'. It was an office in-joke. "Sounds like the title of some story. If I ever write a biography, lines like that are gonna be worth the gold, I can feel it already."
Not that he wasn't already swimming in the cash. Figuratively, of course.
This would not be the end of it, however.
Over the next week, several documents originating from within the White House and the Pentagon surfaced in the media, copies sent to every news outlet above a certain size by an anonymous whistleblower. These documents, both secret instructions issued in advance and to be unsealed in the case of certain events, office communications and mails and even words written by President Nixon himself, were, to say the least, disturbing.
It seemed, from carefully analyzing them, that a considerable part of the government under Nixon was involved with or even members of a sort of… secret genocidal church sect, for lack of a better word. This death cult, naturally, had plans, and many of the things any citizen was able to read now were much, much worse than the suicide of a single Governor (that nevertheless likely was a part of the same organization).
'I write this speech not as a president, but as something much greater', one these texts read. 'I write it as a Messiah, an Absolver and a Savior, for such are my works. No longer shall this world be plagued by the Black or the Asian, nor by the Arab or the Faithless. Using the Power of God, we shall release the righteous from their presence, such that all will find release in God's Embrace. The Rapture is coming.'
Disturbing, yes. One of the most straightforward examples, however, was much less roundabout about what this 'group' seemed to believe.
'Not much longer and we'll get to it. We'll put them all in camps, the blacks and the jews and all the scum we can find, then we gas 'em. Just like the Nazis did, but in God's name this time.'
On the first day, there was disbelief. On the second day, citizens were asking the same questions as reporters, how this could be and how this man had been allowed to even gain the candidacy for presidency.
On the third day, the White House issued a statement as to the falsehood of the leaked documents, sternly rebuking them as fake. On the fourth day, however, analysis of handwriting, research into the names mentioned and authoring them was completed, and all of them pointed towards the opposite.
On the fifth day, there were protests, Americans demanding that President Nixon retire, investigations into any allegations made be concluded under a different president and just punishment be handed out to any involved in potentially causing nuclear apocalypse for their own selfish beliefs. Questions were asked about the anonymous whistleblower as well, of course, but many experts explained, on national TV, that anyone found to have leaked these documents, some of which were highly classified, would be tried and imprisoned within a fortnight, not to mention in case the president and his highest officials really did plan to commit what could only be called treason they would expedite the process even further.
On the sixth day, there were riots in some cities, anger and fear blazing out of control. American citizens no longer felt safe under the 'aegis' of their current president, calls for an independent investigation under another one, quickly elected 'on the sly' as it were if they had to, growing louder.
And on the seventh day President Nixon held a speech demanding any such riot be put to a stop, repeating that he was innocent of whatever imaginary crimes were thought up by his political opponents and declaring that even if he was deeply, unhealthily religious, he was still the elected President of the United States.
The next week, he was impeached.
Sarah Livsey, on the other hand, was quite satisfied. "I really put a lot of work into this so it's nice to see it play out," she told her brother's dead body upon whose lap she was seated at the time.
The political left in the US, including the movements calling for an end to the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement, were outraged, of course, both of them having been explicitly laid out as targeted in the leaked documents. This in turn merely fueled the desire for political change many of them held, galvanizing them in the face of direct opposition.
It truly did not help Nixon's case that many of the things laid out in those 'documents' were actual truths, particularly the plans already put in motion to disenfranchise as many 'leftist' voters as possible in his time as president. Any who doubted them, well… There was actual truth, there.
Your thoughts on the matter can be largely summed as, oh, what was that word again? Right, schadenfreude. Leave it to German to have a specific word for the joy one feels at another's misery.
The international community was, of course, filled with utter consternation at this turn of events. The United States of America were meant to be the leader of the Free West, the stern hand holding back the scourge of communism, not a mad theocracy secretly planning to destroy the world for the God they prayed to.
The official statements, though, those were the best in your opinion. Saudi Arabia issues one along the lines of 'religious fanaticism' being 'a plague on modern mankind', Nasser goes out of his way to publicly suggest that maybe state officials should be screened for church attendance- it's great, simple as that.
Even the USSR seems to be takin part in making fun of America for this one. It seems like, despite internal… Let's call them 'issues', the tension inherent in the Cold War as a whole is lessening for once, though you're redoubling your Wraiths' monitoring of Russia just in case they try to pull anything in response to the current state of affairs.
Well, all the juicy 'fun' in the US aside for the moment, your next step was to look into recruiting whatever Chinese intelligence specialists you could, given the state of the country as it is… Emphasis on was, as in you were planning to but were kind of stymied by the situation you find yourself looking at.
You see, you had Wraiths on the Chinese government as per usual, making the things move around the world every now and then to serve as additional eyes for yourself, but you hadn't really thought about searching out intelligence personnel because, hey, it's still a large country and all, so of course they would have some people taking care of sensitive information, right?
Nope. Mao had all of them executed for being 'potential enemies of the people' at some point.
You, uh, you may have had something to do with that when you cursed him to just go with whatever horrible ideas he had at any given moment. You regret nothing, but it is a minor annoyance here.
Well, still, you'll just take what you can get. Having Sarah suss out whatever disgruntled or dissatisfied members of the CIA and the KGB she can, offers are made and some are accepted. In short order, Solutions Inc., the subsidiary of Cryptic Solution Inc. that is essentially your Private Military Contractor part of business, is enlarged by a good few spies, security specialists and similar, some of which you have set towards educating those among your original recruits that seem like they might be suited towards this line of work.
Because you prize a positive working environment from the top to the very bottom. Just because you expect these people to die on command doesn't mean you don't want to let each of them bloom into their full potential, after all.
That aside, you kind of feel like you should kick the USSR down a bit, given they're kind of on the high horse in regards to the whole 'fanatic madmen control the West' deal. Luckily, your Wraiths once again provide, sharing the advantages of being literal shadows that are nigh invisible in dark areas and thus have an easy time sneaking around.
A day later, a certain anonymous whistleblower strikes again, this time publicising a report on a certain flaw in Russian RBMK reactors the KGB kind of buried deep so none would realize how crappy they are. Or something.
As an engineer, you do not see value in pretending a flaw does not exist- it should be fixed, solutions applied and the entire machine improved instead. As an evil genius, you very much do not mind letting the world know Russia is ready to blow itself up out of a sense of vanity.
Naturally, Russia denies it. Doesn't stop you from having Sinclair arrange for an international scientific journal to publish an article on thorium reactors, which you did work over to be just plainly better than ones running on uranium in this day and age, and their advantages over both US and USSR energy generation technology.
In short, you're dissing their power plants and as you're actually very much justified in doing so, they can't do jack shit about it. Beyond continuing to pretend there is nothing wrong with their patented communist technology.
Note to self, review the possibility of blowing Chernobyl up early. Well, it didn't blow up technically, it melted down, but same difference. All it would take is one single partially immaterial undead at the right time and place and you could do it just like that.
Plasmid Research Report:
ShapeShift 2: Allow the user to perform modifications to their own body, adding the capacity for additional or removed limbs and modifying base body weight by up to 25% percent. Requires knowledge of the changes taking place.
ShapeShift 3: Allow the user to perform modifications to their own body, adding the capacity for full-body transformations and both regenerative and offensive transformations. Requires knowledge of the changes taking place.
While you're on the topic of your PMC, though, you've been having some more success with it in general, actually; with drafts for an official unified NAN military making the rounds of certain officials, local headquarters have already been acquired in all member nations' capitals and personnel distribution determined.
You'll need to recruit heavily, of course, but with a first crop of viable soldiers that didn't manage to fuck up or run out of luck and die on their first couple of deployments to demonstrate they managed to take to their training, as well as a slew of newly minted officers with those that managed to stand out as clear-headed under fire or show other applicable qualities to set up some actual chain of command and military infrastructure headed by actual soldiers.
There's very little true ideology behind this organization of yours so far, of course, as it simply did not have any need for one to date, but you will be introducing somewhat of one shortly; once the official call goes out, the (privatized) NAN military will be responsible for ensuring and maintaining the NAN's neutrality towards conflicts like the Cold War, by force if doing so is required, and guaranteeing the safety of NAN citizenry and its property at large.
It's all just some pretty words so far, of course, but 'neutrality' can be interpreted very wildly, so you don't mind stating it as an official goal of the next stage of your military organization; you do stay neutral if one side immediately loses the moment you show up and the conflict is thus resolved, after all.
For the most part, their job will be to defend against possible invasion by either the US or the USSR, all the while maintaining your stance on refusing to engage in any nuclear arms race; the NAN is and remains a defensive coalition to stand against the forces of both the east and the west and religious terrorism of all stripes.
You had a paragraph or two added to the charter about that this year. It feels really nice to rub it into everyone else's faces, if you're honest. In the meantime, being explicitly against religion as something more than a private act of worship of whatever deity or deities one chooses as an official military of the gathered NAN signatories should hopefully send the message you're intending.
Mhm… Perhaps you'll make it so anyone that wants to preach anything to a group of a certain size is required to register, like sex offenders? Seriously, you are just having too much fun planning out the persecution of religion at large.
Ahh, the Antarctic… it's honestly just a big old pile of ice and snow, but it's a landscape you don't get to see every day- you're far too busy normally, and on Earth Bet you kind of have to prioritize and be ready to react to possible attacks at a moment's notice, so even though you do have teleportation literally just a thought away with the Thinker (she's kind of integrated a few of the teleporters into her mainframe by this this point, if only further out than her more delicate processes) you just didn't find the time so far.
Buuut hey, you're a family man now. That means just taking some time off every now and then to spend with the family instead of eternally lying around on your bi throne and all. Well, that and you really wanted to do something nice for your kids, just because.
They're not really rambunctious as such, except for Serena, but they still do enjoy the chance to let loose and have some fun. So you're just taking a nice, romantic walk with both Nora and Sarah while they play to their hearts' content, of course while you keep a mental eye on them.
Iris and Ivey, growing as quickly as they are, are already about the height of a lot of the penguins around, and with their snow-white skin and dark hair as well as clothes they're blending right in with one of the… flocks? Sure, flocks of them.
Quite literally. You believe your twin daughters have successfully convinced the animals that they're penguins themselves, they've been admitted into the group and are currently diving for fish together with them. Really, it's a good thing the icy water (and temperatures in general) are within safe ranges for vampires, else they'd at minimum have caught a cold by now.
At the same time, Lilian also did go diving, but in search of somewhat bigger prey; she just swam up to an orca and punched it in the face earlier, using underwater dynamics to full effect to really make it hurt. A fight ensured that she, naturally, won, culminating in her consuming the animal's soul and dragging the body up to the ice's surface with her.
On the other hand, Serena is… torn a little back and forth on what to do. On the one hand, she's building a really big ice castle using just her own claws to carve it, but on the other hand you did promise her to go baby seal clubbing together if she wants.
So right now she's basically digging into an iceberg to see how far she can gets before anyone spots a pod of seals, you're pretty sure. Rambunctious, as you noted already.
In the end, you pledge your support for Serena's project anyways, descending down into the hole she dug into an iceberg to help her expand it into a proper winter palace. Hey, while you're at it you may as well, right?
So you take a moment to discuss how to best do this with your blonde daughter, planning out the construction you are about to undertake. Luckily, you can just run the math really quickly with the Thinker inside of your shared heads and just like that, you get to work.
Your claws rip great chunks out of the ice as you dig and work along, simultaneously digging out new ground and smoothing out the walls and ceilings as you go, abusing your powers to easily work at any elevation and especially on sheer, smoothed-out walls by simply floating around or walking on them.
"Hey, ho! Daddy go! Show that ice who owns that hoe!"
Honestly, who wouldn't work extra hard being cheered on by Serena?
In the end, you think you may have overdone it just a bit, but… Oh well, it'll work for its intended purpose, no question about it.
"I like how the statues turned out," Lilian notes as she joins you, Nora and Sarah already having one off to look over your work in a few of the rooms. "Very lifelike."
"Thak you. It was hell getting them just right so the ice wouldn't crumble under its own weight too easily."
"Daddy, daddy, can we have more fractals on the ceiling?"
You smile at Serena indulgently. "Just because you asked, sure."
Meanwhile, the new inhabitants of this little project are coming along nicely as well. The twins have decided that, in order to find the perfect 'penguin lord' to rule over all of its brethren from inside your new palace, they had to hold a tournament among them, driving the flightless birds to battle inside a ring made of their squawking peers.
You would like to note they do not have any power that would let them communicate with them. How exactly they did this is a miracle to you.
That said, an ample supply of weak healing potions, more than enough for penguins, but easy enough to produce in large numbers such that it's really no problem they're used, are keeping them in fighting shape after every round. So far, they have been pecking and scratching at each other using their webbed feet, but penguins really aren't all that suited for combat, all told.
That doesn't stop your twins from having fun with this, though.
The penguin lord is crowned with a solid piece of ice you carved to reflect light in the end, given stewardship of your grand palace. You did incidentally also carve several access paths directly to the ocean from your palace, the whole thing going all the way through the massive ice sheet making up this section of the Antarctic, so the penguins can come and go easier and all.
Their first action is to begin gathering fish they will be stockpiling in one of the side chambers you left empty for them, far below the rooms with furniture and the grand hallways filled with artistic carvings.
"… Are you sure you didn't give them anything to make them smarter?"
""Not that we know of.""
Alright, you suppose…
You have 15 days left in this dimension
It is now 1972
The world continues to tremble on occasion in remembrance of how close it may have gotten to full-out nuclear warfare had Nixon continued to be president of the United States. As it is, there is no trust in him within the public, his impeachment progressing within the Senate.
At the same time, continued disapproval towards the Vietnam War is maintained unabated, such that petitions to withdraw from it have been signed by tens of thousands. Pacifism is experiencing a renaissance in the US, even as cooler heads insist that the nation must stand strong against communism- even if, as most must admit, a continuation of the Vietnam War serves little purpose at this point.
Meanwhile, NAN media, now easily available to a majority of citizens through easily affordable TVs, radios and public news stations all over the alliance, continues to acclaim the current course held by the coalition at large, that of refusing to pursue nuclear firepower in pursuit of greater influence over the world at large despite, notably, being fully capable of launching a tactical weapons division as the process thereof is described in its charter, plain as day.
Instead the same powers and processes are invoked as to let out a call to arms as the NAN is launching a shared military, pooling resources to 'defend and maintain continued neutrality in global conflicts'.
On the other hand, the USSR continues to threaten nuclear Armageddon should any armed forces be stationed near its borders, though diplomatic ties carefully afforded through economic power smooth the situation out to some extent. On the other other hand, China's continued allegations of arming capitalist insurrectionists are straining relations between communist regimes sufficiently nobody is relaxing in regard to global tensions at large.
Oh, and South Africa continues to be a fucking mess, but nobody ever cared about that, not even other Africans.
It's 1972 and things are just rollin' on. By which you mean you literally had Sarah roll your body through a swimming pool of cash while you're asleep, just for the heck of it- and she certainly didn't complain about manhandling you either.
It's okay. She can get her gropes in while you're playing more dead than usual, you'll return the favor tenfold later.
So then, on to business. First off, you went ahead and directed Sinclair to purchase as many assets, rights and properties as he can in Angola, the South-African nation still not done with its war for independence from Portugal and thus ripe for the picking; a lot of companies that used to work in the environment offered previously are either running back home or else simply flopping these days, so you can simply buy up the whole place's economy and look pretty good when the dust settles and you have a stranglehold on anyone that ends up winning one way or the other.
Or, failing that, you can aggressively pursue the protection of your business interest and use NAN troops to install a puppet government, no skin off your back.
That said, messy breakup wars in Africa are nothing new, nobody really cares all that much about that beyond the fact you can work towards wholly absorbing the entire continent by another bite through it. Much more importantly, you've really gotten started on investing economic power into Taiwan, now that China's downward spiral has somewhat stabilized and your plans can proceed with only some chance of everything exploding halfway through.
Mainly you just have your products shipped cheaply and in large amounts, your media projected towards Taiwan's population and inroads made. Of course the current leaders are just as despotic and brutal in suppressing their own people as the communist mainland faction they lost against before being driven all the way to this island, but hey, they'll either work for you or be disposed of soon enough one way or another.
You're not exactly interfering in any 'official' ways beyond that, for now. Let Taiwan get used to the economy being you and prepare to generously sell them lots of weaponry in case you want to give them a little push in the right direction later. Hands-off for now.
Oh, also, France is in kind of deep shit, given its economy has just finally made the jump from 'hanging on by exploiting colonies' to 'oh shit this is right after WWII and everything's in ruins'.
You kind of caused this, it isn't a big surprise or anything. That said, you have lots of money and a neverending thirst for more influence in Europe, so in the cash goes as said influence goes up, purely through buying out as many local companies as you can and exporting pretty much everything France needs in terms of fabricated goods through the Mediterranean and Spain to fill that vacuum up you created by 'liberating' French colonies while the UN said 'no touchy' to them.
Business is, in a word, booming. This is a good thing, honest, as you are in no way an evil corporation literally trying to take over the world.
You are a person that wants to do that, you just also control one.
Next off, some of the more promising talents in that whole 'you are now spies' thing you've got going are sent out to both Pakistan and India, which also happen to be targets of yours for quasi-annexation. You had them enhanced with some lower-ranking tonics that should keep them out of major trouble, especially as you mainly just want them to sabotage local businesses to soften them up for eventual acquisition.
It's mainly a test to see how well you can straight-out take over a country with minimal vampire assets in play, to be honest. You'll see how it goes, you suppose.
In other news you did get started on readying things for the Olympics later this year, disregarding the winter Olympics in Japan anyways. Using your powers of having looked up historical events on the internet before getting to just sleep for-fucking-ever in this dimension, you do know about the whole Munich massacre that took place, and assuming you haven't butterflied those events away entirely you'll probably have to do something about that.
You want all medals to be taken home by NAN athletes and the games to be known as the time and place when the literal domination of Cryptic Solutions first became apparent, not the site of a historic 'tragedy' overshadowing your cheating. Because yes, of course you're cheating; you're already having Brigid work on a minimized, souped-down version of the tonics that will help here and plan to combine those with two of your potions, the ones you've nicknamed Atlas and Quicksilver, that have shown to have semi-permanent effects in mortals if taken regularly in clinical trials.
You just have to love having unlimited access to countless human test subjects. Well technically they're billions, but you really don't go through that many.
You're also going out of your way to recruit a few trustworthy chemists that won't blab to anyone before putting them into a big facility and having them thralled from afar, actually waking up for a good half hour to make sure they all get the power you want them to have. Potion production is and always has been one of those things that bottleneck you towards requiring someone with certain supernatural powers to actually work, but this should allow you to just mass-produce them on the cheap, finally.
Curie has been doing some good work, but she does seem perfectly happy to join you in delegating duties like this to minions.
You also kind of want to figure out an anti-nuke option that you can brandish around openly, like some way to just turn radioactive material inert… Sadly, you don't actually have anything like that, and even if you did it would be one massive pain to actually implement it.
The best idea you've come up with so far is to just place giant forcefield generators in every population center you actually care about and set them up to block off radioactive materials to ward off the fallout, but that is an inherently limited solution to a problem that would very quickly grow out of its ability to handle. Sure, you could just use shielded vehicles and the like to maintain logistics and instate enormous hydroponics facilities to farm for food, but…
This is kind of a problem. Though hydroponics do sound like a nice idea as a way to just let population centres generate a base amount of food to assure enough edibles for everyone. Here you are, defeating world hunger one step at a time… Though you'd need more thorium reactors first, those kinds of places would consume a lot of energy.
Decisions, decisions… Oh, if only you had some magical 'radiation away' material, this would be a lot easier. Sadly, reality has yet to provide you with anything like that.
Ah well, can't be helped. You'd still need to deal with the fallout in case of nuke, but at least you can minimize the danger and, hopefully, stop any actual warheads from detonating.
By blowing up the rockets.
Now, that sounds bad in the first moment, but you have to consider that nukes aren't somehow going to explode when they're being shook- as long as you can avoid frontally hitting the warheads themselves, you should be golden in keeping the things from detonating as they're designed to. They'd still need to be cleaned up afterwards, mind, but at least they wouldn't irradiate the entire globe due to being blown up in high orbit.
On the other hand, one can never be sure putting theory into practice. In that regard, you'll just have to declare it as a feature instead of a bug and regularly remind nuclear powers that they might just irradiate themselves if they try to nuke the NAN.
Is it disingenuous? Yes, a bit, after all the talk of rejecting nuclear weapon races and that no NAN member state shall pursue nuclear warfare. That said, you somehow doubt anyone will care when by definition the other side would have to shoot first to trigger the worst case scenario anyways.
The rest is all about early detection and technology that can launch counter-rockets quickly, precisely and efficiently enough to matter. Luckily, you can do all of that easily enough, in no small part thanks to the Thinker doing the programming involved.
It's all about sharing work and responsibilities, truly.
"So like, we aren't supposed to be shooting rockets, are we?"
Abdullah sighed, taking a step from the plates of metal he was welding together, letting the seam cool down a little. "We aren't and best case we won't, but if some fucker shoots a rocket at us we shoot a rocket at that rocket."
"It just feels wrong, man. I joined up with CS because I wanna do the world a better place, ya know? And here I am, building a rocket prototype."
He sighed again, hand massaging the bridge of his nose. This was not what he got an engineering degree for, but fine, whatever. "Look, this is not great and nobody really wants to do it, but if someone starts firing off nukes we can't just let them destroy whole cities on a whim, okay? It's a defensive kind of thing."
"I get that, I get that. It's just, kinda fucked up, see? It shows what the world's come to, that we need rockets to defend against rockets."
"Yeah well, the world's pretty fucked up alright," Abdullah agreed. "Pretty sure nobody disagrees on that. And hey, at least NAN's stepping back from having our own nukes precisely because of that. This," he said, waving over the hangar filled with dozens of engineers working on realizing the design they'd been sent, "costs way more than having nukes, especially maintaining a project like this, when having nukes is the big stick. The big guys upstairs know that and are doing this anyways. If that's not a statement for peace I don't know what is."
"Mhm." The man he was working with stepped around, eyeing the body of their prototype. "This look about ready for you? I think we can screw on the warhead and go test it, it's right here."
"… Why the fuck do you have a live miniature warhead here and I'm not on the other side of the city?"
You also are, of course, eyeing the next set of borders to defend using more conventional methods- specifically, the enormous amount of coastline under control of NAN-affiliate nations. Many of them have their own navies already, but those are pretty shoddy, more an involved coast guard than anything else.
Which was fine for them so far, of course, but now that you're assembling a proper, alliance-wide military meant to protect against foreign interests, invaders and paid stooges, it seems like it would behoove you to expand it towards maritime operations as well.
In short, you're having the factories in Saudi Arabia churn out parts that are swiftly assembled into ships, largely focused around fast cruisers with notable range to better patrol and defend occupied water-space, though you do round it all out with various types of military ships just so have them on hand.
You also do send out orders to actually train men to station on those ships, of course. In short, you run the whole gamut to rapidly ensure the NAN is capable of fighting off anyone trying to invade your cattle pens.
The Olympic Summer Games 1972, slated to be held in Munich, Germany, were quickly approaching, the world once again focused on a single event in advance. The Olympic Games had always been a focal point like that, after tensions began running higher and higher, becoming yet another proxy-battlefield between the East and the West.
This time, however, there would be a third front. The Neutral Alliance of Nations would be, for one of the first times, openly competing against the big nuclear powers; all athletes hailing from it and competing under the name of a NAN nation would be wearing a patch bearing the symbol of the Alliance on their uniform.
They would also be fed with a wild mix of morphological substances and similar things to enhance their performances and plainly outdo all others. Because playing fair was for losers, such as everyone else not competing for the NAN.
Meanwhile, one Serena Livsey embarked upon a campaign of terror, driving several hopefuls all over the world into worsened performance instead or having them drop out entirely in short order, oftentimes supported by her sisters. Iris and Ivy Livsey in particular did enjoy the effects of their works on mortals, oftentimes painting scenes of themselves or their loved ones suffering horrible fates and replicating the image in the views of their victims at irregular intervals.
A happy fun time for all around. Lilian continued to prefer more direct methods, but sabotaging climate control devices, car brakes and even windows was perfectly viable as a way to drive people insane as well.
Not all were happy with latest developments, however…
The NAN was rapidly militarizing it borders, placing dedicated defensive rocket batteries all along them to ward off the nuclear option, should it come to it. This included, needless to be said, Turkey.
Turkey which was right near the Warsaw pact and within range of a tactical nuke, should one be fired at it from Russia or the other way around. Any amount of overt armaments in it quickly aroused attention, especially after the past events surrounding the nation and how the US stationed tactical nukes within it before.
The NAN was not being particularly stealthy about it, not seeing any pressing reasons as to why it should hide purely defensive installations. The USSR, on the other hand, disagreed, demanding the removal of all NAN forces and weaponry from Turkey under threat of nuclear annihilation.
The USA were preoccupied by the drama around President Nixon's impeachment and vehement denials of any wrongdoing whatsoever, so it seemed like this would be the first direct, full-on confrontation between the middle eastern alliance and the nuclear juggernaut threatening to wipe it out, claiming that 'no pathetic Nanners could stand against the might of their bombs'.
It seemed, however, as though several figures within Russia itself absolutely refused to allow any nuclear warfare to be initiated unless as a last resort, cooler heads ironically turning towards violence to retain their motherland's integrity. Car bombings, assassinations and anti-Soviet sentiments abound, dozens of opposing leaders being imprisoned, dying, dying in prison or killing themselves in a spectacle of political instability in short order.
You know it's not that simple, of course- you literally used Wraiths, divination and Sarah's assistance to identify the right people and have some of their hair brought to you, whereupon you laid several curses onto them all to make this happen before hurriedly returning to sleep.
It is certainly a way to distract the USSR effectively, in essence halting negotiations and letting Nasser, acting as the spokesman for the NAN's high council, operate with a lot more immediate freedom (common sentiment is that he has been working towards a sort of pan-Arabic league for decades and to thus let him have this one, last you checked, not all that different from Wahington and his military uniform when it came to rebelling against the English).
Problem solved, motherfuckers.
Lastly, the takeover of Ethiopia is taking longer and is going less smooth than initially expected. The current king of the African monarchy seems to be distrustful of any outsiders coming to interfere with his rule, all the while being entirely uncaring about the potential benefits for his people.
It's kind of a pain, you suppose, but it's not like it matters all that much in the grand scheme of things. He will either give in or give up the ghost so you can install a more amenable puppet in his place, it's all the same to you.
Kind of screws over your immediate time plan, but you'll either work around it or apply more pressure later, you suppose. Just as long as China is in too much crisis to pay much attention to over he-
No, wait, Mao's still firmly in charge, isn't he? Of course he is, you would've noticed if anything else happened. He may still have a coup pushed through with what resources he can take from other things, such as internal security or whatever, so… You better keep in mind the Eritrean Coup could or could not happen down the line, it's honestly up in the air.
Plus side, something like this wouldn't happen in a single day, so you would have time to notice through your spies and react, at least.
Now that you're awake for a bit and can take your time doing whatever you want, you naturally proceed to go grab the kids and give them an impromptu life lesson about music. Because obviously that's what you would do, duh.
As it turns out, all your daughters are more than happy to gather and have fun in this way, not that you expected much other than that, they're all good girls… in their own ways, anyway.
Lilian is the first to take to singing, but not as a way to appreciate music nor to express anything. Instead, your eldest daughter seems to be considering it as a way to use her voice as a weapon, even without the powers that you would usually presuppose for anything like that.
She only requires minimal coaching before she can reliably hit the right note to outright shatter thin glass in her vicinity, her voice tightly controlled to make it vibrate at specific frequencies. You do naturally support her in this endeavor, mind you, but you're still fairly sure this is an application of Nora's power you're seeing here
By contrast, Serena has a lot of enthusiasm, but as much as your foxy daughter puts her all into her performance it's more screaming than singing, likely because she just wants to get her voice out, regardless of how. You try to tutor her into holding back just the slightest bit so she has an easier time with this, but… Well, she totally could be part of a rock band, you suppose.
She's still giving it her all, after all. That's why, when she silently begs for cuddles after melodically shouting about how much she loves her daddy you can't help but scratch her behind her fox ears.
She enjoys that entirely too much, in your professional opinion.
That still leaves the twins, Iris and Ivy. The two actually have the power that allows you to shift your voice to make virtually any sounds you want to, at the stage you've reached with it, and though they are not that far they very much can imitate musical instruments.
Combined with their seamless cooperation as a single being and a bit of teaching of yours truly to let them leverage their inborn gifts and, well…
One of them is always singing while the other is mouthing out the background music, switching back and forth throughout the song and even dancing a little choreography while performing it.
They really have a gift for the arts, your little wonder twins. Though they aren't so little anymore, they've caught up with their sisters' heights already.
'Let's go and play with the kids a little,' you thought. 'It'll be fun, they're all good girls,' said thought had continued.
Well, you taunted Murphy and you got what you asked for, you suppose. When you went to meet up with the Little Sisters hanging around and being educated inside your headquarters, you hadn't thought a single thing about it, assuming this time would be like every time before.
What you had failed to consider was that the Little Sisters have been learning. Adapting. Advancing. With the physical enhancements being your thralls allows them, the tactical improvements made to their telepathic sub-network through the same and their extensive training in the art of children's games, they have become incredibly difficult to defeat in your current situation.
It doesn't help you went and made it worse. It was just a casual idea, a suggestion, the concept of 'hey, let's tease Riley about being a kid and invite her to join in as well' at the time.
You knew she was indignant about your kids treating her as a younger sister instead of an older one, but you had assumed it would be fine. You would just play with her a bit, pat her head some, the works.
Instead, when you arrived at the meeting place, you were greeted by a mob of dozens upon dozens of Little Sisters, all assembled to greet you for your doom, in turn surrounded by dozens of biomechanical spiders Riley made out of bits and pieces of damaged test subjects nobody needed anymore.
"Uh… Mercy?"
"No," Riley had declared. "First game of the day, Catch. And you. Are. It."
Fast forward to right now. You're running as fast as you can, evading annoyingly swift-footed pursuit- the Little Sisters can't push you, can't keep up with your speeds, but they don't need to, not when they're just trying to harrow you and drive you into a corner. More of them come jumping out of every ventilation shaft you pass, their old stomping grounds and safe spaces still proving their worth after all the reconstruction you did, the girls cutting you off at every turn.
Similarly, the spiders Riley is controlling are following you, but worse, they're announcing your location telepathically, somehow, psychic beacons you have no idea about the exact mechanics of. You can run, but you can't hide, not without breaking the implicit rules of the game and breaking the bots in turn.
You don't grow tired, but neither have you seen a single Little Sister slow down yet, childish enthusiasm enough to let them measure up to your undead constitution so far. It must have been an hour already, where are they taking all this energy from?! Is it the ADAM? It has to be!
You duck past another joyously screaming little girl trying to catch you, your bloodsight alerting you to another dozen or so trying to cut you off at the next intersection. If it weren't for your powers letting you perceive them from afar, you would have been caught already a long time ago.
At the intersection, your nonstop sprint turns into a perfectly executed somersault, vaulting right through the little horde threatenin to overwhelm you- some of them are running on the walls, on the ceiling, others are covering the ground, an almost inescapable wave of little girls all trying to catch you.
You refuse, of course. Staying just out of reach and moving through before they can react or, worse, jump, you forcefully make your way right into the direction they just came from, once again embracing the spirit of the sprint.
They're screeching and giggling, having way too much fun with this whole thing.
Why is this so hard, it was meant to be a little fun just playing games!
In the end you let them catch you, of course. As engaging it is to avoid the girls' relentless pursuit, all good things must come to an end- and as a proper adult, now that you've got kids of your own, it falls to you to let them win gracefully, yet in such a way they derive enjoyment from it.
You know, normal people stuff that even normal people can do, unless they're some measure of emotionally stunted. Or something, you ain't no psychologist and you never did eat the one good one you have on hand.
At any rate you eventually slow down back at the central chamber you first met this little horde of cuties in. It doesn't take long before said horde surges onward like a tidal wave, smelling a moment of weakness.
You are awash in happily giggling Little Sisters, climbing all over you, tugging at your limbs and babbling in a giant ball of chaos. If you ever felt like you were somehow lacking as an eldritch monstrosity from beyond human comprehension, you now know how it feels like to be a 'proper' one.
With how many of them are on you, it doesn't take them long to loosen the seams of your simple T-shirt, outright tearing it off to a backdrop of happy murmuring by their greater mass.
You sigh aloud as they get started on your pants next, probing little hands already feeling around over them. "You could have just asked, you know?" You ask, a little muffled by the multitude of bodies between you and open air.
Nobody ever said playing tag was easy, but you bet few people consider it as the kind of nerve wracking labor you are subjected to on occasion.
You stay perfectly still, becoming one with your environment and avoiding notice of all but the most perceptive, as you know from experience. This time, you are playing to your strengths- though it can't be said you didn't earlier when you were playing tag, but eh, details.
After you finally let yourself be caught and the Little Sisters destroyed your clothes, it was decided (without your input, of course) that the next game to be played (which you also didn't consent to, by the way) would be hide-and-seek.
You argued bitterly to be allowed a quick grace period to hide in, but now, finally, you are safely ensconced in one of the many lounge rooms around your base, all but camouflaged sitting behind a potted plant.
Now all you have to do is sit back, relax and wait until-
"Found you!"
One of the Little Sisters (who, again, are fully adult and anyone claiming otherwise has failed to pay attention to repeated disclaimers) you expected to just pass by like the rest comes climbing out of the room's ventilation shaft, eagerly trotting up to your hiding place. "What gave me away?" You ask, standing up and turning around to face her.
"There was a something. A tingly feeling in this room, hehe!" The girl grins up at you widely, yellow spotlight-eyes crinkled up in joy.
You wait for the rest of the horde to descend, but nothing comes. You tilt your head at her. "So what now?"
"I found you so I get a reward, Big Brother! Then you hide again and the next one gets a reward for finding you." She comes up to you and, just like that, grabs for your dick, kept only half-hard so far because your constant boner just gets in the way otherwise.
Now, though, it rapidly hardens, the Little Sister's small hands rubbing over it. Come to think of it, they're not all that small, the girls have been growing up over the years. "Ah, you mean that kind of reward," you chuckle, hand patting her head as she leans in closer, mouth opening wide to wrap her lips around the head of your cock.
"M-mm!" The girl looks absolutely happy and delighted as her tongue swirls around your hard member, her small mouth taking in a quarter of your cock with ease before she runs out of space. She's looking up at you as you smile back down at her, slowly mussing her hair up before putting it back in order.
You feel her throat parting around your head, then, the Little Sister pushing herself further and further to take more and more of your manhood inside her. You hum in pleasure as you stroke over the side of her neck with just a few fingers, feeling where it swells with your cock's girth.
"You're a very good girl, aren't you? Have you been practicing?"
With almost all of your cock gobbled up now, she lets her tongue slobber past her libs, her head and neck bobbing back and forth. At the same time, she starts swallowing, rippling pressure felt rhythmically all over your length, her hands holding onto the sides of your waist.
"You feel so good… I'm going to come soon," you warn her.
The Little Sister redoubles her efforts, greedily begging with her eyes as she sucks you off better than a high-class whore. You gently buck into her mouth, penetrating all the way into her throat as you are, and before long you can feel it, your peak approaching quickly.
She buries her cute little nose against your belly, sucking all your cum right into her belly like a vacuum the moment you start shooting it, pulsing rope after pulsing rope disappearing directly down her esophagus.
She does let you pull out, but only very slowly, relishing the sensation of your cock sliding out just like she did on its way in. Finally, with a little pop, your entire manhood is freed, coated thickly in saliva that rapidly cools in the air of your underwater villain base.
The Little Sister coughs a few times, her regeneration setting her throat back to normal breathing mode, then smiles up at you happily, giving your tip one last cute little kiss with her lips puckered up. "Only once per reward, or else it wouldn't be fair," she tells you, one eye winking cutely. "I'm at dick-sucking height, but definitely let me find you a few more times!"
Turning around, she pulls her little dress off to the sound of your chuckling, wiggling her butt in your direction as she leaves.
"Time to find a new hiding place, I guess. This might take a bit if they're all like that…"
Suffice it to say, all the Little Sisters you see from then on are almost naked, save for their socks and shoes. You attend to all of them. Repeatedly.
"So, it's been alright for you?" The question is one that must be asked, much as you wish you didn't have to doubt available entertainment in any of your headquarters. "I know the Little Sisters have been having fun, but I'm not so sure about yourself, for instance."
Eleanor Lamb, daughter (biologically speaking, anyways, one of the reproductive cells that she was created from came from the woman at least) shakes her head, her black hair flowing with the motion just a little. "It's fine, really. Just keeping the other girls in line is more than enough to occupy myself. Having TV just adds to it."
Note to self, praise the Thinker for finagling a way to access television from pretty much around the world from base later.
"Glad to hear that. You know I worry about everyone doing alright while I'm down under," you shrug, vaguely gesticulating around. "While I have you here already though, is there anything else I could do for you or the girls?"
Eleanor takes a moment to think, one side of her lips turning inwards as she gently chews on them. "There is one thing I could think of…"
"Oh? Do tell."
"You know, I used to have a connection with the Little Sisters, even before you came," she confirms what you were thinking before already. "All Big Sisters did to some extent, I think, it's how they knew whenever one of them went missing. And, well… It's a very direct kind of connection."
"Hmm… Sharing thoughts, emotions? Sensations?" You guess.
"Exactly. So I kind of felt it every time you, you know. With them. And there's something I wanted to say about that."
You wave for her to go on. This deserves to be heard, of course.
"I will not object to whatever you do with them as long as they want it, that's not what this is about. They… they survived Rapture, they can choose to do these kinds of things if they want. I just wanted to ask you about something related, because I'm not sure who to talk to about it."
"I'm all ears and entirely unjudgmental, if that's what you need. So what's the big deal?"
"HARDER! FUCK MY ASS HARDER YOU BASTARD!"
"Really got a mouth on you, huh?"
Eleanor's ass is tight and almost fighting you as you drill into it, your cock ploughing her behind with forceful thrusts that shove the couch she's kneeling on further and further against the wall. Her teeth are grit and a crazed look blazes in her eyes, the unsurprisingly dirty-minded teenager absolutely enjoying being reamed by you.
That was her request, pretty much. She wanted to be fucked in the ass hard and dirty-like, just taken with no regards for her wellbeing. She's still a Big Sister of course and entirely capable of regenerating any damage away, so really, there wasn't any harm in it.
Which brings you to the present, your entire manhood spearing into the heated tightness of Eleanor's very enjoyable asshole.
"Ugh! Ugh! Just… A little… More!" Her fingers clawing into the velvet of the couch, she pushes her hips towards you just a little further, receiving your pounding with all the eagerness of a bitch in heat. "I want you to fuck me stupid!"
"That can be arranged, of course." Intensifying said pounding, your hands on the young woman's hips as you admire her shapely butt and slim back, you tap deeper into your supernatural might, literally fucking her hard enough a human woman would just break in half. She seems to luxuriate in it, the intensity and rough slaps of flesh against flesh filling out her entire world.
"Yes! Yes! Yes! YEEEEEESSSSS!" Eleanor convulses in your grasp, her legs kicking out, her tongue slipping past her lips. She completely falls apart as she comes from being roughly assfucked, her back entrance locking around the base of your cock so tightly it would probably shear through weaker material than what you're made of.
Well, not quite, but it's the impression you get, see?
Falling face-first against the couch's backrest, she breathes heavily, sweaty face the very picture of contentment. "… How much time do you have?" She asks, your manhood still firmly stuck inside her ass.
"A couple hours, I think?" You smile, amused.
"Good." She wiggles her hips, starting so learn control of her internal musculature already as she almost pulls your cock in deeper yet. "Very good."
You consider this to be a part of the employment package anyone working with you directly may receive, by the way.
With most of the base's inhabitants taken care of for the time being, what with the extensive 'playing' you did with the Little Sisters and Eleanor's (potentially subconscious) influence on the Big Sisters calming them down now that she is a well-fucked, half-conscious mess recovering with a big grin on her face after what you did to her ass, one would be forgiven for assuming you had everyone's condition well in hand.
Hah. Just goes to show assumptions go out the window more often than not wherever you and your little gang of monsters are concerned.
Of course someone has something going on that you should have a look at and slash or deal with. It just wouldn't be the Crypts otherwise. In this case, though, it's a somewhat unusual occurrence in that one of your vampires is worrying over literally nothing, given the facts are what they are.
Specifically, Nora is worried. Worried about that? About her figure. Yeah, you didn't misinterpret that or anything, she's genuinely worrying having had three children with you, plus Shaun back when she was human and thus much more susceptible to such things, her figure might have changed in some way and you might be less attracted to her as a result of that.
Absolutely ludicrous of course, for several reasons. One, she's a vampire, she doesn't suffer from any of those mortal foibles, full stop. If that weren't enough, you would love her just the same even if she let herself go a bit, something she knows very well, and she can literally feel you do, in fact, love her very much still through the literal telepathic connection you have with everyone.
Alas, a woman's heart is a complicated and difficult thing, plain logic not always enough for it to feel at ease. Well, guys aren't really any better, but you categorically deal with female emotional issues more than male ones, so whatever. All that matters is that you have to nip this in the bud before you have to pull Lilian and the twins into this to guilt trip Nora into accepting she's still just as beautiful as the first day she was turned.
So here you are, both of you entirely naked (you never did bother to put any clothes on after the Little Sisters removed them), going over her gloriously womanly body and making absolutely sure that, if anything, she is actually more beautiful than ever before.
Particularly her breasts. It's hard to notice unless someone with literally perfect memory (like yourself) and exceeding amounts of experience with them (also like yourself) were to examine them closely, but Nora's chest actually grew just a little bit throughout her pregnancies, plus a little extra surprise.
"So you're still lactating?" You ask, gently tugging on her slightly hardened nipples with both hands.
"Just a little, hah, but when a cute boy like yourself goes to town on them…" Nora smiles, thumb rubbing over the back of your hand.
"I wonder when you'll get over the fact I'm a couple year younger than you. A century or two? A millennium?"
"It'll always stay true, don't think you can get out of this cougar's claws so easily," she chuckles, enjoying your rhythmic motions for a few moments, occasionally lactating a drop or two of vampire milk. You wonder if it has any interesting alchemical properties, actually… "What about my belly? It's not too spongy?"
"Nora, you still have abs someone could grate cheese, prepare a meal on and then eat it," you succinctly describe just how delicious your vampire wife looks. "You still have a body that's just to die for, take it from a dead man."
"Hmm…" Oh, she's still having a hard time believing you? Fine. You kneel down in front of her, hands sliding down her thighs, and look up.
"You're still more a goddess made flesh than anything that was mortal once upon a time," you assure her, earnestly appealing as much with both your voice and your mind.
"And… how about a bit lower?" Nora asks anxiously. "I did give birth several times…"
"Let me demonstrate to you, in depth, that you are just as tight and sexy as you've ever been," you declare, tongue licking your lips- before it licks hers, your lovely wife's pussy lips parting before your intruding appendage as she gasps, letting her pleasure be known to you directly.
"Oh, that's certainly hard to refute…"
You will eat your Nora out however often you need to until the messae is hammered home.
While you're up already, you also, you decide, may as well go ahead and deal with a couple small things up on the surface, primarily related to your company's ongoing expansion all over the globe. As the saying goes, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, after all, and now you finally get to do it yourself.
First stop, a certain man that you just want to force to do a certain thing. It's really not all that complicated, but why do so many people have to be convinced first to transfer their nation's entire economy into your sockpuppets' ownership? Honestly, it's almost like the king of Ethiopia was asking for it.
Well, technically he's titled as the Emperor of Ethiopia, but since when did anyone care about that exactly? It's a monarchy with fancier titles in all but name as it is, one way or the other.
Well, here you are, a featureless shadow creeping into his bedroom, currently empty save for himself. No family to get in the way, no prostitutes, nobody and nothing.
Just the way you like it. A clear, clean confrontation just between you and him, so you can calmly and directly approach the topic on your mind. All you'd need now is some snacks and it would be a friendly get-together even!
Haile Selassie is, among other things, a Christian of some faith, which may have played a part in why he refused to be de facto absorbed into the NAN which as a whole is taking a resolutely secular stance, some degrees of autocratic as far as rulers go even in this day and age and his decrees do regularly violate human rights, though only some of that is an issue for you.
Luckily, you are here to fix said issues. He will either make it through the changes or be a broken human being by the end, either/or with little way to tell yet. Regardless, you wake him up with a hand over his mouth, his secret holdout gun already stolen from under his pillow.
"Don't struggle too much now," you tell him in a language he understands. "Just try to relax and this will all be over before you know it, just a bad dream… Or don't, I will be having fun either way."
It isn't every day you get to play with the mind of a man as unilaterally powerful over his own population as this one, see?
"Reveal your thoughts, your memories, your mind!" As a mental picture spreads behind your metaphorical inner eyes, you quickly get a grasp on Selassie's mind, the way he thinks, forms likes and dislikes, his memories and character, all laid out for you easily categorized and with notation and links to everything else.
It's really marvelous how your magic can just do that, open a person's mind like a book for you to leaf through at your leisure. Humans are both much more complicated than they often think themselves and much, much easier to analyze than they often believe they are, as is easily demonstrated by what you are perceiving right now, after all.
But you aren't here just to take a look of course, the struggling man you're holding in place unable to move much with how much you're making him weigh out of nowhere. So with an eye on his personal values and priorities to begin with, you bring out the next tool in your arsenal meat for tasks such as this. "The mind and body, all can be changed!"
Time to start carving away and replacing things inside his head, eh?
It is for the best, of course, you don't go too wild; literally changing one's mind is a fiendishly complex process as is, so right now you're mainly focused on getting the parts you actually require to be modified to work correctly over throwing in any fun 'surprises'.
You know this already of course from having tested these same spells on captives on several opportunities you took to practice, but making any truly deep changes requires you to not only modify a single given part of a person's mind, you also have to work in knock-on changes to other parts ad changes that result from them etc. Luckily, you can short a lot of the more finicky details out by abusing your magic and the way it interfaces, simply making all of those at once, but you still must make sure that the cumulative changes you cause don't cause any catastrophic harm elsewhere.
Which happens more often than you'd think. It's really way too easy to end up with uselessly screaming madmen by accident when you're just doing some minor edits in the wrong parts of someone's brain…
It's not really easily used in the middle of a fight, since you need to focus, cast your Mental Scan spell first so you have any idea what you're doing and then you can start messing around with the edits, but given your target is just, say, sitting around for a few minutes and doesn't mind, you can really go nuts. Some of the ongoing modifications you make may also get reverted when the rest of the mind you're working on reasserts what it believes to be true, so you sometimes have to go through several stages of this stuff when you're looking to do something specific.
Which you are right now, now course. Hence why it's taking you literal hours to properly, thoroughly brainwash the Emperor of Ethiopia, but by the end of it he's all but guaranteed to do and sign anything a guy dressed in your company's uniform wants him to.
If you had one, anyways.
The last thing you do is to erase his memories of everything that happened tonight and send him back to sleep. "Sweet dreams, by the way, I input a repeating loop of voices telling you to join the NAN."
After making your way out of the palace you aren't done with Ethiopia yet, though. Knowing what you know (from the future and all that), before long there will be a soviet-backed rebellion rising up to dethrone the current emperor and install a communist regime- assuming, anyways, that your actions so far haven't completely butterflied this turn events away yet.
The fight between freedom and communism (you like terming it this way because it makes it very clear what communism decidedly isn't) is still being fought on all fronts available, but with the way you've essentially locked down the middle east and given both the east and the wets more than enough other problems to think about, you'd be forgiven for assuming they decided to put their money and attention elsewhere.
You'd be wrong, but you'd be forgiven, you're sure.
Of course there are communist spies and rebels in Ethiopia, and of course you make a sport of hunting them down, consuming their souls in all sorts of entertaining ways during it all.
Literally sticking a straw into a guy and drinking him up? Done. Thrown into a woodchipper and the blood pulled out and drank through hemokinesis? Done. Stunned by way of playing eardrum-bursting loud classical music and then bludgeoned with a car, a corpse and a flyswatter reinforced by your gravity manipulation to have extremely high density? Done, done and done.
Note to self, should keep more flyswatters around for comedic potential.
Sadly, it seems the soviets are actually pulling support from their feet on the ground here in Ethiopia, simply not considering it worth their time to destabilize the region when the NAN is likely going to reap the benefits instead anyways. Kind of a minor oopsie, but at least it's one less problem you have to deal with, making it the good kind of problem in retrospect.
Not that you're done meddling with these things directly for the night, oh no…
You have a few hours to kill before you've arranged a little meeting meant to take place before you get back to sleep for the time being, so you end up teleporting yourself (having yourself teleported, same difference) over towards no place other than Taiwan, the charming little island that will be your spear tip to fuck over the rest of China with before you simply take it all over.
You have your media being played here, your products being sold; there is capitalism here, predominantly, but it is your capitalism, so it's actually working properly in both the immediate and longer terms. Still, you could stand with raising the public sentiment towards conquering the mainland some, just to make it all look a bit more impressive; not an endeavor planned and executed by men in government rooms, but rather a movement that overtakes every last man, woman and child, that their cousins enslaved by the madman Mao must be freed from their chains.
Yes, you like that picture. So, wearing a piece of cloth around your face for simple deniability reasons, you go to work using some imported Cryptic Solution spray cans.
A grand picture of emasculated, famished, stick-thin figures, helped to stand by brave men whose comrades are standing in a mildly disorderly battle line, rifles raised to ward off the slavering peons of the Madman, carrying trophies of their victims in chopped-off fingers, shrunken heads and the like on their bodies, a wild mob fighting itself as it does the valorous saviors come to release the Chinese people.
Speaking of, you add a caption in Chinese under the rest of the graffiti as well. 'How Long Can We Stand By?'
Satisfied, you throw the cans to the side, looking your work over. That's one town hall down, a good couple more to go.
With Taiwan 'blessed' by your artistic talents, a little over two dozen pieces of graffiti sprayed with suitably inspiring and imposing messages to hopefully rouse the Taiwanese people to realize and actively oppose the threat of a communist mainland China, you move on to make your appointment, taking a few minutes to get changed back at home before teleporting onwards to Egypt.
Commute has never ben faster and easier than with teleportation. And to think this used to be one of those things you used to be worried about back when you had any time to care about such things…
Man, a lot of your old concerns and plans for the future just kind of evaporated when you died, huh? You suppose you should count yourself lucky it wasn't all of them, of course; most people are a tad more indisposed for dinner plans after being smeared into sidewalk paste by a fucking truck.
Not that you're complaining, mind you, your plans to hire on with the PRT or some other parahuman-related business and just use your new income to raise Sarah (and Reggie, a traitorous part of your mind whispers) by yourself far away from your parents would have involved a lot of much more boring work on your part. Keeping your superiors' needs met in the bedroom can be more than a full-time commitment and when you add all the other casual sex you end up having throughout the day…
Trying for being a porn star was your Plan B, but let's be honest, how many people actually make it big in that industry? With the internet making porn increasingly free to obtain for pretty much anyone, the entire business model would have to be changed and adjusted, something that simply wasn't there when you first started looking into what you could be after school and slash or university.
No matter. All of that is quite behind you these days, and you certainly are better off for it. Adjusting your fine suit one last time (it's the kind you wouldn't mind wearing as your Cain costume and you've developed a taste for expensive suits as of late, though you certainly don't mind wearing cheaper ones if the situation calls for it), you peer around inside Nasser's office, the President of Egypt working late tonight.
Yes, you decided the quasi-leader of the political side of your little illuminati conspiracy deserves to have a little talk, mostly because he's been doing so well and you may as well turn meeting you into a greatly important event and all.
Slithering and sliding as a shadow, you creep up the chair opposite from Nasser's own, positioning yourself when he isn't paying attention to the rest of the room for a moment as he sorts through several documents, occasionally looking at his watch as he goes.
Then you push out of your own shadow, back into normal space, clear your throat. "Gamal Abdel Nasser," you say, the man twitching up to see you sit there with no sign as to your arrival, "a pleasure to meet you."
A light sense of pressure settles over the room, not enough to break anything or make anything hard to do, but still noticeable. Things are weightier, breathing is just a little bit more effort, moving that little bit harder. Outside, thunder rolls over Cairo, the small storm you brewed up over the past twenty minutes, half hour maybe, firing off.
"You would be… Mister Livsey, as I was notified?" Nasser asks more than he says, mildly rooted to the spot.
"One of my names, yes. Feel free to call me Gabriel if you prefer, of course," you smile as though you just made an in-joke. Arguably, you did. "But let's not get bogged down in formalities- you were promised a chat with the CEO and, well, here I am."
You smile your best imposing smile, wishing you had thought to bring a wine glass filled with blood to swirl around mysteriously right now.
"I do hope I do not disappoint."
Before you go any further, you take a moment to take out some of what you did bring; some fancy whiskey taken from… Huh, you aren't sure you know where it was taken from actually, though the Thinker helps you out by pointing out it was stolen from some rich English asshole's private collection when you started to assemble a collection of your own just for the sake of having it.
Hey, everyone's got to have some hobbies, and though you may not drink all that much personally it's one of those things rich people that genuinely have too much money to throw around do, so here you are.
"I would assume you have questions, of course," you say once you've both taken a sip of the glasses you just handed out. "Feel free to voice them."
"What, exactly, is our goal?" Wow, he didn't even need to think about it.
"Oh, that is both fairly simple and complex to answer, but for the sake of brevity… This entire world is to become a safe haven, of sorts. With no wars, no struggle and no need for great, overarching plots to be had."
"Why did you approach me as one of the first members of our little… group? Or was it Egypt at large you were after?" Nasser continues.
"Both, in fact. Egypt was in prime condition to be converted towards our cause with minimal introduction of additional technology and your past history of attempts to form a Pan-Arabic Coalition made you ideal as an initial spokesman for what would become the NAN," you explain, calmly going through the points of the series of events you're outlining here.
One by one he asks, and one by one you answer. You don't exactly have anything to hide and whether it is good sense or a premonition you wouldn't answer any all too personal questions, Nasser never actually asks what you are. A perfectly workable mutual understanding, you feel, is being built up.
Of course the NAN's stance on nuclear weaponry does come up. When it does, you don't bother pretending you didn't come prepared; asking him to step to the window with you, you gesture upwards.
Where you've twisted the clouds into a massive, almost black maelstrom, illuminated only by the trikes of lightning falling well outside the city you happen to be in.
"The NAN does not need nukes," you tell him. "We have much, much better already. Imagine if this wasn't just a storm of clouds, for example. Imagine hailstorms. Snowstorms so thick and all-encompassing they're more regional avalanches than anything else. Meteors of ice so thick they can crush buildings just by virtue of impacting the general vicinity."
The air inside the office is cooling down rapidly, Nasser's breath coming out as fog as he gives you an understanding look. You would like to note Egypt is very much situated in a lot of desert and it's pretty hot around here usually, but alas, that is what happens when you decide to cool everything down just by being present.
By the end of your visit, Nasser, you hope, has gained a new appreciation for the importance of his place in the world. You also leave him with a statue of himself made of ice, just because you were in a kind of artistic mood. What he'll do with it is up to him, you just froze some of the air's humidity into place to make it.
On a side note, you decided to go ahead and release the book you wrote while you were in Remnant, Chained By The Night, just to see how reception would turn out.
It's kind of a low-key hit among the political left in America while the right is getting into a tizzy over it for some reason, all it does is depict the struggles of a male as the less powerful partner is several simultaneous non-consensual relationships. You really don't get why they're screaming about destruction of families all of a sudden.
It's generally taken well in Europe while it's not printed within the USSR due to censorship reasons, and you would rather personally go and kill every last man, woman and child living on that entire landmass than allow anyone to censor your work.
Within the NAN, it's not a great hot by any measure, but it's culturally accepted and by many considered to be a nuanced criticism of socio-cultural norms. Goes to show what happens when you try writing porn.
It is now the second half of 1972
So, while you could go in-depth about happenings all over the world, that would be kind of a pain and also pointless. The majority of everything going on at any one point in time simply doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, whereas identifying the actually relevant topics to cover in a quarterly report for an organization of your size is honestly a bigger challenge than just throwing anything and everything together and calling that 'relevant'.
So! News in the US, Nixon is still being impeached and it's looking increasingly like his vice president may have to take over, though there's also talks of simply holding entirely new elections on the spot. A president of the United States actually being removed from office through impeachment is of course a massive 'scandal' in more conservative circles, but it's not like any of this wasn't constitutional.
Interestingly, however, things are currently going a step further. After Nixon announced his (historically) famous War on Drugs, there have been talks going around about legalizing weed again after the Prohibition-era amendments have been looked over. It was illegalized in, like 1938 or somewhere around the bend, you think? This isn't something you have perfect memory on, you just looked it over while you were still in school for a project.
Ms. Donningham gave you an A and a blowjob for it, by the way.
So while that's all going on, pro-war sentiment in Taiwan is rising, especially as more media attention is put on China's massively weakening state and Mao's instability. You like to think your graffiti helps with that, but when in doubt you'll always rely on propaganda and a charismatic leader or two, the works, basically.
Meanwhile both the NAN and the USSR remain more or less stable- the former is simply passively expanding as per usual whereas the latter is suppressing news of several rebellions taking place, dozens of high-ranking officers and officials 'just so happening' to go nuts and spread anti-soviet sentiments all the while a good few car bombings are going on.
Gotta love the Russians and their sense of politics.
Europe is still kind of caught in the middle of the Cold War and also still a bombed-out hellscape after WWII, but at least reconstruction has begun happening, particularly in Spain now that Franco has fully regained his senses and is working towards installing himself as a permanent power block again.
Meanwhile, the Olympic Summer Games 1972 are about to begin in Munich, Germany. You're looking forward to seeing how your athletes will be doing.
So then, new business quarter, new opportunities! Primarily speaking, you're pumping more wares into Taiwan, both the civilian kind- household appliances are and remain the best sellers overall so far, though the growth of that particular market's income has slowed a bit of late as saturation has set in in places like the US and your own nations (the NAN; if that was unclear)- as well as weaponry, much of which is being produced in your Saudi Arabian factories.
With a firm logistics network in place, you can pump raw materials (except oil, you have an abundance of the stuff there, you have to keep in mind to crash its prices at some point just to break open even more markets for you to consume) in and finished products of virtually any kind out now. As all wages are pretty much set and guaranteed by Cryptic Solutions, it is entirely possible to just not produce wares of a certain kind, then either give everyone involved in their production some holidays or, where doable, have them work extra shifts in other places that require more manhours done, all without pressing more work out of anyone than they already do.
Is this kind of like what communism did? Well, yes, kind of, but not really. You aren't just unilaterally taking everyone off of their farms and shoving them into factories, then wondering why there's a famine, for example. More practically, your workers can resign at any time and you'd let them- they're in it for the money and the money is good, more than most made in their previous occupations, and you actually plan your economy out properly.
As in, you make Sinclair, Henley and the respectively involved departments do it, from marketing and accounting to PR, but it comes out to the same result. You have people to do this for you and they do it well enough.
Or at least the average worker still has more than enough money to feed, house and clothe a family, all with A/C thanks to the part of your company solely focused on architecture and construction building massive, roomy apartment complexes where it makes sense to do so.
You heard there's entirely new social dynamic developing thanks to all of this going on, especially where your economic influence is its most centralized, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and to a lesser extent Israel, though as initial observations have returned positively you're very much expanding this model of economic governance.
Given literally everything these people are living in, wearing, eating, drinking, using and/or otherwise are consumers of is sold by your company, distributed from its point of production by your company logistic network etc., this is both very heartening to see, as they're all your customers, and very, very lucrative.
Speaking of your expanding influence, though, Ethiopia has officially joined the NAN, as have a bunch of miscellaneous central-African nations that, again, nobody gives a fuck about. Well, you would if they had made you, but as it is you don't actually have to put effort into crushing them economically and politically until they got the message.
Progress!
More mercantile feelers are also stretched towards India and Pakistan, though more on that later, and France is continuing to be hollowed out and its insides replaced by Cryptic Solutions. After you pretty much wrecked its economy, you pretty much simply took over empty factories that couldn't sustain themselves without practically free raw materials from Africa, then added a few supply routes and voila, France has an economy again.
A CS economy. You feel like there should be a proper term for this, but you can't come up with one. At any rate, local production does mean you can use your French franchise branch (was that it?) to export cheaper (because less shipping required) wares towards the rest of the EU together with the rest of your usual accoutrements.
All in all, more business, which means good business. Amen.
In terms of research and development, however, things are going even better, if anything. For starters, you have finished designing and building a fancy new model for an orbital satellite camouflaged to look like it's purely meant to handle extensive telecommunication tasks.
Which it does, to be fair. It does so extremely efficiently, such that one of these babies alone can essentially bounce signals back and forth to cover the entirety of the NAN given some ground installations, effectively providing access to all the NAN-sanctioned television channels and internet sites one could wish for.
Given you have instated essentially no censorship and individual governments don't get a say in the matter so smaller ones you don't directly control through a thrall or two don't get to interfere with all of this, this means porn for everyone, pretty much. Also both government-friendly and -opposed news stations, with the latter secretly controlled by your PR department to make any real internal political opposition to the NAN constantly look just a little bad, of course.
You heard the channels and internet sites particularly specialized on political debates are actually doing surprisingly well, in fact.
Anyways, now that you have the capacity to bring a couple of these up in the air, pending the completion of a factory or two specifically meant to produce a few of the required parts, you can offer nearly free high-speed internet and immaculate TV reception to just about anyone that has the required hardware, whether in Cryptic Solution- built TV screens and receivers or computers that already come with the capability to connect to the Better Internet (name pending) built in.
Yes, you're basically kickstarting the existence of the internet and sponsoring various content creators that suddenly have the entire world as a potential audience right in front of them. Humanity will thank you for this in time.
It will learn to.
But alas, simply creating a better way to transfer data was not enough- you also felt that, as a professional evil genius, you should have an orbital laser weapon ready to burn out your enemies at a moment's notice. And so you included an up-sized laser weapon fueled by an Eldritch Core, the entire thing pretty much hidden inside of the 'public' satellite blueprint.
That you're still classifying, of course, but not even the engineers working on these things will know about the high-precision laser part. Capable of lancing out entire cities in one go on demand, though they have to recharge from their Core for a bit after doing any such thing.
"So… Regenerative toothpaste?" You ask through the Thinker, using your own voice modulator as usual, eyeing the sample of a decayed tooth taken from one of your many, many test subjects that seems to be fairly healthy.
"Indeed!" Curie, the lead voice behind this particular pursuit, nods happily, gesturing for the complicated apparatus set up to produce this new minor miracle. "It re-calcifies caries-infested enamel and undoes any damage sustained, provided it is minor enough not to have reached the roots first. In which case it stabilizes the affected flesh and nerves, oui? Still requires a dentist to replace lost parts, but it cuts down on maintenance costs!"
"That's one way to put it, certainly," you shrug. "How expensive is it to create?"
"Not at all that much, it should definitely 'elp in the 'ealthcare sector!"
Can't argue with that, you suppose. "Send the technical details along as per usual and we'll see about making it happen."
Always nice when your researchers are doing something useful and all that. And Curie in particular always did care about curing humanity's ills… regardless of the costs to humanity, but that's why you don't let the former robot launch any 'tests' involving an entire continent's ecosystem to see what effects certain stimuli combined with mutagenic substances may have in relation to an existing ecosystem.
She did apply for something like that, but yeah, you rejected that. You do not want a worse second Australia.
Tonic Research Report:
Armored Shell 2: Adds 2 armor against all damage
Armored Shell 3: Adds 3 armor against all damage and grants 25% immunity to cutting and piercing damage sustained
Booze Hound 2: Turns alcohol into a powerful curative, healing scrapes and minor wounds within seconds upon ingestion of some quantities thereof (3 HP healed per bottle of hard liquor)
Booze Hound 3: Alcohol becomes a short-lived booster shot for both mental and physical tasks, granting a temporary 20 bonus to all rolls upon ingestion of liquor, and increased regenerative effects (5 HP healed per bottle of liquor)
Damage Research 2: Grants nigh impossible insight into researched targets, doubling damage bonuses through research
Damage Research 3: Doubles damage bonuses through research and grants a 10% chance to instantaneously kill a sufficiently researched type of creature or mechanism on any damaging action against them.
Lilian had been keeping her growth back much like her sister did so they could keep on blending in with the small humans around them, but even so she was relieved that human puberty could be quite absurd at times, the small amounts of such she did allow going much further than she would have expected.
She was pretty tall, something she most likely inherited from both her (biological) parents, and she actually had some chest on her. It wasn't an amazing amount, but she was far from fully grown, and for girls her 'age' it may well be amazing.
She didn't particularly care, she just had other priorities. Though a big bosom certainly helped to manipulate others, for some of the other girls all she had to do was wave them around a bit and they couldn't help but stare.
Simple. Almost too simple, honestly.
"So we're gonna be graduating soon," her sister, Serena, spoke up, drawing her out of her introspection. "Any thoughts on what you'll do next?"
"… Nothing, really," Lilian shrugged, impassively. So what if she didn't have any particular opinions on the matter? "I'll probably just ask dad if he needs some help around the business."
"Mhm…" Pushing her mouth up into a fox-like little snout (she did that often), her sibling tilted her head. "Whelp, if nothing comes up, you can always help me out! I'm gonna be taking over Japan after all, a little qualified intern labor is always useful!"
"An intern, am I?" She quirked an eyebrow.
"I'm sure not gonna be paying you," Serena grinned, leaning against her shoulder. "Unless you'd like to be paid in kissies?"
She thought on it. "Still better than being an intern. Though I always thought I could get those on demand…" Turning her sister's head, Lilian pressed a kiss onto her mouth, their tongues flashing out to play with one another, entwining as their lips mashed at the other's.
Pulling back after a bit, she nodded.
"Yeah, free sisterly kisses are still the best."
Serena gave her a smoldering look, one that implied she wasn't going to be satisfied with the humans they kept for sex tonight. "Only the most sisterly ones."
"Exactly." Looking down, Lilian tilted her head. "Do you think we should feed our furniture?"
Yes, they were sitting on the prostrating forms of their 'roommates', the naked girls on all fours where they belonged, their little buttplugs with handles decorated by a big artificial diamond each sticking out a bit to make for easier handles when any hands ran the risk of going idle, the ball gags keeping them quiet moist with the saliva the girls couldn't keep contained.
Like the sloppy little needy pets they were.
"I'd say they could use a little something to drink," Serena grinned, lasciviously spreading her legs to lightly finger herself in anticipation of what was to come. "Wanna see which of them is slower today?"
"Sure, I don't see why not." They weren't supposed to be naked inside the dorms, or do anything even remotely resembling their current behavior, but really, those were human rules meant for humans. The poor things really just didn't know any better, which was why the sisterly pair was there to correct them one transgression at a time.
Which was why they had lesbian orgies inside the school every Tuesday, Thursday and over the whole weekend now. Progress, yay.
Your more covert operations are continuing as before at the moment as well, the long-term plays you've initiated before still playing out, as it were; infiltrators are still mucking around in India, one particularly outstanding one has managed to place himself near some of the political leaders of Pakistan, the works.
The experiment as to mundane subversion is still going on its tracks, tucking along, basically.
On the home front, the Olympic athletes chosen by various NAN nations are still fed with a carefully calibrated diet of your varied low-level stimulants, slowly and steadily going right up against human limits. Brigid actually quite enjoyed the simple, almost statistical work she did to make this strategy to cheat at the Olympics a reality, so hey, good on her; you get the feeling your lead geneticist often just gets lost in more complicated project, completely ignoring anything beyond the scientific data and experiments required to get to the results she requires.
With the Olympic Summer Games approaching fast, you absolutely want to make sure they're all ready to take the gold. And silver and bronze, for that matter, all the top athletes this year had better come from the NAN. You're having the Cryptic Solutions logo branded on all of their uniforms, it's actually the same sign you used back on Remnant as your self-made Huntsman insignia, together with the NAN's logo.
It's pretty neat and you want your new show of predominance over the world to go off with a bang, you see?
"President Nixon, who has been succinctly described in recent times as the Santa Claus of Lies by his political opponents, has in a surprising turn of events handed in his resignation as the President of the United States, declaring that 'if the nation demands it, it will happen'…"
"… Vice President Ford to be taking office until the next presidential elections, vowing to undo any harm caused by the President's actions whether knowingly or accidental…"
"President Nixon's Resignation Speech has been announced, the nation demanding he be held accountable…"
"And I'm telling you, they're doing him dirty, all the pundits swarming around the whole thing like vultures- Yes, I know vultures don't swarm, your point?"
"Breaking News: Acting President Ford has issued forth a Presidential Pardon for disgraced Ex-President Nixon, severely disappointing any that would have wanted to see the incredible allegations made against him investigated…
"… Communist Socialist Marxist Pressure Groups out to destroy America…"
"… incredible footage, riots in the capital as the crowd demands Acting President Ford step down and his controversial Presidential Pardon for the Ex-President be revoked…"
Your corruption senses are tingling. Someone must have done something, you're pretty sure. Time to turn on the transceiver and watch TV down here in Rapture.
Before you get ahead of yourself, though, there's a couple more advances you've been making; for one, you basically took the Israeli air force, currently enjoying some measure of global renown, and expanded it, deploying 'advanced' technology combined with your considerable resources to gather recruits suited towards this line of work, from pilots to maintenance specialists to more manpower to feed the ever-hungry ever-expanding logistical apparatus of your military, clearly denoted and partially separated from your civilian one.
Mostly just so your little quasi-private army can shoot down other people's air forces and support and then bomb everything in sight, as aerial superiority is meant to be used.
On the other hand, pretty much all on your soldiers are getting a little extra pep in their step from now on. You can do it to your athletes, why wouldn't you be able to do it to them?
"So this is the new stuff?"
"Yep. Just came in on the first of the month, CS emblem and all."
"Looks legit. How often are we supposed to take it?"
"One drink a week, apparently."
Just then, a guy twice the size he was earlier that morning walked in, muscles rippling just short of looking unhealthy. "Oh hell, that's the good shit boys! Think we can get the COs to allow some alcohol in this stuff, be one hell of a party trick, hahaha!" He walked off, leaving pieces of splintered wood inside the doorframe where he'd ripped it.
The two soldiers exchanged a look.
"So… One a week?"
"Think they add up?"
It turned out later on that the enhanced size and musculature only lasted for an hour and some change and their comrade had accidentally drunk a month's worth of supply of the new enhancement formulas, leading to his sudden and very notable change.
All that happened to most was that they got just a little fitter, finding it easier to put on muscle and retain it for days after every dose of the surprisingly tasty liquid.
The incident was later covered up, but they'd all seen it. This was some legit superscience shit.
Everything is going according to plan, of course. Anyone saying otherwise is a dirty liar who lies.
The Olympics! A festival of sports and international solidarity, or at least that's what they're being sold as. Truth be told, the entire event is more just a dick measuring contest used to let the USA and the USSR do just that, measure dicks, without having to involve nukes at this point in time, though of course everyone is taking it way too seriously and cheating left and right.
Which is ridiculous of course, you are here now and will have your athletes win everything while totally cheating way harder, gotta use and abuse the fact they don't actually check for even a lot of mundane doping substances yet. They do simple tests and check for alcohol consumption, but that's pretty much it.
Meaning, your subtly roided-out guys and gals are about to crush the competition, all of them wearing a wonderful reminder to the world that Cryptic Solutions owns the NAN which is where all the 'best' athletes come from. You're essentially printing extra advertisement onto their uniforms, which really is fair game considering those uniforms are made by Cryptic Solutions in the first place.
Man, owning the economy fucking rules sometimes. Anytime really.
CS is also 'sponsoring' the games this year, quite a lot in fact, meaning that a whole bunch of ads are pretty much everywhere for various Cryptic Solutions products, from sports shoes to energy drinks, the latter of which you didn't even know you were selling; turns out it was originally a local recipe in some place you took over that kind of took off and was elevated to a mass-produced product you're shipping everywhere now, branching out from there to become a whole lineup of products you're shipping everywhere now.
Hey, at least it's no bullshit, it's an unhealthy drink that keeps you awake no matter what thanks to copious amounts of caffeine and, in some variations, alcohol, mixed with other ingredients that support the desired end result. There's been no deaths from overdosing yet as far as you know and so you shall simply ignore this entire thing for the moment.
Meanwhile, the NAN nations have sent a unified delegation to the games, presenting a strong, united front to measure up to the big powers. It's all coming along rather nicely, so you don't see much reason to interfere on this end of things for the moment.
You follow the trace, nose to the ground and paws pressed against asphalt, nothing to see here but a somewhat large dog wandering along, no sirree.
You're basically running a few rings all around the places the Olympic Games will be held within, just to double-check there's nothing particularly malicious going on; infiltrating official sites as a shadow just in case Germany has assembled the balls to try anything itself, looking around for any suspicious behavior you can see around Munich, sniffing around for the scent of explosives- the usual, pretty much, a simple broadband search for anything you might take issue with.
It would be most… displeasing, to see this whole event get fucked over because some asshole with explosives thought they should mess the whole affair up. You spent way too much attention on all of this, too, hence your personal presence at this time.
You're just taking a couple hours, currently in your wolf form keeping yourself a bit out of sight and all. You'd just go in your normal form, but it's easier to sniff out chemicals and traces thereof closer to the ground, so since it would be kind of weird of you to do this as your usual self, here you go.
You sniff and sniff, but you just can't seem to find any criminals with explosives you can identify. Kind of a bummer, and here you were hoping your usual luck would hold and some shady evil conspiracy would materialize out of the blue for you to dismantle and absorb it into your own.
All you seem to be able to find is the usual; people going about their daily lives, speaking in German (seeing as you're in Germany, that's no big surprise), horny chicks (you can tell by their scent) that are perhaps a little too attracted to your magnificent dark coat and get rather quite touchy-feely with it…
Business as usual, all in all. Ah well, at least nothing is exploding without you ordering it blown up, best to see the good side of things here as in all other things.
Well, idle thoughts about trying to seduce a chick or two in the body of a wolf aside (no matter how hilarious it would be, you aren't really sure about that, you haven't had weird bestiality sex so far and opening that can of worms all but guarantees it'll happen again, you can just feel it), you do have some actual stuff to do while you're out and about already.
Specifically, you have to deal with the Nixon situation. While it's very amusing you got him to pull the old 'switch out, get pardon' tactic he pulled historically as well, you've still got a lot of resentment over the whole thing floating around the US, or in other words a lot of opportunity, should you be the kind of person that goes around and takes over countries.
And would you look at that, you are. Who'd have thought.
Now, to make proper use of all of this, first you'll need to hire on some additional help- much like you couldn't just pull a boarding school out of the ground, you can't just take any random Joe Schmoe off the street and have him run for president. This kind of thing takes money, which isn't the problem admittedly, and more importantly connections.
The right kind of connections to other politicians, favors owed and all that crap. Politics, basically. Nobody gets anywhere near the White House without being connected to this big web of personal connections, that's just how it works.
Sure, you could use the public outrage to engineer a change in how this is done, put a complete unknown into the oval office. Thing is, that would be more work than it's really worth at this point in time, as your new puppet would basically have to deal with everyone else at that point and be pretty damn preoccupied, potentially too much to easily do what you want them to do.
Much easier to just work with the system and disintegrate it from the inside out, in this case.
So then, you need someone for the job. How do you achieve this? Why, you aren't going to bother asking Sarah or have the Thinker trawl through all available data when you can simply use phenomenal cosmic powers to instantly achieve results.
God (you) forbid you put in any more work on this than you strictly need to. This is incidentally why you didn't just pop your Cosmic Guidance on the Olympic Games and investigated in person instead.
Well, that and you kind of felt like taking a walk.
"Who is the best current candidate for presidency of the United States of America?"
Really vaguely worded, but the question being as it is, you think this works out better than trying to precisely define what the 'best' candidate needs to excel in. Just throw the whole thing out there and let magic sort it out.
Damn, you love not having to think too deeply about this stuff. Leaning back, you close your eye and wait for the information you want to come to you.
James Smith sat in his office, sipping coffee from his perfectly normal mug. It was between 180 to 185 degrees Fahreinheit, a bit hot at the moment but it would cool down to normal coffee temperatures before long.
He confirmed his average amount of paperwork to be done and stepped right to it- as the mayor of the average American city, he had a lot of work to do, but it wasn't anywhere beyond the norm for this profession by any measure.
As he idly filled out forms, his averagely-legible signature completing them whenever he finished with one, he looked up to see the picture of himself, his wife and their average 1.53 children for this time to achieve the average of total family size- ha, he got you! No, he had two children, as he simply rounded up when the missus agreed they should have another. A boy and a girl, the statistically average outcome for the nuclear family, as it were.
He loved them dearly, just as he hated his neighbors. Yet another way in which he closely resembled the average American. Sometimes, James wondered if something was wrong with himself, but then he was perfectly normal- as normal as can be, really.
He had been much more rebellious in his teenage years, but as was completely normal he had failed to consider that almost all teenagers were rebellious at this point in their lives.
However, before he could muse on any further, his morning became distinctly less normal as a cloud of mist filled his otherwise completely normal office, hiding his university diploma from sight. He sat up, waiting for things to go back to normal as they often did whenever anything strange happened.
This seemed to be beyond the usual strangeness he experienced in his normal daily life, as the mist condensed into a person, a young man sitting opposite from him now. At least his diploma with perfectly average scores was still intact.
"Hello there," the stranger greeted him. "James Smith, I take it?"
"That would be me, yes," he nodded, standing up to shake the bemused-looking younger man's hand as he also rose. Manners truly maketh man, as a mutual understanding was immediately achieved. "How can i help you?"
"Oh, I have a bit of a business proposition for you. The name is Gabriel Livsey by the way, in case you were wondering." They sat back down as James considered this strange person. Very sure of himself, though he did seem to have reason to be.
As the average politician, playing in the small leagues as he may be, James was perfectly aware that dubious dealings were a matter of life in some circles such as his own. He kept to the average amount of them, but perhaps he would have to adjust his quotas in this regard for the quarter. "Well, you seem to have me at a disadvantage, so please feel free to make your offer."
"How would you like to be immortal and run for President of the United States?"
His brows furrowed as he thought, perfectly aware he was of average intelligence. This simply meant he knew full well that smarts could not be quantified quite so easily, for all that his test scores in school always had been perfectly average. "I am not sure how well any such thing would fit into my own lifestyle," he confessed. "After all, the statistical life expectancy for a male of my generation is decidedly less than indefinite."
Whoops, he usually didn't just blurt these things out like that, he only got weird looks whenever he did… but this Mister Livsey simply smirked.
"I'm sure we can come up with a compromise. At least there is an average for immortals, which does happen to stand far above that of more mortal contemporaries, so perhaps you are simply applying the wrong statistics here," he reasoned. "We can even offer premium healthcare for you and your whole family on top, I'm not afraid to say we are quite interested in sponsoring the next POTUS after Nixon's… unfortunate missteps. Wouldn't you agree it is high time someone corrected them?"
"As the average American, I am very tempted by this last bit. As the average family father, I am sold the moment I have healthcare for me and my family on writing."
"I'm glad we have come to an understanding, then."
"Breaking News: Small-Town Mayor James Smith has declared his candidacy for election as interim president in the event of a revote after popular demand for Acting President Ford's withdrawal from office. In his words: It is time the average man's concerns are taken seriously…"
"The man's got a point, you have to admit. When's the last time your local politician asked you what you think?"
"… Because I do not believe that politics should be the concern of any one class of person in this wonderful nation. No, each and every one of us is part of it, and thus each and every one of us should have a voice! We live a promise of freedom and of justice, all of us, and it cannot be that any of us, least of all the face of these United States, is openly corrupt and incompetent to this degree! It cannot be he gets away with it! And we cannot let this be!"
"He's a marxist socialist leftist following their agenda to secularize our schools and groom our kids, I tell ya!"
"… and our guest today is none other than James Smith, controversial mayor extraordinaire! Thank you for being with us today."
"Please, it's everyone's dream to be in your show just once, Opr…"
So, James is turning out to be unusually well-suited for this whole gig. Turns out that sometimes, all you need is a completely normal guy that's in the right place at the right time.
Once again your inexplicable knowledge of seemingly random things like 'who would do best as US president' is coming in handy. He's basically crushing the popularity polls already and there's no actual framework for any possible re-election yet, even.
Curie does, it has to be said, inhabit a very much human body these days, something you are intimately assured of considering you did, after all, build it to specification yourself. Your sexy redhead scientist, now that the former robot is inside of it, it still is capable of feeling things like hunger.
Capable, though rarely actually doing so; not only do synthetic bodies like the one you made for her need relatively little nourishment to function, being quite superhuman in this regard, you also always make sure she is kept fed even if she is completely sunken into whatever project she's working on at the time.
Not that she's difficult to care for even then. Curie may be many things, but she certainly isn't neglectful of the biological needs she has had ever since you transferred her consciousness. Even left to her own devices she still very much manages to eat, drink and shower regularly, which is more than you can say about certain other scientists and Tinkers you could think of.
Demonstrative throat clearing commences.
Anyways, none of that really matters all too much right now, as you have convinced Curie to go 'observe the results of a large-scale sociological experiment' in person together.
Hence here you are, eating ice cream together and people watching a little on the side. It really is interesting to see how America's citizens are reacting to happenings on the political stage as of late.
"I can detect elevated levels of anger and frustration, commonly redirected towards hopes of removing current leadership," Curie nods, taking a lick from her banana ice cream, chosen to try comparing it to the homemade version pretty common down in Rapture ever since the Little Sisters figured out how to requisition the necessary raw materials. "So far the experiment seems to be a full success. By vilifying the last set of presidents, the next one will look better by contrast and earn more recognition than he would have otherwise given the same actions."
"That's one way to put it, yes," you nod, figuring you were just looking to mess with Nixon and put a convenient puppet into the White House in his place. "Though I don't think everyone quite got the memo, as always…"
Both of you watch as, beyond the window you're sitting at, a group of people argue animatedly. One side is clearly and openly wearing Republican colors, the other side not, and voices are raised in short order.
"Tribal thinking, expanded to the modern age," Curie sighs, perfectly happy to observe this phenomenon. "They identify with one party even as it has nothing to do with their own life and feel attacked when it is criticized, especially so during times of great criticism like this. Ideologically driven action on display."
Voices become fists, raised ones find faces in short order. One man pulls a gun, but he is dogpiled by others and it all become a big brawl, one of many breaking out with unsurprising regularity in some areas across this particular nation.
"It really is amazing to see how some simply refuse to face reality, even when the majority of the actual politicians involved publicly hate Nixon's guts themselves," you comment idly. "Would you like some more?"
"There is never enough ice cream. The little ones taught me as much." Curie states this triumphantly, smiling at you.
"Please don't imitate Brigid too much." Seriously, one probably some level of autistic scientific genius at a time is enough for you already. Your companion just continues to smile, hiding her mouth behind the ice cafe's menu as she makes a show of deciding what to eat next.
This is the kind of moment that justifies your expectation of being richer than god, by the way. You can just eat everything on this menu a few times over and it still wouldn't cost enough to eat into the loose change you brought with you.
You go out of your way to continue your observation tour, idly flirting with Curie all the while as she ever so slightly flirts back, hiding her happy little smiles behind whatever is at hand as best she can during your date. It's actually pretty cute, and somewhat reminds you of the times, back when you were younger, when you did go on dates with girls in school every now and then.
You aren't about to sink into melancholy about those days of course, but still. Cute.
Anyways, you and Curie make a game out of analyzing what you like about the ice cream you try out, steadily increasing the length of your ice cream research log and slowly optimizing what you consider to be the ultimate ice cream, rating various categories from intricacies taste, consistency and even presentation and more.
You also do happen upon one or two of the first wave of, uh… Not exactly propaganda posters, more just election campaign efforts you are financing for one James Smith.
There isn't any actual voting going on yet, of course, but you are getting there, you like to think. Doesn't hurt to get people hyped already, using the current atmosphere all around the nation.
It's not every day that you go out of your way to spend time with a few other guys. That's not because you avoid men, mind you, that'd be pretty silly as far as you're concerned given you're a dude yourself, but rather simply because you rarely see any use in doing so; if you're going to socialize, may as well make it with someone you can fuck afterwards, right?
It's simply a matter of priorities.
That said, you also realize the folly that lies in this way of thinking. Just because someone is male doesn't mean you should ignore them, that would be kind of a dick move in all honesty. They may not be quite as high a priority as other, more fuckable people you work with, but they can and should be granted some level of consideration.
This is why, after some thought on the matter, you are now sitting down in Rapture, sharing some good (read, not making you want to throw up) wine with Henley, Sinclair and Mark, the father of one of the Little Sisters. The one that managed to find his way down to Rapture all by his lonesome and all that.
Right now, you're listening to Mark talk about his daughter and the difficulties, but also the advantages of raising a kid in a place like this. Henley is weirdly completely okay with this way of spending his time, as you'd kind of assumed he'd consider it a waste of time he could use to work instead, whereas Sinclair seems to be in some manner of shock for some reason.
He's just largely unresponsive and doesn't seem capable of processing the sight of yourself lounging around casually chatting with everyone over a couple glasses of wine. Do you really come across as that distant? Sure, you're his employer and physically inactive for most of the year, but…
Ah well, he'll get over it and understand you're still just as personable as ever in time, you're sure. All that work you've been having him do must've dulled his senses or something…
"Are you quite sure you aren't overworking yourself?"
"N-nah, none a' that, chief! I can keep'n workin' all day an' all night, trust me!"
Hmmm… If he's sure, you guess? You turn towards Mark. "Alright. So how have things been with her education, you mentioned worrying about it earlier?"
Now then, amusing asides aside, you have put things into motion in the US, but what about the USSR? Given the positions of the two predominant superpowers on the globe currently not on your paylist, while it would be entirely possible for you to simply destroy one while favor the other, doing so would be a massive waste of human resources at the minimum- you pay good money to have your own workers do what they do and you don't really care whether they're Arabian, African, Russian, European or little green men from Mars as long as they do what they're supposed to.
More resources means more growth, and humans are one of those resources you can't simply churn out indefinitely in your secret factory of all things that exist down at the bottom of the ocean. That makes acquiring them a primary goal of your company, whether by encouraging higher birth rates or by taking over more nations left and right.
Primarily the latter, as waiting for a population to grow, even with some help from Big Daddy Cryptic, simply takes so long it makes more sense to concentrate on taking over the world first, then making use of everything naturally available before you really get into it. Overpopulation may become an issue at some point, but you can cross that bridge when you get to it.
Failing all else, such as space travel and using your advanced robotics to simply reliably prepare habitats on other planets or something to house more and more population over time, you can also always build both up and down- underground cities or massive arcologies are both theoretically entirely viable, especially so for anyone that has your technological basis to work off of.
But back to the matter of acquiring all those human resources already present, just languishing, underutilized, all over the world. It really is a crime how inefficient humans are by themselves, you will literally transform the world into a single big utopia simply as a side effect of optimizing all those inefficiencies at this rate, seriously. From economical reforms, intelligently designed global supply routes planned by a single actor in control of everything, occupation reforms, labor standards- ugh, it really just annoys you how everything is set up as it is, sorry.
The very concept of 'nations' is stupid, when you look at it like that. Why have several opposing subdivisions of a greater whole like that? Yes, you get that national identities just kind of developed naturally and led to what you have today, but come on.
Everyone should just accept they'd be better off under your glorious reign and submit to the rule of Cryptic Solutions. Because you, for one, don't make problems like everyone and everything else, you solve them.
One of your ad slogans goes something like this, too, just less direct and aggressive. You certainly do find the prospect of solving all the problems humanity makes for itself soothing, though, just because the perfectionist in you can't stand them.
Which brings you back around to the USSR, naturally. You want a guy that can effect changes and slowly topple the current hardline communist regime from within, do a sort of planned collapse just like Gorbachev would have in the future- you've caused so many changes it's become hard to predict how everything will go down so you prefer to have a hand on the entire affair, ensure you don't have to take more drastic measures after all.
You need a guy that can spearhead this effort. Someone that's on the inside, but doesn't care all that much for the idea of communism, someone that just does the job because it pays and someone has to do it.
You want someone like Mila Petrov.
Mila Petrov was a minor party official, worked his way up to his current cushy job from being a factory overseer a couple years ago. Being an overseer was cushy in itself, because you just had to run the numbers- you either had to perform better than next year, because the quotas got increased whenever you filled them out, or reduce output to a tenth of what it could be when the quotas got too high, so they got reduced again.
Make some excuses and done. It wasn't like anyone got punished even if they screwed up, so you just had to make sure to meet quotas more often than you didn't. Just in case someone was going to be demoted, it wasn't going to be you.
Thing is, that all became a little stressful for Milo. He had to work long hours drinking vodka in his office outside of those annoying inspections, and he had family to take care of. So he talked to a few right people and went from cushy to cushier.
It was all very simple, to make it in the soviet government. You just had to know how to do what and keep your head down. This way he drank less vodka at work and more at home again, made his wife and kids happy as well.
All was well in the life of Mila Petrov. Until one day there was a man in his office, a man that didn't look very Russian, though he sure talked it.
"Hello there. Mila Petrov, I take it? I have a bit of an offer for you."
Taking a seat, Mila faced the stranger. "I don't know, this could be a trap. Wouldn't want to betray the great soviet party, eh?"
"You do what I want, you'll make it big. Something goes wrong, we offer safe extraction of yourself and your family, to any nation you could want."
Either this was a good offer or it was a lie, in which case he would claim he was gathering information to hand to the party. "I am all ears."
Alright, so it took you way too long after you returned from turning your new Russian friend, but finally, after using way too much blood (both your own and that of bloodbags you had lying around), a small piece of human skin and an otherwise completely pristine and normal book bound in black, the pages empty until you got to work, you have managed to create a fun little book, quite unlike the animated one you have made a habit of summoning wherever you need some people to be educated.
This book, somewhat cool and heavy in your hand, is less a book and more a… device. A spellcasting device, to be precise, meant to do one thing and one thing only- allowing any thinking being using it correctly to cast a spell.
Your Cosmic Guidance is simply too useful to leave it unused… And you have someone in mind to make use of it already.
It is such that, late in the evening, President Nasser of Egypt looks up to see you casually waving a black book through the air, handing it to him before you even bother to speak.
"This book has a set of instructions in it," you tell him, having made sure of it- casting from a book such as this is a tad bit more involved than what you can just do naturally, requiring concentration and time as the user's mind is in essence slotted into the metanatural framework it represents and forced to complete the motions left to complete for the spell to fire. "Once a week, you can follow them and it will answer you one question, and once per week only. You can use it however you want to, just don't bother to ask about me- chances are you can just ask me directly, hm?"
With that, you pop out of existence again, leaving a mildly shocked president behind. The book, grimoire, whatever, is relatively user-friendly, he will figure out the rest in due time.
Come to think of it, this is the first outright magical plaything you've given out to your illuminati pet project, isn't it? Neat.
Gamal Abdel Nasser stared at the enchanted book he had received just a day prior, once again glancing over the instructions as to its use noted on a piece of paper he had found wedged behind the cover.
It seemed simple, in execution. All he needed was a question, written on paper inserted much like the note had been or even just asked aloud, and the book would answer it, though how exactly he did not know. All the same, the instructions warned that the more complicated the question was, the less likely it was to work, whereas anything that could be answered with a simple yes or no tended to work best.
Similarly questions about the past, present or future could be answered by this object, yet the future could and would change if someone aware of it caused such a change. It seemed like prophecies given by it did not account for their own existence.
Still, powerful… If it did work as advertised. Somehow Gamal doubted the man that handed it to him like an office memo was untruthful about it.
Memories of swirling clouds, a vortex filled with malevolent hunger, entirely back blotting out the night sky in all directions…
Either way, there was no talk of any consequences of using it, merely that it would only work once a week. Would something this potentially powerful, this impactful, truly be so… cheap? He had a hard time imagining it, but there was only one way to really find out, he supposed.
So President Nasser, Head of State of the nation of Egypt and spokesman for the Head Council of the Neutral Alliance of Nations, opened the book, the tips of his fingers lingering on a page. "Will nuclear weapons be fired within the next decade?"
Something pressed back against his fingers and he pulled them back, watching, with rapt fascination, as the pages of the book raised themselves, paper rustling against paper, until an empty page was revealed, black ink slowly spreading over it as though the material itself was bleeding.
'No.'
"That is… reassuring, I suppose?" He would definitely have to investigate more, thoughts of the riches and the security this object could bring if used wisely at the forefront of his mind. "For the moment, though…"
Opening the first page again, he almost found himself chuckling. In all languages of the world, the number of days until it may be once again used was plainly shown. He supposed he had something to do, then- put a list of important questions together, with considerations as to what knowledge change what outcomes how and what would be the best to ask in what order.
"And here you think things become easier when your government becomes part of a corporation."
"So then," you say, smiling at your assembled daughters as Sarah and Nora come to join you for your little gathering, "it occurs to me I never did give all of you the talk. You know, the one about sex."
The stunned silence among your offspring is a rare treat, one you make sure to thoroughly enjoy until Lilian clears her throat. "Father, I am not sure if you were aware, but all of us were born knowing how intercourse works."
"You were! But that's not exactly what this is about," you explain. "You see, this talk is more about how exactly to use sex for your own purposes, from breaking particularly stubborn toys through pleasure compared to people you actually like all the way to how to treat humans you are considering to turn into thralls or vampires or just want to have fun with whether for a night or two or the rest of their lives."
"Oh hey, you're gonna teach us your secrets daddy?" Serena's eyes are sparkling, her fox tail waving behind her in excitement as she, much like her mother, likes to have it out in private.
"That's the idea, yes." The door to the room you requisitioned for this opens, letting Sarah and Nora wheel in a tied-up woman that could easily have been a porn star if she wasn't your captive right now, with large, heaving breasts and shapely legs. "Now let me show you how to induce enough pleasure to shut all thought down, without even needing a dick or equivalent to do it with."
You tear off your clothes, completely hairless skin mat in the lighting of the room imitating natural light. The first of your kids to respond to the sight are the twins, the two girls looking older than their older sisters already cat whistling in tandem. ""Nice abs, father. And a very nice cock."
Smiling, you nod. "It is, isn't it? Your mothers would know, you can ask them all about how I like to use it later."
Yes, you are very much fucking with them at this point. That said, you still have an actual teaching moment to go through and damn it, it's one of the few fatherly things you get to do so you will.
