Part of it had to be the people Jan had with her; they were all overly energetic, squeaky clean, dressed in bright colors, clothing all of the same style and from the same manufacturer. They all exuded youthful fertility. Where was the normal angst and paranoia?
Jan noticed Atlanta’s mental digression, and gave up on the small talk, watching with Atlanta as Dana talked to the others. Of them, she only recognized Abe Cox and his wife, Tylee – Jan’s son and daughter-in-law.
“So, a PhD in economics?” Abe said to Dana. He had not-so-subtly taken over the conversation. He was a tall white man, vaguely Hispanic, six three or so, with a tanned face, an athletic build and piercing black eyes. He wore his black hair cut short, and had no visible tats or jewelry. “What was your topic?”
Unlike the blowsy home-schooled cult member he currently portrayed, he was actually the leader of the Indigo’s top strike force when they went on their rare missions against whatever boogity-boogity or big bad they fought this year. Although she didn’t fully understand the intricacies of the Indigo’s leadership set-up, she thought this made him the overall leader of the Indigo as well.
“My dissertation was titled ‘The Econometrics of Neo-Slavery’, and went into the perverse incentivization that originated with for-profit prisons and their contracts specifying a minimum number of prisoners the state in question is required to provide.”
“Your dissertation sounds very strange,” Abe said, smiling and flirting. “There are such things?”
“Of course there are,” Dana said, her voice taking on a ‘lecture to the rubes’ tenor. “When you add in the lobbying and campaign contributions, you end up with…”
Jan stepped back, and Lara followed. Atlanta, now knowing what trick the Indigo was pulling, followed as well. They were separating her from Dana.
“You’d better have a good reason for this,” Atlanta said, after they had backed away a dozen steps, into the shadow of an old white oak.
“She’s cute but naïve,” Lara said. “We want to talk about the price you want to charge us for your static protections without any of her anti-violence interjections.”
“I see,” Atlanta said. “You’re worried that when I call on you ‘for help’, I’m going to be using you as cannon fodder.”
Jan nodded. She continued walking them back, and sat them down at an acorn-encrusted picnic table. “We’re not the super-soldiers you envision,” Jan said. “We don’t do very much fighting at all. We do when we must, but our missions, as you call them, are primarily information gathering in nature.”
“I understand,” Atlanta said. “I have no idea where my contest with Dubuque and the Seven Suits is going to go, so I’m putting together contingency plans and options for the future. You’re not the only group I’ve made deals with, and some of what I’m doing would strike even your group as crazy.”
“Okay, I guess,” Jan said, turning an acorn cap in circles in one hand. “How bad is it? I don’t know if Lara told you, but our Indiana and Illinois groups have all relocated here to Harry Mountain.” Their own punnish private name for this place? Atlanta wasn’t sure.
“The ones who are hiding from me?” Atlanta said. “I figured something along those lines was going on. Have any of Dubuque’s envoys and extortion artists made contact with you?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Jan said. “We did the best job of misdirection and dissembling we could, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time before he realizes we played his envoys.”
“Thus the interest in getting me to personally protect your home base with as many fixed 99 God style protections as you can squeeze out of me, without having to sell your souls.”
Abe and crew now led Dana off, toward one of the larger treehouses, likely where food, drink and mysteries awaited. Atlanta was impressed; it took a lot to distract Dana from her chief-of-staff duties, and she was thoroughly distracted.
“You’re as blunt as the worst of us,” Jan said, bemused. “I want right of refusal for any missions involving violence.”
“And what about those missions with a chance of turning into violence?” Atlanta said. “There are no guarantees when espionage is concerned.”
“By ‘involving violence’, I mean going into a situation with murder and mayhem as the goal.” Jan paused. “If Epharis is right, it’s not going to be long before we see our Hellish enemies start to take advantage of the situation. What I’m afraid of is one of you 99 deciding to make a deal with one of them and open a gate filled with Hellspawn to use as their cannon fodder.”
“The latter is not going to happen,” Atlanta said. She hadn’t been sure before she said it, but at the mere mention of such a thing, she imagined the entire Host screaming in her mind about pulling the plug on any such idiot. “Our creators won’t tolerate any such activity.” She paused, and took in Jan’s surprised look. Atlanta guessed she had spoken with the voice of the Lord again, this time by accident. “And by ‘won’t tolerate’, I mean end the God stupid enough to do any such thing.”
“They can do that?”
Atlanta nodded. “We were told there were big lines we couldn’t cross, and we would recognize them if we threatened to cross them. The most obvious is large-scale indiscriminate slaughter; this one wasn’t obvious to me until you mentioned the possibility.” She licked her lips and thought through a few thousand scenarios. “For instance, in the spirit of whatever screwy alliance we have going” she flickered her eyes toward the treehouse where Dana had stopped, enraptured by something strange and unnatural “I’m willing to tell you that joining up with anyone trying to stop an actual Hellspawn, whatever they may be, is almost as high a priority for a Territorial God as stopping a national war by those in her Territory.”
Her comment elicited a smile from Jan. “And in a similar spirit, if we’re called upon to work against any of the 99 Gods, it’s going to bother us immensely, at a moral and psychological level. We’ll have many of our sensitive types having mental breakdowns and, um, temper tantrums.”
Dana’s distant aura brightened tenfold in Atlanta’s mind, and the normally reserved and polite woman let out a ‘holy shit’ Atlanta could almost hear with unenhanced ears.
Dammit! So that’s what they were up to. “Making Dana one of yours, and initiating her into your mysteries, is not going to help me trust you.” Atlanta fumed as Jan nodded.
“It’s necessary,” Lara said. “She can’t help you with us unless she understands us and where we’re coming from.”
“Your mysteries are not for us 99, are they?” Atlanta said. She was half-ready to stalk out and give up on them, for playing games with her and hers. It made her feel powerless, which didn’t make any sense to her at all.
“No, they’re not. At least not now,” Jan said. Dana wouldn’t be telling Atlanta anything, she translated. “But they will be, second hand, through Dana. Not as abnormal tricks, as those take years of training. But as knowledge. The more your companions understand, the more their knowledge will help.”
Well, if she didn’t want screwy, she shouldn’t have ever gotten herself involved with the Indigo. It was her own damned pre-Apotheosis fault, getting her fortune read in the back of the Anime Café all those times back when she was a nerdy smart-ass mortal kid. She even suspected Lara recognized her from the past, though Atlanta didn’t look or sound anything like her old self.
“Okay, I get it. You’re helping me in your own screwy way.” They had lured her in with the talk of mysteries, and they kept selling themselves with more mysteries. “However, interfering with my relationship with Dana means to me you’ve agreed to my offer. No, I won’t promise not to use you on violent missions, but I will take your reluctance into account.”
Jan and Lara nodded, taken back by Atlanta’s forceful insistence. “Now, where do you want me to put the divine defenses on this crazy place, anyway?”