The black-striped Enforcer went blank for two seconds, then answered slowly, "Oh. Right, right. Understood."
Bella bluffed her way through the whole city, using spells only when she had to, and when she did, always the ones that cost the least.
This baffling Collective ran the city with an iron grip. Every zone you entered demanded a terminal swipe to refresh your record. Eating required a swipe. Riding the city transit required a swipe. The saving grace was that the passersby had no feelings and no interest in anything—get the Enforcers off your back and you were fine.
The city bore Bella nothing but ill will. She'd earlier asked a coworker she was on halfway-decent terms with whether she was pretty—and they actually said she must be sick. No eye for quality!
Charming people first and then harvesting their praise worked poorly. Still, one full loop around the city turned up what she needed: the 'patients' afflicted with Switched-On Syndrome.
This bunch was locked away in a place called the DEN.
She walked in unopposed, and spotted the problem the moment she was through the door: a knot of 'patients' huddled in a storeroom, whispering.
"Oh-ho? So this is… you're planning to revolt?" Bella asked, thoroughly amused.
The three 'patients' in the room all fixed her with hostile stares.
"Relax—a revolt's a fine thing, I'm all for it. But you're far too weak as you are. Here, look. This one's a 180-year-old antique—an M9 pistol, weighs 1.1 kilos (2.4 lbs), holds fifteen rounds, muzzle velocity 390 meters a second (1,280 ft/s)…"
Seeing two men and one older woman in the room, she tossed the gun to the younger of the two men.
He caught it dumbly. Sealed off as his world was, he was no caveman, and it took him no time to realize the thing was a real firearm.
"Why?"
"Switched-On Syndrome isn't a disease. It's the nature every human being is born with," Bella said, entirely in earnest.
"Thank you—thank you for your help. Please, lead us!"
After the customary round of demurring, Bella became these rebels' leader.
She was reproducing the Brotherhood's structure: Mentor, elders, core members, and the rank-and-file assassins at the base. The pyramid works in any age.
On the surface Bella wrote the text, compiling space manuals and flight logs; underneath, she was the resistance's Mentor. She laid in a good stock of weapons and ammunition for them, then lifted a further share of guns and rounds from the Collective's own warehouse.
In her idle hours she roamed everywhere, and whenever she caught sight of a hidden 'patient' in the crowd, she went and pulled them in. Her force swelled fast, breaking a hundred before long.
When she had nothing else to do, she harvested praise from the resistance. Their admiration for her came straight from the heart, and her psionic energy recovered a fair bit every day.
Given that this crowd wasn't in particularly good shape—and didn't dare drill openly with guns—she borrowed the training methods of Capoeira. Building on her own experience, she worked out and calculated the angles most often used in shooting, then folded a whole suite of evasion-and-fire movements into combat, and out of it created a gunfighting art. The name was simple enough: Gun Kata.
It could be practiced empty-handed too. If a city Enforcer asked, you told him, face blank, that you were doing gymnastics.
Nerves in a real fight didn't matter. Drill Gun Kata until it was instinct, and when you met an enemy, your finger squeezed the trigger while your body followed the footwork you'd drilled into muscle memory—and you'd slip most of the incoming rounds.
Once the group had it more or less down, and their Mentor had reaped praise enough, Bella bowed out with the job done.
Given the ragtag, put-it-together-with-spit nature of this revolt, she named the outfit with a shrug: the Creed Brotherhood. Her side had the Assassin Brotherhood; this side had the Creed Brotherhood; put the two together and you got Assassin's Creed! Perfect.
***
Days of tramping around the city left Bella's heels aching, and still no magic node. The magic in this city could be summed up as zero. Not a scrap.
Without the environment to lean on, casting solo put a heavy strain on the mind-lake she'd only just pushed to the sixth level, so she prepared to leave the city and search the seas for a node. If nothing else, the three great nodes—Hong Kong, London, and New York—had to still exist; those areas were just underwater now, and she'd have to dive to look.
"Hank, you're looking sharp today!" After days of plotting revolution with the crowd, Bella was in far better spirits, and couldn't help ribbing Beast when she saw him.
At 1.90 meters (6'3"), with those pale-blue eyes set off by his scholarly air, Beast—so long as he didn't transform—was actually a genuinely good-looking man with a distinguished air.
Right now that presentable man was staring at her blankly, as though puzzling over why she'd said such a thing.
"Isn't this the part where you say something like, 'You look lovely too'?"
Bella waved him off. There was no getting through to a man destined to stay single forever. "Never mind, never mind. I just wanted to let you know—I'll be heading out for a couple of days."
"Where to?"
"Out of the city. Going to look for a node outside the city."
"A node?" Her words had lost him.
At the moment he was deep in these future people's papers on entropy. These future humans had made even less headway in space than people of the modern era, but on the environment, on entropy change, they'd written a great deal—and Beast found it fascinating.
Bella glanced over, met a screen full of equations that made her eyes swim, and gave up. She couldn't make heads or tails of it.
"That's right. I'm looking for a way to send us home—and to tell a few people about the… well, about how this era ends. No matter how you look at it, this ending's far too grim. Humanity should never have come to this."
Beast pointed at the paper he was reading. "I believe they've already developed some kind of time machine—using the rise and fall of entropy to accomplish time travel. We could rely on that method to get back."
Bella thought it over, then shook her head. "I still prefer to go back my own way. Tell you what—let's each work our own angle. I'll go see how bad it's gotten out there; you stay here and study this—entropy, was it?"
Beast knew she had some superpowers, but as to what exactly? No idea. The two of them had never been close to begin with.
If his mutant abilities were online, he could at least have thrown a few punches alongside her. With the mutant gene suppressed, all he had left was a scientist's head, and tagging along to sea would be no help at all.
"Be careful, then."
"Mm. You too."
Bella planted a notion in the mind of the supervisor who oversaw their writing and drawing—the idea that she'd stepped out on business—and then left the city alone.
Stay away too long and the supervisor would surely grow suspicious; a spell only lasts so long. But she wasn't much bothered. Once she found a magic node and worked the spell, she'd jump back along the timeline—and then, from their original point in time, she could pull Beast back too, with no need to set foot in this miserable city ever again.