Rule of Three

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_GUtsfum0c

Rule of Three

“So what do you imagine he’s thinking,” Kei turned to Jack one afternoon, “when he’s just sitting in a room alone talking to himself?”

At this very moment, Bacchae was doing just that. Kei and Jack were parked in the living room, waiting for him to finish his “very important business meeting” as he called it, which seemed to involve an awful lot of being in the kitchen upstairs alone and arguing with himself. Whatever it was he was actually doing, it appeared to be rather heated.

“Honestly, I’ve just learned not to question anything he does.” Jack looked up from where he was sharpening his favorite knife.

“It sometimes sounds almost like he’s talking to someone, doesn’t it?”

“Could just be hisself.”

“I suppose it could.” She went back to her book, and that was that.

Of course, Bacchae was not, in fact, talking to himself. He had no need to address his own person, as that guy frankly kind of pissed him off. Instead, he was conversing with his lovely assistants. They always responded back, but nobody else could hear it. Which was probably for the best, as it would have greatly undermined his rockstar persona.

“We’re not doing that.”

Case in point, Cocaine had just responded to his request with a flat rejection, and her two sisters nodded in agreement.

“Oh, but why not?” Bacchae pouted. “Doesn’t it sound like fun?”

“For you, maybe,” Conscience shook her head. Bacchae was still getting used to her speaking. She caught him off guard sometimes. Like right now. “You just get to look like the big cheese, when really we’re doing all the work.”

“But that’s what I made you for! To do all the important shit in the background while I put on a show.”

“It’s fine when its fun stuff, but this is just annoying,” Cancer decided to play Bacchae’s pouting game and thoroughly showed him up. Her dark, brown hair had fully grown back in, and to celebrate, she’d been doing it in all sorts of bizarre hairstyles. Today’s was a rather loopy affair, and the coils bobbed along as she shook her head.

“Besides, what’s the point?” Cocaine remained the least altered. However, she still had a mouth on her to rival his. “You’re telling us to go out there, snatch a bunch of shit from important people, and then what? They come to complain to you about it?”

“That’s the plan, yeah.”

“I don’t think I get it,” Conscience frowned.

Bacchae leaned back against the counter. “Look, last time I checked, your job was to do the shit I say, not ask questions.”

“It’s our ‘job’ when you start paying us,” Cocaine poked at his exposed chest.

“You are, quite literally, figments of my imagination. What could I possibly get you? A goddamn pony?”

“Oh, a pony sounds nice!”

“Cancer.”

“Sorry. A little acknowledgment might be appreciated. I don’t think you’ve ever uttered a single thank you.”

“Also, lay off the drugs for like, a day at least,” Conscience sighed. “We get all fuzzy when you do too many, and I don’t like it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Cocaine snorted.

“Jesus christ, you are some needy ass bitches. You’re not even real and you’re asking for worker’s rights.”

“I think that says more about you than it does about us.” As usual, Cancer was an idiot up until the moment she wasn’t.

Bacchae scowled. “Fine, fine. I will stay sober(ish) for the next twenty-four hours, and I will give each of you a good smack on the bum.”

“And eat some fruit snacks for me!” Cancer added.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. So,” he clapped his hands together, “here’s what I want you to do…”

~ o ~

He gave them a series of destinations and a list of items to acquire. Each one seemed to belong to a prominent Discordian. Mysteriously, Rudy Debonair’s name did not appear anywhere. “I’m giving him a break,” Bacchae admitted. “He’s already gotten a big scare this month. Anything else might give him a damn heart attack. And if he dies, he’ll be really pissed at me.”

Cocaine snorted derisively, but orders were orders.

The list was long, and was going to take most of the day. Luckily, they didn’t have to walk. Since they weren’t real, they could just kind of be anywhere. At least anywhere that Bacchae had already been. This made the rather enormous list doable, for a bare minimum win.

Though Cocaine suggested splitting up, Conscience argued that none of them knew exactly where most of these items were, so it would probably be faster to have the manpower to search each location thoroughly.

“Ya know, I think I liked it better when you didn’t talk.” Cocaine was not used to having her authority questioned.

“Just trying to get through this bullshit as fast as possible, same as you.”

That answer seemed to mollify Cocaine. If he was here, Bacchae would have commented that women scared him. Each one was annoyed that she’d had that exact same thought.

First on the list was a very specific light pink kimono from a certain Kimiko Yamashita. This was not a concern for the girls, as they were already accustomed to shooting her goons in the face. Even better, Bacchae had already been inside her house, so they didn’t need to use the door.

Even if the layout confused Cocaine and Cancer, Conscience was at least somewhat acquainted with its architectural style.

“Why the hell are all these hallways outside?” Cocaine asked. “And why are so many of these rooms empty?”

Conscience rolled her eyes. “It’s for simplicity’s sake. And a lot of them have the furniture rolled up in the closets.”

“Wait, there were closets?” Cancer blinked in confusion.

“Yeah, they slide open sideways, like the doors. Didn’t you see?”

“Yeaahh, I’ll be right back.” She skidded back around the corner, presumably to check some of the rooms again.

The place was really quiet. One would think that, being who she was, there’d be more servants, or family members going in and out. But it seemed that, besides a cook and one solitary maid they’d seen futzing with some blankets on a clothesline, Kimiko lived almost entirely alone.

It was peaceful, the long, snaking corridors only a step away from the garden and its nice little pond. It was funny how people’s lifestyles sometimes were so firmly at odds with their public life. Had she lived, Conscience thought that Jilli might have really liked a place like this, though she might have felt more like an impostor than anything actually living in one.

This was taking too long, and Cocaine was starting to grow irritated with all the small, barren rooms. Just when it looked like she was about to start snorting the rice flour in the kitchen, Cancer happened to overhear the maid and the cook muttering to each other in the kitchen.

“Is Kimiko-sama at the butsudan again?” the cook asked. It was difficult to get across worry when her face was bright red and her sharp, upper canines protruded from her mouth, but she managed it anyway.

The maid nodded, sighing. “She’s gone every day as long as I’ve been here.”

They both glanced down the nearest corridor and shook their heads. Well, at the very least, something important was down there. Cocaine was busy seeing if she could get her hands on a bao bun—food didn’t taste great when they ate it directly, but food was food—so Cancer gestured and she and Conscience crept down the hall.

It wasn’t as if anyone could hear them, but old habits die hard.

At first, if seemed as if these rooms were just as empty as the others, but to Conscience’s surprise, the last room was occupied. Inside, Kimiko knelt in front of a small altar. The musky smoke from a stick of incense drifted mournfully through the air, and Kimiko took deep breaths of the stuff as she held all three pairs of her hands together, eyes closed. On the altar were some candles—already lit—a drawing of someone who looked to be a young man, and a folded, light pink cloth.

It looked like she was just wrapping up, as she muttered: “I miss you every day of eternity,” and blew out the candles. Kimiko drew in a singular, shaking breath, before her face dropped back into a neutral expression and she stood, gliding out of the room a little too quickly.

Conscience crept through the haze and towards the butsudan. Gingerly, she picked up the pink cloth. It was definitely a kimono, or at least what used to be one. It was torn nearly to shreds, and one or two of the scrappy edges were splattered with a brown substance, no doubt very old blood.

“Oh! Looks like you found it!” Cancer poked her head quite literally through the door.

“Yeah, but I feel bad about taking it,” Conscience admitted. “It seems… really important to her.”

“That’s the whole damn point,” Cocaine had now been drawn to the noise. “So put a cork in your bleeding heart and suck it the fuck up, we’ve got a lot more places to go.”

A short distance away from Akuma-cho was another more specialized area of the city: Arcan Row, the unofficial home of many of Discord’s magi. It was near enough to the Soul Market to make the acquisition of materials convenient, but far enough from the main thoroughfare to be quiet. That weird little diner that Bacchae liked to grease his hangovers at was on the edge of its heavy, looming side streets.

The air here almost seemed to crackle with static, probably because of all the arcane study and the heavily weighted ratio of books to people, but the magi seemed to like it. Many kept their workshops and laboratories here, and most of the tall, brick buildings were adorned with little occult touches. Window box herb gardens watered themselves, and many spare spaces of wall were covered in magic circles.

Bacchae had never been to this particular individual’s abode, and so they had to find it the hard way. Discord’s buildings weren’t necessarily well-labeled, but eventually they located the small basement laboratory by the shadowed set of ominous stairs leading below the street to its entrance.

“I heard this guy was a voodoo priest in his home reality,” Cancer muttered. This was an oversimplification. Isidoros’ craft belonged to a much more ancient and off-putting tradition, and he certainly wasn’t a necromancer.

“Wait, isn’t this the dude that makes the hard-core wizard drugs?” Cocaine added. Of course, that was just his day-gig. Isidoros had a remarkable amount of control over human biology, and those in the know had given him the nickname “the Heart-Threader,” which, if any of them had known, they would have thought was pretty badass.

As it stood, he was only known to them as “the Wizard Weed Guy,” and so they all shrugged and walked through the metal of the door without a care in the world.

The inside of the lab was dark, and full of bubbling elixirs in vibrant colors. Shelves upon shelves were covered in various books and reagents that looked like they might fall down on their heads at any time. The whole place also had a… smell.

“Man, all the incense in the city can’t cover up this rotting corpse stench,” Cocaine coughed. “What’s he makin’ in here?”

“Clearly, something we don’t want to look too deeply into,” Conscience crinkled her nose as well. “Let’s just find what we’re looking for and get out of here.”

“The list just says: ‘Jar. You’ll know the one’,” Cancer squinted, as if the smell was hurting her eyes.

Cocaine threw her hands up. “This room’s fucking full of jars, what could that asswipe have possibly—?”

“Maybe its this one,” Cancer pointed to an alcove in the wall, inside which large chains, covering in arcane sigils, were wrapped around a rather large glass container. Inside was a murky, red liquid which seemed to pulse with a steady beat.

“I would say that’s the one,” Conscience shivered.

One would think that the sigils might have posed a problem, and were most likely there to prevent this very theft occurring. But luckily, that wouldn’t stop the girls, because they couldn’t read. In reality, it had never occurred to Isidoros to prevent figments of ones imagination from snatching his jar, so Cancer’s hands passed through them easily, as she was the only one brave enough to touch it. “If only our boss wasn’t a moron we could menace the whole cosmos,” she sighed.

Into the sack it went, and they tried not to think about it as they carried on.

Also on the list was Dallas Sinclair’s favorite feather boa, Doesn’t Matter’s bassist’s prize pair of overpriced raybands, and a random mug with the words “#1 Radio Host,” on it, half-faded from use, which they found in a dingy apartment towards the bottom of the city, among many others. Finally, they had reached the last entry on the list: “The Brigadier’s Club.”

The girls groaned. That place was so full of worthless junk that they’d probably never find what they were looking for.

“I mean, they just got a new building, right?” Conscience attempted to stay optimistic. “It can’t be all bad, right?”

Cocaine shot her a look that clearly stated she was not hopeful.

The outside was nice at least. It was one of the few buildings that remained largely untouched by the reinvention of Sixth Avenue. The Brigadier’s Club always retained a veneer of academia, even if they were still just simple plunderers at heart. They traveled all across the cosmos, digging up rare artifacts and materials and selling them to the highest bidder. It made sense that such an inter-realital operation would make its home here.

They also had some pretty cool swords on display, and most Discordians like to see a pretty cool sword, so they were a tolerated presence.

Of course, Bacchae had yet to take the tour—he was hoping for a good opportunity to sneak in at night—but he’d walked past it a number of times, so it was really only a matter of stepping inside.

By this point it was that odd time when normal people start packing it in for the evening and real Discordians are busy pre-gaming, so the place was mostly quiet. It also looked oddly put-together, studious, nearly baroque in places. The girls would have found it stuffy were it not for the giant, nigh-incomprehensible cryptid stuffed and mounted to the wall just past the entrance.

“So, what’re we here to get?” Conscience asked. “Not that that will probably narrow it down much.”

“Miriam Halflight’s Spiky Boots,” Cancer read off diligently. “Whatever that means.”

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Conscience let out a large breath. She was really getting sick of a certain someone’s laissez-faire attitude. “Well, at least we know that’s not going to be out for display. I guess we head right to the back rooms.”

“Damn, museum heist will have to wait for another day,” Cocaine clicked her tongue in irritation.

Cancer giggled. “You’re almost as bad as he is.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault, shut up!”

They had made good time with the other requests, so they took a slightly scenic route past all the ancient weapons, magical artifacts, and creature bits, all lovingly categorized and labeled with text in a rather girlish scrawl. Definitely not Halflight’s doing. Eventually, they found themselves in the much more dingy and dusty back area.

There were at least two medium-sized storerooms back here, each filled with crates and chests of various shapes and sizes. A lot of them were covered in dust.

“Ugh, this is going to take forever,” Cocaine grumbled.

“Well,” Conscience glanced around, “if they’re really important, then they’re probably not just laying around in any old crate.”

“Like maybe in a safe?” There was a loud clunk as Cancer knocked on the side of a large, metal safe. “It’s got some oddly specific protection runes on it, but we should be able to take a look at least.”

Cocaine cracked her knuckles, even though no use of them would be required. She simply stuck her head right through the door. A second later, a muffled exclamation could be heard through the metal.

“What is it? We can’t hear you!” Cancer giggled.

The expression on her face was considerably less pleased than they expected.

“Uhh… you guys should see this,” she said, uncharacteristically perturbed.

Cancer and Conscience glanced at each other, then both stuck their heads in as well. It took Cancer a second to realize just what it was that was sitting in there on a small, unassuming cushion, but Conscience recognized it straight away.

“Oh shit,” she muttered. “He’s gonna wanna know they have that.”

Nodding in agreement, Cancer looked equally caught off guard.

Eventually, they did find the boots, which it turned out had extendable blades on the bottoms, like those used for mountain-climbing. “Spiky” had definitely been an… interesting adjective to use.

However, the three of them couldn’t help feeling that it was really the thing in the safe that had been their true objective all along…

~ o ~

He didn’t know if they would slowly trickle into the clock tower, or bombard him all at once as soon as they compared notes. Though one or two needy fucks ambled in early, right around eight PM, the latter occurred in earnest. And Bacchae was sitting on his throne, legs manspread nearly as wide as they would go, waiting for them.

Kimiko Yamashita of course led the charge. Though of all of them she might have been the most desperate to retrieve what was taken from her, there was only a slight tremelo in her voice as she spoke. “My lord,” she bowed, and Bacchae’s skin crawled. “A great calamity seems to have befallen the city.”

“And that is?” he asked, entirely calm.

Clearly someone else in the crowd didn’t like Kimiko’s formality either, because a woman with bright red skin and small horns pushed her way to the front of the crowd. “Someone’s been stealing our shit,” Miriam Halflight grumbled, her tail twitching impatiently.

“Your shit?” Bacchae struggled to keep himself from laughing. “Think you’ll have to be a little more specific.”

“Really important shit,” Dallas Sinclair also spoke up. She was wearing, Bacchae couldn’t help noticing, a frankly inferior feather boa. “Personal items.”

Though he spoke incredibly quietly, somehow the dark-robed man with the dreads could easily be heard over the crowd. “Someone broke into my lab… and stole my phylactery.”

“Oh, is that what this is?” Bacchae asked, the jar full of red, pulsing liquid suddenly in his hand. “Honestly, my bet was protein smoothie.”

It took a minute for some of them to realize what had just happened. But as soon as they did, a cry of disbelief and anger spread through the crowd.

Isidoros, the dark-robed man, remained entirely calm, however. “What could you possibly want with that?”

“Me? Nothin’ really. I’m just the grinch that stole… your fucking shit. And just like the green assmunch, I’ve got a moral to bludgeon into your thick fucking skulls. Because since I’ve been gone, ya’ll have gotten soft.”

There was a confused rumbling from the crowd at this.

“Maybe Malachi was there to wipe your asses after every doody. But your money, your affluence… they don’t mean jack shit to me. Shit gets stolen, people get killed, and no one gets special treatment. So the next time any of you come crawling to me with your stupid fucking problems, you better fuckin’ hope I owe you something, because otherwise, it’s your goddamn problem to deal with. Every man for himself, that the Discordian way.”

“My lord,” Kimiko bowed again, and several people almost smacked her, “with all due respect, things have changed since you left, rules have been put in place. Without them, the city’s order would collapse.”

“And your dragon’s hoards are vulnerable,” he finished for her. “Frankly, if you can’t keep a grip on your shit then you don’t deserve to have it in the first place. As the kids say nowadays: git gud. It was a piece of damn cake to swipe all your most precious possessions, and if its that easy next time, you’re not getting them back. Now here—”

Bacchae reached behind the throne and pulled out an enormous burlap sack. “Because I’m just so goddamn magnanimous, here’s all your junk. Ho, ho, ho or whatever. Grab your shit and scram.”

They did, as quickly as they could, all horrified that someone might decide to take their precious item to gain some sort of advantage. And that’s exactly the way it should have been.

Eventually, they started making their way out, inevitably to make some changes to their personnel, and Bacchae watched them go, waving affably, grinning at the one or two dirty looks that got shot in his direction.

“Do you really think the old way is still gonna work?” Conscience asked from behind him.

He leaned back on the throne and lit the joint he’d hidden in the cushions. “Oh, yeah. You saw how they all were just now: too worried about their own shit to fuck with anyone else’s. That’s how the system runs itself.”

“If you say so…”

There was silence for a minute. Bacchae offered her the joint but she declined.

“Bacchae…” she said finally, “about what we found… in the safe. That’s what we were really looking for today, wasn’t it?”

“What would you say if the answer was ‘yes’?”

“I would tell you that what you’re trying is a stupid idea.”

“Then it wasn’t! Just a great coincidence. You happy?”

Conscience sighed, and after hesitating for just a moment, wrapped her arms around him. “Not at all...”