Swarming Sovereignty

“So…are you sure we need all this force just to deal with your family?” Lia asked. The throne room was lined with guards, among which were all of the swarm’s most powerful combatants.

“Yes.” Amelia replied. “They know they can rebel to free themselves from the Oath, and they will the moment they realize they’re not going to be getting any advantage out of this. They’re treacherous, all of them, and I’m not going to let them lay a finger on anyone I love.”

“Except the kids, right?” Lia said.

“Even the kids.” Amelia said. “We were taught from a young age to be cutthroat and only interested in our own power. They say that might makes right, and even their children are no more than tools they can use to gain influence.”

Rose’s eyes hardened. “We’re taking the children away from them.” She said coldly. “That is unacceptable, and if we could rehabilitate you, we can rehabilitate them. Lily, begin asking around and seeing who is interested in adopting children. I’d also like it if you got with Nailah, Titania, and Alisha after this and did an audit on the other nobles we’ve converted. If there are any that treat children like this, we need to take them away.”

Lily frowned. “This seems somewhat severe.” She said. “We cannot help everyone, and targeting solely the nobles seems to run into discrimination issues, which goes counter to our philosophy.”

“People who abuse children deserve no quarter.” Rose said coldly. “And while we cannot help everyone, we can sure do our best. I will draft up plans to watch for this sort of thing and help the children, but for now it seems likely to me that the nobles are more likely to treat their children like objects, and they would be our best place to start.”

“Let’s discuss this afterwards. But, yes, we at least know my…family,” she spat the word family, as if it was something she detested, “treats their children wrong. They’re right in front of us, I see no reason not to save them.”

“Fine.” Rose sighed. “Bring them in.”

Nailah nodded, walking over and throwing open the double doors. Standing beyond was a group of twenty or so adults, most of whom looked cautiously optimistic. They were ushered in by a group of guards, who shut the door behind them and stood in front of it, hands on their weapons.

“Well.” Amelia said flatly. “I wish I could say it is good to see you again, but it’s really not. I’m sure many of you are harboring some hope that you’re here because I want to give you some sort of position of privilege, but I’m not. To make things perfectly clear, I despise each and every one of you, and have brought you here to let you know that you will not be in anything remotely resembling a position of power, nor will you be afforded any special privileges. I am officially disowning you.”

“Amelia, I would suggest thinking about this before you make a rash decision.” A man near the front, Amelia’s father if Lia’s memory served her correctly, said. “You owe us a great deal, and reneging on your debts will disincentivize anyone from helping you in the future; even if you hate us, it would not be logical to disown us.”

Amelia shook her head. “You misunderstand. I owe you nothing for a lifetime of neglect and abuse. After the age of four, I spent no more than an hour a day inside the manor, instead relegating that all to a clone, and you never noticed. I was a status symbol for you, so you could say that the Hero was part of your family.

“I grew up twisted, in no small part due to the awful values you tried to distill in me. So, to reiterate, we’re not allowing any of you to be anything other than a normal person, no more or less than anyone else. If I had my way, I’d relegate you all to hard manual labor, but Lia and Rose won’t stand for it, so I expect you to thank them for their mercy.”

Amelia waited, folding her arms and tapping a foot. “Well?”

Amelia’s father grit his teeth. “This is no way to treat your parents.” He snarled. “You would have died long ago were it not for our protection, and I refuse to debase myself for this nonsense.”

Amelia let out a short, clipped laugh, almost more of a snort. “I once defeated a god in combat.” She said. “I would have been fine on my own. I was fine on my own.” She waved a hand dismissively, and the assembled people were forced to their knees. “Now, thank your new Queen for her mercy, or things will get ugly.”

“I…would…rather…die.” Amelia’s father said, struggling to his feet. “I…won’t…participate…in…this…farce.”

“Big talk for someone who can barely speak.” Amelia said coldly, raising a hand. Suddenly, Amelia’s father straightened up, as if the weight resting upon him had vanished. He rushed towards Lia, body beginning to twist and morph as he entered a form not dissimilar to the one Ira had been using when Lia first met him.

The guards immediately sprung into action, but Amelia waved them off, standing up and casually intercepting her father by grabbing his neck and lifting him off of the ground. “You’re an arrogant narcissist, just as I used to be. Just like how you raised me to be. And, once again, you’re lucky that I’m not stripping you of your free will or forcing you into the form of an insect. I expect you’ll be rather more…amenable in an hour or two.”

She waved her other hand, and he was immediately completely coating in modeling wax, Amelia dismissively throwing his cocoon to the side. “Would anyone else like to have a go? I can do this all day.”

A woman who had been next to Amelia’s father gasped for air, clearly trying to speak but failing. Amelia waved her hand and the woman gulped in air as she staggered to her feet. “I truly didn’t want to, Amelia.” She said. “Your father forced me, and I couldn’t say no. You know how he is, if I tried to spoil you like I wanted, he would have thrown me out!”

“Pathetic.” Amelia said, curling her lip in distaste. “To have the gall to lie to me now? It would have been better if you had lied when I was young; at least I could have thought you loved me.”

“I’m not –”

“I’m reading your mind.” Amelia said. “I know full well that you’re lying. Shut up, and don’t come near me again.” Modeling wax appeared around the woman, instantly cocooning her. “I didn’t interact much with the rest of you, but you’re either just as bad, or guilty by proxy.” Amelia said dismissively. “If I hear even a whisper of you trying to use the fact that we are related by blood to try and get some sort of advantage, I will personally come and deliver your punishment. You’re not my family, just leeches using my existence for your own gain.”

A giant glob of modeling wax appeared above the other people, and a few of them struggled against the spell Amelia was using to bind them in place, but none were able to break free in time to avoid being cocooned. “Take them away, convert them into whatever.” Amelia instructed. “I don’t care. I just don’t want to see them again.”

Several of the guards peeled away from the walls and began to cart the cocoons away. “So, what about those kids?” Rose asked anxiously. “I couldn’t help but notice they weren’t here.”

“I don’t have any personal grudge with them.” Amelia said. “Not like those people. They were the ones who were old enough to know what they were doing and did it anyway. So…mostly people from the branch families, and a couple of my older siblings and their spouses. I told them to keep the kids elsewhere, and start on their conversions first.”

“Oh, good.” Rose said. “How many are there?”

Amelia shrugged. “Three over ten, a few more under? I wasn’t keeping super close track, and they’re all children of branch families so they didn’t have much to do with me. Not sure if it’s worth unilaterally taking away the kids who are over ten, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask them if they want to stay with their parents, I guess.”

“I’ll begin looking for foster parents immediately.” Lily said. “What should we do with them in the meantime?”

“I can shelter them.” Nailah volunteered. “They probably won’t make any trouble with me, since I used to be their sovereign.”

“We can split them up between our houses and I’m sure Jade and Vivian would be willing to take one or two as well., at least until we find proper homes for them.” Ophelia said. “That way you don’t have six or seven extra children in your house, I’m pretty sure that would get very cramped.”

“I’d appreciate it.” Nailah replied. “Though you should probably take the more docile ones, just in case.”

“In the meantime, I’m going to go brainstorm ways to systematically handle cases like this. Perhaps Connie would have some ideas…” Rose mused.

“I think I’ll take this opportunity to go kill a bunch of monsters down in the dungeon.” Lia said. “Get some more Blood Money and all that.”

“Um, if I may, Mistress,” Ophelia began, “I’ve finally evolved my tracking Skill and have located a cerberus. I was hoping I could get some backup when dealing with it, and…if you would, if you could do the reconversion once we have the cerberus cocooned.”

“That sounds perfect.” Lia replied. “I’d love to come help, get some good exercise.”

“I’ll be coming too.” Amelia said. “You need me to do the teleporting anyway.”

“That’s fine, but could you stay out of the fight unless it looks like we’re about to get hurt?” Lia asked. “I’d like it to be an actual workout, you know?”

“I suppose that’s fine.” Amelia said reluctantly. “But the moment it looks even slightly sketchy I’m stepping in. Now, where’s this cerberus?”

Ophelia held out a hand. “Just take my hand and I should be able to transmit the location to you. Or…I can display an arrow in my palm pointing to it, but that’s probably not precise enough for teleportation. But, um…do you need a minute to prepare first?”

“I’m fine.” Lia said. “I don’t need any weapons or anything.”

“This probably doesn’t need to be said, but I don’t need weapons either.” Amelia added, grabbing Ophelia’s hand.

“Then…I guess we should go.” Ophelia replied.

There was a wrenching sensation, and then Lia found herself in a meadow…right next to a napping cerberus. It shifted as they landed, and Lia panicked, placing a hand on it and beginning to coat it in modeling wax while she emptied her Dimensional Storage onto it. Ophelia, seeing what was happening, joined in, and within a few moments the cerberus was fully cocooned.

“So…that happened.” Lia said.

“It was the most efficient way to go about it, but I don’t think you got your exercise in.” Ophelia said, an amused expression on her face.

“Sorry, I panicked.” Lia said, blushing. “I wasn’t expecting to appear right next to it and just acted on instinct.”

“Well, we got it, and that’s all that matters.” Amelia said, placing a hand on the cocoon and bringing it into her dimensional storage. “Let’s bounce, unless there’s something else important nearby?”

Ophelia paused, then shook her head. “Doesn’t seem to be another cerberus around here, at least.”

“Then we can come back later.” Amelia said, snapping her fingers and teleporting them all back into the world tree.

Nailah, who had been talking with Titania, snapped her head up in surprise. “You’re back already?” She asked. “Is everything alright?”

“Um, it was asleep, and we teleported in next to it and I panicked and reflexively dumped all my modeling wax on it.” Lia explained, a chagrined look on her face.

“Well, it’s better than anyone getting hurt.” Nailah replied. “When do we want to do the reconversion?”

“Now, if you have time.” Lia said. “We’ll get someone capable of cocooning swarm members, then we’ll go. If you have any requests, write them down for us while we wait for the person to get here.”

“I have an hour of time, yeah.” Nailah replied. “No fancy requests or anything, just something that keeps the general gist of my current skillset and isn’t very reptilian. A few scales here and there are fine, but nothing major.”

Lia nodded. “Sounds good. Ophelia, could you go find someone to cocoon her?”

“Already on it.” Ophelia confirmed, tail wagging. “Just you wait, Nailah; you’re going to love it!”

When Nailah awoke, she immediately cast her gaze about, looking for differences. And, as her eyes fell upon what looked to be six copies of herself, she realized that she was, indeed, in three separate bodies now.

It was odd; it felt just as natural as being in one had felt to her previously. There was no sensory overload, and when she tested, she found she was able to move each completely independently, having no problems accidentally confusing which body was which or moving the wrong one. She didn’t feel like she could split her attention like Ophelia, not yet, but Ophelia had said that was a Skill she had obtained, so that was to be expected.

Physically speaking, she looked…much the same as she had before. And, the more she looked, the more confused she got; there wasn’t even a hint of scales or anything vaguely reptilian, and the only other difference she could find was that her tails and ears were fluffier. Confused, she checked her status, making sure that the hydra had indeed been incorporated into her reconversion.

Name: Nailah Glenswarden

Race: Fluffmaster Hydra (Garmrkin)

Level: 1/75, 0/750 EXP

HP: 5,000/5,000

Stamina: 4,000/4,000

Mana: 1,000/1,000

Strength: 500

Defense: 250

Dexterity: 300

Magic: 100

Magic Defense: 200

Mental Fortitude: 750

Title: Tireless Worker

You have spent long hours toiling away, and have developed a resistance against sleep. The amount of sleep you need is reduced, and the effects of sleep deprivation are less pronounced.

Titles:
List truncated. Open ‘Titles” for more.

Skills:
List truncated. Open “Skills” for more.

A…Fluffmaster Hydra? What did that even mean? Garmrkin was the step above wolfkin and below fenrirkin, so that made sense, but she had never heard of anything like a fluffy hydra. Fortunately, figuring out what her race actually meant was as simple as focusing on it in her status.

Fluffmaster Hydra:

The Fluffmaster Hydra is a Champion race made from a hydra, a cerberus, a beastmaster, and a compound dedicated to removing scales. This race provides three bodies to the recipient, as well as superior bonding abilities with animals or monsters that have fur at the expense of not being able to bond with non-furry animals or monsters. Each individual body has separate HP, Stamina, and Mana, and gains full benefit from the creature’s stats.
If a body is killed, the nearest body without any damage over time effects splits into three. Each new body has all equipment that was present upon the creature’s conversion. A maximum of nine bodies may be active at once, and any further attempts to split instead kill the nearest body and reduce the maximum body count for nine days. All bodies over three disappear after nine days. If the creature ever has less than three bodies and has room for more bodies, the creature may choose to split a body for no cost.
The Fluffmaster Hydra has great HP, Stamina, and Strength, good Dexterity, Defense, and Magic Defense, passable Magic and Mana, and phenomenal Mental Fortitude.

What was “a compound dedicated to removing scales”? Where had they found such a thing? Still, she was thankful for it; she hadn’t been looking forward to having scales, and now she didn’t have to. A quick glance over her Skills revealed that they were much the same as they had been before, but there were two Skills in particular that stood out. They massively buffed her HP and Stamina regeneration, bringing them up to one percent every thirty seconds.

That didn’t sound like much now, but those Skills had been documented, and at maximum level they brought the regeneration up to a whopping one percent every three seconds. They were disabled by damage over time effects, but so long as she wasn’t affected by one of those, she would fully heal her HP and Stamina in only five minutes, giving her a massive edge in any sort of prolonged engagement.

She’d have to look through her Titles again, too; she liked Tireless Worker a lot, but now that she had multiple bodies, there wasn’t really much of a reason to keep it equipped, and her wife and girlfriends would not be happy if she chose to leave it on anyway.

Which reminded her…she needed to get that Skill Ophelia had as soon as possible, and stagger out her bodies’ schedules, so she wasn’t overwhelmed any time she became hungry or tired. So, she began walking one of her bodies over to one of the food dispensers, grabbed a book and began to read with another, and sent her last over to find her lovers.

As it turned out, they were all chatting in her living room, and the two bodies Nailah had sent out came across them at the same time.

“Nailah!” Ophelia said, standing up and racing over to give her a hug. “How is it? Where’s your third body?”

“It’s reading.” Nailah replied. “And promising so far, but I need the…uh…” Nailah paused briefly, looking for the right word, “Skill to really get a feel for it.”

The body she was sending to get food was stopped at the door by Titania and Mary. “How is it?” Titania asked.

“Good.” Nailah replied.

“You already said that.” Ophelia pointed out.

“What? Oh, sorry, I…”

You have met the qualifications for the Skill Parallel Processing!
You have 10 easily attainable Skills remaining before Skills will take more effort to obtain, would you like to gain Parallel Processing?

 

Parallel Processing

Level 1: 0/100 EXP

Allows the user to more easily split their focus.
Level 1: The user is 20% more capable of splitting their focus (at 100%, the user may work on two tasks without losing any efficiency in either)
Multithreading, but the processing is actually happening simultaneously

What was multithreading? Regardless, the Skill came just as easily as Ophelia said it would, and Nailah happily accepted it. “Sorry, other conversation. Just got that Skill, though.” She said, paying close attention to which body was doing the speaking.

“Right.” Ophelia said knowingly. “I’m going to keep talking to you, to help with leveling the Skill. Tell me in detail how you’re feeling, please.”

Nailah began to talk to her as best she could whilst still maintaining her other conversation and her reading. “Sorry.” She told Titania and Mary. “It’s good. Just got the Skill, still leveling it up.”

She chatted with them for a while, eventually excusing one body to go eat and bringing her other body in from upstairs to continue the conversation. And, by the time she had finished, Parallel Processing had leveled up four times, bringing its bonus up to a full one hundred percent, making holding two separate conversations completely trivial.

It was an odd sensation at first, but being able to do so many things at once was highly gratifying. Still, her work wouldn’t stop at “just” being able to do three things at once; she potentially had nine bodies worth of things she might have to juggle, and that was quite a bit more than she had capacity for now. She’d have to see if Amelia had some painless way of killing a person, so she could force herself to split; it would increase her efficiency dramatically, and if that was what it took to push herself into high levels of the Skill, she’d do it.

But that could wait. For now, she had lovers to spend time with, books to read, and schedules to be adjusted. Still…Ophelia had been right; this was already shaping up to be just her kind of thing, and she couldn’t wait to see where it took her.

Fighterman481 Alternate title: Rose establishes CPS.

That aside, I'm not sure how I feel about the first half of this chapter, but it's something I felt I needed to cover. On the one hand, it's been sort of a loose thread dangling about for a while, but on the other, it felt sort of like...revenge that was in there for the sake of revenge.

They hadn't done anything on-screen to warrant poor treatment, and what we knew of them was all from dialogue and things that had been told, not shown. Still, Amelia wouldn't just let them be, and it had to be explicitly stated to them that they wouldn't be receiving any sort of advantage from this, so...this is what we got.

The other half, though, I'm happier with. I did actually fully intend to have a bit of a fight scene with the cerberus, but I was writing and for whatever reason, maybe because it was late and my subconscious was telling me something, I wrote that the cerberus was sleeping. I realized the ramifications of that a moment later, but decided to run with it anyway; we had a fight scene recently with the hydra, and the conversion was going to be the more interesting part of that anyway.

Yes, the scale remover was a product Lia picked up from the Dimension of Discounts, and it is apparently a real thing, for "limescale", which seems to be something that tends to build up in places that come into regular contact with hot water? That and reptilian scales are obviously not the same thing, but...they use the same word, and that's good enough for conversion lol.

Also, the flavor text of Parallel Processing probably warrants a little explanation if you haven't majored in a computer related field like I have, so...here's your nerdy explanation for the day (feel free to skip the next five paragraphs):

Multithreading is sort of kind of a lie. You're not actually processing multiple things at the same time, you only have however many processors you have, and any number of threads beyond that won't increase your processing speed. Kind of. If one thread is, say, waiting on user input, then switching to another while waiting will speed things up, even if you only have one processor.

Basically, what multithreading does is give the illusion that multiple things are happening at once, but in reality they're just being switched between so fast that we can't notice. The computer takes all the data it has loaded into the registers (think immediate storage - if memory is a locker, registers are your pockets. They hold less stuff, but you can get that stuff a lot faster than you can get something from a locker), stores it, switches to another thread, grabs the stored data, and keeps on going.

This is called a "context switch", and is the namesake of the ability that lets Ellie switch between Life and Death in The Outlands. Without context switching, multithreading just...wouldn't work, or at the very least, would be a lot slower than it is now. 

When you context switch depends on your computer architecture. In the (very simple) virtual machine I wrote as part of my upper-division courses, each thread would perform one operation before switching to the next. In real operating systems, the timing is going to differ and the logic will change depending on how many processors you have, but that's the gist of it.

If you don't understand it, that's fine, I'm not good at explaining and the wikipedia articles for stuff like context switching tend to have a warning stating it's 'too technical' for most laymen to grasp (though it is explained in more detail there so take that as you will), just know that computers are magic and the people who invented them and improved them are incredibly smart.

Anyway, it's been far too long, so next time we're...probably going to look into the situation at the border, so...look forward to it, I guess.

And, as always, thanks for reading!