The other places we checked had about the same thing: shrines dedicated to me, made by migrants. And not all of them were from the new intakes.
Realizing that people praying to me actually gave off eldritch energies was…unsettling, to say the least. And what made it weirder was that not all of those shrines weren’t personal and private things, because that would make more sense. No, apparently some neighborhoods held ‘congregations’ in the homes of former shamans, chiefs or mayors.
What I once tolerated as a coping mechanism in the harsh wasteland was now a source for eldritch energy. Worse, I didn’t even know where the faith-fuelled stuff was sent. It definitely ain’t to myself, I checked my stats. In the end, I just gave the order to catalog the energy and note any further occurrences for the time being.
So people were taking my discouragement at being viewed as anything more than human as a public taboo, but were still quietly practicing their ‘faith’ in relative privacy, like some underground religion. And my bots detected none of this because the Nexus didn’t spy on its citizens’ private lives.
I then spent the next day in an emergency discussion with my inner circle, though I had to threaten them with no sex before they stopped with the God-King jokes.
“So, people’s faith in you actually has a metaphysical effect, but where that manifested energy is going is yet unknown,” Dr Madison, currently the top expert in the field, stated. She looked pissed as hell, frowning darkly in thought. “We haven’t explored that line of research yet… But common- Forgive me, none of this is common sense or logical, but one would think that following how conventional worship worked, there should be a direct correlation between faith and the strength of the...target of prayer.”
“Maybe it’s because Sev’s not a god, so it just…goes away?” Edward offered.
The professor shook her head harshly, almost snapping in her reply. “From all we studied so far, even metaphysical natural energies doesn’t just vanish. You don’t just create energy and have it just evaporate right after.”
Curie gave a thoughtful hum. “Perhaps it is evaporating, in a sense. One could speculate that the output is not significant enough to maintain cohesion, just like unstable molecule structures created in the lab.”
“And maybe they need a binding agent,” Piper chipped in with a smirk, “Like a…proper god to suck up all the stuff before they go unstable.”
“But it still makes no sense at all!” Madison grumbled, as annoyed with the irrationality of her new field of study as she was enraptured by it.
The meeting ended after we eventually started looping back to the same topics again with the same answers. In the end, it looked like I’ll have to delve into the console for answers while our occult tech was still crawling its way past the starting line.
Not that I was complaining too much. That we had started the tech at all was already a huge advantage over everyone else. Who else out there could, with a few precise and weird chantings and some lines scratched on the dirt, summon clean rainwater? Or cleanse and enrich the land with a comical dance and some animal sacrifices? We barely understood the stuff for now, but the budding applications were already significant to improving life in the Nexus.
Still, there were a few gray areas that needed discussing, which meant a visit to one specialist that would be…fun to visit.
*****
Nora didn’t know whether to be impressed or outraged at the latest madness unfolding within the Nexus. Magic was real, which was a doozy by itself, and while she appreciated Sev’s initiative to lay down the legality of many aspects of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, the fucker wanted to offer euthanasia for the elderly and for those who had truly given up…in exchange for using their corpses for ritual experimentation.
State-assisted suicide as a means to gain cadavers to be ground down into ingredients.
“Are you fucking nuts?!” she snapped at the man in her private office.
Sev shrugged. “More than that at this point, I’m sure.” How can he be so casual about this?
Nora dropped back into her seat with a heavy sigh and glared at him. “You don’t have enough raiders to unethically defile? I thought your child soldiers went out on campaign weeks ago.”
As he always did, Sev ignored the insults hurled at him, by now completely immune to her tirade. “No, but it turns out…” He gave a sigh of his own and the look Nora received was one of dark, wry amusement. “Morality and other attributes plays a part in some of these…things. Turns out, the tears and blood of a virgin are legitimate ingredients, and the heart of the innocent is a key component for some rituals.”
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Nora wanted to scream at him again, maybe even just lunge out and slap him. It didn’t help that she was sure Sev was not trying to pull her leg.
“Why stop at opening a call to murder your own people and desecrate their bodies into mere ingredients?” she growled frustratedly. “Why not skip the steps and just take kids and slit their throats there and then?”
“Because rituals and…spells…requiring live human sacrifices all, so far, produce results that are forbidden by the Nexus.”
Nora blinked several times in disbelief. Again, how the hell can he be so calm about this? “Oh, so just because all the results so far are illegal, that’s why you’re staying away? So, what? The moment you find out ritually torturing and executing your own people brings lets you cure a plague, you’d do it?”
“Would you?” he returned with a pointed look. “If it took one child to send you back to a time before the bombs fell, an alternate past where the bombs would never fall, where you could properly live out your life with Nate and Shaun, would you sacrifice the child?”
Nora froze at the words as her imagination played through the possibility of living a happy life with Nate, and guiding Shaun as he grew up…
“You get your beautiful, pre-war life, free of raiders and super mutants, all for the price of a wasteland orphan’s life.”
“I-I…” Sev’s gaze bore into her indecision. Nora drew in a trembling breath and tried to exhale slowly as she imagined the happy laughter of her husband and child. She failed.
“No,” she finally forced out after several seconds of entertaining the fantasy of a happier life. “Not like that. Never like that.”
Sev gave her a sad smile. “But you still had to take a while to entertain the idea, right? It’s about the same here.” The Nexus’ ruler shook his head slowly. “I won’t allow live sacrifices, ever.”
“But you’re still open to culling the old and the weak willed.”
“I’m considering it, which is why I’m bringing the idea up with you.”
Nora buried her face in her hands, then ran her fingers through her hair. “How beneficial are the results?”
Sev leaned back into his seat. “So far, after testing from a donated cadaver… A pure heart…well, purer than a raider’s anyway…it has undeniably cleansed the entire Boston aquifer and the ground holding it.”
“Holy shit,” Nora exclaimed, forgetting herself.
“The ritual’s a bit of a pain to do, but it’s still a fraction of the time taken by an army of Mr Geigers. The bots have taken samples from all over the affected area…and now people using wells only have to worry about filtering the dirt out of their drink instead of radiation or toxins. Hell, after a month or so, I can phase out the heavy duty filtration from my groundwater purifiers. It might get contaminated again eventually, but that’s the kind of stuff we can do now. And we’re looking into the possibility of the blood from the same person being used to render crops immune to disease and damage.”
“Holy shit,” she wound up repeating.
Sev gave her a wry smirk and shrugged. “See why I’m bringing this up to you, knowing the shit you’ll sling my way?”
Feeling the migraine creeping in, Nora groaned, “I fucking hate you.”
She and her team ended up spending far too many late nights hammering out the ethics and legalities of Sev’s state-assisted suicide program. In the end, the idea was altered into a program where citizens could donate, if they wished to, their bodies once they have passed, to the Nexus Severalty for experimentation and ‘use in metaphysical activities’. It’d mean a smaller ‘harvest’ of human ingredients, but Sev, to his credit, didn’t seem at all put off by that.