Chapter 500 His Best Standing Long Jump
'I hate it! Fuck my life... my dad died to a supervillain for nothing! He wanted to join the empire from the beginning but mom said no. But after he died, she couldn't run to the recordkeepers to apply for citizenship fast enough. Dumb bitch!'
Rick had found himself in the mind of a teenage boy. He listened to the stream of consciousness for a while and learned what the boy and his family had gone through over the past few weeks. Not only had the kid's mother's refusal to join the empire driven a wedge between her and her husband, one that they'd even been contemplating divorce over, but his girlfriend's family had also chosen to join the empire during the first amnesty period. The boy blamed his mother for the resulting breakup as well.
All of his rage had been directed toward his mother, but then one day he'd had a thought. If the empire had the power to enforce the law on rogue supervillains, why did they ignore the havoc that'd been wrought among the people who waived their imperial citizenship? He wasn't old enough to truly understand politics, so he was still mired in the typical teenage thought process of good and evil, black and white. Supervillains were evil, so if the empire was good, they should do something to stop them, citizenship or no citizenship. Thus, the empire itself must be evil as well.
Oftentimes, the simplest thoughts were the most powerful, and that belief that the empire was evil had been enough to generate a thread of belief in Rick, who, though the boy had no idea who he was, had been the only person to ever lead a successful strike against the evil empire and its wicked leader.
Though the thread was tiny, and it didn't generate much faith, the very fact of its existence had given the cult leader access to the boy's thoughts and body.
'Don't worry, boy, you're already doing something for us,' Rick thought, planning to continue watching the teen go about his day. Being a passenger in the boy's mind would allow him to gather firsthand information on the day-to-day functions of the empire, as well as testing a number of his more brutal ideas. After all, the boy wasn't worth much in the first place, so there was no silly moral dilemma for him to pretend to struggle with.
But his ideas of an extended stay in the boy's body were thrown out of the proverbial window when he focused on the thread connecting him and the teen. He saw that the white pulses of light were traveling from his physical body to the boy at a staggering rate. The pulses were thousands of times more frequent and intense than he was receiving from the angry youth. His heart practically fell all the way to his feet when he considered the backlash he would soon suffer, despite the constant "income" from the tens of thousands of others feeding him their belief and faith.
Still, the comparison between the expenditure he was paying out now and the cost of inhabiting Katrina's body taught him a little bit more about how his powers functioned and their limitations. The darker the thread, the more difficult it would be to connect with the person on the other end, and the more infrequent the pulses, the less he gained from them and the more he would spend if he wanted to connect with them.
"Go to the roof," he whispered in the boy's mind, curious as to whether direct orders would work, and if so, how much steeper the cost would be to use those instead of forcefully assuming direct control of a person and shoving their consciousness to the side.
The young man paused for a moment and tilted his head, his mind going blank as he lost his train of thought. At that very moment, if he could see the thread linking him to Rick, he would risk blindness as the intensity and frequency of the light pulses traveling along it made it appear to be a second sun, if said sun had been compressed into a straight line. All he could hear in his mind was a vague voice repeating the words "go to the roof" over and over, getting louder and clearer with each repetition until it was practically shouting in his now throbbing head. Soon, he couldn't take it anymore and robotically marched toward the stairs leading to the roof of the apartment building he lived in with his mother.
Along the way, Rick continually gave orders, forcing him to do different things like stop on the stair landing, stand on one foot, stick out his tongue, poke himself in the eye, and crawl backward up the stairs on all fours. He kept a close eye on the thread of belief to see how it reacted, as well as track the changes in the light pulses headed from him to the teenager, and came to the conclusion that the thread itself would exist as long as the belief it represented existed. In terms of the cost to order the linked person around, the more complex or harmful the action-or the more out of character it was- the more faith Rick would have to expend to force the target to perform it. But as long as he could support the expenditure, the person on the other end of his thread had no choice but to follow the orders being given to them.
After a time, the boy reached the rooftop as ordered. He looked around in confusion, wondering why he had climbed all the way up to the roof of his apartment building when he heard that same sibilant, chanting whisper in his mind.
"Jump off the roof," the whisper repeated.
The boy struggled against the order as hard as he could. He knew that, despite only being a four-story building, if he were to follow the order, he would be severely injured, or even dead.
But alas, after Rick spent a hundred thousand units of faith, if he were to count each individual light that pulsed along the thread as a single unit, the teenager could no longer struggle. In the same robotic fashion as he had climbed the stairs and performed all of the actions Rick had ordered him to during his ascent, he waddled to the ledge, crouched down, and, with all of his might, performed his best standing long jump.
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