Chapter 443: (437) 6.51. How Long Has That Been There?

Vin wasn’t sure how long he stood there, staring at the many posters of him slapped all over Terra’s entrance, but it was probably at least a solid ten seconds or so. Long enough for people to realize he’d returned.

“The Roamer!” he heard echoed from a few different locations, followed by excited gasps as faces he didn’t recognize turned and gazed upon him with shining eyes. “He’s back!”

Vin took a hesitant step back, more aware than ever at the fact that he was cradling a sleeping Lumel in his arms as a small crowd of people pushed forward, eagerly moving toward him. Before he could make the snap decision as to whether he should run or try to slow them down, he blinked, his mouth falling open a second time as the people charging him dropped to their knees in the street, splaying out their hands and literally prostrating themselves before him. Only one other person had ever done something like that before, and Vin froze, completely and utterly lost as to what to do.

“Vin!” a familiar voice hissed, and Vin turned to spot Theodore hiding within a nearby alley, looking like himself for a change as the Spy motioned hurriedly for him to follow. “This way!”

Vin didn’t even hesitate, leaping over the closest of people as he took off toward the alley. He heard a handful of dejected cries and people pleading for him to stop, but he didn’t so much as cast a glance over his shoulder. He cast a silent Stone Wall the moment he’d joined Theodore, however, sealing the entrance to the alley behind them as he looked at the Spy.

“Theodore, so help me if this is one of your freaky ‘welcome back’ pranks, this has gone way too far!”

“It’s not, I’ll explain once we’re safe!” Theodore said, turning and taking off down the alley. Without anything else to go on, Vin followed after him, his face paling the further they ran.

Whoever had been in charge of putting up these posters had done a pretty phenomenal job. Everywhere Vin turned, he found his own face staring back at him. His own magical, clenched fist shining blue as he asked the viewer to join his cause. He was so distracted by the posters it took him a moment to realize they were running the wrong direction, and he shouted at Theodore’s back.

“Theodore, my apartment is that way!”

“Trust me, you don’t want to be there right about now!” the Spy called back. Theodore shook his head as he maneuvered them from one alley to the next, keeping them out of the public eye as best he could. “Most of your friends have temporarily vacated Terra as well, tired of putting up with everything while we tried to fix it.”

“What were they putting up with?!” Vin called back. But rather than answer, Theodore merely cursed as they turned a corner and came face-to-face with a man actively putting more posters up on one of the walls. The stranger’s eyes widened and he dropped the glue brush he was holding. The man sucked in a deep breath, but before he could turn and shout, Theodore darted forward, driving his fist straight into the man’s stomach.

“Sneak attack!” Theodore whisper-shouted, shoving the man aside and kicking the container of glue over as he kept running. Vin felt a little bad about leaving the gasping man rolling around in a pile of glue, but he chose to trust in his Spy, chasing after him.

“When did you learn that ability?” Vin asked as they got farther from the center of town and Theodore slowed down just a hair.

“Middle school,” Theodore answered with a grin. “Drama kids put up with a lot. Now come on, we’re almost to the safe house.”

“We have a safe house?”

Sure enough, Vin was surprised to learn that Terra did in fact have a ‘safe house,’ hidden underneath the public park that had been added near the edge of town. Theodore revealed a trapdoor hidden within a rather dense bush, and after a careful cast of Slow Fall to get him and Lumel down the ladder, Vin’s eyes widened as took in the room before him. It was less a safe house and more of a small connection of rooms laid out similarly to one of the standard apartments as far as he could tell, but there were ladders leading deeper as well, so he had no idea how large it truly was.

Once the trapdoor was sealed and they were isolated from the rest of town, Theodore sighed, fluffing one of the beds in the adjacent room and motioning for Vin to lay Lumel there.

“Here, she can rest and recover. She’s not injured, is she? Getting her to the hospital unseen might be tricky.”

“No, she’s not hurt,” Vin confirmed, gently laying Lumel down before pulling his merider-silk blanket from his pack and tucking her in. One cast of Create Cloud later to give her a pillow, he turned to his Spy, frowning as he crossed his arms. “Enough delay. What’s going on?”

“It’s a bit of a story,” Theodore admitted, motioning for them to retreat to what looked like a perfect replica of the council room in town hall. They grabbed two of the five chairs, and Vin waited patiently for Theodore to collect his thoughts. It took him a moment to decide where to even begin, but eventually, he steepled his fingers together, giving him a sly grin. “…So how do you feel about ”

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“Theodore…” Vin started dangerously, and the Spy sighed.

“I figured as much. Well, guess I’ll just dive straight into it then. A cult has been formed in your name, and it has become surprisingly popular. Way more so than any of the other council members anticipated.”

“What? ” Vin demanded. “Who would even do such a thing? Is everyone safe?”

“Oh, yeah, they’re not dangerous,” Theodore said, waving a hand dismissively. “The safehouse is because I knew you wouldn’t want to deal with any of that. Currently, according to Golrim’s last estimates, about a fifth of Terra’s population is drinking the Vin Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean. The majority of them are made up by the sixth wave, but there’s a decent number of the other waves in there as well. Who would have thought being the highest-leveled Earther and throwing magic around all willy-nilly would ever come back to bite you in the butt, huh?”

“How did this even begin?” Vin demanded, rubbing at his eyes as he tried to figure out how he wanted to handle this. Bringing him somewhere safe to explain all this had definitely been the right call, but he would have preferred if someone had managed to go through all this he’d gotten back to Terra.

“You wouldn’t happen to remember Grant, would you? Mid-thirties? Long, dark hair? Witnessed you literally descend from the heavens as you saved him from a pack of flying demons, as he tells it?”

“Yes, I remember him,” Vin groaned, easily recalling the missing Earther he’d brought back from the sky fragment. The man had been threatening the avisul with a knife, and Vin had thought shocking him with a couple displays of magic would be enough to curb his fury. It had worked at the time, but it would seem his idea had carried with it a few unintentional consequences. He knew he should have been more concerned about the way the man had prostrated himself before him, but he’d been plenty busy at the time and had to rush around to try to find as many missing Earthers as he could. “Is he the one to blame for all this?”

“Seems that way. Though he was just the spark that ignited the powder keg. Somehow, he managed to gather up a decent-sized following without anyone picking up on what he was doing. By the time they began preaching your name, they already had a core group of a few dozen diehard fans. The council didn’t think it was all that big of a deal, and then… well, you saw all the posters.”

“You said almost a fifth of Terra’s population?” Vin asked, his face paling as he ran the numbers. “That’s almost a thousand people!”

“Closer to seven or eight hundred by our last estimates,” Theodore shrugged. “Like I said, at the very least, they’re not really all that dangerous. In fact, hilariously, their message is actually a pretty good one if you ask most people. They’ve been running around preaching for unity between races. There have only been two altercations within the past week, where members of your cult beat up two Earthers who had threatened to harm some of the infernals working on adding rituals to the outer wall.”

“ don’t call it my cult,” Vin begged, shaking his head. “How did Spur and Abby let it get to this point? Even if it’s for a decent-enough reason, attacking people in the street? That feels like something those two would have stomped out immediately.”

“Abby’s got her guards patrolling the town around the clock, and she even pulled them away from a few other stations. But cracking down on a fifth of the entire population just because a small handful of people with similar beliefs caused a ruckus, or due to a few isolated instances of theft, is a bit much. It’s not like they killed anyone, they just kicked them around a bit. Spur seems to be somewhat indecisive about how to handle things, at least in my opinion.”

“Theft? What in the world are they stealing?”

“Mostly things related to you,” Theodore admitted, frowning slightly. “You know Sean, right? A guard from the second wave who is putting together a book of signatures and messages from as many first wavers as he can get his hands on? They grabbed that pretty early on. It’s sort of become Grant’s holy book.”

“They stole Sean’s book?” Vin asked. Anger began bubbling up inside him as he remembered the oddly timid guard who had worked up the courage to ask him to sign his book and add his name to what might very well become a piece of history one day. “I don’t understand. If they know where it is, why hasn’t Abby done anything? That’s the whole point of having a guard!”

“Vin,” Theodore said softly, the man’s cool tone calming him down slightly. “This new group of fanatics outnumber the guard literally twenty to one. As soon as they realized how big this had grown, the council made the call to wait until you returned to Terra, with the hopes that you could put an end to all this peacefully. I think they were afraid that if they went after Grant and chopped off the head of the snake, they might have a full-scale rebellion on their hands, or literal riots in the streets.”

“How am I supposed to fix this?” Vin asked. “I’m no public speaker. Hell, what if I just make things worse?”

“Your little display at the courthouse the other week was in fact what Grant used to truly start launching the cult in earnest,” Theodore admitted, causing Vin to shake his head.

“See? That’s exactly what I mean. I can wow people with magic, but I don’t know how to wow them. I’ve been trying to convince people I’m just a normal person since day one. Clearly I’m not very good at it.”

“Let me go gather the rest of the council, we can come up with a solution together,” Theodore said, getting to his feet and stopping Vin when he went to get up. “You should probably stay here for now. At least until we have a definitive plan in place.”

“Alright,” Vin sighed, rubbing his eyes again as wished he could just ignore all this and collapse into bed beside Lumel. While his endurance was high enough he was able to shrug off most of the lethargy Lumel was feeling after her dream journey, he wasn’t completely immune.

“I’ll be back in a jiffy!” Theodore smiled, twirling and transforming into a nondescript man that didn’t look a thing like him before heading up the ladder back to Terra proper. As soon as the trapdoor closed behind Theodore, Vin dropped his head to the table, groaning as he pressed his forehead into the cool wood. He was tempted to use his impressive Sleeping skill to take a quick nap, when someone cleared their throat only a few feet away.

Jerking his head up, Vin stared in shock as Golrim materialized on the edge of the room, canceling his invisibility as he stepped forward and took a seat on the other side of the table. Giving him his usual sly grin, the Logistician splayed out his fingers, raising an eyebrow as he looked questioningly at him.

“Before you do anything rash, I figured this was an opportunity you shouldn’t let go to waste… Do you to rule over all of Terra?”