Tim's POV
I have seen a ton of postings everywhere by the third day.
I found the first one nailed to a board near the academy's main gate, the paper still fresh enough that the ink hadn't fully weathered. I read it once, then again, slower, to make sure I hadn't misunderstood the language.
*Anyone and everyone can be elected to mayor of E-Rantel. Whoever receives the most votes takes full control of the city's resources upon victory, including the angels, the golems, and the academy. This was Tim's idea; the voting will end in a month.*
"HUH?!?!"
I had said, in my office, in a single sentence delivered while annoyed about something else entirely: *let the people vote for their mayor, five-year terms.* That was the complete content of what I had proposed. I had not specified that the position came bundled with the ownership transfer of every divine and magical asset I had personally built over years of work. I had not specified that the position was open to *anyone* rather than qualified candidates. I had not specified anything beyond the basic democratic mechanism.
Panasolei had taken those few words and built an entire constitutional crisis out of them.
---
Less than two minutes later...
I kicked Panasolei's front door down.
The maids who answered the resulting silence had the specific terror of household staff encountering a situation considerably outside their training, and I didn't slow down to reassure them.
"PANASOLEI, GET YOUR FAT ASS DOWN HERE."
Footsteps came overhead, then Panasolei himself, descending the stairs with the particular speed of a man who understood that delay would not improve his situation, his hands raised in the universal gesture of someone hoping a conversation could happen before violence did.
"Wait a moment, Sir Tim; I can explain myself."
I waited. He reached the bottom of the stairs, the short, round, specific build of a man whose career had been administrative rather than physical, breathing harder than the distance should have required.
"Sir Tim, I wanted to make the mayoral position mean something to the entire Re-Estize Kingdom, so I made a significant production of it. And besides, you wouldn't lose the vote. All of E-Rantel worships you. You would simply win every five years and retain everything."
I pointed at his face. The veins in my forehead had returned.
"You think I'm too stupid to notice that I'd have to win an election every five years for the rest of my life just to keep the things I already built?"
He gave me a smile that was meant to be apologetic and landed somewhere closer to smug.
"Oops," he said. "My bad."
I PUNCHED him in the face.
The blood from his nose was immediate, and the unconsciousness that followed was equally immediate. I left him on his own foyer floor and walked out through the door in RAGE.
---
A week later...
The nobles arrived over the following days.
Not individually, but in processions, the specific theater of wealth announcing itself through scale, carriages, and retainers and the particular performance of importance that this world's aristocracy specialized in. I watched the first few arrive from the academy's windows with a sense of mounting dread that proved entirely justified.
Some brought their personal armies to vote on their behalf: soldiers, sworn retainers, and the armed men who served noble households and whose loyalty was, in the specific legal framework this kingdom operated under, sufficient to register as eligible voters if their lord declared it so.
Some brought peasants from their lands. Entire villages, transported by cart, were the agricultural workers whose votes belonged, in practice, to whoever controlled their livelihood and their housing and their ability to feed their families through the next winter. I watched a line of perhaps three hundred farmers from one estate file past a registration table with the specific blankness of people who understood that voting against their lord's interest was not a real option available to them, regardless of what the ballot said about secrecy.
And then there were the worst of them.
I counted four noble houses that arrived with slaves, not retainers, not peasants under economic coercion, but legally owned human beings, brought specifically to be registered as votes for their owners. I walked the registration lines myself on the second day, unable to stop myself from confirming what I was seeing, and found exactly what I had feared.
Elves among them.
I had encountered enough of this world's demi-human populations by now to recognize the features even through the deliberate disfigurement, the bone structure, the proportions, the specific grace that survived even exhaustion and malnutrition, and the particular hollow-eyed quality of people who had given up expecting anything to change. Their ears had been cut. Not naturally short-cut, the scar tissue was old enough that the mutilation had happened years before this election; the wound healed into a permanent erasure of what they had been born as.
Elves are known as generational slaves, as they live for a really long time, and so they are passed down from father to son, and most are sex slaves, a fate worse than death.
I stood in that registration line for a long moment, looking at people who had been physically altered to make their captivity more convenient for the people who held them, standing in a queue to cast a vote that would be marked according to their owner's instruction rather than their own will, in an election that I had accidentally created.
I had told the king two months ago that I would deal with slavery myself if he gave me the legal cover.
He had not given me the legal cover.
I was looking at exactly why that delay mattered; standing in a line that should not have existed, looking at the dead eyes, made my blood boil.
I walked away before I did something to the noble overseeing that particular registration line that would have created a different kind of crisis than the one I was already managing.
---
The Church of Tim made its appearance somewhere in the middle of this, much to my shame.
It had grown from the seeds the Dragon Kingdom journey had planted; the people who had started calling me "Avatar of the Gods," "Child of the Gods," and "the Chosen" had organized in the months since then into something with actual structure. They moved through E-Rantel's streets now with the specific evangelical energy of a movement that had found its purpose, speaking to anyone new arriving in the city about the good word of Tim, encouraging votes, and building what I can only describe as a religious-political machine assembled entirely around my existence without my consent or design.
I covered my face the first time I walked past a gathering of them on my way to inspect the latest shelter construction. Not from the cold, but from the shame of watching grown adults kneel and kiss their lips to the cobblestones. I had just walked across, treating the literal ground beneath my feet as something sanctified by the contact.
I built another few shelters for new arrivals. I tried not to look at the people praying near its entrance.
---
Later at the town square.
I was walking toward the southern district to assess shelter capacity when I saw the crowd, and when I saw who was at the center of the crowd, I stopped completely.
King Ramposa III was standing on a temporary platform that someone had constructed, delivering what was unmistakably a campaign speech, with the specific cadence and content of a man asking a population to vote for him.
The crowd was not receiving it well.
Most of E-Rantel's population had, by this point, joined the Church of Tim in some capacity: formal membership, casual attendance, or simply the diffuse social pressure of living in a city where everyone around you had decided that worship was the appropriate response to my existence. The booing started before Ramposa had finished his second sentence and built steadily as he continued, the crowd clearly enjoying booing their king for the fun of it.
Someone threw food.
Gazef, I hadn't noticed him until this moment, positioned at the platform's edge with the specific watchfulness of a bodyguard managing a hostile crowd, as he intercepted it before it reached the king, his hand moving with the speed that had made him formidable even against most people.
I walked toward the platform with a look of rage on my face.
Ramposa saw me coming. I watched the specific recalibration cross his face, the recognition that whatever this campaign appearance had been intended to accomplish, my arrival was about to redirect it entirely.
I was mad. I want to be honest that I was not managing this well, that two months of patience had run completely out somewhere between the chance of me losing all my stuff and the slave registration lines, and that what came out of me when I reached the platform came out at a volume that the entire square heard.
"WHY HAVE YOU YET TO BAN SLAVERY? ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS SAY THAT SLAVERY IS BANNED. WAS THAT SO HARD, KING RAMPOSA?"
The crowd heard every word. The booing that followed had a different character than the booing before, sharper, more specific, the crowd's general hostility crystallizing around a concrete grievance they could now articulate themselves.
Ramposa looked pale from the weight of my bloodshot eyes.
"I'm sorry, Tim; you know the nobles of both factions are under the Eight Fingers' control," he said.
"Then I'll get rid of the Eight Fingers myself," I said. "Since they're recognized as a criminal organization, that should require no parliamentary approval at all."
The crowd, hearing me, started cheering.
I looked at Ramposa for a moment longer as I turned to leave.
I understood, even angry, that his failure was not simple cowardice. Understanding it did not make me less angry. Both things were true simultaneously, the way complicated things usually were.
I turned and walked away from the square, the crowd's cheering following me, the Tim Church's members already converting my outburst into the next sermon they would deliver to the next group of new arrivals.
I had work to do.
BUT, after the vote, I don't want to lose my home.
---
Tim
[Level 97+5= 102]