From Lamentation to Jubilation
08 May 2017Monolith Preacher
It has certainly been a busy time of late. Black Omega operations have been proceeding at a smooth rate, and I have re-established my position as one of our intermediaries between Deggie and the Archonian brass. I managed to hit the top ranks of the Archonian power structure, and the high-ups greeted me as a veteran. Velvet Valdes was there waiting for me with an odd strain of gin unknown to anyone in the bubble that he swears saved him from a Thargoid encounter a month ago, despite the fact none of us can work out the specifics of his tale once he starts relating it. Victor Laius gave me a ribbing for taking so long to relieve the pressure from him, then promptly left me with the people I had recently seen as peers to settle in on an even keel. Grim and I exchanged one-liners for a few hours, and then I tried to get a bit of preaching done. Qbitus was too busy checking spreadsheets to pay me any heed, and Withnail was too busy trying to find something with an alcoholic content in it amongst the cleaning cabinet to care what I was saying. Suffice to say my attempts at conversion didn't go as well in polite company as they tend to on my own ship, but I found a nice lodging to take up in the base and settled into my routine quite nicely.Speaking of routine, it's nice to finally have one now I've stopped shuttling around for random high maintenance engineers and can finally call up Sheng to give him their blueprints like he asked. We've been getting along a lot better since I spilled their secrets to him, and he's promised not to modify any ships besides those working for us in Black Omega or those working for the Archon. He can't help but put his own spin on the way he does the upgrades, so he knows Scarlet would be able to track him down. Scarlet and I have managed to get away with conducting our secret operations without arising the ire of the powers that be, which has been working out well for both of us, and I finally managed to modify her ship to become a true contender in the races should either of us fancy getting back into them soon.
All things being well, I decided to take the Belugaosi's Dead out to brainwash a few more VIPs in my spare time. The MPEF has been turning its wheels rather clunkily in my absence, and I thought it best to remind the other preachers out there how it's done now we've got access to more high-profile people to start preaching from the top of stations rather than the ground level of planets. What I did not account for, however, was just quite how much of a difference this would make upon my outlook.
Having lost the battle for Pirate's Lament, my promotion was feeling bittersweet. I talked to a few VIPs in a passenger lounge I was scouting out about the feelings I was experiencing, and managed to find an interested fellow whose plight seemed even more morose than mine own.
This fine gentleman relayed to me in prose even more purple than mine own, the fact that he and his significant other were being subjugated beneath Imperial rule for their tryst. To the surprise of some of the eavesdroppers around us, it was not due to the fact his fellow lovebug was indeed a fellow, but rather that they were from different levels of Imperial society. Without meaning to delve too deeply into the substrata of the Imperial caste system, partially for brevity's sake and partially because the divulging of their names might specify which power I am talking about, the levels between a Serf and King are far more than those which a member of The Pilot's Federation move through, and these distinctions matter more the higher you go. His plan was thus: I would undertake a series of trips with him and some of his more nefarious associates, in order that those keeping records would be too concerned with the plausibility of cargo smuggling and illegal passengers to worry about the allegedly unclean liaisons he would be conducting. I may not be a saint, but I am a preacher, and the idea of shuttling two lovebirds around in a veil of secrecy sounded marvellous, so I stipulated I would only take the mission if I could hitch them officially at the end, just to turn the screw in. Since my Kingship was still valid despite my exile from Gcirthi, I knew that given a long enough time "surveying" their validity, once I helped them tie the knot, there would be nothing that even the Empress Herself could do to stop them enjoying the rest of their life together.
This caused me to rub shoulders with a fair few people whom I had forgotten. One gentleman had been in a Luxury cabin for his first trip on my liner, but upon taking his second, had to be informed that we had no Luxury cabins left and he would have to downgrade. I decided to message him directly when he replied he would take the one Economy cabin on the ship, as we still had First and Business classes available. He declined my offer, and instead asked that I meet him after the trip. As I saw him out, it struck me I had seen him before. Scot Rich was one of the slaves I had brainwashed during my time doing mass runs in Torval space, and he said that if he could not have the luxury accorded his new station as a kingpin, then economy lodgings reminded him of the time he spent converting. He thanked me for showing him the light of the Monolith, and told me the greeting I should be made aware of when people gave me tip-offs in order that I would understand who was and was not safe to talk to about Buster's plans.
Scot Rich had a concubine in residence whom he had found on the same station I had dropped him off from, and it was their shared faith in the Monolith which brought them together. I was never a fan of listening to her talk in my cabins, but she was the person who forced him to take repeat trips, and it was nice to have some variance on our ship's menu. Most people nowadays eat so unhealthily, I never forgot her instance when I was liberating her from Imperial Slavery that she would never eat another ounce of fat in her life if she could avoid it, and so I made sure to stock more lentils than I needed whenever I heard either of them were coming along. It seemed she had gotten so tired of spinning stories for people which avoided her time as a slave that she changed her name and pretended it was a familial trait.
After a cycle or so, we knew that the time would soon come where I could devise an elaborate ceremony to tie together these two lovebirds, but I still had little clue who they were. I asked Scot and Avalynn if we could speed things along a bit, and they introduced me to another couple who I was surprised had even managed to get into any port in their lives. This couple were the real deal, however. They had made a living doing more active terrorism than even I had managed in my time, and I had to admire their tenacity and dedication to their craft. I converted them post haste, and we spent a few nights discussing techniques of coercion and the finer points of nerve agent production. We decided that if we dropped one of them off at a location known to the Imperials then she could create a distraction and meet us back up once the ceremony was done. We played a few games of chinchirorin to calm our nerves, and then I we dropped off our firecracker on a nearby planet, using our passphrase as a farewell greeting this time.
Our plan was set, but there was one unforseen circumstance I was not ready for. Buster was determined to have a ceremony in the tradition of his people, wherein he would proceed into a room with a hole in the wall, and his soon to be husband was in a darkened room the other side of this hole. They would present rings to each other, and they would exchange vows whilst consummating their marriage at the same time. The specifics did not bother me in principle, as I had spent enough time with Bishop Len Brennan to be used to some of the more eccentric fleshy rituals of certain far-flung cultures, but the fact I had still not seen his groom was starting to irk me somewhat. Still, I'm a preacher, not an informant, so I decided to go ahead with the ceremony.
It was...enlightening, to say the least. I can honestly say I have never been introduced to someone in such a unique way, and I felt I knew them more for the observation of his fervour and the sound of his ululations than I would have had I stared him in the face and shook his hand before discussing the finer points of his thoughts on the impending Thargoid threat. I was even more surprised when our most esteemed VIP turned around to me when we docked and gave a knowing wink behind a wry smile and spoke in a rather lewd tone.
So everything had worked out well in the end, and I even managed to get back out and save our pink haired friend just in the nick of time before the SRV I lent her for the distraction was taken out on some backwater moon in the system to erase her ever having left the ship. Her husband was rather impressed, and took me aside when she docked to give me a tip off.
I turned out he had one more contact out in the black who had heard about my ceremony through our regal friend and was interested in procuring my services for extreme marriages to do something he was unwilling to inform me of before I met him. Being the curious type that I am, I met this new contact five thousand light years from the bubble in a nebula I shall never again visit. After a long conversation which lasted the whole of my day-long trip out there where he told me everything except whom he would be marrying, I finally met him on the edge of a black hole and he enthusiastically greeted me with his fiancee.
Suffice to say that I was so sickened by what he asked me to do I burnt him alive and freed his fiancee who shall remain nameless for sake of brevity. I may be a preacher, but even the Monolith considers something as horrible as THAT to be unholy. I asked Len Brennan, and he agreed....that's how you know it was bad.