Apocalypse Redux - Chapter 291: Paying the Piper

What would the god of mischief find funny?

A whoopie cushion would probably get him to crack a smile or something, but Isaac had promised to do something that would be genuinely funny. In his mind, as per his personal definition of the word, that required something more. And drawing on someone else’s definition of the concept might work, but it also might not. So why not go a little over the top, encouraging Loki to potentially make future deals?

Besides, it was an excuse to do something dumb without it being a waste of time.

His targets were twofold, as he owed the god two pranks.

The first one was your standard money-grubbing “money is everything, and can be used to plaster over any issues caused by getting it” CEO. Bad for the workers, bad for the environment, indirectly responsible for enough summoning related problems to get on Isaac’s radar but not enough for official or non-official retaliation.

Isaac wasn’t made of time, he needed to pick his battles and this was not one he normally deemed worth it. But he had the excuse now, and quite frankly, this should be satisfying.

Maximilian Kaiser was about to have a very, very bad day, and this product-showing would likely go down in history as a prime example of what not to do.

Or maybe, just maybe, it would be figured out that someone was mucking about behind the scenes. Actually, people would probably catch on to the sabotage, but what could they possibly do? Tracking him down would be nigh impossible.

In theory, he could be found out at any point in time just by someone with a truth-telling [Skill].

In practice, he’d laid the groundwork for being able to tell them to buzz off last year.

Oh, it had been a half-joking question of “did you do it” about some random crap that he hadn’t been responsible for made by some poor schmuck who’d had the misfortune of doing so in front of cameras.

Isaac had pretended to “almost” explode, only to then calm himseof, stating that he would answer this specific question to make it quite clear that he was taking this stand not because answering would be incriminating, but rather out of general principle.

After all, there were a fuckton of crimes committed every day and he really didn’t want to live in a world where every law enforcement officer felt comfortable asking him about each and every one of them.

If there was reasonable suspicion that he might have committed the crime, then go get a warrant and he’d be more than happy to clear his name. And under most circumstances, he wasn’t opposed to talking to law enforcement. But if people felt this bloody comfortable with questioning him about literally everything that he might theoretically have done, he had to draw a line in the sand.

… And then he’d had to ask Habicht to make sure the guy wasn’t fired. He hadn’t really been malicious, just extraordinarily unlucky.

Kaiser was marching onto the stage at the press conference, ready to show the world what his company had done.

Isaac had considered just messing with the presentation, replacing it with pornography or something, but while that would have been embarrassing, it didn’t quite have the oomph he wanted.

Instead, he’d had Jason steal the flash drive with the prototype presentation, then created an alternative version with a sting in the tail. Using that as a basis, he could keep adjusting it for any changes made, and it all led up to this.

“This is our newest project, the …” Kaiser trailed off when he caught sight of the faces of the people watching his presentation.

The document he’d meant to show had been a basic plan of the summoning rooms for the project. What had actually ended up on the monitor was, well, a company-internal memo about potential weaknesses.

Things weren’t bad enough for official sanctions right off the bat, but both Isaac and the writer of that memo still expected trouble. The corrections were written in small red annotations that were clearly apparent when the document was open, but would be hard to see in previews.

Kaiser made an awkward joke, then tried to keep going. Tried being the operative word. Music that was meant to be played to accompany the presentation was turned all the way down, but the second he touched the volume dial, the sound got dialed up to ear-splitting levels. And so on.

The water in his glass had a metallic taste, which would have been annoying under most situations, but a mere two days ago, the company had been fined for still having lead pipes, so that little trick had scared Kaiser more than a weird taste should have.

And so on.

Slowly, painfully so, Kaiser managed to finish this absolute train wreck of a presentation, and then, he finally collapsed onto his chair.

And the sound of a fart ripped through the room like a gunshot.

Whoopie cushion. Classic for a reason. Might not have been enough on its own, scratch that, it wouldn’t have been enough on its own, but as a grand finale … perfect.

“What the fuck is that smell?”

Oh, right, he’d gotten some military-grade fart spray to fill the cushion with and forgotten about it. And in this case, military-grade meant that it stunk so badly that the merest whiff of it was enough to be instantly considered a public nuisance. No company would ever be willing to sell this crap as stink bombs as they’d be sued into the ground on day one.

Thioacetone was the smelliest chemical in the world, to the point where in the year 1889, a single dropped vial of the crap had caused the evacuation of an entire city.

Isaac hadn’t used nearly as much this time, of course, but people still evacuated the room as though it had just spontaneously caught fire.

He swiftly made his escape before the cloud of “silent but deadly” reached him.

One down, one to go.

***

Target number two. The Nazi.

Usually, as involved as Isaac was in politics, he didn’t much care which party he dealt with. While there were all sorts of parties in the Bundestag, ranging from very liberal to very conservative, they were mostly reasonable.

Despite having different values and priorities, most of them, especially those with power, were close to the center and far from the extremes, and he could pick who to approach from a common sense perspective.

Unfortunately, however, people did exist at the extremes of the spectrum, ranging from unrealistic images of trying to end all taxation and have the government still somehow work to, well, Neo-Nazis.

And under most circumstances, Isaac detested using “Nazi” as an insult, an overused and progressively more meaningless phrase that boiled down to “person I don’t like”.

As a child, Isaac had gone to a concentration camp. Well, the school had taken the whole class on a trip there. He’d seen the gate, the railyard, the recreations of the barracks, and the incinerators.

To be entirely honest, it hadn’t made him feel much he hadn’t felt before, he’d learned all the things they’d been told about on the tour in lessons and books.

And then, they’d gone to the visitor’s center. Seen the pictures, watched the videos, realized that those piles of naked corpses, staring sightlessly into nowhere, were exactly where he’d just been standing.

That was a Nazi, someone who committed that kind of evil.

… And the people who felt that that kind of evil was alright, minimized it, or tried to encourage that whole regrettable chapter to be forgotten, as if that wouldn’t increase the risk of the whole situation repeating itself down the line.

A politician you didn’t like who wanted to limit you in some small way, especially when it was something stupid like “from now on, unasked-for compliments legally count as sexual harassment”, was not a Nazi.

However, there was a miscreant who was an ultra-conservative and liked slipping lesser-known Hitler quotes into his speeches. And while some of them might be explainable as “accidents”, such as saying “everything for Germany”, the man had been a history teacher. Between that and the frequency of the accidents, a true coincidence was unlikely.

But thankfully, he wasn’t that influential, so while that crap had landed him solidly on Isaac’s “not worth having a conversation with” list, it wasn’t enough to make him a viable target.

He’d also started making some noise about “stopping state interference” and “ensuring freedom prevailed” when it came to summoning, yet even that wasn’t enough to put him on Isaac’s radar. He wasn’t in a position to make true any of those things.

Isaac grinned viciously as he stared at his unfortunate victim across the hall. Time to see if he could get Bastian Hagen mad enough to make his head explode.

***

“… And now, we’ll be calling some of our supporters who unfortunately couldn’t make it here, to show what can be achieved when the … sensitive parties aren’t mucking about.”

Isaac hadn’t messed much with the rally so far. Just the occasional heckling, by “thinking out loud” next to someone who would then ask the question and cause a fuss. Because Isaac knew exactly which questions Hagen would not want to answer.

“Yo,” came the reply after a few rings, “Who are you?”

“Who’s this?” Hagen asked back, puzzled.

“You called me,” the voice replied, “You’re bothering me, so either hang up, or stop pussyfooting around.”

Hagen rechecked the number he’d dialed, it looked right, and answered the question.

“This is Hagen, we …”

“Oh, so you’re that asshole.”

“Excuse me!?”

“Well, you called me quite a few names, and proudly proclaimed that anything I could do, you could do better. And then you did nothing. You pathetic blabbermouth.”

“WHO ARE YOU?”

“Who are you to yell at the Great Sage Equalling Heaven?” Sun hung up. He wasn’t normally someone who cared about what people said behind his back, but if someone had accidentally slipped him a transcript of Hagen’s boasting-slash-shit-talking… yeah, it wouldn’t be pretty if Hagen’s call was later redirected to him.

Mopping the sweat from his brow, Hagen mumbled an apology about how his phone must have been hacked and borrowed his aide’s phone. Wouldn’t help him, though.

Isaac was continuously borrowing [Skills] via the [Round Table], with Arthur sitting in the [Skill], cackling like a hyena on crack and constantly making sure he had access to what he needed.

First, he’d borrowed one of Elena’s racial abilities, a fae curse that sapped luck, which he’d slapped Hagen with right at the start.

Second, he was copying Jason’s abilities to mess with distress calls, though the [Skill] could also be used in other ways. Like redirecting a distress call to a pizza delivery place for extra cruelty, or making an annoying politician deal with people he really didn’t want to.

The next call went decently well, and reached the intended target, thoubutgh the guy who picked up had been “harrassed” by Jason all day, and was incredibly short-tempered. All in all, it was less disastrous than the conversation with Sun, but not by much.

And the final call would be even worse if Isaac had judged the people involved correctly.

“Who are you and how did you get this number?”

The voice that answered was so icy, that it caused even Isaac to shiver.

This time, Hagen recognized the voice.

“Frau Bundeskanzlerin?”

“Who. Is. This.”

“Bastian Hagen, I …”

“This is my personal cell phone number, you should not have it, and you certainly should not be using it. Where are you calling me from?”

Obviously, Isaac shouldn’t have that number either, but considering who was working for/with him, most secrets were only secrets because he hadn’t asked anyone to look into them yet.

“Um …” Hagen stammered.

“Where are you right now? Who are you trying to impress?”

“I’m not doing anything?” Hagen said, apparently having decided that trying to talk his way out was better than outright hanging up. Or maybe, the curse was messing with him.

“If I look on your party’s website, will I see where you are on the campaign schedule?” Goldschmidt growled.

“Someone hacked my phone,” Hagen finally insisted.

The cough from the other end of the line was almost certainly a masterfully disguised laugh or scoff.

“In that case, why didn’t you hang up the instant you realized something was wrong?” Goldschmidt asked, “I’m in the middle of an important meeting, get your house in order. And lose this number.”

After a few more attempts at playing down the mess, the whole rally came to an awkward end, and Hagen practically ran off the stage. But the moment he was out of sight, he slipped on a wet patch of floor. Isaac sniggered. He hadn’t even planned that.

But when Hagen slipped down the stairs a minute later, that was one hundred percent on him, as Isaac had been lying in wait, phased into the stairs, pouring just a tiny amount of water onto the marble stairs where the older man’s foot was about to land.

Before, throwing an elderly politician down the stairs would have likely resulted in an attempted murder charge.

Nowadays, few people would high-five him for doing his best to maximize Hagen’s airtime, but he’d be damned if watching that wasn’t satisfying.

Having a grown-ass man sprawl in the middle of the posh lobby of a hotel/conference center, throwing a temper tantrum, was hilarious. But still not quite enough.

Getting above the man while staying completely in the walls was difficult, but Isaac managed it in barely ten seconds.

And once there, he stole the glass ampule that plugged the nearest sprinkler shut. Normally, during a fire, the glass would shatter from the temperature and water would flow down.

The look of utter defeat on the man’s face as water cascaded down all around him was one that Isaac would treasure for the rest of his days.