The Power of Ten

Chapter 17-449: It’s Just Words on Paper, Not

Goldsheet paper as fine as foil, as durable as adamantine, Full-Tempered, QL 40.

Alchemical ink that could stain said gold, 17 Ranks and also QL 40 to make. Had to get the kraken ink from the Lemurians.

Then there was me, who actually made a Pen up to help me with this whole process, just for the additional +5 modifier it could give me with QL 40. I wrote fifty thousand characters to get the style right before I began, and then continued slowly and methodically at the task in my down time.

The new Constitution of America had been established. It was written in three parts: The Constitution Among Mortals of America; The Compact with the Mother Land of America; and the Accord with the Divine.

Naturally the latter two would not have the opposing parties as signatories until the Shroud went down. The former was the hashed-out basic laws and foundation of rights among the people of formerly Canada and the United States, with Mexico still being too fractured to join in... but they could always sign in the future, and when the Mother Land started getting antsy about the border, maybe it would be enough to prompt them to do so.

There had been a LOT of arguments on many levels about the rights, obligations, form of government, checks and balances, and control powers, all of which were actually extremely fluid since once there was a King involved, balance was less important than efficiency of government, since the King WAS the Constitution.

The document was basically designed to give the people a government for when there was no King, and to give a King a working government and guidelines to ponder for their reign. It was meant to sum up the heart of the land and its peoples, which in return would basically guarantee Acclaim. A King who could pick up this document would be guaranteed to have Acclaim.

I suppose I was technically a native of America, as I’d been ‘born’ on Her soil, so I didn’t feel odd being the one to write it all out. Sure, wasted Skill Points. It didn’t bother me. Elegant handwriting was an art style all its own, and the proper interpretation of the Human Language style was the Spellcraft that would make this document work.

Allegiance Karma was pouring into the gold sheets through me as I began to write. This was a potentially major Artifact I was starting to put into play here, so there were no limits on how much could be invested, and the people definitely wanted it to stick.

The contents had naturally all been very publicized and published, and complete documents and arguments in support of and against every single line were available on multiple sites. Idiots who wanted to bring up selfish reasons for this and that found their arguments had already been made and shot down by the dozens and at length. If they wanted to refuse the whole thing based on their emotions for one item, well, everyone had some give and take, and not everybody could be pleased with everything.

That was what the Addendum section for the Kings was all about: trying new things, and getting rid of them if and when they didn’t work anymore.

It also gave legal justification for succeeding the previous national governments, and paved the way for the integration that had already been happening.

In Truth, Hope, and Valor, We the People, in order to found a more Harmonious Union, it began, and I was off.

I was using both TK and ki to accent my control of all this, make sure there were no blights, blotches, or smears, and eliminating any quivers from vibrations, even from breathing or my heartbeat. My Pen scrolled against the page, and Karma glowed and infused every word.

The Preamble. Describing what this Constitution was doing, and why.

The Living Document. Wherein it was announced that this Document was made by mortal hands and was not perfect, and it would live and change as did mortals, over time.

The Declaration of Intent, wherein the wording of the law was never to be twisted to supercede the intent of the Law.

The Declaration of Rights, the nod to Chaos of the Rights of all individual beings.

The Incarnate Right of Kings. Wherein a King was presumed to be a Living Constitution, and this Document was the Test of their Acclaim for the Motherland of North America.

The Right of Allegiances. To exist in this Land, and all Lands, by default.

The Branches of the Government: executive, legislative, and judicial, and how they were to be laid out. How legislators could be appointed or elected, and the means and the ways to do so, extending from local to the national levels, and the powers and the obligations that each had, in the absence of a King’s direct Decree.

On the Cities. Intimately interwound with the Branches, because it was the Cities that would now determine territories. As settlements waxed and waned, the governments rose and fell with them. Without a City Spirit of some kind, only Basic Law prevailed. As a City grew greater, more Laws and Duties that came with them became possible, but they could never supercede Basic Law, only build upon it for specific purposes.

The Right to Convene. If need be, to establish a new Constitution in the event of things changing once again.

The Addendum, wherein the Document would live and evolve by adjustments to the Basic Law, which could be agreed upon by the people or set forth by a King.

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It was a long and wordy Document, and the language in it had to be terribly precise. The attached Explanations of Intent were massive, but fortunately I’d advised enough on those, so I didn’t have to write out the several million words involved in them.

Superhuman skill Ranks, a massive expanded language base that could handle the terms, and a working 50 Intellect were all totally involved in a lot of the wording, and the Explanations of Intent warded against misinterpretations of intent or exaggerated meanings.

I had a lot of people reading along with me through my eyes as I was writing it, in part because as I was doing so my entire understanding of the words I was writing was flowing into each character. Anyone reading this Document was going to be hit with understanding it at the level I did.

It was a crazily powerful feeling to have, and someone deviating from the meaning of the words would become rapidly obvious.

I wrote in Truth, with no falsehood intended, desired, or implied.

In Hope, that we could make something great and good out of all of this.

In Valor, knowing that we might fail, but we were going to try.

Ink blacker than black fell upon gold, and scrawled across the pale yellow Goldsheet as I wrote out the paper that would form the heart of a nation... and perhaps, form a model for other nations.

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The Constitutional Convention had already happened, so this Document was already the Law of the Land. I was merely making the original, to be enshrined in the District of Washington, the National Capital.

The amount of Karma infused into those pages, not merely by me, but all those who perused them and endorsed them, was astronomical. They became a Greater Artifact the moment they were enshrined in the Capitol Building, replacing the old paper documents of the previous Constitution with great ceremony as it was removed and carried away to be displayed as the great relic that it was... but one without true Power now, in this day and age.

Which didn’t mean it couldn’t gain Power anew, somehow; it only meant that it didn’t have them now.

There was only now to wait for a King, and to upgrade the Presidential Mansion into something a bit more.

But, of course, that was only the first and easiest part.

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The Goldsheet for the later two Documents explicitly had to be done at 40+. To be sure of success, Commander Haru’Ara had to apply the final touches. The Ink wasn’t as important, but was made at 42 regardless, and my default Calligraphy check was +43 before my Pen, so that wasn’t an issue, either.

Perhaps it was arrogant to put down on paper our Rights and Obligations to the Mother Land, but we weren’t white blood cells. We were souls with lives and Free Will, and that meant we were backed by the Divine.

Because of that backing, we did indeed have Rights, and if the Lands didn’t like it, the Divine could look down on them like they could look down on us.

Getting that relationship down in print to minimize misunderstandings on everyone’s part was actually a huge and important step in growing the mortal Races. Getting people to understand they had obligations to the world they stood on and the Land beneath their feet wasn’t actually that hard to do, especially in a magical world.josei

Detailing that relationship with the Divine, basically taking ‘secret and hidden knowledge’, and laying it right out there for everyone to see the relationship did indeed remove some of the mystique from it... but also made it very plain that Faith had power, the Divine used that power to protect us and other mortals from forces Outside, and having Faith in them to do their jobs was just as important as us doing ours.

Free Will drove everything. It was Right There in the Document, enshrining its value to us and the Divine. We had the right to believe in who we wished, and they had the right to receive that Faith.

If we did not believe and have Faith, they had no obligation to protect us, and there was a metric fuckton of shit that we needed to be protected from...

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I gave the Compact with the Land into the care of the Druids in the Black Hills, where the High Circle of Druids American was based. The Accord with the Divine would wait in Heavenbound Hall until the time it was needed, too.

The Fey probably were not... no, weren’t at all happy, but we had no obligations to them at all. If anything, they were parasites on our dreams. Since they didn’t feel they had any obligations to us, they had no say in any of this, and were not named as parties involved at all. We certainly weren’t going to reach anything similarly formal with them, because twisting the wording of it was going to be exactly what they would do, and the nature of an agreement with them would simply have to accept that.

Which meant it would be basically worthless on its face. They could use it to justify any behavior they cared to, which was basically what they did now... without profound validation. Making a formal agreement with the Divine and the Land was totally beyond them, so they would have had to rely on us to do it, and we hadn’t.

So, nope to that idea.

They’d gotten a bit pissy about it. It cost them another hamadryad, another erlking, and the nymph they’d brought in to beauty-kill every Convention attendee they could. Legion, Shvaughn, and Morningglory all made good use of them.

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Two weeks and change to do the full Commune scan of America. In many cases, I was just building on what interested Druids had already done, but given the Caster Level and Valence behind mine, I got more information and went deeper than they had.

I was always quick to contact them and assure them that I was not trying to make them look small, and was doing this just to Map things out. There was no way I could keep up on current information, so that was all on them going forward. They were generally equally impressed I was contacting them and gratified that I acknowledged their contributions, especially to current information.

One static flash of info from me would help, but things would certainly change going forwards.

I had no idea how anything could weave the level of magic into some place that they had to make all these Felldeep tunnels, and especially the occluded areas under the Strata. Be that as it may, for now it wasn’t my place to address these findings, just to point and tell people to go... and they went.

It was a grand time of adventure and exploration, with the Hollow World and the Felldeep able to take any level of involvement the surface world could come up with, basically two entire worlds to be involved in... and that was without Hyperborea. Yay! Go help save the world! There’s more to be saved all the time...