Paradise is Other People

[LoreleiFlowers]

Long ago, I went to a youth group to study our holy text. One thing that had been bothering me was the fast-and-loose way the cleric would incorporate holy verses in his sermons, so I decided to craft a fallacious but nice-sounding sermon for the cleric during our study session. Instead of the obvious flaws in my textual argument being pointed out, the cleric applauded my sermon as profound and told me to share it with others.

Ever since then, I realized that I was cognitively set apart from all the people around me. They might have thought I was one of them, but I saw them from outside of their limited perception of reality. These people had banished memory and critique. In their place were only sentiment and 'official' sources.

I could keep playing along with the theater of thought. When an angler would chat with me as I weighed their catch, a spur-of-the-moment absurd argument would leap from my lips and lead them convincingly toward an unexpected conclusion. People would come to me only to hear me speak as my words were poignant and powerful despite my deliberate use of sophistry to entertain.

My listeners would call me wise. I politely dismissed such compliments. No one was better than me — just at different parts of their journeys. The listener just had to learn a bit of critical thinking, especially in picking up on deceptive acts. Still, they demonstrated I had a magical gift, and so I became known as the lorelei of the village — a siren whose voice gathered crowds.

For years, my playful argumentation and winding lessons followed whatever fits my fancy. I remember being truly happy even though I knew something was wrong with this world, which was so full of what should be easily curable foolishness. Why were people not mastering their thoughts or history? Don't professional teachers know that without such masteries, their minds will become easily entrapped in a house of mirrors and illusions?

How foolish I was back then.

"The councils have selected the new king of the Seven Oceans — Duke Linden," my scrying mirror declared. Its hand was warm in my hand as I had held it for so long. "The selection is a shock to many, especially the loreleis who Linden has demonized with claims that they lead young men astray and crash their ships among the rocks."

It was utter nonsense. I never used my gift to crash any sailors upon the rocky shore. I didn't even like men.

I didn't know how to feel.

A friend of a friend messaged me to pack my bags and remember that I shouldn't take things for granted. Her words felt insensitive. How was I taking anything for granted?

I looked around the lake, which was the home of sirens like me. Countless people with broken hearts poured their attention and tears upon their scrying mirrors. Some searched for why a monster like Linden would get selected by our councils. Others wondered how to escape the Seven Oceans for safer waters outside the reach of the vengeful and cruel King who hated sirens like us, but was there a land where the ocean did not touch and protected from the rains? Would a siren even want to live in such a place?

Most sirens could not manage such a trip due to the cost and just the logistics of leaving our lake system this far inland. We had legs, of course, but being on dry land would keep us separated from our food sources and natural habitat. Switching would be uncomfortable and filled with countless unknowns. We only had a little experience outside of the Land of Thousand Lakes, which was a district of the Seven Oceans.

While almost all sirens spend all their time with their scry mirrors for entertainment or information, a handful sought answers about what they could do. So many memories and stories they would hear, but oddly, not a single bit of actionable advice.

"Organize," many of the scry crystals cried, but none of us knew how to do that. Few of us had strong friendships with our neighbors. The lakes kept us in our own little circles, and even then, we didn't talk with each other much because so much of our time was spent working, sleeping, and scrying. We didn't have any time in our schedule to organize. If we did organize, how would we afford food and rent? The lakes were not cheap, and many of them didn't have any fish anymore. We had to import our fish from the sea. How does one fight back when doing so would bring the deprivations of starvation and homelessness, not to mention violence, imprisonment, and execution?

This wasn't a fantasy land filled with humans and internet celebrities. We lived in the magical world like everyone else.

While most continued to scry fruitlessly for solutions, I took a walk on the water with one of the merfolk on the weekend while I was still processing. One of the others walking with me noticed I had a smile on my face.

Commission of Ichika (our protagonist) from Naze​

"Ichika, how do you handle knowing all the things you do and still function?" she inquired of me.

"By grounding my vision of a better future in reality, in which I do my part," I replied with a determined voice. It was a bit of a canned response, like a slogan, but I meant it. "Our situation may seem overwhelming. How does one person stop a king with armies if they come for us? The answer is one doesn't. When we move from thinking about resistance from the point of view of what we can do individually, we find ourselves paralyzed with the magnitude. You start dividing that burden among many people in accordance with what each of them can do, and you will find your share of the burden manageable, though your contribution no less heroic."

As for my name, 'Ichika' used the character for 'One' and the character for 'contemplate; sea'. My mother said it was because I would often be seen alone by the shore, where I seemed just to be thinking or singing to myself. Being alone in moderation was good for me, but these days, I needed to spend more time with others, not less.

The woman didn't seem to like my answer. I think she wanted something passive—a kind of 'how can I feel better' answer. While my past self may have peddled in distractions and illusions, this crisis required me to set aside the art of sophistry and pick up the duty of pedagogy. The best answer I could give her was to do something and be with others. The source of her question's resolution was in solving the problem — not in ignoring it or in drowning herself out through endless distractions. Pacing oneself was fine, but one still had to have something between those pacings.

Another person who had joined us on the water walk asked me how I knew so much about these subjects. The answer was simple — I looked for the knowledge I wanted to have. In my case, I wanted an honest history that cut through the countless illusions the Kings and Queens of the Empire had told us. Some in the walk had balked at me calling our country an Empire, but an honest history told me and those who studied it otherwise.

A week before the council selected Duke Linden, my aunt and uncle had taken me to the Clam Opera House. Such performances were generally beyond my means, but for their generation, my elders could afford such luxuries. We had gone to the restaurant after the show, where I was a dysfunctional mess.

The reason was that I had realized how much of a fool I was. I had always assumed something was wrong with the Seven Oceans, but never really taken all the disparate knowledge I possessed and properly lined it up. What I discovered horrified me. People had always wondered why I didn't take pride in coming from the Sea since they accepted the illusory duty of adoration of one's home sea. My epiphany had taken cautious distancing to the urgent need to rectify or flee my country, leaving me in dire straights.

When my aunt and uncle talked about the necessity of supporting the continuation of Queen Meb's reign, I lashed out in my anguished lack of control. I condemned Queen Meb and the whole regent selection process. Lectures of our country's history blasted out of my mouth and obliterated all other topics. It was definitely not someone pleasant to be around — a problem.

"Ichika, it could be worse," my aunt told me. "It could be Duke Linden who takes the throne."

My aunt had desperately petitioned the persuadable councilors day and night, trying to get them to switch their vote for the current queen. My relative did not want to hear anything about what was wrong with Queen Meb. It was all about defeating Linden. Giving voice to history or critical thought had no place in my aunt's mental ecosystem because the consequence of Linden's ascendency was too dire for us sirens, especially for a lorelei like me.

Still, I had to respond.

"Look what you are doing, Auntie. If we keep selecting between a future that is worse or even worse, we will find ourselves at a dead end."

"Yes, but that is why we have to keep petitioning to change the system and get better nominations for regent," my uncle replied heavily.

"Look at how that has worked out," I retorted in a boiling rage. "The world has gotten far worse."

"What do you mean worse? When we were young children, those with the gift of the lorelei like you were considered cursed and ostracized. The world is much better for a lot of us."

"We should look at the bigger picture. Yes, people like me who can enchant our words can live more freely, but that requires you to miss all the others who have slipped into suffering. Fewer of our waterholes can sustain us due to overfishing and pollution from the alchemists who dump their reagents into the streams that feed into our waters. As the rents for our reefs increase and the fish further and further away from shore, my generation can feel extinction pressures. Almost all my friends have completely foregone having children because they don't know how they can support even one or how that child will survive as things become worse at a frightening pace."

"Even if that is the case, why would you not buy more time by backing Queen to our regional council, "

"I do not disagree, but I don't think she will win," I stated firmly and with an edge to my voice.

"Why?" my aunt wondered, fear entering her voice. Linden winning was her greatest fear.

"She has lost the faith of too many of the merfolk. Every day, she lies about what she does with our armies in the lands of our neighbors, and every day, our scry glasses now give us the truth of her hypocrisy from the point of view of her victims. If you dig back over the last century, it is the same thing over and over as our royals trick us into letting them kill innocent people in order to fill their coffers and the coffers of their friends with the fruits of plunder and conquest. Even if you make this argument that it would be worse under Linden, too many merfolk who would have backed Meb have either switched to Linden or are sitting the selection out."

"But you don't know that."

While I could have never known with certainty back then, I had enough information based on what I was hearing from too many of my generation that I could make a reasonable prediction. After so many similar conversations before the selection, I ended up more isolated than I had ever been before. So heavy was the knowledge and so broken my ability to speak to others that I just couldn't talk to my fellow sirens properly anymore.

Despite my family and friends' desperation for the alternative, Duke Linden did get selected. All those who backed Meb, like my aunt, found the illusions woven around the incumbent's bid to keep the throne unraveling and reality set down upon them with the weight of the ocean deep.

I took to recording my thoughts. It served as a way to process what I had come to understand and to share my insights with others. I had a talent for seeing past certain illusions (not all) and a way with words. We needed to respond to Duke Linden's transition to power urgently. I felt that my purpose would be to assist people in seeing through the dangerous illusions clouding their vision and colonizing their minds. By bringing these people back into reality, we could maybe do something to survive King Linden's reign before it was too late for people like me and many others.

My job was to sort shells by color and size at a calm counter station upstream a bit. Even though I should have been working on weekdays, I found myself just pulling out my magical mirror and doing more recordings. How was I supposed to work in a situation like this? It was like I learned I potentially had terminal cancer but still had to do a job that I hated. Shouldn't I enjoy the last moments of my life? Honestly, I didn't know if King Linden would actually eliminate people like me, but he said he planned to. I was partial to taking his word for it. Regardless, it was an intensely difficult time for me to focus on clam shells when the situation was like this.

I remember someone asking me why my family was panicking like King Linden's ascendency wasn't widespread news. It went to show how little people paid attention sometimes. These people were so far removed from reality that it was painful. For those who could empathize with my plight, I was flailing about trying to get a movement started that could stop King Linden before his armies could crush the lives of so many innocent people.

One night, after a long day of not working and just recording my thoughts, I felt entirely alone in this overcrowded and excessively expensive lake for what had to be the umpteenth time. Then, someone threw a rock into the water near my reef. This stirred me from my depressed laying about and drifted up the shore, where I saw a woman with crimson eyes and white hair — a homunculus from the Fire Kingdoms.

"Why are you here, traveler? I have no place for you to sit in my home beneath the water and nothing for you to eat. If you lost something in the water, I would be happy to fetch it for you."

The homunculus pulled out a magical scroll and wrote on it with her index finger. Her alchemical abilities allowed her to transmute some ink along the path her appendage took across the page. Upon finishing her writing, the woman of Fire turned the parchment back to me so that I could read it.

"Oh great, siren of the Thousand Lakes, I have sought you for you know of truth, and I wish to assist you in spreading that truth by being your warrior."

She was just one person, warrior or not, but with me, that made two. The homunculus looked so surprised by my expression of pure euphoria that someone in the world cared enough to join up with me. Meeting her became the spark I needed not only to improve myself getting out of my passive-aggressive slump but, far more importantly, to start a movement.

But before I got ahead of myself, there was something I had to do.

"What is your name, comrade?"

"Anya," she wrote with flourish and pride. She had a name that meant resurrection. Fitting for supposedly unkillable homunculi.

 

[LoreleiFlowers]

While I was excited just to have someone I could finally talk to in person, Anya had other plans.

"So what is the plan?" she wrote upon her magical scroll with fiery determination.

"The plan?"

"The plan to overthrow the soon-to-be King Linden and free this world from the Seven Oceans tyranny."

This proclamation had cut me off guard, and suddenly, I felt really embarrassed.

"Don't tell me you don't have a plan," she followed up with a suspicious edge to her calligraphy.

"No, I totally have a plan," I replied in haste. My mind just needed to sort mostly disorganized ramblings into something actionable and coherent. "But why don't we get to know each other? I will start. My real name is Ichika, and I am a siren with the blessing of the lorelei, as I said in my glimpses in the mirror world. I work as a clam counter at the Shell Importium upstream to the east."

"Question: I know what Duke Linden says loreleis are monsters who trick people into their untimely deaths, but I have never met one before you. What exactly is a lorelei?"

"Good question," I replied while adjusting the furniture of my thoughts for her previous inquiry. "Loreleis are sirens whose voices can amplify, adjust pitch, and create harmonies magically."

As I put a bit of magical energy in my throat, I projected my voice behind Anya and made it sound like three men chatting.

"Why, how goes it, Missy?" said the projection in a gruff masculine tone of a stereotypical minotaur wrangler from the frontier days.

Anya jumped in surprise.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

Looking at her shocked expression, I suddenly felt awful about my prank. Despite being a lorelei, I wasn't very good at socializing, especially after all the time I spent alone.

"What else can you do with your voice?" the homunculus inquired after picking up the scroll she had dropped in her moment of fright. She definitely recovered fast. It was good she wasn't so easily deterred from the path ahead, which would be filled with struggle and peril.

"Perhaps I can show you some tricks later. Right now, I would like to know more about you."

"My name is Anya, and I am an alchemist and homunculus. I come from the Fire Kingdom of Raj. Queen Meb destroyed my homeland several decades ago with a giant wave that flattened our cities and carried our treasures down into the watery depths of your homeland. Now, I search for any who have a reasonable plan to defeat your monarchy."

"You do not seek vengeance against the merfolk like me? It was my country which harmed you and your people so."

"I would be lying if I said I did not once wish a similar fate to befall your homeland, but after having seen your glimpses with my scrying mirror, I realize that the merfolk are also victims of the Seven Oceans' monarchy. We have a common enemy in King Linden, who will be far worse not only to the Fire Kingdoms but to his own subjects. As you said in your most recent glimpse, the monarchy, which has plundered the whole world in its imperial ambitions, now sees riches within its borders and will visit upon the merfolk all the same deprivations as it does everyone else."

It was as she said. Linden planned many policies that would transform my home sea into a land of peasants, fulling at the mercy of the greed of the aristocrats. For starters, he planned on dismantling our schools for the commoners. These schools had once made my people into a productive workforce during our Industrial Revolution, but that same industrial might made conquering the world easy. Our monarchy turned the rest of the world into sweatshops and client states. With all this cheap workforce on land, we de-industrialized, and our education shifted towards funneling commoners like me into the service sector. Now that the merchants and nobility have nowhere else to extract value, they have turned towards conquering their own country through the power of the throne as the final frontier of their empire.

Child labor was common in our conquered territories, and the practice, once outlawed, had already returned to Duke Linden's domain. As king, Linden's plan to dismantle the commoners' schools would push the poorest of the poor into child labor, and the rest would have to shell out just to get into the highly segregated system of merchant-run academies that would indoctrinate children way more than it would actually educate them. The merchants would definitely celebrate, for not only would teacher unions collapse without the commoner schools, but they would have no more competition with the state-run system, meaning they could charge far higher rates. Everyone would have to go to them.

More urgently for adult merfolk like me, Linden announced the removal of all regulatory dams that protect us from the worst excesses of the merchants. The lampreyic sealords sought to own every cubic meter of the sea in order to exact rents from the merfolks who had to live somewhere and would be punished for not paying for the right to exist. Then, there were the loan sharks who found ways to make as many people into their debtors. Already, most of my generation found themselves in crippling amounts of debt, which we were promised would be worth it in order to get a job that would shell out enough to cover it. Lampreys and sharks had free reign in the countries the Seven Oceans had conquered. While Queen Meb had ushered them into our land, the soon-to-be King Linden would let them go completely frog wild upon the merfolk.

Interrupting my thoughts as I lay half in the water, Anya's scroll passed by my line of sight.

"So we introduced ourselves, so what was the plan?" it said.

"Yes, the plan," I replied with a cough. Hopefully, my mind had something coherent to say. "The plan had five main phases. The first phase is to connect with your closest, most committed allies."

"Like our friends and family?"

"Yes."

"Do you have any friends and family?" my interlocutor inquired with a raised eyebrow.

Not after my abhorrent behavior a few weeks ago when I was a passive-aggressive, one-track-mind know-it-all.

"No," I answered without going into detail. "Do you?"

"No," she replied, equally not going into detail.

I had a feeling that pressing her on the topic would touch on some unpleasant memories, so I kept the ball rolling.

"Well, we can be each other's friend."

This earned a beaming smile from the crimson-eyed Anya.

"The next step is becoming humble. We have to accept that we individually have insufficient power and knowledge to change the world into one we want to live in. That is why we must draw upon many if we want to achieve our vision."

The other woman nodded along, writing this down for later in permanent ink.

"Step three is to develop an actionable vision grounded in reality and informed by history and practice that we can articulate to others," I continued before using my lorelei magic to make sure only Anya could hear what I was saying. "It is not enough to be against King Linden and the monarchy. One has to be able to bring about something better."

More nods.

"Step four: Prove the efficacy of your praxis on a small scale so that you can acquire sufficient support to organize your movement full-time. Soldiers cannot swim on empty stomachs, and neither can revolutionaries.

"This brings us to Step 5: Make a base of operations. Ideally, you want your core team to be self-sufficient. The movement should be a base where all your basic needs are met, like your daily fish and a cozy seabed." I paused for a moment, looking at the land-based person on the shore. "Well, obviously, to each according to their needs."

Anya covered her mouth like she was laughing, even though I couldn't hear it. I assumed she was completely mute but didn't ask.

"Step Six: Reclaim the megaconch. The nobles and merchants now control the conch shells, projecting their propaganda across the sea. If we only listen to them, we will be lulled into accepting the fate they give us. That is why we have to reclaim the seawaves and spread our message from shore to shining shore. Think of it as a massive re-education campaign to fix the damage that all that propaganda has done to our ability to understand the world around us."

"Step Seven: Prepare for Violence because the merchants and nobles do not take kindly to those who threaten their power and control. Like I said earlier, it is important to be humble. I don't know the first thing about fighting or defending myself. I am deathly afraid of violence. What about you?"

In order to answer my question, Anya stood up and suddenly conjured two alchemy pistols from the tattoos that lined her body.

Anya the Homunculus - Commissioned from Naze​

I didn't know much about alchemy or the firearms from the Fire Kingdoms. All I did know was that they didn't work underwater.

More importantly, I was taken aback, first, by how scary it was to see a gun up close. Those things were supposedly very deadly on land. Then, I took in how cool she looked and blushed.

Focus, Ichika, you have only just met, and you shouldn't be falling for the first girl who is nice to you and listens to you yammer away.

"Okay, I will be relying on you then for combat training and expertise," I commented with a squeak in my voice. I took a deep breath to calm myself down before continuing with the 'Plan (still a work in progress)'. "The final step is to transform society. In some places, you might do it through the official channels, but in the Seven Oceans, all of those channels are dammed up for commoners. Only the merchants and nobles can actually get around them to effect change. That is why we must transfer the legitimate authority of the world over to our organization, which will make a democracy where all can participate, no one will have control over the means of their survival used as a tool to coerce them into exploitive labor, and we can live in peaceful coexistence. Any questions?"

Anya quickly wrote something.

"Yes, I thought you said this would be five phases."

"Ughhhh, I thought of a few more while I was talking."

I proceeded to go through all the things she wanted to know, and then I heard a strange sound emanate from the landlubber's stomach.

"Do you have anything to eat or even a place to stay?" I asked with worry.

The white-haired gunslinger shook her head.

We might have to secure food and shelter a bit earlier than planned.