Pyramids All The Way Down

     "Yes, thank you, Torri." An Acara wrapped in mummy rags appeared on the screen, the domes of the grand palace glimmering like moons in the eternal night. At 8am, a strange wind blew through Qasala, spreading the curse that had infected the desert city more than a decade ago. The palace issued a press release declaring that King Razul had returned, and that he was going to, quote, 'fix' the trajectory Qasala has been going through."

     "And what is that trajectory?"

     "As we all know, the kingdom has had significant trouble integrating into the global economy. With much of its exports being made obsolete, and a workforce that lacks knowledge of many modern discoveries, it has been a hectic time for Qasala. Unemployment is at 20%..."

     So the news report went on. Theodaxx listened passively, without much interest; if all Razul wanted to do was help his people, he couldn't really fault him for it. His plan included silly things like a mandatory dress code and a ban on some foreign foods--the Alien Aishas already could not sell their cuisine there--but also things like a more robust public education system, which had been particularly difficult to fund due to threats from some "job-creators" to pull out.

     The new co-king had an elegant and efficient way of getting them to stay: he would simply skip all the negotiating one would normally have to do and take control of their minds.

     "--yes, and one more thing, Torri. As he left the podium, he left his microphone on. It looks like he didn't know how to shut it off. He said something, off the cuff, that was very interesting. Something about needing to protect Neopia from a scourge of a brutal people with technology far beyond our comprehension--"

     "Do you have any idea who or what he might have been referring to?"

     "I'm not quite sure..."

     Theodaxx was not exactly sure either. It wasn't like Neopia had regular contact with extraterrestrials; Mira sometimes came here to clean things up from a scientist that had made the planet his pet project. Dr. Moth? Dr. Lots? Dr. Solh? Whatever. He also knew that Grundos weren't from here. The only other aliens were his own kind.

     Oh.

     That wasn't very good.

     To be clear, these Neopians should have feared the Alien Aishas; they were not a galaxy-spanning empire for no reason, even though the "empire" bit had been retired quite a while ago. The gadgets he had in his back pocket wouldn't be invented for another couple of millennia. If the planet even made it that long--which they could, with good relationship vis-a-vis the empire.

     He remembered what he had learned in his post-post-post-post-post-colonial theory module. The empire had abstained from meddling in local affairs, but it could come to the aid of a planet when, say, some other intra-galactic empire showed up. Solving local problems was also above his pay grade; for one, there was nothing to say that these "problems" were actually problems at all. Certainly his cultural assumptions would blind him, not to mention the materialistic incentives--

     --Ugh, he was going to sleep already. The point was, maybe being threatened by the ghost of an evil emperor was a good thing. Sure, Razul taking the reins would mean the end of relations with Neopia, but who knew? This could be an interesting turning point in their history.

     "For a more international view on this crisis, the top Faerieland Correspondent, coming right now."

     "Hello, Torri." A spectacled Ixi appeared on-screen. The various pink and lavendar structures of Faerieland towered behind him. Most of them had pyramid-shaped roofs, and some were cone-shaped, but what was a cone except a pyramid with a circular base?

     "The Faerie Queen has issued a statement regarding the recent regime change," he continued. "To quote, 'Razul was a very brutal and callous ruler. Faerieland does not accept his so-called "co-kingship" as legitimate, and will rescind all diplomats and Faerieland personnel from there immediately.'"

     "That's interesting. Are the faeries going to stay neutral in this conflict?"

     "We can't expect them to intervene directly. However, Faerieland has a long history of discreet, indirect support in conflicts. The strategy employed by the leadership now seems to be taking Razul's stated reasons for taking power seriously. Fyora the Faerie Queen typically tries to avoid accusations of partiality..."

     There you have it, thought Theodaxx. The wise Faerie Queen would do nothing, so that was the right thing to do. Of course, she didn't bring Razul straight to Qasala's front door. But anybody could have done that; it was only a matter of time.

     But then, couldn't you expect whoever did this to at least try to make things right? What if that person had finally gotten adjusted to the comforts he was used to at home, didn't really know magic or anybody on this planet anyways, and did not want to see another blasted pyramid ever again? Could he really be expected to reverse all this?

     Probably not, thought Theodaxx, sinking into the comfort of the chair cushion. However, it was really quite pathetic to harbor so much resentment against a shape while he was hiding in one.

     He finished up his work and went to take a walk outside. The pyramids were still there, but he would scamper between them until he could stride without fear. In the distance, over Qasala, murky violets blocked the sun's rays, which couldn't have been very good for the plant life.

     Just as there were bright desert flowers here that did not need water, there might have been bottom-of-the-food-chain substitutes that did not need sunlight. Magical lifeforms could theoretically extract the energy from decaying the silicon that so readily filled the landscape, like those octocti on Goringnak V.

     Anyways, where Theodaxx was, the sunlight bounced off this silicon directly into his squinted eyes. He was neither scurrying nor striding through the tombs; instead, he was almost crawling, using his own shadow to defend his vision, which was very clearly under attack. The local spirits wondered if it took modern people significantly more time to learn walking.

     "Young man," offered a sweet voice, "would you like some assistance?"

     "He probably can't even speak yet," another replied.

     "Oh, don't say that! I bet he can call his mama. Where is your mama, young man?"

     The Alien Aisha held back tears in his eyes. "I can speak, spirits!" he projected his voice in an effort to sound more official and kicked some sand in their direction. "Go and lament upon your lives and legacy! Go!"

     He walked until he had decided to lean against a pyramid. Stupid pyramids, lurking in the crystalline structure of the sand.

     Another voice, that of the Queen of Dunes, then addressed him: "You seem to be having quite some trouble."

     "It's just the sun."

     "I recall your people had some sort of eyewear to shield their eyes."

     "Hmpf."

     "You seem troubled."

     "I am not."

     "Is that so? Am I to believe that your ancestors conquered worlds inhospitable, moved suns and stars, and here you are, crawling in the sand because it's too bright outside?

     "Well, that's not the only reason..." mumbled Theodaxx. "I just caused an international incident."

     Theodaxx explained all that had transpired since he last met her--making a bargain with Razul, taking him to Qasala, being agahst at all the pyramids there, sneaking him into the royal family, returning to this accursed field of pyramids, finding out that the former king had unilaterally taken over...

     "He did strike me as a rather ambitious sort," the Queen of Dunes said. "The young ones often are. They are not yet convinced that the living world has moved on."

     "I guess I can't blame him that much," replied Theodaxx. "I'd be furious, too, if I found my descendants running my kingdom into the ground."

     "Don't you know it!" yelled a spirit from afar, so distant that their voice came from the horizon.

     "It is indeed a common enough misfortune. I will not say that I have not tried to haunt those who ruled after me. But you cannot maintain a grasp on things forever. He will learn this, in time."

     "'In time?' How long is that, a thousand years?"

     "Sometimes, it takes longer."

     "I don't think Qasala can take a thousand years."

     "Are you concerned?"

     "Look--it's not that I'm concerned. I'm sure you Neopians can work it out. Razul was killed before, wasn't he? Someone can do it again. He's not even the strongest magician here." Maybe this would finally push them to form some sort of planetary government, instead of living in what Theodaxx could only imagine as sparse tribes in the middle of nowhere.

     "That might be more difficult, if he can obtain legions of mind-controlled soldiers. Does it not bother you that he seems to dislike your kind?"

     "Not everyone has to like us."

     "Aren't you supposed to be a diplomat?"

     "Yes, but I support the self-sufficiency and the independence of planets." Anybody sane would change their minds about the Alien Aisha Empire, eventually, and if not, Neopia would never be a real threat. Real threats to the empire were dealt with swiftly, with the planetary death ray.

     "The independence of mind-controlled masses?"

     There was always a non-zero chance that someone could reverse-engineer even a sliver of their technology. Razul would not stop at the planet, once he realized that it would be rather difficult for Neopia to integrate into the galactic economy by itself, given its inopportune location and populace. Maybe he would even become a threat.

     He also did not speak for all of Neopia. He couldn't. Everyone was free to mess up their own planet, but...

     "I have to do something," he declared. "Intraplanetary relations here take place at a glorblob's pace." Slow enough for Razul to make a stupid mistake.

     There was still the problem ofwhat, if anything, he could do. Razul's spirit was tied to the individual molecules that made up his pyramid, and who knew where every single one of those were? His disintegrator did have the option to completely destroy atoms--but that had an explosive side effect.

     Reasonable argument could have been another avenue, except that Razul wouldn't be convinced by an Alien Aisha. Theodaxx also didn't really know much about interfering with his magic. The Sway probably knew how to do so, except that he had kicked out those dullards and told them to go away permanently.

     Sending a mail to potential contacts in Faerieland was also out of the question. He could not really explain the situation without it sounding like a threat from the Alien Aisha Empire, and going to his higher-ups would run into a similar problem.

     Theodaxx thought for about thirty minutes. Finally, he decided that he didn't really have any sort of solution at all. Neither did the Queen of Dunes, gently reminded him that he was constantly circling back to the same three ideas.

     "I would like to say something," she said. "But first, what do you know about the history of your people?"

     "Everything we learn up until quintenary school." He did not really enjoy history, as a subject. So many millions had studied it in the past, and yet it kept repeating itself, so really, why bother learning about it more deeply? "But I wasn't a particularly good student."

     "Somehow, this does not come as a surprise." Theodaxx shrugged, and then she continued: "When I still breathed, you were expanding across the stars with brutal efficiency. The moment one of you found a new frontier, others swarmed, as though you all shared the same mind. So spoke Reinaliyah."

     The Reinaliyah? You met them?"

     "Yes."

     Magic used to be commonly practiced among the Alien Aishas; the Old Emperors directed the masses with it, but Reinaliyah, a great mage and the first empress of the Second Age, hijacked their spell to grant all her people of immunity to all magic, forever. This, of course, made the empire much less efficient--but very few wanted to return to the way things were before.

     To this day, nobody had the foggiest idea how she managed to achieve this, but the Queen of Dunes presented a theory:

     "It is something to do with those triangles on your foreheads," she told him. "Reinaliyah was the first to introduce us to the significance of this shape. The wide base, she said, represents the four corners of space, and the sides converge onto a single point. In this way it focuses magical energy, and it also focuses the spirit, anchoring us longer upon this world."

     Theodaxx was completely silent. To an outside observer, it may have looked like he was in deep thought, and the Queen of Dunes probably assumed he was pondering something meaningful. Indeed, his thoughts were meaningful... to him. These pyramids--these structures that polluted this planet--they were inspired by the greatest Aisha who had ever lived!

     For the first time in his life, he felt the sting of betrayal in his stomach, then in his chest. Alien Aishas had guts made of not iron, exactly, maybe platinum. Whatever happened, he would force the bolus back inside his body. It was undignified enough to crawl on all fours. No need to make a mess in the sand.

     "I... you're saying... the pyramids..."

     "Yes? The pyramids?"

     "The pyramids... the pyramids... the pyramids..."

     He repeated this at least a dozen times before he had a coherent thought, which was and my eyes still hurt, too. The next few discharges his brain spat out were similarly unimpressive. He remembered a time in primary school when that jerk Dirian tripped him, and he spent who-knows-how-long on the ground while his face became purple. Dirian would then follow him around calling him prabgle-face.

     And after all that, she still got the last laugh. She obtained a title like Chief Executive Director General of Sub-Innovative Synergy Affairs in her parents' company. Figures.

     "Theodaxx?"

     "Yes, that's me." Theodaxx, official emissary of the Alien Aisha Empire to Neopia, whose time there hopefully wouldn't end in disaster. Surely he had to be smart enough to figure it out.

     "Pyramids..." he muttered again, and this time he followed it up: "You say they take something diffuse and focus it. So a diffuse spirit could be concentrated, right?"

     "I do believe I told you that."

     "Razul is pretty scattered around, isn't he?"

     "No," corrected the Queen of Dunes. Most of Razul's spirit was still focused in his pyramid; in order for him to be as dilute as a normal departed spirit, it would have to be destroyed. But then, any other uninhabited pyramid could house him.

     And, as Theodaxx was very much aware, Neopia was chock-full of pyramids. Razul could probably just move into the one at the top of the palace's main dome. You'd need an innumerable amount of spirits to overwhelm Qasala's pyramid capacity, but--

     "--Absolutely not," objected the spirit right in front of him. "Most of us had pyramids built in the hottest, dryest, most inaccessible place in the Obscured Deserts for a reason. For one, ghosthunters won't bother us."

     "Perhaps, but not everyone got a pyramid, did they?" said Theodaxx. "I'd wager most of the anciently-departed spirits who are still attached to the mortal world don't have them.

     "You do realize that without a pyramid, this only happens when a spirit has some unfinished business keeping them here."

     "Yeah," said Theodaxx, "that makes sense, if you died, what, a hundred, two hundred years ago? Any longer than that, and it's almost impossible to really finish any of that business up. What happens then?"

     "I suppose they just wander about."

     "And that's not what they want, right? All I have to do is gather them up, just like this"--he inclined his arms to mime a funnel--"blast them into Qasala, and destroy Razul's original pyramid. They just need some convincing."

     The problem had been successfully reduced to a question of simply advertising a product. Sure, that product was not his to sell, and it wouldn't really turn in a profit, but that had never stopped him before. There wasn't anybody in this galaxy who was a better marketer than Theodaxx.

     To be continued…