Swarming Sovereignty
Chapter 172: Impromptu Interview

Lia had been quite surprised when the Goddess of Hearth had told her about Faelyn. The talk she had wanted to have with her, Amelia, Rose, and Izumi had been a short one; Heather had essentially said that she wanted to bring what they had done with Brom and Liam way back when to a wider scale. This Faelyn person was someone who was coming to be willingly converted, and he would be “streaming” his point of view to most of the rest of the planes.

Lia hadn’t been quite sure what streaming was, but from what she understood, it was basically like the videos they had broadcast to people, but…instead of something recorded and played back, it was “live”, what was happening being broadcast in real time to other people. The benefit seemed to be mostly that the viewers could interact with the “streamer”, and it was apparently a popular form of entertainment on other planes.

There had been other stipulations too, something about this not being Faelyn’s real body and that Heather would be ensuring the conditioning didn’t carry over when Faelyn went back to his real body, but Heather had assured that he wouldn’t be able to leak sensitive information, and his streams would be confined to things that weren’t related to the military in any way. No new information that would be important to a war would be given out, only stuff people already knew.

And, after Heather had assured her that Jerry had been the one to make the rules regarding this, Lia had been convinced that there wasn’t a real downside to her. Or, at the very least, that the downsides would be worth the upsides; it seemed that people knowing they would be treated well had worked wonders for reducing enemy morale and inducing surrenders, so this was just another avenue for that.

Rose and Amelia had pushed Lia to take the rest of the day off, so she had just chosen to just spend time properly catching up with Amelia, Rose, and Connie until Faelyn was brought to them. Her first impressions were…normal, for lack of a better word. He had been taken aback by Amelia’s intensity, like most normal people would be, and he didn’t seem overly arrogant or anything, so she was tentatively hopeful about him.

He followed the trio back into their home, where Connie was waiting. “This is Connie, the fourth in our little polycule.” Lia said. “She’s an otherworlder like you and Izumi, and how she got involved with us is a story for another day, but she’ll be serving to help bridge any culture gaps between us, like what exactly streaming is.”

“Oh, good, I was going to have Izumi help me with that and forgot.” Faelyn replied. “Pleasure to meet you, uh…Your Grace?”

“Connie is fine.” Connie laughed.

“And you’re fine using our names, too, at least for now.” Lia added. “Being called Queen by people who aren’t part of the swarm or who I’m friends with feels…weird, and I don’t like it.”

“Thank you.” Faelyn said. “I should also mention that I am taking a video right now. Sorry I didn’t mention it earlier, I sort of forgot. I’ll be editing out anything you don’t want in there and I’ll show you the final product before I post it, but if you don’t want any of this conversation recorded, let me know and I’ll stop.”

“We figured you would be.” Lia said. “So don’t worry about it. Before we begin talking about your conversion, though, I’d just like to ask what you think of this all. The swarm, streaming us to other people, that sort of a thing.”

“Well…” Faelyn said slowly, “I’m still deciding. I chose to accept the Goddess of Hearth’s offer because I’m all about exploring and trying new things; if I decide that I like my life as part of the swarm, and I think it’s good for society, then I’ll probably wholeheartedly support you all, both when I’m under the swarm’s conditioning and not. If not…well, I’ll still be doing a service by exposing things to people, and I’ll advocate against you.

“If that makes you uncomfortable, then I’d advise not converting me and just killing this body. It won’t damage me in the long term, and I think it would just be in bad taste to be abusing a Goddess’s status to dupe you.”

“Some goddesses wouldn’t agree with you.” Connie snorted. “They’d be all for abusing their status to dupe us.”

Faelyn gave her a shocked look. “You shouldn’t slander the gods like that.” He said automatically. When he realized what he’d done he quickly closed his mouth, but opened it again when Lia prompted him to continue. “Sorry, force of habit, it’s a rule in my chat. Uh, I was just gonna say that my understanding is that the swarm’s position is somewhat tenuous amongst the gods, it could get you in trouble.”

“I only say that because it’s already happened.” Connie replied. “The Goddess of Law tried it, and as per the rules of the gods, she was punished for doing so. You’re probably wondering why she was when others weren’t with the whole Goddess of Hearth situation, but she’s the goddess of law, her lying is a bigger deal than other gods lying. And, yes, we have a general overview of the situation; we talk with the gods on a pretty regular basis.”

“Oh.” Faelyn said.

“Back to what you were saying, we’re fine with that.” Lia said. “We’re confident that you’ll see the benefits of the swarm. In our mind the tradeoff is such; are the the changes to your morals and loyalty worth the benefits you get from becoming part of the swarm?”

“Would you mind elaborating on what those are?” Faelyn asked. “Both the changes to morals and the benefits, that is; I think everyone could guess what the loyalty changes are.”

“In my eyes, the most egregious change is the inability to see forced conversion as morally reprehensible.” Lia said. “It just feels natural, like how a predator doesn’t feel bad about hunting and eating prey. Likewise, you’re made to feel like having me at the top is part of the natural order and not something that can or should be changed.

“For most people, that sort of…I guess reverence is the right word, but their feelings towards me don’t impact their daily lives at all, just like how it doesn’t really matter who your ruler is so long as they’re not a tyrant. Other than that, I like to think that the changes to people’s morals are all positive; they pretty neatly end most if not all discrimination within the swarm.

“Your social status, species, nationality…not gender, since there’s only one of those in the swarm, but any arbitrary subdivision of people on a societal level is pretty much erased. Everyone else is a member of the swarm, and that’s all that matters. If you held discriminatory views against people, you’d probably still hold those views against people who aren’t part of the swarm, but, at the end of the day, that will end up not being important since either everyone will be part of the swarm, or no one will.”

“It just wipes those out?” Faelyn asked, raising an eyebrow. “That seems…hard to do.”

“Well, I tried hard to make it happen.” Amelia replied. “If there was strife within the swarm, that would negatively affect Lia, and I didn’t want that. So, yes, those will all be gone, and war will be, too. Everyone will be able to live relatively peacefully, we’ll mostly only need to worry about monster and natural disasters.”

“I see.” Faelyn said. “Please, continue.”

“Right. Um…off of the top of my head, that’s basically it for the changes to your morals. You lose what loyalty you had to your old nation, but, like you said, most people probably don’t need to be told that. Or, I guess, not lose, but more…you’d prefer to see them as part of the swarm? You’re not suddenly going to hate them or anything. Oh, and it makes you like your new body, which I guess is kind of a loyalty change? More of a change to keep people from freaking out than anything, though.

“Uh, anyway, the benefits. The main one is our aim to make it so no one has to work if they don’t want to. We want to offload stuff like farming and construction to monsters, so people can focus on things they actively want to be doing instead of things they have to do. If we find that not enough people are working then we’ll have to go back to the drawing board, but as things stand, we’re confident that that won’t be an issue.

“Then there’s the fact that, at least under the system we’re familiar with, you’re given a lot more freedom with the swarm’s system. You can grow in ways you never thought would be possible before, you can pick Skills instead of them being forced on you, even changing your race is relatively simple.

“You won’t need to be as worried about monsters, since even noncombatants have a chance against most monsters due to how cocooning things works, and most villages have a bunch of monsters augmenting their town watch. That and the increasing ease with which you can build stuff like walls makes most people feel much safer.

“That and I’ll be doing away with nobility, trying to enact policies that make sure everyone is governed fairly, make a serious attempt to end world hunger…I don’t know how serious those problems are on your plane, but they’ve been a constant on ours. And, yes, I do think ending world hunger is reasonable; Rose has been experimenting with plants in an effort to make them healthier and give better yields, and it’s working pretty well. And our organization is much better than most governments, and corruption is near non-existent, my displeasure is enough to keep most people from thinking about it. But, uh, yeah, I think that’s basically it?”

“A noble goal.” Faelyn agreed. “If you can follow through with those promises, then I think we’ll be fine. I have no more questions, how is this conversion process going to work?”

“Okay, first things first, the Goddess of Hearth said she had already told you this but I just want to make it clear; if you decide you like this body, the one that’s part of the swarm, better, when the swarm reaches your plane, you’ll be given the option to make it your real body. Or…is it that your real body will be transformed into this one? I don’t know the specifics of what’s going on with you and your bodies, but the point is that you don’t need to worry about wasting effort, you can keep everything permanently.

“So…with that in mind, what would you like to be? What kind of things do you want to be good at, what species do you want to be, basically anything you want changed can be. Uh, as long as you don’t want to be a man. The women only thing is baked into the swarm, sorry.”

Faelyn thought on that for a moment. “I really like exploration, and I make heavy use of gravity magic in that. So, if I could get bonuses to it, that would be nice. I’d also really appreciate boosts to communication magic, since I make my living off of it and I sometimes need to use it manually to if my equipment fails me. Other than that, standard scout-y stuff; detection magic, speed, precision…I prefer bows as a weapon, but that’s it. As for species…well, if I’m going to like whatever it is, then I don’t really care, I guess?”

“Easy enough to handle.” Lia said. “Anything else before we cocoon you and get to work?”

“Izumi mentioned a highly-compacted sphere that was made as a result of your gravity magic when fighting the Lord of Monsters, can I see it?”

“It might be wise to use in his conversion, too.” Connie suggested. “It’s going to have extreme gravity-related properties. I think you were planning on using it with the Scourge of the Skies, but to be honest, I’m not sure how much that’s going to help it at this point. Plus, the stronger he becomes, the more people will probably watch his streams, and people are liable to agree with streamers they like.”

“A fair point.” Rose said. “And the Goddess of Hearth did say that if he didn’t want to make this body his ‘real’ one that it’d become a monster, so it’s not like we lose much for trying it. What do you think, Lia?”

“Yeah, why not?” She said, taking the cocoon out of her storage and placing it on the floor before undoing the cocoon entirely. “This is it.” She said. “Not much to look at, but there’s a lot in here. Even Rose has trouble picking it up without magical aid, and she’s incredibly strong.”

Faelyn looked at it for a while, then gave a nod. “Alright, I’m ready, then. Let’s do it.”

Lia walked over to him, placing a hand on his forehead and beginning to secrete modeling wax. “This might feel a little odd, but once you’re halfway covered, you’ll go unconscious and when you wake up, you’ll be converted.”

Faelyn gave her a thumbs-up, and, once he was safely cocooned, Lia cocooned the sphere and put it into the cocoon with him. After some deliberation, they added the griffin Ira had raised, too; like Connie had said, the stronger he was the better, and the capability to fly would serve him well. For the rest of the additions, Lia had Amelia help get any gear or random objects she needed, as well as helping her with suggestions alongside Rose and Connie. And, when Lia began to look over his options, she needed Connie to “translate” some of them, too.

It seemed that streaming was a very big deal to him, given just how many of his options dealt with it, and Lia needed Connie to help figure out what each specific thing would do. In the end, she went with something relatively simple; it was basically just what Faelyn had asked for with nothing cool added, but in exchange the base capabilities were stronger.

They had had to move to a bigger room to accommodate the size of the cocoon, so Lia wrote him a quick note for when he woke up; it just informed him that he was still in Lia’s house, that there’d be a mirror behind him so he could look at himself, and when he was ready to just knock on the door and Lia would come have a quick talk with him before setting him loose.

With that done, she went back to the living room, took out a book, and began to read while snuggled up with Rose. She was excited to see how he turned out, and curious to see how this whole streaming thing would pan out. There was nothing for it but to wait, though, so she just got comfy and let herself enjoy the moment.

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