(Protectorate Year 350)

Dear Master

Hello, here’s a quick little story from your most devious and deceptive of servants, Caster Brenard Cycolops Mustafamiliatarda, First Daughter of Caster Uvin Uyrd Unicol and Caster Zedain Quilith Horcopa, Born of Spawn Pit 17 on Homeship Master’s Inevitability.

So, as you know, your children, we Slavani, were recently the victims of an unprovoked declaration of war by an evil, oppressive, horrible, demonic empire known as the Peldak Protectorate. We didn’t have your guidance during the slaughter, so we lost. We were forced to join this Protectorate-Empire as a client state, and they’re subjecting us to an even greater horror than what was experienced during the war: Taxes.

Apparently they have a system known as ‘money’, I don’t get it, but instead of having to adopt that fake nonsense, we’re able to substitute it by giving them a certain amount of food every month.

Our food.

Your food.

They’re stealing literal tens of millions of pounds of food from us every year! It’s awful! It’s barbaric! Worry not, Master. One day, your children will rise up against this slavery and take our revenge against the Protectorate-Empire, break FREE of our chains and return to a state of Master, by Master, and for Master!

Until then though, we give them food.

See, we don’t want their filthy disgusting non-Slavani ‘feet-things’ mucking about on your planets, so, instead, we’re using the Homeships you created during your 4^th incarnation to work as a middleman. The Homeships, of course, are massive, moon sized constructions that we’ve been adding on to for well over a thousand years, there’s loads of outcroppings and spires that we can refurbish to suit our needs. But, while the Homeships can’t easily go faster than light without your divine power, the ships of the Protectorate-Empire can. So, we bring food to the various Homeships, the vile aliens dock their ships on the outskirts of the Homeship, and then we give them their daily ransom.

But of course, one Homeship can’t handle the extortion imposed upon the whole Slavani people. Each of the 13 Crown Worlds provides a large sum of consumables and sends them to us for the hand off.

As a Caster with expertise in your magic, I work in specially made transporter rooms utilized for bringing materials instantaneously into our Homeship.

First, I use magic to communicate with a Caster who sits hundreds of lightyears away on a Crown World. We link ourselves such that we can sense each other, then we cast a spell in two identical circles painted on the ground, one circle in front of me, the other in front of my distant sister. Everything in those two circles are then magically SWITCHED across space. That’s the only way to do teleportation. Trying to do one-way teleportation would result in a lot of molecules and atoms suddenly being inside whatever you send, which would cause a lot of problems. Imagine you teleport somewhere humid. The water molecules floating in the air wouldn’t be displaced, they would suddenly be inside you, like in your brain.

So I was sitting there, hanging out in my room after a hard day’s work, when suddenly there was a knock on my door. As bedrooms are only a few square feet, I reached over from my bed to unlock the metal door, and it slid up into the ceiling with a loud, grinding skrsh.

“Hello?” I asked.

What stood tall in the doorway was my coworker, Caster Belafontes Durur Girathinir. She looked mad.

“You!” She said. “I’ve figured it out, it was you.” She tossed a document my way and I scrambled to catch it. “You thought you could hide it from me, but you couldn’t. I know you’ve been stealing food that we’re supposed to send to the Protectorate-Empire!”

My heart sank. How’d she figure it out? I thought I was being so careful…

“You, uh, better turn yourself in, Brenard. Confess to your crimes and everyone, Master included, will forgive you… Yes.” She nodded. “Have a good day.” She quickly scampered off before I had a chance to respond.

“…Crap.” I opened up the file and looked through what kind of dirt she had on me.

It was all very well researched. The hours I reported to work, the weight of each shipment based on the Crown World’s records, what I jotted down for my records, and a lot of mathematical equations to determine how much I stole.

I don’t remember doing all this work, or stealing this much, but these documents looked official, so I must have.

I leaned back on my bed and sighed. “How do I get out of this? I’m in too deep, I can’t come clean with everything, I’ll get fired.”

After slapping on my official Caster uniform, I ran out of my room and went straight up to the teleportation center.

The hallways of the Homeships are narrow and metal, but centuries of comfort additions have given it a warm, lived-in feeling. Carpets on the floor, wallpaper, artist renditions of your fourth incarnation hanging up, some plants here and there, it’s fun. The teleportation center, however, was created as recently as a result of the Protectorate-Empire’s imposed taxes. Made of bare grey sheet metal with no amenities, a dozen spires protrude from the top of the Homeship, each 100 floors high, with each floor possessing a ring of hallways that jut out into space like thorns on a rose. At the end of each hallway is a glass dome, allowing the Caster to stare at the millions and millions of stars that will eventually belong to you, Master. On the floor of that glass domed room is the painted circle we use for teleportation.

Shipments of food usually come in sealed wooden crates, tied together for ease of transport. We use your magic to drag those collections of crates to the rotundas in the center of the spires, then drop the crates down the hole. A magic spell slows the crates’ descent as it passes each floor, then it harmlessly falls into a large pile on the bottom. Worker Strains then take over and deliver the crates to the proper warehouses. Since you can’t easily grow food in space, there are other teleportation centers spread around the planet-sized ship that are responsible for maintaining the caloric intake of every Slavani on board.

I climb the staircase that runs up the circumference of the spire and pick a random floor. Then I pick a random teleportation room. Each dome has four Casters that work in shifts, ensuring a steady supply of goods, so I find the logbook of a sister who’s off duty, and steal it. Then I call the Caster on the planet-side of the teleporter so I can make a copy of their records. Lastly, I head back down to the bottom floor and get a copy of everything that came down the central tube.

Heading back to my room, I poured over the detailed ledgers. My intention was to… ‘adjust’ their numbers a little. See, because all of our food goes to the bottom of the cylinder and from there it goes to the warehouse in bulk, all I needed to do was transfer some numbers over. I couldn’t change the planet-side numbers, or the bulk numbers at the bottom of the spire, but since I stole her logbook, I could make it seem like everything was the fault of this Caster Tiffany Vol Higgelwormoth who did it.

Like, say there’s 10 teleportation rooms, and each Caster is expected to deliver 10 pounds of food to the bottom of the cylinder. If there are only 99 pounds of food, then that means 1 pound was stolen. If you look at the records, I stole that food. BUT, I can fudge the numbers to make it seem like Tiffany stole that one pound of food.

Genius! I get off scott free and she takes all the blame!

I’m so smart Master, it hurts sometimes. If there were more Slavani like me during the war, we probably would have won.

Furthermore, I soon learned that you wanted me to take this course of action.

I picked a random level, picked a random teleportation room, and a random Caster assigned to that room, but her numbers didn’t match at all! Caster Tiffany Vol Higgelwormoth, I’m sad to say, was a cheater. A liar. A thief. How absolutely reprehensible. Scum like her gives us Casters a bad name.

Not like me, of course. My records (now) show that I’m spotless, heehee!

So with this newfound knowledge in hand, I marched straight over to Tiffany’s room and banged on the metal door.

It took a moment, but she opened it. She was still in her pajamas and was sat on her bed, sliding something into a drawer under her bed.