The years pass by again without much activity. The life of a bureaucrat is an uneventful one, and Cassandra is only a short jog away if anyone gets too uppity about having to work.
Tymon and Cassy finally get married, with both their families and coworkers attending a beautiful ceremony. Cyryl and Ignas pull some strings to get it done in the massive cathedral which stands proudly in the center of Heaven’s Reach. Some joke that the pair look more like mother and son rather than husband and wife, but such comments don’t bother Tymon anymore. He won.
They spend the following half-year on honeymoon, touring some of the more romantic locations on Peldor. The Heart of the Vistula River, the Capital City of Pelda, and the Grand Canal were their favorites. Cassandra ends up getting pregnant within her first fertility cycle while married, which is considered a great blessing among the peldaks. Three years later, they had a healthy baby boy, free of the physical deformity that afflicted his father.
Tymon’s life is basically complete. He has an important job that’s valuable to the Protectorate, he has a wife, and he’ll start bringing more peldaks into the world. He works the days he has to work, and doesn’t come into the office on the days he isn’t assigned. Without the ability to perform the regular military service that most peldaks enjoy, and with no desire to switch jobs every few decades, this will be Tymon and Cassandra’s situation for the rest of their lives. Because of their immortality, unwillingness to enlist, and since Heaven’s Reach is arguably the safest place in the galaxy, the only way they could die is through total organ failure. With proper diet and exercise, they can easily keep their body fat below 15%, and live in peace until the stars burn out.
During this time, Tymon even becomes a valued figure in Ignas Kosinski’s quest to streamline the struggling peldak bureaucracy. It becomes a simple 5 step process with a centralized record keeping department, but the only noticeable change for the bureaucrats themselves is they can’t just haphazardly send resources willy nilly anymore. Each request has to be at least partially filled, even if it takes several days to send the full amount. No longer can requests be ignored, forcing the other end to resubmit their request.
Cyryl, in contrast to the undeniable success of his friend, never finds a wife, or even gets a steady girlfriend. About halfway through his sentence he barges into Tymon’s apartment and throws his hands up, “I’m done. I give up,” he cries with his breath reeking of booze and his eyes looking in two different directions.
Tymon and Cassy are in the living room of their apartment, sitting around a crib. Cassy jolts upon the intrusion, but Tymon doesn’t avert his eyes from his son. “Done with what?” He asks.
Their son is, at this point, four years old. The most he can do is lay on his back and messily swipe things with his hands. Cassy, a little startled, returns her attention to her son. She has her hands in the crib, is making faces at her son, and extends her index fingers, pointing at her son. Her son, in turn, either wraps his chubby little hands around her fingers and squeezes, tries to push them, or tries slapping them away while giggling. If Cassy brings her fingers to his feet, he struggles to lift his head to see, then kicks her fingers. His ears are a little oversized for a boy his age, and he can’t wiggle them as easily as he should, but he’ll grow into it.
“Done with dating! FUC-“ he remembers their son is present, “-uh. Forget women. They all suck.” He stumbles over and collapses into a chair by the crib. Tymon’s son looks over at Cyryl with his large eyes, then starts laughing at his Godfather. “Hey,” Cyryl reaches in and starts poking the boy, sending him reeling with giggles.
“Have you still not gotten over that?”
“Nope!” Tymon’s son whimpers a little from the sharp noise, so Cyryl lowers his voice, “nope.”
“But…” Cassy says, still having trouble maintaining eye contact. “You can talk to me just fine. I-I mean, you don’t have issues t-talking with me, right?”
“Nah, you’re fine. But I also hated you when we first met, so,” he shrugs. “Maybe I should just find a shy girl, then force myself to put up with her stuttering until she’s comfortable speaking to me.”
“Or you could just stop drinking all together.”
Cyryl rolls his eyes. “Or maybe I should just wait for a Valkyrie to fly down and propose to me with a kiss.”
Cassandra grumbles and looks down at her son, “you’d probably reject her too…”
Tymon smiles, “listen, I can’t really help you, sorry. I think you just need to wait until you’re desperate enough that women don’t annoy you so much. Maybe another hundred years of being single will change your mind.”
“Yeah, makes sense.” He sighs, “or maybe so many peldaks will die in this stupid war that King Arus will force everyone into marriage again, haha.”
As the years progress, the military situation on the newly annexed worlds hasn’t improved. What’s worse, the rest of the Protectorate is continually dumping more and more resources into those planets, but they hardly have any effect. There’re still guerrilla fighters and insurrectionists everywhere, corruption is rampant, and they’re basically refusing to become self-sufficient in protest. The peldaks never intended to occupy so many worlds like this, but it’s an unfortunate necessity to establish a lasting peace. Some colonies, mostly the ones settled by peldaks leaving the legions, prosper on the new worlds. Populated enough to fight off attacks from the angered locals, and productive enough to be self-sufficient. Other colonies, usually ones that were founded as business ventures by non-peldaks, can’t stand up to the pressure, and collapse within a few years. Small fortunes are wasted on these ventures, and every failure is a beacon of hope to the scattered resistance.
Many of the insurrectionists realized they couldn’t beat the Protectorate militarily, so the hope is to outlast them. Can the stubborn peldaks keep the occupation going through all these issues? Can public support for this project last even when terrorist cells are popping up on Protectorate worlds and killing scores of civilians? Can the Protectorate remain a productive nation when a new drug is developed on the occupied worlds, starts flooding Protectorate cities, and an entire generation is lost to addiction and crime? Can the Protectorate even finance the continued occupation when a historic economic blunder leads to hyperinflation and a depression?
The answer is yes, because most of those issues only affected the peldak’s alien allies, not the peldaks themselves. They don’t care about public sentiment, drugs aren’t easily smuggled through Heaven’s Reach, they’re stubborn enough to keep the occupation going for 500 years if need be, and the depression barely affects them because peldaks aren’t obsessed with money. Cyryl doesn’t even notice the complete economic collapse.
But all of that is made irrelevant one day in the year 618.
Tymon walks in about an hour after his shift starts. “Aaah,” he yawns. “Sorry I’m late, everyone. My son got into a fight with Laura’s daughter on the playground, and that took a while to settle. He was yanking her ponytail, so it looks like my boy’s got his first childhood crush, haha.” He looks over the large table full of papers and partial dividers. Everyone looks dead. No life in their eyes, slumped over in their seats, no work is being done. “What’s wrong with you guys?”
Urban, who has long since gotten a set of replacement teeth put in, puts a finger gun to his temple, “I’m gonna kill myself.”
Another man covers his face with his hands and his mouth comes through muffled, “I’m stuck in here for another ten years! It’ll be all over by then!”
A new girl, who’s at least trying to do work, clenches her fist and snaps the pencil between her fingers, “it’s not fair… I didn’t even do anything wrong, but I’m missing this once-in-a-millennia chance..!” She worked as a dockworker and was convicted of helping smuggle drugs into the peldak colony on the world of Ciratha. She didn’t do it for money, she just turned a blind eye to the law because the smugglers were smart and made friends with her beforehand. After they were on a first name basis and had gone out to lunch a few times, they could rely on her to turn a blind eye to their drugs since they were all pals, and she felt more loyalty to her friends than to some obscure government law.
Tymon walks to his desk, “you guys aren’t actually explaining anything. What are you missing?”
Cyryl, leaning back in his chair, balancing on the rear two wheels, lazily turns his head to Tymon. “Did you hear the news? What the Lord Protector said?”
“Obviously not.”
“Okay, well, do you know the Heirs of Leon?”
“Barely?”
Cyryl closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Alright… so everyone is annoyed because there’s this insurrection group called the Heirs of Leon, and they’ve been scoring a lot of victories against us on every world. Proper military victories in real battles, not just ambushes and stuff. Fuckin’… so everyone’s pissed at the Lord Protector, and so he starts going around and giving speeches on what’s going on and why we keep getting beaten and losing territory…” Cyryl starts stuttering and stammering as he tries to find the words, but then he throws up his hands, “and in last night’s speech, he accidentally reveals it’s a damn vampire! Vampires control the Heirs of Leon! And that’s, you know, right?”
Tymon’s ears perk.
Vampires form a very important part in peldak myth and legend. The ultimate evil, vampires killed the Son of God, Hananiah Vendall, and the last conflict in the Unification Wars, known as the Vampire War, was about scouring those creatures clean from the surface of Peldor.
One of the bureaucrats slam his fists on the desk, tears in his eyes, “I wanna fight a vampire!”
Daria cries, “It’s not fair!”
“Fuck this!”
“I don’t need to kill the vampire himself, but at least a ghoul or two or a hundred is enough to satisfy me…”
Urban stares up at the ceiling, “I’m gonna kill myself. I’m gonna kill myself, be reincarnated as someone without decades left on his sentence, and then I’m gonna enlist and kill a vampire.”
Cyryl waves Tymon off, “so, like, you know. It’s kinda hard to get motivated. More so than usual. I thought vampires went extinct but… here one is. And I’m stuck at this desk for another year.”
A woman shouts, “couldn’t he have waited another six before he showed up?!”
A man starts punching the air, “man, if I were still in the legions… I’d punch that monster’s fangs down his throat!”
Tymon nods, “okay but since you can’t go and fight, isn’t it obvious that you should do your best and help the fight against the vampires by doing all this boring work? It’ll help the war effort; a small but vital piece of the Protectorate war machine.”
There’s a pause in the complaining, then everyone starts grumbling, but nevertheless gets back to work. Some make comments that they’d rather be working in the department for ammunition, or machine parts, but such complaints are nothing worth worrying about, since they’re still getting their job done.
This anxious attitude only gets worse over the next year, since that insurrection group, the Heirs of Leon, starts openly using vampiric soldiers, and demonically crafted abominations. They sweep over most of the 9 worlds, taking advantage of a lot of boring supply issues in the Protectorate military, and driving the peldaks back to just a few key strongholds they captured during the first war, nearly 50 years prior.
Every day the bureaucrats have their telenel set to the local news station.
Every day the bureaucrats listen to the newest retreat, ambush, slaughter, or desperate rearguard action as the legions buy time to evacuate refugees. It’s a flood of information coming in from the vampiric blitzkrieg.
Every day, Protectorate High Command releases statements giving updates on the desperate supply situation. Peldor was left largely unaffected by the recent hyperinflation and economic depression, but with so many peldaks still enlisted, Peldor’s industry can’t supply their entire military alone. The remainder was supplied by the Protectorate’s member states, but the depression gutted their industrial base, and the loss of those supplies means there isn’t enough military equipment to go around.
Every few days, the bureaucrats are introduced to a replacement newscaster on the telenel. The reporters keep getting so disgusted by what they’re reading that they have to enlist and go off to try and help.
By the end of the year 618, the Protectorate is reduced to controlling just 20 or 30% of some of these planets, with millions of civilians left beyond the peldak’s reach. The estimates put the death toll -or forcible conversion of the people into mindless ghouls- is set at hundreds of millions across all 9 worlds, with the upper estimates being nearly a billion.
As the advance continues into the year 619, the Protectorate Military Industrial Complex finally recovers enough such that, when the vampires reach their final defensive lines, the peldak legions are ready. For three months, the bureaucrats wait with bated breath as the news casters report on vampiric advances, but each attack breaks against the might of a fully supplied peldak army. Everyone beyond the defensive lines is written off.
The final months, weeks, and days of Cyryl’s sentence drag on, and he starts spending more free time in the gym and firing ranges, rather than at bars, or hanging out with friends.
He starts coming into work drenched in sweat from jogging to the office, rather than taking the bus.
“Eugh, Cyryl!” Someone, usually Tymon, yells. “You stink! Go take a shower!”
“Huh?” He then sniffs under his arm and visibly recoils, “ugk! A-alright, sorry.”
As each day progresses, he regularly takes breaks from work and starts pacing around the office. Every few minutes, he glances up at the clock, then groans due to the lack of progress.
When it becomes the last day of his sentence in the bureaucracy, he does nothing but stare wide-eyed at the clock.
“So Cyryl,” Tymon says, “you have anything special planned for your last day here?”
“Hmh.”
“Hey Cyryl,” a man says, “will you head to the recruiter’s office right after work, or will you wait until tomorrow?”
“Hmh.”
Some of them giggle.
“Cyryl,” Daria says, “you think you’ll get paired up with a single girl and fall in love?”
“Hmh.”
“Mr. Cyryl,” another girl says, “how about finding a vampire girl and marrying her instead?”
“Hmh.”
Everyone gets a good laugh at him, then they divvy up Cyryl’s work. They all understand that there’ll be no work coming out of his station today.
When the clock finally strikes 12, marking the end of that shift, Cyryl leans back in his chair and nearly falls over. A wave of relief washes over him, and everyone claps. A bright, tired smile marks his face, and they all come over to congratulate him.
“You did it!”
“You survived the bureaucracy.”
“Go give that vampire hell, haha.”
“I guess this is probably goodbye.”
Cyryl stands up and addresses his friends and coworkers. “Hey… well, I guess another day doesn’t matter. How about we all go drinking? One last dinner before I head off, right?” He glances to Tymon with a smile.
“I want you to remember your last night in Heaven’s Reach,” Tymon says with a grin, “so I’ll keep women from getting too close.”
Supply issues prevent the bureaucrats from having a true feast, as the ongoing economic woes forced Peldor to export more food to their soldiers. However, since a lack of food is one of the biggest historical causes of peldak riots and civil uprisings, there’s still a minimum level of bread and meat provided to the people by constitutional law. They’re able to have a nice, modest meal to celebrate Cyryl no longer being a convicted criminal.
He ships out the following day, reenlisting in the airship corps, and starts preparing for the inevitable Protectorate counterattack. Cyryl soon becomes an officer in the airship corps due to his experience, and gains command of a fleet of ten airships.
In the year 620, under orders of the new Lord Protector just one month into his administration, Cyryl leads an attack on the city of Pelda, and ends up seizing the senate building, holding hundreds of senators hostage. The new Lord Protector forces these senators to sign a lot of controversial legislation, then he gives broad amnesty to every soldier who took part in the attack on Pelda, so Cyryl won’t be punished.
Then, in the year 621, the Protectorate’s counterattack begins, and Cyryl performs his duties well.
Tymon, meanwhile, has another child with Cassandra during her second fertility period of marriage. Having two children within 30 years is abnormally fast, usually siblings are only that close in age when they’re twins. But everyone praises them for it and calls their union blessed. Cyryl even makes it a priority to return from his airborne unit’s operations against the vampires to be a witness at his Goddaughter’s baptism. Though the baptism is a bit tense since Tymon’s large family has historically supported the Senate, and Cyryl held them hostage just a few years prior.
There’s nothing his family can do about it though, since fighting an active officer in the military during such a troubled time would be a horrible crime.
So instead, they mocked him for still being single.