Vol. 3 Chap. 106 Whistling Past Your Ear
Truths eyes were glued to the Scry. They didnt get his face exactly right, he thought. It was a drawing. Must not have caught a clean picture of him on a recording talisman. Thank you Blessing of the Silent Forest? Or maybe they just wanted people looking at the drawing instead of the picture. No idea why. Wasnt any harder making an illusion of a recording than making a picture.
His mind was skittering away from the reality in front of him, and he knew it. He was seen. And he was being hunted.
Strong chin, strong cheeks, brutal face, narrow eyes with an imperious curl to the lips and hedonistically long hair. Brutishly masculine, or perhaps just brutish.
The fierce looking presenter invited a Retired Security Expert and Counter-Terrorism Consultant to explain things to the audience.
So right now, those of us in the COINTEL and Counter-Terror community are busy connecting a lot of dots. A lot of stuff over the last couple of years start getting a big AHA!, now that we know about Hell Price. Which who cos up with these nas? Hell Prince? Yuck.
He seems to have earned it. The presenters voice was grim.
True. So, to quickly summarize, after the hotel massacre at the Silpa, a massacre which saw three hundred citizens and denizens killed, as well as nurous security personnel, Internal Security made public the existence of Hell Prince. He was ID'd at the scene by surviving officers, as well as the dical sage Dr. Sun Ri. The doctor was, himself, seriously injured in the attack.
Atrocious. To think that Hell Prince would go so far as to try and murder a living saint like Dr. Sun. Its almost impossible to imagine.
Horrible, but also just the tip of a very, very nasty iceberg. Look, economically, we are in a depression. Before that, there was three years of deep recession. This is a perfect breeding ground for economic discontent and stirring up resentnt. Nationalist rhetoric shot way up. Violence shot way up. You even started seeing proto-militias forming. All completely illegal, of course, but was treated as essentially harmless.
The presenter nodded along. Truth thought the counter-intel guy must have been good at his job. He looked like nobody. Truth was staring straight at him, and the best he could describe him would be a guy in a boring suit. He could learn a lot from him.
Turns out, not so harmless. The expert continued.
Not so harmless, no.
Pictures of violence- fights, beatings, slogans sprayed on the walls next to burning hos, were displayed.
We knew, we aning the COINTEL community, that a lot of this was foreign funded. It really doesnt take much. A little bit to get it started, a few shoves along at the right ti, a few professional agitators, and the whole thing becos self-sustaining.
Which is where the Hell Prince cos in?
Yes. It is also the point at which we start having more questions than answers, but I will try to lay out what we know and what we think we know.
They switched back to the drawing of Truth, including a profile now, and occasionally cutting in footage of riots or explosions or demons tearing people apart.
There is currently a lot of debate over whether or not he is a Jeon national. By all accounts he speaks perfect, unaccented Jeongo, but there are spells and demons that can help with that. He is also clearly a master of propaganda and social engineering, which would again suggest he has a deep understanding of Jeon. My guess is that he was born here, but I wouldnt be too shocked to learn he emigrated here at a young age.
Yes, you cant tell those are the features of a pure Jeon man.
Well, again, he may have adopted that look as a disguise. Though of course you are quite right. Anyhow, his apparent age and cultivation puts him around forty at the youngest or a well preserved sixty at the high end.
Forty! But isnt he level four? The presenter blinked in shock.
The man is clearly maniacal. Is it so strange that he would be obsessive about cultivation?
Shocking to think.
We cant say for sure what his background is. His access to elite resources and education suggest an upper class status. Whether he is the survivor of a now defunct family, a bastard of an established family, or simply marginalized within his family, we dont know. We also dont know for sure when or where he got radicalized. His weapon, an angelic sword, suggests he spent significant ti out of the country. Siphios would be the most obvious possibility, but we cannot rule out other unfriendly states.
The Ressilaud Free State gets ntioned a lot.
There are a lot of terrorist training facilities there, and we certainly cant rule it out. It is adjacent to Siphios, of course, so it would be fairly trivial for them to supply him with spells, indoctrination and weaponry.
A map was put up and taken down again.
This is also the point at which he picks up the nickna Hell Prince, I would guess. Cri scene analysis shows a deep understanding of torture, demonic manipulation, violence of almost every description, mind control, glamours, personal manipulation The expert shook his head.
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Rumors about dead, raped won
Have not been confird at this ti. Its important not to get too far ahead of the official reports and what we can independently verify. Would it fit a certain profile? Yes. However, fanatics can also develop strange notions about personal purity, or co to believe they need to father a nation or so other deviance.
But its not confird?
Not confird. So, going back to our narrative, he hooks up with foreign intelligence services and their puppet terrorists. We have to assu he excelled, given the resources he has deployed here in Jeon. He clearly is a significant player for them.
Can you run us through so of that?
Certainly. In no particular order, there have been forty attacks on enrollnt locations, ranging in severity from graffiti to total obliteration of the building it was in. Just those attacks have killed in excess of two thousand people. So of them happened so close together in ti, but distant in location, they were obviously coordinated attacks.
The presenter nodded along.
Then there is the spread of nationalist propaganda. This has, of course, been sweeping the nation, but we do see spikes of intensity anywhere that the Hell Prince is believed to have been active. He is clearly using subtle, powerful, mind affecting spells to delude people into opposition and rebellion.
Diabolical. Though I suppose thats appropriate for him.
Yes, he is a master of human emotions, or at least the negative ones. Hatred, envy, resentnt. That much has been confird. Pictures of riots and burning buildings flashed across the scry ball.
This is another one of those not confird but things- we are pretty sure he is behind the party barge disaster in Buran.
The presenter gasped in shock. You an when all those people were fed to Ghul?
Yes. Hell Prince is a title he has earned, clearly.
Anything else?
Does there need to be more? Sources are telling they are hanging at least four targeted assassinations on him, a few more from assassins he recruited and developed, a foiled attempt to poison a reservoir, the ambushing and murder of a score of riot cops in Conjin The expert shook his head.
How was he able to run around so long?
He is very, very paranoid. Until literally yesterday, nobody knew what he really looked like. He is constantly in motion, and he seems entirely willing to use mind controlling magics to take over private residences. Murdering the current residents first, if necessary.
How did he slip up? If we have his picture now?
Again, not confird. This goes directly to highly classified counter-terror and COINTEL sources and thods. It sounds like he was planning a social engineering attack on the upper echelons of Harban society, possibly even going after governnt ministers. That last bit is obviously speculation, but, given that his suite at the Sila was right next to the suite used by high level ambassadors, its plausible.
Another opportunity to create chaos. Maybe even cause a diplomatic incident.
Certainly plausible. Very plausible. But not confird yet. Anyway, he had checked into the hotel using a pair of demonic servants. Not unusual, given the number of foreign guests they serve. But it did tip off Internal Security to pay even more attention than usual to the Sila. It's no secret that they regularly check hotels for foreign spies or dostic terrorists. Then, and I am speculating here, I would assu that they started connecting dots very rapidly. I dont know what prompted the violence yesterday, but given Hell Princes famous paranoia, he may have been trying to flee.
Incredible.
Yes. I think it says sothing about how scared he is of Internal Security that even as arrogant as Hell Prince is, he ran at the first whiff of danger. I would expect him to try sothing soon, to try and regain face.
Truth leaned back, breaking the trance. It was a lot to process. It was understandable that they would sar him as hard as they could. He would do the sa. And Hell, he did do so, or even a lot, of what they said he did. But giving him a nickna? A backstory?
He felt his thoughts skittering around like water on a hot pan, bouncing and popping until they vanished without a trace. He was a rapist now, huh? Or had a harem. Etenesh wouldnt let him have a harem. Frankly, he didnt want one. It seed like a lot of drama. A master of human emotions too, it seed, or at least the negative ones. That was hilarious to him. It might be kind of true. He certainly was vague on a lot of supposedly positive emotions.
Forty. He must have spent longer in the well than he thought.
He sat in the chair next to the passed out drunk old man in his lonely apartnt. He could see himself living like this. If there were no sibs and no Starbrite, but he still went the maintenance tech route. This could be one way his story ended, though he still thought a brief, violent life as a gangster was more likely. Perhaps he would have a catchy nickna, like Hell Prince.
Why the nickna? Did they really need to tag him with sothing so flashy if he was going to be Public Enemy Number One? Wouldnt they want to make him look badass after they captured him? Now they just looked incompetent letting such a dangerous criminal escape. This seed dumb. And he was through underestimating Internal Security and Starbrite.
He sat in the musty, hardly used chair and thought, letting the ti trickle past. It took a while to crack, but he got there in the end. The old monster, Dr. Sun, had recognized Incisive. They knew he had slipped their net, and would go to ground. So they were shaping an identity for him.
The Prince would be forced to take on aspects of The Hell Prince. He would be arrogant, and pointlessly cruel. He would act rashly, filled with paranoia and petty vanity. Bloodthirsty. A pervert. An enemy of all the good people of Jeon. And if he never again was the Prince? He would have to struggle against the weight of public belief in the Hell Prince every ti he wanted to use the scales. The sa way he struggled to persuade the world he wasnt a gangster, or was a chartered surveyor. They would turn Incisive against him.
He wanted to applaud. It was an impressively nasty play. It wont be enough. It wont be nearly enough. Ive spent my whole life refusing to be who people say I am. This is no different. And my girlfriend is fluffing up the cushions on a far greater throne than any Prince sat on. Truth stood and stretched. There was no sofa. He would sleep on the floor, out of the way.
Hell Prince, huh. He smiled gently. Now there was a sword with two edges.
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