Smoke rose from the burning remains of tires and shattered wooden planks. The crackling of the flames lost itself amidst the chants of thousands of civilians raising their banners, asking only for that which was fair. They marched in circles around the Governor’s palace, the central column that held the dome of the Minced meanders in place. Walls of wounded flesh pulsed alive whilst my father sat on his throne of bone. They lay covered in a surfactant not much different from the one that allows you or me to breathe. A line of officers circled the property, policemen with shields, enhancers barely wearing a baton and their uniforms sprinkled among them, and behind them support agents: medics, summoners, healers, enchanters.

  But not me. I was wearing a pair of earplugs that I had acquired before leaving Cental: green, connected to each other by a blue cord, and most important, belonging to someone else. It was not kleptomania because it was just borrowing. Without asking. Permanently.

  And I wore them because I had borrowed more than a mere pair of rubber stubs from Aconessi. As an Instigator, I was trying to mingle with the surprisingly washed masses, people screaming on my ear and asking for things I couldn’t chant for with enough sincerity to pass by undetected. I wasn’t wearing my uniform. I walked with a slight hunch. My shirt sported a few bleach stains. I didn’t trust myself to keep enough of an act of a revolutionary without any handicap, they would see through my charade. But my instructor in illusion ahd provided me some divine inspiration, and what better to embody a mess than to pretend to be an autistic person with some political worries that decided, against his best interest, to attend such a loud place. I was going to behave slightly weird for the seasoned veterans of marches against government, if I tried to act as a neurotypical person. But Aconessi’s disorder provided me a weapon they couldn’t see through or argue against. I was going to commit mistakes; I was going to fail at upholding the protestor fa?ade against the most zealous fanatics. But would they dare question a distressed autist? I had practiced the stimming, I made sure to upkeep it, absent-mindedly playing with a curl of my hair or constantly rubbing my hands. The texture of my pants was all the rage though. Very good pants: soft, like a pug taking its first breath. Which generally takes a while after they are born. Some years. And they find out they are not built for it, giving up. I rubbed them too. The pants. I am not a pug rubber.

  I avoided eye contact as I slowly shambled my way to the inner edge of the stream of people.

  “Dead Gods, stop shouting…” I murmured, trembling, as I pretended to adjust the ear plugs. I was tempted to take them off because the feeling of having those shoved in my ears for no benefit whatsoever resulted uncomfortable, but I had to keep up the act. I crossed stares with one or two other protestors as I looked to the sides, feigning a little worry or paranoia, or to react to some loud, sudden noise like the beat of a drum drawing closer and closer. The earplugs were only a partial measure to ameliorate sounds, either because my ears were fucked up in their unholy shape, or because Aconessi had better things to funnel his hard money into, like action figures.

  A metallic bat approached me, attached to a man by means of grasp. “You, the one wearing the old green shirt. “You are one of them, aren’t you?” The bat’s business end bounced on his hand as he blocked my path. I almost bumped into him, eliciting his rage, his yelling on my face. The droplets of saliva were warm, his breath rancid. “Are you a fucking pig or not?”

  I pointed at my ear tentatively, my eyes droopy and seemeingly struggling to focus on him. “Autism…”

  “Autism? Here? In public, on a loud as fuck protest? You can lie better, copper.” He still held his bat at the ready, but I could notice the man was reluctant to hit him.

  “I have meds… to buy.” I scratched my arm and avoided his gaze. “For the ADD. I am running out of and cannot even work without them. And I do have a stock, but analgesics could become a problem too.” I tried for it to sound natural and inarticulate. I did a pretty good job.

  “I may be wrong, but you so happen to look like a moron that I have seen hanging about the den of the dogs.” He said, referring, obviously, to retriever Central.

  “Maybe a… brother?” I said, doing my best impression fo a trembling leafa s aI softly gestured at the Governor’s palace. “I am an unrecognized son of the Governor, according to my mom. We don’t want his money, though. We’d rather live in poverty.”

  “It’s a very elaborate lie you are weaving, copper. But I’ll give you the benefit of doubt for now. If I were to beat—“

  “I am… not a cop!” I began the sentence with a demure voice, and ended it with a more desperate, angry tone. “ I am not a cop!”

  “I am letting you go , why are you—“

  “Not a cop! I don’t like being called a liar!” I fidgeted with my fingers on my cheeks as I did this, scratching until it went red. “Not. A. Cop!”

  “Fine, fine! Sorry! Good luck with your brain.” He began taking a few steps back when he noticed the circle of curious citizens that had formed about us .

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  It was as if something had clicked inside him, as if his brain was screaming at him to stop poking the poor autist. And soon enough, they were the bystanders that shouted at him. “You are an idiot, you triggered him!”

  “I am not a cop. Not a cop.” I repeated in a loop, my head shivering from contained anger. Surprised even myself with my acting skills. I stomped a foot on the ground for good measure, as an old lady tried to calm me down with a friendly hand, a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t touch me!”

  I scurried away, got jittery arms failing in front of me while I pretended to struggle for control. A jerk of my legs sent me to the concrete, ass first. I yelped from the pain before dropping on my side, and the yelp was not acted. My tailbone paid the price of my theatrical flair. I had to hold back a smirk when I heard the shouts of the police advancing out of line, an arm of the force breaking their formation to see what the ruckus was all about and intervene. People being murdered in marches? Bad press. Stopping someone from being murdered in a march? Good press. The government of the Meanders takes care of you, citizen. And if you step out of line… well, the government of the Meanders takes care of you, citizen.

  “Make way! Disperse, Meanderians, nothing to see here!” The man leading the tentacle of policemen and women shouted in his megaphone, the formation wedging into the circle and pushing the curious masses apart. “What’s the meaning of this?” The lead officer asked, seeing me on the floor. I hissed at them like a snake.

  The man with the bat sheathed his weapon in a holster made of leather stripes, attached to his waist. “Is it illegal to carry sports gear, officer?” he asked in a voice so adulous it resulted revolting to me. But I ignored it, as I needed to carry on with the act. This was a perfect opportunity to do my job as an Instigator, even if through the minute earpiece (concealed under the left plug) no orders had come yet.

  “You, the one crying and mumbling, get up and identify yourself.” The officer said, his features obfuscated by the deep blue helmet, a dark plastic visor covering his whole face except for a mouth whose wrinkles betrayed an advanced age. Maybe he was in his fifties.

  “I am not a cop!” I cried at him. “You are , don’t touch me!” I began clumsily crawling away, whimpering. “You are!”

  “Citizen, calm down or you will be taken into custody.”

  A woman stepped in between me and the officer. “You cannot do this! this man is an autist having a crisis!”

  “Ma’am, we have a job to do and you are in the way.” With a gesture of his, three officers surged from behind and rushed over me, putting their gloved hands on my shoulders and trying to pull me up. One of them, a woman judging by her voice, was the first to put both hands over me. So I cried out, a war cry, “Do not touch me!” and then aimed for her unprotected forearm. With my teeth. Of course, I used a slight bit of enhancement magic to avoid losing the teeth in the up and coming beating. As the batons hit my slightly enhanced back the chaos ensued all around. More and more officers surrounded me to prevent the good people from interfering with the arrest, their plastic shields absorbing hits from variegated projectiles: bottles, bricks, cobbles, and even a stray dildo. Pink. It almost makes me laugh, ruining everything. Yes, I can laugh while being beaten up. I am a man of many annoying talents.

  It was a symphony of shouts telling me to surrender, telling me I’d rot behind bars or even be put down like the rabid dog I was behaving as. How easy it was to instigate, I just needed to pretend to be disabled. And endure the pain that came with the lowly, non-magical police officers helping those with invisible disabilities take their first steps into the world of plain-to-see disabilities.

  They led med into the mass of the uniformed, and to a police van beneath the lines. The gyves felt apt rattling around my hands. My shoulders contracted in feigned tics while no intelligible words left my mouth, just whimpers. The threw me in the cold metallic seats in the back of the ban, my back straightening against the wall as the doors closed and my gaze crossed with that of the driver by means of the rearview mirror. Outside the chaos rose, screams of pain and insult against the uniformed growing omnipresent, rattling against the walls of the vehicle as the windows rolled up.

  “Name and any other data you may consider relevant?” He asked, voice stern and unwavering.

  “Saon Ladius, Rank A Retriever, assigned as an Instigator. Make the call, will ya. “ I said, dropping all pretense of autism. “Can we watch international news until they give you the order to release me?”

  “I could torture you and pretend you are not one of us Governor’s dogs, so don’t get cocky.” The stocky driver said. “What’s the safeword? Say it and I will believe your story”

  “It’s a safephrase,” I obnoxiousned.

  “Gah, yes, it is. Say it, smartass.”

  “They will work ‘til they bleed, and they will bleed ‘til it works.” I echoed the words my father had once said about a group of captured rebels.

  “Okay, rookie. Saon Ladius, you said?” He said as he chatted through the small tactile screen mounted on his dashboard, his fingers dancing deftly despite their shortness

  “Yes.”

  “They say you are a dangerous psychopath.”

  I blinked twice, dipping my head to look at my pants. My zipper was down. “That’s quite offensive. I am a harmless psychopath most of the time. And a pained one right now.”

  Using my enchantment module, I infused some life into the cuffs, settling their inner mechanism into motion and getting them loose. They dropped over the floor of the van with a clink.

  “Can I go? I need to tend to my pet crows. They are hungry.”

  When his shoulder was patted by a hand so cold and mine, he tensed up. A Rank A soulgyver could easily kill a man with no means to defend himself against magic. Even an armed one.

  “I wouldn’t dream about detaining a Retriever for longer than necessary.”

  “Are you married?”

  “To a marvelous man, yes,” he mumbled, sweating profusely as he felt my hot breath in his ear.

  “Then I cannot kill you because you won’t look at a photo of your sweet wife and daughter. My condolences.”

  And thus I marched, out the freshly unlocked backdoor throwing fingerguns at the agents that had just taken me in, some perplexed by how even my gait had changed. Now, I just needed to find my team to have some after-work fun.