NOVEL NEXT 74.2 - Get Rich Quick Via Plagiarism
"Once upon a time, there was a common farmer who received a magic ring and went on a journey to destroy an evil demon."
"In the far future, there was a noble boy with commoner adoptive parents who was locked in a closet underneath the stairs."
"A man came from the stars and was raised by common farmers, but he had special powers and became the world's greatest hero."
Archmund Granavale had always considered himself a creative person. But he also believed that creativity, at least on some level, was remixing outside influences. The worse you were at it, the more obvious who you were ripping off. But if you got good enough at it, no one could tell exactly who you were ripping off.
Here, he had another obvious advantage. All the stories he was ripping off were from another world. Presumably, those influences would be utterly foreign. So no matter how derivative he was, no one would know he was ripping off anyone at all.
And so he felt no shame in writing down the rough plots of stories from his past life. The Lord of the Rings. Harry Potter. Superman. He couldn't spend all his time training. And Beatrice, Gelias, and Rory spent plenty of time screwing around.
In theory, he could've used more niche stories and more literary tales. But these were basic and elemental. They were icons that had transcended the idea of "story" to become cultural phenomena.
Alexander Omnio I had done the same. He'd taken some of Aesop's Fables and passed them off as his own inventions, and he was still remembered millennia later.
The Empire had developed the printing press, or a reasonably close equivalent. The Lord Reginald Granavale brought newspapers back to the manor whenever he returned from the Imperial Capital. At the few breakfasts he shared with his father, once the meal adjourned, Archmund snatched up the papers and took the opportunity to skim them.
There were a few different titles — the Imperial Courier, the Capital Post, the Omnio Herald — but they all had mostly the same content.
"There's no point of reading those," his visiting cousin Beatrice Blackstone said once. "They're mostly lies from the Empire. Nothing gets into those that the Imperial Family doesn't approve of, and you can hear all of that from your friends."
"I like the business news," said Rory Redmont, the jock friend who was almost certainly too chadly to be hanging out with them. "I hear that if you invest money in companies, you can make a lot back."
"What, are your iron mines running low?"
Archmund didn't care much about the content — stock tips published in a newspaper were probably pump-and-dump schemes anyways. He was examining the newspapers for content, structure, meta-information.
The very existence of newspapers was both obvious yet uninevitable. (Evitable?)
It was likely for a society to invent some way of transmitting information as it advanced. Human societies ran on gossip at first, communicating locations of food and danger. Then the word was born, first in clay tablets, then in handwritten sheafs and scrolls, and then in print. Eventually there might be radio, digital communication, and mass media — but none of that was necessarily inevitable.
The concept of a newspaper, or something like it, was likely. But it relied on cheap paper and a way to print on it and the infrastructure to distribute it and enough of a literate population for it to be necessary.
He wondered if he'd ever stop being paranoid and wonderstruck about how similar his new life was to his old.
The Imperial Capital filled with "lesser nobles", could be described as literate. And so the papers were filled with things that catered to them.
Descriptions of the latest Heroes to arise from the ranks of Adventurers' Guilds and Noble Guards. Not as noble as it might seem, because the number of commoner surnames was surprisingly sparse compared to noble byblows and third cousins.
A gossip column, announcing betrothals and marriages and potential entanglements. Not as frivolous as a celebrity gossip column, because these could change the fate of families and the direction of the empire.
News about Imperial Subjugations of peasant uprisings. Not as heroic as it might seem, for obvious reasons. Not as useful, either, because he didn't have a good mental map of the Empire.
News, stock tips, op eds, a whole lot of hot air to fill space.
And relevant to him, a page of short fiction. Published one chapter at a time, in every paper. Some stories released snippets every day. Some stories released more substantial chapters on weekends.
It was remarkably similar to the penny dreadful model, how Charles Dickens had published the majority of his novels, chapter by chapter, paid by the word.
Sure, he could rip off Charles Dickens's stories. But the issue with Dickens was that all of his stories were distinctly, insufferably British — embedded and arising from the social fabric of the time. He couldn't transplant them whole cloth, he'd have to adapt them to the social fabric of Omnio, which was a whole lot more time and effort than doing some basic feel-good hero stories that had already consumed a world.
In theory, the hard work was already done. Someone had built the worlds, established the characters, written the material. He just had to write it down in a way that matched the stylistic expectations of the reading audience.
("Just.")
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
The major papers all took pitches for ideas for their penny serial sections, so he was more than willing to submit. This was better for him, really. He didn't have to write out the whole story — just an outline of a first volume or so.
He submitted under a pseudonym. This wasn't about fame. This was about money. If he could establish "passive income", that was another lever he could pull on the path to freedom.
Over the course of several weeks, the responses rolled in.
The Lord of the Rings was rejected, because it was deemed as implausible next to the true ("true") stories of adventurers in the Frontier and their attempts to reach and purge the evils of the Frontier Dungeon. The idea that a common farmer with a single magic item, and that item being a ring, being able to defeat the world's greatest evil was… goofy. Silly, if that.
Archmund supposed it made sense. Tolkien had written The Lord of the Rings in the aftermath and traumas of World War I, and had drawn on an existing corpus of Anglo-Germanic myth, so without any of that the epic fantasy of LOTR fell flat against a world where the rich and powerful regularly did acts of great magic.
Harry Potter was also rejected. His vision of the future was drab and uninspired — never mind that he'd been describing his old reality — but then again that reality had been drab and uninspiring as well, so actually it looped around to making sense.
But the idea that a noble could be lost or misplaced was simply just… unrealistic. Noble bloodlines mattered. The idea that a noble would be placed with mere commoners for some inane schoolteacher's plot was absurd. To suggest as much was to lay accusations at the feet of the Arcane University, and that was… politically toxic.
The idea that a noble placed with commoners would be subjected to extreme levels of neglect and abuse (i.e. being locked in a cupboard beneath the stairs) was… well, it was realistic, but it was material for lurid horror stories about the savagery of the peasantry, not an uplifting adventure story.
If he was willing to retool his entire premise, he might be able to reuse some of the plot lines he had in mind, but as it stood the papers couldn't accept his pitch.
He didn't get any response for his Superman rip-off, but he didn't think much of it. He had plenty of other stories to rip off.
And then one day he received a notification through his Gemstone Tablet. Princess Angelina Grace Marca Prima Omnio had requested that they meet. Since he was somewhat geographically restricted, she would come to him, and they could meet in the training grounds above Granavale Dungeon.
He tried to demur — he hadn't expected to hear from her until they went to University, and snow still patchily coated the earth.
She didn't respond, and he thought nothing of it.
Until his father delivered a handwritten missive to him at the next breakfast, with an Imperial seal, with a monogram in the equivalent of the letters AGMPO.
Great.
In retrospect, he wasn't sure why the cold had been a deterrent to him.
He could use his Gems to generate Heat effortlessly, so really the only inconvenience was the meltwater. And the mud. And the harsh winds. And the dry winter air.
"You're here as Mercy, huh?"
"As an agent of the Omnio, of the thirteenth branch, I have significant latitude to move around. The crown princess is resting on ceremony in the palace, surrounded by tutors and luxury until another diplomatic ceremony demands her attention."
"Honestly, it's like you keep making excuses to see me."
"I'm doing you a very big favor, actually."
She threw a paper at him. Buoyed by magic, it floated directly into his hands.
It was his pitch for "Superman". The man from heaven/the stars/the sky, raised by common farmers, who became the world's greatest hero.
Except there was a harsh red mark on it, twisting and complicated. He didn't know the full connotations, but he could make out a few words: "Imperial Censors".
"What on earth were you thinking?" Mercy said.
He had been thinking he wanted to make a quick buck by recycling the laziest stories possible from the Silver Age of comics. He'd start out with reasonable stories about a man getting cats out of trees and stopping evil scientists and end with stories of a living god dragging planets across the universe to save them from destruction.
"If this had been from literally anyone else, they'd be dragged in front of a court for treason!"
Okay. This wasn't great news.
"Is it that bad?"
"Read it!"
He skimmed it again.
Doomed planet/dimension/heaven. Desperate parents. Last hope. Kindly couple.
The devil, of course, was in the details.
He'd overcomplicated things and ripped a hodgepodge of random details from various stories.
The hero jumped in front of a train to save a little boy.
The hero woke up a noble to stop a midnight execution.
The hero blew down slums to stop a corrupt landlord from exploiting the poor.
Okay. He could kind of see where she was coming from. A commoner blessed by the heavens, disrupting the corruption of the old order.
It was bad to suggest that disruptions of the order were desirable. That was point one.
Even worse was the suggestion that a commoner could be the one to do it. Or someone commoner-raised.
"Treason though? Really? How on earth did you manage to get me clear of that?"
"Alright, I guess I exaggerated a little."
"Did you now."
He was surprised. He didn't think she was the type to exaggerate.
"Specifically, it came to Stirpstredecim for monitoring purposes, which meant I could intercept it. But if I wasn't sitting there, you'd be on a watchlist right now."
Archmund was starting to realize he was in a tad over his head. He'd thought the Stirpstredecim were just the black ops branch of the Omnio family they assigned their young to for gaining experience covertly. He hadn't realized they were actually a black ops secret police.
"Isn't everyone on a watchlist?"
A quip from his last life, where big data and internet meant it was possible to put everyone a watchlist, which he realized all too late.
"Most people aren't worth the resources."
"I warrant personal visits from the crown princess."
"Fine, be that way! Yes, there are still eyes on you. But right now they're good eyes. I took care of this one. Please do your utmost to keep them that way!"
Words had power. The Empire believed that, and therefore, so did he.
Perhaps it was worth discarding the idea of laundering Earth pop culture for cheap cash. Perhaps it was worth being more direct, and using them to spread the aspects of Earth ideology he believed in, stuff like human rights and the economic inefficiency of slavery.
But he was too young and too weak to work against the world; he still had to work within it.
Perhaps one day he could take the role of the satirist, if he ever truly wanted to weaken certain social strictures and enforce others. There were injustices that could be resolved. Some could be considered a difference in cultural values. Others, like slavery, were better abolished. But as one reborn from another world, he might the only one who saw it that way until he could change some minds.
The problem was with the everyman hero. The everyman hero assumed a certain set of cultural views were dominant. Enlightenment values, individualistic values, modern values — he wasn't sure which description was most accurate, but they weren't the values of the Omnio Empire.
So if he wanted money, instead of power, he should play to those values. Suck up to society's mores instead of imposing his own.
He could try ripping off Batman: A rich man who beat up the mentally ill seemed far more suitable a tale for this kind of society.
Or maybe Super Mario: a commoner who took miraculous power-ups to beat up Monsters and save the princess in a completely subservient role to nobility.
Hopefully Angelina's father, Emperor Marcus Omnio the Tenth, who ascended to power by marrying into the family, could overlook the similarities in name.