Face-Slapping12 min read
"I went live — and watched them beg."
ButterPicks13 views
"Don't touch the console," I said, and the whole hall blinked at me.
"You—who are you?" a voice snapped back. It was clean, sharp, and full of the kind of calm that hides anger. Sterling Sun stood on the raised floor, robes perfect, face like a stone that never flinched. He was their master. He was supposed to be untouchable.
"I am Lailah Bernard," I said. "And I have a live feed."
People laughed at first. Then the light changed on their faces when the water-screen pulsed and my face filled the sky.
"Master," someone whispered. "She—"
"Silence," Sterling said. He raised a hand, a small wave full of command. "How dare you—"
"Watch the screen," I cut him off. "Watch everything."
"Show me proof," Sterling said. His voice had that old pride. He thought words would stop me.
I tapped the console. The stream rolled.
There was a long still shot of the hall with sixty or so guests, all polished smiles and quiet hands. Then my voice in the stream.
"This is the truth," I said, and one by one I played what I had collected for months.
"Play them," someone behind Sterling hissed. "Don't let her get away."
I let the first clip run. It was a private kitchen. Sterling's hand reached into a fire bowl and poured a cloudy mix into a tub. "This won't hurt—only shape her," his voice said on the clip. "We will make her small. We will make her obedient."
People shifted. Sterling's face did not change.
"Next," I said.
The hall filled with other clips: ropes of words, his students' hands pressing a girl's shoulders down; a medical room with Rafael Guo—my second elder, who used to smile while he worked—taking vials from a hidden shelf and closing his eyes as if to not see. Another clip showed Santiago Romano, the sword brother, placing a forged charm on my throat and whispering, "She will be like white silk—soft and kept."
"That is not a crime," a man in the crowd shouted. "It's custom."
"Is it custom to break a person's life?" I asked. "Is it custom to change someone's body so they can be a painting for your vanity?"
Sterling's jaw moved. "Lies," he said. "All lies."
"Then explain this." I clicked, and the screen filled with messages, copied words between Sterling and Valentina Fernandez—the favored disciple, their chosen daughter. "Valentina," Sterling wrote, "keep her close. She looks like you. Pain is an art." Valentina's replies were quick, cold, cruel. "Let her be pretty and quiet. People like pretty and quiet."
"What proof is this," someone cried. "Words can be forged."
"Can patience be forged?" Rafael had said on video, handing me a thick book with formulas. He said it like a joke. In the hall, his hands trembled.
"Enough," Sterling barked. He walked up onto the dais and the crowd quieted. He was the master; he had protected the place for decades.
"Let her be," he said. "Lailah, you have been our guest. If you insist, we will examine this. But do not soil our name before the elders."
"I won't wait for your permission," I said.
"Stop the feed!" Sterling snarled, but the console had no one to obey but me. The stream jumped to a new window. I called in voices from other places: students who had been ignored, parents who had been told lies, a record of the medicines they had forced me to take. The water-screen had no respect that the hall did.
Sterling's face finally cracked. "You are a child of the stars," he said, as if that explained everything. "You are confused."
I turned off the soft tone and spoke plain. "You poisoned my chance to grow. You made my body weak so I could stand in for Valentina. You thought you could craft a perfect image to feed your pride. You thought no one would see."
"Stop!" The white-haired elder at the back stood. "This is calumny."
"Then stop me," I said. "Arrest me. Call your judges. But first, answer in front of these people: was I a person to you, or a thing?"
"Both," Valentina said softly. Her voice had the honey of favors. "You served our story."
There it was. A simple truth said to a sky of watchers.
"No," I said. "Not any more."
I took a breath and sent the final file.
It was a ledger of receipts. It was a ledger of medicines. It was diplomatic notes that proved Sterling had quietly taken rare supplies, rare herbs, and forbidden tech to alter a body. He had done it for show, he had done it for his name. The ledger showed dates, orders, small payment slips that matched the months when I stopped learning and started shrinking.
"You stole from the order," someone said beside me. "He could be expelled."
Sterling saw his own handwriting on the page and for the first time I saw fear.
He went red, then pale, then red again. "Forged," he gasped. "Forged!"
Valentina's face drained of its smooth color. Her eyes darted, trying to find a way out. Rafael looked at the ground, then up at Sterling.
"Explain why you had her thrown in the dark room," I said.
Silence.
"Why did you take her light?" I asked.
Rafael opened his mouth, closed it. "We thought—"
"You thought?" I repeated. "You thought smallness would be better?"
From the crowd came murmurs that did not end. People pulled out small recording stones, the new kind of mirrors that could send their own pictures. Fingers did not stop after that; hands turned palms toward Sterling and his small court.
"You taught her to be grateful," Santiago said, voice cracking. "You told me—"
"To make her grateful?" I said. "To make her small and grateful?"
Santiago's face went from pale to white to the look of a man who knew he had been a coward.
He took a step forward and the ground did not hold him.
"Apologize," I said.
"Apologize?" He looked at the camera. "Apologize to what? To a thing? This will ruin us."
"You ruined her," I said.
Then the most human sound in that room came: a deep, animal sob. Rafael fell to his knees first.
"Forgive me," he said. "Forgive me. I was blind."
He put his hands out to the crowd. "I was wrong. Forgive me."
The crowd did not answer.
"Don't do this," Sterling snarled, but Rafael's body hit the floor and his voice broke into pleas.
"Please," Rafael said, chin trembling, "I worked the medicines. I thought it would help. I thought it would help the school. I didn't—"
"You didn't think of me," I said. "You thought of your pride."
"Please," Rafael cried, and his voice dissolved into sobs.
Santiago's knees buckled next. He tried to stand but couldn't.
"Kneel," I told him.
He dropped down hard. His armor clanged to the floor. "I followed orders," he said. "I thought I was protecting the sect's line. I—"
"You protected a lie," I said. "Let everyone see how you saved your mask."
He put his face to the ground, hands pressed flat, and the crowd heard him beg. He begged me and the elders and the sky. He begged Sterling then looked up and found no comfort.
And then Sterling.
Sterling stood rigid as rope. His eyes looked at me like someone seeing a stranger steal his house. Pride, anger, fear, shame—everything flashed on his face.
"You will not humiliate me," he said.
"Watch the stream," I told him.
The stream played a moment: Sterling's own voice, recorded when he thought no one was listening, saying that people needed to be softened, that the order could not be harmed by the rough life. "We make the image so the world will bow," the recording said. "We make the image so we can keep our power."
Sterling's face fell into a hard mask. Then the mask exploded.
"What is this trick?" he shouted. "Who gave you this—"
"A system," I said. "A machine from my home. It recorded what you won't even remember saying out loud."
"This is a lie," Sterling roared. "You have been poisoned by the world outside!"
"Is that so?" I asked. "Or is it that you were poisoned by desire?"
He swallowed hard. Then his knees went. I saw the cords of his neck stand out. His hands — the hands that had parted long hair and touched fire bowls — began to shake.
"Please," he said, and the word came out thin.
"Please what?" I asked, voice quiet.
"Please, Masters," he said, his head shaking. "Please, brothers. Help me. Help me keep my honor."
No one moved to help. They looked at him the way you look at a burn.
"Sterling," someone — an elder, older-than-silver, who had watched the order change — spoke. "You have led this house. You have been vain. This is your hour."
Sterling fell. He dropped to his knees hard enough that dust rose. The hall was loud with people breathing. Valentina, who had been a portrait that walked, now looked like someone remembering hunger. Her eyes wet with tears, she stepped back. "I didn't know—" she whispered.
"You did," I said.
Valentina pressed both hands to her mouth. Her cheeks were wet. "I thought—he told me—" Her voice cracked. She had believed the story she had been given.
Sterling's voice came from his knees. It was small. "I was trying to protect the sect."
"You protected a lie," I said.
"I was protecting what we had," he said. "People look to us. They look to our face. I thought if we could hold the face, the house would hold."
"You broke a person."
His hands shook. "Forgive me. Forgive me, Lailah," he said, and the very sound left the hall like a small storm.
"Beg them," I said.
Sterling looked at the crowd. He looked at the students who had chosen to leave. He looked at Rafael and Santiago, at Valentina. He knelt lower, until his forehead touched the floor. "I beg you," he said. "Forgive me. I have done wrong."
The hall did what the world does when someone falls: it watched. Phones lifted. Fingers tapped. The water-screen split into small panes showing the real-time reactions in other temples and towns. People who had left their schools watched with their mouths open. Tweets and quick messages came up like flies.
A voice in the back said, "Record this."
Hands filmed. Mirrors flashed. People took pictures. One old man spat, and then another spat, and the spitting started to move like a tide. A few shouted curses. "Shame!" someone cried. "Shame on thieves!"
Rafael wept openly. "I will leave the order," he sobbed. "I will leave. I cannot stay."
Santiago put his face in his hands and shuddered. "I—" he couldn't finish.
Valentina, who had spent a life as the picture everyone wanted, sobbed then stepped off the dais and ran into the crowd. She tried to hide, but mouths that had once admired her now turned away.
"Tell me you will step down," I told Sterling.
He looked at me, eyes flooded. "Yes," he breathed. "Yes. Take the office away. I will leave."
"Then kneel and apologize to her." My finger pointed to me, but not for me alone. "Apologize to all the voices you silenced."
He bowed his head to me. "I am sorry," he said, and it sounded thin and true in the same breath.
The crowd did not cheer. A few people clapped slowly, as if to puncture the heavy air. Some whispered, "We hope you're sincere." Some spat again. An old woman started to laugh quietly, then shook her head. "It took her to show us the wound," she said.
Sterling stayed on his knees. His robes were ruined now by dust. People walked around him. Some shoved him aside, some filmed. There was shouting. There were tears. Valentina clung to an older woman and cried like a child who had been turned away.
The stream went on for hours. I sat and watched faces change. I watched the way the crowd turned a man into a small animal. I watched how a cultivated name cracked and leaked everything within.
When the lights finally blew out of the hall — not literally but in the slow dying of the crowd — Sterling still knelt.
"Will we put him to trial?" an elder asked.
"Yes," the elder said. "He will be judged. He will be stripped of honor. He will answer the law of our house."
I left the dais and walked past the crowd. Some people looked at me with new light in their eyes. Some looked at the blood stains on my boots and flinched. Rafael reached up and touched my hand. "I'm sorry," he said, and his apology was raw. "I will do what you ask."
"Tell me what you will do," I said.
He looked like a man who had to fix what he had broken. "I will write letters. I will tell the truth. I will teach that a person is not a thing."
Outside, the water-screen still showed my face. The stream had reached hundreds of temples and tens of thousands of people. The number of viewers climbed and did not stop.
"Why didn't you wait for the elders?" Rafael asked later, his voice small and ashamed.
"I waited my whole life," I said. "They thought I would accept being small."
He bowed his head. "You are strong."
"Only because I had to survive," I said. "Only because there was a way out."
Months passed in public time.
They stripped Sterling of his position. The elders spoke and weighed evidence and the court — a thing built from old rules and new cameras — found him guilty of misusing power. He was banned from teaching, his name struck from the ledgers, his house turned over. He had to stand in the public square, arms shaking, and read aloud every plea he had ever denied others. People crowded the square. They hissed at him. He cried like a man who had been unmoored. He knelt and begged each of us, one at a time, to accept his apology. They tossed fruit and old shoes. The watching mirrors sent the show to the whole region. The video of him kneeling was posted in markets and halls and laughed at and debated for weeks.
Valentina changed in ways I could not have expected. She took on small tasks to help rebuild what had been broken. She walked paler and slower. Sometimes she met my eyes, and I saw shame. Once, when no camera watched, she placed a hand on my shoulder and said, "I am sorry." I nodded. She cried. That night she stood in the courtyard and said to no one, "I was wrong."
Rafael left to study herbs in a foreign valley as penance. He wrote every week, sending me receipts of his work with the poor, the sick, and the hungry—anyone he had once ignored. He called those letters, "Records of Repair."
Santiago left the sword room and took up work where he taught young students how to carry a sword and keep someone safe, not to carve their faces. He taught them to ask first.
I never made them kneel on command. I let the public and the law do the work. I let the streaming light make them visible. But I watched them shrink, and for them I felt no pleasure. I had wanted truth, not cruelty.
"Are you done?" my system, SmallReturn, asked in my ear. It had been quiet while justice burned.
"No," I said. "Just getting started."
Days later, on a hard court with hundreds of watchers, I sat with my mother on a small ship. She was not a woman of robes or rites. She was a leader with hands that had made decisions on maps and lives. We spoke little. She had watched the stream too. She had watched a man fall from his pedestal.
"You did the right thing," she said, and her voice held the weight of command and the softness of a hand on my cheek. "But you also gave them a chance to be better."
"Will they be?" I asked.
"They will have to decide," she said. "You gave them the mirror. Now they must choose."
I closed my eyes and could still hear the hall — the soft wet sound of Sterling's begging, the crowd's shouts, the taps of recording stones. I thought about the girls and boys who would not be used as props now. I thought about the healing yet to do.
"Tomorrow," I said aloud, and I meant it. "Tomorrow I stream again."
My life after the first great reveal changed in small, stubborn ways. I did not return to their halls to stay. I did not burn every relationship. I kept a few who truly wanted to repair. I kept some who could not. I built a small team — engineers from my star, menders from the valleys, and children who could speak the truth without fear.
We built a school that would teach both craft and care. We taught armorers how to think of a body the way they thought of a ship: it must be safe, it must carry people, not be a shell for another's pride. We taught healers that power without consent is a crime. We taught elders that they are stewards, not gods.
"Do you miss your old life?" Rafael asked one dusk as we sat and watched a mountain blaze gold in the sun.
"Sometimes," I said. "But I have a life that fits me."
"We were cruel," he said. "We measured people and broke them."
"You can make amends," I said. "Not to wipe the past, but to stop it repeating."
He nodded.
There were days when the stream felt like a sword, days when it felt like a hand, days when it felt like nothing more than a long talk with strangers. I learned to pick my fights. I learned to let some things go. I learned to make space for joy.
I fell in love on the air in small ways. A pilot from my home who came to help with engines called me late into the night and asked my opinion on a design. We argued over coffee and star maps. He was not grand in voice, but he was steady. His name was Kenneth Barrera. He made me laugh.
"Why don't you ever talk about the stars?" he asked once.
"Because I thought I'd left them," I said.
"You didn't leave them," he said. "They were waiting for you to come back and tell them to be better."
"Do you really think I can make a difference here?" I asked.
He fixed a small bolt on my flight chair and met my eyes. "You already did."
I laughed and kissed him then, on a bright roof with the city like a map below.
We kept streaming. I taught people to weld, to fish, to fly. I showed them apple sculptures that were not fruit, and recipes that smelled of a world where kitchens were labs. I kept my anger in a small box and opened it when needed. I used my feed to help. I used it to teach. I used it to call out lies.
The day I finally left their world for good, many people were watching. My mother had a meeting with commanders and could not come, but she recorded a short message that played at the start.
"Be brave," she said. "And honest."
"Will you come back?" Kenneth asked. He had helped steer the ship down the last stretch.
"I will," I promised. "I have things to finish."
We lifted off. The blue of their sky faded to the black of space and then to a bright pin of my home — a blue and green globe that hummed like a song.
"One more live," I told my team. "One more goodbye."
I turned on the stream. "People," I said into the light, "I am going home. But not alone. I am taking your voices with me. I am taking what you taught me. Don't make my return a farewell to you."
A flood of replies came. "Thank you." "We are grateful." "We are watching." Some were blunt. "You changed our world." Some were small. "Good luck."
Sterling's name rarely came up anymore. He had been sentenced and left to the law. Valentina still lived in the halls and did good work. Rafael's letters became a small set of guides for healers.
"Do you regret what you did?" Kenneth asked later, when stars had shaped themselves into long hands.
"I regret only that it took so long," I said. "I regret that I had to prove I was a person at all."
"Yet you did," he said. "And now look."
A child on the screen held up a small green apple. "She says it's not fruit," the child said, and grinned as if she had been part of some small joke. The child had the bright eyes of those who had seen too much and still smiled.
I laughed, the sound small and true.
"Home," I whispered, and my fingers touched the console. The feed closed. The ship hummed. The stars waited.
I left with a final thought — small, stubborn: I had been a mirror, and they had looked. Now they had to choose what to do with the view.
The End
— Thank you for reading —