The sun was setting in the west, beyond the wall, and half of the world was a tangled aurora of gold, ruby, and the barest green. If you looked very, very carefully, you could see through to Endless Daihoon, in the valleys and mountains of color that made the sky what it was. The rest of the sky was half purple and as dark as it got on Daihoon, for the moon wasn’t up yet, but this was Daihoon and so it never really got dark dark.
Perpetual twilight; that’s all.
Mark kinda loved it.
He liked the waters of the lake, lapping in the twilight, too.
The lake was a lot less of a mudhole than it had been, just a week ago. It was a kilometer across, perfectly circular, and though this area in front of Mark was the only really deep part, since it was the fishery, the rest of the lake had at least a small layer of water across the entire distance. Here and there, big weeds grew on island-like spaces. There was talk of leaving the little islands alone, but the plan was to get rid of them and have a fully operational water source in the center of the city, and so that was still the plan.
But people liked the little islands, and Mark did, too.
They reminded him of the Floridas.
Mark sat on a big bench next to the waters, his Union spread wide into those waters, to the fish tanks here and there. They were just like the fish tanks back at Orange City; big pillars of metal that formed a cage of bars in the waters, where little fish could swim out, and big fish and monsters could not fit through. These tanks were a little bigger than the fish tanks in the bay of Orange City, that Dad and the family had been the stewards of for the last 3 generations. The fish tanks here took up a good quarter of the lake. These tanks had a few more specializations than the ones back in Orange City, too.
Mark was absolutely sure these fish tanks were truly enchanted, unlike the ones back in Orange City, which Mark was pretty sure were simply inscribed with the barest mana-soaking, anti-monster enchantments. They were probably basic stuff put there by some Hearthswellian priest or paladin years ago, and maybe they were kept up by the local Hearthswell church, but Mark never knew about that.
Mark wasn’t sure how the tanks worked in Orange City’s bay at all.
These fish tanks had sigils on them that glowed under the waters.
Clearly magical.
Outside of the obvious magic, the whole setup here was different, too, in a directed-farming sort of way.
Dad and them would go out and harvest from the cages every few days, because that’s where fish went to survive the open waters, but they didn’t survive Dad and them.
Here, fish went to the cages to eat.
Person-sized boxes held on top of poles, angled off of the cage walls toward the middle of the fish tanks. Those were food dispensers. If Mark listened very, very carefully, using Union to boost his ability to hear, he could hear them tick every so often, and then plop some pellets into the middle of their tanks. The fish could leave the tanks and go pretty much anywhere in the lake they wanted, but the dispensers plopped out food every minute, and so the fish were predominantly in the tanks, getting fed.
Mark fed all of the fish he could reach, though. Union was good like that, with sustenance and deprivation.
Fish didn’t ‘breathe’ like people, though they did move their mouths and water flowed over their gills well enough that Mark was able to connect to them with a Union of Breath. That was only part of the effort, though; the smaller part. Mostly, Mark connected a Union of Blood to every single fish out there, and all of the greenery growing in the lake, and all the world around them, feeding the fish with every beat of his heart. The plants gave up food for the ability to use Mark’s connection with the greater world for their own gain, so they liked the arrangement, too.
Sally liked getting fed, too.
Sally cracked another beer open beside him, and then she handed him the beer. Mark smiled a little, flicking his empty into the recycling bin to the side, and then taking the offered drink. She cracked open another beer for herself and sipped.
“I miss the bay,” Sally said, looking out across the waters.
“Me too. More than I would have thought.”
They sat in companionable silence, sipping beer, while Mark fed the fish.
The waters had been churning under every dispenser out there, whenever the pellets dropped, but as Mark fed the fish the fish became less and less responsive to the food drops. The water still churned, of course. With the number of fish out there Mark could not really feed them all himself. But Mark connected to the plants under the waters, too, and the plants grew, and that would be more food for the fish as well, when Mark left for the night. Other people would come in and feed the fish whenever they wanted, but, as Mark had found out four days ago when he started coming here on routine, Mark was the only one capable of truly feeding them well.
Some other paladins of Freyala, and especially the priests and paladins of the Farmer God Verdago, had already spoken with Mark about how the fish actually stopped being hungry when he came around. Even keeping the dispensers full with feed, and also through Union work, they could barely get the fish to calm down for a while.
The guys and girls for the Farmer God, Verdago, had pumped up the fishes’ reproductive cycles to the moon, and they were spawning like crazy out there, so it wasn’t too surprising that they were always hungry. It was always going to be like that, too, because people wanted meat and fish were good eating.
Mark thought that they were making the fish breed even faster since he was helping to keep them truly fed, but he hadn’t asked anyone directly about that.
Eventually, the feeding systems here would be kinda superfluous, and the lake would be deep enough and populated enough that the breeding magics would be unnecessary to fill the lake with fish. When that happened, years from now, they’d be pulling meter-long almost-tunas from the lake every single hour. By then, there would be some concentrated magics to keep the plants growing well, to provide constant food and shelter to the fish, and that would be it. The city would be set for fish for a long time.
Of course, if a dragon got involved and they wanted food, then things would need to be adjusted, but Mark was pretty sure they were not going to allow dragons—
“What ya thinking about?” Sally asked.
“A lot of things. About really big fish for dinner, currently... I was thinking about the future. How about you?”
“I’m trying not to think at all,” Sally said, “My stomach isn’t yelling at me to ‘gimmie gimmie gimmie!’ so that’s pretty great. Calming. I feel like a sated fish!”
Mark grinned. “Yeah. They’re finally feeling full, too.” Mark felt the vectors of the fish in the water as they flowed in and out of range, and as they moved away from the tanks... if they could move away. Some couldn’t? Hmm. Mark said, “Looks like some of the fish are big enough to get stuck in the tanks already, but most of them are headed away, back to the mud and the grasses. Or to breed. Again.”
Sally chuckled. “That Farmer magic, eh?”
“Seriously, I think that’s all some of them are doing out there.”
Sally laughed. “Of course they are!”
Mark wanted to enjoy whatever Sally was enjoying right now, but he looked at the water and felt the fish who were probably fucking, and the fish… sort of stopped. Some of them. Some of those vectors simply… went away.
“I think the ones who fuck too much fuck themselves to death.”
“Ah! Hell. That’s less fun.”
Mark laughed at that. And then he teased, “The frys are eating the newly dead ones. Might even be children eating their parents.”
“Oh gods what the fuck, Mark!” And then Sally laughed.
Mark grinned. “You still want to eat a big one though?”
“I absolutely do.” Sally looked at Mark. “But I want to go on a raid, more.”
“Oh! Is it time?” Mark got excited. “Is there something on the boards for us?”
“A few different options. Eliot might have seen something else since we switched buddies, but…” Sally explained, “Some goblins are setting up camp to the east. The big teams passed on them because they’re a new outbreak of the fuckers and not very established, so they don’t have any treasure to steal. Aurora still wants them gone before they can establish themselves, but none of the people who want the goblin runs are going for them. It’s an extermination run. All of the danger of a normal goblin hunt but none of the rewards. Except for 10k points, like all of the options.
“Then there’s a mini-kaiju to the southwest, in a lake-ish area beside the Shine. It’s some mushroom thing, spreading spores everywhere. Big fucker. Not a true kaiju.
“And then there’s some missing monsters to the north. Kandon already sent investigators that way, but they turned up nothing. It became a raid a few hours ago, and they want people who are thinking about becoming Inquisitors to head that way, so I’m kinda partial to that one.” Sally added, “But I know you probably want the mini-kaiju.”
Sally knew him well, then.
Mark rapidly thought through the options, then said, “Eliot can’t possibly want to do goblins, so not them. And yeah. The mini-kaiju is my pick...” But then he said, “The missing monsters, though... I think I heard someone say something about that... Some Farmer. Some lampers went missing? Some expensive-as-fuck breed, too.”
Lampers were some sort of light mana crystal generating, bee-adjacent, hive-producing flying fish that built nests in hard-to-reach areas and then defended those nests to the death. They were sort of light fish, but they were a specific breed that were incredibly easy to tend to and which spread rather well, if they were allowed to spread. You generally put 5 hives out and then next month you’d have 10 hives, and then 15 hives the month afterward. They didn’t spread as fast as you’d expect a monster to spread, which was good. And if you only took half the hive, they came back just as strong as before without spreading at all.
… But, there was an issue.
Mark asked, “But they can hide well? They’re light fish-y, so they can hide in the light. Were they just hidden? Were there nest remains? From being eaten by monsters?”
“No evidence of the hives being broken into and eaten. Just gone. They were there, and then they weren’t! So that means they were taken by someone.” Sally tipped her beer a little, pointing at nothing and everything, saying, “Some noble in competition with some other noble probably stole them.”
Mark hummed, and then thought. “Nah. They wouldn’t do that—”
Sally gave him a Look and a bit of an eye roll.
“… Okay. Well…” Mark perked up as he thought of something. “There wasn’t anyone else in the brig!”
“… Yeah, so?”
“It was just me and Isoko and the place looked unused. Sure, the servitors clean it up all the time, but the point is that no one is making problems... except Tartu… And then me.” Mark grinned a little as he remembered punching Tartu’s face. And then he banished that grin. It wasn’t right to hit people like that. They were all in this together, after all. Mark added, “Even if only Isoko and I got time in the brig, there are 10,000 people here and since there was no one in the brig, we can conclude that there haven’t been any offenses that resulted in brig time. Aurora picked her people well. No one stole those fish. Some monster ate them all, probably.”
Sally let Mark finish, and then she easily said, “It might be the first incident of poaching. Kandon and the enforcers don’t think it’s poaching, either, though House Yarl, the owners of the plot, are accusing House Exatech, the supposed thieves, of being thieves. Kandon responded by sending everyone who wants to investigate out to investigate, in order to quell any possible discontent. He’s making the full system open for anyone to see that all signs point to it not being poaching at all. If you want to believe that, anyway. I think it’s poaching. It’s completely plausible!” Sally said, “You've seen some shady shit, too. I know you have.”
“… Okay,” Mark said, “Sometimes things are smuggled in and out through the docks and everyone looks the other way because it's all under the Seal of Empire and other shit.”
“Ah ha! Yes. See! People are shit!”
Mark laughed. “What? No!”
Sally smirked and then added, “But anyway... It’s 10,000 points for a day trip to the woods, so a lot of people are taking the trip. I kinda want to take the trip just because I don’t trust House Exatech at all.” Sally snorted. “Don’t trust any of them, actually.”
Mark wasn’t convinced it was poaching, and now he was even less sure. Sally had a problem with authority, too, but it was different from Mark’s problem with authority. Hers was a much more general sense of unease.
Sally clearly thought it was poaching, after all.
“There was no one in the brig with us, Sally. So the nobles aren’t infighting—”
“Oh come on, Mark. Nobles gotta noble; they pull shit on each other all the time. Whatever this was, it’s not gonna end as pretty as it did with you and Tartu— And look at what you did with Tartu! House arrest. Of course they aren’t in any brig. Brigs are for normal people. Scions get house arrest.”
… Well, yeah.
Mark could believe that.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Mark made a decision, “Goblins or mini-kaiju; I’m not getting involved in the poaching stuff.”
Sally grinned. “So you agree it could be poaching.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Sally snorted. “It’s gonna be the mini-kaiju then. Eliot does not want to do goblins, and I don’t blame him. They’re people, but they’re pure fucking evil.” Sally shivered. “Fucking… terrible things.”
“You saw the video Eliot made of our first outing, right?”
“Oh yeah.” Sally shivered again. She took a sip of her beer, then said, “I’m gonna piss myself when Addavein shows up in pers… in ‘dragon’.”
“He’s still a person. I don’t think it’s wrong to call him that? Just like the goblins are people… Well. Probably not like goblins at all, actually.”
A moment passed in companionable silence.
And then Sally looked up at the sky. She looked left and right, and then waved one hand far to the side, like she was trying to figure out the size of something.
Sally quietly asked, “So… How big is he, actually?”
“The size of the lake. Like a kilometer wide. They’ve done measurements— they do precise measurements on all known dragons. There’s a database you can look at with all the known dragons, and Addavein is known… But I haven’t looked at his actual measurements.”
Mark didn’t want to really know.
Sally nervously chuckled. “Me, either.”
“It’s fucking terrifying, yeah,” Mark agreed. But he felt he could give some ballpark figures. “So he’s something like a kilometer wide. Or wider. His face is the size of a 4 story mansion…”
Mark fell silent.
Both of them stared at the lake ahead.
Mark looked down, and felt a certain symmetry in what he was seeing. The edge of the lake was a retaining wall, with a meter drop down to the waters below. That edge was pretty much a straight line from Mark’s perspective, left to right, for he was a very small human and the lake was a kilometer in diameter.
Sally said, “I hope he doesn’t land in the lake. That’d ruin the fishing.”
Mark burst out laughing.
Sally started chuckling.
Eventually, none of the fish were hungry anymore and the sun had fully set.
Mark finished off his beer and Sally did the same for her own, and then they got up.
While Sally waited, Mark checked in with the fish house, with an old Farmer named Peter who was in control of the fishery.
Peter cheerfully tapped away at his tablet, confirming Mark’s presence and job completion, as he commented, “You sure fed those fish well! They even stopped nipping at the feed drop! Great job. This is only your fourth time, yeah? You like it?”
“I like it a lot, actually.”
“Can you come by more often?”
Mark smiled softly. “I’ll try to come by more often.”
“Love to hear it! More people need to help the Basic Program or it just doesn’t work right. I know it’s not as glamorous as privatization, but it does the most consistent good for the most amount of people, all the time.”
Mark easily nodded. “Yeah, it does.”
Mark and Sally avoided the tram on their way home, opting for a walk on the road that went that way instead.
It was a nice walk in the perpetual twilight of night. Cool air, the wind blowing through the grassy plains inside the settlement walls, grass waving, and a gentle silence. Peaceful. Settlement lights glowed in the castles of the main area up ahead, the seven towers of the main city all lit up here and there with squares of lights, while the tram station and other buildings were glowing glass sculptures, surrounded by more light. The Noble District was to the right, beyond the castles, and all around them the city walls had lights on, shining down inside the walls, showing that the walls were intact all around.
It looked more like an empty city than a settlement in the wilds.
The tram rumbled by, the lights shining in the windows, showing not a single person was on the tram but it was moving anyway. The servitor in the front simply held onto the controls and rode with the thing as it continued on its path toward the main station far ahead. Mark was pretty sure that the trams needed to be running, so that the settlement acted like a real settlement, for the purpose of Eliot’s Castellan…
Though Mark wasn’t sure.
“So,” Mark started, his voice breaking the comfortable silence of the walk, “You and Eliot getting along? You’ve been paired with each other almost all the time this last week…” He left it there.
Sally winced. “… Well. He’s a noble, and the builder of the whole place and… and we’re getting along.”
She wasn’t lying, but she wasn’t telling the full truth.
“How’s your plan to be a noble yourself going?”
Sally went, “Ha,” then she said, “Not gonna happen for a long time. But…” She looked out across the open world. “That guy back there, the Farmer. He said that thing about Basic work, and you’ve been doing Basic at the airdock, but they need Basic workers for pretty much everything, and ‘everything’ also means ‘manager of apartment complexes’. But that’s not really being a landlord and being responsible for people. It’s close, but…” She fell silent.
She was trying to explain something she didn’t have the words for.
Maybe she needed some help? Some direction?
Mark offered, “Eliot is going to start making real homes soon enough. Now that everything is settled and everyone is temporarily set, he’s going to be selling housing for points.” There was a lot that Mark wasn’t saying, from how there were subsidies of points from the army to whoever wanted to buy a private house, to rentals being an option for a much lower cost, to how Eliot was going to be getting a lot of points from people who bought from him, and a bunch of other things besides. Mark skipped over all of that, and said, “You can do a rental thing, if you want to spend points making houses and then rent them out. Eliot would probably go in on that with you, too.”
Sally rumbled, already knowing much of what Mark was saying, then she said, “It is a morass of shit to get that sort of thing up and running… and I don’t really want to be a landlord, Mark. I just want respect. That’s what that whole idea was all about. You can either be a noble and respected, or be a powerful Awakened and be respected for your deeds, and I already know I’m never going to kill big kaiju like others… So how the fuck do you get respect?
“I want to know everyone near my home, Mark. I want to be in their businesses and helping to make their businesses better. I want to know that the people around me are good people. Like if I see a guy on the street, I want to know why he’s there, and what he’s doing, and that he isn’t hurting someone. I want safety, and I want to make other people safe.
“But how do you make sure that some noble can’t fuck you over like what Tartu did to you? The answer is you can’t.
“He got a slap on the wrist, Mark. A fucking slap on the wrist, for using the HVP to steal from you, and then you got a demerit and bitch work for having the gall to fight back?! I just hate it.
“I know it’ll happen to me again.”
She wasn’t talking about Mark and Tartu at the end. She was talking about Arana, the girlfriend she had had to kill months ago, when the demon Leash possessed her, so that Sally didn’t get possessed herself, while that noble asshole looked on, for he had orchestrated the whole thing as a way for Leash to get to Mark. That noble’s name had been Alonkai Firesteel of House Firehearth, and Sally was still raging all these months later. Mark understood that feeling.
Sally’s eyes turned distant. “I’ll get fucked over by some noble again, and the people I love will die… or maybe I’ll die this time.” She breathed, and then she pulled back. It was like she had cracked open a box of horrors in her mind, her vector going everywhere, and then she pulled back, closing the lid once again. She said, “Being close to you and Eliot is doing a lot to get me respect, but that’s you and Eliot. Not me. I want people to look up to me.”
For a moment, Mark almost teased her about how everyone looked up to her now that she was 8 feet tall, but this was serious, so he did not do that.
Instead, Mark asked, “You want to do the villain thing? I know you’re signed up, but… you and Eliot are both doing it because Isoko and I are. You want to do the villain thing for real? There’s a lot of respect there, and the Church of Freyala already wants me to be an Inquisitor for them. I’m sure the God of War and Murder would be fine with that sort of thing, right?”
Sally frowned a little, looking at the ground. “Aurora said not till March 20th—”
“After, obviously.” Mark added, “The Villain Program is all about taking up space and being a jerk and airing evils and people loving you for it. You’re expected to be disruptive.” Mark said, “If you want revenge against the society that made Alonkai Firesteel of House Firehearth, then being a popular Villain is a good way to get your message out there.”
Sally’s breath hitched at the mention of that name. Her step faltered a little. And then she walked straighter and taller, as she gazed out across the twilight land. Auroras danced in her eyes as she glared at nothing and everything.
She said, “Maybe I should do that, for real.”
Mark grinned a little—
“But come on! You haven’t done shit in the Program anyway.” Sally rolled her eyes and tapped him on the shoulder with a big fist, saying, “What’s all this talk about ‘airing evils’, or whatever.”
“Hey now. I think I did a great job explaining to Tartu why he fucked up a lot.”
Sally grinned, and then she full-blown smiled, showing off bright white teeth. “Yeah you did. Eliot and I heard the techies in charge of the point system talking about changing shavallian to a higher point value in the alchemist’s guild, and some stuff like that. Someone refused to sell some sort of essence to Tartu in the exchange, too.” She seemed absolutely mirthful as she said that. And then she added, “You hear a lot being around Eliot.”
“Look at you, being all sneaky! Big sneaky giant!
“Look at you, being a villain. Just throwing shit out there as much as you want…” Sally looked forward, saying, “You can do whatever you want and you get away with it...” She added, “Mostly.”
“Mostly,” Mark agreed, and then he changed the subject, “So! I still got paid doing Basic work, I have enough for a spellbreaker and I’m thinking about getting one…”
They shot the shit for the rest of the walk back to the apartment, and when they got back home Isoko took out a giant fakemeatloaf out of the oven, along with a bunch of vegetables out of a boiling pot on the top. It was soy, and it wasn’t meat at all, but it tasted pretty good. A bunch of flavorings had gone into the notmeatloaf to make it great, but the vegetables were good with just butter and salt.
Later, in bed, Mark had to put himself to sleep so he didn’t lie awake all night.
The next morning Isoko and Mark left for one final run through the sewers, but before that, the guys running the sewers were delighted to show off the new drones that some tinkerer had made. They were electro-prod drones that could scour the tunnels like in any real city, and they did the work of clearing out the slimes better than most any individual person could ever do. For their final day of sewer work, all Mark and Isoko had to do was walk behind the drones and purity/impurity the sewers as they went.
They didn’t need to even do that cleaning work, not technically, because the sewers were already built to be self-cleaning.
It smelled better when they were cleaned out, though.
The last day of Basic work went as all the others had gone; with work that never seemed to end. Piles of boxes from the settlement stacked up in warehouses, waiting to be packed into cargo hoverships, with more boxes being filled up every single day.