Amelia was midway through a rather animated retelling of a tale from her childhood when Kali asked if they were ready to begin the lesson. Lilith hadn’t been super interested in the details of how Amelia and Lia had met, or, at least, not interested in this level of detail, but she was still glad she asked. She had finally gotten Amelia to open up about something in conversation, and she hoped that it was the first step in becoming friends with the woman.
Amelia didn’t seem like a bad person, per-se, just…prickly, especially towards Jerry. And, from what Connie had told Lilith, she had every right to be; the systems that Jerry had put in place on Amelia’s home plane had had a severe negative impact on Amelia’s life until recently, effectively robbing her of all emotions except for a select few she made herself with Worship.
And, between that and being seen as no more than a tool by those in power, Amelia had cultivated a mindset of trusting no one but herself and a very select few, and especially distrusting those in positions of authority. According to Connie, Amelia was essentially “in rehab” as Amelia’s lovers worked on slowly improving her mindset and getting her accustomed to real emotions. They were apparently near the end of the process, but Amelia was still learning to trust, as her behavior towards Lilith had shown.
“Can I finish this story?” Amelia asked, looking up at Kali with an annoyed expression.
“Take your time.” Kali said patiently. “We’ve got all day.”
Amelia finished her story, and finally it was time for the lesson to begin. Kali shot a glance at Pandora and Jerry, who were still talking animatedly in a corner, then moved over to the globe that controlled where the viewing room they had appropriated as a study was located. After a moment, the surroundings outside the room morphed into that of a misty forest, high up on some mountain.
“There’s no need to look at the new plane for now, so I figured something relaxing would be best.” Kali explained. “So, let’s start from the very basics. Amelia, what is the goal of running a plane?”
“To get more Worship and a stronger army, I guess?” Amelia replied disinterestedly.
“You’re half-right.” Kali said. “If we in were one of the other factions, you would be completely right, but not for us. Our main concern is the wellbeing of the people we preside over; Worship and armies are simply byproducts of this. We need that Worship and those armies in order to ensure the safety of our people, but we otherwise have no real need for them.”
“Yeah, but we’re going to be in a war.” Amelia pointed out. “And we’re explicitly doing this to power ourselves up in preparation.”
“That’s true, but we have to think about after the war, too.” Kali replied patiently. “We don’t want to end up with planes full of miserable people just because we need to win. If we do, then we’re no better than the other factions. There are still plenty of ways of strengthening planes without becoming dictators or creating death worlds like the other factions do.”
“Whatever, I guess.” Amelia said. “Continue.”
“To that end, when designing our plane, we need to be very cognizant of the environment and what kind of challenges it imposes upon potential residents. Foremost among those challenges is, of course, monsters; generally, a good way to start is to take measurements of the average strength of monsters on the plane over the course of a long time, but Jerry’s already done that, so we don’t need to repeat the process.
“Then, you consider how you’re using the plane. This plane will be kept separate from my others for the time being, but often planes are integrated into a preexisting network of planes. Unfortunately, on large planes like the one we’re using, keeping it separate is harder than plugging it into an existing network; people are significantly weaker than their potential when their society has yet to develop, and the monsters that appear on large planes are stronger.”
“So…we need to create some sort of safe harbor for them, then?” Lilith asked slowly. “But we’ll also need to make sure they don’t just…stay there forever like what happened in Haven.”
“Exactly.” Kali said. “And that’s where the real difficulty comes in. We need to make a space that can safely harbor people as they begin to develop proper societies and culture, but there has to be some reason to push beyond that boundary.
“There are a few ways to go about that, but most of those methods involve work once civilization is established, so we’ll focus on what we can do now. Fortunately for us, that’s the fun part of planes like this; we need to carefully sculpt the plane’s ambient Mana and design an ecosystem such that we have the safe haven we need.”
For the first time since Lilith had met her, Amelia looked genuinely intrigued. “How?” She asked. “I tried for ages to change ambient levels of Mana but I could never get anything to stick.”
“That’s to be expected.” Kali said. “To get the Mana to stay the way you want it to, you have to modify all the areas around it, too. If you wanted to arbitrarily raise an area’s ambient Mana, you’d need to decrease the ambient Mana in the areas surrounding it, and then you’d need to hold it in place for a while.
“This is really, really hard to do normally, since it requires near constant attention, but through millennia of trial and error, Jerry developed tools we can use to hold the Mana in place for us. Still, mistakes happen and they’re expensive to fix, so to minimize those mistakes, we need to carefully map out what we want this plane’s Mana to look like.
“Which brings me to the other part of plane design; we need to create an ecosystem that works with the Mana field we want. The concentration of Mana in an area will drastically change what can survive there, and so if we want certain kinds of life to be in an area, we have to consider the Mana as well.
“Now, you can mostly just seed the planet with the beginnings of life and let evolution do its thing, but in our faction, we often like to make sure a set few species emerge, to ensure that people have relatively stable sources of food. Think stuff like grains, vegetables, fruits, livestock…lots of staple foods will be the same in most planes in our faction, simply because they’ve been proven to work and simplify the process of making sure people can eat.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“Ah, I wondered why I was seeing familiar foods in other planes.” Amelia mused. “I suppose that would have to be purposeful thinking back on it, but I hadn’t dwelled on it at the time, I was too busy.”
“Right.” Kali said. “So, we need to foster an environment where those plants and animals can get established without local flora and fauna outcompeting them. They’re pretty hardy by default, but they do need a bit of a push. Usually, we provide that by making a ‘cradle’, an area with an extremely low level of ambient Mana for the plane, but that comes with its own issues. Lilith, can you guess what one of those issues is?”
“Um…” Lilith thought on that for a moment. “People who live there will be weaker than everyone else?” She ventured. “Since they’ll be born somewhere without a lot of Mana.”
“Half credit.” Kali said. “Regardless of where someone is born on a plane, their base level of Mana remains relatively the same. And, in fact, as long as the plane someone is born on has a permanent connection to another plane, they’re born with the same amount of Mana as they would if they were born on the plane with the highest base Mana in the system.
“And by permanent connection, I don’t just mean a portal between the planes; there’s a special…grouping feature that Administrators have access to, allowing them to group planes together. The way our systems work hijacks this mechanism in part, meaning that, at least for our faction, all grouped planes must use the same system. It’s entirely possible to have planes with permanent portals connecting them that aren’t ‘grouped’ in this way, but we don’t like to do that.”
“And why not?” Amelia asked. “It’s worked just fine for us.”
“The swarm is different. Jerry has done some rather complicated work to allow multiple systems to be on a plane, but your system sort of…cannibalizes theirs, it’s not something that would work in the long term.”
“Don’t try it.” Jerry called out, looking away from her conversation with Pandora. “I could only barely manage to do it, and that’s only because I know exactly how the mechanisms they co-opt work and exactly how the system does said co-opting. It’s also super Worship intensive, and I’m operating on a net-negative gain of Worship right now, so it’s not something I can keep up for more than a few decades.”
“There you have it.” Kali said. “But, back to the topic at hand, people who are born there aren’t weaker, but people who are raised there are; there’s not as much ambient Mana to absorb and not as many strong monsters to fight, so growth is slowed. And if we let civilization start there, they’d be deathly afraid of leaving.”
“They still could, though.” Amelia pointed out. “Eventually someone would try and then things would snowball and they’d leave.”
“Amelia, for the entire history of your plane until you appeared, people avoided that one area you set up shop in.” Kali replied. “You were only able to live there because you were so much stronger than everything else that it wasn’t an issue for you. Holing up in a safe area is a well-documented phenomenon, and one I experienced myself with Haven. So, how would you suggest we get around that?”
“Make some event that forces them out?” Amelia hazarded. “If the problem is that they won’t leave, then we just make them leave.”
“But if we do that, then they won’t be strong enough to survive.” Lilith pointed out. “We’ll just be driving them to slaughter.”
“As long as some of them live, that’s enough.” Amelia said. “Once they repopulate then the problem will be solved.”
“And what would Lia think of that plan?” Jerry asked, once again looking away from her conversation. “Ask yourself what she would suggest in this situation.”
Amelia frowned. “Right.” She said. “Well…in that case, we don’t necessarily have to start them in the cradle, right? We can just make small cradles that aren’t suitable for sizeable habitations, and have society develop in a somewhat stronger area that isn’t too overwhelming. It’ll be a lot slower, sure, but I suppose it’s safer.”
“Exactly.” Kali said. “But, in doing so, we have to be very careful in the early stages of their development. We’ll likely need you or Lilith to move behind the scenes in times of crisis so we avoid them being wiped out completely.”
“Won’t they just move once they find these cradles, then?” Lilith asked. “After a generation or two we’d be in the same situation as before.”
“Sometimes they try, but we can incentivize them not to.” Kali said. “One popular way is to make the cradles small enough that they aren’t enough to sustain more than a city. Then, even if some people do move, others will be forced to stay behind. And, so long as we nudge the right people towards the cradle, we can get them to bring back the species they find within for use elsewhere. They’ll need a little push to bring back livestock, since that’s more complicated than plants, but there are plenty of ways to do that.”
“So, can we start talking about how to sculpt ambient Mana now?” Amelia asked. “This big picture stuff is nice, but I think we get the gist, and we can’t actually do anything about that until we know how to sculpt that Mana.”
“And that’s your first mistake.” Kali said. “Even just changing the ambient Mana in one area has effects that can ripple out to the entire rest of the plane. In almost all situations, you want to have a detailed plan for the final Manascape of an entire plane before you even think about doing any modifications. Still, you do have a point; we should start talking about how Mana works on a planar level. Amelia, I imagine you know much of this already, but please feel free to interject if you have a question or correction. So…when outside of a soul and in the absence of Mana constructs, Mana flows from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration…”
----------------------------------------
“Ugh, you have no idea how glad I am to be home.” Amelia said, giving Lia a huge hug. “It was so boring today. I learned a couple of new things, but for the most part it was just stuff I already knew.”
“Good job at sticking with it.” Lia said, happily returning the hug. “I know it’s boring, but Lilith does need to get up to speed on things.”
“I know, I know.” Amelia said. “It’s just that it’s all so basic, so I usually just end up sitting there bored out of my mind. It’s getting a little frustrating.”
“Well, I’m proud of you for being patient. Have there been any fights or anything?” Lia asked. She was a little worried, given Amelia’s temperament, but Amelia had made great strides in the past couple of years, so Lia was hopeful that nothing big had happened.
“No, I’ve been trying hard and we’ve been fine. Actually, I had a long chat with Lilith before the lecture today, and I think we started to get a long a little.”
“Really?! What about?” Lia asked, pleasantly surprised.
“You, actually.” Amelia replied. “About our past, what kind of a person you are, that sort of a thing. And, by the way, she thinks that you undervalue yourself too, so it’s not just us; everyone around you can see it but you.”
Ah, that made sense. Lilith must have been using the topic of Lia to break the ice, and it seemed to have worked. And, if that was the case, Lilith probably talked Lia up a bit more than she otherwise would, just to keep the conversation running smoothly.
Regardless, Lilith had made a huge first step; Amelia warmed up to people relatively fast once the initial wall had been breached, so Lia was sure things would only get better from here as long as Lilith didn’t do anything to make Amelia angry in the near future.
“Amelia, you’re back!” Rose said warmly, walking into the room. “Connie and I have dinner ready, why don’t you come eat and you can tell us all about it?”
“Okay!” Amelia said, letting go of her hug with Lia before giving one to Rose. “Let’s go!”