Chapter 68: Making Time a Priority
Subject: Caim Location: Maliscade - Protoflora: Envisioned Ecosystems (Gate District)
“Sorry we took so long!” Gwen called out to Novette when they rejoined her in her nursery.
“Huh? You did? Sorry, I lose myself with these beauties and can’t keep track of time.”
Speaking of... “time” was a subject Caim wanted to know more about. It was long overdue that he learned in what manner citizens of Shroud tracked time, and what normal business hours were.
“Just for future reference, what do your schedules look like? It will help us plan meetings and such.”
Novette briefly summarized her business hours. It was surprising to say the least.
Novette's Daily Hours
[ 1 Hour ] Morning Readiness and Research
[ 6 Hours ] Shop Open, Only Works When Customers Present
[ 3 Hours ] Nap
[ 6 Hours ] Shop Open, Only Works When Customers Present
[ 1 Hour ] Evening Wind Down and Research
[ 15 Hours ] Sleep
“You sleep for fifteen hours?” Gwen asked.
“Oh, you mean because of the nap? I need it or I get all groggy. Sometimes I wake up at two hours and forty minutes and sometimes I use that full seventy-five.”
Gwen asked how Novette could track time so precisely without leaving her shop to view the city's Time Tower, a structure Caim had ignored, assuming it to be some kind of city defense mechanism and/or a way of tracking magic within the walls. That said, he knew what building she was referring to.
Novette's method couldn’t be with the simple timer she’d used with Caim before. Though expensive, that thing seemed lacking in large-scale measurement. As an answer, Novette produced a miniaturized version of the clock Caim had seen in the Guild.
It was far less ornate, but Caim couldn’t read this one either. Looking at it might have triggered a headache before, but that was no longer the case. Whatever the cause was, it was Vera’s fault.
He could no longer feel the sourcetech degeneration ripping him apart, so he had no way of knowing what might be dangerous to his condition. Did the madness even rip a person apart? What other symptoms were there? He didn't know, because Vera wouldn't tell him anything specific about it!
It’s all Vera’s fault. If she thinks I’ll actually spread her name around here like some kind of god, she’s delusional. I'll tell a handful of confidants and that's it.
“How much do you sleep, Gwen?” Novette asked back.
“Well it hasn’t been very regular lately, but I’m used to around eleven or twelve. I don’t need the full sixteen to feel rested like some people do.”
Novette started chastising Gwen for regularly missing sleep, like she was her older sister. It was hard to see her as a motherly figure, even now knowing the scale of her age.
This day was thirty-two hours. How different was the system of measurement Shroud used from the one he was used to? He’d been paying close attention to Novette’s timer, and a second seemed the same length of time as what he was used to. He’d determined that by watching when the device changed, even if the larger picture remained obscured by his failed adaptation to this world.
“Wait, how much do you sleep, Caim?”
“You know, it depends,” he avoided the question.
People in this world apparently slept half the day away, whereas his body needed sleep a third of the day on his planet. Math was not his strongest area, so this could have made a mistake in the mental calculations, but no matter what, it seems he would need to sleep fewer hours of the day than the native humans of this world.
Thankfully they took his answer to mean that his work as a seeker got in the way of a consistent schedule. He’d seen a lot of that in his time here, but he’d also seen seekers who treated their bodies like weapons that needed to be carefully maintained with the right amount of sleep to keep it functioning optimally. Others, chased the high of their next blightseed accumulation like it was all they looked forward to in their day.
“As for me, Nina let’s me work whenever, and so do both of you. I am going to match my sleep schedule with her party’s schedule so that I don’t disturb them while I'm living there. The work actually doesn’t take that long, but I’ll use my free time to do research for both of you and help you out when you need me. Is that alright?”
She was making unnecessary excuses for herself. Caim cared more about a different subject.
“You don’t need to feel compelled," Caim assured, "this is just to help us decide when to meet. How many days of the week is your shop open, Novette? I supposed I should just have a look at your door, I didn’t pay attention to it before.”
There was a wooden placard on her door that listed the times, but it was a lie that he hadn’t looked. He just hadn’t understood the time intervals inscribed there.
“I’m open standard business hours. Every third day I’m closed, so I'm open for business six days of the week. Today is the eighth, so tomorrow I’ll be closed, and I’ll reopen on the first. You can come over whenever I’m not on errands. Actually, take this key. Ill use the spare. You're welcome anytime you're in trouble or need a place to go.”
Caim briefly looked and Gwen and they shared a brief chuckle. Then they explained that he had done the same thing. It was better that she come here than go to his cramped apartment.
I need a better way to communicate with people but I can’t help but hear that there are nine days in a week?! I need this information!
Caim already knew that time in the day felt longer here than he was used to, but he’d chalked it up to post-warp disorientation. Back then, his memories were still a jumble.
Now, he was beginning to understand that it was something much deeper wrong, and he bet Vera would attribute this to that “assisted adaptation” she’d mentioned in passing.
After grilling the two on their schedules in the least-oppressive way he could manage, talking about different subjects and exhausting the better part of a Shroud hour, he fell silent. He’d have to stop for now, but he’d learned some important things about timekeeping in Shroud.
Time Measurement
[ Week ] 9 Days
[ Day ] 32 Hours
[ Hour ] 75 Minutes
[Minute ] 90 Seconds
[ Seconds ] Indistinguishable
It was important for Caim to make a mental note that sleeping hours were in Shroud time, and he only needed around 6.4 Shroud hours of sleep to feel rested. Yet, inexplicably, he hadn’t noticed that a Shroud day was 2.5 that of a day on his homeworld.
I’ll have to worry about what to do with this information later. A simple task should build up my confidence.
Caim let the others know he was leaving for a contract and started for the door. He promised to return soon.
“Already?! You were in a crisis and you’re already going back?” Gwen shouted.
She even went so far as to cut off his path back into the shop proper. A trail of her hair whipped back from the force of the sudden motion. Gwen’s brows slanted down and her lips pressed tightly together. Her arms were outstretched. She’d put her foot down, both figuratively and literally.
“I always take it slow, now,” he explained. This was true, but going slow could still kill him. “I’m getting better at this, and there’s no time to stop now.”
“Even seekers would take a day off after something like that,” Gwen protested.
Caim turned back to Novette and instructed her to stop the flourishflora experiment's timer at his queue. Rather than allow the plants to go out of range of his routine's effective radius one at a time, it would introduce fewer confounding variables if he stopped the routine himself. She nodded and did so.
"Thank you. Please tell me the results when I get back."
He stepped forward and rested a hand on Gwen's shoulder. Her outstretched arms wavered, but did not lower. He placed his coin pouch on a nearby table.
“It isn’t like I’m completely used to this kind of thing, but it really isn’t the worst thing to happen to me. Sitting around moping won’t change a thing. I’m healthy, I’ll work. Use whatever you need from there to try and turn a profit. I trust you, even if it doesn’t pan out and you lose it all.”
Novette stepped forward and stood beside Gwen, her lips curled in a somber smile.
“You don’t believe me. That’s what this is. You think I’m getting excited over nothing and I can’t be helpful,” Novette said softly.
Gwen turned to look at the botanist, surprised.
Novette was smiling, but she was deeply troubled by the idea of Caim disregarding her accomplishments. He thought it might be related to how the world treated her work, somehow, but he’d have to get to know her better to truly understand.
“Wrong. I don’t need to understand the mechanics of the amazing breakthrough you’ve made. I believe you, and that’s why I have to go out and make myself useful too. I want to do my part and make us all real partners as soon as possible. I’m excited for this journey. Until I can find truly trustworthy fighters, of which I only believe I've found one, I'll be the only one who can protect us. By cautiously accumulating strength, I'm contributing in the only way I can right now.”
He was excited. It definitely sent shivers of fear down his spine too, but he was looking forward to this venture.
With that, Caim gently lowered one of Gwen’s arms and waved goodbye. He left the shop, heading straight for the gate that would take him to his next contract.
He would be hunting a new kind of prey this time, krusts. The contract was already synchronized with his seeker badge. All that was left was to find them.
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Subject: Caim Location: Sorus Valley
It was true that he’d failed when he used Comprehension for the first two times. However, that didn’t mean he’d gotten nothing out of it. Caim had learned more about the routine, and he now had two only relatively worthless maps stored somewhere in the SLATE’s memory.
Caim could use the SLATE, now wrapped around his neck, and navigate through the results of Comprehension's previous searches, much like he would when accessing information about sourcetech routines. When he imagined the one he wanted, it appeared before eyes.
He kept walking down the road on his way to Riventread, eyes scouring Comprehension’s map.
This happened back when he tried to use his routine and didn’t know how far the range was. Or, maybe it was just that he was bad at estimating distance in unfamiliar lands. He had searched for blightbeasts, and Comprehension found those within a section of Riventread and Shimmerden each, ending past the routine’s effective radius.
It only found blightbeasts he'd read about in the seeker's handbook, a fact he was very keen on committing to memory.
Not only did Caim fail to calculate the range, he failed to understand the consequences of searching for something living, like a blightbeast. Of the blightbeasts littering the map when he first activated Comprehension, few remained. That was because once a blightbeast died, it would vanish from the map. New blightbeasts replaced the defeated, but they weren’t added to the map retroactively.
Why did I think to waste Comprehension like this… I just have to learn from it, I guess.
Some were variants he wasn’t comfortable fighting. Krust was the only one that remained in the outskirts layer, apart from a handful of leftover carapaser stragglers. He understood why this was after reading the summary in the handbook’s bestiary.
Bestiary
Krust
"These rare creatures blend in with their environment, steadily accumulating energy."
"Their size is believed to begin at the size of a pebble, and there is no known upper limit to how large they can become. The largest recorded specimen by Blightbane Guild scouts was mistaken for a small island. The festerfont land on which it was first discovered is currently under close watch, where the krust remains dormant."
"Killing one is considered a great enough victory, but few seekers take on contracts involving Krust unless they have some kind of advanced sensory magic. That is because Krust are really only violent when they are disturbed. It is believed that they are more blight anomalies, rather than true blightbeasts."
"Despite their dormant behavior, Krust are dangerous simply because they become harder to kill the longer they live. Because they can live quite long, their power eventually scales beyond the established bounds of their layer. A krust in the Outskirts of a Clarion festerfont, for example, is a threat to Initiates."
"If a seeker believes they have spotted a krust, they are urged to first assess if they can handle it. There is no reward for doing so unless they are on a specific contract, or possess a high-ranking seeker’s badge capable of tracking the kill, but keeping the Krust population in check is a service to all. If they cannot or will not deal with it, they are asked to remain put and ask for a seeker to assist them, or at least bear witness to the slaying. The Guild will then investigate the validity of a claim (based on the records of the involved seekers) and dispense payment for the kill. Note: Because this kind of thing can rarely be proven, seekers consider it too much of a pain, and either handle it for free, or pass krusts by."
Caim took this contract because Comprehension gave him the precise location to look in. This made it less of a hopeless task to find one, but he still didn’t know what to expect, so he hoped to find a small one in a place close to the edge of the outskirts, where he could run if he needed to.
I still remembered getting some stares after picking this one up. I’m just glad everyone was still too beleaguered to say something. No one would believe my reasoning, and it would be worse if they did.
He arrived at Riventread and scanned the map. Eventually, he found just such a specimen. It was close enough to safety.
There were carapasers lingering around, so Caim summoned Scion and ordered it to kill the threats while he set about finding a living rock among a mountain of other rocks.
The downtime’s getting shorter. Just under a minute now. I wonder if, eventually, I’ll be able to use it nonstop.
Looking at the drawing in the bestiary, Krusts had many forms, and they would accumulate mass with their increasing lifespan in a way that didn’t make it obvious to an outside observer. The only sign was a pale green discoloration that could be easily missed when a seeker was focused on the other blightbeasts roaming a festerfont.
Enemies gone, safe now, Scion reported and vanished.
Riventread feels different now. I understand the landscape of the outskirt layer at least, and barely anything beyond carapasers live here. I never encountered a krust before because they are so rare, and the description leads me to believe I would have to provoke one to get it to awaken.
Caim continued searching until he found the object he believed to be the krust. It was small, twice the size of his fist. Not a pebble, but not a boulder either. Actually, maybe that meant it really was a pebble? Not that it mattered. He didn’t know how to judge the size of a rock, or something that looked like a rock.
Kimberly would have something to say about a creature like this, he mused.
Kim had been ARC’s head of research and development. She was actually one of their graduate students, but she didn’t draw any distinctions when it came to squabbling over budgeting priorities. That was not to say she acted maturely. She would throw tantrums with the best of them if she wasn’t allowed to have her way.
I do miss those times. Will I ever be able to have that again?
Looking up at the perpetually overcast-yet-sunny-sky, Caim wondered why he was thinking about this. Maybe it was because he still didn’t have anyone he’d trust to take on a role like Kimberly’s. Even with all the knowledge of his technologically advanced homeworld, he still didn’t feel comfortable filling those shoes.
He waited for Scion to recharge, looking around for any hidden carapasers that might interrupt the fight. There was a party of seekers in the distance walking deeper into the body layer of the festerfont.
Caim couldn’t adequately think of this motionless stone as an enemy, so Scion might not be able to help yet. He summoned Scion anyway, followed soon after by Safeguard Catalyst.
The reason for this choice was twofold. He wanted Safeguard to increase in strength through sustained use, and he also wanted to avoid injury before he needed Flourish to heal it.
With one last look back at the border of the festerfont, Caim pulled his foot back and then swung it forward again to give a solid kick to the rock.