Matt postponed heading into town for the few moments it took to take a quick shower in his enchanted tub, then he and Lucy set off down the path to the village. The Gaians had cut the path just the week before, with plans to pave it before the month was up. Ramsen called it the first step in building up Gaian transportation infrastructure to its former glory, and Matt suspected he was only half-joking.
Matt was, as always, fully armed and armored. The Gaians had, thankfully, come out of the museum fully clothed, just as they had been in the simulation. Within just a few months, they had developed some primitive capacity to make clothes, which, bolstered by some estate credit contributions from Matt towards bolts of cloth and skeins of thread, had them very close to self-sufficiency on the wardrobe front as well.
They had offered to make him some clothes, claiming that he must be uncomfortable in all that armor. He had taken them up on it to create some under-layers he could wear between the armor and his skin, which was an upgrade that he desperately needed, but not much beyond that. Matt had been living in constant danger or the potential of constant danger for a long, long time. He was no longer comfortable without something solid around him. It was all Lucy could do to get him to leave his non-shovel weapons home, arguing that they were all redundant compared to an unbreakable, impossibly sharp Gaian Nullsteel shovel. She was right. Though he kept a holdout dagger somewhere on his person.
The Gaians were sure he couldn’t be comfortable like that, but for once the Gaian mothers and grandmothers hadn’t steamrolled him into happy cotton compliance. They had just looked at him, troubled, and accepted it as something they couldn’t change. For now. He had a strong suspicion that this wasn’t a permanent reprieve.
“So, are you still going to tell them?” Lucy was no longer visible or audible to the Gaians, now that they were out of the museum. It was something that she and Matt had known was going to happen, but Matt suspected the sudden change still stung. For a little while, she had been able to play with the children and have full, acknowledged conversations. The Gaian kids still asked about “the fun angry girl” sometimes.
The practical upshot, however, was that Matt could have a full conversation with her without danger of being overheard, provided all the important information came out of Lucy’s mouth and not his.
“I am. It’s not going to be fun, though. Some of them are pretty protective.”
“The grandmothers? Yeah. They even scare me. I feel like if I was visible they’d have me full of cookies and pulling weeds in ten minutes.”
“Not just them. Ramsen, too. I think he thinks of me like that statue he wanted to build.”
“In that you are strong, but don’t think much?”
“More like something to put in front of his people to keep them working, but also something that shouldn’t do any work itself, anymore.”
It was true. Ramsen would include Matt in every speech. It wasn’t malicious, or even something he was doing to build power for himself. It was just normal thankfulness, combined with reminding his people they had a debt to repay. At the same time, he vigorously protested Matt putting himself in any kind of danger at all, and rightfully pointed out that almost every mundane task Matt might help with was better and more expertly handled by another Gaian.
Matt suspected that if Ramsen and the grandmothers had their full way, he’d sit in a big chair in a short tower overlooking the town, like a lifeguard. He’d be close, visible, but ultimately there for spiritual support more than anything else.
As they broke the borders of the town, the greetings started. Matt politely deflected several offers of excess vegetables, saying he was stocked up. True to form, the Gaians noticed that this seemed to be true and didn’t press. Otherwise, it was all smiles and waves as Matt made his way towards the town cafeteria.
Almost every Gaian could cook for themselves, but Ramsen had explained that the town cafeteria was important anyway. The cafeteria was the town’s largest building, and any Gaian could go there for a free, delicious breakfast, lunch, and dinner any time they pleased. It provided an option besides eating by themselves for Gaians who lived alone, as well as saving time on average for the town overall. It helped increase the total pace of work for the town, and it was also a healthy thing for building community and friendship on an ongoing basis.
Matt didn’t care about any of this, at least not much. He cared about the food. The Gaians claimed that while they had solved the mana-deficiency problem in the vegetables, they were still somewhat perplexed by the lack of flavor from the ingredients. But for Matt, who had high PER and an eating skill that made food more palatable, it was a flavor explosion when eating the large-portioned traditional Gaian cuisine.
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They seemed to be using different words every time, but by some trick of Matt’s reincarnator translation, every morning meal came out to something like “breakfast vegetables”. Today’s breakfast vegetables turned out to be a kind of vinegary, peppery diced vegetable oatmeal. If an Earth human had tried to make the same thing, he suspected it would have been gross. This melted in his mouth, filling him with dozens of nutrients at once, while his body trumpeted the sensation as a great victory over his previous long-term semi-starvation. It was like eating a parade, and by the time he left the cafeteria, he was almost staggering from the fullness.
He was glad for the strength the food gave him, both emotionally and physically. Tough conversations took a lot out of him. He’d need it.
—
A week ago, Barry had been filling Matt in on some details, and brightening the experience for himself somewhat by absolutely dominating Matt in a game of wallball.
“I swear you are cheating somehow. Nobody is this good at this game.”
“Stop whining and turn around.” Barry whipped the ball at him, hard. Vitality and armor meant it didn’t really hurt that much, but it was the humiliation of the thing that mattered.
“Okay, so you were saying. I’ve been doing pretty good on prizes lately.”
“Yes. Especially in terms of your takedown of Scourge. I know you don’t have much context for how much these things cost, but some of those items were so rare they approached being legends. Draining the system completely helped cover the cost, but the rest of it came from the energy stores in the dungeons. And those only recharge slowly, as you already know.”
“How slowly are we talking about?”
“For the Gaians, and the kinds of things they want? Fast enough. But for you to gear up and get strong enough to take down any who comes? Not nearly fast enough. I’m barely keeping up right now, and all you are asking for are bricks and spinning wheels. Soon enough, I’m not even going to be able to keep up with your stat growth. Those points cost more as the totals get higher, believe it or not.”
“So what do I do?” Matt sat down on the curb of the street behind the grocery store nearest to the home where he grew up. The wall of the store was perfect for wallball, and he had played a ton of it with his friends there over the years before they got too old for it to be exciting anymore. Somehow, Barry had decided this game was exactly what Matt needed right now. As usual, he was right.
Barry sat down beside him, looking serious.
“I think you already know what you have to do, Matt. You just don’t want to do it. It’s not pleasant for me to think about, either. But the alternatives are worse.”
Nothing had ever made Matt want to argue more, but he knew Barry was right.
—
With all their polite breakfast conversations done and nothing left to delay them, Matt and Lucy ambled on toward what they called “the war tent”. It wasn’t a tent, and had nothing to do with war. But since the Gaians took farming and civilization-building very, very seriously, it ended up feeling like it was both anyway. Every time they entered, they stood a good chance of walking in on a man banging on the table and saying something like “Turnips again! We can’t bet it all on turnips, Varsal. What if there was a blight? We’d be lost. We MUST attack on more than one front.”
It was intense, and the kind of thing Matt would laugh at if he didn’t have a few years of context on what it was like to starve. Lucy, who lacked that concept or any risk of hurting anyone’s feelings, mocked it mercilessly during her and Matt’s downtime.
This time, there was no argument going. Ramsen and the other leader-Gaians sat stooped over what looked like a map of Matt’s property, with lines on it moving from central circles to drawn channels crossing every plot and breaking off into smaller channels like twigs from a branch. As Matt approached, their conversation cut off as they all stood in greeting.
“Matt!” Ramsen said. “Welcome. We were just finishing our plans for improving the irrigation system. We think we can successfully irrigate 20% more land with what we have. Ardi had a wonderful idea involving covering the irrigation channels themselves, to ward off evaporation. Of course, the air will be just that much more dry, but we weren’t making tremendous progress on that front, anyway.”
“Great! Glad to hear it.”
Ardi, who belonged to the large working-mother class of Gaians, seemed to almost immediately notice something else was on Matt’s mind.
“Ramsen, can’t you see he’s here for something different? Let the boy talk. Come, Matt. Sit.” It wasn’t a request so much as it was an intimidating and kindness-driven command, one Matt was incapable of refusing. He slid into a stool made of a carved rock while the rest of the Gaians cleared their plans from the table, glad for the slight delay.
“So what’s on your mind, Matt? Did you want to talk about the hunting parties again?” Ramsen asked.
“No, I think we have that under control already. This is something different. I need to go on a trip.
Ramsen looked confused. “Wherever to, Matt?”
There weren’t many places for Matt to go on trips to. He had offered to go reclaim desks and chairs from the various Gaian outposts before, but it had been decided that his time was better spent just grinding dungeons, of which there were plenty nearby. Besides that, there wasn’t much. As far as Matt had walked across the Gaian landscape, he was well aware that all the interesting stuff that was going on in Gaia was here. Almost, anyway.
“I thought I’d take a trip out to the teleporter.” It was a simple statement, but it hit all the Gaians like a brick. The teleporter had been built for one reason, and one reason only. It automatically linked up with the planet with the closest relationship with Gaia on some scale even they didn’t fully understand. It was originally for evacuation, a sort of last-ditch option the Gaians hadn’t actually been able to take advantage of.
“You want to leave us, Matt? You aren’t happy here?”