Somewhere far away yet very close, the System chuckled and pulled up her own description for an achievement she had given Arthur. One that even he, by his own preference, didn’t know about.

Rise Together (Achievement)

Again and again, you’ve tired your success to the success of others. Far from riding coat-tails, you’ve offered your own, again and again. To anyone you could help along the way, regardless of whether you knew them well or not.

If it were just once or twice, this might go unnoticed. The sheer density of your actions that include this in one way or another, however, has not only made it a common occurrence but in fact the defining feature the majority of your friends know you by. They think of you, one and all, as helpful in a way they don’t quite understand.

Because of this, your fate is now tied to those you help in a more direct way. As you help others progress, your potential for progress will grow a small amount. There’s only one catch: this perk won’t work for someone who knows about it. It’s a reward for altruism, and nothing destroys the altruistic impulse like knowing there’s something in it for you.

If you’d like to claim this achievement, you must first agree to forget about it. It will exist, working in the background of everything you do. If you don’t, you will gain a significant amount of experience as with most achievements, but nothing more.

Philbin had got much closer to the answer than he knew. Over the course of the centuries, the system had changed in response to her children. She understood them better, and could see how things looked through their eyes just a little more clearly. But they had come to understand her better too. They built up a history of guesses about the intricacies of how she worked that was far more correct than it was wrong. They knew little bits and pieces of her personality, even if they weren’t sure she had one to begin with. They were, after all this time, becoming quite wise.

That even applied to rarer events. There had not been a huge number of visitors to her world, but there had always been some, and they had always managed to help. Part of that had to do with the kinds of souls that were drawn to this place, but much of it was simply because they had the energy to help with in a way no demon could compare to.

The Bear had, of course, carried the most. The system hadn’t brought him here. Neither had the old man, bless him. They couldn’t have because the bear hadn’t died or even come close to it. He had been blown there, carried on the waves of an explosion so large and odd that it bridged literal universes, all to carry a cargo of exactly one soul. He had been so loaded up with potential that she was forced to be quite crude in how she expressed it, turning it into massive amounts of strength that she simply counted on him not to misuse.

The Bear hadn’t disappointed her on that count. The rest was history.

With other visitors, she had been more subtle. Arthur’s Rise Together might not have mentioned the potential he brought with him from Earth, but it was built almost entirely on that foundation. Earth was, near as she could tell, a place of flexibility. They didn’t have a system. They instead relied on constant change and progress to keep them safe and warm. When he came to the Demon World, the energy he brought was flavored in accordance to that change.

It had taken some careful tweaks to make all that potential safe to use, but with Arthur, she had time to figure out the best course of action. The Bear had not given her that luxury. If she didn’t move quickly with him, he would have blown up, taking the better part of the planet with him. With Arthur, she was able to take a more relaxed approach.

Arthur’s potential was tied to an achievement more powerful than most class skills, and its implications flowed both outwards and inwards. The first stop in that cycle was his friends. As he helped them, they gained just a little bit of the effects of his potential. It wasn’t much, but she could see it at work in Arthur’s blacksmith friend’s machines, as well as his water-demon girlfriend’s runes.

Lily, of course, was alight with potential. Arthur had helped her more than anyone. She would have eventually done just fine even without his help. With it, she had so much built up potential just from head pats that she had been able to force the system to give her a class much earlier than was normal. Normally, that would have hurt her, at least in the long run. Wrapped in Arthur’s gentle energy, though, she’d be just fine.

After all that help and potential flowed through his friends, it then made a U-turn and dove back towards Arthur, now tuned to the Demon World courtesy of its own citizens. Once the potential was changed to fit the world, there was nothing it could do to hurt Arthur’s new environment unless he intentionally tried to use it that way. The system was sure he never would. She knew of butterflies more violent than he was.

She briefly considered rewarding Philbin. He didn’t know about Arthur’s achievement, so there was no way he could have guessed the particulars of what was going on. Still, he had come so very close in so many different ways that she felt she should award him somehow. She got to work making an achievement, something that would recognize what he had done without giving him too much confirmation he was right about his guess. It was tough work.

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Halfway through, she stopped and sighed in relief. As Philbin sat and pretended to listen to the presentation, the system could see a familiar glow wend its way through the air, settling on top of the tour guide’s system class like a cat making itself comfortable on a blanket.

There was no need for an achievement now. Arthur had, in his own way, helped the demon grow. And as a result of that, Philbin would have his reward in full, whether the system moved or not.

She sat down and tried to brew another pot of tea. She really did like Arthur more than before. Things just tended to work themselves out when he was near.

—

“And that’s where I was able to cheat,” Milo summarized. “We have almost unlimited slapstone, and a good vein of iron. Not every settlement is going to have that from the get-go.”

“Couldn’t you just make the rails from something different?” a turtle demon in the front row yelled at Milo. “Granite, or some other hard rock.”

“It’s possible. I couldn’t do it because I don’t have the class skills to make it work. A mason certainly could. A miner might be able to, as well.”

The talk was going pretty well. Arthur had introduced Milo, then gave a short explanation of what it was like to live in a semi-mechanized town from his own perspective. There were dozens of machines in Coldbrook, all of which were operating to make people’s work easier. There were grinders, water pumps, and dozens of other little innovations that made things faster.

That hadn’t had the impact he had hoped it would. Machinists were rare but they weren’t unheard of, especially in the capital. And even if the information was more novel, there was only so much the average smith could do with it. But when Arthur mentioned getting lunch and mail through Milo’s rail system, the room blew up.

“How hard would it be for a normal smith to implement this?” an infrastructure class in the front row shouted. “Could they work from plans slowly and accomplish the same thing?”

“Parts of it,” Milo said. “Even I couldn’t do all the work alone. The brain of the system is too complex for me to have designed, even if I understand how it works. But a smith and clockwork class working together should be able to do it.”

“How does it scale?” another demon asked. Arthur suspected the speaker was a librarian. He had spent a lot of time around Spiky, enough to spot someone with the habit of obsessively taking notes just from how they held their pads of paper and pens. “Given enough resources, could implement this at the capital?”

“Now that’s a good question.” Milo nodded. “Yes and no. The rails just cost what they cost. That’s a per-mile expense. If anything, it gets cheaper the more you have to make and maintain. Efficiencies of scale and all that.”

“But not the brain.” The librarian looked satisfied, like a guess had been confirmed.

“But not the brain. It grows faster than the number of stops it serves. Exponentially faster. The first couple hundred houses are easy. You can keep that machine in a shed in your backyard. The first couple thousand need a dozen good-sized barns. For a city the size of the capital…”

“A mountain.” The librarian’s eyes glinted as he worked through the mental math. “Maybe more.”

“Yeah. It gets unmanageable quick. The complexity multiplies by itself. You can break it up into a bunch of smaller systems and manage that, but then they can’t talk to each other. You’d need something where they meet to sort it all out.”

“That’s less of a problem than you’d think!” a woman yelled from the back. “I’m a postmaster. That’s something our class allows for. You can make it into a hub and spoke model!”

“Right but that needs someone stationed there. I’m still working on it. As is my clockmaker. But we are stuck. It’s been months without much progress on the problem, but we hope that some of you might help crack the puzzle. Or might know somebody else who will.” Milo sighed. “I wish it was as easy as figuring out how mechanical pumps can help wellers. That was easy.”

A handful of people in the audience audibly gasped. Milo was caught off guard as a dozen questions about how that worked flew towards him.

“It’s just pumps!” Milo yelled. “They move water.”

“But how?” a weller yelled. “None of the popular rune stacks would work with that kind of outside interference.”

“And how did you convince your weller to let you?” a smithy-looking rhino demon asked before glancing at the weller who just shouted his question. “No offense but they are pretty territorial.”

“That’s true.” The same weller nodded.

“Well, she’s my friend. So we just talked about who would handle what. As for the runes, I have no idea. That’s outside of my pay grade. I’d have to have Mizu here to explain it. She’s giving a talk of her own tomorrow, I think. You could come to that.”

“Oh, wow,” Philbin said. “That’s going to be quite the thing.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Look at that weller. He’s going to tell every single water class he knows about it. They’ll all be here.” Philbin looked around the room. “Actually, not here. They won’t fit.”

“Oh, that’s going to be a lot of public speaking,” Arthur commented.

“She’s afraid of it?”

“She’s not afraid of anything, I think. But she doesn’t love it. I’ll warn her.”

“Do. And I’ll start working on getting us the space we need. How did she pull it off anyway?” Philbin asked. “If that particular weller is confused about it, she must have done something big.”

“A whole new rune stack. Her mom helped her work on it.”

Philbin nodded like that was normal and stood up to talk to the room. “Everyone, it looks like Mizu’s presentation will be on a new rune stack and its interactions with these pumps. Just to be clear.”

The people who had murmured about the pumps before almost exploded with excitement now. Philbin smiled in satisfaction.

“Thought so. I’ll see if I can get access to one of the bigger backup auditoriums. We always keep a couple free for just this kind of situation. It will be off-site now though,” Philbin said to Arthur.

“Sorry for the trouble,” Arthur said meekly.

“Trouble? Arthur, I’m getting achievements just thinking about this problem. It’s a tour guide’s dream. You’ve made my whole year.”

“He’s like that.” Lily finished off a plate of the complementary nuts and began working on the crackers. “Don’t try to get used to it either. He just changes tactics.”