If there's any good thing that can be said about death, it's that there's a certain finality to it. Once you're gone, your troubles are over with. Your troubles. This doesn't keep you from leaving behind an endless mess of obnoxious junk for those who remain on the Prime Material to deal with. Especially if you're an emperor!

Yeah. More political garbage on the voxcast as I drove to work on Friday. They had released plans for the Emperor's succession the following day. It sounded pretty standard: the funeral service and interment, the nominations and votes in the Council of High Lords, the confirmation of the chosen successor, the coronation, presentation before the Gods, and presentation before the People. The last succession was back when I was 6 so I didn't remember it all that clearly, but that all seemed pretty normal to me. But then apparently some Restorationist Councilor noted the agenda left out the bequeathal of the Fast Keys and claimed that this was because they had been lost and were not in the Empire's possession anymore, and apparently this might be the actual motivation of the assassin who murdered the emperor.

Of course Chancellor Rosocress vigorously denounced the entire thing, pointing out once again that the emperor had died a long-expected death of old age and well-publicized illness, that there was no murder and no theft of the Fast Keys, and again called for unity and reconciliation in these difficult times, and for the Restorationists to stop spreading their divisive lies and conspiracy theories during a time of empire-wide mourning.

(Me, I figure he's not likely to persuade the Restorationists of much by calling them a bunch of liars and conspiracy theorists, but hey, what do I know?)

Only good thing to be said about all of it was that the whole thing was going to take place the next day, while I'd be cut off from the world with the rest of the team at my first Adventurer's League raid. Never thought I'd find something that would make me actually look forward to a dungeon crawl, but that's politics for you!

Life was so much simpler, those first few days...

Anyway, once I got to work, a question of aerodynamics arose in the issue Kayla and I were working on. "Could you go chat with Kelamek about this?" she suggested.

"Kelamek?"

"Yeah. He mentioned he had studied aerodynamics, remember?"

I shook my head. "Must have missed that part." I did remember he was from the Buffer States, but he hadn't said much more about his background, had he?

"Oh. Well... yeah, he did," she said, shrugging a little.

So I went over to talk with him. He was busy discussing something with Irgos, but they wrapped it up quickly enough and he turned to me. "What can I do for ya?"

"Just got a question about how to better account for wind resistance in the rune schema. You think you could help with that?"

"Sure, be right over!" I headed back to my desk and he followed, looking over the issue with Kayla and me until we had it figured out.

"Wow, that's pretty good," I said once we had it working. "Where'd you learn stuff like that?"

"School," he said, giving me a funny look.

"Sure, but... you said you were from the Buffer States."

He nodded, not saying anything.

"It just... doesn't seem like something they'd pay that much attention to, living underground with no wind."

The dwarf just laughed. "Oh, you've never been down beneath the surface, have ya? Anywhere there's enough air, enough distance, and a difference in temperature, ya get wind. We prob'ly have worse wind than ya do up here half the time, with it all being channeled through tunnels rather'n spread across a wide open area!"

I bit my lip, trying to picture it. "Never thought of that," I admitted.

He nodded. "We all got things that are hard to imagine. I'd heard tales of the surfacer 'sky.' Even seen a movie or two. Figured it was mostly just like a really big cave with the ceiling painted blue. But then came my first night up here. Nothing coulda prepared me for seein' the stars!" There was a tinge of wonder in his tone at the memory of his first time seeing something I had spent my whole life simply taking for granted.

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"So what was it that brought you up here?" Kayla asked. "You said your dream's to be a warrior like your grandfather; how do you get from there to enchanting cars?"

Kelamek just grinned at her. "My grandfather wasn't any old warrior; he was an engineer."

"He build stuff for the army?"

He shook his head with a guffaw. "No, a train engineer! Took care of logistics and shipping, and fighting back any raiders that tried to keep them from getting through! He ran the very first underground train the army ever built, spent fifty years keeping the front lines supplied."

Kayla looked a bit confused by that. "So he wasn't a soldier then?"

Kelamek scowled at her. "Course he was! Saw plenty of combat too! Ya think the Great Tyrant's forces were only ever on the front lines?"

She nodded slowly. "Guess I never thought about that too much."

"Ya ever hear the saying that an army marches on its stomach? Keeping the men supplied is even more important than training them properly; even the most elite warriors become easy targets if they're starving and unarmed."

"So I guess transportation is kind of in your blood, huh?" I asked.

Kelamek gave a broad grin. "That it is!"

"So why'd you come up here?" Kayla asked. "Aren't cars pretty rare in the Buffer States, with everyone getting around on trains?"

He looked a little bit sullen at the question. After a few moments of hesitation, punctuated by a pointed "hmm?" from Kayla, he admitted the truth. "Came to the Empire because it's where the progress is. Our trains haven't gotten any better in the last thirty years; folks say it's just too expensive to put in the research. Figured I'd learn something about how transportation's done on the surface, that I could take home to help improve things. Ended up picking Dyralight because of its solid reputation for corporate Adventurer's League parties."

I blinked a couple times at that. "You applied here because of the fringe benefits?"

Kayla snickered at me. "You would too if it was a benefit that you cared about."

I wasn't sure about that. "I'm here to try and save lives by making cars safer."

She just rolled her eyes at me. "If you don't count 'positive self-image' as a fringe benefit, you haven't worked at nearly enough crap jobs yet."

"Don't think I want to!"

"Yeah, ignorance is bliss. Still, it does help you appreciate when you find one of the good ones."

"Sure, I'll take your word for it."

She just laughed. "So do you have all your stuff ready for tomorrow?"

"What stuff?"

Kelamek gave me a wide-eyed look. "What stuff? Ya don't have your gear prepared?!?"

Wait, what? "Gear? No one said anything about gear!"

Kayla scoffed. "What did you expect? You can't be a wizard on an Adventurer's League team without protective robes and a magical staff! Everyone knows that!"

Kelamek nodded solemnly. "Not to mention ya got no beard at all! I wonder if they'll even let you in?"

...they almost had me, right up until he said "beard." There was no possible way that was an actual requirement. I just snickered and rolled my eyes at them. "Funny. You had me going there for a second."

The two of them looked at each other and both promptly dissolved into a gigglefit. "Did you see the look on his face?" Kayla asked.

"I know, right? Like, 'where am I gonna find enchanted protective robes on such short notice?' Bwahahahaaa!"

I groaned and shook my head slowly. "We are no longer friends," I proclaimed with mock solemnity.

Kayla laughed a bit more, but then said, "in all seriousness, though, you really should bring something. The Guild does their best to keep the hazard level manageable, but people can and do get hurt in there, and even with healers around, getting hurt hurts! So get some low-level armor if you don't already have any, a simple gambeson at the very least." She gave me a little grin. "You can even save money on it if you get something real basic and do the protective enchanting yourself!"

That just drew another groan from my lips. "Combat-oriented enchantment is hardly my specialty. Guess I've got some research to do tonight."

The rest of the day went pretty smoothly. Once I got home, I dug around in my boxes of stuff until I found an old black leather jacket I had worn obsessively in high school. (It was a phase.) I really didn't want to go out shopping for armor, but the hero-tales talked about warriors wearing leather armor, so why not build my own?

I spent a few hours online researching, and then poking around in a rune simulator, until I had a schema that looked worthwhile. I scribed it from my rune tablet to a blank plate, then I cut open a seam in the back of the jacket, inserted the plate, pushed mana into it until the enchantment took, and quickly sewed the seam back together before the stiffening leather became too tough. Then I grabbed a kitchen knife and gave the jacket a few hard stabs to test it.

Thankfully, all that resulted were a few minor scratches and scuff marks, so I was ready to call it a success. I didn't have any below-the-waist protection, unfortunately, so I still had some shopping to do, but having my own torso armor already cut the cost way down and I was able to get everything else covered for under 70 platinum. A few more enchantments and I figured I was ready for whatever some silly commercialized dungeon could throw at me.

That sounds awfully overconfident, I know. Funny thing is, had it been any sort of ordinary day at the dungeon, I would have been absolutely right on that point.