Bob had grown up in the poorest places in Watts. He was intimately familiar with poverty. He'd spent his entire childhood hungry, dirty, and alone.
Dharavi was still a shock. The people here were also hungry and dirty, but they certainly weren't alone. There were so many people, crowded together in a way that he had a hard time understanding.
They had hired a guide to get them to the address the Facebook group had provided, paying the young man ten mana crystals. He'd been surprised that Bob spoke Hindi, and had happily explained the current state of Mumbai.
There were fourteen Dungeons in and around Mumbai. Two of those Dungeons were reserved for tier six teams to delve, although there was talk about one of those being changed to tier seven. There were then two each for tier five level bracket, twenty-five to twenty-one, twenty to sixteen, fifteen to eleven, and ten to six. The exception was the first tier, five to zero, with four Dungeons.
The government taxed delves at eighty percent, although they did provide food vouchers in return.
Mumbai had been devastated by the integration. The vast majority of the city hadn't boasted a particularly robust infrastructure, quite the opposite in fact, and hundred foot tall eighty ton monsters had caused an incredible amount of incidental damage. The government was working to rebuild, but progress was slow, and Dharavi wasn't at the top of the list, despite being the district from which the most crystals flowed. The entire district had done the math, and determined that staying at level zero depleted the Dungeon less, allowing them to delve more frequently, which in turn, meant more crystals.
Despite the production of crystals, poverty and hunger still reigned in Dharavi. Admittance to one of the Dungeons was as easy as obtaining your delving license, which only required being visually inspected and declared in reasonable health, then getting in line. There were no programs to train delvers, and the results proved that delving could be dangerous. If a family could get by without delving for a month, they wouldn't delve.
There were non-government options for food and water, provided by residents who had managed to gather enough crystals to reach level and had taken the skills necessary to either create water or grow food. Unfortunately, at level five and without having leveled their skills, they weren't able to provide very much, typically seventy to eighty pounds of food. Water was slightly different, as they could create quite a bit more of it, usually around a hundred and twenty gallons.
Bob was well aware of the impact that power had on spells. Despite not having the Divine School of Elemental Water, he could create well over a thousand gallons of water with a single ritual. Of course, he was cheating.
The Old Ways.
You have successfully formed energy patterns without the aid of the System. You have successfully formed persistent energy patterns without the aid of the System. You have successfully formed semi-permenant energy patterns without the aid of the System. You have successfully formed self-sustaining energy patterns without the aid of the System. These actions have significantly increased the value of this Achievement.
Reward: Increases the user's spell casting value when forming patterns without the aid of the system by a percentage equal to the user's tier²
The Old Ways achievement basically provided a boost equal to having fully leveled the spell, without the cost or benefits of thresholds. He'd initially glossed over that particular achievement, focusing more on the free schools and skills, as well as the reduction in cost and increase in power for his Dimensional spells. It wasn't until he'd started free casting again that he'd realized just how large of a boost it really was.
Of course, someone with a path dedicated to creating or controlling water would be just as capable, perhaps even more so, the peak of tier five.
As he listened to their guide, Bob became increasingly convinced that the government had those people, but that they weren't being deployed to Dharavi.
It took two hours to reach their destination, and Bob was tired of walking through narrow alleys where his height and width meant that he had to constantly duck his head, or turn sideways to fit. There had been countless times where groups of people had to back up to an intersection and move down it to allow Bob's group to pass.
They finally emerged into daylight, and found themselves in what appeared to be a landfill. Piles of trash reached twice his height, and the smell was beyond fetid. Bob put up a control air spell to filter out the stench.
A skinny boy, barely a teenager, ran up to the group. He was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, both torn and stained with what Bob strongly suspected was blood.
"Namaste, and thank you for coming," the boy began. "My name is Mohinder Naresan, and I am part of the group that reached out to you."
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mohinder," Bob began, "I'm Robert Whitman, and this," he deposited a sleepy Monroe on the hard packed earth beside him, "is Monroe. Some of my friends decided to joi-"
Bob was interrupted by a loud squeal of delight as a girl, maybe a few years younger than Mohinder, came out from a pile of trash and darted toward Monroe with a battle cry of "Kitty!"
It was a testament to both his massive size, and the general indifference of the feline species, that Monroe was completely unaffected by the impact of the seventy pound child, not even flicking his ears.
Bob continued. "So, these are my friends, all of whom are just as capable if not more so than I am. In particular, Jack has actually built entire cities. Now I can make some water for you, but my help today doesn't do you much good tomorrow. Why don't you explain exactly what's wrong, and we'll see if we can't do something to really help."
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Mohinder watched with trepidation as Shanti climbed on top of the huge cat. He'd seen pictures and videos of Monroe, but it wasn't the same thing as actually having the massive Maine Coon in front of him. "Shanti, be careful," he warned as he looked up at Bob. "Is she safe?"
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Monroe is very gentle," Bob assured him, as he reached over and dug his huge hands into the cat's ruff. "Also, very... let's say relaxed."
Mohinder nodded, then took a deep breath. "The problem we have is that the government sends in water trucks every week, but it's barely enough, and a lot of us don't have any way to store it, or move it. It gets stolen, spilled, or wasted. We used to have running water, but when we came back, everything was broken."
"Show us this cistern you've built," the man Bob had identified as Jack said with a smile.
"It's right over here," Mohinder motioned for the group to follow, watching carefully as Monroe lazily stood up and sauntered next Bob while Shanti sat on his back, hands grasping his ruff, a brilliant smile on her face.
He guided the group around a pile of garbage, behind which was his pride and joy.
"That's impressive," Jack said as he inspected the cistern.
They'd built it by collecting plastic barrels, scrubbing them clean, then cutting the lids and bottoms off of them, before slicing them vertically and bending them to form sections of the cistern wall. The barrels had been fused together, and the entire thing was wrapped wire. It stood an impressive twenty feet tall, and was fifty feet across.
Mohinder smiled proudly. It had taken them months to build, and it had been his idea to wrap it in wire, as he didn't think the plastic wall could handle the weight of the water, especially at the seams where they'd melted the plastic to join the pieces together.
"Call it fifty foot across, twenty feet high, so almost forty-thousand cubic feet," Bob muttered thoughtfully. "I don't know how that translates to gallons, isn't it something like seven gallons to a cubic foot?"
"Seven point five," Jack replied. "Call this a solid three hundred thousand gallons."
Jack crouched down to put himself at eye level with Mohinder. "How many people would be getting water from this cistern every day?"
Mohinder shook his head. "I don't know, maybe a thousand?"
"More like twenty thousand," another man said gruffly. "I'm Mike," he introduced himself, kneeling down as well. "Figure initially five thousand, then ramp that up over a couple of days as word gets around that there is clean water nearby. It will cap eventually as the trip becomes too long, especially when you're hauling fifty pounds of water back, but I've never worked in a population this dense, so my numbers could be way off, and not in the good way."
"So figure twenty-five days if we filled it to the brim," Jack said.
"That doesn't account for assholes," Mike grunted. "I give it two weeks before someone contaminates it, maybe less."
"How much would it cost to fill it up?" Jack asked, directing his question to Bob.
"Twenty-seven thousand crystals, give or take a couple," Bob replied, his eyes distant.
"Ok, so that's our baseline for getting clean water for two weeks," Jack said.
"Pretty sure they can't afford that," Mike said, looking around at the hills of trash.
"The answer is almost never creating," Bob began. "The planet's surface is seventy percent water, and as we were flying down I couldn't help but notice that Mumbai is on the ocean and has quite a few rivers. It's a lot less expensive to make water safe to drink than to create it outright."
"How much cheaper?" Mike asked.
"Well, the initial cost is the same time, but I can create an ongoing effect with control, so figure that instead of eleven hundred gallons created, it becomes eleven hundred gallons cleaned up every hour, with an ongoing cost of eight mana crystals an hour. Over the course twenty-four hours, you spend two hundred and eighty-four crystals, but instead of thirty-three hundred gallons created, assuming you pitched in an extra sixteen crystals, you get two hundred and seventy-one thousand gallons cleaned," Bob replied.
"The problem is we need to get the dirty water here so it can be cleaned," Mike said.
"No," Jack shook his head. "You're focusing on the end. What we need to do is have the cleaning done at the source, then pipe it to cisterns across the city."
"You're talking about building an entire infrastructure," Mike shook his head.
"Hear me out," Jack grinned. "Look around," he gestured to the hills of trash and the ramshackle buildings beyond. "They don't have much of an infrastructure as it is. So let's go ariel. We use elevated pipes, built on pillars that come up from the streets. Each pillar acts as a dispensary."
"We'd need a mechanism in place to keep people from just leaving the water running," Mike said.
Mohinder jolted as someone tapped his shoulder.
He turned to find the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen smiling down at him.
"Sorry about them, they tend to go into problem solving mode. I'm Jessica," she held out her hand, which Mohinder reached up and shook.
"Mohinder," he replied.
"It's nice to meet you Mohinder," the golden haired goddess replied. "Why don't you gather your sister, and I'll wrangle Monroe, and we'll have lunch?"
"Why Monroe?" Mohinder asked.
"Because if we don't feed him, he'll end up taking our lunch, yeah?" Jessica winked at him. "Monroe likes to steal the meat out of Bob's sandwiches. When Monroe got his path, he got a skill called 'Mysterious Paw' that lets him teleport the meat right out of them."
"I'm ready to take a path," Mohinder said proudly. "I just won't do it until Shanti is ready too, and it'll be a while before I have enough crystals for her to level up to five."
"You're taking care of her, then?" Jessica asked as they reached Monroe, who had laid back down, and Shanti, who was almost buried in his fur.
"I am," Mohinder agreed.
"Well then, young man, why don't we dig your sister out of Monroe, and enjoy a nice lunch?"
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Bob watched as Jessica guided Mohinder over to Monroe, and put the kid and his sister at ease as she brought out a table from her inventory and some sandwiches she'd had in stasis.
"She's good with kids," Mike observed.
"An important trait for a man who wants a family," Jack grinned.
Bob shook his head. "Back to the problem at hand. While it wouldn't cost that much to power a control water ritual that filtered out everything except clean water, you're talking about a huge construction project with ariel pipes."
"Figure there's a million people here," Jack said. "Which is insane, but that's the number. We'd need a thousand dispensaries, each of which would serve a thousand people, although most likely you'd have one person out of four pulling the water for a family unit, which means two hundred and fifty people visiting each pillar, each day. That's workable."
"You'll need rituals moving that water around, as well as rituals keeping the pillars repaired, because there is no way they aren't going to be damaged," Bob frowned. "Maybe not the water moving, if you have enough flowing into the system and you have a way to keep people from leaving the water on, the pressure could be enough, but definitely the repair rituals."
"What's the highest you could have a pillar and have it covered by a single repair effect?" Jack asked.
"I couldn't," Bob replied. "At least not enough to matter, we'll need Harv for that."
"Ok, fair," Jack nodded. "Could you summon a forty foot tall pillar in one go?"
"No," Bob shook his head. "Eight by eight by eight, so call it five rituals per forty foot pillar and another to join them."
"Ugh," Mike shook his head. "Add in the repair rituals, and that's almost three quarters of a million crystals just for the pillars."
"We'd probably be better off just buying the pipe," Jack mused.
"Ballpark it at a solid million crystals to provide clean water to Dharavi," Mike shook his head. "That's a big fucking number, and it doesn't take into consideration the ongoing costs, which would probably be around twenty thousand crystals a day." He looked around at the mountains of trash. "Can these people afford twenty-thousand crystals a day? Would they be willing to pay it?"
"Maybe have the government pay for it out what they're pulling in taxes already?" Bob suggested. "It can't be cheap trucking water in here, so it might actually be a net gain for them."
"Let's say we can spend the crystals, and the government agrees to the upkeep, how long would it us?" Mike asked.
"Probably the rest of the time we had allocated for our vacation," Bob admitted. "The pillars alone would take me twenty days. I might be able to cut that down a little bit, but it's a safe number."
"The rest of us could handle the pipes and building the cleaning plant," Jack said confidently.
"Still better than that vacation to Disney world," Mike muttered.