A few minutes after I got to my office, Doran and his team entered. “Morning Wingless, where are the others?” I sent a link to Baker and Shyft they both sent me images of my office door and almost simultaneously entered my office. I pointed at the door.
“Well that answers that.” Doran said chuckling a little. Over the next few minutes Roger, Julia, Zeke, Liana, Steve, and Toman entered my office and sat down at the round table. We said our good mornings and got down to business. I voiced the opinions of some of the people that had approached me over the last few days. Mostly about needing teachers for the younger kids.
I also let it be known that I was going to start writing books dealing with any of the areas of knowledge I possessed that way we could fill the schoolbook and training manual section of the library. All the others agreed to take time to do the same thing. Julia mentioned her daughter was a fantastic writer and suggested we use her as a scribe of some sort or at least an editor. I agreed and asked her to send her daughter up to see me after the meeting. I also implored the rest of my leadership to do the same thing find a scribe so they can split the workload of having to write and still have time to run Sanctuary. We next went over the inventory and needs list which for a group of struggling people was minimal due to Zeke's team.
We also set out a plan for starting classes to help awaken people starting with the guards and acquisitions teams for protection while out in the world or defense of our new home. Of course, to see if we had any ability to even help awaken we decided to try to help the leadership become awakened first. We set a time and place to start working with them to see how well our training regimen works. Everyone seemed very excited about the process but I had to let them know that the process would be hard and might not work so not to get their hopes up. We wrapped up the meeting with talk of the new repairs and projects that we had planned. Roger asked if he could have a few of his guys build a playground for the children. Liana wanted to institute a meal plan.
Toman asked about arming the guard with weapons that could fight demons because we will get found out eventually. I agreed to these suggested ideas. Baker and Doran mentioned that the forge and workshop was finished so they could start production of guard and scavenger weapons. When the meeting was over the masters left leaving Doran and his team, my brothers, and myself to discuss awakening the others. We all agreed to split the training so we would have time to focus on other projects too. Jasper and Paige left to go have a late breakfast, but Doran hung around to talk.
“So, guys, what are you going to do about that woman the other night?”
Shyft shrugged, “Push it to the back of our minds for now and focus on Sanctuary. We can’t do anything about that right now so.”
Baker and I both agreed with the logic, but I did say, “We should implement some wards further from the compound not to keep out but to warn us or trap the intruders.”
Doran furrowed his brow in thought. “I guess we can try something with arcanium rods in the ground made with your ice and sensory magicks. Give me about a week to process and refine the metal then I’ll get you to donate some of your raw essence. It will be a painless but time-consuming process.”
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Baker also offered, “We can do some with my energy as well for traps too if you guys think it will work.”
I looked at Baker and thought about his offer. “Yeah Baker, your energy would be perfect for trapping and disabling vehicles if its humans that come encroaching.
The next week or so went smoothly. No one came to give us any problems and we finished all the repairs and construction projects on Sanctuary. The training of the leadership was moving along nicely. Since they had prior knowledge of the existence of magick it was a lot easier to lead them through the training regimen. Toman and Roger were the first to Awaken, then shortly after Julia, Liana, Zeke, and Steve all became Awoken. None of them had outward powers yet but they were getting the physical empowerment that comes from having energy inside the body. Doran also took each of them to the forge to get some of their raw energy to help forge their own arcanium weapons.
The greatest part of forging arcanium is that it forms into the weapon needed to best fit the user’s energy type. It was one of the most amazing things to watch. Doran would shape it into a long plank and then with an application of dwarven spell work the arcanium would take on a glow of the shape, size, and type of weapon it wanted to be.
Doran had each of them help making the weapons. Julia created a short sword, Liana made a short sword that looked like a meat cleaver, Roger got a pair of tonfa, Steve got a longsword, Zeke got a pair of long daggers, and Toman crafted a halberd.
After their weapons were finished Doran, Baker and I took some time to create some arcanium rods to be placed in the ground around the property all of them had a mixture of my sensory and ice energy, Baker’s metal energy, and Doran’s earth energy. Their purpose was to act as prewarning to incoming threat, slow down, and possibly immobilize any incoming threat. We installed them in 6-foot increments around the outside of the wall turning the field in front of the compound into a veritable minefield.
We spent the next few nights starting our training and informational books. Baker completed 3; metal energy, magickal augmentation, and magickal enhancement. Shyft completed 2, fire energy and physical enhancement. I completed 3 mental augmentation, Ice energy, and water energy. Jasper wrote 2 books; wind energy and familiars. Doran wrote 5 books; earth energy, arcanium refinement and forging, dwarven history, basic smithing, and a basic energy training manual that I helped him with. Paige only had time to write 1 so far on light energy but it was the most extensively written book out of all of our texts.
Once our leadership was awoken, we turned our sights on the guards and the scavengers. Their training took about a month or so having time to only train 3 or 4 hours a day, but all of them eventually became awoken and started to develop their individual energy types. We were as varied as they come. We had water users, earth users, wind users, a poison user, 2 darkness users, another ice user, fire users, a few lightning users, a feral user, 2 raw energy users, and a few metal users. The feral user was a very gruff man by the name of Viktor and his energy was based around granting enhancements to himself centered around different animals. He could increase his eyesight like a hawk, gain the sense of smell of a wolf, gain the agility of a cat, the list can go on. He was a prime candidate for the Ironhides as a guard.
The weeks flew by with full days of training, creating training textbooks, keeping track of the goings on in Sanctuary, and getting ready to start training and separating people into the different teams. We allowed people to choose a team they wanted to try out for first. Some of the members of Sanctuary weren’t sure where they would be the best fit for, so they just wanted to get placed with a specific team by us.