Ora had a constant, vague sense of dissatisfaction sitting somewhere in the back of her head. She’d been out of Haven only a couple of times in the last two and a half years. She’d spent some time in Borirnna, after the uprising, and she’d been back to the Independent cities a few times after Ivterran and Catabron freed themselves from Wasolan.

It wasn’t that Ora was unhappy, she was certain of that much by now. She didn’t want to go back to wandering in the desert, killing everyone she and Tengu happened across. But she missed it.

Of the things that Ora had struggled with, settling down more permanently in the house she and Tengu had once shared in Haven, was the feeling that she shouldn’t have missed being out there. She missed it, and that was fine.

What Ora had spent the last two and a half years doing, rather than fighting out in the sand, was helping Haven gradually get back to a pleasant kind of equilibrium. She was far from the only person working on it. It would have been fair to say that almost all of the nearly sixteen hundred people in Haven were working on the same thing, to one degree or another.

It would be unfair to say that anyone in particular had posed the biggest problem to Haven’s equilibrium. Those few soldiers from the Lord’s House who had chosen to stay in Haven had probably required the most effort to adapt to the ways of their new home, but they were willing to put the work in.

Everyone in Haven, whether they’d lived there before Tengu arrived, come with the first raid on Outer Light, been freed from Wasolan, or come from the second raid on Outer Light and the end of the siege, all had expectations. Everyone has expectations. The problem of managing, and sometimes redirecting, those expectations, was the core of the work Ora had decided to do.

It shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was. Jules and the Sand Crawlers, who had been working with most of the freed soldiers from Wasolan, had been invaluable in the early days, but most of them had gone with Ato to aid Kzara and the Independent Cities.

Ora had known, from her own early days in Haven, that she had carried with her a set of expectations about how the world should be, and how things should operate, from her upbringing. Most of them hadn’t been conscious, and she put it down partly to her youth and largely to Tengu than she’d gotten over a lot of them by the time of the first raid on Outer Light.

Sure there was some part of an escaped wife that expected women to be subservient to men. Or some part of an ex-slaves mind that expected to have to work to be considered useful. But what proved the to be the biggest problem over time was what people expected of Haven.

Throughout the Lord’s House, Haven had been known as a bastion of freedom, a promise of a better life if only you could escape. For some of those more invested in the Lord’s House, like the soldiers and some of the escaped wives, this reputation had been starkly negative: a den of lawlessness and depravity.

What exactly freedom and a better life meant varied from person to person. In most cases it was a small mismatch, one that would never even come up. But with so many people around, there were bound to be bigger disagreements.

One of the jobs Ora had given herself was to interceded in any disagreement that escalated to raised voices. Even when it came to children arguing over toys or sport equipment. She thought it best to keep everything calm and relaxed.

It was so much more tiring than she’d expected.

That part of her mind that wanted to feel bad about something kept trying to tell her that this was nothing compared to her years of fighting, sometimes going for multiple days in a row without much rest.

Ora was getting pretty good at ignoring that part of her mind. Maybe it wasn’t physically taxing in the way that working Outer Light had been, or fighting alongside Tengu and the others had been. But it was so tiring to try to talk to everyone, all the time, about all their problems.

Haven didn’t know about psychologists, yet.

Sure, sometimes Ora would take a day off to help with a harvest or to join in some training, or attend a class that seemed interesting. But it was rare that she gave herself time off to actually relax. She hadn’t mastered ignoring that part of her mind.

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Ryoko was not away from Haven quite as much as everyone else Ora had spent years travelling with. Rather than join in the war on Wasolan, Ryoko had kept up with the expeditions out into the empty parts of the world to look for ruins, for things to salvage. She was away for long stretches at a time, but stayed much longer than any of the others when she did get back.

Ora let herself have a proper day off when Ryoko got back from an expedition and the day before she was due to leave. While they didn’t spend as much of their time together as they once had, they were still very much in love. Everyone assured them it was adorable.

Nearly forty different people had, at some point, approached Ora to let her know that she and Ryoko had helped them realise their own sexual and romantic interests. Interestingly, very few people had approached Ryoko to tell her the same.

It was, in fact, very common for people to seek Ora out, after two years of wandering around looking for arguments to de-escalate and problems to help solve. Ora would often be intercepted in the street, or have someone knocking on her door, looking for someone to talk to about some problem or another.

And she enjoyed it.

But it had probably taken a little too long for her and the other couple dozen people who’d taken to the same sort of work to form a little support group. As much as they did, all, basically enjoy the work, they found that they all needed someone to complain to.

Though Lookout and Outpost were much smaller, and much more settled for it, they did have their own public servants, as Ora and the others started to call their role. From time to time, Ora or some of the others might visit another of the towns in Haven for a bit of variety.

Most recently, a few of them had gone to Journey, since it had been folded into Haven. As had been the case for Haven in the early days, there wasn’t very much need for the public servants in Journey, yet, but it was still worth checking in.

Willik, the old tavernkeep from Journey, was not the only person to move into Haven of his own accord, since the end of the siege at Lookout. A slow stream, in and out, swelled Haven’s population slowly. After the Independent Cities regained their independence, a couple of hundred people moved to Haven.

Generally, as the war with Wasolan was ever more conclusively won, people moved from Kzara and Altok. But, in the two and a half years since the siege was ended, it only amounted to about an extra four hundred people, all told.

Haven wasn’t for everyone, and that was fine. Some of the freed soldiers from Wasolan ended up moving to Altok and Kzara. Some people ended up moving to Narmen. In the end, only about fifty soldiers from the Lord’s House had actually stayed, most of the rest left for Ovek and Oszrath.

As much as possible, Ora and the other public servants tried to talk to everyone who left. There was no trying to talk them out of it, just an attempt to get as complete a picture as possible.

While there was some attempt to reduce the endless different perspectives into broad categories or types, Haven had discovered as much pop psychology as they’d discovered normal psychology. Some people had different wants, some people’s expectations were just too different to what they found in Haven. Some people had different social needs, the same as some people had different physical needs.

Everyone did their best to accommodate everyone else, and if there were the occasional problems, that was what the public servants were there for, after all.

Ora had already felt like she knew a bit about everything from her years with Tengu. But her time as a public servant only made that sense stronger. From helping to build electric elevators into some of the apartment buildings, to quickly improvising a wooden ramp when the concrete one was still setting, to finding disengaged kids and young people something to do that they found interesting. There was always something to stretch her skills and knowledge.

And she enjoyed all of it.

Still, she took a month off for Ryoko’s 25th birthday to go to Altok and visit the Independent cities as a tourist to hang out with Ato, who had found a tattoo artist in the few months since Ora had seen her.

The geometric flower tattoo on her stomach, which she excitedly got naked to show Ora and Ryoko, had sprawled up her breasts and down her thighs and was in danger of wrapping around to her back. Ora had mixed feelings about that, but Ato was clearly very happy with it.

Ora managed to run into Tengu and Jules in the new town called Outreach, which was about midway between the farm and the iron mill that Ato had taken over from Wasolan over two years ago.

They had been debating the merits of chasing Wasolan further south compared to turning their attention back north to the Lord’s House and the war with Oszrath and Narmen. Ora had pointed out that they could just do neither, and relax, and Jules had asked if Ora had seen Ato’s tattoo yet.

As much as Ora thoroughly enjoyed her holiday, she was happy to get back to Haven after her month away. She was happy to be back to talking to everyone, hearing about everyone’s problems. She was embarrassed to hear that people had missed her, while she was gone.