Thirty day-cycles had passed since Katerina and I had met when I woke up and noticed that there was a status screen in front of my eyes.
“What?” I asked as I sat up. I got dressed, went outside. Near the woods was a three meter metallic arch. On top of it was a statue of Aati, and around the sides were other statues, I assume of the other gods and goddesses. I walked over to Katerina’ next door and knocked.
A few seconds later she stuck her head out, careful to hide behind the door. “What is it George? I was sleeping.” We had built a nicer cabin for Ming and Terrance to live in, with a floor made of wooden planks, and Katerina and I lived in the two smaller huts.
I pointed to the Arch. “That thing just appeared last night.”
She gave me a strange look. “Are you trying to trick me into leaving my house naked?”
“No, of course not.”
“What do you mean by that?” The thing I liked least about the girls becoming fluent in English is that they stopped assuming misunderstandings were the result of poor language skills.
“Uh, just that I want it to happen naturally.” I shrugged, and she stared at me for a few seconds before closing the door. I heard some shuffling around inside and a minute later she came out wearing her leather outfit while carrying a staff. When she got to level ten she had chosen to take the ‘Carpenter’ production class, and a few days ago had gotten her Mage class up to level 20, prestiging into ‘Enchanter’. This lets her precast spells and store them in objects. She went with a traditional staff as the object she stored them in, and carved herself a nice one.
When she stepped out I pointed to the arch and she stared at it for a few minutes. “What is that?”
“I’m guessing it’s the ‘Holy Arch’ I got a System Alert for.” She tilted her head and looked at me. “Just check to see if you also have one.” She had told the System to minimize all of her alerts a few weeks ago when she started getting annoyed by the level-up notices.
After checking, however, she nodded. “A hidden quest. Interesting.” We went over to the arch and she touched it. Something surprised her and she grabbed my hand and touched it to the arch.
“So, we can Summon people to our settlement, now.” I asked.
“Looks like it. This is too important to do it on our own. We need the other two.”
I nodded, and went to their cabin. From the sounds inside, I could tell they were already awake, so I made breakfast as I waited for them to finish and leave the cabin.
When they left their cabin I walked out of the kitchen building and pointed towards the arch. “That appeared last night.” I said. “Apparently, it lets us register our respawn location and summon people to help us out.”
“So, that’s what the alert I got meant?” asked Ming. “I noticed it but accidentally woke up T, so...” We could all guess what happened next.
The two of them went over to touch it and register their location. Ming mentioned a character creation screen for the Settler, and Terrance looked confused. “I don’t even see the option for summoning a settler.”
“What does your mission log say?” I asked him.
“Well, there’s an extra quest there now that it says I haven’t yet completed. Says I’ve only been alive for 24 out of 30 days so I have limited Arch access.”
“Makes sense. You did die and respawn near here.” He nodded. “So, we need to talk about what kind of settler we need to summon. Want to discuss it over breakfast?”
We went to the kitchen and I brought out the meat, eggs and fruit I had cooked. “Sorry about stealing your XP, Ming, but you seemed busy and I didn’t want to interrupt you.” She looked embarrassed at that. When she had reached level ten she picked the Chef class and we built her this kitchen. Unfortunately, she only had four people to cook for three times per day, so leveling up that occupation was slow. “So, what kind of settler do you guys think we need? I think we should go for a production class. We have a hunter, blacksmith, carpenter, and chef. Maybe a tailor? Farmer?”
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“Yeah, clothes that don’t chafe would be good.” responded Katerina. “We did find that flax field near here, so we don’t really need to farm it. At least not for now.”
“And we’ve got plenty of food for now.” responded Terrance. “Way more meat than we need from all the hunting, and plenty of nuts and fruit. So we don’t really need a farmer for now.”
We did briefly discuss bringing in another combat person, but with all of us having a combat profession, me being a swordsman and Terrance being a Brawler, we could more than handle what creatures lived in the area. If anything, the population of dangerous creatures was so low that we needed fewer combat specialists. The girls even spent most of their combat training practicing their skills in camp, Katerina firing spells at the targets I used for archery practice and Ming meditating in private. She had prestiged into a class that translated as something like “Cultivation Master”, which let her use mana to enhance her body, either permanently through meditation or temporarily through spells.
We returned to the Arch and Ming activated the summoning. Only she and Katerina had a maximum MP over 100 points, so we assumed they would have to do the summoning, but when I touched the arch while Ming was using it it asked if I wanted to donate mana to the summoning. The Arch wouldn’t allow Terrance to donate, as that feature was locked to him, but the three of us had a total of two hundred and seventy four mana to donate. By donating just one point I was able to access the character creation screen, but it only allowed the one that donated the most to edit the sheet. Ming went first and created a sheet for a woman. She wanted to diversify the gene pool as much as possible, so she chose a woman that looked Indian. She gave the woman the Tailor class and put the sample clothes on her picture, presumably because I could see the image. Once she was done she sent Terrance to get a set of clothes and made the two of us turn around as she summoned the woman and they helped her get dressed.
The woman seemed confused. She struggled to form basic sounds for a few seconds before saying “Who? You?” Confused, I looked over her character sheet, something which all of those that donated mana for her summoning were allowed to do for the first week, to help guide the summon.
“She has English at level ten, but there’s no background for her.” I clicked the question mark in the corner of the tab and clicked the background box where my sheet detailed my past before coming to this world and a few things I’d done since.
Ming decided to name her Kong De, the chinese word for empty, and the girls took her off to the girl’s cabin talk to her. With nothing left to do here, Terrance and I went back to doing our jobs. He went to the forge to make more tools, in this case everything a tailor or farmer might want, and I went to check my traps. Thankfully, I only had to make one trip, as my Inventory had leveled up to six, giving me two hundred and sixteen liters of space to store the animals in.
Just as I returned with the animals, mostly squirrels and rabbits with one boar and a few birds, the girls left the cabin. “I think we should summon one more person.” said Katerina. “She doesn’t want to be here alone, and being the only one in her situation is upsetting her. Maybe if she has a friend, things will get better for her.”
“Could we summon a man this time?” I asked. “I would like to maintain a balance, but if you think another woman would be better...”
Katerina nodded. “That would be fine. We probably won’t want to summon too many people, and having a third possible couple is a good thing.”
I nodded and, as Ming lead Kong De to the kitchen to get something to eat, Katerina, Terrance and I went back to the arch. I donated my full fifty two mana to the summoning, with Katerina donated the rest. While I couldn’t show Terrance the character sheet, I could describe things for him. For the sake of genetic diversity, we selected both Native American and Middle Eastern, and told the sheet to pick at random. Race didn’t really matter to either of us, we just wanted to make sure that our tiny population wouldn’t cause issues if we didn’t summon anyone else. The next person to be summoned would be whichever race wasn’t randomized this time and after that we would let it pick at random, maybe even randomly picking traits from different races.
The one thing that did matter was that they were a farmer. They would be able to plant crops for us, not just food but goods needed for industry as well. The next couple would be miners, so that someone could gather raw materials for us to use to make everything else. After that, it we weren’t sure what we would need.
I summoned the man, making Katerina turn around as Terrance and I helped him get dressed, and then took him to the men’s dorm, AKA, my cabin, to talk to him. After an hour or so figuring out what he knew and familiarizing him with the camp, we got him a meal and handed him a sickle. He looked at it for a few seconds before smiling. “I know how to use this.” he said before heading to the area of the field dominated by tall flowers we were calling Flax.
Louise, as Terrance and I decided to name him, gathered a bundle of flowers and hauled them back to the production area where he and Kong De got to work turning the stalks into thread. It would take a long time to process everything he could gather, and several weeks to make enough cloth to clothe all of us, but that didn’t matter. They both looked like they were happy with their jobs, and got along really well.
Terrance and I spent the rest of the day and the next building a tailor’s shop with looms in the back and shelves up front. It was the best building we had made so far and Katerina had skipped a day of scouting and practicing to make shelves, a counter, and a loom.
The next day we summoned two more people, a woman to mine clay and a man to mine iron ore. They were both given tools which Terrance had made in case we needed them, an iron shovel and an iron pickaxe, as well as extra backpacks. We did tell them to use their inventory first when moving things, as it would let them move materials without having to deal with the extra weight, but for now the one liter they could move wouldn’t be enough.
Perhaps the strangest thing that happened that week was when we caught Louise and Kong De feeling each other up instead of working. We took them aside, as well as the other two, and the two Transfer women gave the Settler settler woman ‘the talk’ at the same time the two Transfer men did the same with the Settler men. While no one had any diseases, they still needed to understand the possible results of what they were doing, and especially that they should only do it in private.
As we only had one spare set of clothing for everyone, we waited a week for Kong De to make more clothing before summoning more people. This time the women summoned an herbalist and a builder the first day and the men summoned a Lumberjack and a second Miner the second day, this time having him specialize in mining stone for us to expand the village. The new recruits all had randomized racial features, so none of them appeared to be from a specific region of Earth.
Now that we had three times the number of people that we had a week ago, we were able to greatly expand the village. The builder and Katerina framed out several buildings, including a proper bunkhouse for both the men and the women. The builder wanted to try different styles of buildings and was working on plastering walls on the tailor and Herbalist’s shops. The kitchen would be expanded into a proper tavern and the smithy would have a stone forge by the time he finished.
I was trying to work out how to domesticate wild animals with Louise when we got our first visitor. “Hello.” the man said in a German accent. “I am Michael, a Transfer. I am a trader, looking for someone to trade with.”
“Hi, I’m George, this is Katerina and Ming.” I said. When Louise saw him approaching from across the field, he had called us, and the two best fighters came to meet him. “What do you have to trade?”
“Oh, well...” he thought for a few seconds. “I didn’t bring anything with me, but over that way there is another town, and we were hoping to open up trade with you.” It turned out that he was from across the field, past the bamboo forest, and that his village had sent him out looking for others. He had seen our smoke and come to talk to us.