I was glad the meeting had gotten off to such a good start, because the other topics were a lot more acrimonious - and impossible to discuss and decide on completely separately.

First, the Points Siphon. Our earlier agreement would have had us pumping each use of the Siphon into increasing our food production capabilities. With the shop providing the rations at an affordable cost, that struck a lot of us as hugely wasteful. Even if the rations were incredibly unpleasant, they worked. Why dump the points into food production when we could pursue gunpowder, working electricity, or stronger melee weapons and armor? The Turner’s near-combat-ready wall-hangings had been an incredible stroke of luck, as was Sofia’s bow. The vast majority of people were either relying purely on Abilities or were stuck with things like baseball bats and kitchen knives. Our armor situation wasn't much better. Yeah, we'd shared the technique for making paper armor. It was decent, but not terribly durable. It wouldn't last forever.

“Affordable rations” meant different things to different people, however. George had been able to casually fork over nearly 50 Money to me, and he had more than that left. Priya and our kids were equally wealthy. Even leaving that aside, our group could feasibly kill the 40 monsters a day - or twenty of the higher-point, higher-money Bladetails - that we'd need to stay fed.

That was a far cry from many people's situations. In particular, the convoy from Royal Woods was full of people who had killed fewer than five monsters total. Having to kill four or five a day - per person in their family - seemed understandably impossible to them.

Which segued into the next discussion: many low-point individuals had approached the colonel, asking for training and resources to be allocated to them. They wanted high-point individuals to escort them around until they got stronger. Unfortunately, they had little to offer to incentivize such assistance, so the debate quickly devolved into “But we need you!” and “Wow, entitled much? We have problems of our own.”

I waved a hand at Colonel Zwerinski, getting his attention. As soon as he gave me the floor, I stepped forward to address the audience.

“Who here feels like they need or want an escort to earn points?”

Hands went up. I scooped up Cassie and Pointy so they could see the crowd clearly. Pointy squeaked out “Got it!” a bare second after I raised her up.

“Alright,” I said. “Now, keep your hands up if you want an escort and have a healing ability, lower your hands if you don’t.”

A substantial majority of the hands went down.

“What are the totals?” I asked Pointy quietly.

“183 requesting assistance, 46 with a healing-focused ability.”

“So if we divided them up into five groups of about 30 people each, each group would have, uh, about nine healers?”

I looked up at the audience. “You don’t need us, you need you. A group of 30 of you could take down anything that’s spawned so far near-instantly, and you’d have about nine healers with you. If anyone did get injured, you’d just need to clean the wound and they’d be right as rain again in no time.”

“We’re not going to get any points with thirty of us!” snarled one woman.

“Order!” commanded Colonel Zwerinski. “Wait to be given the floor to speak.”

I answered the woman anyway. “What, and you think you’re going to get points faster and better having one of us tow you around? I need to take care of my own family,” I said, nodding at Cassie. “I could maybe devote an extra hour to helping someone farm points each day, but there’s nearly 200 of you at this meeting who still want help. And… that’s hardly everyone in the neighborhood, yeah?” I looked to the colonel for confirmation.

“We’ve still got about half the neighborhood hiding out indoors,” he said, expression grim.

“So, yeah.” I said. “Hundreds of people, all of whom need points. Even if there were twenty people each willing to help one person each day, you’re looking at months before we could help everyone. You want to wait? You can all just go, safely, as long as you go together.”

“Ms. Moretti raises a fine point,” said Colonel Zwerinski. “For myself and the other Points Siphon recipients, we made a deal - we take from the community, and then we give back to it. We’re being paid for our time and assistance, and we agreed to it. How many people here have three or more abilities and would be willing to devoting at least an hour a day to helping a low-points person level up?”

A handful of hands went up. I thought about raising mine - there clearly weren’t enough people interested to make this work, and being seen as willing might garner me some goodwill… but I didn’t feel like bullshitting people. I kept my arms wrapped around my daughter.

“Alright. So if we went that route, it would take approximately a month for each of you to get assistance, not counting those not present at this meeting. How many of you are comfortable waiting a month?”

Not a single hand was raised.

“I do not feel the logistics justify a vote. The proposal is unimplementable.”

A woman stood up from the middle of the crowd. “Hey! You won’t even hold a vote on it?”

The colonel’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “I will remind everyone that disruptive behavior is grounds for removal from this forum. Wait to be recognized before speaking.”

The woman raised a hand, expression full of contempt. The colonel called on her. “Why won’t you even vote on it? I thought we were deciding things together. Why do you get to decide for everyone?”

“I don’t.” Colonel Zwerinski’s voice was clipped, irritated. “I wish I did. I attempted to invoke martial law, but without troops at my disposal I was unable to do so. I am currently serving my community as best I can by facilitating communication and coordination. But I can no more decide for you than I can decide for them.” The colonel swept a hand at the front rows of the audience, where many of the high-point individuals had claimed seats. “Without authority, I cannot order them to help you any more than I can order you to form combat groups or train. With the scarcity of capable volunteers, and no authority to force compliance, I don’t see any way to implement the proposal. Do you?”

Put on the spot, the woman didn’t immediately capitulate. She waffled a little, not really saying much of substance, but simply insisting that there must be some way to figure it out.

The colonel stared at her flatly. “Well, ma’am, when you figure out a way to squeeze a gallon of orange juice from a single orange, you let me know. In the meantime, we’ve got a lot more to sort out.”

…

People seemed generally receptive to my idea of sending masses of low-point people around together, a proposal Colonel Zwerinski was referring to as “Combat Groups.” But sorting people into groups ran us right into the housing issue. It made sense to make groups of people who were living close to each other, and a significant amount of people wanted to live right here, on Lavender Lane.

I wasn’t thrilled about this unintended consequence of founding my Shop. It meant all of us - including my family - would have to range farther afield to grab points. I tried raising the complaint, but was largely ignored. I felt like it made sense to make several enclaves around the neighborhood that could swing by periodically to buy food, rather than pile everyone right on top of the shop and have to travel constantly to earn points. Asking that sort of continual travel from everyone seemed like an awful plan. People couldn't move quickly; the badblankets were easy foes if you were ready for them, and they’d only killed one or two people I’d heard of, but you did have to be ready. Jogging or running was alright if you had a blade out and a little bit of strength, but biking was right out. Maybe I’d be able to manage it eventually, as my Life Sense’s range improved and my mastery of it increased, but for most people it wasn’t going to be an option anytime soon.

No one really argued with me, they just more-or-less ignored my arguments. The vast majority of people wanted to be near the source of food and near other people, logical or not.

The connected nature of all our problems meant that it took hours of arguing, and vote after vote, before we could agree on a set of decisions:

The Points Siphon would mostly be used to pursue non-food goals - transportation, improved shelter, electricity, armor, and weapons We would still power up a “farmer” one day in three, to decrease our need to spend Money on food. Food produced by Points Siphon-boosted food creators would go to Combat Group members first, but we’d start keeping tallies of handouts and contributions to the community.

There were still a lot of unresolved issues. For example, a lot of the newcomers were upset that there was already a list of Points Siphon recipients who’d receive Points before they did. We hadn’t worked out the details of how contributions and handouts would be measured against each other, or what would happen if someone continued looking for handouts and didn't contribute. There were a handful of people who were low on the Points Siphon list and were too frail to accompany a combat group. We didn’t a have a real solution for those people… but the day was drawing to a close, and it was unrealistic to think we could solve all our problems at once.

No one was truly happy with the outcome, but no one was ready to start a riot either.

I’d count that as a win.