“So, I’ve been practicing being all leader-y, right?” Kay commented to Eleniah without looking at her as he walked up next to her. “But what’s the best thing here? Should I be standing above the gatehouse all dramatic-like? Or do I have their leaders brought to me as I loom over them from my throne atop a raised platform in my cavernous throne room?” He turned his shit-eating grin at her, “What would be more intimidating? I was thinking the throne room one, but an armored man looking down at you from above a closed portcullis is good too, and it’s actually usable since I don’t have a throne room.”

Eleniah took a step back and looked him up and down with her brow furrowed. “What?”

Kay shrugged as he turned back to stare towards the outer gate of Avalon’s southern wall. “I’m just messing around. Things seem like they’re looking up recently.” He turned back to her with a wide smile, “Can I borrow some of your blood?”

Eleniah took another step back. “What?”

Kay rolled his eyes and walked up next to her. “I just need a drop. I finally figured out that new Skill, and I want to show it off to you.”

“It’s a little creepy at first, but it’s pretty awesome.” Tyuah chimed in from a few feet behind them.

Eleniah slowly held out one hand while staring at him suspiciously.

Kay rolled his eyes, “Stop being dramatic; I just need a drop.” He made a tiny needle out of a drop of his own blood and took control of the one drop that welled up out of Eleniah’s finger. He stared at it as he started pooling blood into a hovering orb from out of his flask. “I have a theory that using more blood from the original might make them better, but right now, it’s just a demonstration.”

“The original?” Eleniah asked.

Kay didn’t respond as he merged the drop of blood from Eleniah with the orb from his flask. Right before he used the new Skill, he had a random urge. Ever since he’d finally figured out Create Simulacrum (Blood), it felt like he’d stepped over a precipice into a new land, at least metaphorically. This new urge came from the same place as that feeling. “[Create Simulacrum (Blood)]” He intoned.

The orb twisted like giant invisible hands were squeezing at it before legs and arms grew out of it. Within a couple of seconds, a red copy of Eleniah stood in front of them.

“Huh.” Eleniah started circling the simulacrum, closely inspecting it without actually touching it. “This… this is a new one to me. I’ve never heard of a skill like this.”

Still off-balance internally, Kay also stared at the simulacrum. “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”

Eleniah looked up from the simulacrum’s copy of her clothing to give him a quizzical look. “Really?”

“I looked at the Skill’s description, and it specifically said it needed something from the original being copied with the Skill. In my case, it said blood, but I think it was really talking about DNA.” Kay paused with his mouth open, then shrugged, “Or maybe that’s just my assumption; maybe it meant something else. But if I’m right, I don’t think there are a lot of Classes or Skills that can do anything like this that isn’t connected to the body in some way.”

After circling the copy of her a few more times, Eleniah stooped at Kay’s side again. “Why’d you use the Voice of the World?”

“It just felt right.” He held out his arm and stared at his hand as he flexed it a few times. “I feel… different.”

“Hmm.” Eleniah watched him for a few moments before deliberately changing the subject, “There’s a school of thought that thinks that using the Voice of the World to invoke your Skills while you use them makes the Skills stronger. At least for the ones with active effects at least.”

“Maybe they’re right; who knows. I just had this sudden feeling that I needed to do it that way.” The simulacrum dissolved back into formless blood at that moment, and Kay took a few seconds to collect it back up and store it again.

“Do you feel… bad?”

“No… just different. Like some big change has happened.”

Eleniah inched closer until her shoulder bumped up against his. “This is just a thought, but could you have finally accepted the fact that you ended up here?”

Kay slowly turned his head to look at her. “… How are you so damn insightful?” He’d realized it because of her saying so, but she was right. This entire time at least some part of him had been rejecting his current life. Some of it was a desire to go home and have a “normal” life again, some of it was a denial that someone as boring as him could have such an interesting adventure, and some of it was a refusal to believe that this was real. Just less than an hour ago, that same part of him had looked at him having a pool of blood, a reasonable thing to have for him to train his Classes and Skills, as cringe-worthy and strange. But that was gone now. For the first time since he’d woken up in that field somewhere outside the territory of Tumbling Rapids, Kenneth “Kay” Daniels was one hundred percent there, both physically and mentally, and he told Eleniah all of that.

“I’m a wise elder compared to you,” She answered in response to his first question.

“So you’re saying you’re old?”

She playfully slugged him in the arm. “Shut it, youngster. What made you get to this point? Do you know what brought you over the edge of that precipice you’re describing?”

Kay held out his hand and formed another blood simulacrum in front of them, of him this time. He stared at where his eyes would be on the copy. “I think it was working on getting this Skill. Everything that’s happened since I showed up has been me going with the flow. I trained with you because I fell into it, became an adventurer because it was the easy thing to do, came here with you when you pushed me to, I even ended up doing what you suggested with starting Avalon. I figured that out ages ago, but I think I’ve been lying to myself that I’d broken out of that.” He mentally commanded the figure of himself in front of him to copy his movements as he raised one hand. He stared at the curvature of his own arm muscles, both on his own body and the copy. “It’s been almost two years, and I’ve just been going with the path of least resistance, accepting things that were happening because they were laid out in front of me, following people’s expectations. But this,” He pointed at the clone, his fingertip touching its fingertip. “This was all me. It’s something that’s entirely of this world that I picked for myself and struggled to achieve.” He cocked his head to the side, not breaking eye contact with the simulacrum. “I wonder what that says about me?”

Eleniah scoffed, “It says you’re a person who got thrown into a tough situation. Stop being so hard on yourself.” She leaned against him and rested her head on his shoulder, “Are you going to leave?”

“Nah. Just because I ended up here because of something I’m not totally proud of doesn’t mean I’m going to give it up.” He quickly dispersed his Skill and made the blood flow back into storage in a single swirl of red. “I do need to grow up a little more, though.”

“You’ve got a lot longer of a lifespan now; you have time for it.”

“As touching as this scene is,” A voice called out from behind them, “We are going to have visitors soon, and I don’t know if this is the kind of first impression that we want to give off.” Ahthia walked up to Eleniah’s other side and poked her in the kidney. “Stop molesting the Mayor.”

“Hey, I’m his teacher; I can molest him if I want.”

“That’s an abuse of power.” Ahthia retorted.

“And that sounds really inappropriate,” Kay added.

“You shut up!” She snapped at Kay before whirling on Ahthia, “And he’s in charge of me!”

“Is he?” Ahthia asked with a raised eyebrow, “You’re the one always talking about how he has to listen to you because he’s your student.”

“Is he still her student at this point, though?” Meten asked as he joined the group, “He has students of his own now; I think he might have graduated.

Eleniah glared back and forth at both of them. “I will have my revenge for this.”

“Alright!” Kay clapped his hands in front of him once. “Now that we’ve pushed out of that mood, Ahthia, what should we be expecting?”

“All I know for sure is that one of the people who talked me into leaving the Clans in the first place is bringing ‘everyone who wants to leave’.” She shrugged, “Apparently, that’s a couple thousand people or so.”

“Do we even have room for that many people?” Kay tried not to scowl as he scratched at the stubble he’d ignored this morning, “And how does a group that big even get here?”

“Caravans, probably. And no, we don’t. We have enough housing to hold about five hundred people with a little bit of crowding.” Ahthia answered, “I’ve been sending letters back and forth with my contacts, so I knew that they’d be bringing around that many people, but they left earlier than I thought they were going to. We have plans, though, so we should be able to get everyone in some kind of housing in a few weeks at least.”

“I don’t want temporary housing for a group of what are basically refugees fleeing a political structure they don’t want to be part of becoming some kind of slum.” Kay ordered, “That’s happened too many times in history already, and I don’t want the kinds of problems that come along with that to happen here.”

“David says he has plans to make sure that doesn’t happen.” She glanced up at him with a small frown on her face, “Haven’t you been kept in the loop about this?”

“No, I’ve been paying attention; I just haven’t been asking about all the details. Daniel said he has it handled. Now that we’re at the moment of it happening, I thought I’d reiterate what I want.” He looked down at her and added, “I already told him and Darten all of this; I’m mostly just repeating it for you.”

“Why?”

Kay gestured towards the small dust cloud being kicked up by the advance party as they descended the slope into the valley towards the gates. “Because you’re probably going to be the point of contact between them and me, at least until they get fully integrated.”

“They have leaders, people who can talk to you themselves.”

“People I don’t know or trust, unlike you. So until I do trust them, you get to pay attention to them and tell me anything I need to know that they might decide to hide.”

Ahthia grunted as she stared at the approaching group. “I understand. I don’t think they’d do anything we’d need to worry about, but I’ll keep an eye out.”

“Perfect.”

There wasn’t much more to say as the delegation approached. The group did quickly discuss the best way to greet the incoming representatives, and Kay’s idea of looming over them from the top of the gates was rejected as too aggressive. A runner was sent to find a nearby room that could serve as a meeting place, which ended up being part of a guard post that the expanding city guard didn’t need at that moment.

Furniture was brought in or moved around to turn the briefing room into what might generously be called a slap-dash attempt to make an audience chamber. Kay sat in a large padded chair from somewhere that was placed opposite the door, while Meten, Eleniah, and Ahthia sat on smaller chairs to either side of him. Amanda and the other ministers weren’t there, with most of them doing their jobs where those jobs didn’t directly intersect with the issue of the new arrivals, and David and Darten, whose jobs completed intersected with the issue, were rushing around trying to get as much work done as possible in the short time they had.

Almost two hours since Kay had been interrupted during his training, the foremost representatives of the approaching group were finally ushered into Kay’s presence. A dwarven man with an intricately braided beard, a very young-looking human man, and a beastkin woman of an unfamiliar kind with rounded black and white ears atop her head stepped into the room and stopped a few feet from where Kay sat.

Ahthia had been sent to lead them in, and she stopped a few steps closer to Kay and looked up at him. “Mayor Kay, these are Elder Atrovel, Elder Melina, and Headman Paj.” She introduced the three, gesturing at the dwarf, the beastkin, and the human in turn.

All three of them bowed, and Elder Atrovel spoke up, “Greetings, Mayor Kay of Avalon.”

While, technically, Kay’s real title was Mayor Kenneth Davis, Kay had long ago decided to use Kay as his reign name.

Kay had been thinking about how to present himself to these people. He could be a bored ruler leaning against his seat, someone who leaned forward and loomed, or he could take on any other persona to try and achieve the effects he wanted. He’d also quickly realized that he didn’t have enough experience to figure out what would be best, so he went for being himself. He nodded at the three of them and gestured for them to rise out of their bows. “Greetings.” He paused a moment. He’d been running over what to say with Eleniah before this moment, but he took the time to run over everything one more time. “You’ve been in contact with Minister Ahthia before this point. I allowed her to send an invitation to those she knew back in the territory of the Weathered Clans that might want to leave the stifling traditions of the Clans and go somewhere new. From the replies back and forth and the fact that the three of you are known to her, I assume that you are the leaders of those people that made the choice.”

“That is correct, sir.” Elder Melina answered.

“How many people are with you?”

The three of them shared an uncomfortable look. “Almost four thousand.”

Kay raised one eyebrow. “That’s almost double what we were told about.”

Elder Melina grimaced, “Things… happened.”

“Do tell.”

She sighed and shook her head. “You already know that some people in the Clans have been advocating and quietly pushing for more change to be allowed, correct?” She glanced over at Ahthia.

Kay nodded, “I do. That group, which you are a part of, encouraged Ahthia to leave the Clans with the others of her age that decided to go somewhere else.”

“Right. I was actually the one who talked to her.” Melina sighed and shook her head, “You don’t need to hear the entire story right now. It would take a few hours to tell anyway. To shorten it a bit, we were planning on having a slow trickle of people that wanted to leave head this direction over a longer period of time. The two thousand number we gave Ahthia in our letters was just a preliminary estimate we had, but we never planned to send everyone in one giant group like this.”

“We got found out.” Altrovel chimed in, “We were quietly asking people how they felt and if they wanted to leave. Either we weren’t cautious enough, or someone snitched because there was a giant dust-up about it among the Elders.” He shrugged uncomfortably, “We’ve been exiled. The traditionalists among the ruling Elders told us that if we wanted to leave, then we could get out.” He gestured in the direction of the gates, “The people that came with us are the ones we gathered up or ran into on the way out.” He pointed at Headman Paj, “Paj’s village is one of the ones we stopped in on the way here. It was one of the villages in this direction where we had sympathizers, and the whole village decided to come with us. That happened more than once.”

Melina took a deep breath, then kneeled on the ground. The other two representatives followed her lead. “Mayor Kay, while this is not what was discussed or planned for, we are here to beg you for sanctuary. We’ve been banished with nowhere to go, and our messages with your Minister showed that you might be willing to take in our people, who were cast out only for wanting change in their lives, to make those lives better.”

Kay stared down at them for a moment, debating what exactly to say. There would be consequences from this on multiple fronts. Politically, it would piss off the Clans. More than that, though, it would set a precedent. Eventually, Kay spoke up. “There will be requirements of you and your people.”

The three representatives looked up at him, still kneeling.

“Your people will become part of Avalon. Our laws and methods of leadership will be followed. I will not allow it for the people you bring with you to become a separate group of people from the Clans within our territory. They must become part of Avalon.” Kay thought for a moment more, then waved his hand through the air. “The details and specifics of what are required can be discussed later. Are you willing to commit to permanently becoming part of Avalon? This isn’t like a small group of people coming here and deciding to live here without becoming true citizens. All of you will have to swear as part of Avalon.”

Melina nodded deep enough that it almost became a bow, all while still kneeling. “We are prepared for that.”

Kay heard Paj mutter under his breath, the first thing he’d said the entire meeting, “We were hoping that would be an option, so yeah, we’re totally alright with that.”

Kay glanced over at Eleniah.

“They don’t want to end up as a lower class of not-quite citizens,” She whispered to him.

“Then we can move ahead.” Kay opened his mouth to continue, then stopped. He stared at Melina for a moment. “Elder Melina, I do apologize if this is rude, but what kind of beastkin are you?”

“I’m a badger beastkin, Mayor Kay.” She held out her hand for a moment, and Kay saw thick claws in place of where her fingernails would be.

“Interesting.” Kay had a brief thought, but he set it aside for the moment. “Well, we have a large number of new people coming in this direction that are all going to join us as citizens of Avalon, it seems, and there’s a lot of work to get done. So, to quote a skilled author’s book, let’s be about it.”