Commander Faulkin

The Free City of Lotrot had begun as a fortified encampment of the Merchants Guild, and the merchants still held a significant place in the city's running. The merchants, however much they might have been foundational to Lotrot's origins, had soon been outnumbered by the artisans and adventurers drawn to the Rim by the abundance of raw mana crystals and monsters. The twin Talons of the Lotrot military had their origins among a particularly well organized group of adventurers and various guards hired by the merchants, the artisans, and, later, the magi who came with their own interests in the Rim and the Mana Wastes beyond.

The arassi had migrated south to distance themselves from the monstrous side of their parentage, but they none the less shared in the deep communal inclinations of their kobold ancestors. Being the majority demographic among the populace of Lotrot, they had strong, some might even say severe, reactions to the few individuals that had attempted to seize sole power over the city. Every last one of them had been immortalized, their bronze dipped heads adorning the Arch of the Southern Promenade. As most of the castings had taken place before (or rather, during) the deaths of the Failed Usurpers, the expressions expressed agony and horror.

Commander Faulkin had grown very fond of imagining Dame Chasraheil's head adorning the Arch. The representative of the Rimward Mages Association in Lotrot just had a way of stating her opinions that raised Faulkin's scales. "Obviously, we cannot allow such a resource to remain in the possession of Travelers, no matter how affable they may seem. The are demons, after all."

"Do you know how to wrest control of that dungeon from the Grand-Tapestry-appointed Champion of Order, Dame?" Crafts Master Gilvillian asked that with less offense and more curiosity than his words implied.

"Sufficient study should provide us the answer," the elf replied, looking down her nose at the gnome.

"That would be a 'no', then, wouldn't it?" Tover of the Lupines, head of the Adventurers Guild of Lotrot, said. "The only way we are going to get that opportunity for such a study is if we establish friendly relations. Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"As much as it pains me to agree, Guild Master Tover appears to be correct. Even more painful for me to state this, but alas, bitter sweet politics: the dungeon, with its 'Design Lead' as an ally stands to profit us more than enraging the parandrians by taking overt action against a Champion of Order. They do so idolize those the Grand Tapestry singles out." The deep voiced arassas who said that made a study of examining her claws. Master Merchant Zarabelkami did not quite smile at the elf as bare her teeth in the Dame's general direction. "They can be so touchy about honoring the Will of the Grand Tapestry. How many of your mages, ah, 'disappeared' after your last run in with Ba'Ahrat's band?"

The elf narrowed her eyes and returned the polite show of teeth. "How would they even know?"

Faulkin said, "Moot point. Neither Patrollers nor Delvers will participate in any attempt to subdue the Studio of Capricious Dreams. It's too dangerous, especially when we already have the start of friendly relations. Why risk lives needlessly?" She looked at her fellow City Councilors, meeting each gaze in turn. "I move that we open negotiations with the Travelers in control of the new dungeon."

"Seconded," Tover and Zarabelkami chorused. They eyed each other with a mutually amused disgust.

The Crafts Master said, "I agree."

The last member of the City Council, Speaker Drelan Noc Scalla, added his opinion to the discussion. He held the finely woven rainbow spectrum cloth. "The reports of our first Delvers have all mentioned the art of this new Studio. How great a tragedy would it be to rob our future selves of the beauty that may yet come from this Studio of Capricious Dreams for the sake of short term greed? I will not condone provoking conflict with these Travelers. Further, Dame Chasraheil, calling them demons when they have every indication of being Aware strikes me as a deliberate provocation of that conflict."

The silver haired elf sniffed. "I reserve the right for the Rimward Mages Association to charge triple rates when you fools finally come crawling to us to save you from those demons. And that, Drelan, is what they are, regardless of their Awareness."

"Your show of anti-diplomacy is not going to get Haur invited to these meetings." The Master Merchant allowed her scales to ripple from her muzzle down to her claw tips, their gilded edgings creating a light show of disdain.

Faulkin briefly pictured Zarabelkami's head on the Arch next to the Dame's. "That is a four to one vote to negotiate. Whom do we want to send?"

The Lotrot City Council spent the rest of the session arguing the elf into picking a reasonable representative.

*~*~*

Kargerran

Sergeant Kargerran saluted Delver Talon Commander Muglibaum.

Master Merchant Zarabelkami, her gilded scales aggressively announcing her presence, chuckled at the formality from the comfort of her enchanted landau as it hovered beside the Talon Commander, the top folded down to better enjoy the pleasant day.

Seir Wejerlan, a relatively young elf representing the Rimward Mages Association, maintained a pleasant expression that somehow failed to hide his irritation. While the Master Merchant delighted in poking the mages, Kargerran expected that the irritation had more to do with the fact that Crafts Master Gilvillian's senior apprentice, Elorikin, had managed to secure a position in the delegation. The charming gnelf was well known for calling all of elven kind her siblings. When asked, she would happily explain that she was just being democratic. After all, Elorikin's gnomish mother refused to say with whom she had conceived her eldest daughter, so as far as she knew, any elf could be her half sibling.

The Crafts Master, not to be thoroughly over shadowed by the Master Merchant, had generously offered to share his enchanted carriage with Elder Harusk, a white furred fox kin representing the beast kin among the city of Lotrot.

The last representative Kargerran had the honor of shepherding out to the new dungeon was a slender parandrous stag. Officially, Va'Melnroe came on behalf of the Adventurers Guild. Kargerran wasn't sure exactly how that played out, but with "adventurer" being a polite way of saying "mercenary" and the parandrians habit of involving themselves in conflicts in other countries on the side of the highest bidder, well, there was a connection. Tenuous, but a connection all the same.

The Talon Commander returned Kargerran's salute. "Eager to see what your Rangers have been up to, sergeant?"

"Yes, Talon Commander!" Kargerran answered.

"Me, too. Looks like the last stragglers are ready. Let's move out!" Muglibaum addressed the last to the entire company.

*~*~*

Lena

Lena poked her toon's head in on the Rangers. They were all awake, though the arassi seemed to be slower to get moving than the two beast kin.

"Good morning! At least, I think it's morning. There's light coming from the other side of the entrance portals. I think I've worked out an oven and refrigerator set up. Turns out temperature displacements are much cheaper to maintain than temperature changes. And I've been working out some fun with clay shaping. I just need to come up with a decent clock, or time piece or something so I can figure out when I need to check the kiln. Oh, apologies! I'm rambling! Anyhow, you're welcome to try out the new kitchen level. The guys are still sleeping. Also— I'm probably starting to get to overwhelming. Sorry again! I'm a little on the hyper side right now because I've let my mana pool get a good reserve built up, so we can try some of those spell casting experiments you talked about last night."

Vi chuckled, probably more at the raised fur and scales of his comrades than at Lena. "Please do lead on, ma'am."

Lena narrowed her eyes at Vi. "You picked that up from Jason, didn't you?"

"Yes. Am I using the title wrongly?" Vi assumed a contrite expression.

Lena shook her head. "Not really. It's just an adjustment for me. Where we come from, we're all West Coast chill, very informal. Jason's a Southerner, born and raised in back woods Alabama. He may have lost the drawl during his time in the service, but he's got a lot more of the formal manners drilled into him than I ever learned. I have to remind myself to let him open doors for me because the few times I've done for him, the awkward got very awkward for him. It was so adorable!"

"What do doors have to do with manners?" the fox kin Ranger, Tilly, asked.

"I never really got that, either. Wait, sorry, that was a force-of-habit response. There's a pretty huge social change going on in America that really got started almost a century ago - maybe two? Anyhow, you go from having a couple few millennium of gender based oppression and the odd crap that comes out of that transitioning to a more egalitarian society, and everybody over thinking things so much because most of us want that egalitarian, people-are-just-people-and-not-stereotypes society, and traditions are all being questioned and —. Doors. Manners. Side tracking again. The rationale behind a lot of the older traditions of gender-based manners was that essentially, 'men can, so men should; women are too delicate to be allowed to try'. So that meant things like guys opening doors for women and staying on the down side of whichever way they were using stairs."

Lena put her hands over her mouth and gave Tilly a helpless look of apology. "I'm going to be like this until the mana pressure eases up, so I'm going to try not talking and just showing you the new level."

So saying, Lena nudged the crystal door she had swapped in for the solid-stone-turning-into-the-walkway closure. The door slid into the wall, rolling on glass-slick wheel-like bearings, making a soft susurration. She then dropped a stone bar along the side of the doorway to keep the door in its pocket before leading the way out to the Orange Tree platform. Two new archways graced the platform.

One was sculpted into angular geometric shapes, accented with dimly glowing green-blue crystal inset in lines with right angle bends running up and around and down, joining or outlining embossed rectangles. As they approached, the crystal shifted to a more green, then yellowing, glow.

The second archway looked to be all polished crystal, carved into some familiar and quite a few odd vegetables. Perhaps more because of the opaque quality of the crystal, their colors had a near-realistic brilliance.

"Whoah!" the cat kin Ranger breathed out, fascinated with the new shiny arches.

Lena shrugged. "They're still rough. I'll work on the details later, but the techie gate is closed until Candy finishes setting up her space. A lot of the spare mana in my pool is there because she hasn't allocated it yet. The fruits gate leads to the kitchen."

All of the Rangers had to make tactile inspections of the two archways before she could herd them into the new level. Then, once in the kitchen, the Rangers had to poke and prod at every nook and cranny. Lena enjoyed their commentary, using the Rangers as a distraction from her need to use up the mana her dungeon held in reserve.

The kitchen was a circular room, four meters in diameter. Counters began directly on the left as they entered. The tops were smooth marbled stone, white with veins of lavender. A quarter of the way around from the portal, the counters stopped in favor of an ever flowing fountain. On the other side of the fountain, three ovens were arranged in a column together with their approximate temperatures inscribed on the stone doors. The bottom oven, marked 200°C, was more of a broiler than an oven. The middle and top ovens had a slow circulation placed on the air inside and were marked as 175°C and 100°C, respectively. Warm water cascaded down a series of small pools arranged against the ovens to fall into the fountain. Counters resumed on the other side of the oven, stopping directly across from the portal in.

A doorway, closed by another stone door (this one with an inset handle), was the reason for this second break. Lena really wanted to unlock some kind of metal soon, because the stone bearing balls, no matter how polished, just took up too much space when forced to support the weight of insulated doors.

Lena had opted to fore-go closed cabinetry. She didn't want to deal with stone or crystal hinges, and so she had used the crystal material to make near white shelving under the counter tops and at regular intervals over them. She had already stocked some of the shelves with hand towels, dish cloths, and clay pieces that were still air drying, preparing for their first firings.

"I didn't realize you had spells!" one of the delver Rangers said, Mathor(?).

"I don't, but what makes you think that?" Lena asked.

"The fountain," Mithor (that was his name!) said. "How else do you have it working in here?"

Lena wrinkled her nose. "Valves. Do you hear the clinking? I'm not sure if the ram head pump is behind enough stone to mute that for you guys or not, but I'm so eager to get copper unlocked! Getting iron should lead to steel, and then I can really get some awesome cookware produced, but with copper I can set up a good plumbing system, something more than the rudimentary stuff I've cobbled together so far."

Nilis asked, "You consider this rudimentary?"

"Well, yeah. Water, work space, heat source; those are the bare minimums for cooking, right?"

"Where's the cook surface?" the cat kin Ranger asked.

Lena glided over and tapped at the ovens. "Here for now. When I have iron unlocked, I'll put in a proper stove."

The cat kin (what was his name?) raised a hand toward the ovens, pausing (pawsing? Nope, don't start punning) when he felt the heat radiating from them.

"Smart," Lena said. "I couldn't get the doors to stay cool without doing weird levels of temperature tinkering, so I made a hook to grab the door handles with, there on the shelf at eye level. The doors are set on tracks, but I don't know how well the tracks will take just letting the doors drop down, so please be careful. The broiler door just pops out and slides right, but that's also the hottest of the ovens. The top oven is more for warming or dehydrating foods, with the middle set to pretty close to a standard baking temperature. At some point, I'm going to get the guys involved to tinker around with creating some kind of on-off switch for fan on, fan off settings, something to make them into a standard or convection oven, depending on what you're cooking." This time Lena caught herself before apologizing for the rambling and instead just shut up.

Vi carefully lifted one of the plates up to study.

"Oh, be careful, please! That still needs to be fired. It's quite fragile right now. I need to build a kiln, but I also need to conserve mana regen at the moment seeing as I'll need to bring the temperature up around 1320° Celsius to get the kaolin clay to properly vitrify. I'd love to talk with some of the local potters to find out what they use for glaze materials. So many of the metallic colorants leech toxins over time, and that's no where near the same kind of problem for decorative pieces as it is for ones that are supposed to be food safe."

"But you have the skill to change the innate color of what you create. Why would you need colorants?" Vi asked.

Lena said, "Until I know more about how that color change takes place, I'm not risking the possibility of accidentally poisoning people. Cloth and things that we brush up against are relatively safe to color with metals and poisonous compounds because most of that is only poisonous when ingested, and the feel of the material doesn't change, it doesn't burn like sunshine or the like, so I'm confident that my [Applied Color Theory] isn't making things radioactive."

"Colors are not poisonous," Vi said, his confusion clear in the tilt of his head and pursing of his lips.

Lena opened her mouth, thought better of it, and changed what she was about to say to a question. "What do you know about molecules?" At the blank looks she got from all the Rangers, Lena added, "Atoms? Chemistry?" More blank looks and tilted heads. "Alchemy?" she hazarded.

All their expressions lit up with comprehension. Vi said, "Oh, we know how to mix some basic potions. That's part of the Ranger Design, but most of us are too busy with field work to really delve into a full exploration of the alchemical arts."

"Okay," Lena said. "I guess I'll save the explanation for later. It's not the colors that are poisonous, but what the color change might mean about the changes to the physical make up of what I color. I don't know enough, so I'm being cautious."

Vi made a study of Lena's toon, which led the other Rangers to examine her closely as well. Vi said, "You're shaking."

"Mana build up," Lena said, shrugging.

"How about we start the spell casting experiments, see how much of the dungeon's mana pool we can use up to help with that?" Vi suggested.

"Okay." Sometimes that was the best answer.

*~*~*

Candy

Candy felt much steadier after her deep thinking and nap. She did not appreciate having all the rules changed on her. It made the world unpredictable, and that instability meant that she could no longer trust the routines and little rituals she had developed to move through life without the constant need to question and examine every single detail. However, she now had a plan to deal with that unpredictability, and a lab to begin discovering the new rules she would have to live by.

So far, socially, at least, the rules she had learned for interacting with other humans held when interacting with the arassi and beast kin. She had those rules mentally marked down as tentatively stable for the sapient beings of Rhofhir.

Standing in the barely formed part of Lena's Studio, the part Lena had specifically ceded to Candy's control, she took a deep breath and, feeling silly, she pushed out the thought-command, «[Zone Management].»

*** *** ***

Zone Designation: The Studio of Capricious Dreams

Territory Designation: Human Habitat C*

Access: Territory Manager

MPP: 1000/1000

MPR: 500

MPC: 20

*** *** ***

*** *** ***

The Design Lead has given you access to change the designation of the Territory you are to manage. Do you wish to proceed with designation change?

*** *** ***

«Yes.»

*** *** ***

What designation do you want to bestow upon this Territory?

*** *** ***

«Physics Lab.»

*** *** ***

Territory Designation updated.

*** *** ***

Okay, this mental interface was like a voice-command computer, only with thoughts. Candy could work with that.

«[Zone Management].»

*** *** ***

Zone Designation: The Studio of Capricious Dreams

Territory Designation: Physics Lab

Access: Territory Manager

MPP: 1000/1000

MPR: 500

MPC: 20

[Structure] • [Resources]

*** *** ***

«[Structure].» Information flooded her mind, but unlike the disorganized buffeting of her senses, this information was orderly, precise. There was a soothing quality to the simplicity of comprehending the rules of building out her territory's structure that acted like a balm to her mind.

Language, words, they were so … inexact, so abstract. Despite the words used to convey the information, the Tapestry system managed to provide all the precision and nuance that Candy usually had to spend hours dragging out of textbooks and people. It was only with the other engineering students and their professors that Candy had felt able to truly communicate, but even that had been limited by the abstractions of language. With the Tapestry, she found that she merely had to frame her ignorance for that ignorance to be answered.

During this time, she discovered that her precious Physics did still work as she expected. Everything she had learned about mass, velocity, the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, the atomic-scale strong and weak forces; they were all still relevant. A fifth force, however, also interacted with the world of Rhofhir, and that force, the Aetherial force, was tied up in mana.

Querying the system directly on how they came to be on Rhofhir also yielded a surprisingly reassuring answer. Brad's invention had created ideal conditions for the echo of their electromagnetic signatures to reach one of the mana-based probes created by the Arcane Asylum. No mage had attempted to control their contact and so the system had verified that their echoes matched a racial template already held by the Tapestry.

The primary purpose of the Tapestry was to condition mana, much like the ozone layer of Earth's atmosphere conditioned solar radiation. Unlike the ozone layer, though, the Tapestry was an artificial construct comprised of a variety of mana-filtering components, all controlled by a highly complex operating system written in a programming language known to the inhabitants of Rhofhir as magic.

Candy considered herself a scientist. Magic was simply unexplained natural phenomena. She didn't need to give ignorance a fancy name, not when she had a lab to explore that ignorance, to whittle it down with empirical trials.

*** *** ***

Design of the Scientist unlocked.

*** *** ***

But there were also individuals who had learned something of how this mana force worked. Even if they sent her down intellectual paths formed from superstition, they had observational data to mine. Now if she could just get her hands on a mage.