5.5

Lena

In the end, it still took six days before everyone who wanted to speak got the chance. Several of the communities present declined the opportunity, but a number of orators won sufficient endorsement for extended speeches.

Lena poked the mental play button for her avatar as the last speaker stepped down. The image of who she had been took the display stage — the Lena born on Earth with brown hair and blue eyes, human. She had draped her avatar in a toga-like dress, imitating many of the fashions of their guests.

"All communities have had the opportunity to speak. Of the proposals put forth, I have heard what comes to an essential of four options.

"The first option is to seek dungeon managers from the cities nearest the affected dungeons. The second is that those managers be sought from the nations claiming the territories wherein the dungeons lie. Third is to appoint dungeon managers from some sort of world-spanning guild, whether that be an existing one or one newly formed for the purpose. The fourth option advanced will only lead to a swift Unraveling, but I shall include that in the voting choices: to close down all access to every dungeon everywhere.

"At the end of one skymark, I will begin the voting. Each proposal will be weighed on its own merit — each delegation may vote their approval for all four. Should more than one proposal achieve the 55% approval threshold, the next round of voting will require that each delegation provide no more than one approval vote.

"Take this time to discuss your votes amongst yourselves. When it is time to vote, the display stage will light up. Each proposal will receive three minutes of voting time, during which the last recorded press of the buttons on the speaker stage will be counted as that delegation's vote."

Very deliberately, Lena avoided addressing any of the questions cast upon her character over the last six days, choosing to simply turn off the display stages at that point.

None of the delegates present had much, if any, reason to trust her. Not even the people from Lotrot, whose delegation apparently included most of their Assembly. No, she knew that she was a giant ball of crystallized honey in their cake batter, and perhaps if she cared about them beyond her instinct to preserve life she might care what they thought.

As it was, the only opinions she held sacrosanct were those of her cousin and, to a lesser extent, their friends. They held her loyalty.

Not for the first time, Lena reached along the contract binding Jason and Rob to her, a light touch, just a quick check that they were alive and in good spirits. She didn't think Jason had ever noticed her doing it, and she had improved quite a lot since Candy called her out on her so-called spying.

It wasn't spying, though! She wasn't any more or any less aware of what her friends did in her dungeon — in her body — by looking through their contract bonds than when she used her own senses.

«Hey, gloomy, you gonna keep moping or get your butt over to the [Commons] for our conference?» Candy's acerbic tone broke through Lena's murky introspection.

Lena popped her toon into the [Commons], alighting on the couch arm next to her cousin. Aaron claimed the seat with Candy while Brad and Dibbs took separate seats. "I'm here. What'cha need?"

"What do you think the vote's going to look like?" Candy asked.

Lena shrugged. "I think the local control is going to be popular, but the various guilds seem to have a lot of power. With the choices boiled down, we might have a run off vote between the two, and then some back and forth over the actual implementation making the difference."

Dibbs narrowed his gaze at Lena's toon. "You don't seem to care that much, despite the effort you're putting forth."

"I'm … dealing," Lena said, not trying to look any way but how worn down she felt. "When we first got the details worked out, I was ready to just hand over the cores with their primary purposes and some limiters locked in, all ready to go be activated in the broken dungeons, but we're too ignorant of all the local politics to just hand over power willy-nilly. At this time, the requirement for me to become flesh and blood again can't be reached, and the more I have to act for the other dungeons, the more stringent those requirements get. If we had a way to make a zone control core self mobile, then I could attempt that. They're the only physical patterns I have that are capable of handling all the mana states. Thing is, they aren't self mobile, nor can I just dump one in a golem body and call it good."

Brad frowned. "You're really fused with the dungeon?"

Candy and Lena nodded.

Candy said, "She's somehow been actually grafted into the Grand Tapestry. I think she ended up as a dungeon because it's a way the Tapestry can isolate her from the core system. And now, well, she can't *not* be a living mana transformer anymore. Right now, the only thing we have close enough to match that are the zone control cores, but they aren't any better able to leave a dungeon than Lena currently is."

"Side issue," Lena said, wishing she had a face to rub. "The thing is, while I am capable of simply handing out the cores, after the fudge nut cluster of the Sun elves tricking us into taking over [Priesley's Folly] — which isn't actually in their damn empire and I was too berry popping naive to confirm whose feet I'd be stepping on first — I'm not going down that path. Regardless of the level of governance selecting the candidates for the dungeon masters, I will be the one confirming them, and they will be under contract to me."

"Then why this whole council?" Brad asked, his wings shifting with his confusion.

Dibbs tipped his head to the side. "You're looking for legitimacy?" he guessed.

"In essence," Lena agreed. "It may not matter in the long run, but people already fight over control of the dungeons anyhow. This way, we might get a reprieve on that front, at least long enough for the dungeon masters to figure out how to do their jobs."

Aaron grimaced, but didn't repeat his belief that Lena was being too optimistic and naive again. She didn't need the reminder.

Dibbs frowned, leaning forward and propping his elbows on his knees while he rested his chin on his fists. "What about your belief that the dungeons must be dangerous?"

Candy and Aaron turned to look at Lena's toon with puzzled expressions.

"What's this?" Aaron asked.

Lena slumped her shoulders, then made her toon straighten up. "Unifying threat. As long as monster pits are possible, the races have a vested interest in working together against the monsters. When that's yanked away, all sides will find it a lot easier to justify hating on the neighbors."

"What the hell happened to not making waves?" Aaron asked, frowning.

"That was Jason's stance," Lena said. "I don't really have much choice. As it is, I've been fighting the compulsion to attach to every single unmanaged dungeon on Rhofhir and bring it under my control. I can't even plan the expansions properly because the urge is that bad, and the last thing I want to do is be forced to repeat a direct linking like with the Folly."

Candy nodded the way she did when she forgot that her body reflected her thoughts, more of an up and down bob of her chin than anything else.

Brad shook his head. "I thought I got caught up on what you lot have been up to, but what the bloody fuck are you planning then?"

"Candidates, contracts, cores." Lena ticked the points off on her fingers. "We get that taken care of while we give the people who were born on Rhofhir a way to oversee the dungeon masters. Those dungeon masters still have to answer to me so I can ensure that they do the damned job the way it needs doing."

*~*~*

Aaron

"At least you're sticking with some version of our plan," Aaron found himself saying.

Lena's toon looked at him with a surprised expression. "Sugar on a stick, is everyone pissed off with me?"

"I'm not," Candy quickly said.

Aaron closed his eyes and sighed. "You're trying too hard to be the Lone Ranger, making the rest of us into Silver or Tonto. As our game master, you understood how to give up control enough for each of us to actually be part of the story, but as an actual Dungeon Master? You're not giving us a chance to be partners, and, frankly, at this point, I'm regretting taking the employment contract with you."

Lena's toon froze, becoming a statue of light.

Brad fluffed his wings and looked away.

Candy turned to face Aaron, her body stiff and her eyes wide. "Are you —? Are you leaving?"

Aaron shook his head, then thought about it. "You know, maybe I'll take one of those D.M. contracts — if you haven't changed it from what you and Rob nailed down, Lena?"

"I haven't," Lena's voice whispered from the walls, her toon remaining still. "Would you be —?"

"No," Aaron said, cutting off Lena's question before she could finish it. "I told you when you roped me into speaking with Ignemrot that I wasn't going to be your new Liaison until you apologize to Jason and mean it. Well, I meant that."

"Okay." The tone held despondency, but Aaron steeled his heart. He didn't like being the lance to other people's emotional boils. No one really liked the pus that came out, but better to lance early than deal with a deeper infection. Right?

"Okay," Lena said again, her voice firming and her toon animating once more. Nuances of shifting expressions breathed a facsimile of life into the form Lena chose to interact with them. "Well. I won't hold you where you don't want to be. Are there any other bombshells to drop? I mean, this is such a great time, right?"

Dibbs said, "As interesting as the drama is, I suggest we stay on the topic of this conference. I'm far from a political man and I can still tell you that you had a solid twenty of the most politicly powerful sapients on Rhofhir among the speakers. Given that they all had different ideas on how to run things, whatever decision you come to will anger at least one faction. Do you have any contingency plans for the interference they're going to push at you?"

Lena's toon shrugged. "Dungeons have to work a certain way. As long as that's met, and no one's trying to kill off my friends or me, I would prefer the most peaceful means of making things work, but if that's not an option, well, dungeons are already in a semi-antagonistic relationship with the sapients. I'll make my own dungeon masters if I can't get a good set of volunteers from the people born here. Dungeon masters will always have the same innate right of self defence that any being has. Beyond that, a dungeon's purpose is to put a regulated flow of conditioned mana out into the world. How that happens is all about how well people get along with the dungeon masters."

"That was a long winded no," Brad said.

"Hey!" Candy said, her voice loud and her angry face on. "The snipping is not helping!"

Brad opened his mouth, but didn't speak. Instead, his gaze grew distant and he stuck his tongue out, tapping the top of his nose. "My will is down. Apologies for the distraction."

"Lena?" Candy made her cousin's name sound like a warning.

Lena's toon made eye contact with Candy's gaze and they, rather obviously, had a quick and private conversation over the G.C. Lena's toon nodded. "Apology accepted, and I'm sorry you're feeling provoked."

Aaron set his hand on Candy's shoulder. "Let it go," he suggested, anticipating that that wasn't quite what Candy wanted from her cousin.

Candy closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. "Okay."

"So," Aaron said, "Dibbs, long-short is that no, we don't know enough to come up with an actual plan. We have our principles defined, and we have safeguards in place in case people come storming our castle, but that's all we can do."

Dibbs clicked his tongue and unfocused his gaze. "That's better than nothing."

*~*~*

Lena

The display stages flashed to life, Lena's avatar — that fake copy of her toon meant to play the role of a composed being — took shape. She watched on as her avatar repeated the instructions for voting, and sighed at the number of people ejected from her dungeon for breaking the anti-hostility portions of their entrance contracts.

"We will start the voting with local communities putting forth candidates for dungeon masters," her avatar announced, and the opinion bar took on a preeminent position within the view of the delegates. The 55% approval mark glowed, just to make the goal explicitly clear.

In the first thirty seconds, 23% of the bar had filled in from the disapproval side, while 42% approval showed. Over the three minute voting time, the numbers shifted slightly, with the final tally standing at 49% approval for local selection and 24% rejection. That left 27% rejecting by omission.

During the voting for regional candidate selection, the vote bar shifted wildly as most of the elven communities ended up with two members playing some version of button smashing to get their views counted. Several hundreds more people ended up being ejected at this point.

The final vote tally returned 38% approval, 41% rejection, and 21% omission.

Voting for the guild option was much more sedate, and the numbers held quite steady from start to end, with 47% approval and 43% rejection.

The vote to close all dungeons didn't even get up to 1% approval, with only 3% omitting to vote in rejection of the idea.

Lena's avatar took center stage again, the opinion bar fading to near non-existence. "None of the proposals put forth reached the consensus mark, which leaves the assignment to my whim. However, I find it very interesting that both the local and the world spanning guild options got such a large chunk of approval.

"Dungeons must produce conditioned mana. Maintaining oversight prevents that conditioning coming as monster swarms, and allows for harvesting more material resources from dungeons. Each Adventurer guild, each merchant guild, each crafts guild, and each independent polity are invited to select representatives to remain for a discussion of how to form a Dungeon Masters guild. No current member of those guilds will be eligible for admission to the Dungeon Masters guild. This conference closes when the sun sets for the second time from now along the Maltese Rimward Trade Road."

That would give the participants a full day to pack up and leave while the various organizations invited to the second conference selected their representatives.

*~*~*

Rhofhir

The stretched and tattered threads of Rhofhir's pattern collectors led him in several directions. Most traced along toward other of his project worlds, and those were easily darned. However, the few that snaked to the edge of his domain (out of the currents of his manasphere) held interesting promises woven among their threads. Rhofhir picked at those promises, the patterns of the thread weaving that revealed the work of a cultivator with the potential to ascend. Keeping hold of those patterns while he repaired the pattern collectors to their more passive state provided Rhofhir with an interesting diversion. He found his curiosity wakening and delighted in the sensation. What kind of sapient had woven these translation formations?

That delight offset the regret he felt at having to sacrifice some of his active mana to repair the tear to his manasphere. The waste bothered the universal divinity less than the potential of his shed mana to interfere with another divinity's projects.

Well, a simple mention to Morningstar when the cosmic divinity next checked in was the best Rhofhir could do. Thrusting himself into another universal divinity's manasphere was no less than an act of war. The occasional puffs of the other divinities' mana were annoying, but they were only dangerous if the divinity receiving them had slipped into a somnolent state.