For the very first time, I’d called an Emer’Thalis meeting. Now, six of us stood in the back of the town hall, the dark veins of the building’s wood casting us in a soft glow.

Amak represented the shadows, Ava (and Edgar) the kexids, Tuk the Ftheranites, and Carpin the fighters from Drawgin. To round them all off, there was me.

Even before I could kick things off formally, Ava chittered excitedly. “Edgar, we’ve been invited to a meeting. Oh, I do love a good meeting. What do you think it will be about?”

There were, in fact, a number of things that I hoped to cover. Broadly speaking, though, I’d realized we needed to figure our shit out. We had no guard. We had no laws. No formal process for when something went wrong. No formal chain of command.

All things that weren’t overly important for a small outpost that was supposed to last a month. With the shadows moving here permanently, the kexids currently en route, the builders looking for more work, and the fighters delving the dungeon, however, it was time to chat.

Admittedly, part of the reason I’d called the meeting was also the chance that Suds might kidnap me soon. I wasn’t exactly planning on letting him, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to figure everything out just in case. Having the settlement be able to run in my absence seemed like good planning.

“All right!” I did my best to start things with a level of enthusiasm that I wasn’t truly feeling. Everyone involved (except maybe Edgar?) was clearly older and more experienced than I was, and I felt a bit silly trying to lead. “I really just had three things to cover. One: I wanted to let everyone know there’s a small chance I might be outside the city for a while. Two: I wanted us to talk about how we want to make decisions for the city. There’s a lot of different sub-populations here, and we should probably have some process for when one group butts heads with another. Third, I thought we could talk about how we wanted to use Emer’Thalis’s settlement energy.”

I was met with three nods, at which point I repeated it all over again in Old Common for the kexids’ benefit.

“Anything else before we begin?” I had my agenda, but if one of them had something we all needed to address, it was rare that we were gathered like this, after all.

“I believe I do, actually.” As Carpin began to speak, I feared for the worst — problems with the fighters were something I wasn’t well equipped to handle. “It’s about the dungeon, actually.”

Huh. Probably just updating us on what he’s done with it since I gave him control over it.

“I was actually just informed that no one has been able to enter it. The party that was supposed to delve it tried, and they immediately got pushed out by a strong jet of water. They’re convinced some manner of water elemental has taken up residence in the dungeon.”

My eye twitched as I immediately put two and two together. At least I know where Barb is now.

“That’s… probably our new guest. And also probably temporary.” I sighed. “It’s definitely not something we can fix, though.” That is, unless we had someone who wanted to try to fight Barb’s level 31 dad.

With that in mind, I put my stunning leadership abilities on full display, suggesting the tried-and-true method that had gotten me through most bad situations. “Let’s just ignore it and hopefully it should go away?”

Carpin frowned but nodded, and then just like that, we began.

Much of the logistics were handled rather quickly. Instead of trying to draft out some wide-reaching set of laws and establish a guard, we opted for a much simpler route. Any issues that arose which pertained strictly to one of the groups could be handled internally: The shadows, for example, had had their own way of dealing with disagreements long before Emer’Thalis had been around, and I had no desire to step on their toes.

If something happened cross-group (for instance, if a fighter stole something from a shadow), a small delegation would be put together consisting of members from all the affected groups. They’d act as a jury of sorts, and would decide what the right course of action was. It wasn’t a particularly objective system, but small towns seemed to have their own way of handling justice, and I trusted everyone present to make sure nothing too wild occurred.

For any major decisions that affected everyone, we’d just talk things over and put them to a vote.

With that all decided, the bulk of the conversation then turned to how to use the city’s settlement energy. I pulled up my interface, first noting how much energy we had available.

Current Settlement Energy: 114

Daily Settlement Energy Generated: 434/500 (+125)

My brows shot up and the figure. Had it always been that high? I focused on the numbers and a more detailed breakdown appeared.

Generated by citizens: 434 (180 generated from citizens, 254 by temporary residents)

Generated by dungeon delvers (average): 200

Daily drain from dungeon perks: 75

Huh. I’d given Carpin free reign to use the energy however he wanted to for the dungeon, which explained the energy cost. I looked a bit deeper, and it seemed he’d found a way to decrease the dungeon reset times by paying a daily fee.

I hadn’t realized how much energy we’d be getting back from the dungeon, though. I’d also forgotten that official citizens granted more energy than temporary residents. Now that the shadows had opted to live here full time, the settlement energy they generated had gone up ten-fold.

More important than the actual number, though, was what all that energy could be used for. On the Settlement Energy page of the interface, there were five tabs that could be selected.

General

Forest

Research

Defenses

Dungeon

+

I mentally tapped on the plus icon, curious to see what other options I had, but all I got back was a message.

Additional options may be unlocked when their requirements are met.

Not wanting to make any big choices without full information, I posed a question to the group. “Anyone know what other sorts of things we can spend settlement energy on and how to unlock them?” Amak and Ava, at the very least, likely had a wealth of experience with settlement management.

Surprisingly, it was actually Tuk that answered. “Most of it’s unlocked with buildings. Like that church you were telling me about? Building one of ‘em would unlock Faith options. Or making a big mess hall might unlock some food-related options under the General tab. Think you got all the big ones though, at least for a settlement of this size.”

Amak nodded at that. “You should also get a new tab if you start an army, a guard regiment, or start up some form of raw resource production. While I can’t speak from personal experience, something like mining or even farming would suffice. I believe you have every section you’re likely to get in the near future, however.”

In some sense, that was actually a relief to hear: Fewer options meant fewer choices we had to make.

With that, I dove right in. I’d provisionally given Ava and Tuk view-access to the settlement interface so they could follow along, whereas Amak and Carpin had already had such.

General

Build Speed - Exchange settlement energy to reduce the time required to complete a building. Select a building to see detailed exchange rates.

Tuk immediately chimed in. “Let’s agree to never use that one. Just wasting your energy, and me and the crew would get less experience. Plus, if you want the quality to be anything besides Standard, it’ll charge you into the ground.”

Fair enough for me. No one gainsaid the man, prompting us to move on.

A few more options pertained to buildings in more nuanced ways. For instance, there was the option to move already-built buildings around, giving us the option of rearranging our settlement. There was also an option to help with road-building, though none of it seemed overly important in the short term.

A few ruinously expensive options allowed us to alter the local landscape, and there were a smattering of more quality-of-life and cosmetic options, like purchasing the ability to keep certain parts of the city well-lit even at night.

“Does anyone think any of this is valuable right now?” I’d largely called them here because I wanted their input, but even to my untrained eye, it seemed like the General tab was a bust.

“Perhaps not immediately, but it would be prudent to build some sort of lake long term. The vast majority of the settlement’s water is conjured, and most of it comes from Elphaea and the forest. Kickstarting an actual water cycle would be far more beneficial if it could be managed.”

I frowned at that. How does conjured water even work? Is it pulled from water vapor in the air? Magically summoned from absolutely nothing? If the latter, does it ever disappear? If it didn’t, that would probably be a problem, wouldn’t it? The world would slowly be getting wetter and wetter every time a water mage cast a spell.

Not the time to get lost in the weeds. Like Amak had said, it wasn’t an immediate concern. “Anything else?” The rest shook their heads, and we moved onto the next tab.

Forest

Modify Level - Select a species or type of creature (e.g. predators, game animals, insects) and forcefully modify its leveling speed to push its average level up or down.

Modify Population - Select a species or type of creature (e.g. predators, game animals, insects) and forcefully modify its birth rates to push its population up or down. Note, this settlement perk may also be used to modify growth rates of herbs and plants.

Seed Life - Introduces a new species to your settlement forest. Focus to view current options. If a new plant or animal is manually brought to the forest, options may be expanded.

Those were interesting. It looked like, with enough settlement energy, I’d be able to transform the forest into a paradise for fighters looking to level up, or on the flip side, turn it into a glorified public park. Seed Life also looked promising if we could introduce either a plant or an animal that would make for an easy food source.

The forest already was much safer than its southern counterpart — a purposeful choice on Elphaea’s part — but it would be interesting to see what was possible with her working in tandem with these settlement perks.

Before I could get too far into planning, Amak brought me back to reality.

“These look to be invaluable options, and in fact, they’re not ones we had back home. I imagine that has to do with the fact that the entirety of the forest lies within your settlement. Despite that, I would ask that under no circumstances does anyone even consider touching these save for the shadows. The food chain of a forest is a delicate thing, and improper use of any of these could throw it into chaos.”

Oop. Probably should have thought of that, although in my defense, for all I knew, the food chain was magically maintained. Something to leave to Amak then, but hopefully he’d have some non-catastrophic ideas for it.

Walled Off - Prevents any forest creatures from leaving the forest and entering other parts of the settlement, unless manually taken out.

“Largely already done by Elphaea, though I doubt she would mind the assistance,” Amak noted.

Meaty - Increases meat yields from all edible creatures within the forest.

“To be purchased as soon as possible. I didn’t push for it because Hartha’s class skills did something similar, and we needed the energy to open the dungeon and then honor our agreement with the fighters. With more mouths coming and Hartha gone, however, this is likely our next priority.” Amak’s words came out measured and collected, and I was guessing he’d already gone through these lists and weighed all the options prior to this meeting. To some extent, it felt like he was the one leading this meeting, but it was hardly any surprise that he would have the most to say regarding the forest.

At his assertion of priorities, no one denied the man. Food was, after all, pretty important.

A few smaller options remained, like setting borders which the forest wouldn’t grow past, but in large part, most of them were inferior to the tried and true method of having a dryad to run things. Belatedly, I realized that perhaps I should have held the meeting in the forest so that Elphaea could chime in, but I trusted Amak would consult her if need be.

From there, we moved onto the Research tab. Only one option was available.

Research Booze - Your city produces its own spirits and has a still, allowing you to perform research on new types of alcohol.

Current researchers assigned - 0/1

Current research progress - 0/500

Settlement Energy required to artificially reach the next research milestone: 5000

“Hah!” Tuk chortled. “That’s one of the lads from Ftheran that made that. Should see about if he wants the ‘research’ position. Looks like it doesn’t cost you anything unless you’re trying to rush it, and it’d be nice to have something besides wine and moonshine around. Plus, it’s the only research you’ll be doing unless we build the specialized buildings for it.”

Well, couldn’t hurt, I guess. We agreed to track the guy down at some point, but it wasn’t all that high priority. Might make Nadja’s job more exciting, at the very least.

The Defenses tab was similarly sparse. It looked like the vast majority of the options that Ephesis had once had access to had disappeared as the city decayed over time. In fact, I’d taken the liberty of dismissing the confounding disorientation defense a while back, and it looked like I didn’t even have the option to summon it back if I wanted to. It looked like the settlement barrier was in a similar situation, though it did show up.

Barrier - Erect a city-wide barrier which is fully impermeable to all entities not registered as residents. Once summoned, the barrier can subsist off of ambient mana or be strengthened with an ongoing settlement energy cost.

Initial Cost: Error. Conditions no longer satisfied. Barrier cannot be resummoned once taken down.

Intuitively, I knew that if I focused on it, I could see more details about how much damage it would block depending on how much settlement energy it was fed, but frankly I wasn’t that interested. With the kexids having snapped out of their berserker fugue state, there weren’t really any enemies around. The deadlands themselves were a barrier enough.

Still, it was nice to have. If nothing else, it eased the mind, and no one had suggested we remove it.

We skimmed the other options, but only halfheartedly, quickly moving onto the final section: Dungeon.

The perks were actually fairly similar to the Forest tab in a lot of ways, with options to modify the difficulty and variety of the dungeon. There were also perks that modified the loot that was dropped by dungeon monsters and the prevalence of hidden treasure.

The main difference was that these perks were horrifically expensive. Even just modifying the level requirements of the dungeon up by one would bankrupt us multiple times over. For now, all of those options would go untouched.

Some of the more logistical perks, however, were on the table, and indeed, Carpin had already spent some of our energy on them.

Respawn Timer - Decreases the amount of time it takes for the dungeon to reset between runs.

Energy Harvest Rate - Increases the amount of settlement energy collected from monsters slain within the dungeon.

It looked like there were options for making a large one-time purchase of the perks, as well as paying daily continuous fees, which was largely what we were doing at the moment. Probably less cost effective, but in the immediate term, it did what we needed it to.

As we scrolled through the various options, Carpin animatedly elaborated on each of them. “... so you see, as much as it would be a great benefit to all involved to focus on increasing the quality of loot dropped, if we wish to be forward-looking, the Respawn Timer is the largest priority. Of course, some energy must be spent on the harvest rate as well, as you have to spend a little to make a little. The true boon would be getting the dungeon to be Instanced so multiple parties could delve at once, but that’s not currently an option, so-”

He droned on for a while, seeming to take great joy in the minor details, which none of us begrudged him. In the end, however, it was fairly simple. He wanted us to spend more energy so more people could run the dungeon in a given day.

And just like that, we’d gone through everything.

At least, I thought we had.

“Right,” Tuk grunted. “That covers all that, and then we should probably look at our options for more buildings, yeah?”

I blinked. “Oh. Right.”

As it turned out, for a settlement of our size, and with our current resources, the options for new buildings were rather sparse. More importantly, most of them weren’t helpful. We did not, after all, have a dire need for a hotel, a blacksmith, a market square, or — though perhaps some might have disagreed with me — a brothel.

The action plan, then, ended up being fairly simple, and almost exclusively revolved around food.

Buy the Meaty perk for the forest to help with food in the short term. Build a warehouse specifically for food storage. This was already underway. Build a more official, system-recognized mess hall. With the food-related buildings, there would theoretically be some new options to spend settlement energy on. After that, all leftover energy could be invested into the dungeon.

There would be more to do, certainly, but we could reevaluate once we got there. For now, we had a path forward.

Our business concluded, we went our separate ways.

I alternated between carving and cantrips for a while, all in the safety of my own tent. Briefly, I considered calling it an early night, but the sound of approaching footsteps cut that thought short.

Deciding to preempt the impending encounter, I opened the flap of my tent to see who it was. My first guess was going to be Amak, as he was generally the one who collected me when he needed something.

Instead however, it wasn’t a shadow at all.

There, headed my way, was one particularly tired looking barber.

“Ah! Tess! Lovely, you’re here.” Though he made a strong effort, I could hear as he tried — and failed — to inject some energy into his voice. “Apologies for all the business earlier, but to cut straight to the point, I was sent to chat with you by my father.”

He paused, and I could almost visibly see another dose of energy escaping from him. “To put it bluntly: What are your thoughts on letting my father kidnap you?”