It is expensive to start from scratch.

Pre-Fall ethicist.

“Nicol didn’t catch them,” Katia Michaelson announced after they sat in the foyer.

The Undersecretary had been back at first light, catching Johanna almost by surprise. She had two of the city’s guards stand watch “in case” along with some of her escorts, although Johanna wasn’t sure if the “case” she expected was someone trying to get in or them trying to get out.

She’d also quickly rebuffed the City Council. The mayor had requested the four’s presence to figure out what happened and what all of that meant. She’d simply replied to Captain Flores that she was taking over – had already taken over after all, and there was no need for “distractions”.

“Besides,” she’d told him, “you’ve been there all along. You can tell him whatever he needs to know.”

“But he wants to know what that means for New Sandusky. That sort of thing was not supposed when the agreement was…”

The hapless Captain had stopped, facing Michaelson’s silent glare.

“It’s too early to know what that means for your city or anything else. If he wants to complain, tell him to address his grievances to the Executive’s Office.”

Once the distraction had been shooed off, the Undersecretary returned to her priorities.

“The reported wagon was there, true, but it was a normal merchant carriage intended for some place called Bloomville, a day away. The city guard recorded many people going out for parts unknown, more than usual traffic, so I’m assuming they made sure to muddy their tracks.”

She sighed.

“I don’t know if I have to be happy he didn’t have to face Talented with little to lose or that he missed them.”

“You – sorry, Mr. Nicol – didn’t take some of the Talented city guards?” Johanna asked.

“He did. A Lancer and a Fixer, he said.”

“Good. That’d be guardsman Hicks. Only a base Fixer, but having one with you lessens a lot of the risk involved in fighting. Although, well, that’s not an absolute guarantee, I think. If you figure out who is what, you can force your Fixer out of the picture and then finish the rest. That’s what they were doing wrong with Laura.”

“Well, in this case, it was a miss. And now we have to face the problem we discussed yesterday.”

Johanna was about to reply when she heard a shout at the entrance to the Talent House. Looking there, she spotted a familiar figure and one of Katia’s agents trying to bar her. He moved slightly back as gray pointed spikes materialized, covering the woman’s arms. The other immediately drew his sword, alarmed by the Talent.

“Petra! You’re back?”

“Scott’s team got back late yesterday, just before the gate closed. What’s this rumor I heard about fighting in the streets?”

Katia looked at the woman striding across the reception hall and hugging Johanna.

“One of your Talented salvagers, I assume?” she asked.

“Yes. Petra Veldhuis, Earth Shaper. Petra, meet Mrs. Katia Michaelson… from the State government.”

“Oh… Oh.”

“You got the skill yet?”

“The Talent? Yes, almost a day after leaving New Sandusky.”

Katia’s head swiveled as she followed the exchange, trying to make sense.

“Petra, here, is one of our testers. She has been with us since the northwest, the Marches of the Dakota. Technically, she’s a junior associate in the House, while the rest of the scavengers are…”

“External contractors,” Petra helpfully supplied.

“External Contractors, right, as Ulrich calls them. So she volunteered to run Talent testing in parallel to what Gomez was doing on low-level Talents. Solid Water, in this case.”

“I unlocked the last Empathy point on my own, and it was working, so I still have the stand-alone Empathy parchment you left me,” Petra confirmed.

Petra Janneke Veldhuis

Female human, 25 years, 10 months

Earth Shaper

Level: 7 (21000 XP needed)

260/260 mana (+16 per hour)

41/41 stamina (+17 per hour)

1 unallocated skill point

XP: 2598

STR: 17 (2720 XP needed)

Jagged Stone (41)

AUT: 18 (2957 XP needed)

Tremor (43)

AGI: 18 (2080 XP needed)

Earthbind (43)

PER: 16 (2000 XP needed)

Mana Sight (39)

DEX: 16 (2126 XP needed)

Popping Rocks (39)

EMP: 16 (4945 XP needed)

Solid Water (55)

+4.3 Strength for skill checks

43% more stability

Detect mana flows & pools of 25.6 size or greater

+41 stamina

Bodily immunity to fire, up to 690°F (366°C)

Water needs per day lowers by 55%

“So, you were really at -2. No wonder Moore ditched your original Talent. And the new Talent?” Johanna asked.

“Not that good. It’s a full ten on the weird scale, though, but maybe four on the useful scale and maybe one on the offense scale. I wasted the Talent point unless your Ancient can remove it for me,” Petra replied before asking, “Who’s Moore?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The two women abruptly realized that Katia was looking at them and ostensibly drumming her fingers on the reception table. She stopped immediately when she saw she’d gotten the women’s attention.

“I will not pretend to understand any of what you said, but at least I can guess it is not immediately relevant to our current problem?”

“Sorry,” Johanna said and proceeded to provide a concise summary for Petra.

“That’s the guy you were running away from when you were in Zahl,” she said.

“Well, the Adjutant is his left hand, so to speak.”

“And now, he’s stolen what we worked for in Washington DC.”

“And he’s seized almost all of the cache, yes.”

“And now Independence State finds itself in peril if the Warden has Talents and we have none,” Katia injected, unwilling to let the two take their time to discuss the current predicament.

Johanna turned back to the undersecretary.

“About that… I talked with Moore – the Ancient.”

“You said you couldn’t.”

“He can call me into a form of dreams. It’s a bit surreal but more real than dreams usually are. I’m more… aware. It’s weird, but it works. But he cannot do that a lot – it costs him experience. I don’t know much or how he gets it, but I would guess it’s worth an entire level, maybe. I suspect he can grant us that experience or burn it to communicate… or do the incarnation thing he did yesterday. It’s equal parts dream and discussion.”

“So what does your patron say?” Katia asked.

“Quality, not quantity.”

“Uh?”

“I think he suggests we take advantage of his extensive knowledge of the system of Talents. He knows exactly what each Talent does and how they work together. You’ve just seen it with Petra. We know the mapping between some known sorcery Talents and the Sorcerers of America compendium, but when it comes to higher-end ones or Heroic Talents, it’s mostly a mystery. All you have to guide you is the name on the parchment. So we test.”

“The Warden’s forces will not know much about it,” Katia realized what Johanna was saying.

“I don’t know what Talents the Adjutant’s agents picked, but they were not familiar with them yet, and they only had a very limited choice. The Warden may have a massive store and a hundred copies of any of them now, but does he know what, say, Tough Luck does and how useful it is? And yes, it’s apparently a real Talent, even if it requires a level of 8 to use. His forces will have to spend time learning how to use them and how to combine them.”

“But you need Ancient books.”

“I’ll be back,” Johanna said, rushing upwards.

A few minutes later, she was climbing the stairs down, her arms laden with a dozen books wrapped in a cloth.

“I picked them from the books we brought back. Had to make sure Moore did not sacrifice them, so I labeled them to make sure he remembered to leave them alone.”

When she unwrapped the cloth cover, Katia spotted paper labels saying “do not convert yet”, wrapped over the cover.

“Are those…?”

“An Ancient fantasy series of sorts. A bit trash, I say; I don’t know if I’m going to finish it. The hero is a chump with all the bowing and scraping; I like his girlfriend more with all the swords coming out of her shoulders. I think I won’t regret sacrificing that without finishing it.”

“So you can still make some?”

“So Moore can make some. I can show you… how does the sheet I made yesterday translates into reality. If you want to try.”

Katia Anna Michaelson

Female human, 48 years, 7 months

Unspecialized (director)

Level: 5 (8000 XP needed)

5 unallocated skill points

XP: 31,071

STR: 13

AUT: 17

AGI: 16

PER: 16 (2000 XP needed)

DEX: 14

EMP: 18 (3000 XP needed)

As usual, Moore wasn’t sure if the talk through Pull had gone well or not, but after seeing the burgled and destroyed caches, he’d moved to reassure Johanna he still could do it all over again. After all, there were lots of books where those came from.

And he’d get more experience. He was unsure if he wanted to hoard it again in case of an intervention or if it wasn’t better spent immediately upon the four. Unlocking the horizon to level 10 after doing the emergency raise to 9 for Johanna showed a significant quality increase in available skills. Enough that he could even conceive of replacing some of their current skills with new ones. He’d got a peek at that range with some of the skills used by Changed Beasts, but having a wide range of actual level 10 ones was different. Things like Fire Spray not only looked like it would be acting as a blowtorch coming out of her fingers, but it had a double passive effect. Old Fire Handling was fine, but it did not compare.

And, of course, no one would have had access to those yet.

At least Johanna had the gist of it. He’d already got the descriptor yesterday, when they shook hands, and all that Michaelson had obtained since was five experience points, as people typically got from day to day. The woman looked like a two-time villain but was obviously a legal authority if the rough evaluation provided by the System was an indication. Everyone treated her as a big boss, even the local guards. And now Johanna seemed to be poised to make her a set.

However, the guesses about Tyrant Fixer written on her custom sheet yesterday were wrong. Given the baseline stats, the woman had more of an Earth or Water Shaper profile. The so-called “Gomez method” did provide the current stats, not the base ones.

It’s only a slight disparity. And besides, if she’s an administration boss or something, she’s not a front-line adventurer. She’s not getting enough XP for whenever the next tier of Classes is.

Johanna had needed to extract parchments from most of the books of the series, but not all 12 of them. She simply stashed the remains – Tom or one of her friends could use them for the benefit of someone else – along with the three unconverted books.

The conversion session had been a bit weird. Three separate levels, two additional Empathy parchments, Authority… Johanna had been surprised to see no specialization on the first parchment, but it had popped after three and a Talent, and she realized that Moore was just getting the undersecretary to a proper level for it. Gone were the days when he provided expected intermediate steps to reassure them. You squeezed the most of each page this time.

Tyrant Minister. A level 8 specialization – she should not have been surprised; Katia Michaelson was old enough to have accumulated a lot of experience. And only six Talents to go with it, which did surprise her, but she assumed Moore knew better, just like he’d done for Peter. He’d skipped entirely over Strength and Dexterity, and she knew there were Talents in those lines, although not many with good tiers.

What truly surprised her was the complete lack of healing, but she realized Moore already knew she was probably not going to fight directly against the Warden.

Quality, not quantity.

Katia Anna Michaelson

Female human, 48 years, 7 months

Tyrant Minister

Level: 8 (21,000 XP needed)

1/338 mana (+17 per hour)

0 unallocated skill points

XP: 71

STR: 13

AUT: 18 (2000 XP needed)

Falter (80)

Telepathy (44)

AGI: 17 (2000 XP needed)

Stable Sleep (42)

PER: 17 (5000 XP needed)

Detect Lies (42)

Mana Sight (42)

DEX: 14

EMP: 20 (8000 XP needed)

Silence (88)

“That’s… unnatural,” Katia concluded once the last book was stashed away.

“Welcome to the rank of Saints, Tyrant Minister Michaelson,” Johanna simply replied in the formal manner she’d developed.

“I would take that name as a joke if that weird parchment didn’t state it exactly that way.”

“Tyrant seems to be associated with the Authority quality, which was your second highest. Which makes sense somehow. Half of the labels do, and then you get odd stuff, and you wonder how those labels were created. And Minister is the third evolution of Fixer. Looks I underestimated your potential at first.”

“Now what?”

“I can see your regeneration kicking in already. That’s Mana Sight, which you have, by the way. In a couple of minutes at most, you’ll have enough to use one Talent for a short while. By tomorrow, all of yours will be ready to use properly.”

Johanna started to explain the Talents she knew about. Stable Sleep was the only one she had no idea about.

“I can talk to anyone I’ve met?”

Katia was going from surprise to surprise.

Johanna checked again in the reference list copied from Gomez’s notes.

“You should be able to send your voice to anyone you’ve met within the last two days or so, I guess. Provided they’re not too far away. We don’t have a formula for the distance.”

“You’re going to make my assistant half redundant. If I can call any of my staff just like that.”

Katia frowned as she said that.

“Is that why I got it?”

“Quality, not quantity. Remember, Moore knows better. That set of Talents seems… well-designed. For you.”

“I probably don’t need half of those, but I can see how some of my senior agents in the field could use them. Although I don’t know why… you…” she said, pointedly looking at Johanna to make it obvious she was talking to Moore instead, “… thought I need some sleep aid. I do sleep well.”

“It might be about putting people to sleep instead. It wouldn’t surprise me if it worked that way. Talents are weird, and we know so few of them.”

“So, you wasted those books on me. What now? What are your patron’s plans?”

“Well… we restore the Talent House’s capacity to provide. All we need are some books. And there are plenty of them where they came from.”

“Millions,” Petra laughed. “And I’m sure we missed a few Artifacts in the ruins.”

“You’re not going to Washington DC.,” Katia stated.

“Uh?”

“One, I’m not letting you alone.”

“We would have dozens of ready Talented. Who have already been there and know the way. Right, Petra?”

“Not sure if Cameron’s ready to head back to the coast so soon. Especially this late in the year. It’s going to be nearly winter by the time we can make it. But I’ll ask him.”

“Do you need to be there to pick books?” Katia asked Johanna.

“No, but…”

“No buts. You can convert those books in Vernon. I said, ‘Consider you drafted’. You four are coming with me back to Vernon.”