Chapter 102: The Dreamer
Coop spent the afternoon exchanging ideas and researching factions with Charlie, Shalatha, and Asha-Kali. They went through the tablets he had selected, mostly alleviating concerns he had with establishing the faction. He had never participated in any study groups while he was in school, but he imagined the experience would have been similar.
Coop’s more capricious questions frequently drove them off topic. More than once, he needed Charlie’s responsible presence to remind him about their priorities. He wouldn’t be betting on assimilations anytime soon, even if they had a faction, so he didn’t need to learn the rules. They wouldn’t be subject to the more proper faction wars until after Earth’s assimilation was complete, since in those cases the settlements themselves would be up for grabs. Earth was sealed off by the system for the time being, so he didn’t need to research faction politics. They also didn’t have the type of funds that would be necessary to sponsor Chosen in a different assimilation even if they did become available. Basically, they couldn’t even do most of the cool stuff factions were known for, even if they had one.
They predicted that some limited features, like the faction events and faction disputes might be available, even during the assimilation. They were projection-based services that would occur in designated places where territory wouldn’t be exchanged. Participants went through the same process that the system already allowed with the contracted residents.
If they competed successfully, they could receive more settlement-wide benefits in the form of other buff chips, but Coop wasn’t convinced they would be worth the additional headache. Shalatha retrieved another tablet that went over the known rewards from the chips. They basically turned the territory into a soup of insignificant boosts with the primary purpose of bolstering the population by incentivizing residents into the settlement. Coop thought it was more akin to a marketing scheme for something like timeshares than to actual reinforcement. Not even he cared about stats enough to be excited about +2 Agility at night while inside the settlement’s territory.
However, the main problem was that a fledgling faction would be subject to something that Coop interpreted as hazing, where the established powers would attempt to put newcomers in their place to reinforce the hierarchy of factions. For the most part, the factions behaved as if they ran the show, but even Coop could see that the galactic community only existed thanks to the system wrangling mana and uplifting them. Without the system, those factions would be trapped in their bubbles and effectively lost to the cosmos, forever hamstrung by mana. They were all little fish swimming in the system’s aquarium, believing it was the ocean. Coop wasn’t sure where that left humans; feeder fish being acclimated to the aquarium’s water, probably.
The two zombie librarians were an excellent resource for common knowledge within the galactic community, but that meant that everything they knew was filtered through the lens of the system. Coop had to consider the limitations on their perspective. Still, compared to how much he knew about factions, the system, and mana, they were absolutely brimming with insights.
Charlie wound up volunteering to take responsibility for Ghost Reef’s future human library when he explained how the other librarians had been reluctant to take the books he had scavenged. They’d just need to get something constructed. It would be another project to add to Marcus’s list, but Coop was content with leaving the specifics of development to others at this point.
Charlie’s profession had been slow to start, but managing a library would give her ample opportunity to level it up. Charlie was miffed that Camila’s profession was absolutely flying in comparison. Apparently, Charlie required plenty of advocacy, giving her friend free profession levels whenever they were together, so Charlie was excited to get her own going. If she didn’t, Camila would end up with significantly more attributes, even if Charlie’s class level was slightly higher.
As evening approached, the sun began to shine through the floor to ceiling window next to their shared table. Coop took his leave for the day. He wanted to stretch his legs and take a visit to the pearlescent chambers underneath the fort. It was time to grind.
He had some lingering concerns about monsters building up and expanding into the inner walls, forcing Coop to clear the darkness of swarms once again. At the moment, they lacked the manpower to have phantoms continually patrolling and guarding like they did before the siege. If he could prevent that extra hassle with some short grind sessions, he would.
He said his goodbyes, but before he took more than three steps away from the sofa Asha-Kali lunged after him, clearing the back of the sofa in a single motion that was unleashed like a spring. The quick movement made Coop instinctually try to dodge, with hundreds of thousands of individual engagements for training, but she was so much faster, he had no chance. She snatched both of Coop’s arms and held him still, at arm’s length, pinning them against his body.
“The hell?” Coop huffed through teeth gritted from effort and surprise.