Limitless Path

It had been a little while since she had been back, though not forever, certainly. The walls were a bit higher than last time; it looked like they had just gone through an effort to reconstruct parts of them over the last few weeks, though her parents hadn't mentioned anything about that. Other than that, the place looked very similar from the outside, though there was one building that was pretty tall that was visible even from the front of the town now. Beth supposed they must have completed the hotel they had been talking about building, which made a lot of sense with where their town was positioned. There were people entering and exiting the town she didn't recognize, but then again, between not knowing every single neighbor, and them having picked up more people just in the first couple years after Earth's integration, that was a surprise. It was hard to tell if anyone was a visitor, except for a woman with feathers for hair she passed as she walked down the main street; there still weren't any sapient beasts native to Earth, meaning this was definitely an interstellar visitor.

Beth walked to the city hall, which had been rebuilt twice at this point and was now looking much more official, though it did still have an overall small footprint, at least when compared to something like a CRA Hall. The building was four stories now, and her parents had an office on the fourth floor, though she only found one of them there. Her father was working at a desk in the corner, stamping and signing some papers as he reviewed a large stack of documents, going through each and every one carefully before signing it or denying it. Beth wasn't sure how a town the size of a large neighborhood, even with the hotel and the food production area like an expanded greenhouse, could generate that much paperwork, but it was another reason she spent time out punching things. Less signatures out there.

"Beth!" her father cried when he finally noticed her. She could be damned quiet when she moved, and was such rather often without even thinking about it.

"Dad," Beth replied, returning his hug after he got up from the desk.

"It's been a bit. How are you?" he asked, sitting on the front edge of his desk.

"Same old, same old," Beth said with a shrug. She sometimes felt a little odd around her parents considering she was subjectively older than them at this point. Neither of them had spent hardly any time in an instance with compressed time, whereas Beth had spent decades in such instances. She was, if one wanted to really be technical about it, much older than her parents. Not just that, even if most of that time was dismissed, she had still traveled far more widely than they had and experienced far more of what life, and the universe, had to offer.

"Well, you're looking rather good for all that," her father said. "You seem to really have a, how to say, glow about you these days. I know you're doing what you love, but there's something else there…"

"The whole group got our Mana Physiques now, but I unlocked a new power," Beth said with a shrug. "It gives me a big boost all the time. Maybe you're just seeing that shine through a bit?"

"A new power? Is this something you can discuss?" he asked, rubbing at his glasses. Despite all the healing available, genetic deficiencies, even more common ones like eye issues, were expensive and difficult to treat. It wasn't worth it for Beth's father, in his own opinion, to spend a bunch of money when his glasses worked just fine. Beth knew because she'd offered more than once, but he was perfectly with the current status quo.

"It's not something that you'll encounter for a very long, if ever," Beth said with a shrug.

"A bit harsh, but likely a fair assessment," he said. "Though, your mother and I have been leveling and working on catching up. Not that our progress has been fast, but we've been taking things nice and steady. We don’t need to be the strongest; we're not young anymore and can leave that to the kids. As long as we advance, we'll get stronger and, more importantly, increase out lifespans."

"There's plenty my group can do to help, if you just let me know," Beth said. "We can get you time in dungeons or trials, elixirs, anything you want or need. Don't wait until you're old and gray to say that you need some help."

"I'll keep that in mind, but I think we're doing just fine in our own ways, sweetie," he said.

"Speaking of 'we,' where is Mom?" Beth asked.

"Doing exactly what we were just talking about," her father said with a sigh. "I'm taking care of the last of this paperwork and she's out leveling. It'll be my turn tomorrow, and then we have the next day off and we'll likely clear a dungeon in the morning. Strange how normal saying that has become now."

"And you're sure you two don't need any help? I can get you in time compressed dungeons super easy. I'm talking about free, no effort or cost," Beth said, dangling the temptation in front of him.

"I really appreciate the sentiment, sweetie, and we might take you up on that as we manage to get some of this work rolled off onto others, but we'll just go at our own pace right now," he said with another, smaller sigh.

"Why do you have so much paperwork, anyway?" Beth asked.

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"We've had a lot of people leave, and we've had a lot of people move in, just in the last two years," he said, shaking his head. "We've set up ways to deal with people moving in, buying the houses, renting a hotel room long-term, and how we want to integrate people. At the end of the day, and because not all that many people have communicators even now, that winds up in a ton of paperwork. It's a pain, and we do digitize copies of everything, anyway, but we still do everything by hand first and then make copies of it."

"You should just set up a kiosk downstairs," Beth said, leaning back in the chair she had grabbed.

"Well, that might not exactly work," her father said, scratching his head.

"I mean, it doesn't have to be crazy. You've got people who come here in person, they're in town, so they're at most a mile away or less. Anybody who wants to go through the process just walks over here and types something up on the computer and then you can review it on your communicator," Beth said, waving a hand idly.

"That might work, but setting up and maintaining the computers would be a bit of a pain and would likely be less effective than somebody just penning in a form," he said. "I think we can mostly get rid of the paper when most people have communicators, but we still need a simpler way to take care of everything until then."

"How is the adoption of those going? Is it just a money issue for people?" Beth asked.

"From what I understand, that's mostly it. The only really dealer around is the CRA, and they have plenty of units, but people also have to get an Emblem to buy from their store. So, people save up a lot of money, then spend most of that just on the Emblem. I heard there's a couple stores opened in a few places from some interstellar companies that are selling things like communicators, but they have very few locations. Around here, people would have to make their way down to the city, New York City, to find one of those locations. I think the next closest would be a location in what used to be Pittsburgh, so that's even further and through even more dangerous land."

"Hmm, maybe I can get somebody to set up something small in the area for a year to get some goods to people outside of the CRA stuff," Beth said. "Or, I could just buy a bunch of stuff from the CRA and have somebody sell it in town until the stock is all gone."

"If you're not going to oversee it yourself, I wouldn't bother with it, honestly," said her father. "There's a lot of cases of theft happening; not many here, mind you, but there's a lot going around. It's not everything getting stolen all the time, but crime rates are definitely still elevated as compared to before the integration. The CRA also doesn't do much for that kind of thing."

"Not our jurisdiction," Beth said with a lazy shrug. "If the theft is big enough, or enough people get hurt, or somebody gets kidnapped or killed, then we step in. Otherwise, that kind of stuff is mostly left to local law enforcement to sort out. We usually step in when they ask for help, or when a problem spirals out of control, but that is the point where they're burning down the city."

"I notice you naturally just use 'we' when talking about the CRA," her father said with a small smile, a bit of melancholy in his tone.

"I've been with them for literal decades now," Beth replied, this time with a helpless shrug. "I'm part of the organization, no question. I've got a Gold Emblem, which is something that not a lot of people even go for, and I'm eventually going for Platinum. The new Hall Master here that replaced Baelvyr is only a Platinum, if that give you more context for what I'm working on next. Well, maybe not right this minute, but it won't be too many years for me to get the next level."

"I suppose I still think of you as my little girl most of the time, sweetie. Time's been passing so fast, and you've done far more than most. It just still feels like your that little girl I took to the park on the weekend and carried to the car when you got tired," he said, a bit of a faraway look in his eyes.

"Alright, let's not get sappy," Beth said, standing up and stretching. "You think Mom is going to be back sometime soon?"

"I think she'll be back in another hour. Do you want to go home and wait for her?" her father replied.

"I don't mind. We're heading out in a day or so for something, but that won't take long and then we'll be back for a while," Beth said. "Well, scratch that, I don't know what the plan is after the next two weeks, but we should be back for longer after this thing we've got scheduled."

"Are you able to keep leveling and progressing here at home? I wouldn't want us to be holding you and the team back," her father said as he tidied his desk before walking her out. He closed the town hall up for the night, which spoke to how much of a sleepy little town the place still was, that one person worked administration and could just close the place down alone when they were done.

They returned to Beth's childhood home, which had remained remarkably unchanged over the years, though there were clear signs parts had been slightly rebuilt. Beth's greatly enhanced sight and powers allowed her to easily see that the windows were all brand new and hand enchantments etched into the casements and the glass. Beyond that, the doors were also new and enchanted, and the whole roof had been redone at some point, also utilizing enchanted materials. The inside was much as it had always been, though even there she noticed some subtle signs that thing had been reinforced or remodeled in a way that added to their strength and durability. She was pretty sure many of the formations in the windows, doors, and layered into parts of the floor were for detecting, and preventing, intrusion into the building, which made sense, but did tell her that her parents were doing pretty well.

She waited in the living room for her mother to return, answering a few questions from her father in the meantime, while also ignoring a few. If she let him carry on, they'd be talking for the whole night, and she wasn't nearly as much of a walking encyclopedia as her father seemed to assume she was. Her mother eventually arrived, insisting on giving her a long, strong hug before pestering her about her adventures in recent months. Beth gave both of them a summary of what they had been up to, though even a brief accounting of their activities took another hour or so. Her mother insisted she stay for dinner, and right at the end of her story telling, Sera showed up, who she had invited down to get more familiar with her parents.

The four of them had a pleasant dinner together, and Beth was able to turn things around a bit and ask them what they had been up to. It was a lot of boring administrative work, on the whole, but they did have their own stories to share about fights and battles and various developments in the town. They had been relatively lucky so far, insomuch as people that had moved in when others moved out were alright sorts, overall, and hadn't materially done harm to the town or the people in it. They had been a bit less lucky with other developments in the area, at least in terms of anything really beneficial that could give them a huge boost. They had the two dungeons, of course, but nothing else had cropped up that would make the area a real draw for people from far and wide. Not that the dungeons were anything to sneeze at, but close proximity to several easy dungeons would only ensure the towns survival, it wouldn't guarantee that they would thrive going forward. Conversely, they didn't have anything horrible happen, either, which was a real blessing in this new paradigm of beasts and monsters, so they hadn't needed to go into emergency.

Beth and Sera inquired about what they had been up to in terms of their personal progression, and her parents talked about their rebirths and their first class evolutions. They had gone in some surprising directions, at least for Beth, and it was interesting to break down what they had picked and why they had picked it. Beth couldn't really go too in-depth into their current builds and strategies as they were still fairly lacking when it came to skills, though she could help them a little bit with that in that she could let them use some of the skill crystals they had. Neither of them needed Swift, but Beth still had the crystal for Spatial Step, and her parents had her father learn it first. The crystal couldn't be used back-to-back, but she would leave it with them and her mother could use it while they were off taking care of Baelvyr's business. Her team didn't really need it, now or in the future, so it wasn't a big deal to leave it somewhere for a few weeks.