Neophyte World Builder

LEVOS

How had it come to this?

Levos sighed bitterly as he slipped into the house. It wasn’t a bad house… small for four people, but pleasant enough even if in less than perfect condition. In older days, it had been common to keep a few houses ready for visitors, though often times there were not enough for refugees or sudden migrations. Even so, the idea of a homeless underclass had made him wince when Ylena mentioned it.

It wasn’t that such things were unknown, of course. They just weren’t considered civilized in the society Levos was familiar with. He’d thought them the sign of an underdeveloped or poorly-functioning nation, one that hadn’t met the needs of its people.

He still thought that, but now he wondered if there weren’t still a few things to learn from the primitive Calen. They’d survived all this time, after all. Too bad they hated the Aravel, not that he could blame them once he heard the warped version of history they had been taught.

“Food’s here,” he called out, dropping the satchel down. His explorations outside of civilization had netted some minor valuables he could sell, and that meant they weren’t in danger of starving. Ynot needed to hunt live prey, but it was pretty good at taking care of vermin.

Ylena scampered out first, clapping her hands. She was now in much less formal and flimsy clothing—a tunic with a layer of leather over the top, and sturdy laced sandals—but she still had a delicate air to her and she’d tied her hair up in small braids, a custom that was far more rare among the Aravel.

“Thank you, Levos,” she said with a wiggle of her ears. “Any news about the ah… war?” The slight sway to her tail and tilt to her ears at the end showed her embarrassed concern. She hadn’t wanted to return even when the pursuit had ignited an apparent religious war among her people, one that had shown weakness in the Duskward Remnant and led to an occupation by another fragment of the Empire.

The entire government was falling apart because they’d brought a spoiled Calen princess into the Empire.

That wasn’t really fair, Levos thought to himself. Things had been falling apart for a long while… barely kept together by the long-standing tradition and the castes established by Memory Paths. The lifelines that ended up in all the menial tasks were none too happy about the ruling lifelines continuing to put off solutions, and only the weight of all that tradition had kept everything in check.

Ylena didn’t even want to hurt anyone. She wanted adventure and to explore away from her people’s own stifling culture… and Ynot had just charmed her into that. Levos still wasn’t sure how the wheezing mushroom could have such an infectious personality, but Ylena’s loyalty was unquestioned. She’d given up her own life of luxury just to see the world with the small group Levos ostensibly led.

Nowadays he wasn’t sure if he was still the leader, since Ynot’s odd impulsiveness to see things tended to decide where they were going. Levos didn’t mind… both Pini and himself had always been the wandering sorts anyway. It was also easy to see why people liked Ynot.

Levos shook himself out of his thoughts. “It’s tense, but they’ve stopped fighting. Nobody wants things to get any more bloody, but I have a feeling this isn’t over. Food is getting more expensive because the workers are refusing to do their jobs, and I don’t think things will hold together much longer. We should try to find somewhere farther away to take a break… I’m not sure where Ynot was talking about going next.”

“It wants to go see the Dawnwall!” Pini cackled as he made his entrance. His old rooken friend hopped up to the stool near Ylena, giving a light wing pat to the back of the young elf. “It hasn’t shut up about it since it heard, but I think that might be too much. I suggest the Aqua Band next, it’s in the right direction and close enough to civilization that if Ylena wants to stop, she can find a place to stay with the rooken.”

“I don’t mind staying with the Aravel, I’m not one of the Transcendent,” Ylena huffed pointedly. “I think they’re just jealous and trying to use the Tastka myth as an excuse to lash out.”

Levos wasn’t so sure Tastka was a myth, but he didn’t raise that point, as Ynot shuffled in once more before he could get into the argument. He lifted a hand to greet his bizarre friend, letting the mushroom’s strange senses pick up the exaggerated movement. Ynot didn’t ‘see’ things the same way anyone else did, not even Pini.

“This place is not safe,” Ynot wheezed in its peculiar voice. “More earth shakes come.”

Levos just frowned. Quakes were not totally unknown, especially near areas of high Flame, but this was a very stable region. What’s more, a small quake had happened while they were in the Calen kingdom a couple years ago… the chance that another would hit so soon was infinitesimal, at least in this region. Yet Ynot knew the earth and how it behaved far better than any being except maybe a dwarf or a very obsessed underfoot.

Before he could argue, the table quivered violently, and a large crack split along the curving dome of the house, crumbling bits of the shaped stone dusting the floor. Ylena squeaked and bolted off the stool, while Pini jerked back and leapt onto a window sill. Levos was glad the window was open for him.

“That… was not normal,” Levos muttered. His lineage was old enough that he could remember even more violent quakes, but they were few and far between, and almost always tied to some flaw in the land. This was a city that had stood for generations, nearly reaching back to the start of the Age of Silence. It shouldn’t be near anything unstable.

“We should go,” Ynot pressed, already heading for the doorway.

Levos frowned, but started gathering his things.

With all the talk of the collapse of the current order, followed by inexplicable movement of the ground… he had a feeling this city would be very dangerous soon.

Very soon.

It really was fortunate that this civilization had something like paper, Nethys reflected. It wasn’t quite like the wood pulp paper she’d been accustomed to, but it served the same purpose. A little more stiff, perhaps, and it required a careful hand with the ink… but it worked just the same and if anything was more durable.

Of course, by the time she’d died, almost everything had been done electronically… but she’d been taught enough about how the old methods worked that it hadn’t taken more than a few years to fully adjust. As she was now well into her late twenties, she’d fully adapted. It was more work, but she’d always had a knack for doing it by hand.

The hard part had been inventing and laying out the procedures. Genev hadn’t seen the point of many of them at first, and she was probably right… most of them wouldn’t even be applicable for decades, if even within her lifetime. The economic system could only handle so many shocks at once, and without a stable long-distance communications system some of the concerns were moot.

That might change soon, however.

“Still working hard? The day is getting long. Have you eaten dinner?”

Genev’s soft question—almost a coo—whispered in Nethys’s ear moments before she felt the arms wrap around her from behind. The gentle softness of her wife’s bosom nestled against the back of her head, and Nethys reflexively wrapped her tail around a leg for an answering squeeze. She did not look up from the papers.

“Not yet,” Nethys admitted after a moment. “I’ll put these down in a moment… the numbers are fine, I’m just nervous. The fact that nobody has done this before is kind of shocking to me. It’s pretty obvious.”

“It really gets me excited when you don’t realize you’re a genius,” the avian woman purred into her ear.

Nethys just swat at Genev’s hip with the tip of her tail, causing a little burst of laughter and a release. She’d never pried to find out how her lover had managed to get such a dangerous Totem despite being clearly from the middle class, but she was convinced it had somehow turned up Genev’s libido and then snapped off the off switch.

Not that Genev ever forced the issue… and Nethys did enjoy it, even if she’d been uncertain at first. It could just be… a lot. She’d never had so much physical affection in her life on Earth, and even here her few relationships before Genev had been far less enthusiastic.

“It does sound ridiculous, at first,” Genev admitted as she slid up beside Nethys. “I trust you know what you’re doing, but the idea makes the guilds very wary. We may have to worry about assassins coming after me.”

“I will make sure that doesn’t happen,” Nethys replied automatically. “It’s already leaked that I’m your partner, so that should give people pause already. Once we unveil our first deal, they’ll know that going after you will be a very bad idea.”

Genev clucked lightly—literally, given her avian tendencies—before leaning against the desk with a curious tilt of her head and a lifted eyebrow. “Well, now I really am wondering what my little money pot is up to. You are sinking an awful lot of our savings into these two ventures, but I suppose the contracts can’t work without the communications.”

Nethys sighed, “Even the contracts aren’t that strange. You just get a binding enforcement on the trade secrets and you can have an extension of the guild market in another city. Why is that so hard? The banking families do this already, you know. We’re just replacing the blood relationship with a contract.”

The look Genev gave her was skeptical, so Nethys shut up and went back to the papers, scribbling the last signature. All the numbers added up, so things should be fine… unless the whole thing fell apart. Then she’d have to go out and kill some valuable beast or something, and Nethys was in no hurry to risk blowing off half of her hand again.

She knew that wasn’t the real revolutionary thing she was doing. Long-distance magical communications had existed for centuries, and courier networks or relayed communications were a thing as well. The expense of setting up these relays, and the expense of buying time and magical power from the casters, was where it all fell apart. Nobility or the rich—for those realms that didn’t have nobility—were the only civilians who could afford it, and it had been almost exclusively military otherwise.

So what Nethys had done was simple. She hadn’t even done the initial math for it. She’d hired a codebreaker to make a compressed manner of covering the most common topics, then hired decoders at each station sending or receiving the proprietary code after she’d revised it with her [Mathemancer] abilities. The bulk of the time was spent decoding, but that could be fanned out to cheap workers, keeping the casters handling the transmission and reception.

Suddenly, even down-on-their-luck people could afford a very short message, and the more well-off could have a message across the continent within a few days at most. In theory. They didn’t have stations everywhere yet, but since Genev’s success had given the older woman some pull here, it would be difficult for anyone to catch up to the carefully planned network when it went live in five days.

“Now, you were saying something about dinner?” Nethys asked, turning about to take her wife’s hand. Genev had, as promised, gotten them married in Partaon within a tenday of her return, and had been steadfastly loyal—if bizarrely horny—ever since. The Ellarto Republic did not recognize their union, so they kept it under wraps, but it had been important to Genev, and Nethys found she was glad they’d done so.

As Genev opened her mouth, the room rattled and the inkwell fell to the floor, shattering in a splotch of oily black. Genev let out a shrill squawk, but Nethys just tightened her grip until the earthquake passed, mildly surprised.

It was only after she felt Genev’s trembling that Nethys realized she’d never felt such a thing here on this world.