House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Commons - 13

A2 - Reputation - 37

A3 - Medcorps - 0

A4 - Marshal - 8

A5 - Non-Coms - 4

S1 - Wikipedia - 19

S2 - Steam - 0

S3 - Wookiepedia - 37

S4 - World - 6

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Wookiepedia

Thanks to the Mobile Medical Unit 4-077, the new skill “Medicine” has been added, which we are now Prodigious in.

Additionally, since we have some amount of past training in related skills such as Herblore before that eventually got formally classified as “The Green,” the skill will start out at basic competence or Level 5 - 100/100.

Next, (because this is pretty disappointing for a 13/13 roll, but there's not much wiggle room for a wiki page about a med-droid) our Force talent has been bumped from Knack to Skilled.

(To those disappointed by this roll, I do understand, but that's just how RNG is sometimes.

That said, I can do my best for interpretation in this case, pointing you to the fact that this new skill is being listed as a Magic skill and that was not an accident.

Just because this landed on the skill side of “T6 = Personal Power/Skill” doesn't mean we can’t learn a few Powers with some effort…)

World: Warhammer Fantasy Wiki

The good doG has received the Antler of the Blue Stag, directly from RNGesus as a gift and bribe to spare Wulfric (and only Wulfric) from any Divine judgements she feels are necessary.

She is fully aware of what it does and can choose to use it or not at her own discretion.

This works similarly to our Prodigious Stealth effect where it buffs “the community of warriors,” which here can range from a few people to an army.

While active, ALL Combat skills are brought up to Talented.

However, it only activates while the good doG is actively a part of a group, not just near one, as well as having the Antler on her person, so the buff won't be applied as frequently as our Stealth Buff has been.

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Story:

This had somehow been the most delightfully interesting and incredibly boring month of your life.

You came back from Vulture's Roost with people talking about mountain raids and daring attacks and found Kingsgrave sitting in exactly the same place you'd left it, with the siege lines hardly changed and everyone still staring at the same walls.

Apparently you could disappear into the Red Mountains, help break another army's siege, visit the ruins where Jon had been born, come back covered in glory, and Kingsgrave would still be there waiting for you.

At least the Infantry hadn't fallen apart while you were gone.

Several months ago, leaving for a few weeks would've meant returning to arguments about who commanded what, missing supplies, half-understood orders, and at least one lord convinced somebody else's sergeant had insulted him personally.

Instead the officers had managed, the noncoms had kept doing their jobs, and Barristan's temporary arrangements hadn't needed you to immediately start repairing them.

You'd spent months trying to make yourself less necessary to the daily functioning of the Infantry, and annoyingly enough it seemed to have worked.

Unfortunately, none of that made Kingsgrave less of a bastard.

The last few sieges had spoiled all of you.

You'd gotten used to skeleton garrisons, demoralized defenders, servants opening gates, or somebody inside deciding they had better things to do than die for whichever claimant currently occupied their home.

Kingsgrave had most of its native strength, plenty of supplies, plenty of warning, and a defensive position generations of Dornishmen had spent improving specifically because enormous armies sometimes came marching down the Prince's Pass.

Not merely the castle either.

The roads, water, trails, lookout points, settlements, approaches, and every inconvenient patch of ground around it had spent thousands of years being adjusted by people whose descendants knew exactly why those adjustments mattered.

One lord repaired a wall, his grandson moved a cistern, somebody a century later cut a trail through another slope, and eventually all those little decisions became a landscape built around one simple idea: when the enormous invading army arrives, make sure it breaks first.

Worse, this wasn't even an unusual problem from the Dornish perspective.

The old Gardener Kings had possessed enormous armies, and whenever the Reach rather than the Stormlands decided Dorne needed conquering again, the Prince's Pass was one of the obvious places to funnel them.

Vulture's Roost had experience resisting very angry Stormlanders.

Kingsgrave had experience resisting armies large enough to make Stormlanders look restrained.

Thankfully, plenty of the men outside the walls came from families that had spent those same thousands of years trying to get through.

Reachmen and Stormlanders started producing family histories, old campaign maps, stories about invasions that failed, stories about invasions that almost worked, and occasionally stories about some ancestor who'd discovered a brilliant route nobody had bothered recording clearly enough for his descendants to identify.

Quite a few of the accounts contradicted one another, which generally meant several hours of argument followed by scouts being sent out to discover whose dead grandfather was lying.

More recent information was considerably better.

Dorne had spent years inside the same kingdom as the Reach and Stormlands, which meant places men once entered with armies had since been visited for marriages, negotiations, hunting, trade, or simple curiosity.

Stormlanders had done more of that for obvious reasons, but quite a few Reach lords had apparently spent King Robert's reign wandering around old invasion routes while nobody could reasonably tell them they weren't allowed.

You respected that immensely.

Given several peaceful years inside the same realm, their response had been to quietly take notes on how they might invade later.

There was something deeply reassuring about Westerosi nobility occasionally planning ahead.

The camp gradually developed the atmosphere of someone accidentally giving several hundred lords Maester chains.

Men compared chronicles over dinner, sent scouts to check old claims, argued about streams mentioned three hundred years earlier, and spent unreasonable amounts of time identifying which hill somebody's ancestor had actually meant.

Every failed invasion became useful because it provided another method everyone could confidently avoid.

You found the whole thing fascinating.

Kingsgrave remained stubbornly intact, which took some shine off the practical results, but you'd never seen this many lords willingly treat somebody else's family history as useful information.

Normally pride got involved long before anything productive happened.

Here everyone seemed too interested in beating Kingsgrave to care whose dead ancestor supplied the answer.

The rune experiments got dragged into the same process almost immediately.

Northern soldiers had already been showing Southerners simple marks for strength, endurance, protection, and whatever else somebody's grandfather had taught him to scratch into a shield.

The effects remained small, but enough men had tried them by now that dismissing the entire thing as Northern superstition had become difficult.

A sword becoming barely noticeably lighter sounded unimpressive until you'd been carrying it for six hours.

Hart Weard remained the far more interesting problem.

Nobody could reproduce what it did, but the shield proved that complicated arrangements of runes could produce something far beyond the tiny effects of a single symbol.

People had therefore reached the very dangerous stage of research where they knew something was possible and understood almost none of the rules.

Soon you had Northmen drawing symbols beside Reachmen drawing maps of Kingsgrave, which inevitably led to people asking whether the two sets of knowledge could be useful together.

Could reinforcement runes help ladders survive longer, could lighter tools make digging less miserable, could reduced equipment weight make some ugly mountain approach practical, and did any old Northern mark interact with stone in a way useful enough to matter?

Most answers turned out to be disappointing.

A few didn't.

Nobody discovered the ancient rune for making Dornish walls politely collapse, but every small success gave somebody another reason to keep experimenting.

It also meant the exchange was finally running properly in both directions.

Northmen had runes and scraps of First Men knowledge that Southerners suddenly wanted.

Reachmen and Stormlanders had the Red Mountains, invasion histories, and generations of experience attacking exactly this country.

Everyone had something useful enough that nobody could spend very long pretending his kingdom understood war better than everyone else's.

Even the Riverlanders and Crownlanders found their own specialty.

Their histories had considerably fewer examples of one enormous stable kingdom slowly expanding until it roughly matched its modern borders.

The Riverlands especially had spent a ridiculous amount of time divided, conquered, partially united, broken apart, reunited under somebody else, then conquered again.

House Mudd and House Justman were both remembered as examples of River Kings, but their kingdoms hadn't even covered the same territory.

The Crownlands were stranger still.

The Crownlands as a political thing hadn't existed until the Targaryens decided they wanted land around King's Landing answering directly to them.

Before that, the region had been full of petty kingdoms, awkward alliances, border houses, and unfortunate families stuck between larger powers that kept changing their minds about who owned what.

That left both regions with centuries of stories about small states surviving beside much stronger neighbors.

Some fought, some negotiated, some switched sides at the right moment, and a great many survived by making conquest sufficiently irritating that the larger kingdom eventually accepted terms simply to stop dealing with them.

Their smaller-scale warfare translated surprisingly well to the Dornish raiding around you.

The Red Mountains had little groups slipping through scrub and broken ground to harass supplies.

Riverlanders had spent centuries hiding along rivers, reeds, brush, little islands, and woods to accomplish essentially the same thing.

One raid barely mattered.

Ten raids lost some wagons.

Enough small annoyances over enough months could turn an invasion expected to last years into one that had to end before winter.

That made the Riverlanders and Crownlanders excellent stand-ins for the Dornish during the war games.

You'd expected at least some resentment over being assigned to play the enemy, especially when half the exercise involved demonstrating how efficiently they could ruin a Reachman's campaign.

Instead they seemed delighted that everyone had finally discovered an area of warfare where being historically surrounded by stronger neighbors counted as prestigious expertise.

It was absolutely bizarre.

You'd watched lords argue over standing several feet closer to Barristan during a march, and now the same sort of men were graciously congratulating a Riverlord for demonstrating how his ancestors would've murdered their supply train.

Apparently Westerosi nobility could achieve harmony provided everyone had a sufficiently complicated siege to hate together.

You usually served as either the Infantry commander or one of the people asked whether some rune idea was plausible.

By now you possessed an alarmingly detailed understanding of how storming Kingsgrave could go wrong.

You also had several increasingly refined ideas for how to make it go wrong somewhat less catastrophically.

That was the extent of your progress.

No great breach appeared, nobody found a forgotten gate, and Kingsgrave remained stubbornly attached to the mountain.

At least all the waiting continued helping with the lords themselves.

Barristan wasn't Mace Tyrell and had no intention of organizing a grand tourney while an enemy castle watched from the hill, but enough nobles trapped together eventually produced competitions anyway.

There were spars, archery contests, riding competitions, hunting when anyone could justify it, war games, and plenty of evenings where half a dozen lords simply ended up occupying the same large tent with food and something to drink.

You started bringing Tulin and Lord Teba into more of those gatherings.

Your own relationships with Southern lords were useful, but having every connection run through you would become rather pointless once the armies eventually scattered.

Tulin needed men outside the North who knew his name for reasons beyond being the young lunatic attached to you, and his father could talk to older lords without needing you anywhere nearby.

It was satisfying watching those connections continue without you.

A Reach lord who'd originally spoken to Tulin because he happened to be sitting beside you would seek him out later to argue about archery.

A Stormlander who met Lord Teba over supper would end up discussing horses with him several days afterward.

None of it looked terribly important at the moment, which probably meant it would reshape somebody's marriage prospects or military alliance in ten years.

You even convinced several people to spar with Jon.

That usually ended how you'd expected.

Jon had accumulated enough of a reputation that losing to him no longer embarrassed anyone too badly.

That made younger knights particularly willing to try, since testing yourself against somebody everyone agreed was exceptional sounded much better than volunteering to get beaten by your lord's bastard cousin.

Usually they still got beaten.

Eventually the obvious question started circulating through camp.

Jon against Barristan.

Nobody had arranged it yet, but enough people had independently suggested the match that it was probably going to happen eventually.

You were doing absolutely nothing to discourage this.

There wasn't any complicated reason behind your interest.

Jon was the best fighter you personally knew, while Barristan had the greatest reputation of any living knight and had already demonstrated that the reputation wasn't merely old men remembering his youth.

You wanted to watch them fight.

Barristan was old enough that he should've been getting worse.

Physically he probably was, at least slightly.

The irritating thing was that every time somebody sparred with him he seemed to learn something, and you were reasonably sure you'd watched the man improve during the campaign.

That was an absolutely ridiculous thing to say about someone who hadn't lost a fair fight in decades.

His body might be slowing down, but his skill seemed determined to replace whatever his muscles lost before anyone could take advantage.

You really wanted to see what Jon did with that.

News from the rest of the war kept filtering into camp between all of this.

The funniest piece was that Fair Isle had been retaken by Emmon Frey of all people.

He'd apparently done it with mostly Lannister reserve troops and whatever ships could be scraped together around Lannisport.

Naturally, the Riverlords claimed the victory immediately.

The soldiers being mostly Lannister and the ships coming from Lannisport were considered minor technical details.

His name was Frey, therefore Fair Isle was now evidence of Riverland military excellence.

The Crownlanders got their own victory soon afterward.

Your uncle Ned had retaken Rook's Rest from Stannis, which produced considerable celebration among the Crownlander lords in camp despite House Staunton's forces currently serving with Joffrey.

Their land being back in loyalist hands mattered considerably more than who happened to be standing nearby when the raven arrived.

Maidenpool remained a much uglier subject.

Stannis still held it, and nobody enjoyed speculating about what his Red Priests might be doing in one of the more religiously important cities of the Seven.

Reliable information remained scarce enough that everyone's imagination could comfortably supply something worse.

The Vale was almost as frustrating.

Latest reports suggested Stannis had consolidated much of his position in the north while forces still loyal to Lysa Arryn had retaken ground farther south.

Every Riverlander discussing this went out of his way to call her Lysa Arryn.

Never Lysa Tully.

Apparently allowing Stannis to invade the Vale while continuing to insist the Vale wasn't involved in the war had finally exhausted whatever sentimental claim remained on her childhood house.

Neither side winning was particularly good for Joffrey, but if Stannis and Lysa's men wanted to weaken each other instead of letting him take the Vale uncontested, nobody in your camp was going to complain loudly.

Gulltown and Runestone remained the awkward exceptions.

They'd actually declared for Joffrey and therefore deserved support more than anyone else in the Vale, which would've been considerably more useful if loyalist armies could reach them without first solving the entire political problem surrounding the kingdom.

For now they mostly received promises, recognition, and whatever aid could be slipped toward them.

The Golden Company's movements finally became clearer as well.

After Summerhall, Aegon's combined forces had apparently begun spreading into the Stormlands and Reach instead of immediately retreating deeper into Dorne.

Then Stannis's forces started hitting coastal positions behind them.

That forced a large part of the army back before those attacks could turn into a proper threat to their rear.

They dealt with that problem, prepared to start moving again, and then some kind of plague tore through them.

The followers of the Seven in camp decided almost immediately that this was divine punishment for worshipping the Grandfather.

You couldn't exactly prove them wrong.

The Old Gods had never struck you as especially interested in sending plagues, but you couldn't imagine they'd object if the Seven had found a useful contribution to the war effort.

Whatever caused it, Aegon's forces had recovered enough to become troublesome again.

Golden Company and Dornish troops were now harassing Willas Tyrell's advance while reinforcements had reached Yronwood.

That turned what had already promised to be a difficult siege into something potentially much uglier.

Willas was still working his way toward the far side of the Prince's Pass, though slowly.

If he reached you before Kingsgrave fell, doubling the pressure might finally crack the route open.

If Yronwood became the larger problem first, there was already talk that all three loyalist armies might have to gather long enough to smash the enemy concentration before splitting apart again.

Barristan had at least clarified the part everyone in your command cared about.

Even if the three armies physically reunited, they would remain three armies for command purposes.

Nobody intended to pour every Infantry unit in Dorne into one enormous administrative nightmare and begin arguing over precedence from the beginning.

You were extremely grateful for that.

You'd only recently gotten your own Infantry to the point where everybody broadly understood what they were doing.

The thought of somebody adding two more armies and telling you to sort it out made Kingsgrave seem merciful.

And through all of this, the Red Mountains had started turning green.

You'd been trying very hard not to think about that.

The effect had followed you through greener country before, where slightly healthier grass or a suspiciously lively tree could be blamed on weather, coincidence, strange soil, or whatever explanation let everyone remain comfortable.

Even Nightsong sat close enough to greener land that nobody could point at a single patch of vegetation and confidently blame you.

Kingsgrave was much worse for denial.

The Red Mountains had earned their name honestly: red stone, brown earth, tan scrub, dusty slopes, and then wherever your army had spent enough time, green.

Grass thickened, bushes pushed out new leaves, and plants that had looked half dead when you arrived started behaving as though somebody had finally informed them water existed.

The trail from your Vulture's Roost expedition killed whatever deniability remained.

Scouts using the same routes to carry messages toward Joffrey reported that in places they could literally follow where your force had gone by following the healthier vegetation.

There was apparently a visible green line across parts of the Red Mountains marking your journey there and back.

You would've preferred nobody mention this.

Your own soldiers had other ideas.

Long Lake men weren't remotely secretive about their lord being blessed by the Old Gods and having a special way with plants.

Once Southern lords started asking questions, your soldiers were perfectly happy to explain that yes, you'd always done strange things around growing things and yes, obviously the gods liked you.

This was apparently considered helpful.

Then people started asking you to bless trees.

At first you assumed they were joking.

Some of them were.

Enough weren't that refusing every request would've become more conspicuous than simply touching the occasional tree and saying something suitably vague.

The trees then betrayed you.

A half-bare little thing near one of the larger tents put out fresh leaves within several days.

A shrub somebody asked you to bless thickened enough that men started bringing other people over to look at it.

Scouts reported that plants you'd touched weeks earlier still looked healthier than everything around them.

You attempted to maintain that none of this proved very much.

Apparently some of the lords had developed a scientific streak during the siege and decided to ruin that for you too.

Without explaining what they were testing, they found two similar trees several miles apart under roughly comparable conditions.

They arranged for you to be brought near one, somebody requested the increasingly traditional blessing, and nobody took you anywhere near the second.

Then they waited.

The result was obnoxiously clear.

The tree you'd touched started leafing out far more strongly than the other one.

So much for superstition.

After that, the requests multiplied.

Trees, shrubs, patches of camp vegetation, one particularly miserable fruit tree somebody had apparently become emotionally invested in.

You had somehow become the person Southern lords approached when they wanted a plant blessed.

The followers of the Seven didn't seem especially bothered by any of it.

That was the part you cared about.

After Red Priests, Grandfather cultists, blood magic, infected corpses, and every other supernatural horror this war had produced, publicly demonstrating another form of magic could've become complicated very quickly.

Instead, most seemed curious or mildly impressed.

One lord observed that if the Old Gods wanted to express themselves by making bushes healthier, that was considerably more civilized than what most foreign gods had been doing lately.

You were perfectly happy to accept that theological standard.

The Northmen were unbearable.

They'd already spent weeks enjoying the fact that runes worked after generations of Southerners treating them as scratches.

Jon was developing a reputation for being nearly impossible to beat in the yard.

Now their young Infantry commander was walking through Dorne leaving green plants behind him.

You could practically feel Northern smugness increasing around camp.

Normally Jon would've been the person you complained to about this.

Unfortunately, every time somebody asked you to bless another tree he got that stupid little smirk on his face.

Once or twice he even managed to look solemn while doing it, which was considerably worse.

At least Jinx still loved you.

Janus didn't count.

Janus had never stopped mocking you in the first place, the bastard.

So after a month at Kingsgrave, the army had accomplished quite a lot.

Lords from half the realm were trading military history, Northmen and Southerners were experimenting with runes, Riverlanders had discovered tremendous pride in pretending to be Dornish, new friendships were forming, Jon might eventually fight Barristan, loyalist armies elsewhere were still moving, and everyone had apparently agreed that you were some kind of walking agricultural blessing.

Kingsgrave was still there.

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Skills:

Combat:

(12) Form/Bewegungsgestalt - 110/400 (+40)

(11) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 70/300 (+40)

(12) Archery - 100/400 (+40) (Gifted)

(12) Equestrianism - 5/400 (+20) (Talented)

(13) Heavy Armour - 70/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(12) Interpersonal Communication - 75/400 (+50) (Skilled)

(8) Public Speaking - 100/100 (+25) (Skilled)

(13) Management - 500/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

(8) Stewardship - 60/100 (+15) (Knack)

(7) Northern Law - 60/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) General Westerosi Law - 50/100 (+5) (Knack)

Language:

(11) Common Speaking - 80/300 (+40) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 180/300 (+5) (Knack)

(8) Valyrian Speaking - 5/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) Common Reading - 25/100 (+0)

(6) Valyrian Reading - 30/100 (+0)

Scholarly:

(9) Pure Math(s) - 65/100 (+5)

(12) Accounts/Ledgers - 210/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

(10) Northern History - 180/200 (+5) (Knack)

(8) General Westerosi History - 35/100 (+5)

(8) Northern Peoples - 80/100 (+0)

(7) General Westerosi Peoples - 15/100 (+5)

Leisure:

(10) Hunting - 20/200 (+0)

(7) Fishing - 59/100 (+0)

(6) Swimming - 39/100 (+0)

(6) Seacraft - 6/100 (+0)

(6) Climbing - 60/100 (+0)

(5) Acting (Lying) - 45/100 (+5)

War:

(12) Strategy - 100/400 (+50) (Prodigious +)

(7) Castrametation - 90/100 (+30) (Knack)

(4) Poliorcetics - 60/100 (+75)

(4) Fleetcraft - 15/100 (+5) (Knack)

(3) Battlewise - 90/100 (+0)

Magic:

(13) The Green - 50/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

(7) Warging - 25/100 (+25) (Gifted)

(6) Westerosi Runes - 60/100 (+50)

(1) The Force - 60/100 (+10) (Skilled)

(5) Medicine - 100/100 (Prodigious)

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Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 108

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T3 = Objects/Effect on Another Place

L5 = Slightly Convenient

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Voting:

Main Actions: (What should we focus on next chapter?)

A1 - Focus on the needs and training of the Common men.

A2 - Focus on your reputation with the Lords by training with them.

A3 - Work with the Medcorps and other Support Staff.

A4 - Focus on your Marshal Skill by Training with Jon and the Knights.

A5 - Focus on the Organisation and Non-Coms of the Army.

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia

S2 - Steam Games

S3 - Wookiepedia (On Cooldown 1/1)

S4 - World Rolls List

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Information/Maps:

1 - War-Map: In Zones mode for easier understanding.

Imgur - File Garden - Catbox

Key:

Red - Joff’s Loyalists

Blue - Stannis’s Rebels

Purple - Blackfyre/Dorne

Yellow - Arryn Loyalists

2 - New World Map

Note: Not accurate to Westeros or Western Essos/the Free Cities.

3 - The Wolf of Serenno

As a little non-canon diversion from this fic, I wrote a short crossover where a young Ned Stark and Ashara Dayne are taken from Westeros and raised by Count Dooku, with Ned eventually becoming the galaxy's most confusingly honorable Sith.

It gave me an excuse to explore how Westerosi ideas about honor, lordship, family, and duty would collide with the Jedi, Sith, Republic, and CIS. While also helping me flesh out how I want Westerosi characters to understand the wider galaxy in this fic.

So while none of it is canon here, it did contribute to the worldbuilding, and if you've enjoyed that side of this story, you might enjoy the experiment.

4 - In Defense of the Ork: A Serious Argument for an Unserious Utopia

Despite Orks not actually showing up in this fic, at least not yet, researching for it’s thoroughly reignited my interest in Warhammer 40K, and some discussions in the comments here’ve made it clear there’re at least a few of you who’re interested in the setting too.

So, for anyone in that camp, I recently got stuck with a particularly stupid brain worm and decided I’d make a serious attempt to prove Orks are actually altruists living in a utopia, mostly because I figured taking the idea seriously would make it obvious why it was ridiculous.

Instead, I somehow came away with very little evidence against it and considerably more than I wanted in its favor.

It’s a deeply unserious diversion taken far too seriously, but if you’re into 40K, you might get a kick out of watching me accidentally reason myself into Orkish moral philosophy.

5 - Write That One: Self-Inserts, Canon, and the Futility of Proving a Story Inevitable

This has essentially nothing to do with the current Quest or even its fandom, but it is something I have been working on for a while and thought some of you might find interesting, especially anyone still here from the last Quest, BOBO. It is an extended essay using Harry Potter self-inserts, Dumbledore, and the butterfly effect to examine how impossible it is to prove what “would actually happen” after changing canon, why authors often waste enormous effort defending choices nobody has attacked yet, and why the more useful goal is to choose the story you actually want to tell and make it convincing.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Did anything feel different about this chapter?

As you saw in the information post after Chapter 75, I recently went through the entire quest to assemble the rolls, your choices, their knock-on effects, and what all of that means for the world now.

I actually finished that alongside Chapter 75, so this is the first chapter written with that fuller picture from the start.

I've also changed how I write and edit.

Rather than just doing things how I always have, I've started asking at each step: what am I trying to accomplish, and is there a better way to do it?

Most of that should be invisible to you while making things easier and better on my end, but it's also given me more room for things I couldn't consistently manage before.

One is what I've been calling “load-bearing humor,” basically describing things in ways that are funny without stopping to make a joke.

That, along with a few other changes, has also made this chapter a smidge longer than usual.

So I've changed four or five things at once, but almost all of them are things where, if I did my job right, you shouldn't even notice.

So, did this just feel like another chapter of the quest, or did anything actually feel different?