Swarming Sovereignty

The two of them were currently in the Dimension of Discounts, a couple of minutes before their appointment was scheduled. The night before, Connie had told them that Terence had a request for them, and wished to speak with them.

It was a bit odd, considering he was one of their biggest detractors, but Connie had assured them that it wasn’t going to be anything too unreasonable, and that they shouldn’t worry too much about it. Of course, even though she said that, Lia always felt nervous at times like these. Still, Rose’s reassuring presence helped mitigate the anxiety, and soon enough a dwarven man teleported into the space in front of them.

“Ah, you’re here, good.” He said. “As you no doubt have guessed, I’m Terrence, God of Tradition.” He conjured up a chair and sat down, locking eyes with both Rose and Lia in turn. “Let me be clear; this is not like your conversation with Heather. I still stand firmly against you, and will continue to do so. However, Jerry has assured me that you two are reasonable people, so I came to make a request anyway.”

Lia hesitated. “If it won’t hurt us or the Swarm, then we’ll hear you out at the very least.” She said. “What is it?”

“To be frank, I’m worried that the Swarm will kill off several cultures, and I was hoping you could begin considering measures to preserve them.” Terrence replied. “I don’t think that will interfere with you in any meaningful way, it just might take some extra thought.”

Lia blinked in surprise. “What?” She asked. “I’m sorry, but…I don’t understand. Why would the Swarm end up killing off cultures? We’re not asking people to change their festivals or anything.”

“Culture isn’t just about festivals.” Terrence explained. “It’s about the way people do things, and how they live their lives. It is very easy to kill off cultures in the process of conquering nations, and even more so with the huge lifestyle change inherent with the Swarm. For instance, the presence of modeling wax as an easily available building material could lead to homogenization of building appearances.

“I’m not asking you to stop people from using modeling wax for building, I just want there to be incentives for keeping traditional building styles alive. I believe a world full of diversity is a much more pleasant place to live and travel in, and I don’t want to see cultures die because they weren’t thought about.”

Lia thought on that for a moment. “I’m not opposed to the idea, I think everywhere being basically they same would be awful, but…what can we do other than offer some currency incentives once we get currency going? Hold a celebration or something? That doesn’t solve the building issue, though. And how can we tell when something counts as a different culture? How specific will it need to get? Do you have a list we can reference?”

“We’re open to ideas if you have any.” Rose said. “In fact, if you want us to do this, I would ask that you collaborate with us; it will help keep things up to your standards and alleviate worries you may have. You may be helping us with the work, but it won’t impact the war, so I think we can put aside our differences to solve this problem.”

“That is fair.” Terrence sighed. “I will draw up some proposals and lists and give them to Connie. And let me reiterate that this changes nothing between us; I still disapprove of your methods and ideology, and I will still be doing my best to stop you. I just wish to soften the impact of my side potentially failing.”

“We know.” Lia replied. “Thank you. Um…is there anything else you wanted to talk about?”

“No, that will be all.” Terrence said. “Farewell.”

With that he vanished, leaving Lia and Rose alone. “Well…that wasn’t too bad.” Lia said tentatively. “What did you make of it?”

“I think…I think we don’t need to read into it that much.” Rose said. “I believe he was genuine in his requests, and he has a good point.”

“That’s what I was thinking too.” Lia agreed. “Well…we blocked out an hour for this in case it went long and it only took a couple of minutes, so…what now?”

“I think a trip to our hot spring sounds good.” Rose said. “What about you?”

“That sounds lovely.” Lia agreed. Amelia and Connie were currently busy, so Lia and Rose chose to soak with just the two of them. They spent a relaxing hour in the spring, then said their goodbyes.

After Rose had left, Lia took out her tablet and navigated to her stream dashboard, then hit the button to go live. She hummed to herself as she left the hot spring building, keeping an eye on the time so she would know when to transition away from her intro screen.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard a text-to-speech message come through. “You forgot to put on your intro screen.”

“What?” Lia asked, blinking in surprise and looking down at her tablet. “I…oh, I did. Uh, sorry? Well…no point putting it on now, so I guess I’ll just start? Since some of you were asking about it yesterday, I was going to introduce you all to the Dimension of Discounts, which is where I am now. It’s a bit of a long story, but…basically I have some of Amelia’s power, and she made this place to help me use it. Or…made a Skill that became this place?

“Whatever the case, I can use this power to make just about anything, as long as I have enough Blood Money. As of late it’s been mostly used to help supply me with interesting trinkets for use in conversion, but stuff like my tablet also comes from here. As of late there’s also been talks of using it to create a modern electronics factory to jumpstart production, but we’ve put that on hold until we can figure out how different our tech will end up being.”

Lia scanned the chat, doing her best to follow the scrolling comments until a text to speech message was allowed through. “How can you make a modern factory just like that? Wouldn’t you need to know how they work?”

“What I know doesn’t matter for this.” Lia said. “It’s not like normal magic, it runs almost closer to system level and draws off of the collective unconscious.” That wasn’t at all how it worked, or…at least, not how it worked now, but she needed to obscure Connie’s involvement for the time being. “Thanks to people like Fae and Izumi, we’ve been able to get it to make stuff like this.”

“Show us.” Text to speech demanded.

“Sure.” Lia replied, heading over to the area where she purchased items. “We were discussing energy storage yesterday, so grabbing some batteries now seems like a good idea. Here, I just head over to this terminal, search up batteries, and…there we go, here’s a bunch of them!”

Lia scanned through the options, eventually settling on one that boasted high capacity and throughput. “I want this one, so I’ll just press this button and…there!” The battery appeared on a pedestal to her right, and she took a moment to slip it into her storage. “That’s all there is to it.”

She began to scan the chat again. “No, it’s not a trick.” She said. “And no, you can’t learn how to do it, even if you become part of the Swarm. It’s something Amelia made with her power as a Hero, and you can’t just replicate that on your own. Or…maybe you could get something similar? But it won’t be like this, that’s for sure.”

“And you’re just going to tell us about a tactical advantage like this?” The text to speech said. “That seems foolish to the extreme, now we can make countermeasures.”

Lia raised an eyebrow. “Like what? If you think you can get in here, well…I guess I can’t say I know for sure you can’t, but I’d be really surprised if it was possible for people to break in here. To my knowledge, trying to get here is about the same level of difficulty as coming to Ratha would be. And just knowing that I have this helps you…how? You won’t get blindsided by how quickly we can build up? You’ll see that anyway.”

Lia paused for a moment, distracted by the sight of the chat scrolling upwards. The emotes of her in particular caught her eye; they had been made shockingly quickly, and it was strange seeing stylized images of herself, Rose, and Amelia sprinkled in with the text.

She was so mesmerized by it that the next text to speech message made her jump. “How expensive was that? I mean it said twenty Blood Money, but how much actually is that?”

“A negligible amount.” Lia replied, smiling sheepishly. “I get a little bit when any member of the Swarm kills something, so that much is basically nothing at this point. For small purchases like this they might as well be free. It’s only big stuff like the tablet that are relevant nowadays.”

She answered a couple more questions on the nature of the Dimension of Discounts, then headed back out into the World Tree. “So, we’ve got about an hour before my next meeting, why don’t we go look at potential conversion options for this battery? I’ll walk you all through my process for this, and I think you’ll find it interesting.”

Lia made her way through the portal into the work floor, then headed towards their cocoon storage. She passed quite a few people on her way there, and Lia was pleased to find that she was beginning to recognize a lot more of them than she used to. It was a nice feeling; ever since the influx of migrants back when the Glens and Aura had first been converted, she hadn’t been able to recognize everyone in the capital by sight, and it had felt lonely in an odd sort of way.

She was snapped out of her musings by a text to speech message. “Why are we down on the work floor?”

“Ah, right. This is where our storage is, both for cocoons and other stuff. We’re planning on moving it to a dedicated level at some point, but for now it’s all down here. I’m going to be picking up some pots and boxes, as well as the cocoon of something defensive, preferably with high HP and Mana.

“The pots and boxes will help drive home that this I’m trying to make a storage receptacle. It doesn’t really matter that they’re for storing something else entirely, what matters is that they store things at all. If I throw in other things related to electricity, that should be enough.”

“That doesn’t seem right.” Text to speech said. “The world doesn’t work on vibes like that; it needs some sort of actual numbers or magical connection.”

Lia shrugged. “Turns out magical theory was wrong. There is a connection based on things that are conceptually linked, it’s just really subtle, subtle enough that even the gods didn’t catch it.”

She reached the storage district, and entered the warehouse where they were keeping cocoons. It was a large building filled with rows and rows of wooden shelving, upon which sat cocoons of various sizes. “So, storage here is a little awkward.” She said. “It’s really hard to make a truly optimal sorting system for cocoons, so we’ve had to settle for grouping things that feel similar together.

“Most of the stuff in here is open for use as long as you’re being reasonable, so stock rotates pretty quickly. And since cocoons are often pretty big, there’s probably not as much in here as you think there is. Still, what I’m after right now is mostly just a proof of concept, so what’s here in the general use section should be plenty.”

“What concept are you even trying to prove?” Text to speech asked. “How does making batteries alive help anyone?”

Lia smiled as she began inspecting the labels for each row of shelves. “Normal batteries can’t get Skills.” She said. “These ones can. Things like being able to store more electricity, wireless interfacing, converting spare Mana to electricity, even something like a built-in solar panel are all possible.

“Plus, right now one of our biggest issues is that we’re going to be dealing will all sorts of incompatible sockets or whatever they are. We can bypass that entirely with conversion. Whatever sort of wires it provides will almost certainly be compatible with one another. It’d be silly if they weren’t, seeing as how we’re all about working together.”

Lia stopped in front of a row of shelves labeled “big tough things”, then began to walk down the aisle, carefully reading the label in front of each cocoon. “I’m looking for something with a lot of HP and Mana.” She reiterated. “And I think…yes, this one seems good.”

The cocoon in question was large, easily twice Lia’s size, and the small placard in front of it indicated that it belonged to a scavenger slime that had seemed to rely on powerful counterattacking abilities to stave off potential predators. Lia put it into her storage, then began to head back out of the warehouse.

“So, now I’m going to go grab a couple of other things that’ll help. Some plants Rose made that we use to help revitalize soil, a fruit of the World Tree, and some plants that produce light.” Lia informed. “I’m going to try to go for solar power like I mentioned before, and the plants will help with that. Fruit of the World Tree is incredibly potent as conversion material, and if I’m lucky it’ll allow the battery to generate power from the World Tree’s energizing effects.”

“So, you think you can just play god and change the very makeup of something like that?” Text to speech accused. “How can you pretend at humility while engaging in this arrogance?”

Lia stopped. “What?” She replied, bewildered. “Why would this be arrogant? Of all the issues the gods have had with the Swarm, converting non-sapient beings was never one. In fact, as far as I’m aware, even those that oppose us consider this a benefit of the Swarm. They don’t care if you breed dogs or plants or whatever, so why would this be different?”

Thankfully, the chat seemed to agree with her, and it didn’t turn into a big argument. So, she did her best to keep a conversation going as she picked up the rest of what she wanted, then put everything together and began to look through her options. And, just as she hoped, she was able to get a battery with “high capacity” and the capability to generate small amounts of power from the sun and the World Tree.

With that done, she headed to the meeting rooms, and began taking suggestions from chat on what to look up next. Or, rather, from the text to speech; Fae had told her that just looking up whatever chat wants is a recipe for finding embarrassing or lewd content, and since people were still moderating her text to speech, it was pretty safe. So, she settled in and let herself enjoy just learning new things.