027 – Ashakir V: Rumors

027 – Ashakir V: Rumors

“To Whomst-ever the Fuck It May Concern:
This is Elsie. Stop leaving empty bottles of whatever godforsaken Varran swill you’re drinking out in [Ayle]’s pavilion, it’s really gross and smells really bad. This isn’t the game anymore, there’s no despawn timer. Trash just stays around, not that it would matter to a drunk like you. YES. OF COURSE IT’S YOU. Clean up your messes, Haddy. Please. And for god’s sake, don’t just toss them off the edge of the guild hall. We may be in low orbit, but that’s so not the point.”

—A crumpled up note in an unknown script, found jammed into a half-melted bottle washed up on the Naeviri coast, 5 Y.S.

Apparently, what came next was cleanup.

After Ai and Sari had had their fill of spiced seafood, they ended up helping the laborers who operated the seafood boil stall clean their work area. After the chaos of the daytime meal, everyone pitched in to prepare the stall for the evening boil that would take place in a few hours. Comfortable conversation was the default here, as workers who were clearly acquainted with each other from long hours laboring together fell into an easy camaraderie.

Their cheer was infectious so Ai was in good spirits, especially after the hearty meal. Besides, if this were Dirge, this would be a great place to gather rumors. A potential quest hub, as it were.

There was a not-insignificant pile of shells from all sorts of Ashakiri seafood in front of Ai—Kirokka and Go’shem, and giant prawns that Ai had learned were called Golam’mo—as she followed the directions of one of the dockworkers who apparently moonlighted at the seafood boil stall. There was something to be said about doing something so simply menial yet so immediately beneficial to the people she was helping. Ai hummed happily as she worked, Aru napping at her feet after he’d also had his fill of scraps.

“You havin’ any problems with the shells, Ayle?” The dockworker, who had introduced himself earlier with a boisterous guffaw as Gazza of the Galan Street Dockworkers’ Guild, inquired.

“No, not really.” Ai responded. They had her collecting and sorting the assorted shells, separating them between the crustaceans and the shellfish. It was therapeutic, in a way. It also let her work through her post-meal fullness as she focused on the simple task, as she’d definitely gorged herself too much. Sari had too, come to think of it, but she was on floor-sweeping duty somewhere.

Ai had asked Gazza what they were saving the shells for earlier, and he’d laughingly obliged. The crab and prawn shells still had plenty of flavor in them, so would be baked until crispy and ground into a powder for use in a traditional Ashakiri flavored salt. The shells of any clams were going to be refined into sodium bicarbonate, which was extremely useful in a plethora of other ways.

Being in Ashakir almost let Ai forget that Dirge was a brutal survival MMO on top of everything else, with how vibrantly full of life the city was.

Even as her efforts in Titanomachy had succeeded, even as the Ve’un network’s guarantee of safety against the dark of the night had allowed Varrah to prosper, eons of scarcity, or desperate survival, were hard to dislodge from any culture. There remained a general, underlying understanding in the Varran mindset that they could let absolutely nothing go to waste.

“Gazza, how long have you worked with the seafood boilers… whatever their official name is?” Ai stopped in the middle of her question. She didn’t know what the seafood boilers were actually called.

“Oh, ‘bout nine years, or summat. Mebbe ten? I’m here ‘cause it’s the Dockworkers’ Guild that runs this joint. We also run the Skewer Alley next door!” He pointed with a beefy hand. His barrel chest was thickly built like a tree trunk, and the voice that came out of it was just as thick and booming. It seemed like everyone working Galan Street was built like this, if both Gazan and the Skewer Alley vendors from earlier were anything to go by.

“Everyone just calls this place the Galan Street Boilpot!” He guffawed again, as seemed to be his habit. With that, he put down his tools and climbed down from his perch—he’d been in the middle of cleaning the Karuga-shell cauldron—and walked over to check on Ai’s progress.

“Oh, good. You’re nearly done. Once you finish, go take the shells to Ossa, that old bag sittin’ over there in the corner. She’s been in charge here since forever ago, see? You tell her Gazza checked over your work and that there’s nothin’ to worry about.” He peered into the sacks she had been sorting the shells into, evidently finding her menial performance satisfactory. It took only a couple more minutes afterwards for Ai to finish up.

She was about to take her haul to the old woman who Gazza had pointed out, when she noticed a thickly corded braid of dyed rope swinging from Gazza’s hip. It was a rich blue, a similar color to the Temple of Storms’ blue paint. Any dye of that quality couldn’t have been cheap, especially for a laborer on a dockworker’s wages. More importantly, there were currents of magic running through it—

[Firm-Knot]-[Merra-Strength]-[Resh-Blessing].

—that intrigued her. But Gazza himself had what would have been a D-Rank or even F-Rank Semblance during Dirge. Essentially non-magical, for all intents and purposes. The length of cord must have been prepared by someone else, or have been the result of a charm or cantrip. Folk magic, whose cost was borne by the collective Semblance of a people because it had been engraved so deeply into the world that it had for all intents and purposes become reality. All it usually took to invoke them was an action or a prayer.

The chain of ideas connected the tying of the knot into a blessing by the Storm God. [Merra] seemed to be a concept tied to a social group, and it being concatenated with [Strength] indicated that this was a spell that beseeched Resh for physical strength, but only for a group called the Merra.

Gazza caught her staring.

“Oh, I know that look. You’re a karra, aren’t you? I had this done by my niece, she gets that same look in her eye when she’s doin’ anything magical. She’s named after the Progenitor too, y’know.” He chuckled.

“Mayhap little Aylan could even make it to an Academy some day, grow past bein’ a Merra like her old man and her uncle. If you’ll pardon my impudence, Lady Aspirant.” Gazza said, looking past Ai. Ai turned her head to follow his gaze. Sari had returned from sweeping up, broom still in hand. Her white and azure robes made her rank plain to see, though that was certainly by design.

“There’s nothing to apologize for. I was the first from my village to attend an Academy as well. I come from deep in the Northern Acquisition, so new to the Republic we weren’t even assigned a caste yet, but… here I am now. If I could do it, she can too.” She said with a gentle smile, managing to sound neat and professional despite being covered in dust from her sweeping. She turned to face Ai.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Miss Ayle, we should get going. It’s still Fourth Drum, but I’m sure you’d like to look around the city more before we have to meet up with Master Benessel.” We’ve done our communal duty, so we’re safe to leave now, was left unsaid.

Ai froze for a moment, her mind going back to what Gazza had just said about his niece.

Also named after ‘the Progenitor’?

Her mind flashed back to the immediate aftermath of her transmigration a couple weeks ago, when she was reviewing her Status screen. When she’d first learned of her massively increased SSS-Rank Semblance. There was something in there about a Progenitor—

“[Status]-[Semblance].” She quickly whispered. Dirge’s game UI was individually rendered to each Player so that others couldn’t see your menus, making it so that people had to actually communicate with each other. But invoking it still required a verbal component—a cantrip, just like Gazza’s knot, only built into the game by the devs rather than centuries of cultural practice, however that was resolved in her new reality.

The Semblance panel of her [Status] screen shimmered into being in front of her, visible only to herself.

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Semblance

A measure of your influence on the world. The greater your impact, the higher your Semblance, and the mightier your magic becomes.

Semblance: SSS (LIMIT BROKEN: 99,999+/10,000 [Rank: ???])

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