090, 2/2

Erick sat still for a moment, there in his chair in the library. He thought about what had happened. He had seen some bad situations in his day, but his visit to Candlepoint had affected him in some deep kinda way.

… He would likely ask himself if everything he had seen was a part of some sort of agenda for a long, long time to come. But for now, he would do what his heart told him to do.

He looked over to Poi, and thought at the man.

Poi said, “If they’re less desperate, then they’ll likely be less willing to follow whatever evil voice rises up in their midst. That place is rife for some unkind influence to take control of the entire place, and they’re already all loyal to the Shades.”

“Yeah… That’s what I thought, too.” Erick asked, “What did Kiri manage to find?”

“She’s off looking after your other request, now.” Poi said, “You’re not going to find much, though. Widespread rad collection is the bane of most archmages.”

“That’s what I heard, too.” Erick asked, “What is a rad, Poi?”

“A collection of mana.” Poi shrugged. “Don’t know what else to say.”

“I’m probably going to have to attach some sort of collection spell to [Domain of the Withering Slime]. But that would make it a tier 5.” Erick turned his attention inward as he glanced at his Status. He only had 7 points available. “I need to invent a few more Basic Spells to get that option, though.” He added, “Or I could try to get above tier 6. My [Endless Plasma Wrap] is only tier 6, and that’s the highest I have… Creating a tier 7, 8, and 9, would be 21 more points. Or I could reinvent some Basic Spells… I wonder how [Force Bolt] came to be…”

Erick thought for a moment longer, and then he acted. Six Ophiels popped out of the air at Erick’s discretion. He sent one of them blipping into his gardening room, to pick up a box of Erick Beans and a container of rice, ready for planting—

He paused. He asked Poi, “Is there going to be a problem with giving food aid to the shadelings of Candlepoint?”

Poi said, “Yes. Not from me, though. Even if their suffering is a ploy, allowing people to suffer is still wrong.”

“… Will it be a problem I can’t handle?”

“No idea, sir.” Poi said, “I have no idea how this is going to play out, but I won’t go there in person, and you should never go, either. No one you care about should ever have any contact with a shadeling, and you should treat this as playing along with their ploy, for now, with the full intention of backstabbing them when they show who they are.”

Erick sighed, “Yeah…”

With a mental push, Erick sent his Ophiel and their stash of seeds out into an unimportant part of the Crystal Forest, a mere 570 kilometers away to the south east. The sky was full dark, with stars twinkling above. The moons washed the land in silver. He sat back in his chair again, as he guided his [Familiar]s to first hover high into the sky, and then light up that part of the desert with bright, full spectrum spotlights.

Crystal Mimics on the ground immediately noticed the lights. They jerked active for a few small moments, but they quickly resumed their attempts at hiding in plain sight when nothing else happened.

Next, came a [Cascade Imaging] set up in the middle of the Erick’s future project. He let that run, searching for ‘people’, hoping he would find none. And then he went to work, clearing out the mimics and working over the land.

What took Erick a good hour to make was a basic garden of three rings. It was perfectly circular and about a kilometer across, with a tall, outer wall, five meters high and a meter wide. The next section of the garden was a portion of land filled with stone spikes, that beans would vine upon. The center of the circular garden was a flat, clay and loam basin that would soon be growing rice.

This land wasn’t the best for growing anything. The plants Erick planned to grow would likely start dying as soon as Erick stopped supporting the area. But by that time, something else would likely happen, and maybe the shadelings wouldn’t need this project. Or maybe he could make something closer to them, and they could harvest what he grew for them, instead of him doing the whole job.

Eh. It’s not like it would be a hard job. He had a lot of tricks up his sleeve to help him grow what he wanted to grow. It was just beans and rice, after all. He could even use that spell he made a long while ago, [Gravity Strainer].

 

 

He’d have to cast it a few… five hundred times, around the place, and it wouldn’t last very long, but he could designate ‘beans’ and ‘rice’ and those would get pulled upward. Ophiel could then go around and use his Handy Aura to clip the produce off the plants, sending them to gathering points in the air above.

It should work.

Erick set nine Ophiel to work, planting the small amount of his beans and rice into their respective locations. His reserves didn’t account for much coverage. He’d have to grow and replant a dozen times before the land was filled with green vines, and the basin held enough water to plant the rice.

So he did just that.

Glowing rain came down all across the orange land, while Ophiels waited in eight Restful [Prismatic Ward]s, evenly placed around the walls, with one in the center, on a three meter tall tower of stone. The Ophiel in the center sang a song of violins and growth, as he poured out platinum from the sky.

Green vines sprouted, twirling up around stone trellises, under the watchful eyes of Ophiel, and Erick. When pods started to sprout, Erick cut the rain, and Ophiels descended upon the new harvest with careful, yet quick telekinetic hands. They plucked open bean pods and scattered the white seeds everywhere.

The second platinum rain brought a whole lot more beans than the first, and actually began to fill up the basin in the center. But this second iteration was not enough to cover even a tenth of the cleared land.

Erick repeated the process a few more times. After the third iteration, the basin had enough water in it to support the rice, so Erick planted rice, and started to spread those golden grains out across the basin when they started to sprout up from the platinum waters.

He quickly decided that there was no need to keep the vines clean and orderly, or to keep the rice orderly, either.

With his [Gravity Strainer]s set up across the whole of the space, golden grains and green bean pods began reaching for the night sky, and the spotlights above. Ophiels all around the garden began to carefully pluck the produce, sending it up into the air, to collect together. They took breaks in their own [Prismatic Ward]s when needed, for Erick only directed them how to do their assigned tasks once, and then they were on their own, each of them performing their duty perfectly, using their own mana.

Plants were damaged in the process, but [Gravity Strainer] mostly separated leaves and stems from bean pods and rice. Those leaves and stems fell back to the ground, or into the water, where churning, growing vines and rapidly multiplying water plants, quickly overtook the debris.

Erick left nine Ophiel to their tasks, but took direct control of the last one, to collect the creations of his garden. For now, he would store the goods beside his house. So he [Stoneshape]d two stone silos next to his house. They were average sized rooms, but he would likely have to make them larger in order to fit the results of his experiment. But that was okay.

With a [Teleporting Platform], and moving as quickly as Ophiel could, Erick gathered the raw goods and teleported them into those stone rooms. A hundred kilograms of raw rice here. A hundred kilos of beans there. Now two hundred kilos of each. Now more. And then even more. Faster and faster it came. The variety of produce was dearly lacking, but beans and rice was a complete meal, and there was a lot of it. Before long, Erick had to take a break alongside his Ophiel. He had actually run out of mana [Teleport]ing back and forth.

He canceled the rain over the garden and set his Ophiel to harvest what was left. The two buildings he made were full, so he built a third, then a fourth. There was about as much beans as there was rice, but both would need to be shelled and threshed before they were edible. That would cut down on the size of the harvest by a lot.

Two stone silos was still more than enough to feed a lot of people for quite a while, though.

Erick cast four specialized drying and preservation [Ward]s into the stone rooms, and then sealed them, save for holes at the top to let out moisture. He had barely ever used those preservation [Ward]s, but they were very necessary, since he had put the grain away wet. Normally, this was a major no-no. But it wouldn’t rot in a single day. By tomorrow, it should be ready to shell and thresh, but Erick had never done that before. He decided he would have to ask a few people on the Community Gardening Council for some tips. Tomorrow, though.

He came back to himself on his chair in the library, and smiled.

Teressa was on the other side of the room, reading a book. She noticed his return and smiled, as she asked, “Did you finish?” She gestured to the table beside him, saying, “Kiri found some of what you wanted.”

“The goods should be ready for preparation in twelve hours.” Erick picked up the note sitting atop four different books. He read it, then said, “No real way to SLR gather rads, eh?” He looked to the books. The one on top was the smallest one, the most promising, and on loan from Sirocco. He picked it up, and read the title. ‘Summoning Rads: a guide to automatic gathering magics’. He smiled a little, then muttered, “Summoning magic is one way, I guess.” He looked to the other books, leafing through them a little, then asked, “Do you know anything about what happens if a monster eats rads, Teressa? Kiri’s note says nothing really happens.”

“Don’t know much.” Teressa said, “I do know that wyrms eat everything and generally get stronger and crazier when they eat enough rads.”

Erick set the books back down. “I’ll read that in the morning.” He got up, and with one of two remaining Ophiels on his shoulder, said, “Good night, Teressa.”

“Night, Boss.”

 

– – – –

 

Erick’s other remaining Ophiel remained stationed in the center of the garden with the lights turned off, sitting on the stump that rose above the basin, under a nearly full strength [Prismatic Ward]. Casting that dense air had nearly cost him his full mana pool and therefore his body, but that was fine. Ophiel loved being out in the open air, even at night in the cold, cold air, and besides, he recovered his strength under that dense air when needed. This was open country, where the wind blew hard and the stars shone bright as the moons and agave outside of the garden walls glittered with reflected light. Occasionally, Ophiel returned to the vine-filled, messy garden to check for anything out of place, but nothing appeared, and nothing happened.

When the sun came up, the chill wind turned to a warm breeze. Flying at night was nice, but Ophiel much preferred less frost in his flights. As the sun reached up from the eastern horizon, and heat returned to the Crystal Forest, Ophiel played in the warm breeze above a land of tangled green vines, and a drying lake basin.

 

– – – –

 

Erick tried not to shout as he gestured toward his silos of foodstuffs, saying, “It’s so that they don’t get radicalized by their Shade overlords and prompted into war! I am perfectly aware of the dangers of dealing with them. I’m not ever going to meet them in person!”

Hours ago, morning dawned, and Erick had gone out to see what to make of his haul. The rice was great, but still in husks, and the beans were still in pods. Both had dried out considerably due to the drying [Ward]s he put up last night, so that was good. The rice turned flaky in his hands, revealing white grains under golden husks, while the beans were almost popping out of their dried brown shells on their own. They were definitely ready for the next part of the preparation process. Technically, he could give this haul to Justine as-is, but that seemed cheap, somehow. Especially when he was perfectly capable of giving them a finished product.

Maybe he would even move this whole operation next to Candlepoint, and let them do almost everything, except for the necessity of the rains, or course. He would ask for darkchips to keep up the appearances of doing this for his own greed, but if they let him, he would do this for free. Seeing a city full of hungry people was not something Erick could walk away from, or ignore.

Solving the rad-sustenance problem would come later. Giving them a hand up instead of a hand out would also come later. Right now they were dying of desperation, and that was intolerable.

So he went to speak to Kip, the bluemetal wrought who worked the rice fields in the Garden, to ask for some help threshing and shelling, with whatever machines they used. Kip seemed wary at first, and then helpful, and then downright antagonistic, when Erick told Kip the full story of why he needed threshing help.

From there, things spiraled out of control rather fast.

And now, standing on the bare orange rock outside of his house, next to his poor man’s silos of grain and beans, Erick felt like he was facing an immortal wrought firing squad. Three different people were all telling him he was doing the wrong thing, while only one person seemed to be on the fence.

Kip said, “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” He rounded on Erick, saying, “They’re taking you for a long walk down a short tunnel. You know that right? Or maybe you don’t!”

Killzone loomed, saying, “I don’t like it. I don’t think you should do this. Not only are you empowering what is assuredly an enemy, but you are weakening your own resolve against what must come later.”

Erick scowled, saying, “I assure you, that I am perfectly aware of the necessity of what must come.”

“Are you?” Anhelia, full of anger, said, “You are too kind, Erick. They are using you. I’ve seen it before. I will see it again. And you. Are. Being. Used.” She turned to Silverite, demanding, “Talk him out of this!”

Silverite was the only hope Erick had, as she was the only one who did not immediately pounce on Erick’s idea as foolish. But now, as her thin lips turned to a frown, that little hope began to shrivel and die on the vine.

Silverite looked directly at him, and said, “Erick. I understand your compulsion to help.” She glanced over to Poi, adding, “And since this compulsion is not magical, I was willing to hear you out. Here is my conclusion: You are cleared for helping Candlepoi—”

Kip shouted, “FUCKING SLAG, Silverite! You cannot be serious!”

Anhelia said, “I agree with Kipernikus. This is too foolish to even entertain.”

“It’s not too foolish! I’m perfectly aware of the depravity of the Shades,” Erick said.

Anhelia rounded on him, eyes wide and anger drawing her face into heavy lines. She almost shoved a pointed iron finger at his chest. But she stopped. She did not say anything. She shook her finger in barely checked rage. In a second, she forced herself to calm, dropping her hand to her side. She said, “All that you think you know is second hand knowledge, but this action will ensure that the Shades give you first hand knowledge.”

Erick said, “I know that Ar’Kendrithyst deserves total destruction.”

Anhelia scoffed a laugh, then turned away to hide the hurt in her eyes. For all their metallic nature, wrought certainly wore their emotions openly, sometimes.

Erick waited for someone else to say something.

“What are your thoughts, Silverite?” Killzone asked.

They all turned to her, as Silverite’s next words came telepathically, ‘They don’t have [Cleanse], but they could easily hire someone to [Cleanse] their food for them. Maybe they won’t. Maybe, we can make them dependent on Erick for food, and if they get uppity, we send them toxic goods. It would be easy enough to create a bean or a rice that would kill a shadeling.’

They all looked to Erick, as Erick had a minor breakdown.

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Could he do that? Could he poison people?

Holy shit!

He would have to, wouldn’t he?

He sent, ‘Okay.’

Anhelia brightened, then shoved her emotions back below the surface. Kip looked unconvinced. Killzone simply nodded, while Silverite stood impassively.

Erick pushed his luck. “What about me feeding them rads, too?”

The reaction he got was unexpected.

Anhelia said, “Yes. Do this.” She added, “If they remain monsters with rads in them, they will be much easier to pick out of society when necessary. If they start discarding their shadeling status, they could be worse than Hunters.”

Erick recoiled in disgust. He hadn’t even considered that angle. He almost changed his mind about helping them with food. But. No. He held firm. The shadelings would get their food… And their rads, too. And if they turned into betrayers Erick would…

Erick didn’t finish that thought.

Killzone said, “Monsters who overeat rads doom themselves to a messy death. So them asking for rads is not a big deal on the surface. The danger of giving them rads is that you are interacting with evil, and it will pull you under when it gets a chance.”

Silverite said, “They also use those rads to get levels, so. It’s not a non-issue, but it’s close.”

Anhelia said, dismissively, “They’re capping out at around level 55, so that’s fine. Let them limit themselves.”

“What?” Erick asked. “What are you talking about?”

Silverite said, “Monsters gain experience differently than people. There have been many theories on the subject for a long time, but finding monsters that speak is a rarity, so all we’ve really had is observational data. Like how mimics are almost always level 30 or 31. Candlepoint is a wealth of information about Melemizargo’s forces that we’ve never known before. Almost every shadeling is somewhere between level 35 to 55.”

“You’re not the only archmage to visit that place, Erick,” Anhelia said, the venom of her voice barely hidden. “Some of them have been working to understand the enemy. Not feed them.” She winced at her own words, and turned away, saying, “I’ve had enough. Apologies, all. I can’t do this.” She walked away, her iron feet tapping hard on the orange stone as she left.

Killzone watched her go for a short moment, then turned back to Erick, saying, “I don’t think you know what you’re doing, but a lot of us are scrambling for answers right now. Maybe you’ll find some, without them duping you into some wrongheaded action.” He glanced to Silverite, saying, “I’ve got to go.”

Silverite nodded. Killzone blipped away in a black flash.

Kip said, “Fine. I guess we’re doing this. I got threshers you can use. Today only, though!” He glared at Erick, adding, “They need to get their own threshers. And you need to not help them so much. A little help is fine; it’s the…” He angrily said, “I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do, but we’re doing it, by Rozeta. I guess we’re doing it. I’ll be right back.” He flickered blue; blipping away.

Silverite and Erick, and Poi, remained.

Silverite asked, “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I feel for them.” Erick said, “And more importantly: No one should be born into a position where everyone is out to kill you, or thinks you’re a threat. They will become our worst fears because that is the only route they have left for themselves.”

“I can see how you would think that statement is valid. In most cases, it is. But not here. Not now. Not when it comes to Shades.” Silverite said, “So I will say this: Never appear to them in person. Never accept gifts without thorough vetting. I’d tell you to never make bargains, but that ship has sailed. And beware that the rest of the world might see this as aiding the enemy.” She stared at him, saying, “And now, I will impart unto you the wisdom we impart to every soldier who takes a tour of duty in Ar’Kendrithyst: never, ever, speak highly or lowly or about anything or anyone you might encounter out there. The Shades and their ilk will twist your sights and beguile your emotions. They will make you feel they are innocent of the killings they have done and caused. But not everyone who is dealt a poor fate in this world turns into a maniacal murderer, or a monster. They chose to become Shades. They chose the Darkness. You are not their savior. You are not a hero. You are a watchdog of civilization, here to ensure the Darkness remains controlled, and to bark loudly when it ventures out of bounds.”