Ch 14: Hand

Kline pointed at Davi who’d had his hand raised for nearly five minutes. It had taken quite some time to earn another free hour of questions after what had happened with Xiu, but Kline had finally allowed another one that morning.

“Why don’t you have a ton of guns?” he asked.

That was a very good question, thought Michael. They had access to people from other worlds, and their society didn’t seem exactly backwards when it came to innovation. With their focus on the military, firearms were an obvious choice. He already partially knew the answer, thanks to what Marcus had told him, but he still wanted to know why they weren’t more widespread.

“We do have guns. It took several takers who’d overestimated their engineering abilities blowing themselves up to accomplish it, but eventually we had rudimentary firearms. Unfortunately, they do not work well with Magicka. The more complicated a machine is, the more trouble it has when someone has magicka, and we found that even very simple firearms were more prone to misfires, or worse when someone with even a low magical potential uses them. There are very occasionally those who are born with no magic affinity, and they are recruited as sharpshooters.” He nodded at Marcus. “Dwarves, who have no magic channels, also use simple firearms. It’s one of the reasons no country in the Humelands has ever tried to invade them.”

He pointed at Michael.

“Are the Humelands the only place with humans?”

He shook his head.

“There are humans on every continent as far as I know. It is believed that we are the largest concentration of them here, though if that’s true or not was lost during the cataclysm.”

Michael nodded, that made his admittedly foolish dream of maybe locating his wife when she died, or even his kids when they passed even more foolish. They could be anywhere in a large new world that he didn’t even know the scope of. That was assuming they could only reincarnate as humans, or that they would reincarnate at all.

The Cataclysm was something Kline had mentioned before. Some kind of event that destroyed the Humelands capital and caused massive rifts and monsters to appear. Before it had occurred, the Humelands had been a single country. Stent claimed to have held the true heir to the old throne, but apparently so did every other country.

Kline pointed at Ogun.

“Do you have holidays here? Special days you celebrate?”

“Yes,” Kline answered simply before pointing to someone else.

Michael had noticed he did that a lot when the questions were cultural or recently historical. Marcus and Davi both believed it was to keep them from being able to fit in too well. If they did manage to desert then they would be easier to pick out as Takers and so easier to round up and hang if they needed to. Far away historical events didn’t seem to matter as much, as they were such common knowledge that a few others had already known about the cataclysm before the question had even been asked.

“What are these Tusinians we are to be fighting like?” asked Prakash.

Kline’s relaxed smile that had only recently returned, faded. “They are savages. They dress in rags, indulge in slavery and serfdom. Their women have no rights, and their men are treated like dogs. They claim that they are owed Stent’s lands due to a marriage more than three hundred years past. They have mercenaries do their fighting for them, because they are cowards.”

Michael raised an eyebrow and exchanged a glance with Pyotr. They both knew propaganda when they heard it. That didn’t mean they were immune to it, but this was a bit less subtle than it tended to be in their own countries of origin.

After that, Kline’s appetite to answer questions seemed to fade quickly and he only answered two more with quick responses before everyone was shuffled to their next class. Magic class was next, and at this point Michael had learned all of the spells he was required to, so he was instead shuffled early to help Dugan.

Once Dugan had realized his knack for paperwork he’d started to have him fill out and correct the majority of the basic forms. When he wasn’t filling out paperwork he was helping him to load wagons and move supplies from one area to another, sort out freshly arrived goods, or even help with the maintenance for the weapons and armor. Michael very quickly became an adept hand at sewing buttons or patches onto uniforms, polishing brass buttons, and even hemming pants. When they were working, Dugan indulged Michael in answering the occasional question, though for the most part he seemed very wary of what he said, and didn’t seem like much of a conversationalist to begin with.

Since their first meeting, Michael had noticed a number of people with strange features he wouldn’t have recognized before. Oddly wide eyes, slightly pointed ears, fingers just a bit too long, even patches of hair in unnatural colors. Whatever had happened to the aelves in Stent, it was long ago that their traits were only minor in their descendants.

“Do you know how long Tusinia has been fighting Stent?” Michael asked as he threaded a fresh needle.

“Long time.”

Michael sighed at the non-answer. “Do they have a lot of dwarves there?”

“No. Only a small mountain range there. Most of us that live below the Humelands are in Swandia.”

Michael nodded, he’d heard of that country a few times. It was apparently some distance to the East. “Do dwarves worship the divine?” he asked.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Dugan snorted, startling Michael a bit.

“Our gods still have names. They live beneath the earth, carving our homes and leaving behind what is needed for us to live. We can touch them, they are not merely floating words of gold and blessings given by some wispy priest.”

Michael raised an eyebrow, that was the most he’d ever gotten Dugan to talk. He was about to ask a follow-up question when Dugan stood up and walked away, returning with a stack of papers for Michael to work through. He sighed. The work wasn’t too dissimilar to what he’d done for a living in his last life, which made it easy, but left him feeling a bit jealous of Ollie being able to spend his time learning magic.

When he was done he was shuffled back in with the regular group and the rest of the day was normal until it came time for combat training. It was spear practice that day, but instead of being given one, he was instead given one of the no bladed swords and told to stand to the side and wait by Kline. Shortly after, Teft and Ollie appeared.

“Ollie needs to start more practical combat training,” said Kline as he gestured for Michael to stand across from him. “He’s been learning his shield spell, possibly the most important spell in a combat mage’s repertoire, but it needs training in active use. You’re going to be attacking him.

“Oh?” said Michael, brandishing his sword a bit and smiling shamelessly. He was more than a foot taller than Ollie at this point, and while his swordsmanship wasn’t quite at Pyotr’s level, he was able to hold his own against everyone else very well.

Ollie just shook his head at him. “Brains over brawn.”

Michael shrugged. “I’ve got both over you, so that should be fine.”

“First we’ll establish a baseline,” said Teft gesturing to Ollie. “Form a shield a foot in front of you and to the side.”