Saylee looked at Teresa for a moment, asking something without saying anything. Teresa looked around, seeing only Patrick and Zack present. Levels 71 and 80 respectively. It’d be tough, but Teresa likely countered some of Zack’s abilities pretty well while Jake’s
“We’re here to discuss teleportation rights, and also to warn you of a threat you may already be aware of.” Saylee said after a quick confirmation from Teresa. Warning another government about the multiversal invaders looking to traffic people came with its own risks. If they were already compromised, then there was a non-zero chance that they would be attacked.
Teresa simply nodded to confirm that she felt they could take these two in a fight, though it probably wouldn’t be pretty. Saylee would certainly die in the process, but so would Patrick and Zackery. If reinforcements came then they would be screwed, but really a fight would just be a bad outcome for everyone.
Meaning it was unlikely their hosts would attack them even if compromised.
“Teleportation rights for you go the same way they do for everyone else. Send someone here to tour around, we send someone to your place, and go from there. Only thing I need to hear about are the final reports.” Zackery said, looking back to an invisible screen. “Is the warning about that Contaminated Zone thing you guys have over by Arconette? You guys deal with that yet?”
“I already spoke with Ambassador Corazon, and they are sending a delegation to The Mall currently.” Saylee informed. “Yes, the Contaminated Zone has been taken care of by a joint operation between The Mall and Arconette.”
Their Ambassador was named Corazon? Like ‘heart’ in Spanish? Teresa wondered why
“What kind of name is The Mall? You guys planning to be a central shopping center or something?” Zack asked. “Not a bad idea actually, getting ahead of it and immediately snatching a mercantile name like that. Whoever came up with that must have a good mind for finance and marketing in the long term, huh?”
Nobody decided to mention that a dog had named their settlement that for reasons unknown, but Saylee managed to save face and respond diplomatically.
“Thank you, our people back home will be glad to hear you think so.” That was good, it sounded real polite without revealing anything about their leader, not even gender. Or species. That was especially important. “However, our warning is more in regard to a multiversal threat.”
“Oh sweet, multiverse stuff. I was wondering when that’d be a thing.” Zack looked up from his City Monolith excitedly, surprising Teresa a bit with his reaction.
“From what we understand, each universe has its own laws of physics, chemistry, you name it. Most universes include Mana in some capacity, but ours didn’t. In universes with no Mana, apparently the laws of physics are typically really simple, but ours is complex enough to allow for advanced technology. Essentially, the System was made as a means of multiversal travel some undefined period of time ago in a universe with natural laws similar to our own. Other multiversal factions have found a way to invade our universe using people with level caps, and they plan on harvesting both people and our resources to do something we don’t fully understand yet.” Saylee summed up the issue pretty well, leaving room to explain some of the finer details as they continued.
“Well that sucks.” Zackery’s response also perfectly summed up the general feeling towards the situation. “You know all of this how exactly?”
“A god possessed the body of a multiversal invader that tried to kill me. He then threatened to take my family hostage and force me to traffic people from The Mall, but I threatened mutually assured destruction and managed to keep anything from happening there.” Teresa answered.
“So gods are a thing too, neat.” Zackery was taking a lot of this in stride.
“Those gods are trafficking people to potentially harvest their souls, so I don’t know about neat.” Teresa wasn’t sure yet if she preferred his very nonchalant acceptance of this or not, but on the bright side it didn’t seem like they really needed to try to convince him very much.
“Then we just have to organize a response, find people’s families and prevent them from being taken hostage. Not too hard.” Zackery quickly was ready to form a response, and Teresa decided she did in fact prefer talking with this guy rather than Ezio. So far, at least.
“That leads us to another issue.” Saylee took over again. “Humanity was spread across at least two planets after the Tutorial. If your parents, siblings, spouse, or children happen to be on the other planet, you would not be able to do much to help them.”
“Is there any way to reach the other planet? Or planets? Can we teleport?” Zackery asked.
“At the moment we have no way to travel from planet to planet.” Saylee informed him. “It is vital we inform you because as the leader of a large city, it is extremely likely you’ll be approached. Whoever does will likely hold members of your family hostage, only promising their safety on the condition that you deliver people.”
“That won’t be an issue.”
“You’ve already found your family I take it?”
“No, I just don’t have any. Not that I care about. I got a distant cousin, but I don’t really care much about her. Loaned her money once when she was in a tough spot, she made a shitload off of it and ghosted me. Taking her hostage would be doing me a favor.” Zackery shrugged and went back to looking at the monolith. “You guys at least seem competent, that’s a relief. It feels like I’m surrounded by idiots most of the time.”
Teresa caught Patrick sigh and roll his eyes, seemingly not happy with his assessment.
“Well, it seems like you’re doing rather well for yourself. Real nice city you have here, likely the most developed one I’ve seen.” Saylee’s opinion was shared with Teresa, it did seem pretty neat. Once again though, Teresa still wasn’t fully on board. Arconette had its problems under the surface, who was to say Stormwreck didn’t?
“Hardly. We’ve been working on the sewers all month and I’m being told it’s unlikely to show results at all for several more months. How hard can it be?” Zackery seemed exasperated at this, though that seemed reasonable to Teresa. There’s no way building a sewer system would be simple, how would you make the waste go where you want it? It wasn’t as easy as digging a tunnel, you would have to have it all lead somewhere while actually using water or some magical means to transport stuff.
“I think it’s already incredible that you guys have surveyed so much of the land.” Randall spoke up, making a good point. Really there was a lot involved in construction projects that most didn’t think about, and as a geologist he would know.
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
“It was easy enough, just had to figure out where I wanted everything.” Zack replied. Teresa was aware Patrick shook his head every so slightly. By this point, she felt it was pretty clear they had some disagreements there.
“Right, but the subsurface investigations would be difficult. You got to sample the soil to make sure nothing is gonna collapse if you dig there. Figuring out details about the water table without decent tools would involve a lot of labor. Without pumps you’ll have to use gravity, figuring that out in such a large city would be a nightmare so I imagine you already have something worked out there. Where is the outflow gonna go if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve heard you have a lot of lakes nearby, you probably don’t want those contaminated.” Her dad may not have worked on specifically sewers before, but he still knew his shit. Pun intended.
“I delegate all of that, Patrick is working on it.” Zackery shrugged. “We have nearly 800,000 people here, I’m sure there are plenty of people qualified for this kind of work.”
“Actually we’re pretty short on that.” Patrick talked for the first time this meeting, and Teresa was willing to hear him out. “Several hundred thousand are either children or elderly, and we’ve got a lot of people already occupied daily with getting food. We made a few wells, but filtration is what we’re really working on. Don’t want to give babies unfiltered ground water when we don’t know what’s in it.”
“Babies aren’t supposed to drink water until they’re at least 6 months old and are eating solid food.” Randall informed once again.
“Yeah, we got plenty of formula starting out so they’ll be fine. It’s just that the sewers are a huge project to start out with, we still need to learn more about the foundations for the buildings we do have.” Patrick seemed pretty stressed about it, and Zackery immediately made it worse.
“Just delegate then, that’s what I do.”
“You can’t just keep saying delegate! There’s only so much we can do at once, and we haven’t settled down enough-”
“We’ll take our leave here, I believe we are also to be heading to New Haven here shortly.” Saylee interrupted with perfect timing, because Teresa didn’t particularly want to awkwardly stand there while Patrick and Zackery had their argument about how large scale projects this early on was a crappy idea.
“Very well. I’ll be sure to remember The Mall as reasonably competent from our meeting, I await to hear back from our Ambassador.” Zackery dismissed them, Patrick clenching and unclenching his fist. Patrick took the lead, taking them out of the building.
“Sorry about that, Didn’t mean to lose my cool in front of guests.” Patrick apologized as he led them through the city. “You all going to be heading to New Haven right away or are you going to be staying a while?”
“We’re going immediately.” Jake answered, seeming antsy. Teresa didn’t blame him.
“Alright, sounds good. I’ll lead you to the correct edge of the city and point the way. Excuse me, what was your name again?” He asked, looking at Teresa’s dad.
“Randall.”
“Awesome, great to meet you. You sound like you know a lot about, uh, ground stuff I guess. Sorry, I’m just figuring most of this out as I go. We could really use your expertise though, would you be willing to work with us? Once again, the pay will be great.”
“Sorry, I’m not available at the moment and I also still need to consider my options once everything is taken care of, no offense.” Randall shot down the job offer, but Patrick didn’t seem very upset about it.
“It’s fine, I expected as much. Worth a shot though.”
They continued on through the city, and Teresa could confirm that there really was a lot of Japanese food. Not that she was complaining. If anything she was just surprised how fast they managed to make it. Most of it was seafood based, but they had sashimi, imitation miso soup, meals with what Teresa thought was kelp, and a bunch of options she honestly didn’t know anything about. She didn’t really know much about Japanese culture or anything, but it was clear that a lot of people must have come right out of the Tutorial immediately ready to cook.
Teresa could respect it heavily. Not everyone needed to be a monster hunting maniac. If a bunch of people got video game abilities and decided they wanted to use it to make good food, then Teresa was all for it.
Walking through the city, Teresa decided to use her Perception to eavesdrop on anything she could. Was this an invasion of privacy? Yeah, definitely, but she was just listening for anything that would alarm her. When she first arrived in Arconette, she had tried to limit her Perception’s abilities to be polite, but fuck being polite now. Zackery and Patrick had both taken a lot of news in stride, and she was suspicious of them.
Sure, she might be overhearing a lot of personal conversations and activities, but what if she overheard someone discussing something like the multiversal invaders?
The fact Teresa had become much more jaded to other people wasn’t lost on her. She was self aware enough to notice how her personality and values had shifted since the Contaminated Zone. Normally, Teresa believed there was a disconnect from her emotions and her actual true self. It was a belief she had for a long time actually.
Going through panic attacks while logically wondering why her body reacted that way was what made her believe that. Her emotions were just something her body did in response, it wasn’t really her, the person ‘operating,’ her body, or living in it.
Now though, was one of the few times her emotions and logic agreed on something. She needed to be cautious of new people, she couldn’t afford to be soft. That was how people wound up dead.
One of the reasons Teresa hadn’t wanted to be the Leader of The Mall was because she was worried about how she might change over time, how her experiences might affect her negatively. Not a lot of time had passed, and she already felt like her values had shifted, and she saw nothing wrong with that.
Maybe she should have taken the role as Leader of The Mall. It would have been useful, at least. It’d let her ensure things go the way she wanted them to. When she stepped down from the role, she had hoped others who knew more about what goes into something like that would take her place and use that power to do more good than she could.
But what if there wasn’t anyone like that? If she were in charge, she could leverage the thousands of people under her to protect those who needed protection, and kill those who needed to die. For this reason, she took an interest in how Zackery would manage his city, and maybe she would learn from his mistakes and-
Nope, enough of that. No going power hungry. She was still just upset after recent events, seeing a lot of people you know and fought with die gruesomely wasn’t something you just get over in a couple days. Maybe her emotions and logic weren’t as aligned as she thought they were.
“Are there any monsters in between here and New Haven?” Teresa asked.
“Not particularly. Portals spawn in of course, but since it’s such a regularly traveled route they get destroyed before they can grow in power at all. If you see a Portal, it’ll probably be pretty close to level 1.” Patrick’s answer disappointed Teresa a bit, but she didn’t let it show.
It took about an hour to get from one side of the city to the other, and that was while moving at decent speeds. ‘Decent’ being what Teresa estimated to be around 15 miles an hour or so. To her it was practically walking speed, but they were in a city and didn’t want to cause a ruckus. They’d take off cruising soon.
“Here we are.” Patrick gestured to an open field with black soil with a trail of compact dirt leading into the distance. “Not sure how far it is, but like I said it should be pretty short if you have a good Agility stat. Seeing how one of you is only level 15, I imagine it will be a bit longer, but it shouldn’t be that bad.”
“Her level won’t be a problem.” Teresa said as Saylee approached Preston. She hopped on his back as he gave her a piggyback ride, making Patrick snort out loud.
“That’s hilarious, are you actually gonna travel like that?” He asked.
“If it works, it works.” Was Saylee’s answer, seeming to amuse Patrick.
“Can’t argue there. Have a safe trip y’all, I look forward to doing business with you again.”
With that, the group was off to New Haven where Jake’s grandpa currently lived.