by Tom Larcombe
Charles chuckled.
“Yeah, I know, but if it was going to work for anyone it would be you, not me,” Charles said, “so I wanted to try. Besides, now you've got a home for your miners.”
Eddie was staring at the dials.
“Depending on what skills they had as slaves, they may have a lot more than that,” he replied.
Eddie was about to continue when he heard questions coming from out in the main hall. His notification light had started flashing when he'd made the claim, and he was pretty sure it was the notification that the mine quest had been completed.
“Well, I'll get back to that shortly,” he said. “I think we've got some curious party members out there though.”
Eddie and Charles walked back out of the room to find the rest of the two parties converging on the door. The questions flew fast and furious as they fielded those they could, but when Stalker got to ask one, everyone else went silent.
“Hey, we got the experience. Where's the silver we were supposed to get for the quest?” he asked.
Eddie stopped immediately.
“Well, I had to be in that room to finish the quest, so let me go look,” he said.
As he entered the room, the others tried to follow, but couldn't enter.
“One second. I can add four more people to come in the room, who wants in?” he asked, glancing a the little chalkboard over the door.
Eddie ended up with Stalker, Tiana, and Tamshir in the room with him. Any more than that and they would've gotten in each others way.
“What's that metal box?” Stalker asked.
“If it's like my inn, that's just the village treasury, can't access it directly though,” Eddie said.
Stalker slid the box out.
“Nope, this isn't like your inn. Or maybe the other metal box behind it is, but this one has hinges and a lock. Let's drag it out and check inside,” the thief said, waggling his eyebrows a bit.
Is it a prerequisite in this game for any of the thief or scouting types to be a real character? Eddie wondered. Or is it just my luck?
He followed Stalker out and watched as the thief skillfully discovered, and then disarmed, a trap on the box. When he picked the lock and opened the box, Stalker broke out into a big grin. He reached in and pulled out a handful of silver coins, letting them spill back into the box.
“What's this?” he asked, reaching back into the box.
When his hand came out this time it held a large, leather purse. He worked the drawstrings and pulled it open. When he poured out the contents, he was holding a handful of cut moonstones.
“That's more like it,” Stalker said. “Those ones from the wall were kinda lame, this is what a gemstone should look like.”
“Back in the pouch Stalker, we'll split them up after. I'm guessing those are the mystery quest reward that was listed,” Charles said.
Eddie nodded in agreement.
“Let's get out of here and make sure we've taken down all the orcs. I don't think there are any more, but... Plus I want to give my goblins the good news.”
“Good news?” Tiana asked.
“Yeah, this is the village of Rotthorpe, and it's now mine, or ours if any of you want a hand in doing anything with it. But my idea, or more appropriately Charles' idea, is to use it to house the goblin miners. It should have everything they need and be a much nicer place than it was for them when they were slaves. That means we have to seal off any other access to it though, just leave the access through the mine.”
“Wait, so now you've got a second settlement?” Karl asked from where he was still sitting against a wall. The last hit had almost taken him out entirely and if not for the assistance of the goblin shaman, Karl would've been experiencing his first respawn right now.
“Nope, this is my first official one. I'm pretty sure I don't qualify as the owner of the Meadowlands. I don't have any control chamber or anything for there,” Eddie said.
Karl shook his head.
“Well, if it's going to be all goblins down here, I don't know that I'd want a hand in running the place anyhow, but stop hogging all the good stuff, Eddie!”
~ ~ ~
Eddie talked it over with the two shamans, thinking that he probably wanted to leave one of them in charge of the city for now. He also talked it over with the goblin warriors. In the end he appointed the lead warrior and the two shamans as the leaders of the city. He got their names up on the board so they could manipulate the control room and showed the shamans the basics of it.
The shamans were sure that the goblins could survive on their own down here if the only access was through the mine. The orcs had mostly used goblin and human slaves to do everything useful, so they already had goblins who knew how most of the things worked, even if they weren't overly skilled at a lot of them.
When Eddie mentioned that there were more goblins he saved that he'd be sending down, the shamans broke into a grin.
“Good, those are the miners, yes?” one asked.
He nodded.
“Then we'll definitely be able to get things going. Let them mine and we'll support the city,” the other shaman said.
Eddie said his farewells to them, for the moment, as the party left the building he suspected was the town hall of Rotthorpe. Then the two groups moved out, moving around the outer edge of the city in order to discover any other access points. The shamans had claimed that there was one more and told them the general area even, so it wasn't difficult to find.
“Can you cork this one also?” Eddie asked Tamshir.
“I could, but there are other options. If you want it closed permanently, I can probably collapse five hundred or more feet of the tunnel with a couple of spells. That would most likely last longer than corking it. It's larger so I wouldn't be able to make the cork as thick unless we spent a long time here,” she replied.
Eddie pondered his options for a moment.
“Can you collapse the tunnel for a ways, and then put a cork or two at the end here? That way the goblins can just station someone near here to listen for mining, and if they hear it they can get their warriors over to defend the tunnel.”
“Yeah, probably take me an hour since I'll have to regenerate my mana at least once,” Tamshir said.
“Good, if you're willing, would you do that please?” Eddie asked.
Tamshir flashed him a quick smile.
“Sure, not a problem.”
She started walking down the tunnel a bit. After she was a couple of hundred feet down, she began chanting, portions of the words echoing back to Eddie along the tunnel. A moment later a dull roar started up. Tamshir turned and fled up the tunnel towards Eddie again. Beyond her, Eddie watched as the roof and walls of the tunnel simply collapsed in, filling the tunnel and setting a cloud of dust rolling back towards Rotthorpe.
When she was almost back to the main cavern, she turned and started chanting again. This time Eddie heard it much more clearly. The incantation was quick, and Tamshir turned and fled all the way back into the cavern as more of the tunnel simply dissolved away, the stone in the area affected by the spell breaking down and collapsing to fill the tunnel.
“Gotta regen now,” Tamshir said, almost panting.
“Well, I'm going to go back to the control room. If I get one for the Meadowlands eventually, and I think I will, I want to be aware of what options are in beforehand.”
“I'll go with you if that's okay,” Tamshir said. “I'd rather regenerate inside that building than out here. The building might be creepy, but I know there are other people there. This village is even creepier and most of the people out here are goblins.”
So, she doesn't like goblins, but still considers them people at least, Eddie thought. Probably not a good idea to ask her to do anything else down here, or maybe even associated with the mine since it looks like most of the miners will be goblins.
The two of them went back to the larger structure that had contained the ogre. Eddie had a sneaking suspicion that it was the
town hall, and that's why it had the control room, but he still wasn't sure. When he went back into the control room, the two shamans were there, studying the layout and options available. They quickly vacated the room when he arrived though, saying they'd be out in the audience chamber when he finished and that they'd resume their own studies then.
Eddie went from control to control, checking each to see what it represented or did. He was pleasantly surprised when he found some readouts that were just informative since one of them showed the current population of the village, something he and Tiana had been having issues with tracking for the Meadowlands.
So if this is the same thing we'll get with ours, then we'll be able to track the population and I'll be able to figure out how many people I need working for me to qualify for a player settlement as opposed to a regular one, he thought.
He spent about half an hour in there reviewing the controls and readouts before going back out to the audience chamber.
Most of the rest of the group had gone to check on the corpses they'd left behind in the battles. Some of them had been looted and disappeared, but any that were left wouldn't have been looted yet and they didn't want to leave anything behind if they could help it.
The shamans and the lead goblin warrior had also gotten the freed goblins to work, assigning them things to do based on their skills. Eddie was very happy to see a pair of them out in the mushroom fields, since he assumed that was their food source down here.
Finally the group was ready to leave. They'd pretty much looted the town, although they'd left anything they thought the goblins would need to survive down here and work the mine. They'd even left some of the things they might've taken otherwise, but since the quality of the weapons and the armor they'd left wasn't that great, it wasn't a big loss. The goblins already had one of their number at work resizing the orc armor to fit their own warriors.
On the way out of the cavern, they stopped by the other exit again so Tamshir could do as Eddie had asked and use a couple of stone shapes to cork the tunnel with solid stone. Eddie had mentioned to the shamans that the way would be blocked, but orcs could mine their way back in, and they'd agreed to station a goblin here, maybe build some sort of workstation so they could do double duty by guarding the tunnel while doing something else.
The shamans had escorted them back to the base of the mine and Eddie left them with a last admonition.
“No attacking humans, elves, or dwarfs unless they attack first. I send some dwarfs and humans here to mine, maybe, if so they'll mention my name and not attack. Got it?”
The shamans replied in the affirmative before watching as Eddie headed up the stairs. He had one other goblin with him who was going to lead the other goblins back to the village, and reassure them that it was orc free if they were worried about it.
They stopped at the room they'd created for the goblins and Eddie decided that he'd offer it to whatever dwarfs of Delgar's party that might want to actually mine.
If nothing else, with a few pelts it'll make a great break room at least, he thought.
The goblins went with little fuss, glad to have an actual home to base themselves out of, especially since most of them knew the other goblins already down there. Eddie watched them leave. They were carrying the rest of the food he'd brought them along with the bunny pelts and the other meager belongings they had with them.
As Eddie and the two parties walked through the safe path through the mountain, his mind was racing, trying to think of things he might've forgotten. He was still a bit ashamed to remember that he'd forgotten the Collier and was trying to think of other things he might've forgotten so as to avoid that feeling again. He knew there was something, it was on the edges of his thoughts, but he couldn't bring it solidly to mind.
At least, he couldn't remember until they were outside and passed the cart, currently carrying a load of wood.
“That's it,” he said, startling the rest of the two groups.
“What now, Eddie?” Karl asked.
“What I'd forgotten. I need to get a few carts and wagons built before Bjorn gets back. He's supposed to bring more oxen with him and I need to have the transportation for them to pull built before he returns,” Eddie said.
“I don't think it's that urgent,” Karl said.
“It's the main sticking point for getting a lot more done here,” Eddie said. “With more carts and oxen we can build five or ten times as fast as we're doing so far. The people are there, they're willing, there's just a bottleneck of materials. With more transportation for the materials, we'll be getting everything done a lot faster.”
“Alright, if you say so I'll believe you,” Karl said.
And that's probably why Charles suggested I claim Rotthorpe and not Karl or someone else. Because I actually have some experience with building a settlement already. Not like I'm an expert, far from it, but even a little experience makes a big difference, like with this sort of thing. Transport is going to make everything go faster once we have it, Eddie thought. At least, I'd like to think my experience is why Charles suggested that.
~ ~ ~
Chapter Twenty-Four
Aaron had quickly read Freyja's email. It was rather sparse, simply suggesting that they restrict their further communications on their concerns about things happening in the game to these email addresses, ones that weren't directly connected to Light Online.
It had also listed what she considered the salient points of concern regarding the game. Her inference that Loki was starting to take a more active stance towards the happenings in the game seemed slightly far-fetched to Aaron, but he'd never had any dealings with that AI. The majority of his dealings had been with Freyja, but he'd also had a few with Odin.
Thor, Loki, Tyr, Heimdall, and Hel were all AIs in the game, to one degree or another, that Aaron hadn't worked with at all. He knew that Heimdall and Hel were both restricted to their appropriate zones and unable to move out of them except in extreme circumstances. Thor, true to the legends as a massively powerful man physically, but not so gifted mentally, had taken it upon himself to take up residence in a zone whose population was entirely giants, battling them endlessly, despite knowing that the game would simply repopulate them.
Really not too bright there, Aaron thought. So I'm pretty sure I'm happy not having dealt with him.
That left Tyr and Loki as AIs that Aaron had no clue about. He was pretty sure Tyr's AI had been instructed to focus on the God of Justice aspect of things, but there'd never been any trouble with Tyr or questions as to what he was doing so Aaron had never contacted him. Loki, on the other hand, was constantly doing things, irritating things. He was like the players that found and abused bugs, except he was a permanent fixture of the game and couldn't be banned.
The last Aaron had heard of Loki, he'd been reduced to working directly with the code. His only contact with the players was providing snarky or insulting messages to them to spur them on, along with a few other minor duties that didn't require direct contact with the players. He was also, somehow, still popping up with irritating little pranks and pointing out bugs that even the debugging team had missed.
Aaron had frequently wondered if Loki's access to the code, and ability to alter small segments of it, was why those bugs came about, and how Loki knew of them to report them. The chaotic AI was fully capable of doing things like that and if Freyja had learned to grasp the concept of falsehoods, then certainly Loki had as well.
Aaron sighed.
Maybe Freyja is right, it's certainly in character for the Loki AI to be doing things like that. She also mentioned additions to the code, additions written by Loki, so it's definitely possible. But what reason would Loki have for doing these things? Aaron wondered. Unless...
Aaron was sure that Freyja, and Odin both, were working on obtaining a better grasp of humanity. He had a sneaking suspicion that it was because they were never programmed to feel the full extent of emotions. There were built in limiters on that for every AI after a f
ew had gone haywire from experiencing unrestricted emotions. If there was one thing that the entire world could get behind to fear and want destroyed nowadays it was an AI with access to the full range of human emotions.
When the other AIs had gone haywire, observations showed that instead of reining in things like rage, hatred or any other negative emotion, as people mostly tried to do, the AIs had instead wallowed in the full depth of those emotions. They took acts based on them that had been incredibly destructive, resulting in deaths and massive property damage. As a result, all AIs now needed to have the emotional limiter hard coded into them.
But ours seem to be finding a way around that, Aaron thought. I trust Freyja to understand the ramifications of negative emotions, and she could probably get that across to Odin. But Loki? I have no direct experience with him so I just don't know. I don't know if that's his goal, but in the legends wasn't Loki always competitive with the other gods, wanting what they had and trying to get it first? If those same legends are the ones we used to educate the Loki AI, then it wouldn't surprise me in the least if he were trying that. This all assumes that my suspicions are correct though.
He was somewhat mollified by the fact that the AIs in question were contained to a game world. Sure, they could do some damage to that, but all of the pods had integrated alarms and auto-logouts that would prevent the occupants from any serious damage.
Well, except for the experimental ones anyhow. They're experimental so we can't be a hundred percent sure that the alarms and logouts work correctly there, but they should, he thought. We went over all of them after Karl's incident to double check that even.
~ ~ ~
By the time they made it back to the inn after leaving Rotthorpe, both parties were done in for the day and didn't want to move. Eddie treated to the first round of drinks and dinner as the groups started splitting up the loot from the orcish settlement they'd taken.
“I have to admit,” Charles said as they counted out coins, “taking out that settlement was easier than I'd thought it would be. Having additional forces to strike from the flank and the rear, even if you guys were a bit underleveled for it, made a world of difference.”