“Place a guard are you fucking crazy?” Wilson let his temper slip again temporarily but caught himself. “So we have to protect this woman that tried to screw us over and has effectively stolen millions?” he caught his astonished laughter before it came out.
“Let me remind you, Mr Wilson, that this is an innocent woman in your care. If anything and I mean anything were to happen to her before she is tried in a court of law, the consequences to you and your company would no doubt be dire.”
Wilson thought about speaking again but decided against it and simply nodded. “Don’t bother guarding over her, she’s not going anywhere for a while yet.” He said to the two suited me standing between him and Rachel’s pod.
It was a futile endeavour, but Wilson thought that he had been personally slighted by this ‘girl’ who had worked for him and tried to screw both him and the company over. It would be his mission for the next six months at a minimum to do anything he could think of to have her either tried in absence, or otherwise forcibly removed from the pod early. There was no way that the law could remain on her side for the duration of her playtime.
Chapter Twenty, Community
T
he boat seemed to be anchored off of the beaches just far enough away that it was impossible to see how many people were on board if any, or if they were actually people at all and not a swashbuckling boat of pirate orcs ready to take us over. It didn’t feel like an attack though, as if I was going to attack Coyote Creek I certainly wouldn’t park up my big boat out of (presumably) firing range and row a little one to shore. I knew that’s what had happened as I could see the little rowboat pulled up onto the sand and out of the water.
Ushuk led me like a small puppy trying to get his master to take him out for the first walk of the day until we reached the man in the clearing who had gathered quite a lot of attention from my clan. Well, I say ‘man’ but what I really should have said was ‘Elf’.
I couldn’t tell at first because the stranger wore a hooded robe, much like Rachel’s that covered his head and entire form. He stood taller than myself even, which meant that amongst my goblins he was about twice their height, it was almost a comical sight. When he turned to face me I could see that he had long, silver hair that flowed outside of his robe and down to his hips. His nose and mouth were thin, sharp and pointed and his eyes were completely white with only the smallest of pupils dead in the centre. He did not look like the prim and proper elves that I had been expecting, more like a menacing, piercing white demon that could see right into my soul.
“Hello, how can I help you?” I put on my very best shopkeeper voice and outstretched a hand for the visitor to shake. He looked at me for a moment before moving, then raised an arm toward mine, his robe following the motion. When his arm reached mine, his hand protruded from his clothing and I could see that the skin on it was sheet white. I could even see the veins running through his hand and into his arm, which was also as white as snow.
He shook my hand slowly as though he hadn’t been expecting to, or hadn’t done so ever before. When we parted contact he finally spoke. His voice was a whisp and it sounded as though more than one person was taking.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Tandy,” He hissed. It made me shiver as it reminded me of so many spirits in so many horror movies.
“It has come to our attention that you have a new village here,” he continued, making a show of looking around. “very impressive.”
“Village?” I repeated in a questioning tone.
“Yes,” he simply stated.
“Right,” I said.
“You seem to have a very, unorthodox way of doing things don’t you,” He continued. I could tell he was looking at my little tent that I’d kept around for the nostalgia.
“Some might say that,” I punctuated. His tone had started to put me on the defensive and I could feel my palms starting to sweat. ‘This is it’ I thought to myself. The moment where I would finally realise just how hard the game was.
“Quite.” The visitor replied. “My name is Quintus.” He stated and his ‘esses’ seemed to drag on forever.
“OK,” I replied.
“Your village has come to our attention, because it is now big enough, to trade with us.” He continued, but he put a bit of a strange emphasis on the word trade.
“Ok,” I replied again mechanically before registering what he had said. “Oh, OK!” I repeated much more enthusiastically. “What are you selling?”
“No, I am afraid that is not how this works. First, you must build a trading hub or forum…whatever your…race…allows,” he turned his nose up slightly as he spoke and I got the distinct impression that goblins and humans weren’t exactly his favourite trading partners. “Then our settlements must enter into a trading agreement with each other that outlines the terms. Of course, there are agreements to facilitate trade on a trade-by-trade basis. It looks as though that might be preferable to your…situation.”
“I don’t really get why you have come all of this way just to tell me that you won't trade with us yet,” I queried.
“I am an emissary of my people. It is normal for us to visit our future partners so that we may guide them into a preferable relationship for everyone.” Quintus rasped.
“Right. So you are saying I need to build a trading hub and then call you back or something? How would I do that?”
“Once the trading hub has been constructed, as I have already made our introductions it will take care of the rest.
“Can I come and see your village?” I asked.
“That would…not be wise,” Quintus replied. “My people are not as accommodating as many of the races in the world. I am afraid I wouldn’t be able to guarantee your safety.”
“Can you tell me where it is so I can add it to my map?” I asked.
“We do not like to broadcast our location, however you may be able to trade for this information once proper provisions have been made.” He replied. Of course, everything had a price – even information.
Before I knew it, the hooded figure had returned to his rowboat, rowed seemingly effortlessly back to the ship anchored off of our shoreline and all three had disappeared leaving no trace of their exitance behind. The very first thing I instructed Rok to do once we were alone yet again was to have the wall extended along the shoreline and a dock be built. I wanted to be able to have a little more control over who could just ‘turn up’ in a boat on our waters, and by the way where the hell did the lake go anyway for such a big ship to be deemed necessary? Anyway questions later. I didn’t feel like I needed to give Rok any specific instructions, and he assured me that it would be ‘three days,’ or six fingers worth and that resources wouldn’t be a problem.
I decided to tackle the trading forum situation myself as quite frankly I had nothing better to do. I toyed with the idea of turning the unused tent into the building but something inside of me still wanted that around as a reminder of where we had come from. Instead I came up with the ingenious idea of employing a little supermarket psychology into my campsite – or should I say village now?
I’d read that in normal supermarkets a huge amount of psychology had gone into planning the layouts and positioning was everything to maximising sales. I didn’t have to go quite that far, but the location I chose for the trading hub was going to be important – or at least I thought so.
I formulated the idea clearly in my mind before I started any work. I wanted the wall that was to be constructed in front of the clear waters to have a single opening that would funnel any and all visitors straight through the market – that way visitors would have no choice but to shop. Sure I didn’t know if it really worked like that, but I thought that at least if the visitors were coming from the water, then it made sense to have the hub as close to that as possible.
As was becoming more and more the norm, the game nudged my imagination towards what it wanted me to envision, which eventually settled on a kind of Greek-style open-air market, comp
lete with sheeted canopies and hanging fresh fish. The image was so clear in my mind that I could also now see the resource requirements ticking ever upward as I made my amendments without having to rely on a new system message popping up. When all was said and done, my new building would require four hundred wood, one hundred stone, twenty pieces of leather and ten pieces of copper. It was the most expensive thing that I had ever conceived of and I certainly didn’t have the resources available to hand to construct such a thing.
To my surprise, I wasn’t prevented from actually going ahead with the construction. As usual, the site that the game had designated turned into a construction zone and filled with all of the resources available for the task but I could tell there weren’t enough. I wondered what would happen when I ran out, but that was definitely a problem for future me to deal with. My speculation was that it would get to a certain stage and just stop, whether that would mean a longer build time, or that it would instantly finish once the resources were available remained a mystery to me though.
It would be hard work tapping away at the construction site on my own, so I decided to wait until I had some more help available to me, which would also mean I might have a few more of the resources necessary for the construction of the damn thing.
It was about time for me to check my settlement interface, being a little behind on my management duties what with all the fun happening.
Coyote Creek Settlement Information
Central Building: Goblin Chief’s Hut
Current Occupant: Tandy [Crocodile’s Teeth Clan]
Village
Buildings:Goblin Chief’s Hut1 (100%)
Goblin Breeding Hut1 (100%)
Unspecified Shelter1 (100%)
Campfire1 (100%)
Goblin Longhouse1 (100%)
Goblin Construction Yard1 (100%)
Spider Nest (Dark Forest)3 (100%)
Goblin Barracks1 (100%)
Sawmill1 (100%)
Armoury1 (100%)
Hydroponic Farm1 (100%)
Trading Forum0 (0%)
Occupants:50
Skill types:Goblin Baby6
Goblin Adolescent6
Goblin Adult10
Goblin Cook1
Goblin Feeder10
Goblin Builder1
Goblin Worker8
Goblin Hauler1
Goblin Healer1
Goblin Warrior1
Goblin Crafter2
Human2
Goblin Behemoth1
Current Food Available: 12
Current Maintenance Level: 98
Current Food Generation: 104 Units / Day
It seemed to me as though my new Goblin Behemoth was eating enough food to feed a small cohort. My worst fears had finally been realised – my food generation divided by my maintenance level had almost reached one. With no food in reserve (well nothing serious at least) and no new food being generated, it meant that if I summoned anything other than a feeder to my clan, I would start losing my most vital resource. I wasn’t sure what would happen to goblins who were malnourished but something inside of me told me that it wasn’t a situation that I wanted to be in.
Something was still bothering me though, and it was the designation of a ‘village’ that Coyote Creek had somehow been afflicted with. I could see that the word ‘village’ was bolder and slightly bigger than the others, so I clicked it in the hope of finding out some more information.
Village
A village is automatically born when a settlement reaches a permanent occupancy of 50 members. In addition, the settlement must have a Central Building, a Recruiting Station, A Place for occupants to eat and a Leader.
There are many bonuses that are available to a settlement once it becomes a village, notably:
Other settlements will be able to see the location of your village, should they possess a high enough mapping skill level.
Your village will be able to allocate quests where necessary in order to further the advancement of the settlement.
You may trade with other settlements after the creation of a Trading Post or Forum.
Immigration will now be factored into your settlement, causing population counts to vary depending upon the availability of work, resources and morale.
Your village will now generate Settlement Points. Settlement Points are generated at a rate determined by the population of the settlement, with the points generated increasing with each level of the individual, over the base value determined by a number of factors according to their cost and role.
I clicked through to the ‘Settlement Points’ page to see if I could glean any more information about how the points were generated, but it was horrifically complex, with lines and lines of numbers and multipliers split over hundreds of pages. I wondered if anyone ever took the time to read the damn thing, which also made me wonder if anyone else had actually ever even seen it. The sheer wealth of information made my head spin, but it was strange that it didn’t really tell me that much about what I could expect from running a village.
Something I had overlooked though, was the sheer amount of breeding that these goblins seemed to be getting up to on their own. I had twelve of them at the child or adolescent stage and that just seemed insane to me. No wonder we had reached that fifty-member milestone so quickly. Actually, had it been quickly? Time had started to sort of merge all of my days within Freedom into one long experience, and I knew that I had to keep a better track of things.
Anyway back to the Settlement Points, which will from here on be referred to as SP. As I looked through the interfaces that I had available to me I could see that they had started cropping up all over the place. For example, on my new building I could ‘instantly finish’ it for three hundred SP. I could level up nearly all of the buildings that were listed in my settlement just by spending the points too, and it didn’t stop there. Every member of my clan, barring myself and Rachel were also listed as available to level up using SP too. I felt like the whole game had just opened up to me all over again.
I had a whopping zero SP at my disposal, BUT a new line in my settlement information was informing me that we were generating the SP at a rate of seventy eight per day. ‘Not too shabby’ I thought, as to level up a goblin from level one to level two was only one hundred SP, and from level two to level three was one hundred and fifty. It got a little more complex after that though, as the number seemed to vary from goblin to goblin. I wondered if it had to do with how much experience that they had accrued so far, their skills or some other factor that I hadn’t thought of. Ushuk for example, at level nine cost two and a half thousand SP to reach level ten – that meant at my current rate a whopping thirty-three days of generation for one lousy level – that was definitely something that I wasn’t about to do.
What was more likely, was that I would be using the points to complete and level up the buildings as I could afford them – it just seemed like the best use for them, as the buildings themselves seemed to provide the biggest benefits to my clan.
Something that I noticed that would actually be very helpful, was from the Breeding Hut’s interface. I could still create and modify the goblins that I was about to employ, but now I also had access to a new ‘perks’ tab, which opened up a whole new list of opportunities for me. I now had the ability to buy permanent upgrades for the goblins that were to be summoned, arranged in tiers according to their cost and level. For example, the first upgrade was called ‘Level up!’ and it told me that if I spent one thousand SP on it, every creature summoned from my Breeding Hut would start its life at level two. It was a no-brainer that after ten summons this would have paid for itself already, then everything else would be gravy. Once ‘Level Up!’ had been brought, it could then be brought again so that everything would be level three, then four and so on – presumably for a higher cost. I could also buy modifiers so that my summoned creatures would start with additional points in their strength, wisdom or social stats which weren’t as expensive at five hundred poi
nts each for the first level but were definitely very useful.
I finally had another goal to work towards – gain as many SP as I could because I wanted everything.
“Bossman?” a female goblin voice croaked from behind me. I turned to see that it was Snafu.
“Yes Snafu, what is it?” I was still distracted by all of the new features available to me.
“Clan getting bigger. Now in a Village.”
“Right,” I confirmed.
“Need proper kitchen now for food. Pot not big enough.”
“Shit.” I knew this would come eventually, but right now? Right as I had so many things to make and buy.
You have been offered a quest
You must build a kitchen for the Coyote Creek Village so that all of the inhabitants can remain well fed
Reward: Experience. Reputation with Snafu
Do you wish to accept this quest? Yes/No
‘Fine, I’ll say it again’ I thought as I pressed to accept the quest. It was a bit of a blast from the past though as I hadn’t been offered a quest in what felt like a lifetime and although it was stated in the village facts, I hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly.
The Copper Rose Page 28