Warsinger

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Renown tiers (and maximum volunteer/conscription limits):

  ● Tier 1 - 10

  ● Tier 2 - 100

  ● Tier 3 - 500

  ● Tier 4 - 1000

  ● Tier 5 - 3000

  ● Tier 6 – 5000-10000

  The logistics of recruiting a thousand people on each building I wanted to restore was mind-boggling, as was the fact that I could like… do that now. It cheered me up until I realized that Navigail meant I could recruit 1000 volunteers across ALL my projects, if I had multiples, and distribute them accordingly. Then it didn’t seem like quite as much manpower – but still a lot. It also drove home that, if I was going to successfully accept and complete the quest Matir had set me, I needed a lot more positive Renown to get the volunteers we’d need to defeat the Drachan. I was immediately and profoundly intimidated.

  “Interesting content, I assume?” Istvan asked.

  “If micromanaging castle elements is your thing, sure.” I played around with the Castle options briefly, calling up different menus. In addition to being able to repair or replace things, I could also add completely new structures: everything from better curtain walls through to an Oratory, which was used to house mages, and anti-aircraft defenses. Because of the flying units and magitech airships, military strategy in Archemi required you to think in all three dimensions: land, sea, and sky. Just like the real world.

  I tried zooming the Infrastructure system out to the city level. The cost of the repairs needed to restore Karhad was enough to make a man cry – something to the tune of 500,000 olbia. But when I zoomed further out to the County level, I realized it wasn’t all bad. Racsa had a lot of resources, and it had a lot of arable land. The towns on the eastern borders of the province were had metal and mana refineries, and they were still generating profit. When I zoomed out to survey the whole province, it looked even better. The Demon had carved a scar of destruction from the south-west of Myszno, through Racsa to the southern edge of Litvy, leaving most of the eastern counties unscathed. My province had definitely taken an economic downturn, but it wasn’t unsalvageable. I was sitting on top of the worst-hit area in the territory. We were in crisis mode down here, but for many parts of the province - especially in the north - it was business as usual.

  I went back to the list of quests and tried to look at them like an officer instead of an infantryman. For several minutes, my mind was just a dull black drone of the bullshit people with ADHD helplessly think about. Was I hungry? Are sleeping cats a liquid or a solid? Why did Archemi have a Pee Meter, but not a Poop Meter? But after dwelling on that important topic for maybe three seconds, the light switch in my brain flipped on. The trigger was the gnawing sensation in my own stomach.

  “You know, about half of these quests are about food and water,” I said. “We can assign the Engineers to fix the water, right? Three counties are having trouble with refugees, and two don’t have anyone to pull in the harvest. That’s a self-solving problem right there. So before I fuck off to Dakhdir, here’s what we’re going to do…”

  Chapter 6

  I went back to the Count's Suite to decompress after sorting out which quests I wanted to farm out, and which ones I wanted to do myself after we brought Suri home. My ears were still ringing as I let myself back into the cool musty quiet of Lord Bolza's old living quarters. The Ducal Suite was an apartment on the top floor of the Inner Keep, and it hadn’t been touched since Ashur had vacated it. Double doors opened into a spacious living area, with a fireplace, seating and a small polished wooden dining table. The furnishings were comfortable, if not well-worn. Like the rest of the castle livery, the apartment was decorated in green and silver. The chairs were upholstered in heavy, soft green leather. The duvets and curtains were green, heavily embroidered. The towels in the bathroom were the color of new spring leaves. A huge portrait of the Voivode and his family hung over the fireplace, staring aloofly across the dark, silent parlor. Every person in the picture, including the cute little lap dinosaur grinning in Bolza’s daughter’s arms, had died in the invasion.

  The apartment had its own ornate black marble bathroom complete with floor-set tub, all of it currently non-functional because the bathtub was full of sand. Nasaku vampires had to sleep in sand to regenerate, which as a half blood, now included me. At the back of the living area was a short hallway with two bedroom suites. The larger of the two, the Duchess Suite, had slept the countess and their children. The second largest was the private quarters of the Voivode, dark and grandiose, with a four-poster bed and a wall of trophies, awards, and paintings. It had two wings: to the right was the tiny bedroom used by the Count’s valet; to the left was his study, which by itself was about the size of the sweaty little studio I’d rented in L.A. The Ducal Suite was easily the most luxurious place I had ever stayed in, the kind of mega-condo I never dreamed I could own. And I hated everything about it.

  Grimacing, I slunk to the only room where I felt remotely comfortable: the study. Even that made me feel like a burglar prowling through someone else's home. The Voivode's papers were almost where he had left them, spread out over his desk. There was a pistol in the top drawer, unloaded, and a bowl of half-eaten pistachios sitting on the desk next to a pipe still stuffed with fragrant tobacco. A quill rested beside to a dried-out inkwell. When the Demon and his horde had stormed his city, he'd abandoned his desk and run to take charge - and had never returned. I shuffled the papers and nuts aside to clear some space, adjusted the fancy plush office chair to the right height, and tipped it back to put my feet up on the desk. I took a second to reach out telepathically to Karalti. She was out burning off some steam, hunting the agile herbivorous dinosaurs in the hills to the north of the castle.

  “Okay.” I sighed into the still, dark air. “Hey, Tidbit: don't go too far, okay? We're still leaving for Dakhdir tonight.”

  “Don't worry! I'll be back before highmoon,” she trilled. She sounded much more cheerful than I felt. “I just remembered I hadn't eaten in a while. I’ve been hungry lately, so I thought it might be a good idea to get a snack before we wing it three thousand miles.”

  “Sure. Good hunting. See you soon.” I switched back to my own thoughts, tuning her out, and sighed again. “Alright, Ms. Kingdom Management System. Let's finish those tutorials.”

  The screens appeared as commanded. I unequipped my armor and stripped my shirt. While Navigail fired up the tutorials, I dropped down and did clap pushups until my arms burned.

  The HUD walked me through the intricacies of resource allocation and setting up supply chains, maintaining relationships with the other lords and ladies of my province, setting and collecting taxes, and even a brief overview of different kinds of governments. I was about to check out the governing system of Zaunt when my HUD purred - I had an incoming vid call from Rin.

  “Hey girl, how's it going?” Hanging by my knees from the railing of Bolza’s four-poster bed, I grinned at her as the window jumped to life. It wasn't just Rin in the frame: she was sitting shoulder to shoulder with her main squeeze, Ebisa. The Royal Assassin was masked, as usual, slouched in a red sleeveless hooded jerkin that left her thin, dull grey arms bare. By contrast, Rin was an adorable little shortstack, with an open heart-shaped face, pearly silver skin, and big blue-on-blue eyes that currently blazed with worry. Like all Mercurions, both women had intricate glass winglets instead of ears. Ebisa's were made of soldered stained glass in many different shades of red. Rin's were prismatic and angular, glinting blue and gold by torchlight.

  “Hector... are you upside down?” Rin asked.

  “Blah! It is I, Count Dragozin!” I mimed pulling an invisible Dracula cape over my face. “And yes, I am. I'm practicing my acro-bat-ics.”

  Ebisa tutted, crossing her arms. Rin laughed, high and tinkling.

  “How are you?” she asked, gently. “And... is Suri...?”

  I sighed. “Suri's a work in progress. We leave tonight, but I had to sort out shit in Myszno before we can leave. A huge mob turned up
at the castle. We've got a double-digit list of Kingdom Quests, and we have to be in Taltos in five days’ time.”

  Rin winced. “Oh no. That's not good. Do you even have a way to find her?”

  “Vash gave us the idea to use Cutthroat,” I said. “She's been trying to run toward the south ever since Suri died and respawned. I made a harness so Karalti can carry her. We're going to use her like a radar.”

  “Oh! That's right! She's Suri's bonded mount!” She clapped her hands together. “That should work pretty well.”

  “Yeah. You take a look at that attachment?”

  “I did.” Rin's delicate filigree brows furrowed. “It's... ummm... well...”

  She looked to Ebisa, who shrugged nonchalantly.

  “It's definitely weird,” Rin continued slowly. “And you're right, it gave me a bit of a scare. But... to be honest... I have no idea what it is, or who could have sent it.”

  “You can't read the code?” I asked.

  “Coding was always just a hobby for me,” she replied. “I learned the basics, you know... but I’m not a programmer. I was an environmental artist. I worked with WYSIWYG software.”

  “Oh.” Right. I'd forgotten that.

  “What I CAN tell you is that it looks kind of like it was written in Python?” she said, wincing. “Kind of. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say this was something to do with A.I coding. There's some... umm... sigmoid stuff and some variables that refer to some kind of database in there, and that's something I associate with A.I. The people who'd know what they were looking at are, umm, well...”

  “Dead,” I filled in.

  “Yeah.” Rin deflated, looking down at her hands.

  “Who would have known? No one currently in the game?”

  She made a face. “Well, Ororgael would know, but he's busy possessing Baldr Hyland and trying to rule the world. Anyone on the OUROS programming team would be able to interpret this. Dinesh Jagind, Steve - your brother Steve, that is - Nicolas Bostov, Jacob Ratzinger...”

  “Right.” I sighed. “Well, it scared the shit out of me. I have no idea who could have sent it.”

  “I don't think it's anything to worry about. My hunch is that it's an auto-generated report of some kind,” Rin replied. “There's no admins for the game to send automatic reports to, right? So it might have run into a small error in your locale, fixed it, and tried to send the report to a moderator. When it didn't find one, it sent the report to the player who was in that locale. I know that OUROS has the capability to fix and report on things. That's why the orbital servers were viable... OUROS doesn't need human input to fix itself.”

  “Huh.” I glanced at my left shoulder. Early on in the game, I’d glitched through a piece of broken wood in a wrecked airship. At some point, the wood had disappeared and left a triangular black scar on my body, a void where the flesh had never grown back. It was still there, unchanged. “Glitches happen, I guess. But I've had a couple happen to me, and never received anything like this before.”

  “OUROS is adapting to the lack of Earth contact,” Rin said. “Creepy, but it's actually a good sign for us.”

  “I sure hope so.” I reached up to grasp the railing, unhooked my knees, and dropped down onto the bed. “Anyway - how are things going in Litvy? Do you think you'll be able to repair the Warsinger?”

  “No.” Ebisa spoke up for the first time. She had a rough, gravelly voice, like she gargled whisky and barbed wire for breakfast. “The machine is so damaged that repairs are beyond our ability, or indeed the ability of almost anyone still alive.”

  “Even with Kanzo's memory stone in her, Ebisa can't make heads or tails of it.” Rin reached for her hand, squeezing it. “And neither can I. It's almost... biological.”

  “It's not. It is a machine,” Ebisa said. “But it’s a very complex machine, even more anatomically complex than a Mercurion body.”

  I scooted forward to the edge of the bed and rested my elbows on my knees. “Dammit. Ignas just wrote to me and told me that Baldr is massing an army. We need something that can bring down two hundred and fifty dragons. Airships are basically worthless against them, and Vlachia relies heavily on its airforce. They’ll mop the floor with us.”

  “ Don’t worry - we're going to study Nocturne as much as we can,” Rin said. “And try and figure out what anti-dragon and anti-Drachan weaponry it has. We're going to generally research everything we can about the Warsingers, but there's only a few people who could possibly know anything about their mechanics.”

  “The Grandmaesters of Zaunt.” Ebisa nodded curtly. “The reigning families of the Akto Tlaxican, the Great Houses. They are the only ones who might know how to repair, maintain, and animate these machines. ‘Might’.”

  “Yeah, and there's a problem with that,” Rin added. “The civil war.”

  I frowned. “What is the civil war on Zaunt all about, anyway?”

  The pair of Mercurions looked at each other. Rin turned back to me. “It’s complicated, but, well, the short version is that the country is split into two factions: North Zaunt and South Zaunt. The North is ruled by the Phaedra, who are... how would you describe them?”

  “Religious zealots,” Ebisa growled. “The Phaedra trace their ancestry back to the Mercurion they are named for, Phaedra I, who was widely considered to be the greatest Artificer ever crafted. They worship dragons as their liberators, and despise the Aesari, who created us to fight a war that was won aeons ago. They have a prophecy that the Mercurions will inherit the world when the Drachan return and are defeated once and for all. By contrast, the Zaryan houses of South Zaunt are secular, descended from Phaedra's estranged wives Zarya and Tanis. They divorced Phaedra after he went mad during the forging of the Caul of Souls and founded their own Houses and lineages. They believe every Mercurion crafted by Phaedra's line is insane and must be exterminated, and that the Caul of Souls must be preserved at any cost. The Phaedrans consider the Zaryans to be illegitimate, poorly designed bastards who must be wiped out to preserve the supremacy of our species.”

  “Yeah. And they're both fighting for control of the most important resource in Zaunt,” Rin said. “ Pat’xhi Man’takak. The Cavern of Blossoming Flowers.”

  “I’m guessing that isn’t the Mercurion botanical gardens?” I arched an eyebrow.

  “No. It's a huge well of Seid - mana - near the center of the Zaunt mainland.” Rin nodded. “And... now I think of it, it could even be one of the Dragon Gates.”

  Great. I thought back to my own main world quest - the one I still hadn't accepted - and sighed. “Who's in control of the Cavern right now?”

  “No one. The Cavern is the center of Zaunt’s no-man's land.” Ebisa gestured with one hand.

  “Okay. So, are there any good guys in this fight, or are they both just shades of shit?”

  The assassin shrugged. “The North is a totalitarian cult led by a single figurehead, the sixty-sixth Phaedra, who claims to be continuously reincarnated through his descendants. The South is somewhat more politically liberal, but they have a contempt for human life the north does not. The Phaedra consider themselves saviors of all humans, Meewfolk and Lys. The Zaryans see your kind as fodder for the mines, the Caul, and for sangehti'tak. Both factions maintain that Mercurions are the pinnacle of sentient life. “

  I groaned, and rubbed my eyes. “So what you're saying is that getting the Warsingers serviced is going to be a nightmare.”

  Rin let out a nervous giggle. “Ahh… Yeah.”

  “Alright. Well, good to know.” I stretched my hands out and grimaced. “Sorry to cut this short, but I have about twenty quests to tag and assign before we fuck off to Dakhdir. When I've got some time, I'll give you a call back. Hope you guys are doing okay in Litvy.”

  “We are!” Rin's face lit up. “Soma is super into the Warsinger. He's trying to figure out how the engines work, so he doesn't really have any time to be... well... Soma. By the way - Karalti can teleport now, right?”

  “Yeah.”


  “If she brings you here before you guys fly south, I have new gear for Suri!” Rin bounced on her seat, waving her fists. “And... I uhh... I was wondering if there was anything you wanted or needed? We have a lot of resources here, so my crafting skill and EXP are going WAY up...”

  “Not unless you can get me a motorcycle,” I joked.

  “A what?” Ebisa asked.

  “I'm kidding. Don't worry about it. We need paved roads before magitech motorbikes become a thing.” I waved her off. “Let me think about it. I don't want to burden you with-”

  “Wait.” Rin held a hand up. “You're not burdening me with anything, okay? Inventing stuff is how I advance in this game. If you give me ideas or projects to do, it benefits me as well. Plus, now you're Voivode, you get to allocate all the resources of the province, right? Having you as a patron is an Artificer's dream. Ask me for anything, and if I can make it, I will.”

  “Oh. No worries, then. I'll have a think about things I could use while Karalti and I are flying,” I said. “She and I are working on our aerial combat style, so maybe there's some tech she and I could use for that?”

  “I bet there is!” Rin bobbed her head. “Okay, I have to go too! Good luck finding Suri!”

  Ebisa chuckled, and looped an arm around Rin's waist as the smaller Mercurion concentrated for a moment, and then the video cut and vanished.

  Man. I sure did miss having someone to hug like that. But because I didn’t, I opened the KMS Quests window and tried to distract myself instead.

  I couldn't fault Ryuko on their Content Management architecture. Every system they had worked on the same nesting doll principle: macro to micro, all the information organized like a pyramid. We still had a few registered Heroes from the war, and I was easily able to call up their profiles and assess their suitability for taking on quests:

  Available Heroes