Chapter 130: Industry

Arthur didn’t realize he was walking face-first into a very long afternoon until it was too late.

Most of Arthur’s days since coming to the demon world were characterized by little moments, at least in terms of how he remembered them. There would be a few tiny stories, pinpoints on his personal timeline that made those days worth experiencing. The rest of his moments tended to blend together into big lumps of time spent working, practicing his craft, or not doing much of anything at all.

Almost immediately, this was a different kind of afternoon. He could feel it from the first conversation he had.

“Arthur!” Kout had found him. “I found something.”

“Something good?” Arthur feigned interest as best he could. He had Mizu-things to fix. “More food plants?”

“Nope. Bigger than that. Tell him, Karra.”

Arthur’s tea sense was, for some reason, still wide open and demanding he take a look. Both Karra and Kout’s preference for the moment were for calming teas, like the stuff a little kid would get on their birthday to take the edge away from over-excitement. Whatever they were excited for was big. Really big.

“Kout found more slap-stone,” Karra said. “Off to the side of the quarry. I was digging away at the dirt around the dungeon so Milo could put a case around it, and Kout was there, and…”

“It’s huge, Arthur,” Kout said, waving his hands. “Huge.”

“How big?” Arthur mentally shelved Mizu’s issues for the moment. This didn’t seem like something that was going to go away without some attention. Empathetic Host was clear on that much.

“You have to see it. Come on,” Karra said.

Kout started walking towards the gates, almost faster than Arthur could keep up with. Karra rolled her eyes as she watched the two slow men amble towards the big discovery. Moments later, Arthur suddenly felt an arm loop around his waist then lift him off the ground before shooting forward a step and doing the same thing to the scavenger class ahead of him.

“No time for that,” Karra said. “Not on an exciting day.”

Apparently, Karra’s class defined hand-carrying people as work. She was suddenly a lot faster and stronger than what Arthur would expect from her raw stats. What would have been a long walk suddenly became the work of a minute or so as she Karbo-shot towards the formerly trapped dungeon. It wasn’t a dignified moment for Arthur, but he didn’t complain. Whatever shame there was in being carried like a sack of potatoes was more than made up for by the sheer speed of the travel, and even with a long afternoon stretching out before him, it was hard not to feel that every moment mattered.

“What am I looking at here?” Once Karra deposited him on the hillside, Arthur could see nothing much more impressive than a long trench. He was sure that someone who was an expert could see the meaning behind everything. But the trick was to be okay with feeling stupid for a moment and ask someone to explain it to him. “I see the trench but I’m not sure what it means.”

“When Kout’s scavenger senses told him there was something here, I started digging,” Karra said. “You’ve seen me dig. I can do a lot. And then Kout found the stampers, who can dig pretty well too. That trench is longer than it looks like from here. And every bit of it has Slapstone at the bottom.”

“There’s… a lot of it?”

“You can’t imagine,” Kout said. “Not an insult. We found Spiky and had him estimate how much he thought was here, based on what he could see and what I can feel. It took him two minutes to do the math, Arthur.”

“Oh.” Arthur tried to imagine an object so big that it took two minutes of librarian-math to estimate its size. Kout was right. He couldn’t do it. “That’s big, right? Other people probably want Slapstone.”

“Arthur, want is an understatement. There’s no end to the uses of this stuff, and this is the biggest deposit I’ve ever heard of. We won’t even be able to sell this by ourselves. The government will step in and help us. They have to, just to prioritize who needs it the most.”

“Arthur, this is an industry.” Karra was almost bouncing with excitement. “You’re a crafter. Crafters are great. They make life worth living in a particular place. But they need someone to craft for. And that part usually takes time to build up because most resources in a new place are hard to get. I’m industry. I make industry happen. Something like this means we now get miners moving into town. Processors to cut the stone faster and into more useful shapes. Shippers.”

“We already have a shipper. Just got one today,” Arthur said, thinking of Talca.

“Well, we’ll have more,” Kout said. “And fast. Does the new transporter seem good?”

“He’s the best,” Arthur said confidently. “I think literally the best, or close too it.”

“We’ll need that. I’m not even exaggerating. Arthur, go talk to him right now. This is all going to happen very fast from here,” Kout said.

As quickly as both Kout and Karra had dragged Arthur out to show him the deposit, they now shoved him towards Talca. The transporter didn’t have a house to be in, and Arthur spent a few minutes searching around the town before he finally realized exactly where he’d be.

“Skal, be careful of this guy. He’ll steal all your food.” Arthur marveled at how fast Talca’s old-guy-who-can-make-lunch senses had found Skal’s little beach at the end of the world. Skal already had a few fish cooking over the fire on sticks for the transporter too. It was a match made in the heavens. “And Talca, don’t eat all the fish, okay? We rely on them.”

“Too late,” Talca said. “Arthur, do you even know what this old man can do? Why haven’t you built him a dock yet?”

“He didn’t ask for one.” Arthur paused for a moment before realizing that Skal had asked in an oblique way several times. There was always a ‘once I have more boats’ and ‘once we have a dock’ appended to any of his estimates of how much fish he could bring in. “Does it make that much of a difference?”

“He’s a net fisherman, Arthur,” Talca said. “All the stuff he’s been doing so far has been with line fishing, which means its being done without his class. Frankly, I don’t know how he does it at all. Fishing is hard.”

“Wait, no.” Arthur remembered the last couple of months pretty clearly, and that made no sense. “He’s been supplying the entire village with fish, no problem. That has to be class.”

“Arthur, this is…” Talca shook his head. “He’s young, Skal, he doesn’t get it. Sorry.”

“He didn’t need to do anything. I’m happy just to fish.” Skal smiled and rotated the fishes above the fire a bit to make sure they cooked evenly. “Plenty of time.”

“He’s lying, Arthur. This old man could supply every single colony with enough fish to keep them happy in his spare time. And shellfish. And whatever else you can catch in a net or a cage. The mind boggles at the possibilities. If he had drying racks, or… Arthur, it’s an entire industry.” Talca was waving his arms wildly now, the most animated that Arthur had ever seen him. “Skal, why are you even here? And why didn’t you tell him this?”

“Oh, you know.” Skal wobbled his head. “I didn’t want to step on the young folks. And I moved out here to take it easy. I’m getting on, you know. I didn’t expect the easy life to get boring so quickly.”

“Well, that’s over now.” Talca said. “Arthur, do you have the materials to build a dock?”

“We have plenty of wood.” Arthur mulled it over and added the new discovery to the list. “And Slapstone.”

“You’d need a lot, but only if you wanted to build everything now,” Talca said. “How much Slapstone do you have?”

“So, about that. Apparently, a functionally unlimited amount,” Arthur said.

“That’s not a thing, Arthur,” Talca responded.

Arthur sat down, stole one of the cooked fishes, and filled them in on the wonders of an amount of magic rock so big it took Spiky a few minutes to calculate.

“Damn. You hear stories, you know. About frontier towns, and what they find. But you never believe them.” Talca was halfway through his fish by the time Arthur had him caught up. “Of course, Skal doesn’t have to imagine, since he remembers it from last time.”

“The last expansion was generations ago, you fool.” Skal laughed. “I’m not that old.”

“I acknowledge you might have been young and your memory a bit light,” Talca said.

“Keep it up, and I’ll cut off your fish supply. It would be a shame, this early in what could have been a good thing for you,” Skal teased.

“Wait! I acknowledge you aren’t all that old.” Talca sprang back to the fire, protecting his fish. “You probably don’t remember all of that history.”

The older man and the oldest man squabbled for a bit before things calmed down a little, burning precious seconds as they did. Arthur’s tea-sense was clear on the subtext. They both needed something nice and sweet, and then they could sit around and talk to each other for hours. Finally, they came back to the conversation, wreathed in an aura of friendship and ready to talk business.

“So, expect roads to happen faster now,” Talca said, his face turning serious. “As soon as I get the first load of Slapstone out, the government’s going to pull resources from other roads to finish yours. If you want the road outside your town to look a certain way, I’d advise you to finish it quick. Otherwise, it’s gonna be government gravel right up to the gate.”

“Won’t that hurt other settlements? Pulling stampers?” Arthur asked.

“No. They’ll pull them from old-world projects. It’s that important. And I’m going to need another plot, a big one. For a depot. We need a place to store the stone so it can be shipped. And… Gods, Arthur, this is big. Bigger than you think. There are dozens of things you'll need.”

“Can it wait?” Arthur asked. “Not that it’s not important. But I’m having a pretty busy day.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll put together a list,” Talca said. “Catch more fish, old man. It’s gonna be a long day.”

Marvelling at how fast Talca’s travel-tuned social skills could make friends, Arthur jogged back towards the town, specifically aiming at the plaza. If he was lucky, he could get food and find someone to send to Mizu as moral support in one go.

“Arthur!” Lily yelled, as he approached. “No tea today?”

“Probably not! Things are getting pretty busy.”

Arthur sat down in the chair, feeling a bit out of breath. His tea-sense for both Lily and Onna was saying they were mostly just worried, which made sense. Lily didn’t care about the tea, he could tell. She cared about whether or not he felt like he had time for the tea, which would tell her something about Mizu. Or something like that.