Chapter 84: Teenage Retirees

Author's note: Our first tea drop arrived! Here's a quick closeup on the tea! It's beautiful!

We also got a couple of extra canisters from Dona so if you missed the first form, we're opening up four more spots on the tea drop!

https://forms.gle/XsRPVZRcMzS7qCjp8

* The open canister is for personal use and won't be shipped out.

--

 Arthur and Milo went a bit further out on their walk that day. They visited the quarry, where Arthur was well-known enough that he got a bit of a tour.

“So what do you think?” the foreman asked once it was all over. He was the first adult Owl-Demon Arthur had ever seen, which was interesting if only because it gave him more context on Lily. Otherwise, he wasn’t all that similar to anyone else Arthur knew, despite being nice in a rock-dust-and-boisterousness kind of way.

“It’s… big. But somehow, I feel trapped down here, a bit,” Arthur said.

“Yeah, that’s normal. It’s sort of a claustrophobia of big spaces. New guys have to get used to it.”

“It is more than I thought it would be.” Milo looked around the space with general interest. “Just getting the rocks out of the bottom is a lot more than I thought it would be.”

“Yeah, it takes a lot of muscle. And planning. You said you were a mechanic, right?”

“Right, smith and mechanic.” Milo pointed at a system of cranks and counterweights used to lift various-sized blocks back up to level ground. “Stuff like that is where the money is for me. You have a mechanic?”

“No. The smith maintains all this. But we had to ship someone in to design and build the system initially. It cost quite a bit, even though it’s worth every coin. You’re a city-dweller, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, consider the frontier at some point. I mean it. Someone like you is worth a mint out here. And it’s not just money. It’s big, important jobs all the time.”

“I will think about that. It’s hard, though,” Milo said.

“Oh, I know it. Takes a special kind to drop all their connections and relationships, and come out here. Just giving you some food for thought.”

—

Back in the tavern, Milo and Arthur took a load off.

“So what do you think? Of the town, I mean.”

“It’s weird, Arthur. I have this reflex to just dismiss it all. It’s a small town, not much here, it’s all boring. But I still can’t help thinking about the potential of it all.”

“In what way?”

“So this town is missing a lot of stuff. But what if you had a town that had everything from the beginning? Say you had Mizu and me, and she dug wells and made sure everyone had running water. And I built the systems, from the ground up, with the town as it grew. This town is mostly miners. They hire out the things they need when they don’t have a person for it.”

“What are you thinking of?”

“City of the future. Perfect plumbing. Better roads. Better houses. Not that the city we live in is bad. It’s great. Lots of people worked hard to make it that way. But it has problems too. Old systems that would be too expensive to rip out and improve. Wells that are a patchwork of different upgrades. Roads that don’t make sense because nobody was planning with everything in mind. That kind of thing.”

“Why didn’t the city start with something like that?” Arthur asked. He could remember back on Earth where there were professionals in charge of everything but even then, some parts of each city were better than others.

“Coordination, mostly. Building a new city is hard. You have to convince all these people to accept a lower quality of life for a while. And most people just don’t want to abandon everyone they know and go do that.” Milo shrugged. “It’s probably just a dream. But if it wasn’t, it would be huge.”

The rest of the day was, predictably, pretty boring. They ate lunch, strolled, and chatted with locals who were interested about why they were there. Minos being a local hero of sorts just for expanding the world certainly helped. But eventually, they tapped out on things to do. Spiky rejoined them at some point, but there was only so much he could tell them about how much he liked talking about books with his new girlfriend.

“You know what the problem is?” Arthur asked, after a ten-minute gap in conversation.

“What’s that?” Spiky asked.

“We don’t have jobs here. Normally, I’d have a lot of free time, but most of my day would be eaten up with work. I’d split up what was left between errands, Mizu, and other friends. But there’s no way to make up for that big chunk of time here. We just aren’t used to being unoccupied.”

“Huh.” Spiky thought about it. “That actually does make sense. Nobody retires in their teens. I wonder if it’s just because they haven’t figured out how to fill the hours yet. People get better at that when they grow older.”

“Maybe. But if we had jobs, and a few more friends, I think it would all probably work. We’d be busy, then we’d have fun, then we’d sleep. We’d know all the little local tricks for passing the time. And we wouldn’t be trying to wring every last drop of interesting conversation out of each other,” Arthur said.

“I was tapped out days ago,” Milo said. “Unless you all want to hear about different things you can add to steel to make it suitable for different uses.”

“I’ll pass,” Spiky said. “I know most of the cut-and-dried bits from books, anyway.”

“And I just don’t want to learn about it that bad,” Arthur said.

“Well, fair enough.  I’m going to go to the smith’s. You know everything you need to know about the improvements I’m making, Spiky?”

“I do.” Spiky tapped his notebook. “And some things we can't feasibly do here because we don’t have the materials. Different experiments with different liquids inside, that sort of thing will have to wait.”

“Well, good luck, then,” Arthur said as he waved Milo off. “Go change the world.”

—

Spiky and Arthur went up to their room. They had all been working, in their own ways. Today was the day they’d consolidate those gains and cash in the payoffs.

For Arthur, that meant formulating a new recipe. The nourishing tea was a success, but not nearly as big as he wanted. He had spent a few moments throughout the day gathering ingredients, reasonably confident he could do better. That would take time and equipment, though. Spiky’s work was insensitive enough to location that he could just do it anywhere, so there was no real reason Arthur couldn’t keep him company.

“What’s first?” Arthur looked at Spiky’s collection of pencils, paper, and envelopes. He was girded for war, the type that librarians did, with all the stationary bases covered and recovered. “The shocks?”

“Maps first, the ones from Milo’s dad. It’s easier. That’s just copy work.”

“And you can copy them accurately? Freehand?”

“It’s part of the class. It’s what they have you start on, when you are training.” Spiky started a rapid sketch on a big roll of paper. “Each one takes time, but not nearly as much as it should. I’ll have these done in an hour.”

As Spiky got down to business, Arthur geared up for his own work.

Boiling water was a given, as always. So was weighting out and preparing tea leaves in various cups. But for everything else, things were about to get wacky, at least to the extent they could in tea preparation. Taking out his mortar and pestle, he started to grind grains to dust. Once he had a substantial amount of a dozen different grain powders, he started in with adjuvants. A bit of each was mixed with honey. A bit more was mixed with sugar syrup. Some was even tossed into caramel, resulting in a grainy, sticky sort of mixture that he hoped would soften in the drink.

“That’s insane. You must have fifty containers out,” Spiky said as he paused in his sketching process.

“Well, yeah. It’s a brute-force process. I have no way of knowing what will work besides what Food Scientist tells me, and the skill works better the closer I get to the end product. I have to go step by step.” And Arthur did. He started mixing the various calorie-bearing components with different teas, different consistencies of cream, and at different temperatures. He took the promising versions of those and whipped them, stirred them, and added in the ingredients in different orders, looking to test any and every possible variable.

All of this took time. By the point he was down to the last fifth of his potential combinations, Spiky was done with the maps.

“Where do you send these, anyway?”

“Lots of places. There are research teams that work only in planning and analysis of new territory. There are several local governments that might care, and the layers of government over them that all need to know. And different departments of those… it’s a whole thing. That’s why I need so many. Everyone will make their own copies, but any I don’t send out now will delay the process.”

“You think it’ll make that much of a difference? The time, that is.”

“I didn’t, originally. It was another data point that would get thrown in a pile. But with these,” Spiky held up a picture of a shock. “All bets are off. They change the math. For all I know, this is the pebble that will break the wheelbarrow and they’ll announce a new territory annex tomorrow. It’s impossible to guess.”

“When was the last one?”

“More than a generation ago. It takes time to fill in the new space. And because of how circles work, every new strip of territory is much bigger than the last.”

“And people will go?”

“Oh, yes. Free land and opportunity are like that. Young classers will leave in droves. It’s the chance to be a new town’s only architect, or their only enchanter. It’s a big deal. Not every town will have full coverage class-wise, but more common classes will be pleased to get the chance to grow without a lot of competition. And that’s before you even get into the adventure and romance of it.”

Spiky started work on the pamphlets about the shocks. This was the harder bit, mostly due to the fact that he had to think about what he was writing. There was a whole format he needed to follow as far as technical specs, descriptions of uses, and method of creation, on top of having to write a layman’s version describing the benefits.

“If I get any of this substantially wrong, the shock will end up spreading slower. This has to look like it came from a professional,” Spiky explained as he went.

“Academic snobbery in play?” Arthur asked.

“Something like that. Honestly, it’s not the worst policy, even though it does seem a bit counterintuitive. Most poorly written pamphlets you see don’t end up being worth reading. If they had value, the creators would have found someone like me to scribe them.” Spiky held up one of the pictures, now accompanied by a ton of text connected to lines that indicated the parts that each paragraph described. “It’s not beyond my abilities. It’s just a lot of pressure.”

“I’m consistently surprised by how much you can do. Don’t be offended, but at first I thought it was just stocking books,” Arthur said.

“At first, it was just stocking books,” Spiky said as he added a few more notes to his page. “But librarian is a generalist knowledge class with specificity tacked on, not the other way around. We can do an awful lot well, and one thing very well. It happens I’m a dissemination-of-knowledge variant. I get experience for all the normal stuff, but a lot more when I teach people about things.”