Amazon Apocalypse 7: Chapter 5

I asked the other regulars in the pocket realm and learned the kid's name was Peter, and he was one of many orphans in the pocket realm. Lots of children had been at school during the integration. Any that had parents working outside of the city wound up permanently separated from them.

There was an off chance their parents were still alive somewhere, and maybe when the integration was over some of these orphans would finally be reunited with their parents, but considering what the casualty rates were on most shards, I didn't have high hopes for them.

The news took some wind out of my sails. When I heard his name, my mind immediately went back to Peter Morris, the guy who got himself elected to Crownhill's city council and immediately made plans to take over, despite his lacking levels.

I'd taken them to be two Peters in a pod, but their shared name was just coincidence. Since he was an orphan, I had no one to blame for his poor behavior.

In fact, since the guy in charge of this whole shard was ultimately me, the only person I could pin any blame on was myself.

I'd left establishing an educational system for the kids in the pocket realm for others to handle. Until recently, I had no reason to visit the pocket realm. Nor any reason to care about the orphans in it. When I heard Margaret had sent some teachers here to take care of the children, I assumed the issue was solved.

There were people who could teach and basic farm work to keep the older kids out of trouble. There were even people who would watch the really young children like Adrian while their parents adventured or worked their crafting job.

But it all had been pulled together half-heartedly, like an attempt to recreate the old world in our new one. The problems were evident. The teachers and childcare workers were volunteers who'd self-organized, but had been focused more on their own survival. Margaret had provided a little direction, but not much beyond telling them to create a school and that they could grow food here and sell it to support the school.

Children like Peter could skip class all day long and there was little the teachers could do about it. Many kids would rather play than learn, and Peter was one such child. Hearing what the children said, I saw their reasoning. What was the point of learning algebra and studying pre-integration literature when their jobs outside this pocket realm would revolve around fighting monsters or working a trade the System would guide them through using the job system?

The old curriculum needed massive revisions. Some traditional education was still needed, but for the orphans this place also needed to be a foster home. The teachers needed a new curriculum that would be valuable for the future citizens of Crownhill they were raising. They also needed new discipline to keep rowdy students in hand in a world where it was more important to hone martial capabilities than it was to suppress any form of violence.

I spoke with a lot of people. First the teachers and the other parents, then some of the older students, and finally some of the people in Frank's Adventurer's Guild. As I understood it, they had a pretty extensive training program set up already. It was meant for adults rather than children, but I figured it could be adapted.

Heck, we had a jobs training program in Crownhill for buying people access to jobs granted by the System. They were available for purchase at the Obelisk if only one had the contribution points to spend on them. That purchase was a gift from me to anyone who demonstrated willingness to use their new job well, though I feared it was taken for granted at this point.

I had a lot of ideas, and past experience told me I could just borrow some of Frank's people and have them set up the whole curriculum. But then I realized this was the same program Adrian would be going through. Did I really want to leave my son's education in the hands of someone else?

No, I wanted the best for my son. And in this case it meant wanting the best for every kid who would grow up in Crownhill in the coming years.

I got to work that day. The schoolhouse the volunteer teachers had been using was in the center of the farm, since the older kids were also used to help pick fruits and vegetables and raise the local livestock.

The schoolhouse I built was a few hundred times larger, made bigger in certain locations thanks to spatial compression. Normally I had to steal some volume from the surrounding space for spatial compression, but I was reluctant to do that here due to the fact that this was already a pocket realm of modest size.

That was when I remembered the hidden underground city beneath my house. There was plenty of pocket space up for grabs there, though I'd already swiped large parts of it to add to Crownhill's more futuristic district.

I searched for a school and eventually found what had probably been a futuristic Architect school somewhere in the ruins, complete with a holographic training course for dungeon runs. That was exactly what I needed, so I happily added it to the school. With that trick, I ended up not consuming any of the valuable pocket realm space at all in building the new school.

I rounded up the volunteer teaching staff and told them what I had in mind. They were skeptical at first, but quickly got on board when they learned they would be getting paid real wages.

I even asked Adrian for his input. He wanted chocolate pudding for lunch every day, which I wasn't sure I could swing. He also asked for classes that involved building things, which I thought was a good idea.

I soon crafted a curriculum. We'd teach important skills like wilderness survival, scavenging for valuable items and how to make sure you were selling them at a profit, how to behave and negotiate with people from a completely alien culture, and how to allocate stat points as you gained levels.

The first few lectures were mostly a trial run, but between that and a few trips to Mucaria to purchase school supplies intended for their apprentice-level wizards, I put together the equivalent of middle and high school textbooks for a post-integration world.

Getting the hang of using the Architect holographic dungeon took a bit of work, but eventually I figured out how to turn it on and program it. I put together a computer interface that translated the interface to English and set up a small power station that would run both it and anything else the pocket realm needed. When I was done, all it would take was a single button to activate an appropriate training course. The holographic setup was probably massively underutilized, but I could always come back in the future and set up more training programs then.

Soon enough, I was running kids ages fifteen and up through a virtual dungeon and teaching them what they needed to know about searching the deep wilderness. I set up quests in the shard for volunteer instructors, and had skilled examples of the most common jobs come in to teach.

Scavengers talked about what it was like searching for items in the ruins scattered throughout the shard or combing over the wilderness for rare items or monsters. Hunters talked about bringing down monsters and butchering them for meat, skins, and cores. Merchants talked about what common items you could buy from small settlements in the wilderness, the importance of investing in a bag of holding, and what it was like to haul their cargo back to the nearest major settlement with an obelisk.

There were plenty of ways people in Crownhill made a living, including many I'd never even thought of, but that played a vital role in our economy. I could only scratch my head sheepishly when I realized one of the most common jobs was fulfilling quests for the local shardlord.

Apparently I had so many daily quests that cropped up automatically that people had learned they could just take them every day. Such quest takers were employees for me in all but name.

This training program was a lot better than what everybody else got when the integration hit us, and I was confident the next generation of citizens would show up far better prepared than we were.

When the older kids were taken care of, I moved on to the younger middle-school-aged kids. They'd have some time in the holographic simulator as well, but it was more focused around basic survival. They were given watered-down versions of the classes and tests the older kids would have. Once this batch of students made it to the higher level courses, the difficulty there could be increased, since the next batch of students would have had additional training.

Younger than that looked more like traditional school children than the other classes. Here, they'd be taught to read and write, understand the political entity they were part of, and explore their talents and interests.

I cheated a bit to get Adrian a slot among these younger students. Yes, he'd be younger than anyone else in the class, but I thought he was ready. The first class went pretty smoothly as I briefly went through the history of Crownhill. I was in a better position than most to recite the whole story, since there were very few people who'd been as central to everything as I had.

"So the reason I lost my teddy bear is because of Craig the security guard?" a young girl asked.

"Well... probably. I don't know for sure." I shrugged.

"Craig killed my parents!" another kid said angrily.

"Probably," I hung my head sympathetically.

Making sure future generations would all curse the name of the guy who had given me so many problems was a small fringe benefit to writing the school curriculum.

After the lesson, Adrian approached me to ask some questions in private.

"Dad, who are you?" Adrian asked.

I sat down by the lakeshore and patted the spot next to me. I'm pretty sure I knew what he wanted to know.

"You've talked with the older kids, right? A lot of the parents have jobs outside the pocket realm. Well, I have one too. I help make sure the city is safe."

"Like a guard? Timmy's dad is a guard," Adrian said.

I chuckled. "Yeah, I work with the city guards a lot, but I'm not part of them. I don't want you to go around bragging, but I'm pretty important, and sometimes I'm even telling the guards what to do."

"You're the boss?" he asked curiously.

I smiled. "You could say that. I wasn't always in charge. And truthfully I've had a tough time coming to terms with it. But when you were born, I promised your mother I'd make this place safe for you and the friends you'll make. That means I'll have to tell people what to do a bit more than I'm comfortable with, but you and your mother are worth it."

"Why don't you get chocolate pudding every night?" Adrian asked in what was probably the longest train of thought I'd ever heard from the kid. It was a bit of a mouthful for such a young child, and I could tell putting the thoughts together took some real effort from him. Even so, I couldn't help but laugh.

"Okay, I'm only the boss of some things. Not everything. Chocolate pudding distribution is your mother's domain."

Adrian had a very thoughtful and serious expression on his face. He asked a few more questions about why we owned a big castle and most other people lived in the city. And how some other kids mentioned their dad was super strong and he wondered if I was strong too. I cut straight to the heart of his questions.

"Don't worry, Adrian. I'll take care of you and everyone else in our big family. As long as I'm around, you won't have to worry about monsters or anything like that. As for how strong I am? I can hold my own, just leave it at that."

Eventually, in the distance, I saw the older kids looking for crabs and bugs again and felt a childlike curiosity to see what all the fuss was about. I'd seen them gathering the little critters up for ages but never seen what they actually did with them.

I got up to investigate and put Adrian on my shoulder to do so. The two of us walked over and looked around, and eventually we found the older kids, with the exception of the one who'd knocked over Adrian's castle.

He and the other orphans were in an extra program that would fill their need for parental figures. With any luck, he would learn his lesson and grow into a productive member of society. Adrian had promised to help me with this issue in particular, and he'd be my eyes on the ground.

Thankfully, the other kids were a bit nicer to Adrian and me, and the two of us watched on as one boy pitted a thumb-sized crab against a large beetle. The two tiny creatures lay in the middle of an arena with a strip of sand in the middle and water on either side.

Normally, two tiny level one creatures such as this would just walk past one another, but cleverly the children had placed a tiny flake of monster core in the center of the arena.

I'd never been too focused on the art of raising beasts, but I understood it was a process some worlds highly valued. For us during the integration, they might as well be the same thing, but they were actually distinct categories. Monsters spawned fully formed as eruptions of power from the Kindling Dimension, whereas beasts grew stronger on their own.

The categorization was made more complicated by the fact that some monsters fought among themselves and eventually became more like beasts, but the distinction was important to anyone trying to raise beasts for food, mounts, or pets. Beasts could be tamed and monsters would never be.

From the looks of things, we might have some beast tamers in the future, since the crab and beetle were both well trained. Both seemed eager for a piece of the monster core flake in the center of the arena, which was enough to spark conflict between them. The beetle rammed the crab, which dodged left and right with snapping claws.

The beetle had the advantage, but eventually the crab snatched the flake of monster core and dragged it off the strip of dry land and into the water nearby. The beetle tried to chase the crab down, but it wasn't fast enough to prevent the crab from taking the core flake into the water.

Shortly after, the sand caved in beneath the beetle's footing, and one of the older kids called the match in the crab's favor. Half the crowd of kids cheered while the other half sagged. One nervous kid rescued his beetle and gingerly dried it off. He only sighed with relief when it started moving around again.

I'd been a bit skeptical about this whole critter battle arena when I first heard about it, and I'd feared it was some sort of gladiatorial arena for insects and would be full of body parts and dying bugs. Plenty of ants had certainly died under a magnifying glass when I was a kid, after all.

But it seemed like these kids really prized their best bug fighters and did their best to cherish them. I saw the passion in all their cheering, and I felt Adrian's keen interest on my shoulder.

"Dad, do you have a bug?" Adrian asked.

"I know where we could find one. Let's go on a little father-son adventure." I thought back to all the strange magical critters that had appeared while poking through Sanctum back when I'd first gotten my mystic realm.

<Note>

Maybe one more chapter like this? I like the extra time with Adrian and having this at the beginning of this book instead of the end of the last one means I can be a bit more relaxed about pacing.

Hopefully we can also have the scene where Adrian realizes his dad is actually almost A-Grade and is actually the emperor of the shard sometime in another 20 chapters. (Carter has pretty high examine resistance, so even after he figures out how to use examine he won't know Carter's level until Carter tells or shows him.)

I try to do most alternate POV from the perspective of love interests, but that one might be worth including anyway.