CC 10: Thesaurize ~ Seventeen!

Luckily he had plenty of experience fighting off monsters. Joe spent the next forty minutes or so finishing off the last of the Penguins and Hoardings, the only monsters that had come out during the current Beast Wave. The defenders had done a spectacular job with holding back the tide of bodies until the very end. He chuckled quietly to himself as he kept a wary eye out for any Elven survivors, “They just weren’t good enough to stop me.”

Eventually, the final monster was slain by a combination of Joe hunting it, and barely more than one hundred human survivors working together. As the dust settled, the surviving Hamlet folk turned their eyes on him, though they put away their weapons before cautiously approaching him.

Joe tried to assess them as fairly as possible, but no matter how he looked at them, he could tell that almost all of the humans were likely here under duress. It wasn’t just their poorly maintained weapons and armor, the way that they shivered in the constant debuffing wind of Jotunheim, or the fact that they looked absolutely exhausted. No, it was the fact that they were looking at him with a mixture of excitement and suspicion, which slowly shifted to glimmers of hope.

Taking a deep breath, the Ritualist put a smile on his face and began working to swiftly gain their trust. “Hello, everyone! I'm here to let you know about a Town that’s been secured, and would be happy to take you in!”

Immediately, their faces fell, and people began looking at him with more intense scrutiny. Joe internally cursed himself lightly, then let his own smile fall. “Okay, fair enough. Let me be as honest as possible. I came here with almost the entirety of the Dwarven nation, and if you were to come with me, you’d have to fight for every scrap of respect and opportunity. But! I’m now a member of the council, and I’m able to represent humanity directly to the leaders of the Town.”

People began speaking to each other quietly, clearly debating still on whether to just attack him or listen to him further. Joe glared around at them, and it could have been the cold, the fact that they just suffered a huge loss, or perhaps he was actually more intimidating than he felt, but nobody made a move. “I can give you a safe respawn point, a chance to get out of this world and a way to build your skills and combat ability. Yeah, you're going to have to fight for everything you earn. But if you're not okay with fighting, why would you want to stay out here where there aren't even any walls to slow down the monsters?”

The Ritualist let out a sigh of relief as he saw his Dark Charisma starting to sway them. He’d realized that he was appealing to the incorrect emotions to leverage his capabilities to their fullest, which is why he’d switched away from his planned speech. A brown-haired man stepped forward, his eyes intense as he marched up to Joe, stopping less than a foot away from him as though his close proximity would allow him to discern any lies. “Three questions for you. Can you guarantee us what you just said… or are we going to follow you straight into a prison cell if we listen?”

“I promise that we’ll get there.” Joe nodded slightly, “There's a good chance that as soon as we get back, you’ll be surrounded by troops and held until I'm able to get an area set up for you. You’re going to be the first group I bring back, because you’re the first that I found. That means we'll have to make an entirely new plan for what to do with you.”

The man looked back over his shoulder, getting a few nods from the other assembled men. Then he got back into his strong position, towering over Joe. “Second question then; you said you're going to give us a chance to get out of here. You mean this area, or Jotunheim as a whole?”

“My goal is to have the bifrost in our city as soon as possible. We've already been able to secure our settlement as a Town, and we’re building up toward City rank as we speak.” Joe gestured around at the group that was growing larger by the second. “That's one of the reasons I’m out recruiting at the moment. One of the requirements for a city is a population of a hundred thousand. So I need you, just not as much as you need me.”

“Glad to see where we stand in negotiations.” The spokesperson for the destroyed Hamlet muttered with great annoyance. “Last question then, is your Town all male, all female, or mixed?”

“Uh. What?” Joe scanned the people in the crowd around him again, this time with a specific thought in mind. He started to laugh quietly as he realized what was going on here. “You mean to tell me that the Elves sent you through as groups of men, or women, but not both?”

“It's supposed to help us temper our minds. We were told that after a few years of advancing in the theocracy, we might be trusted to live within a few miles of each other. So long as we had chaperones due to being under seventy-five years old.” There was a collective grunt of dissatisfaction from the entire group, which made Joe break down laughing.

“I've never been so happy that I joined the Dwarves!” Joe collected himself quickly, the glares from the people surrounding him helping with that greatly. “Yeah, not something I've really spent a lot of time thinking about, but we have tens of thousands of humans. No one's been splitting us up, so… mixed?”

Not a single person chose to stay behind.

The entire group marched out of the destroyed settlement, following Joe as he tried to retrace his steps to where he’d fallen out of the sky. It took a while to find the exact spot he had landed, as he’d come in from the top, and burrowed through the snow for a while before poking out. As soon as the location was found, Joe dug out a large space and immediately built a shrine.

There were dozens of exclamations of surprise as the building appeared out of nothing but what seemed to be floating fire and mana. Joe was glad that there were no debuffs impacting his ability to work on this at the moment, and he was able to Maintain an air of mystery and power. He wanted to offer the survivors a means of escape, a new home where they could begin to rebuild their lives without the strange, stringent rules forced on them by near-immortal beings. The Ritualist muttered to himself as he worked, shaking his head in confusion. “Say what you will about the Dwarves, they don't particularly care what you do… so long as you can afford it.”

With the shrine complete, Joe activated the fast travel system, then turned to address the raggedy survivors. “Give me ten minutes to talk to the people over there, then choose your destination as ‘Novusheim’. All you need to do is touch the altar, and pay the mana cost.”

An instant later, Joe was standing in a town square over a thousand miles away. A quick glance around the area showed that none of the new settlers had ignored his request for ten minutes, but a dozen messengers had noticed his arrival and were sprinting toward him. Barely managing to stay ahead of them, Joe Omnivaulted toward the council chambers and burst past the receptionist.

Upon flinging open the door of the room and gathering a half dozen startled glances; Joe realized something was amiss. Grandmaster Snow raised an eyebrow at him archley, “You’re late. Did you not get the memo?”

“I didn’t.” Joe opened his mouth to apologize, then shook his head sharply and refocused. “I just got back from finishing off an Elven settlement, and I have a couple hundred refugees that want to come to Novusheim.”

“Elves?” One of the councilmen thundered darkly, the air in the room immediately turning dense and stale as his aura erupted into the environment around him.

“No, of course not.” Joe waved away that question, and the sudden tension ramping up in the room quieted and swirled into confusion. “It was an Elven town, but they’re all dead. All I have are the human survivors that want a fresh start and a chance at earning for themselves again.”

“There's no way that we can allow-”

The blustering councilman was cut off by another, this one nearly as pale as Grandmaster Snow. He was by far the oldest Dwarf that Joe had yet met, and he was petting at his beard as he spoke. “But we must take them in. I can already tell the arguments that our fellow councilman is going to make. If we are to attain the status of a City, we’re going to need to either rely on humans that bypass Alfheim entirely, or work on rehabilitating the humans that come here with the Elven theocracy yoked to their shoulders.”

Grandmaster Snow frowned, and her next words were ones of dissent. “I'm not certain we’re ready to begin receiving outsiders. How are we supposed to trust them? Trade with them? How will we know if they’re selling our secrets to their Elven allies?”

“We could read their mail.” Joe suggested brightly and sarcastically, as he had no intention to do anything of the sort. Seeing her wince, he knew that his point had been made. “Look, we’re going to have to let them earn their place in our eventual City. I was thinking we should make a small suburb within the walls that monsters will pass through in order to come here. That way, even if there are still Elven sympathizers among them, they’ll need to fight off monsters—even if it’s just to stay alive.”

“Doc? How would you go about this rehabilitation that Joe is proposing?” Snow turned to the ancient Dwarf, who’d been silently considering them as they spoke.

“What a fun day to come in person instead of sending a proxy!” The old Dwarf chuckled ruefully, then gestured at the table. The stone top shifted as thousands of tiny stone sutures erupted across the entirety of it. In a moment, it had turned into a strange, tiny, to-scale replica of the entire Town of Novusheim. There were a few additions to the walls, which the Dwarf pointed out to begin explaining his thoughts.

“Instead of a single, small suburb within our walls, I propose four of them.” He tapped the outermost small circular section of wall, nearest the entrance to the labyrinth. “All of the converts to our cause will start here. Many of them will die. Many, many times. We can issue a quest for them to defeat monsters and protect our interests in the area. Councilman Joe, your shrines act as a respawn point for your people, do they not?”

“They can be used that way.” Joe confirmed with a hint of confusion in his voice.

“Perfection. In that case, each of these four areas will have a shrine that the humans are bound to. When they’re slain, they’ll return to this same small suburb. Once they’ve completed the first of what will no doubt be a lengthy series of quests, they’ll be allowed to move up to the second section. There they’ll have greater luxury, freedom, and ability to work on skills outside of their fighting prowess. At this point, we’ll allow them to retain a portion of the materials they collect from monsters.”

“You want them to have crafting stations?” The Dwarf at the table who spoke with a dissenting voice was nearly shaking in anger, and Joe looked at him with great confusion. He’d never seen this Dwarf before, but seeing as how Doc had sent a proxy, perhaps this furious person was here as one as well. “What’re we going to do, trade with them? Trust that their goods won't be booby-trapped?”

“Yes. We will trade with them.” Doc calmly stated, reaching into his front pocket and pulling out a pair of perfectly round spectacles. Joe winced at that, hoping that this wasn’t a sign that the Dwarf was a member of the scholars guild. As far as he knew, there was still a bounty on his head from them. “The further out they are from being full members of our fine City, the less they’ll get in exchange. By the time they’re admitted into full membership, they’ll be so accustomed to working with us, trading with us, finally earning full price and discounts, that there’s no way they’d ever go back. At that stage, all we can do is consider their rehabilitation complete, and hope for the best.”

“I insist that we make them wear an identifying name tag that’s bound to each of them.” The angry Dwarf could see that he was on the losing side of this argument, and tried to throw in conditions. “If they venture outside of their assigned area, closer to the Town, the towers must attack them. Otherwise I won’t agree to this, and will fight against it every step of the way.”

“Ugh… Master Frenzy, I understand that you’re new to the council,” Grandmaster Snow took a calming breath before continuing, “but you are quickly following the path of your predecessor, Master Wrath. Perhaps we could-”

“I can only take that as a compliment.” Frenzy spoke with obvious passion about the subject, “Master Wrath abdicated his position in an attempt to focus on the final stages before he achieves the rank of Grandmaster. Knowing I’m walking a similar path-”

Joe interrupted the argument as it began to spiral, “I like the idea, actually. Even when I was in the army back on contemporary Earth, we were made to wear badges with embedded RFID chips. Without them, our own people would’ve fired on us, and our automated defenses would’ve brought us down. This is no different in my mind, and I absolutely agree with the motion Master Frenzy has proposed.”

That stopped the argument cold, and even the fiery new council member seemed taken aback. “You’d willingly put limitations on your own people? This proves my point. How terrible are humans that you have so little faith in them?”

“On the record, or off the record?” Joe queried the Master, trying to make a joke. When the expressions around the table turned grave, he rolled his eyes and gave a proper answer. “Just like with anyone else, we have a bell curve. Most people are perfectly fine. Some are paragons of light, virtue, and justice, while others are… not. Trust, but verify. I'm all for it.”

The door to the chamber slammed open, and a Master Sergeant of the Legion roared out, “We've captured enemy combatants in the middle of Town!”

All of the commotion was halted as threads of mana wove around the entire area and stopped anyone from doing anything rash, Grandmaster Snow had finally decided to take control of the situation. “Let's get this handled. Joe, if you’re going to bring lost sheep back to the fold, it is incumbent upon you to provide them with a stable.”

“Yeah, yeah. I'll go get the bubbles.”