QuestWright Bk2 C55: Mommy, Where Do Vellums Come From? (Patreon)

Author's note:

ReaderQuest will hit a little later. Right now, I'm a little sick but pushin through. Here's the first QuestWright, working on the next, and I've got the first chapter of LitRPG Tycoon hitting in a moment. Enjoy!

Chapter 55: Mommy, Where Do Vellums Come From?

Palehides are monsters; that fact is not disputed across the world. When laid flat, they casually run from twelve to sixteen feet at the shoulder, with several Alpha and Mutated varieties going much farther.

Their most distinctive feature is their skin. A palehides' flesh is a dull ivory-white with gray marbling beneath the surface, giving the creature an almost carved-stone appearance when viewed from a distance. Its skin hangs in thick, overlapping folds, most pronounced on the shoulders, neck, and flanks, creating layers that can be several inches thick. These folds are what make Palehide leather so valuable in production.

A single Palehide can net its slayer hundreds of Crests, as long as they can bring back its resources.

***

The Palehide died on a Thursday in the area formerly known as the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie.

It was a larger monster and had lived for nearly eleven years in the grasslands outside the greater Capital area. For most of that time, it had known little beyond grazing, migration, and occasionally charging anything foolish enough to get in its way.

Its final mistake was charging a glowing figure who bared his teeth as they drew closer. The battle lasted for only three minutes. The reaping and recovery of resources, however, took well over six hours.

By sunset, nearly every useful piece of the monster had been loaded into wagons. Monster meat was nearly worthless, as consumption did odd things to the body. But its bones were stacked, its blood collected, and all of its organs packed into sealed barrels for sale to the Capital’s Alchemists.

But the greatest prize known across the world was the Palehide’s skin.

Two laborers spent the entire afternoon removing it in large sections before packing the folded material carefully into a reinforced cart. The wagon joined a convoy headed north, and thus, the hide’s journey had begun.

The journey was far longer than those who lived before the Reshaping had experienced. Gasoline-powered vehicles would make the trip in a little over an hour. For a team in a convoy traveling by horse and heavy cart, the journey took two long days. 

The benefit of traveling within the Capital’s radius was the constant patrols, keeping monsters back and away from those with business in mind. The negatives were the bribery and payoffs that those same patrols required in order for the group to pass through unmolested. It was luck that the traveling group had found the Palehide at all. There was always good money to be made from selling to alchemists.

Upon arriving at the Capital, the hide passed through three separate inspections. 

The first insured it was free of any trace elements that might be harmful to the public.

The second inspection weighed and documented every scrap of material, providing the hauling crew with a receipt and a stamp verifying ownership.

The third concerned import taxes, where steely-eyed Clerks demonstrated a remarkable talent for discovering fees that had somehow gone unnoticed during the first two inspections.

After the taxes were finally settled, the hide was transferred to Warehouse District Seventeen, Building Four, Shelf Nine, Position Twenty-Two. And there it sat, for five days…

The Capital was many things, but hurried was not one of them.

As time allowed, a processing order worked its way through the proper channels, receiving four signatures and the nod of a triple-chinned supervisor who had never once skipped a meal. Laborers retrieved the material and transported it to the Guild Tanneries. 

Workers cleaned away the last traces of flesh and blood. The hide was then stretched upon massive wooden frames and submerged in a sequence of alchemical baths designed to remove lingering monstrous influences. These large tubs were then shuffled off into the dark, with a date and time of retrieval marked on their front-facing edges. Someone had even added a smiley face.

Though the process of tanning wasn’t a new concept, the method by which Vellums are created was a closely guarded secret. The alchemical recipes used had led to the death of many spies trying to ferret out the process. As the home of the Sovereign, the world’s first QuestWright, the Central Guild holds a total monopoly on Vellums everywhere. 

In a world where experience is the ultimate form of currency, Vellums are worth more than gold.

The process took twelve days, during which the tub was brought back out for further checking. Multiple thousands of hides passed through the Tanneries every year, where an entire post-apocalyptic-industrial complex had built itself up seemingly without thought. Every inch and foot was empirically weighed and measured to exacting standards. 

There were charts and forms, and ledgers documenting other ledgers, with Clerks whose sole responsibility was ensuring those ledgers agreed with one another. Several dozens of people made their living from determining whether a hide was ready for the next step.

When the treatment process was completed, the Palehide entered the compression rooms. Engineers had worked up massive presses that operated day and night, compressing and folding layer after layer of treated hide. 

While some Central Guild sites, like Liora, had smaller operations, creating only a few hundred Vellums a day, the Capital produced an exponentially larger number through precision and efficiency. These smaller sites went through a rigorous process to obtain the process and recipe, including large security tests that are often called obscenely overdone.

Between heat, pressure, and another proprietary chemical mixture, the monster leather was stretched and compressed simultaneously, increasing its usable surface area while moderately preserving much of its durability. Though many monsters provided enough wealth of flesh to be used for Vellums, Palehides were especially durable and could see through all of the processes with only minor losses.

Six days later, what had once been a lumbering monster capable of flattening a wagon now existed only as several hundred pale sheets stacked neatly atop a wooden pallet. 

It still was not vellum.

That distinction mattered more than a naive observer would think. Vellum was unique in that it could be used directly with System-granted abilities. Though valuable in its own right for armor, prepared hide was still just fancy leather. No QuestWright could draft a Quest upon it, and no Inspectors could produce itemized reports. To the System, it was little different than ordinary paper.

The pallet was cataloged, stamped, inspected, and approved for transport. Then, it waited.

The Capital was many things, but efficient was not always one of them.

During that time, the prepared hide changed warehouses once and was briefly misplaced when a clerk accidentally transposed two numbers in a ledger. Eventually, once the error had been discovered and corrected, a team of laborers arrived with a handcart and wheeled the pallet of proto-vellum away from the Tanneries. Away from the manufacturing districts, and to its final destination closer to the heart of the Capital.

Beneath an imposing, too-large tower of spiraling glass and metal, workers dragged items in and out without a nod or a smile. Several guards checked identities, then checked again as the laborers pressed through into the bottom area. The second most secretive location in the Capital. The domain of the Crucible, the Central Guild’s top Alchemist.

There were no twists and turns on the path, and bright lights shone down with aplomb. Two men, under the scrutinizing gaze of all who came across them, pushed the weighty handcart forward with their heads down if only to keep from blinding themselves. 

After being treated, the Palehide leather was stiff to the touch and sat unmoving as they moved forward. Passing them on the side were other laborers pushing what could now be called Vellums forward in great, burgeoning stacks. They, too, had their heads down. 

Each was paid not only for their efforts, but also for their silence. More than a few stories had made their rounds about what happened when you spoke openly of what happened in the bottom of the Crucible’s tower. None of it was good.

Finally, the path diverged, making a sweeping turn to the left. Their IDs were checked a third time, then two guards detached themselves from the wall and stepped in front, while two more took their places like the hands of a rotating wheel. 

There was something new with the guards on this day.

Each of them held a large, weighty, metal object in their hands that looked familiar to one of the older laborers. He wanted to ask about it, but knew the guard wouldn’t speak to them. This wasn’t the time, and it especially wasn’t the place. 

But the older man thought it looked like an old Tommy gun from before the millennium. Something he’d only seen in movies. Only, there was a light blue glow about it that caught the eye. One of the guards noticed him noticing and gave a sharp glare. He put his head back down.

Up a slight crest, which required some muscle on the cart, then they entered a too-large room at the very center of the tower. The younger man beside the veteran laborer gasped at what he saw, but was immediately shushed by his co-worker.

Standing in the center of the room were two figures so large as to take one’s breath away. The old man, with his lifetime of experience, immediately thought the word, Kaiju. He wasn’t far off the mark.

At over sixty feet tall, each monster stood motionless within a recessed basin carved into the tower’s foundation. Thick, weighty restraints circled their wrists, ankles, and necks, each chain wider than a man’s torso, with a dull sheen spread across them from the bright lights overhead.

As soon as they came into sight, the older man’s burden with the weight doubled as the younger one stopped to stare at the monsters. The veteran laborer didn’t blame him one bit, but he nudged the younger man nonetheless, and they continued forward.

The creatures were slight variations of one another. They resembled large, pale, hairless giants. Their translucent skin held a pale marbling that resembled the leather on the cart. But unlike the leather, their arms had dark red veins running through them, revealing a sprawling network of blood just beneath the surface.

Thick tubes disappeared from the ceiling and wall into their backs, necks, and shoulders before vanishing into the floor itself. The younger man’s eyes traveled to the red tubes, then up, and around as he followed the red river’s flow. The older man was just happy he was still pushing.

They entered a quick line filled with further carts and guards before it was their turn. Stepping forward, they locked the cart's wheels into four pre-designated slots, then moved back. The young man’s eyes traveled with the cart as the space below them opened. The smell of iron was strong, causing him to take two steps back in confusion, even before the panel sealed itself.

That’s when the young man heard something. It sounded like heavy breathing. When he looked up, one of the behemoths was looking straight at him, mouth agape, an edge of eternity appearing from the back of its toothless throat. The young man gulped past the dry, sticky spit in his mouth as the old laborer patted his back in sympathy.

The panel opened only a moment later, and they unlocked the clamps as the young man sweated and tried to get a hold of himself. Oddly to the young man, the weight of the cart had lightened noticeably, but the load looked exactly the same.

They exited and made it to the output warehouse within an hour, where the newly created Vellums were weighed and measured again. A denomination of Crests was set aside for all parties involved, with the largest share going to the alchemy companies under the Crucible’s purview; they were then loaded onto a horse-drawn cart surrounded by guards and left the Capital within a day.

Traveling south, the caravan was only attacked twice, making the Guard Captain think that perhaps things were getting better. That stopped being a thought in her mind when they lost several guards to a flying monster she’d never seen before. It took several arrows and one shot from an experimental weapon before it was on the ground, and even then, it took another hour before collapsing from blood loss.

Her men wanted to try their hand at harvesting it, but there was a bonus on the line for completing their duty within a pre-set timeframe, and none of them had the skills to make much of the creature. They collected their dead and continued on, rotating riderless horses for extra speed.

Liberty came within sight a day after they were supposed to arrive. Showing the Capital writ that allowed them to keep their weapons in the city caused a minor fight between the Guard Captain and the General manning the defenses, but they were eventually let through and delivered their cargo intact.

From here, the collected Vellums met Clerk after Clerk as they were registered and placed in a dark, secret location within the Guildtower. Then, one morning, the Vellums created from a Palehide that died on a Thursday drifted through the Tower’s halls. It landed on an excitable Clerk’s desk, and the first stack was delivered, with notes, to a young Journeyman QuestWright named Cassio Vale who had recently gone through many troubles.

Picking the Re-Quest up, he reviewed the requirements and drafted the Quest with a weary sigh.

[Tier 1 Delivery Quest]

Questor: Private Willoughby,

Objective: Transport one small pallet of hygienic paper from Liberty Loaders A to the North Lantern Residence.

Routing: Utilize the North Private Highway for transit. Guiding Waypoint is active.

Reward: 5 XP

Cassio Vale

Liberty Guildtower

Journeyman QuestWright

Without a thought, Cassio put it aside and picked up the next. This piece of Vellum was formed from the rear end of its originating Palehide. If Cassio had known, he’d have thought it appropriate.