Author's Nightmare: Chapter 141 (Patreon)

Shango POV: Day 117

Current Wealth: 242 gold 16 silver 21 copper

[Appraisal]

• Class: Revolutionary

• Level: 19

• Condition: Fine

• Modifiers: +5 Speed, +7 Toughness, +4 Alertness, +4 Strength

• Statistics: Strength 13, Speed 12, Dexterity 8, Stamina 6, Toughness 12, Alertness 12, Charisma 3, Intelligence 10

• Inventory: Local wear, shortsword, knivesx3

• Class abilities: Detect Element II

• Current Experience Points: 118/580

• Unspent Skillpoints: 6

“Oh, fuck, I have.” Solitaire gasped, eyes bulging even wider than usual, and threatening to consume the rest of his face in the process. I was almost too distracted to ask my next question, but I did. 

“How did you not notice?”

This must have come from the gatling gun and rockets, it was stupid enough of me not to check but Solitaire should have felt something change. He’d leveled enough times by now for that. 

“Looks like inventing new things earns you XP.” I observed, as Solitaire spent it. “But only when you don’t know how to make it already. You did need to essentially come up with the designs for the gatling gun and rocket launcher yourself, right?”

“Right.” He replied, sounding rather sour over the fact. I guessed Solitaire had never liked struggling with things. He’d always somehow seen the right answer as his due, the idea that he’d be forced to keep doing this as a means of progression was…

Kind of funny actually. 

[Appraisal]

• Class: Revolutionary

• Level: 19

• Condition: Fine

• Modifiers: +7 Speed, +8 Toughness, +6 Alertness, +5 Strength

• Statistics: Strength 14, Speed 13, Dexterity 8, Stamina 6, Toughness 14, Alertness 14, Charisma 3, Intelligence 10

• Inventory: Local wear, shortsword, knivesx3

• Class abilities: Detect Element II

• Current Experience Points: 118/580

• Unspent Skillpoints: 0

Well, Solitaire hadn’t wasted time spending his points. And he’d done it the way we were all learning was the best way- a roughly even spread to ensure our superhumanity grew into that of a jack of all trades. 

“How much can you bench?” I asked, entirely jokingly. Solitaire either missed the humour or decided not to miss his chance to show off.

“Six hundred kilos, thereabouts.” His nose wrinkled. “Still only half as strong as Beam.”

It was a very Solitaire response to improving one’s super powers so much within the span of a mere few seconds, but I could see that his mood had lifted. Somewhat, at least. 

“Well fortunately we don’t need to rely on it, if you can keep us stocked with rockets and ammo we may not even need to swing a single sword.”

Somehow, I doubted things would be that easy. Even if I hadn’t, convincing Solitaire would be hard. So I saved my energy and headed off.

Of course he wasn’t the only one who’d been powering up over the last few days, it was actually that which made me feel so…Embarrassed. Not even checking his stats had been a ridiculous oversight on my part. I pulled them up now, not as much because I expected a change as because the change I had seen was still new enough that I was continuing to draw no small sliver of satisfaction from it. Reassurance, it was. A reminder that despite everything, we were growing stronger. Frighteningly so, almost. Two months ago Beam had been lifting grown men like they were children and punching hard enough to require he hold back or risk killing everyone he fought. Now he was hauling boulders mostly by himself, and the other day I’d seen him actually send Argar a metre back and a good few centimetres off the ground with an uppercut. 

I wondered when I’d be able to do that.

[Appraisal]

• Class: Emperor

• Level: 19

• Condition: Fine

• Modifiers: +9 Toughness, +7 Strength, +6 Speed, +4 Alertness

• Statistics: Strength 13, Speed 12, Dexterity 6, Stamina 5, Toughness 13, Alertness 12, Charisma 9, Intelligence 9

• Inventory: Local wear, plate armour, repeater, shortspear

• Class abilities: Appraisal II

• Current Experience Points: 143/580

• Unspent Skillpoints: 0

Even with Solitaire’s new leap in power, I actually wasn’t that far behind him anymore. Maybe less than our builds would’ve indicated. If his estimates were right, and they usually were, thirteen strength would make me somewhere around eight times the strength of an average man. That was a lot less than I’d have preferred of course, but ideally I wouldn’t be fighting up close anyway. God had made me for many things, but being a front-liner was certainly not one of them. That’s why the world had Solitaires and Beams. 

I made my way through the mansion, quickly reaching my office and taking a seat inside. It had, technically, been a storeroom, but at Solitaire’s not-so-unreasonable insistence of solidarity we’d had it emptied out and furnished with all the necessities of a workspace. A desk sat in it, and upon that desk was a carpet of papers holding the word of one noble or another. I took my seat and got to looking through them. 

Honestly? It wasn’t that bad. Say one thing for human society since the mediaeval era- and you really can say more than one thing- but it’s gotten more complex. Compared to the infinite dynamism of a billion-dollar corporation, a single family’s affairs, limited as our holdings and funds were, was pretty trivial. 

It helped of course that I was, for once, taking over from a competent person. My father was many things you see. Stupid? Yes. Arrogant? Also yes. Evil? Of course. Impulsive? Yhup. Moronic, delusional, idiotic, prone to inspiring repeated synonyms of “unintelligent” when described? Yes to all the above. Phelia was his exact opposite.

Well, okay, I was being unfair to the old man. He was smart. For a normal person. Certainly smarter than most of our economic peers. It wasn’t that Solitaire was right, it was that he had a point. Sometimes I felt the gorilla comparisons when speaking to most of my species too, and that was never so strongly as when I saw them trying to manage their own success. 

Because it really isn’t hard to keep a track of your funds and deals. You just need to look at all the angles.

The best thing about the Velaharo family, easily, is the combination of their age and their history of actually not-shit rulers. The result of this has been an extraordinarily large library that, up until just a few years ago, was decently well-maintained, and to this day still includes records on…Well, everything really. People, of the past of course. Families. Lands and areas, buildings, resources. The filing system was a bit archaic- sorting everything by matter of relevance rather than alphabetic or chronological order- but I’d always had a knack for bloodhounding my way through filing systems, and within a few days I’d mastered the art of digging up whatever info I needed.

Which meant I could look at all the offers around me with a very informed eye. Intelligence is good, of course. But never, ever, underestimate knowledge. You are what you know, and I knew something about everything. 

I couldn’t have done half as well without Phelia, who’d not only memorised a scary fraction of the information in question- and thus saved me precious searching time very regularly- but had been sure to gather what knowledge she could on more modern sources too. Even if she hadn’t the time or funds to put it all down on paper. 

Together, we assessed our options. 

Offer for land in Belvort, a village just ten miles off. No, unthinkable, because Belvort’s current governor had been recorded three times bucking under other nobles’ leadership, had ties to Lord Byror and, most crucially, was stupid enough to do something he shouldn’t.

Offer for more iron, more cheaply than Wilskasai was offering and in impossibly great volumes. Nope. Actually worse than unthinkable, because the iron in question was famously of shit quality…One hundred years ago. It’d faded into obscurity since the little fiasco of its current owners’ ancestor trying to do just this, and finding his reputation badly damaged only after some poor sod had forked over a great some on dogshit ore.

No offer, and yet an opportunity, where the village of Ghortan was sending people out in search for work after their Lord’s efforts to have its too-large populace strategically die in the winter fell through. That interested us, and with just a few strokes of my quill we had eight more recruits, bringing our total up to twenty two.

And so it went. 

Each day there was some small advantage to find, or some disaster to avert, and as the weeks passed on I found our resources growing rather than shrinking. There wasn’t much to it, just cutting costs and growing profits. I got us potassium nitrate for cheaper by cutting a deal with some local alchemists, which let Solitaire make as much black powder for less. I was brought the prospect of outfitting our higher ranked recruits- Alora, Magnus and such- with firearms like mine, and figured out a work rate that would leave Ardin room to do that by dripping some of his labor off to assistants. 

As time passed, business started to boom. It wasn’t hard to see why. The Coalition had left us completely unmolested since Byror’s crippling, which meant that, bit by bit, the braver families of Elswick were starting to come out of the woodwork and try their luck working with us. Not all had good deals, mind, and most had an agenda, but that just meant more time to spend sifting the good from the bad. There wasn’t a lot that couldn’t be managed if you were willing to take your time and do it right, from top to bottom. I could’ve managed alone, and so could Phelia. With both of us combining our skills we practically sprinted by the offers. By the standards of painstakingly diligent proof-reads at least. 

Which was, itself, a sign of something off. We should’ve been getting a lot more with the looming threat of Byror and pals fading. I took the question to Phelia one day, who, completely unsurprisingly, gave me an answer.

“It’s because of your strange standing.” She shrugged. “You’re nobility in legal terms, that much was seen to by our marriage. As the last Velaharo head my name is preserved and passed on to my husband. But that doesn’t mean you’re seen as Velaharo, or nobility. There’s a culture there, a history, which you have so far simply refused to engage with. You’re still leaving yourself an outsider.”

I chewed on that, and didn’t take long to realise she was right. Looking at it from the nobility’s perspective we were a new, growing power of unknown motive, intents and nature who barely saw fit to interact with them. Of course they were suspicious of us, and, more to the point, suspicious of people who’d try to partner with us in spite of that. We were probably getting so many shit deals because of a selection bias to only receive deals from desperate people or idiots. 

So I decided to change things. We were in a good spot now, and I’d come to trust Phelia enough that I didn’t mind leaving her in charge of the mansion while I looked into more social affairs. Even if we both went there was enough stability in our position to leave things for a day. 

I began looking into social gatherings among the nobility.