CHAPTER THREE-HUNDRED SEVENTY-FIVE

Someday, I’ll learn to not pile so many things onto my plate. Oh, I’ll make a huge tree made for combat! A cubic mile isn’t that much room, right? A hold for the town? Sounds good, sign me up! Dealing with Rezlar’s dad and the thieves guild at the same time? Childsplay! Why not add in training a kid to be a ninja, too?

Really though, it sometimes feels like a lot, but it’s nice to have so much to do. I think if I didn’t have so many irons in the fire, I might go nuts. I can’t twiddle my thumbs or chew my fingernails when bored anymore, so I guess my new hobby is projects… and pretending like that’s a new thing and not something I’ve been doing basically from the start.

Thankfully, I have my scions to help keep things running smoothly, so I only have to check in every so often to make sure things are going well. Which kinda works against me, because then I feel like I can take on another project, heh. Especially in times like this where it feels like I just have to wait.

The Tree of Cycles and the Forest as a whole are progressing smoothly. I have a lot of upgrades I want to do, and I have the mana to do them, but I’m letting Tarl and them do their detailed inspecting before I do anything else. It’s mostly so they can do their work in peace. I give them enough to do without adding in more things while they’re still trying to get a read on what’s there. I would feel a bit bad about planning to add more the moment they’re done, but I think they’re getting used to the fact that their official records are probably going to be obsolete before the ink dries.

I at least can occupy myself with planning out the expansion in the crypt. The area is already under my control, it just needs to be dug out and built. It’ll need Coda’s attention eventually, but I don’t think he’ll need to take long to make sure things won't collapse. The look and feel are already set, so he just needs to add more, which shouldn’t take him too long.

Unlike the hold, which is keeping his attention right now, and probably will for the foreseeable future. It’s ambitious, and though I’m still a little wary about how much flex there is in the design, the numbers are looking confident, as is everyone else working on it. The entire… I think of it as the ‘surface’, even though it’s inside the mountain. But the area straight in from the entrance, as well as the stuff upward are just about done. There’s still some final carving needed to make things look pretty, as well as running the plumbing, but aside from that, it’s basically ready to be furnished and lived in.

You know, if it wasn’t basically office space and warehouses and such. The deeper floors are a lot more complex and I honestly lose track of what’s going to be houses, and what’s going to be shops. There’s demand for both along the main staircases, and I don’t know which should get precedent. Thankfully, Rezlar and the other planners know how to build a city, so they’re weaving that particular tapestry. The industrial areas being near the bottom are easier to identify. I’m sure the forges would love to be able to tap into the volcanic area, but that’s way

deeper than the plans call to dig. Still, I bet there’s going to be a lot of demand for the rancher caste of antkin to domesticate the wyrms to use for forges and smelters and such. The crucible ants would work really well, too, but I think they’ll be a lot harder to domesticate.

As for the Earl and the thieves, and their plot against Rezlar, that’s the most frustrating thing to have to wait on. They’ve tried a few times to delay the progress of the hold, but it’ll take something a lot less subtle for them to cause anything significant. Injuries are pretty quick to heal between the healing slimes and the medic caste of antkin. Supplies can’t really get lost with Poe and the birds overhead, with bats taking over at night. So all they can really do is pretend to be kinda bad at their jobs, but not so bad that they’ll get fired.

Which will play perfectly into firing the one guy so Pul can step up. I think he’s ready to throw his levels around, even if I think ninja is still quite a ways off for him. After the heavy talk about what he’ll be training to do, I’ve been making sure to show the less lethal options for basically everything.

He was pretty incredulous about how knowing anatomy would give him less lethal options, but Poppy has been demonstrating it for me to see, though she’s still figuring out the details herself.

Pressure points made my list of things I’d like my ninja to have access to, but I didn’t have any idea how to actually do it. Would it be some kind of mind affinity ability, to block the nerves? Maybe lightning instead? Like with a lot of my random musings, the nerd squad somehow got ahold of the concept and started tinkering. Better than them trying to subtly work on explo- er… rapid oxidation. Yeah, that’ll probably not get their attention. Maybe.

Either way, Thing has been toying with electricity, which will be good for the speaker project… which I really need to try to knuckle down for and get running, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he manages to pull the full affinity for himself, maybe after taking some go juice for the spark. Things like tasers are easy to pull off, but a taser shock is not a pressure point strike.

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Queen’s been toying with trying to do mental effects or even poisons. She doesn’t have mental affinity to mess with, but with some runes from Thing, she can at least run experiments. Her poisons are pretty able to paralyze on contact, which are cool and would definitely be something to at least show Pul, but a poison isn’t a pressure point hit, either. Nor is a mental block to being able to use a limb.

I was actually pretty surprised when Poppy wanted my attention and showed off her own take on it. She had been practicing on a wolf, who looked like they didn’t really like being a lab rat, but at least it cooperated for her demonstration. A tap with one of her tendrils and a surge of life affinity was enough to produce what I would call a pressure point attack! Just poke, limb numb for a time between a few seconds and a few minutes. I could also see the wolf wasn’t just acting, but actually couldn’t use that leg until the effect wore off.

So I’m very happy to see that be a thing! Even more than the potential for the cool attacks, but if my ninja has life affinity, it’ll go a long way toward ensuring I’m not just making a murder-hobo in fancy black pajamas. I can see the basic ninja being able to do some minor healing with a pressure point, like how acupuncture is supposedly supposed to work. I never put much stock in it back on Earth, but with literal magic, I will happily hammer the concept into something workable.

There’ll probably be advancements for the class that focus more on healing, but I think that will be on Pul to decide how he wants to guide his path with it. And his choices also extend to his choice of weapon. We haven’t really talked too much about them, but if pressure points are going to be a thing, they’ll basically have to be delivered by hand, which means he needs to learn from Rocky, or more likely, from Onyx. But she’ll still need to learn from Rocky to be able to teach Pul.

I definitely want Pul to learn judo, or at least a version of it. I don’t doubt Rocky would be able to teach it pretty easily. The basic concept of judo is all about controlling the flow of the energy in a fight, which Rocky already does with his affinities. Distilling the concept down to work with the physical instead of the magical is probably something the zombie has already done, even if he prefers his boxing style.

I’ll also need him to teach Pul how to strike, which if I’m doing that, he might as well teach Onyx. And she might as well teach Pul so she can show what fun stuff shadow affinity can add to the mix, because I’ll have Teemo eat a hat for me if my ninja doesn’t get shadow affinity.

So yeah, two, possibly three affinities if kinetic counts, which it probably should, a bunch of knowledge for anatomy, stealth, the defense of judo and the offense of some kind of karate or something… that’s a lot for a class. It makes me wonder if he’ll even be able to get the class before we deal with the thieves. So many things to learn, and that’s even after I thought I had done a good job pruning the idea down to the basic core of what I want my ninja to be.

And even worse for poor Pul if he can’t get the class soon, he’ll basically be doing a quintessential ninja mission with his infiltration of the thieves. Sure, it’ll be a bit more social than a lot of ninja stealth stuff, but it’s still very much in line with what a ninja should be able to do. On the bright side, it might be just the sort of thing to help it crystalize for him, like the stuff I did with Rhonda and Freddie. On the other hand, they were safe in my borders for all of that.

I don’t want to go tossing him into a dangerous mission with only half a skillset, but it’s looking more and more like that’s what might end up happening. That’s probably why I’m so frustrated right now. I can see the potential problem, but my only real option is to wait and hope. Having a problem that I can’t actually work on is a special kind of hell, especially when the consequences might land on someone else.

I mentally sigh and shake my head, doing my best to push it out of my mind for now. If there’s nothing I can do about it, I should focus on something I can do something about, and there’s a project I’ve been putting off and putting off as other things pop up.

I need to design the speaker. In concept, it’s pretty simple, just like the pickups for Slash’s guitar: sound makes pressure on quartz, quartz releases a unique electrical signal. Then you amplify it and turn electrical hertz into sound hertz. We kinda have half the solution already, with Slash’s hat. But now, instead of simply translating a sound to electricity and back to sound, I need to produce sound from some other kind of input.

If I knew better how the Voice title worked, I might be able to kludge together something that uses the same concept, but I have no idea how it actually works. The only thing I can think to try would be some kind of text to speech thing, but I feel like that’s a bit beyond Thing’s ability to do with his runes. We’d need a smart typewriter to not only be able to read the input, but also properly pronounce whatever’s being written.

Too bad I don’t have a denizen to… hmm. I might not, but Vanta does. His little automatons are probably exactly what I need. In fact, I probably don’t even need his specific ones at all! I’d need a sonic affinity one!

I hum as I ditch my notes and scribbles, and instead delve into the options for spawners. There’s no speaker denizen yet, but I bet I can design one, even if I have to work around it by designing a gravity affinity automaton and giving it sonic, too! I bet Order can feel a disturbance, but I’m too focused to care right now. I have a problem I can work on!