CHAPTER 293: CLOSETTOWN

I took a seat in front of Lena’s desk before replying. “The short answer for what comes next,” I said, “is that it’s up to you, of course.”

Lena nodded. “I appreciate hearing you say that aloud, Your Majesty.” She cleared her throat and shifted uncomfortably. “I would also appreciate hearing what you think our options even are.”

“You probably have more than you think. I’ll go ahead and say up front that nobody is going to kick you out of here. You’ve all been through a lot recently, so I want you to take whatever time you need.”

“That is very generous of you,” she said with a tired smile, accompanied by a glimmer of suspicion in her eyes. I could appreciate that, since questioning the motives of somebody who gave you free stuff was generally a good habit to have. “It relieves a great deal of stress.”

She didn’t give voice to her doubt, so I moved on as though I hadn’t read into her expression. “Looking beyond the short term, you and your people aren’t currently citizens of any nation, which puts you in a vulnerable spot. Believe it or not, I have some experience with that.”

“Because you come from another world?”

“Yes. You’ve heard about that?”

“I have heard many stories about you, Your Majesty.” Her whiskers twitched. “I do not know how many I can say are true.”

I stroked my feather boa and ignored the urge to ask her what stories she’d heard, specifically. “Well, as far as getting your people citizenship status with an established nation, I can probably work something out with Eschendur. Hiward has a pretty strict immigration policy, so they’re unlikely to make the process easy if we wanted to go that route. If, however, you’re interested in sticking around, then making everyone a citizen of Closetland is as easy as having my majordomo print out some ID cards.”

At the mention of staying, the corner of Lena’s mouth turned down ever so slightly, a subtle enough shift that anyone without enhanced perception would have missed it. She likely thought this was the ‘gotcha’ moment to my generosity.

Lena placed her elbows on her desk and threaded her fingers together. “I do not think I understand Closetland,” she said. “Before being teleported here, I had never even heard of it.”

“We’re new.”

“How new?”

“Very. But we have diplomatic relations with both Eschendur and Hiward, and my recent meeting with the count will open some things up with Litta as well.”

“I see,” she said. “Why is it called Closetland?”

“This whole space exists within the bounds of a System-granted ability that I exploited into a self-compounding growth machine,” I said. “The ability was called Pocket Closet.”

“Like having a closet in your pocket? It is bigger on the inside?”

“Right. It’s a play on the term ‘pocket dimension’, I think. Like it was supposed to be a closet-sized pocket dimension.”

Lena waved her hand through the air. “This is much bigger than a closet.”

“True. It’s more of an island-nation-sized pocket dimension now.”

The Littan thought for a moment. “Wouldn’t Pocketland have made more sense, then? Since it’s a pocket dimension, but without being the size of a closet? The word ‘closet’ doesn’t really apply at all anymore.”

“That’s a good point,” I said. “But we’re not the most sensible of people. However, if you’re interested in exerting some influence on our naming conventions, this city needs a new name, and I’m willing to delegate the shit out of that. I’m willing to delegate the shit out of a lot of things, actually.”

Lena took her time chewing through our off-the-rails discussion before her eyes lit up with understanding. “To delegate, you will need people,” she said. “And I suspect there are not many of them around yet?”

“Yes. And if through this process of delegation certain individuals show themselves as being trustworthy, then they’ll be in a unique position to take advantage of the rising influence of Closetland, thus rising alongside her.”

“Um… you mean that you are hiring?”

I considered whether my habit of using many words when fewer words worked just as well was doing me any favors. “Yeah.”

“And there is compensation?”

“Of course,” I said.

The glint of suspicion softened a bit as Lena furrowed her brow in thought. She started to ask a question, but hesitated. I let the silence hang until she worked up the resolve to voice her concern.

“No offense, Your Majesty, but given that Closetland is ‘very new’, how much compensation would she be, uh, capable of providing? And for how long?”

“Your concern over the fiscal stability of a new kingdom is wise,” I said. “However, I am a man of means and am capable of supporting a substantial and well-paid workforce until we have some tax revenue going. If you’re interested in specifics, here’s what I was thinking…”

Lena and I met for another hour, hashing out the details of what becoming a government employee for the Kingdom of Closetland would look like. While the woman was justifiably skeptical of my motivations, she grew more and more convinced that I wasn’t secretly a conman or another slaver in disguise as we spoke. We didn’t only discuss Lena herself, but also the broad strokes of the other Littans who’d just gained their freedom. She was quite knowledgeable about their general skillsets, but intended to do a more comprehensive census as well.

That was something I’d wanted to have done anyway, so I had Grotto send along a model questionnaire. I removed about a third of the questions for being too invasive before handing it off to Lena to start working on it. This would also include gauging the interest people had in remaining within Closetland, and giving them notice of where they could obtain more information about their options. I went ahead and scheduled time for some large presentations, since there was no way I had the bandwidth for two-thousand individual one-on-ones. This is why I was delegating.

On the whole, Lena was a diamond in the rough. She was whip-smart and quick to learn, but had major gaps in her knowledge since the education she’d received growing up was centered around how best to run some rich asshole’s household. Even so, those skills were surprisingly transferable to the role I had in mind for her in Closetland. After all, I was a rich asshole who needed someone to run my new city, and a city was sort of like a household but on a much larger scale.

For the moment, Lena would be hired on as a consultant with no obligation to commit to anything. Given her reaction to my initial salary offer, I was pretty sure she’d be sticking around.

Since she was the unofficial leader of the–now highly successful–Krimsim slave rebellion, having her decide to become a Closetlander would go a long way towards enticing everyone else to lay down roots. I’d come to learn that I was fairly terrifying to the average person, given my god-like superpowers, soul-piercing gaze, and the greatly exaggerated rumors concerning my tendency to rub elbows with c’thons and other horrific entities. Having someone like Lena managing New Krimsim would be much more comfortable for its prospective future residents.

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[Avoiding excessive engagement with the common folk will also allow you to maintain the fear and respect of your subjects without diluting your mythos. Having a popular but ultimately toothless individual serving as the local face of government is a highly effective tactic employed by autocrats throughout history.]

“While I’m glad my decision making falls in line with your evil overlord playbook, you should probably tone down on the despotic vocab when discussing our burgeoning empire.”

[Why? I have found that literally stating my goals tends to disarm people as they erroneously assume that my claims are hyperbolic. For you, they would be even more likely to believe that you’re speaking in jest. If anything, enhancing our use of menacing terminology will further obfuscate our true goal of iron-fisted domination.]

“My goals do not include any ferrous metals.”

[Ah. Yes, iron is too soft. Perhaps Prismatite-fisted domination would be more accurate?]

I sent Grotto a mental sigh as I crossed the town square, making a stop at the fountain at its center, where our favorite four-armed mage was working some magic. A small crowd had gathered, drawn in by the glowing lines of mana that Etja was drawing in the air over the city’s central water feature. Some of those who saw me approach gave me a deep bow, although the reaction from the others was mixed. My nominal status as the king of our micro-nation hadn’t made the rounds to everyone, mainly because we’d previously had no reason to formally assign me the title and make it public. Even among those who’d heard about it, they weren’t all convinced of its legitimacy.

The ones bowing were mainly doing so because they felt it was better to play along than risk irritating the guy who’d teleported an entire city after kicking the shit out of a 700-foot-long monster. I’m sure that some did it out of genuine respect and gratitude for saving their lives, but I tried not to make any assumptions either way.

Etja turned her head and gave me a wave, even as she continued to work with her other three hands.

“Hey there, your kingliness!” she said. This mode of address drew a few befuddled looks.

“Madam Director,” I replied. “I see you’re hard at work on thaumaturgical matters.”

“Yep! The Littans stripped out all the mana chips from weaves across the city and defaced the runes on anything they considered secret. So now, me and Grotto are fixing the important stuff.”

“That includes this fountain?” I asked.

“The weave inside of it purifies all the water that comes out. It’s basically a public well that can’t get polluted.”

“I see,” I said, taking a closer look at the strands of mana travelling into the marble. I could easily see where Etja was smoothing over the scratched and abraded weave beneath the surface, then laying down fresh runes. “Clean water is important, but where’s the water itself come from?”

“Originally, it was an underground spring.” She shrugged. “That’s gone now, so Grotto made a weave for making water like the kind you have making dirt.”

“What about the mana density required for that to function?”

“He put it far enough below us so that it doesn’t affect anyone up here.”

“Huh,” I grunted. “Will this be enough water for now?”

“The volume isn’t a problem, but it’ll be hard for a couple thousand people to use one fountain. There are some others like this one around the city that we’ll be fixing up next.”

“And I guess the Littans scrubbing the runes before they left isn’t an issue.”

“I looked at everything I could before they did that,” said Etja, giving me a zesty wink. “Mana sight lets me see the weaves, and Total Recall lets me remember them perfectly.”

“Nice,” I said, pitying the soldiers who’d spent days uselessly removing those runes. “Well, that’s one problem solved. Speaking of water, what’s the sewage situation looking like?”

“There are sewers, but they’re pretty broken. Grotto has some golems crawling around down there and doing some stuff and things. I don’t know about the specifics, though. He said he could deal with all the humanoid waste, and that’s all I really needed or wanted to know.”

“That’s fair.” I took another look at the fountain. The base of the structure was undamaged, with five faucets along the sides to easily fill containers without having to dunk them in. At the center was a marble base with a jagged, broken top, where a statue of a famous Littan explorer had stood. It had been destroyed during the battle. Etja followed my eyes.

“Wanna put up a statue of yourself?” she asked.

“Hells no,” I said. “I’m not that vain.” I ran a hand over my perfectly oiled and impeccably shaped beard. “If Lena decides to stay on, then I’ll have her poll the people to decide what to put here. Maybe it should be you, since you’re the one fixing the fountain.”

“That sounds great!” said Etja, flashing me–and everyone watching our conversation–a charming smile. Half the people there looked like they’d just been acknowledged by their childhood hero, and a few men immediately hustled off while whispering with one another over where to find some high-quality stone.

I spent another few minutes catching up with everything Etja was working on, making my way into the medical clinic afterward. This was one of the temporary structures, although with the amount of control Grotto had over the Closet and the golem-based labor at our disposal, it was more structurally sound than most other buildings in the city even before the battle. The reason that it was temporary was because it had been thrown up hastily and was ugly as sin. There was a zero-tolerance policy for Brutalist architecture within Closetland’s borders, so the blocky mess would have to go sooner rather than later.

The vast majority of injuries people sustained during the battle had been addressed within a couple of weeks of the event, and it had only taken that long because of the lingering mana toxicity most people had suffered. Magical healing was rough on a normal person’s constitution, but some low-intensity spells and heavily diluted potions would have set most people right in a couple of days. Unfortunately, any magically enhanced treatment had to wait until people had been purged of the excess mana and had been given time to recover. Sadly, this meant the death toll for the battle had continued to rise as mundane medicine failed and people succumbed to their injuries while detoxing in the low-density chambers Grotto and I had set up.

After the mana toxicity was dealt with, most people made a full recovery and no more deaths came to pass. Now, the clinic was mostly populated by those who’d acquired an illness or injury after the battle. There was one wing of the clinic that was still occupied by those who’d been injured during the battle, although these people didn’t have any open wounds or broken bones. They were all healed as well as they could be, but each of them had suffered a permanent injury, mostly in the form of missing limbs taken by birds or crushed under collapsing structures.

Replacing a lost limb was a hassle for Delvers who weren’t built for losing them in the first place, like I was. It was difficult to find a healer with the right skillset, and expensive as hell even when you did. The people in this wing of the clinic were regular folks without any regenerative abilities, not Delvers. Normally, if they lost an arm or leg, that was that. Xim could encourage missing limbs to regrow over time, but the skill was useless for an ordinary person. The magic was too demanding on their bodies, which meant these people were out of luck.

At least, they were out of luck when it came to getting their biological body parts back. That didn’t mean they couldn’t get prosthetics, and while this world’s average prosthetics technology was about as sophisticated as carving a nice piece of wood and tying it to the stump with a cushion in between, Nuralie had seen this problem as an opportunity to experim–

I mean innovate.

Nuralie wasn’t experimenting on people.

She was innovating.

And as I strode into the rehabilitation wing, I found Nuralie innovating on a man to whom she was attaching a steel leg that was half robot half magic. The Littan watched the procedure while wearing an expression that was equal parts hope and fear. I presumed that he hoped the leg would work and feared that it might explode or maybe poison him.

His fear was misplaced, of course. Experimental magitech prosthetics might be dangerous, but innovative magitech prosthetics were perfectly safe.

Jokes aside, it really was safe, and I stood and watched as Nuralie put the finishing touches on some life-changing technology.