CHAPTER 1453: CHAPTER 1452: QUICK PROGRESS

"This is going by far quicker than I had ever imagined. Was... Is there a reason I was so worried before?"

"Hm... probably inexperience and your constant desire to overthink things to a point that simply doesn’t matter? I would say it was probably those two things, though I don’t know in which order..."

Mom gave me a cheeky smirk before patting my shoulder as she added "Really though, you had no idea how it would work so you were worried. Makes sense, and now you know how to do it. However, don’t think that this is how all construction goes; you had really nice materials and no worries of bureaucracy to impede you..."

On my other side Mother Ria just nodded as she stared at the house in front of us, taking in the rich dark wood that made up a majority of the structure and parsing over it with those brilliant sapphires of hers.

"The amount of laws and regulations we had to follow just to add a few rooms and the training grounds to the mansion took weeks... As for the other parts of the cities under our dominion that we improved, those sites of construction took months to complete.

They only actually needed a week, maybe two, but sniveling politicians in each city needed to approve the budget, make sure everything was to code, schedule inspections, consult people... even for us it took forever, though thankfully this big blue lug was able to... ’convince’ them to hasten things."

Said ’big blue lug’ just grunted and nodded before excusing herself as she went over to chat with her Squire and Jahi, who were currently standing over a table Anput made for them outside so that they could deliberate over... anything.

"Well... let us go inside then, yes? Might as well begin planning the various room layouts themselves, no? Furnishing them and making some progress in turning this house into a home."

The typically calm Elf was rather animated with that suggestion as she gestured at the house, which was all I needed since any help in this regard would do me wonders; I knew what I wanted but having a second opinion was always best, if only because it was a fresh set of thoughts on anything and everything.

We agreed to just go room by room to start, beginning with the large foyer that served as the entrance and designating where things should go and what definitely needed to be where; since the second floor was under construction now we were actually able to do so with the area above in mind, which made things even easier.

Sadly some of this was merely planning for the future since I didn’t have a ten foot by twenty foot rug to roll out for the grand entrance to our home, nor did I have any paintings to hang on the walls...

Honestly I don’t think any of us would ever be good at painting, so commissioning an artist was going to be a must sometime in the near and far future, though we would circumvent the ’traditional’ style of having a bunch of paintings with Anput being... Anput.

She was going to want to have various piece of her work hanging around to showcase her skill, and considering what I had seen her do for our weapons in a short amount of time I was confident we could still get some good pieces of art to hang up on the walls soon, just not of the painted variety.

~~~

Jahi PoV

"Already planning out the city itself? Overly ambitious considering you aren’t supposed to get the first settlers for another week and you’re still building your own home, but..."

"No time like the present. Now, either help or just be quiet, alright?"

Waving my Mom off and tapping the hastily drawn map on the table, I looked at Nirinia and said "Having the first set of fields just below here would do well. For the beginning of the city it keeps everything tightly packed, but in the long term it can be expanded upon and we can wall it off easily."

"I wasn’t arguing with you, just pointing out that having a bunch of crop fields below your home might be... not entirely ideal. But if you want to eventually wall it all off anyways and turn this into a districted city, that could work. You just need to plan it that way."

Starting off small and then growing was going to be challenging if we didn’t plan to be large right from the start, and I wasn’t even under the pretense that I was thinking that large just yet; yeah I wasn’t completely knowledgable in all of this, but I wanted to have more than to not have enough.

Always sounds like a better problem when you have too much of something instead of too little in these scenarios, after all, so I was planning with that in mind as of now; of course, even though she was always going to be a slightly insufferable prick about these things, when Mom suggested anything I was going to listen.

"Districting will work only if you plan every detail properly. Keeping things connected in every sense of the word is tricky, and no matter how large you try to make the supportive infrastructure now it’ll always be too little. Set goals and work from there... or be an idiot and try and plan it all out now."

"Two large fields on either side with two barns and silos in between should do well to start, and we can begin the housing on the edges of each. Have those barns and silos built... let’s just say on the north, putting the guest compound over on the west, Merchant Hall on the east, and then the square down south. Should work..."

I began to sketch out yet another design for the city while the other two watched on, bringing another debate up and leaving me wanting to tear my hair out as we had to scrap some of it and I had to draw up yet another one, though at the same time it was better... I just was beginning to understand why Mom disliked her job most of the time.