Mark woke to the smell of dinner cooking. When he went out to the living room he saw Sally frying up some sort of meat, and the world outside was white with snow. Isoko was watching the screen, and Eliot was poking around on his computer inside his room, but with the door open.
“Afternoon,” Mark said, and he got some normal welcomes in return. And then he asked, “Did you guys enjoy your beetle hunt this morning?”
“We did!” Sally said, grinning as she turned. “Really good day, actually.”
Isoko paused the screen and turned. “There’s a sunset beetle hunt if you want to go. Should be another morning hunt tomorrow, and then the beetles will move on with the front of the winter auroras.”
Mark said, “Actually, I need to find some livium for Quark. I lost communication during the goblin hunt, and I didn’t like that, so it’s time to actually get Quark a non-sentient livium core. It was something like 300k or 400k goldleaf for a basic system last I checked, which is probably out of my price range for normal interactions. And it’s not even on the list of available items in the settlement, anyway. But I need that incorruptible communication system, so… Anyone got any ideas? Where to find livium?”
Isoko shook her head. “No idea.”
“Can’t help you there,” Sally said.
Mark nodded and then looked into Eliot’s room.
“There’s really no livium here…” Eliot began, but he went quiet as he focused on his computer system, doing something— He came back, blinked, and looked at Mark. “Huh. No livium in the settlement at all.”
Mark felt a jolt of joy that Eliot was already checking on that for him. It was surprisingly kind. Mark smiled, saying, “Well thanks for checking.”
“It’s weird though, right?” Eliot asked, mostly himself, his vector pointed inward. “I thought we had almost everything here…” He went quiet.
“How about an artificer solution?” Isoko asked. “The Sacredcuts owe us.”
Mark had a weird moment of imagining himself asking the Sacredcuts for help with Quark, or with permanent communication solutions, and then he said, “They don’t owe us. That was a goblin hunt and it needed to be done for everyone’s sake. Come on, Isoko.”
Isoko got off the couch, saying, “Sure they owe us. They even said as much at the party last night.”
“That was just them being nice,” Mark said, though now he suddenly wasn’t sure. And then he realized he didn’t care if the Sacredcuts thought they owed him at all. Mark shook his head. “An artificer solution would require upkeep. A livium core would instead take in my astral body and attune itself to my Power Levels, and thus be as strong as me at resisting various Powers. It means I don’t have to learn Tactile Telekinesis, which is still years off if it’s even possible at all.”
Isoko said, “Then we should go to the Sacredcuts for a connection to livium, anyway. They probably have that, if nothing else. And we could ask Elaria tomorrow at magic lessons. If no one else knows anything, then Elaria certainly does.”
Mark went, “Huh… Yeah. She would know.”
Eliot came out of his room saying, “Some of the guys at the Command Center want livium, too, and they’re trying to buy it, but it’s not as simple as buying something. Every livium core comes from some other True AI, or from a Summoner, and most of the Summoners in the world are apparently contracted with a lot of the AI corps. United Sapient’s AI families are practically review boards for ethical AI procreation. One of the ways that United Sapient does approve people is through a successful settlement program, though. At least Quentin at the command center is aiming for one of those approvals, though he wants AI kids, which is different from your wants.”
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“Procreation committee?” Mark asked. Mark was dumbfounded. “That’s not what I heard… but I admit I stopped looking into it when I saw the price tag, like, in December.”
“Some people are pre-approved and I think you’re one of them,” Eliot said. “Other people have to go through a lot of hoops.”
Mark felt suddenly… weird. “So that’s… That’s a thing.”
“I assume there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t see,” Eliot said, “But I haven’t looked into it too much, either.”
Mark didn’t know what to do with any of that information, so he didn’t do anything with it at all.
He asked Sally what was cooking, and she talked about seeing beef for sale earlier in the day, so she bought it as quickly as she could. They were having hamburgers for dinner.
It was a good dinner.
Afterward they all watched a movie that had come out a few days ago that Sally and Eliot had both been wanting to see, but which they hadn’t seen yet. It was a procedural drama about demons and lawyers and the whole thing questioned if demons were real, because sometimes people just straight-up invented or imagined demons when demons did not exist. The movie was called The Demon Defense, and it was based on some historical thing that happened 50ish years ago. It was actually a remake of an older movie that Mark had never seen, but which both Sally and Eliot had seen.
In the new version of the movie a man stood accused of killing another man, but the defense was saying ‘it was demons!’ and the prosecution was saying ‘no, your guy is just a killer, and demons don’t exist’. In the end, the guy was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to jail, but then, after the sentencing and sending to jail, the demon turned out to be real. The guy was not released from prison, though, because he did do the crimes. It was kind of a downer, semi-tragic ending.
Mark liked the part where the demon turned out to be real the best. Everything before that felt like the story just wasn’t realistic. Demons were real, after all. But then again, history rarely made sense, and the movie was based on history.
Sally and Isoko had been going strong all day long, and they managed to make it through to the end of the movie, but then they moved into their rooms and crashed out the second the credits started rolling.
Mark was honestly still tired from the goblin hunt, so he had no problems going back to his bed around 10 pm. But he couldn’t sleep. He was just tired. So he read research on adamantium and watched adamantium forging videos for a few hours, constantly playing with his adamantium, crystallizing it as best he could, and then remaking it. Needles, or rather small scalpel blades of adamantium, turned out to be easy to make.
Mark closed his eyes around midnight and made himself fall asleep.
- -
The world was black with edges of silver here and there, like crystals partially revealed in an unseen light.
- -
Mark woke up feeling groggy. It was 6 am and a fine time to rise and shine.
Sally and Eliot went on to do some maintenance for the settlement here and there, to get started on new private housing, while Mark and Isoko left the apartment and headed toward Valen Manor. It was time for more magic lessons.
On the tram, Mark and Isoko held onto the overhead railings as they stared at the white world outside. The lake was frozen over with tufts of islands sticking up out of the ice. Frost swirled on eddies in the sky, collected on the edges of various things like the tallest trees and solid rock markers, crafting sideways icicles and crystal formations out of the winter air. Snow gathered. The grass was dead and yet it would come back when winter was over, in 6 to 12 weeks.
The two of them were alone on the tram.
Mark asked, “Have you had any dreams of a map, yet?”
“I had some weird dreams last night, but they were all about candy and bugs and eating bugs. Too many winter beetles on the mind.”
“Oh yeah! Those beetles. There should have been another culling this morning, right?”
Isoko shook her head. “They moved on faster than expected. It’s going to be a bad winter, or an easy one, and I don’t know which.”
“Elaria would know, right?”
