The Factory Must Grow - [Book 1: The System Must Live]

"Now this is lovely," Alyssa sighed, her fingers gliding over what may as well have been the finest silk instead of coarse linen twine.

"Yes, I am rather pleased with how this batch came out," Henrietta acknowledged. "These are what I'd actually consider clothing-quality, far more than these." She indicated the papyrus-cloth outfit she was actively wearing. Alyssa's own was stiff and uncomfortable, but it was at least tough and didn't smell too weird.

I miss [Field Dress], she mentally sighed, before catching herself. No. Bad Alyssa. No thinking about lost skills.

She should think about her new skills instead! Like how her practice with magic had yielded a new subskill... for [Ignite]... of ⟨Blowtorch⟩, which allowed her to summon jets of flame at her fingertips, instead of always lighting something else on fire. It had also taken her then-last skill slot, forcing her to put another point into Skill (Subskills) to leave room for other things. Fortunately, she'd had two points to work with, and had put the other one in Dexterity (Movement) to make her scouting that much better.

Class: [Ranger of Far Lands] (Air, Force, Wood)
Level: 9
Major Stats: Dexterity 8 (Movement 2), Recovery 4, Resistance 1: (Physical 3)
Regular Stats: Mind 0: (Senses 3), Strength 3, Aura 0, Skill 2: (Subskills 2, Movement 1), Power 0
Minor Stats: Generation 0, Cohesion 1, Capacity 0
Skills (8/10*): [Leafstep]* ⟨Springlaunch⟩** ⟨Tumbling⟩** ⟨Blowback⟩** 20, [Ignite] ⟨Conflagrate⟩* ⟨Blowtorch⟩* 16, [Rustlewind] 8

And like, she could hardly complain about her skills. Her levels were flying up, months of work happening in weeks. It just... didn't satisfy her.

Quick, think about something else. Right, fabric!

"So, when do you think we'll be able to get new clothes?" she asked, her voice full of hope.

Henrietta immediately dashed all of that hope against the rocks as she shook her head, "Not for a while. This here took me far too long to justify new outfits for us all. If there's a chance, maybe we can make an automatic loom and use that to create fabric, but for now it needs to wait."

"So why even make the thread in the first place, if we're not going to use it?"

"So that we're ready once the loom is made," Henrietta easily responded, "It's something that we would need to figure out eventually, given the general importance of good fabric."

Alyssa shrugged, her eyes flicking to something new. "Sure, I guess. Ooh, what's that?"

"That is the normal drying-area I have for papyrus. Clark requested that he could get some for the roof of the kitchen, but as you can see, I haven't made much progress on it."

"It looks complicated," Alyssa noted, admiring the sets of reeds propped up at varying angles and distances from one another.

"I've found that it dries better when slightly under tension and exposed to the air. But, that means it needs to be adjustable so that I can keep it under tension."

"That's cool. How do you adjust it, though?"

"Well, you see...."

"Liiigghhhhttt," Alyssa carefully enunciated, feeling out every syllable of the magical word.

"Light," Oliver responded, "You need to say it faster. That's the wrong tempo."

"I know that," she shot back, "I was trying to say it properly. You don't need to jump all over me just because you're jealous about not being the only caster anymore."

"Saying it with the incorrect tempo is saying it incorrectly. Though Light may not be one of them, certain words require speech at even a fixed speed, and those can fix the speed of your entire statement around them to ensure the proper meaning is maintained."

"And are you going to teach me any of those words?" she countered.

Oliver shrugged, "Not anytime soon."

She responded with an appropriately indignant look, but Oliver pretended he didn't see it and simply carried on the same, "Your ability to utilize Magespeech is rudimentary at best, and I am therefore attempting to teach you the most broadly applicable clauses and words which you could use for your casting."

"I'm doing great, what are you talking about?"

Oliver looked at her flatly, then spouted off a bunch of incomprehensible gibberish.

"Yeah, obviously," she bluffed her way through understanding what her teammate had just said. Pretending she knew what she was doing had gotten her this far, it could get her a bit further.

"I'm glad we agree, that you are 'a rank novice meddling with powers beyond comprehension, with no potential to ever get better.' It fills me with such wondrous pride to know that you see the truth of things even when I'm using so many words that I know you've never heard of."

"Okay, that's not fair."

"Why not?"

Alyssa tried to conjure the right words to her tongue, but just found herself grasping at straws instead, "Because. Also, how do you even do sentences? I thought all Magespeech was nouns."

"It is," Oliver confirmed.

"So how..." she began, only to see Oliver glaring at her. "Sorry," she mouthed.

"Any word in Magespeech can technically be used for any part of language. Sentence construction, context, and alternate pronunciations can all indicate that a given word isn't going to be the subject of a statement. 'Steam' may be a noun, but if I say that 'I hand steam water,' you can probably figure out that I mean boiling water. Of course, the reality is far more complicated than that, because the Tapestry is a harsh and unforgiving linguist, but you don't need to worry about that, because you're a rank novice."

"Hey!" Even if he wasn't entirely wrong, protesting still felt good.

"You're utilizing single words to nudge existing magic in small ways. You barely even need more than that to do what you want with your skills. Proper grammar..." He seemed really grumpy about what he was saying, "It's important, but it isn't critical unless you're doing something more complicated or fiddly. It's really important in divination, though."

"But I'm a diviner myself," Alyssa mimed tightening a tie, "So clearly this is important."

Oliver just sighed, putting aside the clay tablet he'd been idly working on in order to massage his temple. That was the most emotional expressions she'd gotten out of him all week, so she considered it a win. "Fine. Technically for some forms of divination, it doesn't matter as much. Arcanoception is a form of divination, after all, and it very much doesn't require proper grammar to work. Happy now?"

"Depends on if I'm saying Light correctly."

"You tripped on the second vowel again, it sounded like you had a lisp and said 'softly illuminated in warm tones' instead of 'a pure sunbeam of light reflecting a grand display of dazzling brilliance.' Which I suppose could be what you're going for? Since you are, you know, such a master of mage-tongue."

Alyssa displayed her tongue-mastery by sticking hers out as far as it could go. He responded in kind.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Two steps over, Ride," Jacob instructed, and Alyssa obliged. The ballista fixed on her groaned and screeched but didn't otherwise move.

She bounced on the balls of her feet lightly as the Warrior poked and prodded around the slide mechanism that the turret was built around. It was a little nerve-wracking intentionally not rendering invisible to the Force-tracking enchantment of the extremely dangerous weapon, but Jacob needed help diagnosing why it was freezing up, and Alyssa had been the least busy at the time.

It was fine though. She'd largely gotten her fill of "dense subtropical forest" exploration, so tasks that kept her closer to the rest of the team were nice in the way they allowed her to eat freshly-cooked food and sleep on an 'actual' mattress. It beat berries and jerky every meal, and whatever moss and leaves she could scrounge up each night. Plus, there were wayyy fewer bugs 'at home' than there were out in the wilderness, which was... always a plus.

She'd seen spiders the size of her torso, and the only thing nice she could say about those was that they proved to be excellent practice targets for her magic.

Even without that, the comforts of home were... really nice. A certain amount of stress was building up over time, because unlike what a lot of self-help people back home liked to say, going without modern conveniences for an extended period of time wasn't making her 'more appreciative' of modern life. It was just making her annoyed to not have things like running water or bread. And cheese. Or drinks.

"Unbound, I could use a drink."

"Did you speak?" Jacob called out. Alyssa shook her head in response, indicating it wasn't a concern.

"I could just really use a drink!" she repeated, just to be on the safe side, to which Jacob responded with a thumbs-up.

A moment later, another testing instruction came, "Return!"

Alyssa hopped back to her starting position, and a sound like a garbage disposal emanated from the ballista.

"Are things... alright in there?" she asked.

"Fortunately, it seems that it is simply a mechanical failure, and as such we shall not require Smith's assistance for the repair," Jacob replied, "Alas, I cannot determine what has failed quite yet. You may return here, if you so choose. This may take some time."

Alyssa breathed a bit of a sigh of relief and started redirecting her Force into the ground beneath her feet, ensuring that almost none of it escaped to let the turret track her. She took a seat a few feet from where Jacob was working, on a boulder that had been displaced from the pit mine to her right.

She got bored of watching the veteran play mechanic after a minute, and instead allowed her eyes to wander to where the digger inklings were slowly digging out more and more red stone. The topsoil had been mostly cleared away, leaving only a few fissures that had been packed with more of the red, clay-y earth that they were using back at First Tower to make bricks. Those fissures themselves seemed to be the primary focus of the excavating creatures, with each of the saber-toothed moles favoring their own small area which they dug out and transported the rubble to a pile on the far side of the clearing.

They... really hadn't gotten very deep. There was a maximum of twenty feet from the deepest part of the hole - a fissure filled with muddy water - and the area immediately around the pit. Even that wasn't indicative of how far they'd gotten, because that area was padded up by the displaced dirt, which only made it that much... more.

Alyssa had never cared much about her emotions, she saw it as them and her doing their own things as separately as possible, but she could still feel that they were doing something. It wasn't anything important, of course, but it was still interesting.

"It's different than I expected," she decided to say.

Jacob looked over from where he was fiddling with a couple of metal tools. "The Ironworks, or the Jump in its entirety?"

She shrugged, "Yes? I was kind of thinking about the mine and all that, but the Jump as well."

Jacob nodded. "One moment, I am nearly finished."

Alyssa expected him to carefully leverage some piece that had gotten dislodged back into place, but instead he just took the iron rod he was holding and struck the metal base with... not all his strength, but definitely a good amount of it. There was a bit of a whir, a couple of clicks, and when Jacob walked in front of the ballista, it quickly locked onto him and started following his movements.

Well, until he made himself untrackable and returned to the inside of the firing line, anyway. He briefly paused when passing the stack of claynades they'd unloaded from the weapon, then decided against reloading it and took a very proper and formal seat near Alyssa.

She didn't know what to say, and after a moment, Jacob pointed towards one of the diggers. "Well done finding the diggers. They have been exceptionally valuable for our progress thus far."

That wasn't what she thought he'd say, "Thanks?"

"It is important to properly recognize contributions," he explained, "Particularly when they are not what is expected of you."

"But this is my role. I'm the Ranger, I find stuff. I don't need to be thanked or commended for doing the bare basics of my job. I mean, I guess it's kind of nice, but that kind of thanks just gets burdensome, you know?"

"I do understand. I am not condemning you for not thanking the rest of us as we do our duties. I am merely acknowledging the accomplishment of my peer, and thanking her for it."

"You're not my peer," Alyssa almost instinctively protested. "You're the second-in-command, you've got decades of experience on me, you fought in the damned War, you-"

"And I am equal in rank to you in these situations, yes," Jacob cut her off. "Just as it is important to recognize that which has been done, so too is it important to know when accomplishments and achievements do not matter. This is one of those situations. You are, I assume, continuing to adjust to the same thing which I had difficulty with."

"What? The chain of command? Yeah, I promise that I do not miss harsh deadlines and restrictive instructions about where to be and what to do. I put up with that, I didn't live it," she chuckled, "It wasn't even my idea. The Forerunner Program was how I could get out of it, as much as anything. Helping people without a dozen hundred external opinions on what I could, what I should, how to best use my life?"

"I do not question that you struggle with authority," and wasn't that an understatement. "However, what I refer to is clarity. There is simplicity in unambiguous orders. There is simplicity in ambiguous orders, as well. They grant purpose, limit the scope of tools accessible, and grant insight into a world beyond the one lived in."

He swept his hand at the pit mine and The Jungle beyond. "Yet here could hardly be more different. What we had expected was a clear mission, an obvious target, and a challenging if direct means that it could be accomplished. However, I urge you to consider that the mission has not changed. We are in harsh territory, a small squad tasked with an impossible goal. Our resources are less than we would prefer, our support base absent, and all we have to rely on is one another."

Alyssa shrugged. Because... yeah? Jacob seemed like he was trying to say something profound, but it wasn't like any of this wasn't things she'd already figured out on her own. The problem wasn't the structure, the problem was the lack of anything else.

Jacob couldn't read her thoughts, and so continued, "In such cases, I simply urge that you would know that your team is capable of the tasks before us. It is important that we trust the Commander is-"

"Except I do trust Commander Inq," Alyssa interrupted, protesting the implication that she was some kind of reckless wild child who didn't believe in her superior. "And I trust Clark and Oliver too, though I'd probably trust Clark more if he hadn't just been down for two days with food poisoning. I mean really, he's both the cook and the healer, how does he even..."

Jacob paused for a moment, "That is good. That is very good. Trust is what all relationships is built upon. The knowledge that none is above their obligations is the foundation upon which our Empire is founded."

"Fulfill the role presented to you, yeah yeah. Claim not that which is unearned, say no when asked if you're a god, be realistic about your capabilities, recognize your limits even as you strive to expand them. Platitudes only go so far, though."

"It is nonetheless good that you know what we fight for."

"How could I not? You'd have to be literally asleep to make it through any kind of school without all of that drilled into your head. And I did excellent in school, and I didn't sign up for the Expedition just to get out of the rigid lockstep of the military."

Jacob motioned for her to continue. "So... yeah," she shrugged. "It's different than I expected. More digging in the dirt, less carving bloody swathes through demon hordes."

[Ignite] ⟨Blowtorch⟩

She idly called a spark to hand, playing with the little flame as it danced between her fingers and across her palm. The subskill didn't do that much to protect her from the flame it created, but so long as she was careful she could keep it from burning her. She didn't even need to be that careful, so long as she kept it moving.

"I'd kill some more flowers if there were enough to justify it," she groused. "I just want to burn something."

In lieu of watching something shrivel and turn to a crisp, she instead flicked the flame into the air like it was a coin, then gave it a skill-augmented backhand when it came back down, "Pyroclast."

A wave of flames spread out, washing into the air over the Ironworks mine. The fire died out fairly quickly, but it was still fun to work with.

"To face challenges that we are unprepared for is not merely the nature of an Expedition," Jacob finally said, "It is all of life."

"Yeah," she agreed, then pulled herself together. "So, did you want a hand bringing rocks back to First Tower or should I run ahead and give them the good news?"

Jacob looked over at the pile of ore that was awaiting transport back to be refined. "Permit an old man some solitude. I can manage my task, you see where you can aid the others."

Alyssa nodded, gathered her things up, and launched herself towards home. She could probably also benefit from a bit of quiet time to think.

Even if it was just to figure out what to think.