Town Builder

Chapter 48 The Arrival

My drafting session was a little frantic as I wanted to have the plans ready—seven sets of townhouse plans, housing 21 families when completed. I had chosen these over the shops because I wanted to give the incoming people a residence immediately. As I was leaving before Jaesmin even woke I was met with Galana at my door. “Lord Tallis the first of the new townsfolk has arrived.” I was shocked it was a day earlier than planned. We were not ready. Seeing my panic, she explained. “It is just one family, a bunny beastkin family.”

Relief flooded me as we were not ready for the entire population of migrants. “Good. Did you want to talk about gnome city guards?” A pained look came over Galana’s face. She was not racist, but as you would suspect, gnome’s trying to keep order in a tavern brawl would be humorous at best. “Go talk with Titus. He is a powerful gnome warrior who can give you pointers on effectively incorporating them into your forces.”

“That is actually a good idea.” She said with surprise. By her tone, it was like I rarely had good ideas. “I will go immediately.” Galana left, and I met the bunnies at the town hall.

The bunnies were the bakers, as I had suspected. They looked a little scared, huddled in their cloaks and heavy backpacks. They were road-weary and must have left right after agreeing with me. Kytalia was talking to the three of them. Bella, the bunny girl, had wide eyes at all the different people coming out to work for the day. I told Kytalia that these bakers would be supplying our army and guards with bread, but they were guaranteed their own shop/residence in the consumables district. It was enough information for Kytalia to get them settled.

I did ask them if they saw our mounted soldiers. Tanguin had ridden out to meet the refugee caravan. The female rabbitkin said they hid whenever someone passed, but mounted men rode past them two days ago. That was a relief. I told Kytalia to bring Bella by the alchemy shop. Savannah was the best young woman in town to acclimate new children to life in Malcum.

A new sense of urgency overcame me. I was sure if I were in the real world, I would be dealing with multiple ulcers by now. The good thing was that my build team was now highly efficient, and townsfolk fed us a consistent supply of lumber. It was barely late afternoon when we had completed all seven structures far enough along to have a parade of furniture entering them. Since we had skipped lunch, I released everyone and headed to talk with Breda.

She was hunched over her model of Malcum when I entered her office. “Lord Tallis, it has begun, I am told!”

“Yes, the first beastkin arrived, and hopefully, they trickle in slowly, but I am guessing we will be swarmed and outnumbered by tomorrow. We finished the housing units I drafted last night. I came by to get the tannery or paper mill plans, whichever one you think is better in the short term.” She handed me the tannery plans without a second thought.

“The tannery would help free up Curraen’s sons to work on goods instead of preparing excess hides for sale. We should have enough qualified tanners coming in to take over the facility. They might have a skill level to deserve such a building, but they can use it.” Breda said plainly. I took the plans to the spot Breda had wanted it built. I liked not having to think about where to place every building for efficiency or fear of making a mistake.

The second tannery was to be built outside the walls west of town. Since much of our hide harvesting came from the plains, it made sense. I told some kids I passed to go and collect the builder team from the inn, as their lunch hour was over.

Working on the town border to the Cleardusk plains made me yearn to get out there and level up. I had sacrificed a lot of my personal growth for Malcum. I messaged Mad Dog, wondering where he was. He was heading north from the city to meet up with Tanguin. His team was rounding up the stragglers trailing behind the large caravan.

There had been a few problems. The towns didn’t sell food to my refugees, and the towns sent word back to the capital that the tiny little village of Malcum was taking in non-humans at an alarming rate. Well, this was to be expected in a human-centralist empire. I had hoped they would be happy I was taking the refugees off their hands.

Maybe I could handle the blowback—if my garrison arrived before they came and inspected my town. At least I had three relatively powerful players and a handful of high-level NPCs for defense. I left my build team to work on the tannery and told them to get as far as they could and that we would finish the tannery first thing in the morning and then transition to the warehouse next.

They were shocked we were not going to build more shops or housing. I told them I needed to spend time on the NPC auction site and read some skill books. I wasn’t going to have time to draft plans tonight, so we were switching to the warehouse build. We still had the gatehouse barracks, so I was not too concerned with preparing housing everyone. My next draft session would be for the support buildings for the garrison anyway. I would need the garrison cleared out and ready for my promised troops.

Garn Steelhand found me walking to the inn. “Lord Tallis, the shop you built for me is perfect for my needs. I talked with your town planner, Breda, and she showed me the library model and build plans. I am glad I moved here. I just wanted to ask you a favor. Can I be put in charge of the skill books? The orc woman showed me your collection. It is impressive to amass so many.”

“I don’t plan to sell those. They are to educate citizens in skills we don’t have teachers for,” I said, skeptical of his eagerness.

Garn explained, “I have a unique skill called jack-of-all-trades. I can’t teach it to anyone, but it allows me to learn any skill up to novice rank. It is why I love books. I am always learning.”

“So your life goal is to learn every skill?” I asked, somewhat amazed. He nodded enthusiastically.

“Yes, a little ambitious of me, but I think it can be done. I have 102 skills currently.” He said with pride. My jaw dropped.

“Okay Garn, just make sure you keep the collection away from players as they will destroy the books if they use them,” I said after some thought. The dwarf ran off before I had even finished my sentence. I think Garn would make a fantastic curator for the library—if it was ever built.

I needed some alone time right now, so I went someplace no one would look for me.

I sat in my garden behind the house. My stick men who tended it looked puzzled at my presence. I summoned and created a stone Adirondack chair to sit on and relax. I was going to spend tonight in the NPC auction and then focus on reading skill books.

When I opened the auction tab, I could see it was pretty cutthroat. The test players had finally accumulated enough wealth and managed small populations to compete. I doubted any of these players actually cared about the NPCs, though. To them, NPCs were just fodder for their gaming ambitions. My first search was for a paper maker.

Success, 29 with the paper-making skill and no bids on any of them. Two masters as well. So, no one was planning on making paper yet. One human and one angelkin. I tagged both. I have no point in bidding just yet and letting people know about my interest. I moved on to my second need, traders.

There were three skill categories: merchant, trader, and caravaner. The caravaner just focused on transporting goods. The trader seemed to be a wholesale merchant: large volume and repeated products. The merchant was the one who was always looking for the best deal, no matter the item. It seemed the trader type would be the best for my town as our exports would be the same over and over.

There was minimal interest in traders on the auction. This made sense as this was a long-term investment, and almost all the testers would lose their characters. Maybe I should start looking for others in the same position as myself. There would be a lot of risks involved, and I wasn’t sure about trusting other hard-wired players at this point.

I had been fortunate to find Mad Dog and his team. But honestly, I doubted that was chance. The game controlling AI and Simba had sent them to me. I was sure of it. So, I decided to trust the AI. They would make it happen if they thought I needed to connect with and work with other hard-wired players.

Looking at the traders, there were two experts, a lizardman and a human. I tagged both. The only master trader was a human, but someone had already bid on her, and I didn’t want to get into a bidding war so I would be passing.

I also needed to start stockpiling some funds for the auction. Maybe I shouldn’t have handed off my alchemy piggy bank to Mad Dog’s crew, but they were doing a lot of work investing and growing Malcum, so I shouldn’t dwell on it.

I tagged two expert caravaners, a dwarf and a halfling, just in case. The expert merchants that were still available were an undead and a shade. I set my search criteria to exclude all undead and shades in the future. No point in looking at them if I couldn’t recruit them. I had been given a huge hint that my garrison of soldiers was antagonistic toward the undead. So I knew I couldn’t recruit any undead NPCs to Malcum.

I moved on to guards. There were four flavors of guards based on their skill sets: city, palace, caravan, and ceremonial. I was developing my own city guards, and I just wanted to send some protection with my traders, so I searched for caravan guards. A fair number were listed in the expert rank. Checking on the city and palace guards, I saw that there were already many bids. The only listed skill showing for the caravan guards was survival. They had other skills, but just their highest skill was listed.

I tagged the one master caravan guard, a beastkin bull woman. That seemed a contrary term, bull-woman. Wasn’t a bull male by its very nature? My brewer was the same type of beastkin, basically a minotaur. I think he was single as well—matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match! I also tagged two expert caravan guards, both human women.

I spent quite some time looking for builders and mages. Even with the numerous NPCs in the auction, all the top prospects were already embroiled in the bidding wars. I tagged two master furniture makers, an elf and a human. Neither had bids yet so that they might be available for just a single platinum coin at the auction close. Furniture would be one of my primary exports since we had an unlimited high-quality wood supply.

I sifted through the NPCs, looking for the diamond hidden in the pile. Four grandmasters…but I did not plan to invest 100 platinum just to bid on a grandmaster. My financial situation was much too fragile. One grandmaster, a warrior, was already up to 120 platinum! Since I knew the game system, I realized whoever won that prize would probably have had to do some irritating quest to keep the NPC under their employ and pay a fat wage on top! I had been more fortunate than I realized.

The other grandmaster skills were fishing, weaving, and navigation, had yet to be bid on. At this point, there needed to be a larger benefit to outweigh the cost. I had spent way too much time in the interface, and I needed to move on to using my skill books. I could have spent hours longer just sorting and resorting…looking and daydreaming about what certain NPCs would bring to Malcum, but I had a horde of citizens approaching.

I started with my two skill books on ritual magic.

Enchanting: Ritual Magic 1 Tier 1 Unlocked, +1 Stamina, +2% speed of rituals

Understanding washed over me. This aspect of enchanting involves large objects or areas. A lot of things started to click into place for me, but I could feel my mind grasping for straws with such a low level of knowledge in my enchanting background. Tantalizing untraceable filaments spun my head about the potential of weaving magic into my structures. Power built into the fabric of the building itself, not just some minor aura, but real power.

I greedily consumed my three skill books on enchanting, bringing that skill to 4, and the one on runic script, bringing that skill to 2. It didn’t help. I knew I needed all these skills to reach at least level 7 before I could start crafting my magical building plans. It was a bit frustrating, and it was already morning, and I needed to supervise the completion of the tannery. I was the only one with the skill of masonry structures at a high enough level not to have the final building receive a penalty.

The work on the tannery finished at lunch, and as if a signal, Tanguin came riding up to let us know a group of five hundred and seventeen new residents was just two hours behind him with three of his other riders. Well damn. I told Tanguin to get them assembled outside the garrison guardhouse. Building time was done for now.

The next two hours were spent collecting the townsfolk to the gate. Our relatively small population of 226 was about to get overwhelmed. I used the chat to see Mad Dog’s status. He had another 118 in his group and would be here tomorrow morning.

I stood on the tower and watched their approach. It felt like we were going to be besieged by a ragged group of refugees and wagons. As they gathered at the base of the wall, I remembered one building I had not built or drafted yet. A bathhouse. The smell of dirty bodies rose up the tower to me, and I knew what plans I would be working on tonight.

I gave my best welcoming speech as the townsfolk handed out food to the hungry people. We first separated out Galanas guards and their families, 24 guards with 56 family members. Galana, with her current roster of 7 guards, took this group away to settle them. I guessed the remaining three guards were with Mad Dog.

My next and not enviable task was assigning the lucky families who would immediately get a shop/apartment building. This list was compiled by my master of guilds, Neral. The giantkin was able to somehow sort the highest-skilled NPCs without ever meeting them. It was a slow process as I announced a person, and they moved forward with their family and were escorted by volunteers to their new shop/ residence.

When I ran out of shop buildings, we started putting families into the three-family apartment buildings until we ran out of space there. Surprisingly, this left me looking down on just 71 remaining refugees, mostly beastkin of the cat, wolf, and bunny varieties. There was one family of five gnomes left as well, who was a rugmaker by trade. Fareth came and snagged them before I continued to settle them in the inn.

I didn’t think we had done too bad. The remaining people were quickly swallowed up by my generous townsfolk offering spare rooms in their homes until residences could be added to the town. I stood there looking over an empty field now with Jaemsin beside me.

“Well, that went much better than I anticipated,” I said, looking at her. We turned to look into Malcum, which was now more active than ever.

“I agree,” she said. “I agree, this was the right thing to do. I am sorry I doubted you, Tallis. Seeing the joy and relief on the faces of those people, realizing this was real. Malcum is going to be a better place for it.” She was smiling at me. I hugged her, and we watched, and my interface started beeping to get my attention.

Quest Completed: Fareth’s Epic Dish, See Grand Master Chef Fareth for Reward

Malcum has been promoted from a Village to a Town, 250,000 experience rewarded, +5 NPC auction slots awarded

Malcum has reached town status, Malcum is being added to regional maps

New Diplomacy options are now available in your interface

Wandering Monster Difficulty has been Increased

Please select one adjacent monster region to increase in difficulty in 24 hours, failure to select will result in a random selection

Malcum is now required to send participants to the Grand War, the next battle in 420 days, 4 hours, 18 minutes

Congratulations! You have reached level 22, 6 stat points, 2 skill points awarded

Congratulations! You have reached level 23, 6 stat points, 2 skill points awarded

Each line was either joy or pain for me. Nothing was ever easy in this game. You make some little gains, and they try to hammer you back down. Well, first things first. We need a bathhouse!