Chapter 151.1: Welcome to the Kingdom: Executing
PART 1/2
Asmo sat at a desk in a dry, dark room. She sat at this desk alongside Winic, the table sprawling with magical implements and ingredients that she didn’t understand. Beneath those objects were papers covered in haphazard scribbles, ink bleeding out onto the old table. The must within the underground cellar made it somewhat difficult to breathe, and the clutter certainly didn’t help with Asmo’s feeling of claustrophobia.
This place was his study, where he not only created magical items himself, but also had his students work for him on things he wasn’t Classed to create on his own. Currently, they were there alone, with Asmo giving Winic instructions on what items they’d need to create for this first mission. She was planning on sending out Carison, Keiki, and Jon out to three cities, but first she’d need Winic’s expertise in making preparations.
Asmo looked over the mess of a desk they were sitting at. In the wide room, full of random shelves and tables thrown about and absolutely covered in more scraps of metal, wood, paper, and ink—plus even more covering the floor—she felt like she barely even had room to exist there, herself. As Winic tinkered with a small machine in his seat, Asmo pulled out some sheets of Message Paper she’d gotten from the kingdom’s stores.
“Where should I put these?” she asked, looking over the completely covered table.
“Hm,” he glanced up from his gadget, surveying the desk for a moment, before he pointed to a seemingly arbitrary spot near Asmo, where the table happened to not have anything on it, except for a few sheets of scribbled-on paper. “There.”
“...Okay.” She reached over to set them down. “Should I just move some stuff over so they’re closer to—”
“No,” he interrupted. “If you do that, I’ll lose track of where everything is.”
“Have you not already?” Asmo gazed around the cluttered room. “It seems as though it would be impossible to find anything here.”
“Of course not. If I put something somewhere, I’ll remember where it is.”
Asmo frowned. “If it works for you, I suppose.”
“Anyway, what did you come to discuss with me?”
She nodded, looking back over at him. “I’d like you to make an item that can work with these Message Papers I’ve brought you. Something that can read what’s written on them, and that can write things, itself. Can you do that?”
He gave a haughty laugh. “Can I? Of course. Simple automation Enchantment on a pen, with some sensing Enchantments to go with it. Though you’ll have to refill it manually.”
“Mm, no. No, that will not work. This device needs to be small, not as big as a pen. It should be no larger than a fingertip, ideally. And it also cannot be refilled manually. In fact, it should not need any maintenance at all, at least not at any sort of regular interval. Can you do that?”
Winic looked at Asmo thoughtfully. “That’s…a more interesting problem to solve. Fingertip-sized, eh? Perhaps I could use a rock with levitation that’s dipped in ink to draw on the paper. Or, no, maybe I don’t use ink at all. I could reconfigure the Paper into working off of illusions, then we don’t need ink. Though that’d require some new ingredients. I could send an assistant on an errand, I suppose. And as for the reading, we could use…”
He continued muttering to himself while Asmo glanced over his toolset. Within this room was probably dozens, no…hundreds of gold pieces worth of equipment. One of the kingdom’s finest researchers in Enchantment technology, at her disposal. She’d use this to its fullest.
“Will you just need three of these?” Winic asked. “For the three VIPs you’re sending. Or, perhaps four, one for me, as well?”
“Make four. But…do some experiments for me. The four you are making, when they read out what’s written on them, it shouldn’t be loud. But see how loud you can make it, and tell me. And whether or not you can get them to automatically propagate. If something is written on the father Message Paper, can you get the Message Paper it is connected to send a message to another Message Paper? And continue that chain, so whatever is written on the father is written—and announced audibly—to a dozen others. And see if you can make automated messages that are written upon certain triggers being tripped. And how complex those triggers can be. And whether there can be several triggers for a single message, but for those triggers to be delayed, or on a timer. And—”
“Er, one request at a time, please,” Winic chuckled nervously. “I don’t know what all you’re planning to do with these experiments, but I can only do so much at once.”
“If you can’t do it, get someone else to.”
“Well, the job would be best suited to me. My assistants can only do so much, after all. If you would give me some time to take your requests one by one—”
Asmo slammed a hand on the desk, rattling the tools and scatting papers to the floor. She stood, shouting down at the old man, “You think we have time?! You think we can stand around waiting?!”
He shrinked away from her. “Er…”
Asmo took a deep breath, collecting herself, and sat back down. “I apologize for the emotional outburst. That was unprofessional of me. What I mean to say was, I have vested interest in getting these tasks complete as quickly as possible. And as such, waiting for you to take them one by one would go directly against that interest. As such, I encourage you to find a way to complete this more quickly than you normally would.”
Winic continued staring at Asmo cautiously. “Do you…Why do you care? Is it not the same whether we take control of the Kingdom within thirty days or within thirty-five? I understand not wanting to wait around forever, but I wouldn’t think a few days’ delay would be such a…problem.”
Asmo took another deep breath, her face twitching at Winic’s continued insistence of delaying the operation. “As I said, I have a vested interest in completing this as quickly as possible. There is a…thing I must collect, and the Demons are preventing me from doing so.”
“A thing?”
“And as we speak, that thing could be in danger, it could be dying on the streets, could be losing its way, getting turned against me, could be running off to never come back.” Asmo started losing control of her breathing once again. “I cannot allow that to happen. That fake Koinkar will not prevent me from keeping what I care about safe! I will—”
She stopped herself, pausing to collect herself once more. A deep breath, clear the mind, clear the emotions. She counted backward from thirteen in her head. Calm.
She opened her eyes to see Winic staring at her as he would a crazed beggar in the streets, but paid him no heed. “As I have said, I encourage you to move as quickly as possible. If you delay in your work, I will face further risk of permanently losing something that I care about. In that case, I will ensure that the people I relied on—the people who failed to do what I asked of them—will lose something that they care about. That way, we all have equal encouragement to succeed.”
“I…” Winic frowned. “Are you threatening to not pay me if your…thing, perishes?”
“Something along those lines. Now please, find a way to make this happen quickly.”
He sighed, breath brushing papers on the desk aside. “Yes, of course. Just, a few more questions about these items you want me to make.”
“Go ahead. I can answer anything you want me to.”
Updat𝓮d from freew𝒆bnov𝒆l.co(m)