every road leads to rome | Glowfic Constellation

"It's good to meet you, Senator Jealwind. I imagine we'll be seeing a fair amount of each other if you're responsible for traders in the area."

"Yes! That's the capacity in which I was invited here; I'm very interested in safe roads. It's half the risk, and half the cost, in every merchant venture.

"Now, the steps here: I believe we want to convene in a smaller group with interested senators who will have either strong or useful opinions on the project, generate a proposal which is satisfactory to all, and finally submit that to greater Assembly for approval. After this process, ideally, you will be able to conduct your business with the highways of Pallass' greater area, possibly with supplementary guidelines for interfacing with local authorities for the smaller towns and their roads.

"I expect this process to take several weeks, and then more if the proposal is rejected by the Assembly and sent back for further revision."

"That sounds reasonable to me. I should warn you that I'm not used to normal peoples' politics, only gods', so I might need some coaching. I do have priests and acolytes back home who can advise me a little but they'll only know what I tell them about the local conditions."

"You'll be able to hire an aide if you wish to—oh, do you have any currency?"

"I can make coins, though as I understand it that's rude to do very much of. I can also move trade goods between my home world and this one."

"I'd very much like to hear more about that! Can you move anything between any locations?"

"I can move any object that's sitting on me to any part of myself that's big enough for it to sit on. I can't do living things and it does take some attention but if I'm already having a conversation somewhere it's pretty trivial."

"If you can do that we can obviate half of shipping! It works—intercontinental, if you can do it interworld?"

"Once I have a claim there, certainly. It's not a very sustainable thing for me to do regularly, though - traders depending on me as they travel are a good source of attention, porters picking up packages and carrying them off to be sold aren't particularly."

"Understandable," he says. "Perhaps for small, high-value deliveries?" He sees the conflict of interests, but everything has a price. "The alchemists will pay you a lot to teleport in rare reagents from Baleros and Chandrar, which you can spend on expanding road travel."

(Do they want to get in the city while they talk? The secretary will deal with immigration control for them.)

He'll follow the senator if he starts moving, yes. "Mmhmm, I just want to be clear that I'm not in a position to replace your entire shipping industry even if I wanted to. At home I have plenty of use for regular currency and I don't expect it to be any different here."

"Of course." The senator was, in fact, unsure whether Kiraavi was a currency-using type of entity. No one's ever accused Khoteizetrough of having a bank account!

Entering the city proper, the degree of urban planning that goes into Pallass is even more evident. It's how it has to be, really, when even the land being built on has to be purposefully made to specification. There are smithing districts, insulated and reinforced to bear the work of high-level craftsmen, residential sectors located towards the inner rims of the floors to get more sunlight, warehouses built along the heavy-duty goods transport elevators with great wide streets to run pallets down, alchemy labs cloistered in even more reinforced negative-pressure zones...

The progression of floors makes the city into a sort of inverted pyramid shape, reminiscent of a stadium, and the 'arena' in the center is left open: public space reserved for gardens and open-air plazas, with a scarce few important-looking buildings on the rim.

It's incredible. It doesn't take long for him to notice a Skill in use, either, as he takes it all in. He waits to spot a more conventionally visible example and points it out. "What's that? It can't be a blessing if your gods are dead..."

It's a Drake blurring around a carriage headed his way, translocated a good dozen feet in an instant, yelling at the driver to watch where they're going.

"That? Oh, probably [Flicker Step] or [Flicker Dodge], something like that. Blessing?"

"Blessings are minor powers gods like me can give to people, things like improved endurance or an improved sense of direction. Something flashy like [Flicker Step] would be an acolyte power, which we only get one of and share less often; mine is extended senses. Regular people from my world don't have powers aside from those, so it's surprising to see them here."

"So no one gets classes unless a god hands one out to you? Or, no, Skills at all? That sounds terribly inconvenient." Horrible, really, but he's not going to say that to Kiraavi, aforementioned dispenser of Skills.

"If Skills like that are common it's inconvenient to say the least, comparatively. People do all right without them for the most part but I'll have to see if it's something I can import at all."

"[Flicker Step] specifically is a reasonably advanced and moderately rare Skill; maybe one in three thirty-year-olds has something as generally impressive as that? One in two fifty-year-olds? I'm guessing. But the more common sort of Skills, you want them to... well, do your job, right. You can be a cleaner without being a [Cleaner], and lots of people clean their own homes, but if you're doing it all day for money you don't want to do it bare-classed."

"People in my home world do get better at things with practice but nothing like that. Does it just happen, here, or do you have to do something special for it?"

"Some classes you can only get if you meet certain conditions, or if someone or some body endorses you for it, like you have to be employed by the Watch to become a [Guardsman], but for most cases it just happens when you go to sleep. There are a few factors that go into what classes and Skills you get, but mostly it's what you spend your time doing, the kinds of challenges you face, and what you feel most—yourself—about."

"Huh. Well, that's not promising, but it's interesting to know about, anyway. What kinds of Skills are common here?"

"That's a really broad question to answer!"

The senator strokes his chin.

"The lowest-level skills you get when you first pick up a class are usually 'knowledge Skills' like [Basic Cooking], [Basic Woodworking], [Basic Brewing] and so on. Just gives you a good fundamental grasp of the domain, like if you'd spent a month or two learning it the long way. A step above those are 'enhancement Skills': [Lesser Dexterity], [Enhanced Intelligence], [Heat Resistance]. They do what you think they'd do.

"Level five to ten, you might start getting activated skills: [Check Sum], [Instant Drying], [Charming Smile] and so on. Usually can be used multiple times a day, weak to start off and get better as you level. I think that's as far as I can say which is common."

"Enhancement Skills sound like my blessings, so I suppose those won't be very interesting here - plenty of people at home have at least one blessing, but not all of them, and acolytes are rare."

"I think people will be plenty interested if they can just buy an enhancement. Most people only get one or two, even if they pick up a second class, and the problem is like—let's say you're an [Accountant] and get [Lesser Memory] at Level 10, it goes to [Enhanced Memory] at 15, and by the time you're Level 20 you're getting skills like [Instant Report] and [Force Compliance], you're probably not ever getting [Enhanced Intelligence], even though in theory it's a 'lesser' Skill than the ones you're getting.

"But at that point enhancing intelligence is more, not less useful, right, because it's a—force multiplier. So there is very much scarcity in those foundational enhancements."