027 - Ashakir V: Rumors
“To Whomst-ever the Fuck It May Concern:This is Elsie. Stop leaving empty bottles of whatever godforsaken Varran swill you’re drinking out in [Ayle]’s pavilion, it’s really gross and smells really bad. This isn’t the game anymore, there’s no despawn timer. Trash just stays around, not that it would matter to a drunk like you. YES. OF COURSE IT’S YOU. Clean up your messes, Haddy. Please. And for god’s sake, don’t just toss them off the edge of the guild hall. We may be in low orbit, but that’s so not the point.”
—A crumpled up note in an unknown script, found jammed into a half-melted bottle washed up on the Naeviri coast, 5 Y.S.
Apparently, what came next was cleanup.
After Ai and Sari had had their fill of spiced seafood, they ended up helping the laborers who operated the seafood boil stall clean their work area. After the chaos of the daytime meal, everyone pitched in to prepare the stall for the evening boil that would take place in a few hours. Comfortable conversation was the default here, as workers who were clearly acquainted with each other from long hours laboring together fell into an easy camaraderie.
Their cheer was infectious so Ai was in good spirits, especially after the hearty meal. Besides, if this were Dirge, this would be a great place to gather rumors. A potential quest hub, as it were.
There was a not-insignificant pile of shells from all sorts of Ashakiri seafood in front of Ai—Kirokka and Go’shem, and giant prawns that Ai had learned were called Golam’mo—as she followed the directions of one of the dockworkers who apparently moonlighted at the seafood boil stall. There was something to be said about doing something so simply menial yet so immediately beneficial to the people she was helping. Ai hummed happily as she worked, Aru napping at her feet after he’d also had his fill of scraps.
“You havin’ any problems with the shells, Ayle?” The dockworker, who had introduced himself earlier with a boisterous guffaw as Gazza of the Galan Street Dockworkers’ Guild, inquired.
“No, not really.” Ai responded. They had her collecting and sorting the assorted shells, separating them between the crustaceans and the shellfish. It was therapeutic, in a way. It also let her work through her post-meal fullness as she focused on the simple task, as she’d definitely gorged herself too much. Sari had too, come to think of it, but she was on floor-sweeping duty somewhere.
Ai had asked Gazza what they were saving the shells for earlier, and he’d laughingly obliged. The crab and prawn shells still had plenty of flavor in them, so would be baked until crispy and ground into a powder for use in a traditional Ashakiri flavored salt. The shells of any clams were going to be refined into sodium bicarbonate, which was extremely useful in a plethora of other ways.
Being in Ashakir almost let Ai forget that Dirge was a brutal survival MMO on top of everything else, with how vibrantly full of life the city was.
Even as her efforts in Titanomachy had succeeded, even as the Ve’un network’s guarantee of safety against the dark of the night had allowed Varrah to prosper, eons of scarcity, or desperate survival, were hard to dislodge from any culture. There remained a general, underlying understanding in the Varran mindset that they could let absolutely nothing go to waste.
“Gazza, how long have you worked with the seafood boilers… whatever their official name is?” Ai stopped in the middle of her question. She didn’t know what the seafood boilers were actually called.
“Oh, ‘bout nine years, or summat. Mebbe ten? I’m here ‘cause it’s the Dockworkers’ Guild that runs this joint. We also run the Skewer Alley next door!” He pointed with a beefy hand. His barrel chest was thickly built like a tree trunk, and the voice that came out of it was just as thick and booming. It seemed like everyone working Galan Street was built like this, if both Gazan and the Skewer Alley vendors from earlier were anything to go by.
“Everyone just calls this place the Galan Street Boilpot!” He guffawed again, as seemed to be his habit. With that, he put down his tools and climbed down from his perch—he’d been in the middle of cleaning the Karuga-shell cauldron—and walked over to check on Ai’s progress.
“Oh, good. You’re nearly done. Once you finish, go take the shells to Ossa, that old bag sittin’ over there in the corner. She’s been in charge here since forever ago, see? You tell her Gazza checked over your work and that there’s nothin’ to worry about.” He peered into the sacks she had been sorting the shells into, evidently finding her menial performance satisfactory. It took only a couple more minutes afterwards for Ai to finish up.
She was about to take her haul to the old woman who Gazza had pointed out, when she noticed a thickly corded braid of dyed rope swinging from Gazza’s hip. It was a rich blue, a similar color to the Temple of Storms’ blue paint. Any dye of that quality couldn’t have been cheap, especially for a laborer on a dockworker’s wages. More importantly, there were currents of magic running through it—
[Firm-Knot]-[Merra-Strength]-[Resh-Blessing].
—that intrigued her. But Gazza himself had what would have been a D-Rank or even F-Rank Semblance during Dirge. Essentially non-magical, for all intents and purposes. The length of cord must have been prepared by someone else, or have been the result of a charm or cantrip. Folk magic, whose cost was borne by the collective Semblance of a people because it had been engraved so deeply into the world that it had for all intents and purposes become reality. All it usually took to invoke them was an action or a prayer.
The chain of ideas connected the tying of the knot into a blessing by the Storm God. [Merra] seemed to be a concept tied to a social group, and it being concatenated with [Strength] indicated that this was a spell that beseeched Resh for physical strength, but only for a group called the Merra.
Gazza caught her staring.
“Oh, I know that look. You’re a karra, aren’t you? I had this done by my niece, she gets that same look in her eye when she’s doin’ anything magical. She’s named after the Progenitor too, y’know.” He chuckled.
“Mayhap little Aylan could even make it to an Academy some day, grow past bein' a Merra like her old man and her uncle. If you'll pardon my impudence, Lady Aspirant." Gazza said, looking past Ai. Ai turned her head to follow his gaze. Sari had returned from sweeping up, broom still in hand. Her white and azure robes made her rank plain to see, though that was certainly by design.
"There's nothing to apologize for. I was the first from my village to attend an Academy as well. I come from deep in the Northern Acquisition, so new to the Republic we weren't even assigned a caste yet, but… here I am now. If I could do it, she can too." She said with a gentle smile, managing to sound neat and professional despite being covered in dust from her sweeping. She turned to face Ai.
“Miss Ayle, we should get going. It’s still Fourth Drum, but I’m sure you’d like to look around the city more before we have to meet up with Master Benessel.” We’ve done our communal duty, so we’re safe to leave now, was left unsaid.
Ai froze for a moment, her mind going back to what Gazza had just said about his niece.
Also named after ‘the Progenitor’?
Her mind flashed back to the immediate aftermath of her transmigration a couple weeks ago, when she was reviewing her Status screen. When she’d first learned of her massively increased SSS-Rank Semblance. There was something in there about a Progenitor—
“[Status]-[Semblance].” She quickly whispered. Dirge’s game UI was individually rendered to each Player so that others couldn’t see your menus, making it so that people had to actually communicate with each other. But invoking it still required a verbal component—a cantrip, just like Gazza’s knot, only built into the game by the devs rather than centuries of cultural practice, however that was resolved in her new reality.
The Semblance panel of her [Status] screen shimmered into being in front of her, visible only to herself.
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Semblance
A measure of your influence on the world. The greater your impact, the higher your Semblance, and the mightier your magic becomes.
Semblance: SSS (LIMIT BROKEN: 99,999+/10,000 [Rank: ???])
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Recent Additions:
+15,000: [Progenitor of Magecraft]
+10,000: [Shield Against the Shadowed Dark]
+5,000: [Spearhead of the Grand Coalition]
+5,000: [Hero of the Titanomachy]
…
[show more?]
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There it was, just as she’d remembered. She’d gained over 15,000 in her Semblance from an achievement called [Progenitor of Magecraft]. That was worth an entire S-Rank mage’s Semblance all on its own.
She had been loathe to accept the idea that the Varrans actually venerated her specifically. She’d suspected it given all the context clues, especially when [Stormold] turned out to have achieved apotheosis while, as far as she knew, her physical body was off hibernating.
She was more preoccupied with the nature of the Ve’un when Benessel had said something about her name being an “auspicious alias”, and Inneol the Burned Man had said something to the effect of her being “arrogant” to take the name Ayle. Both men’s comments felt to her like they’d been made offhand, something said to flatter or denigrate her, words that were meant to affect her in some way. Ai’s mind went to the engraving in her sarcophagus, back at the tomb she and Aru had been interred in.
First of the Karravar.
She’d assumed [Stormold] and the rest of her guild—whoever was around when they’d built the tomb, if they had built it—had meant that she was the founder and guildmaster of Karravar [kava]. But if the Varrans viewed her as the Progenitor of their magecraft, as the literal founder of their Karravar order and thus explicitly tied to the geopolitical and magical might of the Varran Republic…
Well. Her Semblance being what it was started to make even more sense.
“...Are you alright, Miss Ayle?” Sari was right in her face. Her brows were furrowed slightly, apparently worried.
“...Yes. It’s nothing.”
“If you say so, Miss Ayle.” Sari acquiesced, but even Ai could see that she was being humored.
Ai frowned. She had gotten away from her objective long enough. She needed to gather information.
“So! Gazza!” Ai changed the subject, “Do you know of any strange tales? Local stories? Anything noteworthy, anything at all?”
Word had soon spread that there was a strange karra named Ayle asking questions about local mysteries, who came into the Galan Street Boilpot along with a bonafide Karravar Aspirant. Within half an hour, Ai was surrounded by a gaggle of local Merra—which had turned out to be the word for the Varran Republic’s laborer caste at the bottom rung of society, which was definitely not a thing back during the game. Each of the locals who’d gathered had some tall tale or oddity they wanted to regale her with, but it was immediately obvious that some of the stories had more merit than others.
Gazza was there, apparently taking it upon himself to sort out the ridiculous tales from the less-ridiculous ones.
“Oy! Stop wastin’ Miss Ayle’s time, you lot!” He shouted, apparently having interpreted Sari’s interactions with her to mean that Ai needed to be addressed with an honorific. Given that the Karravar seemed to be so honored within Varran society, and now that she knew he was of a low caste, his choice of verbiage made sense.
She’d much rather him just call her Ayle, though.
“She’s lookin’ for real stories, not some tripe about some Seranal with a weird fin your cousin caught out on his fishing trip last week!” Gazza went on.
“Blow it out your ass, Gazza!” A particularly courageous dockworker had shouted back, earning him a meaty smack upside the head.
There were a few more hecklers, but Gazza weeded them out until eventually there were only a handful of people left. Each of them had a serious look on their face, clearly worried about something. One of them, a reed-thin man with furrowed eyes, glanced up at Gazza for permission to speak. The hulking man nodded, then gestured for him to step forward.
“M’name’s Baboc, Miss Ayle,” He stammered, gesturing to the others as well, “There’s something you ought to know about. We come here to work all the way from the edge of Ashakir, out in Kannac town. People’ve been going missing.
“It can’t be seawyrms, we’d find… traces of’em—and it’s not regular land wyrms neither, only fishermen are goin' missin'. Some of the night-fishing boats have come back talkin’ about the… well, we don’t get Karravar comin’ in to help us, no offense to present company, of course, your Ladyship.” He rushed to apologize, but Sari gestured for him to continue with a wave of her hand.
“Right, well. Everyone says there’s something strange happenin’ with the Ve’un . No one’s dumb enough to go past it when it’s dark, but we hafta make a living, so people go out near the edge where the fish are, see?” Baboc explained.
“We’re losin’ people what seems like every night. People’re too scared to go out to fish unless the Sun’s high in the sky now, Nor be blessed. But the city ain’t comin’ to help us. We’re just Merra. The Darranor just told poor Essel here to donate a fat honkin’ offerin’ if we wanted’em to come take a look. You’re our only hope, Miss Ayle.”
Missing townsfolk and potentially Veh-related shenanigans at the edge of town. That was a capital-Q Quest if Ai ever saw one. She glanced down at Aru, who happily flapped his feathered tail against the floor.
"We'll go take a look." She decided.
"Thank you kindly…” Baboc bowed deeply, his voice full of affected reverence. He glanced side-eyed at Sari, his face unreadable despite his reverent tone.
"...Karravar Ayle."