Magic is Programming

Carlos firmly suppressed his urge to laugh at the sight of the mayor's facepalm, and dismissed his thoughts of Star Trek memes. However amusing the comparison might be, explaining it even to Amber would be difficult, and he wanted to show this man respect. As the old and presumably experienced mayor of the town, or city or whatever it was, that Carlos was being put in charge of, he could be either a priceless ally or a tremendously bothersome obstacle, and Carlos would much prefer having him as an ally.

A moment passed in awkward silence, the mayor still resting his face in his hands, and Amber blushed and stammered. "I- Um. W-what's wrong?"

Without a word, and without even looking, the mayor shifted to let just his left hand support his face, and reached down with his right hand to open a drawer in his desk. He pulled out a small sheet of paper with something printed on it, and held it out in the air in front of him, still not looking, until Carlos took it. Carlos held it a bit to the side towards Amber, so that the two of them could read it together.

Yes, Sandaras passed through Dramos on his way into the Wilds when he was not yet famous.

No, Sandaras did not grow up in Dramos. No, Sandaras did not learn anything significant in Dramos. No, Sandaras did not meet anyone famous in Dramos. No, Sandaras did not achieve anything of note in Dramos. No, Sandaras did not return to Dramos, not even on his way back from the same trip to the Wilds. No, Sandaras does not consider Dramos important or care about it.

Sandaras arrived in Dramos late in the evening, got a meal and a room at one of our cheapest inns, and stayed the night. A pair of young would-be thieves tried to break into his room to rob him in the middle of the night. Sandaras dispatched both of them and left their bodies outside his door, where one of the inn's maids found them shortly before they dissipated. He was briefly questioned about the incident, but when the innkeeper confirmed his legitimate renting of the room Sandaras was declared an innocent victim who merely defended himself. Sandaras departed into the Wilds early that morning. The identities of the thieves are not known.

The only reason anyone knows Sandaras was even here is the city guard's log of the robbery attempt. Someone noticed that record after Sandaras became famous as an archmage, and spread rumors about it. Whatever you heard that brought you here is absurd and ridiculous exaggeration.

Carlos paused at a word that didn't seem to make sense in context, and reached mentally for the bond with Amber that Purple had made. ['Dissipated'?]

[Hmm? Oh, right, your world doesn't have respawning. When someone respawns, their dead body disappears. Some theorists think that it's actually transported and healed somehow to form the respawned body, but whatever happens doesn't work the same way as a teleport spell.]

Amber continued staring at the paper for a few seconds, then gulped and awkwardly cleared her throat. "Um. Well. That's... disappointing. And embarrassing."

The mayor groaned, and put his right hand back into supporting his forehead again, still not looking up. "Please tell me that wasn't your only reason for choosing Dramos."

Carlos stepped forward half a step. "Dramos is near a broad swath of Wilds with plenty of potential territory to tame and claim, and also has significant size and a major road connecting to it."

The mayor shifted, raising his head to look forward at Carlos, and rested his chin instead of his forehead on his hands. "Is that all?"

Carlos almost flinched at the mayor's dry tone. Carlos might nominally be in charge, but he really didn't feel like he'd earned it, and he was used to deferring to his bosses instead. "Well, to be honest, we weren't really prepared to become nobles, and weren't given much information to base the decision on." He nervously raised his right hand to scratch the back of his head. "Though, ah, it occurs to me that we could have asked. And should have. Sorry. Um. What would you suggest that we do?"

The mayor raised an eyebrow and stared at Carlos. Then his body shook slightly. Then again. Then he lifted his head off his hands, sat back up, and started laughing. He paused for a moment to breathe, but then laughed a bit more, before wiping his forehead and settling down, taking a deep breath to stop his lingering chuckles. "Well, there's something to be said for acknowledging your own shortcomings, at least. Can't say I ever thought a high lord, newly raised or not, would be asking me for advice. High Lord Carlos Founder, I think it was? I'm Mayor Stelras of Dramos. Welcome to Dramos, and I hope you can make this city truly worthy of the term, but you have a lot of work to do."

A bit of tension seemed to leave the air, and Carlos relaxed and lowered his arm, belatedly noticing the nervous gesture he'd been making. "Good to meet you Mayor Stelras. I have my own area of expertise, and I am not at all shy about that, but administering a government and making it work smoothly is not it. What does Dramos need from us the most?"

Mayor Stelras leaned back in his chair and slowly ran his gaze over Carlos and Amber. "Hmm. New nobles. Escorts from the Crown means no other notable backing. Very young. And while my sense for other people's mana isn't the best, I can tell your soul development is still minor, if not brand new. Right now, you are nobles only in your potential. You must develop, and quickly. Fortunately, the one benefit of high soul rank that kicks in immediately is faster development. Even mythril rank can't hold a candle to your adamantium for development rate.

"So go practice. Train. Go adventure!" Stelras started rising to his feet as he continued expounding his advice, his voice growing gradually louder and his hands waving to punctuate his points. "Use your ten soul structures, exercise your soul as much as you possibly can, to absorb and incorporate more mana into yourselves. And for souls' sake, don't die! The setback to your development might be cheap right now, but it won't stay that way. You can't afford to be casual about respawning like too many commoners are!"

Stelras paused, glanced down at his desk, which was now much farther below his head than when he'd been sitting, then straightened and cleared his throat. "Ahem. But I'm sure your assigned guards can give all the guidance you need on that topic. In any case, if you openly declare your nobility to all as you are now, you will attract trouble like a lantern at night attracts flies. Things will go more smoothly for you if you go incognito, and you don't strike me as the type to care about flaunting your status."

Carlos nodded. "Makes sense, and I don't mind at all." He glanced at the two guards behind them. "I don't know if incognito can work with two sets of that impressive armor shadowing us, though."

The guard on the right, nearer Carlos, bowed toward him. "The Crown prepared for exactly this eventuality, my lord." Without further ceremony, both guards' armor came alive with motion, flowing and transforming as it shrank inward. It stopped gleaming so brightly, and some sections changed from hard steel into flexible cloth or leather, while others morphed into pieces of chainmail. The metal covering from their eyes to their necks retracted into the upper part of their helmets, leaving just a vertical bar in the center over the nose to protect their faces below the forehead.

Their armor now looked like something that at least was available in the shop where Amber had bought Carlos's armor, though well out of Amber's price range at the time. The mana in the armor was... Huh. Carlos squinted, and really focused his mana sense on where he'd felt mana in that armor before. There was still some easily sensed mana in a few places, but much less than he remembered, and he didn't think the armor's transformation would have cost that much. He pushed at it for a few more seconds, and... the guard did something Carlos could barely sense, and the armor's mana opened up for just a moment, giving a brief glimpse of how much was truly still there before closing back up and concealing it again.

Carlos smiled sheepishly and nodded in thanks before turning back to Mayor Stelras. "Ok, what do we look like now?"

"If you take off those platinum rings and hide them away, you will appear like a pair of youths seeking adventure whose parents have hired guards for you. Some might still think you have money you have not learned to spend wisely, but that is a much less troublesome thing."

"Good. That leaves one last thing I don't know if we can conceal well enough." Carlos brought out Purple, and placed him on the mayor's desk.

Stelras looked quizzically at the small purple crystal, just slightly taller than an inch and half as wide, and raised both eyebrows high as the crystal stood on one pointed tip, the other tip pointing straight up, and began hovering in the air above his desk. "My word! You have a...? And mobile? No, no, I won't ask. I don't want to know. Smallest one I've ever heard of, but you're right to be concerned. You probably won't encounter anyone who can detect it when it's hidden, but if anyone does notice..." He shook his head. After a moment of consideration, he looked past Carlos's shoulder. "I don't suppose you Royal Guards can do something?"

The guard standing behind Carlos shook his head. "If it is stolen, we will fulfill the Crown's obligation to recover a House Treasure upon request. We can guard it, or transport it somewhere. We cannot conceal it from magical detection. That would require either an expert mage, or a custom commission from the Enchanters Guild."

"No enchanters!" Carlos immediately interjected, then paused to consider how much to say. "We... have some history with the Enchanters Guild involving this. We do not want to draw their attention to it again."

"Very well, but we have no mage in Dramos expert enough for the task. Even the novices who come chasing Sandaras's legend usually leave after finding out the truth." Mayor Stelras grimaced. "That leaves just taking the risk of someone discovering it on you, or sending it into the Wilds, or leaving it stashed somewhere as your only options."

"Hmm." Carlos tilted his head slightly and brought a hand to his chin as he looked down at Purple, pretending to just be thinking. [I think it's probably best to not let anyone, including Stelras, know that you can talk and understand speech until we get powerful enough to protect you ourselves, but would you be ok with staying with him for a while? Until we go to the Wilds, at least?]

[Yes. Is ok. That is ok. Can stay in one place longer and build.]

[Don't disrupt any wards he has, but yeah. This will probably be for at least a few days.] Carlos turned his gaze back to the mayor. "Stelras, could you keep it for now?"

Stelras grimaced again. "Yes. The city treasury has a secure safe for exceptionally valuable items; I can put it in there. That crystal is probably worth more than the entire treasury, but it's the most secure place we have."

"It will have to do. We should put our house plate and rings there too, while we're at it." Carlos suited his actions to his words as he spoke, taking off his ring and getting the plate out from his pack. By the time he placed both items next to Purple on the mayor's desk, Amber had already put her ring there as well.

"We'll need you to point us to an appropriate inn for our guise, and provide money to pay for it. Sorry about that, but we're broke. Maybe we'll find something valuable in the wilds eventually to repay it. Um. And I think that's all before we go. Amber, can you think of anything else?" Carlos looked at Amber, but she just shook her head, and movement in the corner of his eye drew his attention back to Stelras.

Stelras's head and upper body were quivering, and the corners of his mouth turned up, and finally he broke out laughing. He weakly sat back down, chuckling and shaking his head the whole way down, until he took a deep breath, unlocked and opened a drawer low on the left side of his desk, grabbed a small bag that clinked as he raised it, and casually tossed the bag to Carlos. "Nobles. Saying you're broke. Offering to repay your own mayor the cost of an inn in your own city. Hehe. Ha! You really are completely new to all this, aren't you?" He shook his head in amusement. "You know about taxes, right? You're nobles. You receive taxes now. That money's yours. A fraction of the unallocated cash reserves of Dramos, which is your city."

Carlos peered into the bag and saw a mix of copper, silver, and gold coins. Not too many of the gold, but even a single gold coin was roughly equivalent in value here to ten thousand dollars back on Earth. Very roughly, and some things cost a lot more, or a lot less, than on Earth, but it was still a useful number for getting a sense of the magnitude of an amount of money in this unfamiliar currency. Stelras had just tossed him the equivalent of about half a year's salary, gross not net, at his old software engineering job. The house name plate and rings the Crown had given them were many times more valuable, but those were special items they had to keep. This was cash for spending.

Carlos started laughing himself, and hefted the bag, feeling its weight, before tucking it into a pocket. "Right, I'll have to get used to that idea. Thanks for not exploiting our ignorance about that. Now just point us to an appropriate inn, and we'll let you get back to managing the city until we're ready to be actually useful."

Ressara, Investigative Scholar, idly chewed a bit of steak as she watched the common room of the Adventurer's Haven from her vantage point at a corner table. Oddly, despite her efforts to avoid attention by cloaking her buxom figure with a slouch and a cloak, hiding her long dark hair under a hood, and trying to fade into the shadows of the darkest corner the room had, it seemed she could barely go a few minutes without yet another adventurer trying to strike up a conversation. They kept asking if she had any need for an adventurer's services, and some had even come back to ask again, as if they thought she was lying when she said no.

Every so often, someone new would walk in the inn's door, and she'd perk up and try to assess them. Were they here chasing Sandaras's legend? Inspired to match it, perhaps? Did they have any chance of succeeding? Ressara had known before she even set out for Dramos that the rumors were probably vastly overblown, but that didn't matter to her. Sandaras's story was old, and the trail of anything not already known was so cold it might as well be dead. She was not here to investigate Sandaras. She was here to find and investigate the next legend in the making, ideally even as a firsthand witness, and to her the rumors about Sandaras were just a lure to draw in her quarry.

Ressara took a sip of cold water, the ice in it one of the luxuries offered by this premier inn of the city, and glanced over at the door yet again. Her eyes instantly locked onto a pair of very professional looking soldiers as they entered. Their stance and bearing, and the way they systematically but rapidly looked over every spot in the room, told of experienced professional wariness, and their armor was expertly made. What really drew her attention, however, was how their soul development was disguised.

A layer of mana, that superficially appeared to be the outermost layer of development on the surface of the soul, obscured the true surface of each soldier's soul. The fake was well crafted and she could not see beyond it, but Ressara had dedicated a specialized soul structure to examining other souls, and that layer was too uniform and orderly to be natural. The ultimate proof of it, however, was that an auxiliary enchantment kept gently but insistently nudging her to pay no attention to it. It would have worked, too, if she hadn't prepared for such things by making a soul structure to detect and invert any attempts to influence her mind by magic.

...Maybe the inversion part of that structure hadn't been such a good idea, though. It was actually difficult to take her attention away from those two souls to focus on anything else. With an effort, she tore her eyes away from the soldiers, and examined the pair they were escorting. They were a pair of youths, one man and one woman. The man walked with a confident stride, standing straight and tall with shoulders held high, but the young woman seemed to be suppressing the urge to shrink away from everyone around her, and not quite succeeding.

And for the soul development of those two... Oh my! Small portions of mother's soul shell were still there, and yet their own surface layers were already compressed once, and they were greedily drinking in the ambient mana much faster than she'd ever seen before from anyone who wasn't actively focusing on it. The persistent urge to pay attention to the guards' souls instead faded into the background, overwhelmed by her newfound fascination. The mana of the air was responding to their presence with a quickness and strength that suggested they might be mages, too.

This bore investigating.

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