Monroe

Chapter Two Hundred and Fifty-Two. Surfs up!

There were definitely advantages to having superhuman dexterity, Bob mused as he crouched a bit lower on the surfboard.

Monroe was perched towards the front of the board, the big Maine-Coon sitting primly, the only signs of his excitement being a swishing tail.

Bob had been right, Monroe loved surfing. As long as he didn't get dumped in the water, and even then, he didn't mind swimming if the waves weren't too tall.

Fortunately, Bob had the foresight to practice a bit before adding the big floofer to the mix.

As the water curled over his head, sparkling and refracting the sun, he smiled. Hawaii was amazing. Between this and the Bahamas, he was beginning to consider a move to a more tropical location.

He hadn't gone looking yet, but there had to be tropical islands near or at the equator of Thayland. If there weren't, he was pretty sure he could make one.

He managed to ride the wave almost all the way in, hopping off the board when the water was just barely up to his chest and towing the board along with his imperial majesty all the way up to the beach, where Monroe stepped off and sauntered over to the pavilion where Dave and Amanda were lounging.

The beach wasn't nearly as crowded as it had been the previous two days, which may have had a correlation to the President's announcement that the world, while not ending, was going to have a bit of a hiccup, and the entire planet would be evacuating.

They'd all watched the speech the night before, as well as the news broadcasts afterward, and he'd been impressed with how she'd handled it. There hadn't been any rioting, at least not in Hawaii, or specifically not on the beach they were vacationing on.

"He looked pretty comfortable out there," Amanda said, reaching down to rub Monroe's ears before the big cat jumped up onto a lounge, circled twice, kneaded the cushion four times, and then sprawled out.

"He liked it," Bob confirmed. "I can sense his emotions, sort of, and he was all wind/smell/water/sun/happy."

"Doesn't that feel kind of weird, constantly knowing what Monroe is feeling?" Dave asked.

"Not really? It's sort of compartmentalized," Bob explained, "I have to focus on it unless he's feeling something very strongly and trying to get my attention."

"Oh, I should be your familiar," Amanda grinned at Dave, "then I could just think at you when I need you to get me a drink or rub my feet."

"We'd have to be each other's familiars, remember the Reciprocity Accord of twenty-thirteen," Dave smiled back as he sat up and pulled her lounge chair toward him so that he could rub her feet.

"Of course," Amanda purred, closing her eyes, "then I'd know whenever you need to release a little 'tension.'"

"You two never stop, do you," Jessica's voice came from behind Bob, and he turned to see the vivacious Australian pulling a wheeled cooler along the beach as she approached.

"Why would we?" Dave asked as he focused his attention on Amanda's insole.

"Oh, you shouldn't ever stop," Jessica grinned, "just makes a single shiela feel a bit lonesome."

She picked up the cooler and placed it on the table, then turned to face the ocean, taking off her wide-brimmed hat and tossing it on a lounge chair next to Bob.

She was wearing a white bikini that showed off the light golden tan she had quickly acquired.

Bob, despite hours in the sun surfing and parasailing, was still incredibly pale. His only consolation was that he hadn't burned either.

She moved her lounge into the sun and adjusted it, so it was flat, then flopped down it face first. "Bob, be a mate and slap some lotion on my back?" She said cajolingly.

Bob sighed and grabbed the bottle of lotion from the towel on the table and ignored Amanda's giggle as he carefully applied it to Jessica's back.

He knew that he shouldn't be uncomfortable with casual physical contact amongst friends, but it wasn't something he'd ever had, and he wasn't used to it.

Jessica seemed determined to help him overcome that.

It wasn't that he didn't find her attractive. Objectively, he could recognize that she was absolutely beautiful, and her easy and outgoing nature made it easy to be around her. He just had a hard time with physical contact, and she'd made it obvious that she was attracted to him, which was something else he didn't have much experience with.

"Thanks," Jessica murmured from her pillow after he'd finished.

"I think the proper response is 'No worries, mate,' right?" Bob replied.

"We'll make an Aussie out of you yet," was Jessica's muffled response.

"Your Majesty," Mike nodded stiffly.

Kellan grinned as he looked over the facility he'd built. He was processing twenty thousand people an hour, placing them into stasis and moving them into the warehouse.

"How many people have been processed so far?" Kellan asked.

Mike pulled his tablet out of his inventory and tapped it for a moment before replying. "One million six hundred and twenty thousand eight hundred and twelve."

"You've done very well," Kellan said. "Are there any issues that need addressing? Any flaws in the design or execution?"

"There have been a few issues with the divine blessing's translation being a bit off, and if the next batch of stasis units could be a friendlier color, that would be nice," Mike replied.

"On the whole, it's been successful then," Kellan stated, noting Mike's nod.

"Excellent, I'll need more of your people to staff another ten identical facilities," Kellan said.

Someone with less keen hearing would have missed the slight sigh. Kellan raised an eyebrow and looked at Mike expectantly.

"Will that be a problem?" Kellan asked.

"No," Mike replied, "No, it won't. I'll just need to set up a command structure to coordinate three shifts of twelve thousand men each, making sure they are transported with enough time to switch out at their stations, schedule and coordinate breaks and lunches, and make sure they actually have food available, etc." Mike sighed again.

"Bob once told me that your people had a saying about the reward for a job well done being more work," Kellan offered with a grin.

"That we do," Mike agreed.

"Rest assured that in Greenwold, the reward for a job well done is somewhat more substantial," Kellan replied, taking a folded piece of parchment and handing it to Mike.

Mike opened the parchment and scanned it briefly, then his complexion paled, and he read it again, more slowly this time. "Are you serious?" Mike asked.

"I am," Kellan stated firmly. "You've shown yourself to be an excellent leader. While I realize you likely haven't consulted all of your men yet, I think you'll find an eighth of an acre per man sufficient. All you need to do is locate the land on which you'd like to settle, and I will ensure that skilled personnel, familiar with magically enhanced civil engineering, are available to plan your city."

"I'm not even sure if I'm going to stay," Mike protested.

Kellan smiled. "Come now," he said gently, "you've been back to Earth once in how many months? And that was only to attend the funeral of your former wife. While you may not have admitted it to yourself, Greenwold is your home now."

He patted Mike on the shoulder and strolled away. He had no doubt that Mike was going to stay on Thayland, if only because so many of his men were. Quite a few of them were more than a little angry about the manner in which their government had treated them, and his delivering the mana crystals that in their minds ought to have been used to heal them in the first place had cemented their decision to stay on Thayland.

Mike would stay, accepting the title and founding a Noble house and a new city.

His next step was to find a disenfranchised population of women from Earth and add them to Mike's new city. The Old Guard had very few women, which was not conducive to a healthy and stable population, so he'd need to correct that.

Kellan was confident that if he mixed the genders in equal ratios, that problem would sort itself out. Humans tended to pair off easily enough, and soon the population would be self-sustaining.

He planned to steer Mike towards settling on the western side of the southern coast. The area suffered from rather terrible storms, but if you ignored the month of unending raining that bookended winter, the climate was more temperate, and he'd been looking to anchor that corner of his Kingdom for several centuries.

Juan grimaced as he read the latest report.

His ascension to the presidency had been unexpected. The former president had died suddenly after returning from the mysterious disaster at the United Nations.

The briefing he'd been provided left a rather large but unspoken accusation pointing to the King of Greenwold as the likely cause. Seeing no other choice, he'd done as he was instructed, cycling the country's military personnel into a magic portal and delivering a message to his people.

All as instructed.

In return, he'd been brought to the new world, given enough mana crystals to reach level five, and taken the skills they'd advised.

Juan had met, in secret, with the newly appointed prime minister of his neighbor to the south. They'd quietly come to the mutual agreement that the King of Greenwold was responsible for not only the deaths of their predecessors but also the deaths of other world leaders. It was a terrifying realization that someone could simply snuff out the lives of important men so easily, with no repercussions. It served to highlight the changes the world would go through. The strong would rule, and the weak would serve.

Juan's unspoken concern was that the race had already been run and won. It was impossible to catch up to the King of Greenwold, and so the best he could hope for was to become a strong, stable ruler that the King wouldn't feel a need to depose.

He'd rushed to make changes to his country that would reflect a more civil, enlightened society. The report in front of him was yet another indication that this change wasn't going to come easily. While the countries further north of him suffered the worst from the cartels, they had a presence here as well, and they were resistant to being dug out.

His predecessor had been bought and paid for by the cartels and had allowed their influence to dig deeply into his country. The cartels had grown even more vicious after they'd been ousted from Mexico, as evidenced by the pushback against his reforms.

Juan called for his secretary. He didn't have the military might that Mexico had somehow possessed, but in the interest of rooting out the cartels, perhaps the President of Mexico might be convinced to lend it to him. Their countries shared a long, most often amiable history. It couldn't hurt to make the call, not when he considered the alternative.

"Two weeks?" Elania asked in surprise.

"The King hired thirty some odd thousand of the Old Guard to staff the facilities, and they'll be processing better than half a million people a day," Ed replied.

"Where is he getting the mana crystals?" She asked.

Ed grimaced. "Us, mostly. The Aussies and the Brits are contributing, as are the Russians, but the lion's share is coming from us."

"But we aren't even pulling that many crystals," Elania protested, tapping her tablet for a moment. "We just broke four hundred million last month."

"Yes, but we spent them all building out another fifty Dungeons," Ed sighed, "which means once fully staffed, we'll be pulling in close to a billion a month."

"And, of course, he's requiring that we pay an additional ten percent for the costs of constructing the warehouses to store our citizens, another ten percent for the cost of the rituals, and another ten percent for maintenance," Elania grumbled.

"Which means the United States alone will be paying, with our current Dungeons, four hundred million crystals a month," Ed agreed. "And we are far from the most populous nation."

"Mathematically, I think he can pull it off," Elania mumbled.

"His entire country is going to be wall-to-wall Dungeons, but the numbers I've run show that it's possible, although China and India are going to need to ramp up fast," Ed offered.

"We've been tasked to run a hundred Chinese through Glacier Valley, pushing them to level twenty-five as Curators," Elania said dryly.

"What?" Ed nearly shouted. "I'm going to be pushing my soldiers into stasis soon, we don't have time to train up any curators. Hell, I already begged Bob to train the beancounters from the IRS."

"I don't suppose we could lean on him to work with the Chinese?" Elania asked thoughtfully.

"I doubt it," Ed snorted, "he's training the number crunchers as a personal favor to me, and I don't have any credit left with him."

"If it's any consolation, the King tasked the Brits to train up the Indians," Elania sighed. "He's learned our history rather quickly, and I'm afraid some of the conclusions he's drawn reflect poorly on us, as his perspective is that of a being who has lived and ruled for thousands of years."

"He took out the worst of the despots and tyrants rather quickly," Ed grinned sharply. "I have to admit, I'm a lot more comfortable putting our soldiers in stasis with the knowledge that those people aren't around anymore."

"His timing was unfortunate," Elania disagreed. "Everyone either knows or suspects that he was behind their removal, and it has served as a rather pointed example of what will happen to anyone who doesn't play along."

"While I'm not a fan of surrendering our sovereignty to anyone, it's hard to argue with the results," Ed said firmly. "Honduras reached out to Mexico for help with cartels, that started a domino effect that is going to see those fuckers completely wiped out."

Elania waved a hand. "Yes, and they won't be missed," she nodded. Her Secretary of Defence tended to see things through the lens of his office. Threats to the United States were to be removed. Not that she minded that particular cancer's removal from the world.

Some of her citizens might end up suffering from withdrawal, but ultimately they'd be better off. Honestly, the opioid epidemic was worse than cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth combined.

The pharmaceutical companies were suffering a bit, as the footage of their attempted theft from Harvest Eilodon had been authenticated, and the information had been disseminated to all the major news outlets that he'd been attempting to arrange to have a cure for cancer distributed to anyone who needed it, for free.

It had been especially interesting to watch two major news networks go down in flames as one failed to report the event, claiming that the allegations were yet to be substantiated, while another had tried to spin it entirely, painting Johnson and Johnson as the victim.

She shook her head, clearing her thoughts.

"You need more sleep," Ed told her flatly. "You're burning the candle at both ends. If you were an officer under my command, I'd have you confined to the infirmary, isolation, for forty-eight hours."

"I've got a mostly empty morning tomorrow," she replied, trying to hide a yawn that surfaced at the mention of sleep. "I'm going to bed after this, and I'm not due to be awake for six hours."

Ed snorted again and shook his head but let the subject drop. He knew from experience that sometimes, six hours was a luxury.

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