Sydney released a powerful and frigid pressure toward Thea Glasshammer’s face. Her gaze didn’t waver in the slightest. “...what did you say?”

Thea’s barred her teeth. “Do I need to spell it out for you? Your subordinate’s elemental isn’t here. It was taken by Ace several months ago in order to study the composition of elementals. Honestly, at this point…heh.”

If anything, Sydney’s gaze turned colder. But she didn’t follow the impulse of her temper. Instead, she tilted her head to the side and examined Thea. This was… wrong somehow.

It had taken Sydney months in order to locate the small island that the Nemesai called home. When she had seen the state of their living conditions, even Sydney felt a brief flash of pity for these individuals. They were truly living out of caves in order to survive. Apparently, Phirun was using the time where the other Zones were preparing to search for the Runic Tablet to hunt the Nemesai down to the ends of the Earth.

King Phirun held a deep grudge against the Nemesai for nearly causing Ifrenne to crash into the sea, after all. And he was not the sort of man to forget small slights.

Yet it wasn’t just exhaustion and fear that Sydney found in Thea’s expression. Her eyes were narrowed and it was fury that seemed to burn with a tangible heat in her person. Sydney’s skin tingled as she continued to channel her new image through her body in the face of that heat, extinguishing its influence around her. Cold and a numbness that was not quite related to the cold spread across her body. Yet Sydney didn’t even blink.

Her anger was completely extinguished. What she needed was to understand whether Thea Glasshammer was lying to her right now.

The tension of the moment seemed the vibrate the air between the two women. Then Sydney saw it. Thea wasn’t lying, but she was posturing. In order to push Sydney to challenge her to a fight. Right now, Thea Glasshammer was raw and itching for a target for all the aggression she didn’t want to turn toward herself.

Coward. Very purposefully, Sydney blinked. The chill surrounding her faded.

Some part of Sydney wanted to try and say something to Thea, guide her toward some self-reflection that would rid her of this burden she carried. Yet Sydney already had her hands full trying to finally put Drake back together. The man had been insensible from pain for almost a year at this point.

In the past, Sydney would have felt more sympathy for Thea. Now she just felt pity. She couldn’t muster up any desire to assist this young woman.

So Sydney turned away. “Thanks for the information.”

Ace… what happened to us…? Behind her, Thea’s image flared to life, furious but unwilling to be the aggressor in the situation. Yet Sydney just looked down toward her numb hands. A white bolt of lightning skittered across her knuckles. Would you truly continue to prolong Drake’s torture in order to accomplish your twisted wish…? Why couldn’t you have let go of your obsession.

Sydney’s hands dropped to her sides. She spoke out loud as she left the caves, one small favor for the girl too afraid of the truth standing behind her. “We aren’t gods. We are all just shitty people… even Randidly Ghosthound.”

*****

In the end, Randidly had to pull out some spare lumber that he had laying around in his interspatial ring in order to support the rapid proliferation of sketches he made as he designed the Kharon Academy’s underground Labyrinth. After much deliberation, Randidly had set the goal to create nine levels to the labyrinth to mirror the nine worlds held by Yggdrasil. But since even his first level meant he was standing in the middle of a wide circle of hastily made sketches...

So Randidly had constructed his typical one-room shack, with a writing desk and heavy wooden table in the middle of the shack. The walls had since been covered in pages of initial designs, from play mechanisms to traps to puzzles and finally to the initial idea for a living engraving that Randidly would carve into the place to give it its own spirit.

All the hung sketches had the strange effect of making the house seem like a normal woodcutter’s shack from the outside, but once one was inside, it looked like the entirety of the structure was made with the fluttering pieces of paper that had been pinned to the walls. It was a rustling house of cards, ready to fall. Not a single spot of wood, aside from the table, desk, and the roof, was showing.

When Randidly had gone down for his second batch of paper, Tatiana gave him an extremely strange look. Perhaps her insight into Randidly’s actions had triggered, because she reminded Randidly that his main focus should be on solving the problems they already had, not creating more complicated jobs for her.

Randidly grinned at her and winked, to which Tatiana rolled her eyes. But he did spend some more time thinking about the problems plaguing Kharon before he returned to the time sink that Randidly’s shack had become.

Most of the struggles between the various economic interest on Kharon were for two reasons: space and funding. The former Randidly could address pretty easily, but the latter was a much more thorny bundle of problems. Because it wasn’t just that the companies wanted money from the government, but they wanted reassurance their investments weren’t soon going to become worthless.

Currently, Kharon charged a flat tax on both the importation of raw materials from the various areas they visited and on finished goods. All of the expenditures that Tatiana and her administration made had come from these taxes.

The companies essentially paid to bring in the raw materials and then the consumers paid to obtain their final products. But the tax itself was relatively small. Which meant most of the money was in fact in the hands of the various companies in Kharon, but they didn’t feel comfortable spending money on improving their own infrastructure because of the lack of predictability of Kharon’s movements.

Should they improve their work area? Should they invest in more warehouses? Would it be more intelligent to just watch as the price of land continued to rise and then sell their land to a competitor for double what they paid for it?

So the companies watched the way that Tatiana and Naffur, as the leaders of the Order Ducis and the Kharon government, spent their money and tried to extrapolate what that meant for the future of the Wandering City. Needless to say, it was not an efficient exercise and left most of the companies frustrated. Especially due to the sudden need for Kharon to head toward the borderlands recently. The unpredictability was finally beginning to wear on the people who had taken up residence in Kharon.

The people of Kharon knew the reason Randidly had brought them to the new areas. They understood their duty. But they also wished it didn’t feel like they were being ignored.

Essentially, the companies wanted more control over their own fates. Which was a tricky issue. In the end, Randidly sat crosslegged outside of his hut for almost two hours and considered what to do. Because he didn’t want to give up the freedom of Kharon’s movements. Yet he definitely could understand how the non-Order Ducis people wanted some additional predictability.

Randidly pressed his eyes closed. There isn’t an ideal solution… but perhaps adding some perceived control will help. Just feeling like there is a Path forward… even if the Path is long, seeing the steps they need to take has meaning.

So, despite being very aware that he had basically no training to be doing this, Randidly Ghosthound began designing a government. But as he did so, he worried less about the functional problems of how this government will function and more about how it would fit into the image of Kharon.

That image Randidly had been so careful to cultivate was the source of his city’s strength. Not any pretty words or designations as the home of the Order Ducis, the Order that policed the other Orders. Not being the home of the most powerful man in the world. But the spirit of the people that lived there. The government that Randidly began to create wouldn’t be successful because it was a perfect system, but because the people using it wanted to work.

So Randidly envisioned a council with five seats. Two would go to the leader of the Kharon city government and the Order Ducis respectively, but the other three would be determined semi-randomly. Three random pairs of names would be drawn from the list of every tax-paying adult who was registered with the Kharon government as a citizen. One person from each of those pairs would be chosen to be on the council.

Each individual selected to be in the pairs could nominate another to take their place on the council, but only before the decision between the two people was made. Such a nomination would have to be accepted; it could be rejected if someone wasn’t interested. For the first group, Randidly would choose one person from each of the pairs, but after that, the choice between the pairs would be made by the non-chosen individuals from the prior term’s pairings.

Randidly knew there had to be protections for the careers and livelihoods of the randomly chosen representatives, but he wasn’t sure where to begin. In this case, Randidly hoped Tatiana would be willing to take care of the details. What he wanted was not for established parties to emerge, but for organizations to satisfy themselves with letting the randomly chosen representatives from their midst being selected.

Probably a foolish dream, but Randidly hoped that the people who made Kharon’s decisions in the future would be those acting out of a sense of public duty, not due to a hunger for personal power or control.

Terms would be two months long. And each term would focus on three things. So that the businesses would be able to relax somewhat, two of those things would be visits to designated locations on Earth. Although Kharon would be free to wander most of the time, it would return at least once a month to trade with various settlements determined by the new governing body. The council would choose where those visits would occur.

The other task before the council was the grand mandate to engage in a singular ‘betterment project’ to improve the situation of Kharon itself. It was a general ask, but he hoped that was all he would need to ask. Randidly thought about expanding the new council’s responsibilities, but he figured those three things were enough for a two month period.

Of course, in addition to the government, what Kharon needed was space. So Randidly planned on making two other giant floating islands along with Kharon Academy. One would be middle-income housing and the other would be fertile fields, to try and alleviate some of the upward pressure on the land values inside the actual city limits of Kharon.

Making a housing sector would take some of the allure of becoming an instructor for Kharon Academy, but Randidly figured that the difference in quality would still make the Academy more of a draw. For the housing sector, he imagined mostly condos and apartment buildings. Perhaps also some specialty housing for the larger Ogres...

Relatively satisfied by his attempts to address the problems Tatiana brought to his attention, Randidly allowed himself to turn his attention back to the Kharon Academy project. Specifically, to the various images present in the labyrinth.

Not that Randidly planned to soak the whole area in his images, but it did occur to him that he could have others participate in the building of the labyrinth’s levels to create their own spin on what he had planned. Plus, Randidly was already running dry on ideas as he started designing the fourth floor of the labyrinth, which Randidly planned on being the largest of the nine. It would be the springboard to further exploration and the place where most children could cease their explorations.

Beyond that fourth however…

Humming to himself, Randidly didn’t even realize that someone had approached his hut until he heard a tentative knock on the door. His Grim Intuition belatedly spread outward and identified Mareen standing outside of his wooden shack.

After finishing the Aether diagram Randidly was currently working on, he went to the door. He tilted his head to the side when she immediately bowed. Randidly could sense her nervousness. He didn’t even need to sense her image; she was as stiff and ungainly as a puppet. “Are you here to talk about my house…?”

“What? Oh no.” Mareen blinked. Then she looked behind Randidly through the open door to the shack. Her eyes went across the papers hanging from the wall. She even blinked rapidly as the veritable sea of paper came within her purview. “Oh! Have you been working on the plans for your house?”

Randidly winced and stepped to the side. Again, he had lost track of time while working. A break might be a good change of pace, even if the work had been relatively fulfilling. Too much of even a good thing would kill you. “No, I honestly have not. This is… for something else. But come on in. If not for plans to build the house, what are you doing here?”

After walking into the shack, Mareen spun around. Then she pressed her lips together. “I… I know it’s unusual, but I thought…. Well, I’d like to ask for your blessing. I plan to ask Naffur to marry me.”

Randidly rubbed his chin. Then his brain registered what Mareen had said. “...Huh?”