“What is she doing?” Bath asked, expression irate. “I was hoping to meet with her.”

Samantha raised an eyebrow as she washed a pan in the sink. “You know, you sound just like any other teenager,” she remarked.

Bath visibly sulked as he sat down at the kitchen island and pushed a coaster back and forth.

“Sounds like you miss her,” Samantha smiled. It’s hard for me to reconcile this Bath with the Dragon of COTD, she thought. The ease with which he switched between different roles was disconcerting, but Samantha was determined to focus on the Bath in front of her.

My son, she reminded herself. The same Bath she’d taken on vacations, chaperoned on field trips. The son whom she’d tucked in at night and cuddled with under blankets by the fireplace.

My son, an alien, she sighed internally, shaking her head slightly.

“I guess,” Bath replied, looking up sheepishly.

Samantha chuckled. “She’ll be back soon,” she reminded him. “Or, you can go and attend the competition she’s participating in.”

“Maybe I will. Where’s she at?”

Samantha rolled her eyes as she placed her towel to dry on the rack by the window. “She’s at something called the ‘Junior Dragonleaf Olympiad’; it’s in Virginia somewhere. You can look up the details online.”

Samantha couldn’t remember where the competition was since Avery’s middle school had taken care of transporting the student athletes. And even after listening to Avery go on about the various new sports in the Olympiad, Samantha couldn’t definitively recall what any of them were. She knew they were twists on pre-COTD sports, and that they involved dragonleaf, but that was it.

“Where’s Dad?” Bath asked.

Samantha walked around and sat down next to Bath.

“He’s working on one of the government projects,” Samantha explained. “Since you’ve been gone, there’s been a push by local city leaders to put people to work on restoration initiatives. I believe your father is working on cleaning part of the shore.”

The two of them continued to talk, though Samantha was careful not to ask too much about what Bath had done in his capacity as the Dragon. She was inclined to go along with Bath’s clear separation of identities.

Since Avery was coming back in two days, they planned to have dinner together then. After sorting that out, Bath excused himself, announcing his intention to seek out Avery’s competition.

“See you soon,” Samantha called out as he left.

“Bye Mom,” he replied as the door closed behind him.

---

Bath was a little surprised that Brian was working on a restoration project. He had told Lepochim to write up a report of the many goings-ons and changes in his absence, but he hadn’t received it yet. While he had extended out his essence to cover his immediate surroundings, he hadn’t been focusing on information-gathering.

It seems like humans are really taking my environmentalist message to heart, Bath thought, smiling wryly to himself. It only took me taking over the world…

Before finding Avery, Bath decided to return to Basalith and do some professional-grade eavesdropping. While he’d gleaned from Nevis’ critical, offhanded comments that Lepochim had screwed some things up with regards to keeping all of COTD in check, he didn’t know the extent. He couldn’t imagine Lepochim messing things up too badly, especially since he’d placed so many responsibilities on quasi-sapients, but then again…

He dispersed his essence into a cloud of tiny gnats that changed into miniature ears all over the city. He resigned himself to listening for a few hours. All the while, he called Lisa to meet with him in one of the Spire’s office spaces.

“Wait, Susan and David are who again?”

Bath sighed. He and Lisa stood in front of a white board filled top to bottom with information he was picking up.

“They were part of the team that won Basalith’s tournament, remember? Edgier Than You?”

Lisa tilted her head. “Jeeze, that feels like ages ago.”

Bath nodded. Though it was barely a month since the tournament, so much had happened that it felt more like a year.

“So they’ve, what, taken over the Ukraine?” Lisa asked incredulously. “...Why?”

Bath inhaled deeply. “I sent them to Kray City with Edgewood and the others on the winning team,” he explained. “It seems like they decided to head next door and found another city.”

“Found a city? They’ve taken over the entire region, though,” Lisa pointed out. “How did they do that?”

Bath shuffled his feet. “Well, you know how the city-seeds give their possessors extra path points, right?”

Lisa nodded.

“David and Susan were already quite powerful, powerful enough to take over a city-seed. Once they obtained control, they funneled their new source of PP into strengthening their power and expanding out.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Lisa grumbled. “So what’s the big deal, anyway?”

“Well, they’ve turned the entire Ukraine region into a massive trading center,” Bath explained, writing “TRADING CENTER” in capital letters on the whiteboard. “They’ve assumed the position as a halfway point between Western and Central Europe and Asia.”

Lisa fingered her lip. “So...”

“This is a problem because they’ve been sponsoring all sorts of ridiculous things with their wealth and influence,” Bath added.

“Like what?”

Bath rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Do you know what their capital city-seed is called?”

Lisa shook her head.

“Sodom.”

Lisa stared at him blankly. “Uh...”

Bath underlined “SODOM” on the board. “Instead of focusing on advancement in a useful capacity, much of their citizens focus on self-pleasure and sitting around at home all day. Or, at the very least, many are involved in that industry.”

Lisa appeared uncomfortable with the way the conversation was progressing. “That...sounds interesting,” she finally managed to say. “What about all the kids living there…?”

Bath shrugged. “They’re still there.”

“I’m not really sure what to do with this information,” Lisa admitted. “It’s not like it’s against the law or anything, but I can’t believe an entire country is focusing on...you know.”

“I’m not entirely sure how to treat the situation, either,” Bath replied, staring intently out the window onto Basalith. “There’s a time and place for such pleasures, but all in balance.”

Lisa’s face began to redden.

Bath smiled at her, but didn’t say anything.

“I think we should probably send someone that way to balance things out,” Lisa said. “If we can reduce their area of influence to their city alone, versus all of Ukraine, hopefully things will be less, erm, extreme.”

“That can be arranged,” Bath said. “Anybody you wish to promote to leader of a city-seed?”

Lisa massaged her jaw. “What about...” She turned toward Bath. “Why not give one of the verdora a city?” she asked. “You’ve already given one to Lepochim.”

Bath considered the notion. “It would be difficult,” he said. “The verdora all received their boons later than humans. Moreover, it might be insensitive to send in verdora to deal with this kind of issue.” Besides, Bath thought, most verdora are obsessed with propriety. They’re not the most well-equipped bunch to deal with a city called Sodom.

“What if you sent in Eyrin?” Lisa suggested. “He’s pretty strong, and has all his boons...moreover, he’s also a kursi.” Very few people would be able to mess with him. Since “brown robes,” or the kursi assigned to keep city-seeds under control, were only supposed to act as peacekeepers, Eyrin would be in a superior position to any non-kursi.

Bath shook his head. “We can give him a city-seed somewhere, but not in the Ukraine. We can appoint one of the kursi from the vanguard, however, to go there.”

Lisa nodded. “True. Do you have anyone in mind?”

“Since language is no longer an issue due to the translators we received from Lime World...we could choose anyone. You’ve spent more time with the kursi than I have; you decide.”

“I suppose that’s true. Fine, then. I’d suggest Zhou, but I think we want to save him for other things.” He was the most powerful kursi in the vanguard given his 299 years of age.

Suddenly, Lisa’s eyes gleamed. “What if we put my Aunt and Uncle in charge of a new city-seed?”

“Lauretta and Bern?”

“Yeah.”

Bath narrowed his eyes. “You forgive them for what they’ve done to you and your family?”

Lisa met his stare. “No, but I understand why they did what they did, at least a little. But I think being with the kursi on the vanguard clarified things a bit for me.”

“How so?”

Lisa closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. “Kursi really don’t tend to live for very long, not as long as they have.”

Bath inclined his head. “I am familiar with the fragility of the human psyche,” he replied blithely.

“Yeah, yeah,” Lisa said. “Anyways, if you think about it, the fact that Lauretta and Bern are mostly sane–” excepting the ridiculousness of mind-wiping her family into mistaking them as genuine relatives– “makes them a large asset for COTD as a whole.”

“Fair point. Fine, I’ll inform Lepochim to reach out to them. We can give them this specific assignment as a way for them to redeem themselves. I’m still surprised that you’ve suggested them for this role, though,” Bath said.

“I can’t ignore them,” Lisa replied, “and I’m not going to waste their abilities.”

“Quite utilitarian of you,” he said, grinning mischievously. “Sounds very Big-WD-ish.”

“I guess.”

They continued to discuss other topics and gossip Bath gleaned from the citizens of Basalith. After another hour, Lisa remembered the issue of giving Eyrin a city-seed.

“We need to ask him first,” Bath said. “He’s one of the princes of Illudis; I don’t want to sow seeds of resentment.”

“Why?” Lisa asked, genuinely puzzled. “Why does that even matter? Nobody can threaten you in the slightest. Even if people did have resentment, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”

“Just because I can doesn’t mean I will. Why, you wouldn’t ask him first?”

Lisa frowned. “I mean, we’re not asking any people on Earth what they want,” she clarified. “Why are we giving the verdora special treatment?”

“Humans worship us,” Bath said. “The verdora aren’t there yet.” They don’t even understand the concept of religion, Bath quietly lamented. That made things more difficult. “Assigning them to a position on this foreign, supposedly backwater planet might appear to be a punishment rather than a reward.”

A look of understanding came over Lisa’s face. “I guess that makes sense.”

Bath smiled. “I’ve already asked him, though.”

Lisa blanched. “Wait, I thought you just said–“

Bath looked at her smugly. “I just asked.”

“I guess he said...yes?”

“Yeah, he agreed to start a city-seed.”

“...Where?”

“Texas.”

---

Fartuun pored over a slew of screens and notifications, parsing reports and writing responses in the blink of an eye thanks to the V-Tap.

I’m really starting to get the hang of this thing, she thought. But even with it speeding things up, it’s still going to take me days to get through all of this.

In the time that she had been gone, numerous inventions had come into being. Since she was technically in charge of vetting all new inventions as one of the heads of the Consortium of Information and Engineering–as she’d found the organization had been named in her absence–she had a lot of paperwork to sort through. And she technically was supposed to delegate this kind of thing out, but now that she had the V-Tap...she was using this as an opportunity to test her limits.

I’m easily doing the work of twenty people, she thought to herself. We need to learn how to make something like this implant on our own.

One thing her implant had pointed out to her was the stunning levels of innovation coming out of regions of the world that, before COTD, people had written off. Places like her homeland of Somalia, or Honduras. The innovations weren’t necessarily the most impressive, but they solved key issues involving infrastructure and food production, as well as dissemination of information. Places like Jerboaland, for instance, served as a model for how previously undeveloped regions could rapidly rise up.

Fartuun felt her heart swell a bit as she thought back to her own childhood and teenage years in Mogadishu. Comparing that world to Jerboaland, she felt very little nostalgia.

“People can go anywhere, do anything,” she murmured. Within reason, of course–the threat of spearrow attack was still raw in the minds of all.

She looked out the window from her Jerboaland apartment, watching as humans and quasi-sapients roamed the streets. A pair of falcon quasies soared through the sky overhead, their talons clamped together like a couple holding hands.

She smiled as she turned back to her array of displays. “It truly is a good day to be alive.”