Excerpt from the eighth draft of An Earthling’s Guide to the Larger Universe

Settlements, Towns, and Cities

The Voice generally groups permanent habitations into settlements, towns, and cities. Technically, they are all settlements, but achieving “town” or “city” status opens more options.

Recognized settlements all have a settlement crystal. It allows for control of certain settlement functions; what these functions are seems to vary from place to place. It’s unknown if this is at the desire of the ruler or if there are multiple types of settlement crystal. Some common features are a Voice-maintained interstellar store, mapping functions and the ability to send messages, though others such as weather reporting or portals are possible.

Settlement governments default to a single ruler who controls everything, but more complicated arrangements are normal; only the smallest of settlements work well with only one person who can do things officially. It’s possible to set up anything from specified roles to succession chains within the settlement structure, just like normal - only these are enforced by the Voice.

The largest difference between this and our current structure is that there must always be a way for someone to challenge for the highest position, which always has certain powers. What the challenge is and how you qualify for it varies, but it always exists. I suspect that the Voice disallows requirements it believes are inappropriate, but I have no proof of this.

For those of us who are starting in a current city, this probably doesn’t mean much; we’re not used to having the crystals around; we’ve found ways to do most other things. The Voice’s store costs Etherium and does not allow you to sell items on it; it’s also generally far more expensive than having the same thing made locally. Most people ignore it.

Doyle arrived Sunday afternoon, tired from his long drive and grumbling about being “too old to do this shit anymore”.

Rissa settled onto the bed she’d been sharing with Serenity and looked at Doyle. “You know, you had me reassure Echo’s aunt, but you never did tell me what happened out at the ranch. I got the impression it wasn’t good?”

“That’s one way to put it,” Doyle agreed, settling down in the only chair in the hotel room. “Turns out Echo’s parents are dead. They went to this ranch following work for her father, supposedly, only the guy who offered it was a real sleazeball. It’s a long way from town, and he’d charge you for anything - charge you more than it’d cost you to get it, even food. Food had an extra charge for being cooked for you. Of course, you could cook it for yourself if you paid the kitchen use fee. You couldn’t really get around it, even if you had a car, since it was a two-hour trip each way to town. He never sent anyone but his son to town unless he had to. Of course, if you couldn’t afford what you wanted, he’d let you go into debt. But he wouldn’t let anyone in debt leave the farm at all. He paid enough to get by, technically, if all you did was eat and sleep, maybe a new set of clothes every year or two.”

“I didn’t think that was legal.” Rissa frowned. She sounded upset.

“It probably isn’t,” Doyle admitted, “But it’s hard to fight. Especially for people from out of town who no one knows. It happens. I think he may’ve had something religious to draw ‘em in in the first place, but Echo doesn’t know. What’s definitely illegal is assigning her parents’ debts to Echo. Also, pretty sure making it so no one can send messages outside or leave without his permission. Not that illegal matters if he can get away with it.”

“What did you do?” Serenity’s thoughts were leaning heavily towards a large “accidental” fire, but however satisfying that solution might be, it probably wasn’t the best option.

Doyle shrugged. “Less than I wanted to, but still more than enough to piss ‘em off. We walked in, Echo managed to get with one of the other kids while I pretended to be a city idiot with a broken car and no cell service. They offered me a place for the night but said they didn’t have phone service. I acted all grateful about it and the offer of a trip to town in the morning, said I’d pay ‘em back for the trouble.”

Doyle looked at both of them to make sure they were still following the story. “That night, Echo and I snuck all the kids out of the locked dorm they kept ‘em in, away from the parents, and tucked ‘em into the back of a pickup. Got two of the mothers to come along too; fortunately, one of ‘em happened to be the person on the truck’s title. Getting my hands on the keys wasn’t possible, but there are tricks even with the newer cars. Pretty sure we woke people up when we left - and wouldn’t you know, on our way back to town, we entered a dungeon.”

“You what.” Rissa’s voice was flat, but her sentiment was almost exactly how Serenity felt.

Doyle smiled. “Yeah, that’s what we thought too. We had kids in the open back of a pickup! But when we tried to turn around, the road wasn’t there. It just ended in a steep bank. So we had to go on. Echo was already in the back, so she kept a lookout there. Strange thing is, nothing attacked us. Nothing at all.”

“What sort of dungeon was it?” It was probably not a field dungeon; you could leave those the same way you entered. They might make it difficult, but the ground didn’t change. A dungeon like Aki’s didn’t announce the entrance, so that wasn’t it either. No, this sounded instanced, but instanced dungeons that didn’t ask if you wanted to enter were rare. “A Trial?” It was the first option that met all the criteria Serenity could think of.

Trials were weird. They could be anything.

Doyle nodded. “Good guess. It called itself a Contested Settlement Trial. It turned out to be a race - we had to reach the Settlement Crystal before our opponents did, claim it, and hold it for a day. We were in a pickup on a good road; they started off closer. They were - well, Katya called them rockfin; does that mean anything to you?”

Serenity nodded.

“They’re the underground fish. You brought one out with you when you brought Katya out.” Rissa paused, then continued. “I think it ended up getting taken to DC, but I’m not sure.”

Serenity vaguely remembered the fish getting mentioned; by his mother, maybe? He didn’t think Rissa had mentioned it.

“Then you know they’re not real fast. We apparently triggered the Trial when we got close enough to the Settlement Crystal and they hadn’t found it yet. All we had to do was follow the road. The Trial even gave relative distances. When we got to the Crystal, Echo claimed it. The rockfin didn’t even arrive until a couple hours after that; once we knew what we were fighting, Echo set up treehouses. We knocked it out, then lifted it up into one of the treehouses. It didn’t fight after that, and we never saw a second one.”

Serenity nodded. “Well, that explains why the settlement exists. Why didn’t you leave after that?”

Doyle chuckled and shook his head. “First it was the rockfin, then one of the kids threw a fit about leaving the comfy treehouse. We decided to leave a group in the settlement. Then Katya arrived. It took us a few days more to get ready. I can only be glad that the settlement would provide free food for a while, we needed it.”

Doyle’s smile disappeared. “When we got back, we found out that some people from the ranch came through the settlement while we were gone. Echo had it set to only people she allowed in, but apparently that only works while she’s in the settlement. She hasn’t dared to leave it yet. That’s part of why she wants you to visit; you’re the settlement owner, and she thinks you might have some more options.”

Serenity keyed on Doyle’s statement. “Part of the reason?”

“Echo doesn’t want to talk about it, but I think there’s more to it. I think she deliberately didn’t tell me, since she knows I’d tell you.” Doyle shrugged. “She likes secrets, but she is still sixteen, even if she’s smart.”

Google Maps said it was a seventeen-hour drive to a spot somewhere close to the entrance to Serenity Settlement. With two of them in the car, that was theoretically possible, but neither of them wanted to actually make that drive. They ended up stopping for the night in a town neither of them had ever heard of before - Raton, New Mexico. It was well past the halfway point, which meant Serenity might even be able to accomplish something the day they arrived. It was still going to be a long day’s drive.

Serenity more than half expected something to happen to delay the drive, but nothing did. After a quick breakfast, they were on the road again in the morning.

Serenity knew when they entered Serenity Settlement. Like Aki’s dungeon, there wasn’t a notice at the border, but also like Aki’s dungeon, the mana density - and, Serenity supposed, the essence density - were high enough that he stopped continuously bleeding off mana and essence. It wasn’t like a ley line; he couldn’t just grab it and eat it to refresh himself. On the other hand, he also wouldn’t glow.

Serenity sighed and leaned back in his seat. Doyle had insisted on taking the final leg, since it was off the GPS and he knew where they were going. “We’re here.” The landscape didn’t look like he’d expected; he’d been told there were treehouses, but this looked like pasture land. He could see some trees off to the side; it looked like there was probably a stream.

“Almost,” Doyle disagreed. “You see that blot in the distance, ahead of us? Looks like a cloud?”

Serenity looked ahead. There did seem to be a dark cloud in the distance. “Yeah.”

“That’s the actual settlement - well, the trees that surround it. They’re giants; I’m not sure even a sequoia is bigger. We wouldn’t be able to see them if they weren’t so big.”

“Huh. The settlement has a lot of land that isn’t actually used by the habitation, then. I hadn’t realized it worked that way.” Serenity looked around. The only strange thing about the land they were driving over was that it wasn’t fenced and didn’t look like it had ever been worked.

“It’s been growing,” Doyle agreed. “It seems to be new land. I’m not sure how that works. The treeline is growing, too, but right now this stuff is growing faster. All I know for sure is that every time I leave or enter, it takes longer to cross. It doesn’t show up on GPS at all; in fact, when you get close, it errors. I tried driving all the way around it a couple weeks ago, and as far as I can tell - minus the GPS errors - it simply doesn’t exist.”

“Maybe it didn’t.” Serenity looked at the land with new curiosity. “I knew the planet would grow, I didn’t know exactly how it would work. Maybe this is how.”