Home was technically in Prescott now. Most nights I slept in a heated penthouse with Molls at my side. At that moment, though, I couldn’t be with her. I needed to talk to Axle.

Over the past month, he’d proven to be an exceptional operations manager. I’d also placed him in charge of the Prescott space elevator, which he ran through a series of proxies, employees, and managers. Axle himself stayed out of Prescott as often as he could, running everything from his open-for-business Knowle Library in Silken Sands.

His library had grown substantially over the single month since it had first been built. And, to my absolute approval, but to the utter amazement of BlueCleave, he ran it for free. Knowledge, he said, was free to all workers of the affiliate and its subsidiaries.

It was stuff like that which kept us in the multiversal news. Well, that and our squad of starfish troopers, which were considered unkillable by most opposing military forces.

Thinking of our troopers reminded me of the Afflqwst quest we had finished in Long Beach. I swiped it up again, as I had a few times since it had completed.

Quest – Preserve new territory from effects of incoming natural disaster.

REQUIREMENTS:

Activate countermeasures to neutralize incoming tsunami.

PROBABLE OUTCOME – Affiliate territory destroyed. (78%).

POSSIBLE OUTCOME – Affiliate territory protected. (6%).

Quest Complete! REWARD – Item coupon.

Every quest we had completed since shortly before we took Arizona had given us a base level starfish suit as the reward, worth exactly fifty-five thousand morties. This item coupon was significantly more expensive, in the hundreds of millions of morties range.

I’d hesitated to go turn it in just yet, primarily out of business, but also a mild fear of change. So much had already changed, a new item from Teslak couldn’t help but change everything even further.

Nothing in Silken Sands was the same as that first week. It had become a jewel in the desert, massively expanded. Mudcrete walls still formed up the primary surrounding defensive structure, but like a castle of old, we had multiple walls.

BlueCleave had turned the place into a fortress, complete with towering mudcrete apartment complexes to house some of the families of our military. Most of the humans who had lived at the camp moved on to Prescott, once it was safe for them. The city felt more like Earth had, before it became Nu-Earth.

Lee and Suzanna had stayed, and they had expanded their farm to new levels. Where Mr. Sada’s mansion once stood was an orchard, covered by a thick shell of translucent steel, Mr. Sada’s memorial statue guarding the entrance in. It let in all the sunlight our tropical rainforest required, and allowed for good defenses as well.

I had beamed in atop Axle’s library tower. It was a small room at the highest point of the library that offered an amazing view of Silken Sands, and I felt compelled to take it in whenever I visited. Below me swept the concrete and steel of Axle’s library, all fourteen wings of it.

What had started as a single acre had rapidly grown into the largest repository of knowledge on Nu-Earth, covering five full acres, and rising several stories in the air. We’d had to move the main road to make room for its growth. Axle and Jada insisted on staying at their two-percent cut of the affiliate, but that alone had made them wealthier than any Knowle in our neck of the BuyMort multiverse.

They both loved the library like a child, and spent most of their free time within its walls. Axle in particular was there regularly, talking on his phone with Prescott to manage the elevator. His primary passion appeared to be the gathering and securing of knowledge. Any books, films, records, or especially news clips he gathered as if they were precious minerals.

I’d never seen him more excited than when one of our roaming rescue squads found a stash of old television news from Nu-Earth. It was merely one large cardboard box full, but the tapes were each like gold to him. He carefully recorded them into his kiosk system, and then spent days watching through each one of them.

The reason he liked our news shows more than anything else was the sheer amount of knowledge he was able to glean from them. He told me it wasn’t just the subject matter, though most of it he admitted was fascinating. It was the people. The way they told the stories. How they presented information, and how that presentation changed over time. News, he explained, was an acronym for New Events, Weather, and Sports. A bit of trivia I’d never even heard before, and I used to watch the damn stuff.

Axle was learning about our people as much as he could, and his ever-growing library helped in that cause immensely. He asked Nu-Earth humans plenty of questions too. Nearly anytime he interacted with a new rescue, or refugee, he was asking weird questions. But that was first hand knowledge, which he explained was simply not as valuable as objective knowledge.

Most of his interviews were available in the library too, but were categorized in the ‘unreliable’ section, as chemical memory was simply never the same as hard copy.

Other Knowles had begun making pilgrimages to Nu-Earth, specifically to visit the famous Knowle library. They would trade with Axle, bringing him records from other portions of the multiverse, and exchanging them for everything he had gleaned about Nu-Earth. Everything except the information he kept in the restricted section, and any information about our resident beholder, Quadrum.

The extra-dimensional being still inhabited the lowest part of our underground facility, just above the Sleem farm. They studied the gelatinous creatures, and their ability to breed, but we had been unable to determine much more than that. Axle told me at one point he suspected one of the rare and complex machines we had seen in Quadrum’s underground lair was a trans-dimensional probe, capable of scanning multiple parallel universes simultaneously.

Beyond that, the powerful creature kept to itself and made few demands, which Axle and I always saw to personally.

The small apartment buildings we’d installed had also grown, each now twelve stories in height and filled with thriving hobb families. A new BlueCleave baby had been born, the first born outside Storage in generations, so a rather large party had been thrown. Banners and hobb decorations still festooned the area, and Morbin Time, our local bar, still had customers staggering out at midday.

Life was good, even with the earthquake. We were far enough from it that not much in the way of structural damage had occurred, and our industrious hobb workforce was already making repairs to those areas. Thanks to our expensive action against the tsunami, our land, lives, and affiliate were all intact.

The spider ranch, which was also experiencing a meteoric rise in fame, had expanded significantly. Drusk, our mordren rancher, had taken to the role far better than I’d expected. His arrival at our compound had been unpleasant, and I’d ended up rather severely injuring him, but the giant dragon-man had proven to be good with the spiders. He even seemed to enjoy the work.

Together with Dro’erja, a dark elf slave I’d freed and kept hidden, Drusk was becoming well known for producing some of the highest quality raw spider silk available on the Nu-Earth market. Our best, most profitable market was underwear. Wealthy people from all over the multiverse wanted Nu-Earth panties, boxers, and bras, made from the strangest silk available.

Our black widows were particularly prized, as they were rare on Nu-Earth after BuyMort arrived. A more aggressive strain of the spider, called the brown widow, had pushed the black widows out of most of their breeding areas before BuyMort, so we had one of the last remaining healthy clutters of them on the planet.

The ranch itself had been expanded physically as well. While the Joshua Trees were good for the spiders, we did eventually replace them with fully artificial trees that had been shaped for spiders to weave webs on. At regular intervals, we had installed thin fencing, not for any security purposes, but to give our spiders something to hunt from.

They lived on different webs than they hunted on, and selling their hunting webs caused the population few, if any problems when done right. A series of installed ponds doubled as playplaces for Shela, a giant Swamp Spinner spider that was Dro’erja’s ward, and insect breeding pools to feed our ever-growing clutter. Shela’s presence was of particular importance, as her silk pheromones caused breeding booms among our other spiders, as well as selling for a premium on the open market.

Her webbing was financially viable for an affiliate of our size even though she was a single spider, as she produced it en masse now that she was living her best life. A single well-fed swamp spinner living in an environment that made her feel safe could produce upwards of two tons of raw silk per month. With her breeding pheromones attached, the stuff was more valuable than gold.

Only trouble was moving it without creating records that got back to us, which Axle handled through a network of smugglers. We slipped it out right under Dearth’s nose, using their own stolen elevator.

Installed privacy screening systems ensured that Dro’erja could walk about the ranch as he pleased, but his presence was still a secret to most of our staff. Drusk was trustworthy, he and Dro’erja had become master and apprentice. Other than him, and a few of my closest advisors, we kept Dro’erja’s existence a secret.

Dark elf internal politics and social norms seemed to be focused around hierarchies, and the House of None was not allowed to be successful by dark elf cultural decree. Most dark elves were part of the House of None, and the higher houses used them as slave labor. Hiding Dro’erja at my affiliate not only helped me feel better about slaughtering the minor house that had held him and his spider captive, it provided us with a massively profitable spider ranch.

It was nothing compared to the elevator, but that was just me being a parasite on Dearth, which I enjoyed. They wanted to avoid the expensive BuyMort transport costs, and so established a firm shipping network. I was happily taking that shipping network away from them by force, one piece at a time, and then charging them a percentage to use it. As long as my cost was lower than a BuyMort beam off-world, I got paid, and they didn’t attack for risk of damaging their own profit pipeline.

Thinking of our finances got me back to the present. I loved looking out over Silken Sands from Axle’s tower, but there was work to do. It was time to go find my giant hyena-man friend and partner. I stepped back from the tower’s edge, my mind calmed from the encounter with Kraken Corp’s representative, and headed down the stairs to find Axle.

He was bound to be in the library somewhere.