Chapter 45 – The Base

The officer’s building was a Tier 3 structure that was almost as large as the barracks at this point.  Buildings on Ordinal had slots for rooms that aided in their general function.  Some of those slots were more valuable than others and the two buildings represented opposing philosophies.

The Barracks was built into several large slots, where the barracks room was the predominant force.  The Dashing Dandies had a smaller, elite room that only held two hundred troops, while the other two large slots were occupied by conventional barracks.  Those each held 500 troops comfortably.  

There were an assortment of small slots as well as a few medium slots like the armory, which provided bonuses to equipment stored there, but ultimately the entire Barracks existed to hold troops which of course blew my mind because few things on Ordinal made any sense.

On the flip side to that obvious, intelligent, and well laid out philosophy was the officers' building which favored small and medium sized slots, lacking any large slots at all.  Large slots in buildings were cavernous spaces where you could fit a football field, smaller slots were more like rooms.  Multiple smaller slots could form a department, and the same slot could be shared between departments depending on the Army Commander’s Administration skill.

My Administration skill was the important skill here.  Since I was in charge of Windfall, during a massive construction boom, the Army of Windfall, preparing for a war, and a large caravan, that even now was bringing in absurd amounts of needed supplies, as such my already high Administration skill was skyrocketing.  

When the portal to Union opened, I was probably going to reach divine rank in Administration.  

When I’d been with the caravan, I managed to hit low Expert.  By now I’d pushed through Advanced and was angling towards Grand Master Administration.  The fact that my best skills were Administration and Hiking was of no end of annoyance to me.  Counterspell?  Nah.  Sword?  Who needs it?  Perception?  Those Pumas weren’t going to sneak up on themselves!

But if someone needed me to walk across town to deliver a TPS report I was your man.  

That said, I gave lots and lots of bonuses to people, meaning that my departments could hold more rooms than normal and they could share more rooms between themselves than normal.  

In short…

“I have no freaking clue where we are,” I groaned as Fenris turned a corner and started walking up some stairs.

“I will admit, this place does take some getting used to,” said Fenris as he opened a red door with a blue stripe and we walked through the new Intelligence bureau, in the Information gathering department.  It was also in the counterintelligence department, military planning department, and several other departments I could not recall.  

Everyone saluted as we walked past and Fenris waved them down.  Several eyed me, the actual head of the army before getting back to work.  I recognized one of them.  

“Sheblin,” I asked, looking at the princess of the southern kingdom.  

“Mayor,” she said uncomfortably as she stood.

“I haven’t seen you since we fought against the Dark Overlord,” I said.  Dropping that people actually fought and lived against the Dark Overlord was useful and would be something most adventures would have been proud of.  She winced.  I glanced over at Fenris.   

“Sheblin has been a great help with all the scouting reports coming in,” said Fenris.  “Sir Dalton brought her to my attention personally.  She volunteered to work here and is one of the few adventurers working behind the scenes to ensure that we can fight at our maximum potential.  I consider her work here to be extremely important.”

That was a bit thick.

“Of course,” I responded and remembered when she was fighting against the Dark Overlord.  Just because people were adventures didn’t mean they were action heroes at heart.  Sheblin was one of the adventures who had stared death in the face and blinked, and I couldn’t blame her.  She was captured, tortured and then forced to fight for her life.  It was one of those things where some people rose to the occasion and overcame the trauma while others didn’t.  

She might eventually recover, but that wasn’t happening before this next fight.  

I dismissed Sheblin and we left the area, cutting through another office when we came out in another hallway where an assortment of clerks were racing between locations.  Mingled in there were at least three of them were Beakatrix’s drones, which were apparently already in use in the base.  

Fenris cut through a training office into a medium sized room that was full of dozens of clerks pushing through yet more paperwork.  One of them eyed us as we walked in, but immediately quieted down.

“Where are we now?” I asked.

“That was Healer training, we’re going to cut through the Scout training area next,” said Fenris as he nodded at several people in passing.  

“Why aren’t we taking the hallway?” I asked.

“You’re kidding, right,” said Fenris as we stepped out into said hallway where a mass of clerks were slipping past each other in a hypnotic pattern.  I didn’t see a gap that an adult male could fit through, let alone two.  

“Was it always this bad?” I asked as we entered a third room across the hall and continued.

“No, it has been getting progressively worse as the commander’s administration skill leveled, at this point if you aren’t a clerk it isn’t even worth trying to use a hallway,” said Fenris as he opened a door leading into a conference room.  “You’re sure you can’t open a portal?”

“I have no idea where we are,” I replied.  Portals were neat and all, but I needed to know where to put it.  I’d never been where we were going and I couldn’t send Shart because by the time I got through to the demon what room we were looking for, the meeting would be over.  

“We are getting close,” said Fenris with a smirk as he pushed open a door.  

“We’re here?  Thank goodness,” I groaned looking around.  This room wasn’t very impressive for the meeting that was about to happen.

“No, this is a lower level conference room, we’re going to go to the War Room,” said Fenris.  

“Where is that?” I asked.

“The hallway next to my office,” said Fenris.

“We should have braved the hallway,” I said.

“It takes fifteen minutes to walk through the halls that far, this only takes five.  Plus, you should actually see some of these rooms ‘you’ ordered built,” said Fenris as we cut through another office causing everyone to look at us sourly.  

Technically he was right, I had signed the paperwork at some point.  Or Fenris had signed it for me.  Or Mar.  There were a lot of things done in my name that I wasn’t technically aware of, even with my administration skill sending me notes.  

So many notes.  

“What is this office?” I asked, looking around.  

“Manpower Extension,” said Fenris.  “It allows each sergeant to control 25% more troopers in the field.  If we ever upgrade to Tier 5, that will increase to 37.5%.”

That was very useful.  On Ordinal your command limit determined how many soldiers you could control, but officers allowed you to cheat that limit by only counting as an individual.  Operating under someone typically reduced their effective command rating somewhat, unless you were a great general who’d spent the perks, which I had.

However, a lot of those perks required my Army to have rooms like this maelstrom of half contained insanity.  I was about to comment on how strange this place was when Fenris started climbing a ladder.  

“Of course,” I said, following him up into a crawl space.  We came out on the other side into a break room where he handed me a hot mug of wakeup juice.

I looked around, carefully assessing the break room and a poster saying “Puma Checks are Everyone’s Responsibility.”  The poster had a picture of Badgelor giving a double thumbs up while standing on a dead puma.  At least the army was doing important work.  

“It is a good likeness,” said Fenris about the poster.  

“I’m sure Badgelor approves,” I chuckled.

“Yes, he posed before you left,” said Fenris gesturing towards the Badgelor stamp of approval.

“Freaking mascot,” I grumbled checking another poster that told people to watch out for PTSD.  Puma Traumatic Stress Disorder, apparently according to this people who were frequently ambushed by pumas went overboard on puma checks and constantly searched for danger.  

They couldn’t all be winners.  

“Badgelor has been a great help.  The Falconians are far more likely to cooperate when they know Badgelor personally approves of your actions,” said Fenris.  “I’ve heard that he is now leading his own army in the streets of Windfall.  That clips the branches of anyone who wants to contest your plan.”

“Do you think it will work?” I asked.

“I don’t question the Mayor,” said Fenris.

“Please question me, I’m not the mayor to you.  I’m your friend and I need your honest opinion,” I said bluntly.  “I’m putting a lot on you for this, do you think it will work?”

Fenris stood perfectly still for a moment, something he could only do because of his mechanical spine.  It looked so out of place with the cup of steaming wake up juice in his hand that I almost chuckled but could not.  Finally, he spoke, only moving his lips.

“I believe that the probability of success is high,” he said mechanically, too mechanically.  Then Fenris shook his head and looked pained.  “That’s been happening every so often.”

“I was saving something for later,” I said, holding out my arm and activating my Body Sculptor skill.  I made my forearm bend slightly, then more until my hand could touch my elbow.  Then I focused harder, extending the bone by several inches so that my left arm was considerably longer than my right.

“That’s disgusting,” said Fenris as I restored everything to normal.

“I can use this skill to regenerate bones,” I said, causing the Cyber Warden’s eyes to open.  “I’ll fix you after the war.”

“I didn’t ask,” said Fenris.

“I know, but it is my fault you are like this, and you aren’t happy about it,” I replied.  “After, I’ll patch you right up.  Good as new.”

Fenris stood ramrod straight for a long second then visibly tried, and failed, to relax.  “You are improving your healing just to fix Jarra, aren’t you?”

“I’m doing all of this for Jarra,” I said looking around the room.  “This building, this war.  All of it.  “

“That’s not the take I would have expected,” said Fenris.

“It was easier to tell myself that when she was an ideal.  I’m fighting for the idea of a world where this wouldn’t have happened to Jarra.  I’m fighting for a world where everyone has a chance to empower themselves and live their best lives,” I said, shaking my head.  “But at the end of the day, I’m really just going in there to kill the asshole who hurt my girlfriend.”  

“And now that she’s back,” asked Fenris.

“I think it's worse,” I said.  “I always imagined she died painlessly, and instead she was tortured mercilessly while I fecked around.  I should have gone there faster.  I should have been better.  The ideal Mayor everyone wants would have already succeeded.”

“But the ideal mayor was Grebthar,” said Fenris, a flash of pain crossing his face.

“And he tried too hard for too long.  It broke him, and then he did something stupid and now the Dark Overlord is trying to destroy all of it,” I said, finishing the steaming cup in one gulp, the fact that the liquid was near boiling didn’t bother me in the least.  “I have to destroy him to get to the Dark Overlord, and I hope Charles forgives me when I do it because deep down I think there is still some good part of him that is screaming at what the Dark Overlord is doing.”