Monroe

Chapter Three Hundred and Fifty-three. Working through the problems.

"We have confirmation?" Elania asked.

"Yes, from the Queen herself," Taylor replied.

"I'd thought it would actually take longer for the first person on Earth to reach tier eight," Elania muttered.

"The Queen took her position as a symbol to delve continuously, demonstrating that she could protect her citizens," Taylor said. "You've been delving in between cabinet meetings. It's unreasonable to expect that you'd be the first person to reach tier eight."

"There is an entire segment of our citizens who don't like seeing our country fail to be first in any accomplishment," Elania retorted. "Sadly, they make up about forty percent of the nation."

"They'll still vote for you," Taylor said confidently. "Honestly, you could run as an independent at this point, and you'd still get the votes."

Elania roller her head carefully, wincing. "I think it says something when I prefer fighting monsters over dealing with the bureaucratic infighting," she complained. "Something unpleasant with lots of expletives."

"At least the protesters are gone," Taylor said brightly.

That particular problem had been solved by both action and inaction. It was, oddly enough, the most hated group of federal employees that had been turned into everyday heros. The King of Greenwold had demanded that her least useful citizens be sent into the Dungeons when he decided that the various nations of Earth couldn't be trusted to behave themselves, resulting in over thirty thousand IRS agents being sent to crunch monsters instead of numbers.

They'd been some of the last ones sent back to Earth as they'd kept right on delving throughout the process of putting the population of Earth in stasis and through the integration. The practical result was that this group had reached their tier cap and maxed out all of their skills. She'd personally appealed to them to chose evolution over reincarnation, and to focus on leveling their portal skills.

They were now comfortably stationed across the country in small groups. They provided regular portal service from one station to another, allowing a bus full of people to travel from one coast to another in less than twenty-four hours.

It wasn't air travel, but it got the job done, and with the interstate system still suffering from the integration, it was the only real option.

This had allowed Elania to offer the protesters a choice. They could take a seat on the provided bus and be whisked off to a Dungeon that had slots available, or they could remain. But either way, the capital wasn't getting any more food than it was already allocated, and the people who were supposed to be there wouldn't be the ones going hungry.

It took a week for the last of the hold outs to realize that she was perfectly willing to let them starve themselves to death.

"The good news is, we're up another hundred thousand crystals this month," Taylor said, sliding the report in front of her.

"What's the request tally?" Elania asked as she opened the report.

"I think it's sitting at two point five trillion," Taylor replied. "I haven't gone over this week's requests to do the tally."

Elania nodded idly. The various departments of the federal government hadn't yet clued into the fact that mana crystals weren't a fiat currency. Individually, every knew that, but it was a case of knowing as opposed to knowing. Some of them had to know that they were effectively defunct, or at least due for a vastly revised mandate, but they persisted.

"Do we have a winner for the most ridiculous request this week?" Elania asked.

"I think so," Taylor smiled. "A request for ten million crystals to ritually summon one hundred thousand Spoonhead Sculpin into Lake Eerie, and another one hundred thousand crystals to monitor the fish over the next year to determine the viability of restoring endangered species through ritual summoning."

Elania chuckled, shaking her head. "If we had a couple trillion mana crystals in the bank, I'd be happy to give it to them," she said.

"I know," Taylor sighed. "Kind of a light week, but the tone deafness of it qualified."

"Give us ten million crystals to summon fish that we aren't going to eat," Elania said in deep voice. "It's like they don't get that we're barely keeping people fed as it is."

"We're getting there, though," Taylor replied. "Every person that heads to a Dungeon with open slots is one less person we have to feed."

"Hopefully the manufacturing plants make a difference," Elania said.

Having done the math, and realized that despite the number of Dungeons, there wouldn't be enough slots available for all of her citizens to delve, she'd diverted what few excess crystals they'd gathered into a pair of manufacturing plants, built from the rubble of New York and Philadelphia. Both plants were devoted to the production of transformers, which had been some of the hardest components of the electrical grid to get replacements for before the apocalypse.

The plants hired people who unable or unwilling to delve the Dungeons, and paid them in mana crystals. The result was that they were able to buy food, and the nation was finally making real progress on repairing the grid.

They weren't paid many mana crystals, but it was enough. Even given the pricing restrictions on food, there were tens of thousands of druids, pacifistic and otherwise, who were banking crystals hand over fist even though they were only allowed by law to accept one hundred and one mana crystals to cast the plant growth ritual. The ability to reduce the resources needed to cast that spell had been spotted early on, and there were some who had managed a significant enough discount that they were pocketing ten crystals for each ritual.

Elania finished reading the report. It had indicated with the influx of new delvers, that they could expect the tax revenue to increase by a factor of four, initially. It also requested that multiple shepherds be assigned to each of the Dungeons that had received new delvers, although the report called them 'freshers', another term that had carried over from Thayland.

She leaned back and stretched again. Overall, the country was doing fairly well, considering the challenges they were facing. They'd faced multiple Dungeon overflows from unregistered, home built Dungeons, but fatalities had been minimal, less than a hundred. After the events, which occurred within an hour of one another, she'd sent out a message, offering not only completely amnesty, but five hundred mana crystals to the first person to report an unregistered Dungeon.

That had led to the discovery of over forty unregistered Dungeons across the country, all but one of which were being delved regularly by either individuals or small groups.

"Alright, what's next on the agenda?" She asked her chief of staff.

"It looks like Housing and Urban Development," Taylor replied. "They're due in five."

"Enough time to pee, but not enough time poo," Elania said with a sigh as she stood from her desk.

Kellan winged his way over the lush rainforest, mentally noting the location of another Dungeon.

Given the size difference between the two equatorial continents and Greenwold, there should have been more Dungeons, but the Karcerian Empire hadn't benefited from nearly two hundred nations building Dungeons.

Ultimately, his retention rate had exceeded his expectations. As enamored with technology as the people from Earth were, he hadn't anticipated just how many of the people loathed their governments. All told he'd managed to keep over seventy million people from Earth.

Some of the commitments he'd chosen to make were proving slightly more difficult than he'd anticipated, namely establishing normalized traffic between Earth and Thayland.

They were willing to wait for a new phone, but they weren't willing to give up on having one entirely. For some, it was of greater importance to maintain contact with friends and family across dimensions.

Regardless of their reasons, he'd had enlisted the help of a group of dimensionalists to open portals to and from Earth regularly, although the prices they were charging nearly brought a tear to his eye.

The purpose of his flight today was to locate the various Dungeons so that he could establish settlements. The many Dungeons that had been driven into his continent were often quite close together. When the various nations had been rotating people through them, reaching level ten to fifteen, or rarely, twenty-five, there hadn't been any issues in terms of having enough mana available. The average tier had reached the tipping point several months ago, with tier six being the norm rather than tier five. It seemed that most people were evolving, rather than reincarnating after reaching the tier five cap, which meant more people were delving those Dungeons at both a higher tier and level.

Fortunately, he'd claimed domain over the other seventy percent of the landmass, none of which was covered in ice.

Kellan frowned as he paused to hover over the next Dungeon. There were monsters pouring out of it, ugly insectoid beasts.

He dipped down and touched the entrance with a wingtip. It was time to clean up another mess the Empire had left behind.

Two percent. That was the amount a single delve at tier eight, level thirty, reduced the capacity of the Dungeons in Glacier Valley.

Bob could finish six delves each day, eight if he was feeling particularly masochistic, which meant he could delve a Dungeon from full capacity to zero in six to eight days. Unlike the Dungeons spread around the world by the System, the Dungeons in Glacier Valley did not regain half a percent of capacity each day. It was closer to a tenth of a percent.

"Have you recorded any data as far as delving one of these Dungeons to zero, and seeing how quickly it refills?" Bob asked.

"Nah, we've just been keeping them from overflowing," Jessica said. "They get like point one percent per day, yeah?"

"Twenty-four gets more than that," Dave disagreed.

"Babe, I know twenty-four is your favorite, but I promise it doesn't get more mana than the others," Amanda said affectionately.

"We should find out," Bob said thoughtfully. "I'm guessing you keep twenty-four delved down?"

"It's rarely above fifty percent," Dave agreed. "Twenty-four, seventeen, five, and thirty-six are the ones we tend to delve when we don't need to work the rest to keep them from overflowing."

"Mana isn't a liquid, but it behaves almost like a superfluid," Bob mused. "Taking that into consideration, it's entirely possible that an empty Dungeon close to a Dungeon that is only half empty would fill more quickly." He shook his head. "We need to run some tests."

"It wouldn't hurt, I suppose," Amanda agreed.

"What we really need to do is figure out just exactly how much capacity a single delve consumes based on the tier and level of the individual or group," Bob continued. "How much do you drop the capacity with a single delve?"

"Around three percent if we're grouped up, close to seven if we're doing it as a raid, which we really only do if we want try out new tactics or we're exploring a new Dungeon," Dave replied.

'There is an option within your interface that will allow you to see values past whole numbers,' Trebor advised.

'Where might that be?' Bob mentally projected.

'In the interface options sub menu, there is an option for what units of measurements you wish to use. The unit selected by default was the one which the user's mind defaulted to, however if open that menu, it will provide options for not only other units of measurement, but the number of decimal places you wish to see displayed.'

"So, there is a way to see values past whole numbers," Bob told the group, then relayed what Trebor had told him while changing his own options.

"What we really need to do is to determine exactly how much mana is required to generate a single monster," Bob said. "For that we'll need a natural Dungeon without any man made Dungeons interfering with the rate at which it recovers. We'll also need an entire spread of test candidates, starting at tier five, level zero, and going up from there, incrementing both level and tiers."

"And when exactly are you planning to run this grand experiment?" Mike asked dryly. "You've set yourself up to need to grind like made for the next decade."

Bob opened his mouth, then closed it with a frown. "Shit," he muttered.

"Eggheads," Mike sighed. "Why don't you write up the whole experiment, and we'll see about getting the Old Guard involved? They've got a wide enough spread of people, and as long as we don't eat the crayons, we're perfectly capable of writing down the numbers the pretty screens show us."

"Yeah, sorry," Bob shook his head. "I got a little excited there. Quantifying the mana needed to manifest a monster, based on the tier and level of the monster, could lead to being able to quantify it in other ways. There's just so much we don't know about mana, but the interface the System has given us allows us to work it out."

'Unless you already know that math?' Bob mentally projected.

'I do not,' Trebor replied. 'I've been given a general sense of what the next threshold of my advancement will provide, and I can state with certainty that I'm not likely to have access to that information. The next stage of my development will allow me to determine a manifestations primary attribute, and I believe that further advancements will reveal their major, then eventually minor, mana affiliations. At that point, you should be able to tell at a glance what sort of path a monster follows, allowing you to preemptively counter them.'

"Someone, somewhere, has to already be working on this, yeah?" Jessica said. "I mean, nerds have to nerd, and with all these new energies flying around, there is no way that aren't a bunch of boffins running about, super keen to figure it all out."

"Probably not on Thayland?" Bob offered weakly.

"I don't know if I'd even wager on that," Jessica disagreed, "but you can bet your toned, muscular arse that they are back on Earth."

"Speaking of which," Amanda interjected, before Jessica could continue, "how is your portal spell coming along? I know I'd like to pick up a few things from Earth."

"Telescope," Mike grunted. "I know we're smart enough to build one, but we didn't because it turns out that it's a pain in the ass. It's a lot easier just to buy one. Summoning shit does have its limitations."

Bob could only nod his agreement. He'd known that in order to summon an object, you had to understand how it worked. That simple statement was misleading in its simplicity. Creating a lens required the knowledge of how the material was refined and polished, as well as knowing exactly how the curvature impacted light passing through it. It wasn't enough to have merely read about it and remembered the details, you needed to fully understand the object. It was one of the reasons that Bob considered Summoning to be the long game. Sure, the school was not, objectively, as powerful as conjuration when it came to eradicating monsters. But considering his current two thousand year life span, he would have time learn, at which point Summon Mana-Infused Creature wouldn't be his most powerful spell.