Monroe

Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-Three. Conversations and exploration.

"He really does seem like a nice boy, but it sounds like he's carrying quite a bit of baggage, yeah?" Veronica said.

"Yes, mum, I know," Jessica sighed. "I don't know if we'll ever move beyond friends, but I do know that if I stick with him, I'll end up tier twenty or something."

"I don't know if you need to go that far," Ronald shook his head. "Tier ten is crazy enough."

"Everyone I started with has fallen off," Jessica replied. "They've all hit tier six, and evolved to tier seven, but they've all slowed down to a crawl." She shook her head. "I get it, yeah? They're around level forty, most everyone with a double affinity, and they're comfortable. There's not much that can really threaten them, and you really don't have to work that hard to maintain a comfortable standard of living. If I wasn't running about with Bob, I'd have fallen off the leveling train myself." She sighed. "Would I like to give being with Bob a shot? Yeah, I would. But I'm not chasing him for that. I'm haring off after him because he's keeping us all motivated. Strewth, it's the challenge of keeping up with someone that's so driven, yeah? I mean, Bob's great, and he had sort of an early access to the new System interface before anyone else, but the thing of it is, he's not special. It's easy to look at someone who is super gifted and just be like 'right, well, that's not me' but with him, it's just a matter of putting in the work."

"But why?" Veronica asked worriedly. "You're a full tier ahead of your other friends, and they're living leisurely lives of luxury. Why chase more power?"

"Because I want to know just how far I can go," Jessica admitted. "That other species, the Eire, some of the things that tier fourteen woman said," Jessica shook her head again. "There's so much more out here than we could ever have imagined. Tier ten isn't the end, and if she was to believed, the beings who rule that universe are over tier forty. We're just children, playing in our little sandbox whilst the rest of the world is out there, waiting for us to grow up and start exploring."

"I love you, but the Jessi-bear I raised wasn't interested in ruling over anyone," Ronald grinned as he continued. "Not least of all because she would be bloody awful at it."

Jessica shook her hair out with a toss of her head, raised her chin and looked down her nose imperiously. "I'll have you know that Queen Jessica's subjects will regard her as both benevolent, and kind."

"Queen Jessica has yet to file her own taxes," her father replied dryly.

Jessica hung her head. "I'll have a minister for finance to handle that sort of thing," she grumbled.

"So long as you're not putting all your eggs in one basket," Veronica said. "Unrequited love is unhealthy, yeah?"

"I'm not in love with him," Jessica sighed. "He's a friend first, and if he ever gets past his hang ups, I'm still single, we might give it a go."

"As a father, I feel like I should object to any man you're interested on general principal, but I'm going to wish you luck anyway," Ronald said. "That man is carrying a lot of weight, and I imagine a good shag would loosen him up."

"A good shag, eh?" Veronica mused. "I don't suppose you know where I might find of those?"

"I've heard about this room just down toward the end of the ship," Ronald replied, "where if you go in wearing lingerie, such as that lacy yellow teddy, and a blindfold, that you might just find yourself subjected to a mind blowing shag."

"Oh really," Veronica smiled wickedly. "Is there any sort of time schedule for this?"

"I don't wanna hear this," Jessica complained.

"I'm sure if you went to put on your teddy in our daughters room, by the time you get back it would be open for business, as it were," Ronald smirked.

"Out!" Jessica said firmly, "both of you!"

Bob looked around the table.

Bailli, Erick, Mike, Jack, Eddi, and Wayna had decided to take the first rotation, farming for Mana Crystals to keep the search for an appropriate world funded, leaving Jessica, Dave, Amanda, Harv, and Eli to keep him company.

"So, we're going to plan on being away for a month," Bob began. "Given the number of jumps it took to find ourselves in a solar system last time, we should be shaving a lot of time off the search, but I imagine we'll still find a lot of solar systems that don't have anything for us."

"We should probably talk about just how low we'll go, yeah?" Jessica asked.

"We shouldn't go for anything that can't support tier sixteen, but I'd be willing to settle for tier fourteen," Bob replied.

"Nah, not the tier, I meant the habitability," Jessica said.

"Yeah, I wanna put a big old nope on completely frozen worlds," Amanda said.

"I need some sunlight," Dave agreed.

"I'd like some sort of air," Eli added. "Those collars Alex gave us are great, but not having an atmosphere is just weird."

"Is asking for a biosphere too much?" Harv asked.

"It might be," Bob shook his head. "We're looking for a habitable planet circling a K,G, or M type star. We're going to find a lot more of the latter than the former, and M stars might be the least likely place we'll find a habitable planet," he frowned. "Maybe. I'm not entirely sure how much System fuckery is going on in terms of astrophysics, or even planetary physics. When I first got here, after I'd rescued Monroe and fixed my matrix, I did a little bit of napkin math, and I'm pretty sure that Thayland, which is anagolous to Mars, should be both colder, and much more desolate. I suppose the planet could have been terraformed, but I wouldn't even begin to know where to look for that sort of thing."

"Given that the System is all about moving the Mana around, it's not outside the realm of possibility that in addition to stopping the expansion of the universe, it's also fudging things to keep planets healthy enough for life," Dave offered.

"What life, though?" Jessica asked. "There have to be species that have developed to thrive in environments we can't. Hell, there might be people who evolved from humans into something that can make it in an environment we can't. I bet there's an ocean world out there with no land, and some people with gills and flippers living their best lives, yeah?"

'Trebor, do you have enough access to confirm that?' Bob mentally projected.

'I do not have the access, but I can confirm that due to having searched through possible species for your apotheosis,' Trebor replied.

"Fair," Bob agreed. "We really don't know what we'll find."

"The Tree That Shalt Not Be Named," Amanda muttered.

"Exactly," Bob nodded.

"I know we're looking for us, and also for people from Earth, but let's not ignore the possibility of a safe world," Harv began. "While both Earth and Thayland are barely tier ten worlds, they have still presented significant challenges. We don't know what a Tide on Earth is going to look like, and Thidwell's plan for keeping everyone in orbit has a lot of merit, but the fact remains that there might be planets out there that don't have tides. If a planet like that is lower tier, so much the better. Despite the clamor for more access to Dungeons there remain quite a few people who aren't interested in delving at all. Having a place for them to live in relative safety, allowing them to pursue their lives, would be the best thing for them."

"You just don't want all the research scientists to spend all their time hunting monsters," Eli grinned.

"I do not," Harv agreed.

Bob raised his hands. "I agree in that we should make note of any planet that looks habitable."

"As well as confirm it," Dave insisted. "We're saving so much time with your new jump spell that we can take advantage of the opportunity it gives us."

"Too right," Jessica agreed, laying a hand gently on Bob's arm. "I know the clock is ticking, but you've got almost ten years. Sure, we need to get started, and while I'm not quite the delving lunatic you are, I am super keen to get back to it, but we're in this for the long haul. It's a marathon, not a sprint, yeah?"

"Not to mention that we really do have to cap our skills before we tier up," Amanda sighed.

Bob nodded. He'd been tempted to set a realistic goal in terms of their primary skills, and call it good. After all, given the amount of time needed to level his spell up from one hundred and fifty, to one hundred and ninety-two, it didn't really seem worth it.

Then he'd done the math. Jake at level one fifty vs one ninety-two didn't make that big of a difference. It was the increased experience costs for his new tier that did.

When they evolved, they would keep their schools, skills, and attributes, although they'd gain the extra attribute points to distribute. Assuming he continued with a triple affinity for summoning, the maximum level for his Summon Mana-Infused creature spell would go from one hundred and ninety-two, to two hundred and thirty four. The problem lie in that the experience for leveling the spell would go from a base of twelve thousand eight hundred, to fourteen thousand four hundred. The increase wasn't quite thirteen percent, but overall, the amount of experience required to advance the spell at tier eight compared to tier nine was measured in the billions.

"We'll check out any planets in the habitable zone," Bob agreed. "Who knows, we might find a tier thirty world that will make a nice leveling spot in the future."

"I don't know how I feel about a world where the average monster tier is fifteen," Amanda mumbled.

"I'm not going to lie, I don't really know what to expect when we start swinging at tier ten and higher," Bob shrugged. "It's brand new territory, but the math all works out as far as experience goes."

"We know that something has to change at tier ten," Dave said. "Unless taking that System skill that puts you on the prayer switchboard makes all the difference."

Bob didn't have the answer, and having asked, he knew that Trebor didn't either. Naomeh, the tier fourteen Eire he'd met, had told him that certain information was restricted by tier, implying that the ability to understand was linked to your tier in some fashion. She had said that below tier ten was considered the 'Mortal' tiers, while below twenty was labeled 'Ascendent.'

She'd been unwilling to go into further detail, but the whole thing led him to suspect that these were break points where something changed.

He'd only recently begun considering if that applied to monsters as well.

"We won't know until we get there," Bob said. "With that in mind, I'm ready to make the first jump, unless anyone has something they haven't taken care of first?"

When no one spoke up, Bob nodded, and stood up, rolling his neck. It was time.

"Well, shit."

"Green, white, and blue, that's a good sign, yeah?" Jessica smiled.

"It is," Bob agreed. "We'll need to check it out, but that's promising."

The first jump had brought them to a M class solar system with nothing in the habitable zone. It had two gas giants and an ice giant, and was completely unremarkable.

This was the second jump, and while he wasn't ready to celebrate quite yet, the second planet in from the sun, another M class, looked an awfully lot like Earth, at least from the edge of the Solar System, which appeared to be where the new spell would be dropping them off, although two jumps didn't exactly provide enough data to say with any certainty.

"How far out are we?" Jessica asked.

She was the only one besides himself in the bridge, having offered to keep him company, while Dave and Amanda did couple things. He was pretty sure Harv and Eli weren't doing the same sort of couple things, but they were hanging out together as well, leaving Jessica to fend for herself while Bob was jumping the ship.

Bob checked his screen. "If we full burn then decel, call it four weeks."

Jessica winced, and Bob nodded. "Yeah, we'll be doing a lot more exploring than we used," he agreed. "We don't know how many solar systems are going to have something worth exploring, but being guaranteed to be in a solar system each jump cuts out a lot of the time."

Bob pulled up an image of the solar system they'd entered. It showed six planets, although it was possible that there were more that were currently behind the star. There was a small planet close to the sun that was almost certain to be a scorched rock completely devoid of life. The next planet was their target, and it was probably riding the outer edge of the habitable zone. The next planet was a grayish color, but it lacked any indication of an atmosphere, and given it's distance from the star, it was most likely frozen.

The next was a gas giant much further in, but the computer had identified over a dozen moons so far. Another gas giant was on the far side of the solar system, and the imagery was only good enough to suggest it's composition. Rounding everything out the final planet was an ice giant, which was sized somewhere in between Saturn and Neptune.

Bob was going to hug Alex when they got back to Thayland. Or at least give him a firm handshake. The upgraded armbands had been fantastic, but he was quickly coming to the realization that they really were toys in comparison to the computer systems he'd installed on the Freedom.

The software, which Alex happily admitted was stolen from NASA and then improved by DARPA, was putting together a picture of the solar system remarkably quickly, pulling data in from not only the sensors on the masts, but six large and complicated telescopes that Jack had sourced.

"It looks a bit like home," Jessica said.

"It's a lot colder though," Bob said. "The computer says it's running at just over 3k, and while that's at the upper end for an M, our sun runs at 5.7k, so it's barely half of that."

"Still, blue green and white means water, plant life, and atmosphere, right?" Jessica asked.

"I think so," Bob agreed. "I imagine that we'll have a better picture of it once we get closer."