Buttopia
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Chapter 75: Growing Awareness
🕑 Added 2025-01-03 19:57:09 +0000 UTC
"Good news, Corey can now level up. They can’t act fully independent of me yet, but they are capable of gaining their own levels and attribute points when I invest in the linked class abilities,” I said to the three men in the garage as Corey floated out the open door.
“Let’s add that to the list of shit ya don’t tell people. To be clear, I don’t actually know if it’s a problem, but everyone who uses dungeon cores keeps a tight lid on how they’re doing it,” Mel said. I wasn’t surprised about that. With what he had told me about the general public’s reaction to dungeon cores, it made sense that it was best to limit letting others know of your own connections to them.
“Yeah, I figured you might say that. So, I’m down eleven levels. Nothing critical lost with the drop,” I explained. Mel nodded along, seemingly unbothered by my level of loss.
“Hey, I’ve made up a decently sized lunch for everyone and I think we all need to have a big talk about what happened this morning,” John said as he opened the door to the garage from the kitchen.
“Yeah, and what’d we need to talk about?” Mel said gruffly before I had a chance to speak. That would need to stop. He could be as much of a dick as he wanted to, to me, but not my kids.
“For starters? Resource management, not to mention living space. You just founded an empire while we were already a little short on food supplies. So now we need to solve that problem. So next time, be a little less of a jackass before asking questions. I expect everyone inside within ten minutes,” John said, slamming the door behind him. Mel looked slightly deflated after that dressing down. I was glad to see John able to handle that himself.
“You heard the man. Mel, could you go find the others? And Timon, I’ve got some folding chairs buried over behind you; wanna help me get those inside as well?” I said, phrasing my questions more as orders. Neither man said anything, but both did as I asked. Good to know there were some upsides to being an emperor.
Ten minutes later, we were all gathered in an even more cramped living room than we had the day before. The only new resident that was missing was Pryte as he was still away doing whatever it was he needed to get the class orbs. John had managed to make enough sandwiches to feed us all, which was probably a good choice as I wasn’t sure how long my bread would be good for anyway. While we were eating I noticed Timon was keeping his eyes on Rabyn pretty strongly. I was starting to question if the mantis was really only a pilot. He always seemed to be paying attention, even when you didn’t notice.
“Alright, we need to talk logistics. I’ve done the math on the food Dad has in storage, and I wasn’t sure it would last more than a month before. Now I’m sure it won’t. Right now the world isn’t in any shape that we can easily just go shopping, so first we are going to need to handle that,” John said after he had finished his food.
“Timon, what do we have on the bus?” Mel asked.
“We can probably double what’s in the house, but I’m guessing John didn’t take into account the added caloric needs of our fighters here. You and me can skip out on the extra food, but they’re gonna need it pretty badly,” Timon said. He was right. I hadn’t mentioned that at all to John. He had no way of knowing that I needed extra food to replenish my core energy, damn.
“Rabyn, how much are you storing?” Mel asked the orc next.
“Much more than that, but if we start depleting my larder, it will severely hurt our climbing capabilities,” he answered.
“Yeah, I’d rather not do that either if we have any other choice. How’s the hunting around here?” Mel asked.
“Probably pretty good. I was never a big hunter myself, but we do have moose, and those are some of the bigger animals on the planet that hunters go after, tons of meat,” I answered. Hunting was likely trivial with my abilities, but we’d still need to butcher and store the meat. That wasn’t a thing I knew anything about. We did have Rabyn now, though, so he might know something. I wasn’t sure if John knew much about game meat, but he was also a strong possibility.
“Alright, then what we’re gonna do is load up as much shit as we can during our free time at the Arena. Plenty of food there, so if we all fill up our storage every time we can, that should add a ton to our stock here. Let’s keep hunting as the second option and only dip into Rabyn if we ain’t got any other choices left. Cecile, how soon can you get a farm going?” Mel asked one-half of the twinogs.
“Already started. I mapped out a clear patch last night. I’m hoping one of my class options speeds this all up. Otherwise, we are looking at at least four months for the first crop. The ground has no mana at all, so I’ve gotta slowly build that up first,” he answered. I assumed that had to do with the fact Earth was mana-barren.
“That’s actually faster than I thought. Does this sound viable, John?” Mel asked, surprisingly respectfully this time.
“Yeah, I think we can work with that, but we need better sleeping arrangements too. Yes, we can all fit in the house and bus, but not comfortably, and if I understand what happened this morning, that means we need to figure out how to handle living together long-term. So we are going to need more buildings,” John said. I had already started considering that. I wanted my own independent workshop as well, and we would need something for indoor training, as well as a library. I very much intended to start collecting as many Spiral books as we could safely have here.
“Yeah, that’s gonna be something else we have to handle. If we can manage to make do with the space we have now, I think we should have enough that we can trade for some basic building supplies once we get the traveler’s gate here, maybe even lure in a carpenter if we’re lucky. Also, I think John has elected himself quartermaster for the Empire of Dave, and considering none of the rest of us even thought about these issues, he’s the only one apparently qualified for it,” Mel said.
“Motion passed,” I said, smiling at my son, who sighed loudly but didn’t voice any complaints, possibly because he had none or, much more likely because Maud’s laughter had drowned out any feasible attempt.
“So something that’s been bugging me since this started, why do we have to fight in the Arena exactly? Why is that a requirement of having a faction?” I asked. I knew the judge had mentioned showing our strength, but it seemed we would have to field a squad eventually, no matter what. But why did we have to?
“New factions aren’t required to field an Arena squad unless they have holdings. This new empire started off by holding this planet and will likely hold the universe should we complete the judge’s demands. There are a lot of differing historical claims as to why this is required, so I can’t give you an exact reason for it. I also don’t know exactly how the scoring system works,” Elody said, speaking up first.
“Yeah, well, I can explain that part at least. She’s right on the history being lost to the ages unless Sanquar knows something, but it was likely long lost by that point, too,” Mel said.
The majesties of the worlds in the place the Spiral labeled chaotic space is something I find hard to describe in these diaries. Grom was right to convince me to join him on this journey. There are so many uncontacted universes across the wildways, but beyond that there are even those that know of the Spiral and choose to remain apart. I wonder how much of the lost knowledge of the Spiral has been retained in some secret hidden corner of a maelstrom. The mind boggles at the immensities of what I have seen.
Personal Diary of Ronald Tammen
Comments
Ian Weidner
How does that look now?
viperfan7
My thinking is that if you can't solve the text size issue, you can at least try to mitigate it by making it clearer and cleaner
Allan Miller
It’s a text size issue for me. It’s just a bit too small.
viperfan7
Cool, I'm going to keep working on my thingy, should be pretty nifty when done, I'll message you when it's done directly since my domain has my last name in it. Just using it as a fun little project to finally learn HTML5 canvas for myself, no idea if it'll be useful but I'm doing it anyways, noi idea how long it'll take, damn ADHD
Ian Weidner
I'll give it a try in the morning
viperfan7
It might help to have more separation between lines, Or have some kind of "Start of line" character, something like > Dave: asdshjjahkdf asjdhjfdas > Corey: jhlkajhf Since it's an image, it can't take advantage of cleartype, so maybe changing the colours to something like #00FFFF and #FF00FF, and the start of line character being #FFFF00 That way the blue subpixel (Which there's usually twice as many of) is used in both colours of the text meant to be read, adding some amount of subpixel smoothing, and still keeping it nice and high contrast Another thing that could help is increasing both font size and image resolution, so the text is the same relative size, but higher pixel density I use something like this for my fish shell config ┬─[root@pve:~]─[03:22:47 AM] ╰─>$ So maybe something like ┬─[Dave] | asdfkjasd | adfasdfasf ╰─ asdfkjasd ┬─[Corey] | asdfkjasd | adfasdfasf ╰─ asdfkjasd Could look cool, and make reading a litte easier, but thats.... a ton of work But also brings the option of having only the name and brackets/lines be coloured, while the text stays white EDIT: Just tried it out, it honestly looks pretty damn fantastic https://imgur.com/nT1JlO8 Keeps the shell console feel, while adding what amounts to chat bubbles. Just make sure you use a monospaced font like lucidia console You'd probably want to make some sort of script to convert the normal way of writing it into that, since quite frankly, doing it by hand was... a headache to say the least. Hell, I bet you could actually do it with a bash script to convert a text file to that format, then copy that over to something like draw.io to scale it up, and use that image generated as a really nice, crisp text block. Hell, I'll be happy to help, seems like a fun project, either make it using javascript or bash. EDIT 2: I'm working on something, I'll message you when it's ready, using it as a project to finally get around to learning html5 canvas
Ian Weidner
I replaced the image with a higher res, larger image. Let me know if that's any better.
Ian Weidner
Is larger enough? I can all look at other ways of displaying it as well if you're good to give feedback
Allan Miller
It’s really hard to read the red and green text on my iPhone. I wish that text was larger.
