The card in Karl’s hand said 812.
The one still sitting in Elsa’s fingers said 812 as well, and she was holding it up at exactly the height where everybody could read it.
Dane worked it out first, which surprised everyone in the lobby including Dane.
"Hold on."
"Mm?" Elsa said.
"That’s the same number."
"Is it?" She turned her card over and looked at it with an expression of enormous surprise that lasted about a second and a half before she gave up on it entirely. "Oh, would you look at that?"
"You did that on purpose."
"I paid for the rooms, Dane. I don’t have to do anything on purpose. Things simply happen around me."
Sana had already taken her card and had already put it in her pocket, and she did not say anything, but she also did not walk toward the lift, which was its own kind of statement.
Dori’s had gone into her jacket before Elsa finished dealing, and she was standing by the doors with her scarf still up, watching the whole thing.
"Okay, but hear me out," Dane said, turning around. "Bro to bro talk. Right? When does that happen? When do me and Kazu sit up and eat those little jars of nuts from the fridge and talk about our lives? Because I’ve been in a pod all day and I have a lot to say and none of you people want to hear any of it."
"Nobody wants to hear any of it," Sana said.
"You’re all sick."
"I have two beds in my room," Sana added. "Kazu can come join me so he doesn’t inconvenience you, Elsa. you paid after all."
Elsa’s head turned so fast her mask nearly came off her forehead.
Karl was tired in a way that had gone past his eyes and into his back, and the argument was already going somewhere he could not follow, so he did the only thing that made sense to him.
"Which floor is 812 on?" he asked.
Elsa stopped mid breath. "Eighth."
"Right." He picked up his bag. "Night."
He was in the lift before anyone said anything else, and the last thing he saw through the closing doors was Dane with both arms out and no words in his mouth, Sana looking at the floor, Dori’s shoulders shaking behind her scarf, and Elsa standing in the middle of all of it going red from the jaw up and making absolutely no attempt to hide it from any of them.
...
The shower in 812 had four settings and he used the one that worked.
He came out with a towel around his waist and his hair still dripping onto his shoulders, sat down on the end of the nearer bed, and let the panel come up in front of him at last.
He had been carrying it around unopened since the cafe.
There was a new line at the bottom of it.
[Shop.]
’That wasn’t there this morning.’
[Correct. Shop access is tied to closed quests. The Administrator has closed one.]
The panel opened sideways and kept opening. Infrastructure. Blessings. Consumables. Exchange. Bonds. Five columns of pale text hanging in a hotel room, and above them, greyed and quiet, the tab from the arena that he had not touched yet.
He went through the columns instead. Infrastructure was the wall he had already seen from the throne, except he could reach it now without going anywhere, which was the whole point of it.
Blessings was a list of jobs.
Exchange was gold, iron, salt, timber, a hundred things with real-world prices attached, and for about four seconds Karl’s heart went somewhere stupid.
[Exchange draws from production. An empty world produces nothing.]
’So I can’t just sell gold I don’t have.’
[The Administrator may sell anything he owns.]
’I don’t own much in that world, so i guess i can work on that first.’
[Correct.]
Consumables was where it got strange.
Halfway down there was a regression elixir at forty thousand EXP, described in one flat line as returning the user to a prior age, and he read it twice and left it alone, because forty thousand was a number that belonged to someone he was not yet.
Then, three rows under it, at two hundred exp.
[Refinement draught, tier one. Effect: cosmetic. Permanent.]
Karl looked at that for longer than he was proud of.
He had never thought of himself as much to look at. Not badly. Just nothing in particular, the sort of face that a lecture hall passed over on the way to somewhere else, and he had been perfectly happy about it for twenty-one years because it kept people from talking to him.
Two hundred EXP was one bad match’s worth.
’What does cosmetic actually mean.’
[Cosmetic.]
’That’s not-’
[Purchase?]
He bought it.
It arrived in his palm as a small glass thing with nothing written on it, and he drank it standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a towel around his waist and his hair in his eyes, and then he spent the next forty seconds finding out that the system had a sense of humour it never used out loud.
It went in cold and came up hot.
His teeth ached first, all of them at once, then his jaw, then the skin along his hairline pulled tight enough that he grabbed the sink with both hands and made a noise into the mirror that he was going to think about for the rest of his life.
His eyes watered.
Something in his nose clicked. He stood bent over a hotel sink in a towel with his face on fire, alone, having paid for this.
Then it stopped.
He straightened up and looked.
Nothing had happened, was his first thought.
Then his second thought caught up and pointed out that his skin had cleared, that the shadows he had been carrying under his eyes since March were gone, that his jaw had picked up an edge it had not had at dinner, and that the whole effect added up to a man who looked like he had slept eight hours a night for a year and eaten properly the entire time.
It was not a different face. It was his face, being taken seriously.
’That’s it? Two hundred?’
[Tier one.]
’There are more tiers.’
[There are only two tiers.]
Karl turned the light off and left the bathroom quickly.
...
He sat back down on the bed and got to work on the part that actually mattered, and the tiredness went out of him the way it always did when there was a board in front of him.
"Are there additional tiers?"
[There are just two tiers available.]
Karl quickly switched off the bathroom light and stepped out.
...
Returning to the bed, he shifted his focus to the crucial tasks ahead. As always happened when a strategic board appeared before him, his fatigue dissolved completely.
He had 2,740 EXP and nineteen thousand six hundred and forty dollars in an account that remained eleven and a half thousand short.
He also recalled the man behind the card table on Monday who intended to be exceedingly pleasant about the debt, alongside the words of a girl on a bench who had reminded him that paying it off wouldn’t truly end things.
What he required was a passive income stream.
"Infrastructure," he murmured.
The massive menu unfolded across the length of the room.
He passed right over Settlement tier one at twelve thousand EXP and continued scrolling downward.
Near the very bottom, beneath the options he had previously observed from the throne—and overlooked initially while being overwhelmed by the scale of a city—he spotted a particular entry.
[Hamlet, tier one – 1,300 EXP.]
"What is the population size?"
He needed something that made money while he slept.
’Infrastructure.’
The wall came down the length of the room. Settlement tier one sat at twelve thousand, and he ignored it, and kept scrolling, and near the bottom, under everything he had already seen from the throne, there was a line he had missed the first time because he had been busy being overwhelmed by a city.
[Hamlet, tier one - 1,300 EXP.]
’Population?’
[12.]
’Twelve, what?’
[People.]
He paused.
’They’re real?’
[They are human.]
’That’s not what I asked.’
[The Administrator did not ask a question this unit can answer.]
He bought it anyway.
1300 EXP went out of his balance, and somewhere on the other side of his own skull a stretch of empty ground under the tower stopped being empty.
He felt it land in his chest, small and physical, like a coin dropping into a machine.
[Blessing required. Unassigned population produces nothing.]
The Blessings column turned itself toward him.
[Fishing.]
[Masonry.]
[Weaving.]
[Woodcutting.]
There was nothing to fish and nothing to build with yet, so he went back to infrastructure, bought a stand of trees for a hundred, and put it on the slope east of the tower where he would be able to see it from the throne.
Then he spent 40 exp and dropped woodcutting onto all twelve of them at once.
The panel took a moment.
[Projection.]
[Weekly yield: 450 EXP.]
[Weekly revenue: 300 dollars, contingent on sale of goods.]
Three hundred dollars a week.
Against thirty-one thousand it was almost funny, and he sat there on the end of a hotel bed and looked at it and did not laugh, because six months ago three hundred dollars a week would have been his mother not taking the Sunday shift.
’It works,’ he thought. ’It’s small, but it works.’
[Correct.]
[Charlotte notes that the Administrator has been sitting in a towel for a while.]
’Charlotte-’
The door opened.
Elsa came in two steps with her shoes in one hand and her mask finally off.