With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

3rd Sigmarzeit 2512
Mid Morning

"First time flying?"

The Lady Richilde has mastered her outward expression fairly well, but Aranei has been instructing me on the subject of unconscious tells, and… With a power ring to keep track, changes in heart rate, brain activity, posture… It's too easy, really.

"Yes, Sir.. Paolo." Head level, her eyes dip to take in Altdorf spread below us. "It.. is."

"Really? The Imperial Zoo's got a herd of pegasi. You didn't get to ride one at any point?"

"Those are.. trained for war, and tend to react poorly to… To unfamiliar riders."

"The Emperor didn't take you up on Deathclaw?"

"No. No. No, he did not." She makes an effort to master herself. "Is this.. flight… Flying, common, in your lands?"

"What, Bretonnia? I've flown with most members of my retinue at some point. Some… Take to it better than others. The village children find it thrilling, but their parents.. generally take to it about as well as you are."

She closes her eyes for a moment, wetting her lips and nodding.

"And some took to it well?"

I nod. "Sir Mallobaude was fine with it. That's… Why I was a bit surprised that you didn't have any experience with it. His uncle used to go pegasus-riding with him regularly when he was growing up."

"Sir Mallobaude? His family is from Parravon?"

"His mother's family, yes."

"And his father's family?"

"Couronne. Didn't spend a lot of time with his father."

"Are his parents estranged?"

"More like never tranged, really. She wasn't his wife or his official mistress."

"Then his absence from Sir Mallobaude's life may be no bad thing. He sounds like a man of low character."

"We both better hope not. He runs the country."

Her heads jerks around from taking in the sight below to stare at me. I smile slightly guiltily.

"His father is King Louen Leoncoeur."

"I thought that checking would be gauche-" And the magics in the Tabard of Kings blocks my scans. "-but that appears to be accepted fact."

"Check..?"

"Ah, you're aware that certain characteristics run in families?" She nods cautiously. "My people understand the mechanisms by which that occurs. We usually need a small blood sample from each person to compare their characteristics in detail, but I can do it by waving the ring at someone."

"I take it that your people can fly as well."

"Not as an act of will. And none of the flying creatures on my world could support an adult's weight. But we have machines for flying. Personal flying machines exist but they've never really caught on. Large flying machines for transporting large numbers of people are more common."

"Like the balloon-borne airships of the Dwarfs?"

"No, we gave up on balloon technology for air travel about a century ago. Then we moved onto something more like a gyrocopter but with lightweight engines and front-mounted propellers rather than-."

"I'm afraid that I was not educated as an engineer. Details such as that would be lost on me."

"Ah, sorry. Anyway, yes, the civilisation I come from can fly. But what do you think of the view?"

She considers the scene for a moment.

"I think that I like Altdorf more the less I can smell it."

Yeah, it… It doesn't look great. There's so much smoke from foundries and cooking fires that a constant pall of smoke hangs over the city. You could go cross-eyed trying to make sense of the streets, and they've taken on that particularly unsettling medieval architecture where the first floor overhangs the ground floor, blocking out the light to the road between them. The river comes in to the city looking reasonably fresh, and goes out a greyish brown that puts me well off the idea of drinking anything water-based while in the city. The streets are covered in excrement that I hope comes from horses and teams of boys with shovels take coins from town-dwellers to shovel a clean path through the fetid mess.

The only positive thing I can say about it is that it's actually pretty colourful. Richly pigmented paint appears to be both fashionable and within the budget of most people.

"Are the cities of your country different?"

"Less smoke. Wider streets. Taller buildings. And we make an effort to have some greenery in the mix. Trees improve air quality a lot, even when they're not in bloom."

"Then how do your fires work?"

"We use either mine gas or lightning. Gas doesn't make much smoke, and lightning only makes smoke where it's generated." Hm. "How badly do you think people would be terrified if I cleaned things up?"

"To what extent?"

"If I sent a giant wall of orange through the city, cleaning the air and removing the excrement."

Her face falls.

"I think they would stampede in a panic and many of them would die."

Yes, she's… Probably right. "Scratch that, then. Ready to see my village?"

"Should I not pack first?"

"We don’t have any sort of embassy building. I can throw something together in half an hour or so, but it's probably better if you have a look around and tell me what you want for however many people you're going to bring with you."

"Then, yes, I am."

"Alright. When we move, it will be something like if you closed your eyes, turned around and then opened them again. What you can see will have changed, but you're still safe and sound. Do you understand?"

"No. But then, I didn't expect to. I am prepared."

"Alright." I plot a transition course to my village, harnessing my desire to return home and to show off what I've achieved. "Three, two, one, now."

The scenery skips just as I said, and her only real response is to blink in confusion at the new scenery.

"That is… It?"

"Yes."

"I.. thought that this part of Mousillon was swampland."

"When I got here, it was. I dug a few canals…" I point one out. "There, you see? To improve drainage, so we could use the land for planting. I went with apple trees so that their roots could stabilise the banks. Once I'm sure that I've got it right, we can add fields of annual crops between them."

"Is that something that you learned on your former world as well?"

"Ah. Sort of. The nation of Holland is largely below sea level and so has to use various drainage techniques to keep their land land, but I didn't study it in enough detail to implement that here."

"Then where did you learn?"

I wince slightly. "Well, since they've been cut off from the rest of the Empire… Marienburg has had to pioneer similar techniques to enable them to plant their hinterlands. They're sort of this world's Holland-equivalent. When they heard about the shipping canals I'm working on, they were happy to help."

"I see. That means that the Empire's maps of your land are out of date. Let us begin our tour there."

 

3rd Sigmarzeit 2512
Mid Morning

Lady Richilde pauses to examine a species of tree that I doubt that she's seen before.

"What is this?

"A cocoa tree. Native to Lustria."

She takes hold of one of the browning leaves and examines it.

"Is it diseased?"

"No, it just needs damper conditions and warmer temperatures than we usually get here." I sigh. "I knew that the yield would be lower than they get in Lustria, but I didn't think that they'd do this badly. I could probably build a greenhouse, but that seems a bit… Profligate, for a luxury product."

"What is its fruit?"

"Cocoa beans, which can be used to make a substance called chocolate. The dried bean can be used to make a hot drink, but it's the solid I was hoping to recreate."

"A drink? We import coffee beans from Araby. Are the two related?"

"No, though I see why you'd think that. And you're getting ripped off. They're roasting the beans before shipping so you can't plant them to grow them somewhere else, and that ruins the flavour. If you like coffee, I'll grab you a bag from the source and you can taste the difference."

"I doubt that trees planted in the Empire would do much better than these; we are further north. Have you tried opening relations with the various colonies on the Lustrian coast?"

"I wouldn't do that without coming to terms with the lizardmen first. I'd just get innocent farmers killed otherwise."

My skink priest contact Xhokiwoki was perfectly happy to provide me with examples of Lustrian fruit and vegetables, but last time I asked they told me that the Mage-Priests hadn't seen fit to speak about my situation. Whether that means they don't know, don't care or weren't paying attention when he tried to raise the matter, I don't know. And the Mage-Priests' view that the Old ones put humans in the Old World to stay there means that they almost certainly aren't just going to accept human farming colonies even if the colonies were prepared to pay them tribute.

Being carnivores, lizardmen don't have much in the way of arable farming and have no real interest in getting more. They don't want food, gold or labour. I pay for what I buy by returning stolen lizardman relics, but there's a limit to how much outstanding stuff there is.

She turns away from the probably-dying plant to look out across the fields being cleared by the labour of both local peasants and beastwomen. Yes, I could do it faster, but I need something that can be replicated.

"Have you considered growing them elsewhere?"

"Nehekhara is too dry. The only real alternatives would be Cathay or Ind, and I don't have any contacts in either country yet." I wave my right hand at the land being cleared. "This is all going to be conventional local crops. And I still have to worry that something is going to go wrong."

"Why? The soil in newly cleared land should be fertile and free of disease."

"We're basically in the Bretonnian version of Sylvania here. Slightly fewer zombies, slightly more mutants. I've cleared up as much residual Dhar as I can -and Loremasters of the Tower of Hoeth checked my work- but I do not want anything infecting people via the food supply."

She looks a little disturbed by that, and tries to brush dried leaf off her left hand.

I shake my head. "How often do you eat food that's been checked for Dhar contamination by a Loremaster? Do you have any idea how many cults I ferreted out in Altdorf?"

It wasn't all that hard. Scan for Dhar concentrations, then check with the Light or Amethyst College and then send in the Witch Hunters. The cults generally relied on secrecy amongst their members to avoid detection rather than magic defences, so I've been an out-of-context problem for them.

She nods, a little relieved. "Seventeen, and I take your point. Any of them could have attempted to sneak a potion of some sort into our food as they did with Uncle Karl, or cause some other grief."

We spend a few moments watching wheat seeds being sown.

"You mentioned the country of Holland on your world. Is there any part of your world that is similar to the Empire?"

"Oh, yes. You're closest to the Holy Roman Empire, but with a more sophisticated level of technology than they ever achieved. They had the same elected monarchy, just… More poorly organised. And of course they were monotheistic."

"Worshipping a single god is a little unusual-."

"No, they only believed that a single god exists. The two largest religions of my homeworld both shared that belief. The sort of pantheism that the Empire has would be… Plenty of places used to be like that, but the monotheistic religions converted most of them."

As far as I've been able to tell, monotheism isn't a thing on this planet. She's clearly having a little trouble with the idea. Even die-hard Ulricians want to be interred in a Garden of Morr when they die, and even a faithful follower of Sigmar would want a priest of Taal to bless their hunting before going to a priest of their main deity. It's a major difference between the Empire and Europe, and if I were a better historian I might be able to tell what changes it had made to their social development. I think that literacy rates are worse, but I don't know that for certain. Since they were never conquered by Tilea I imagine that Reikspiel is more like pre-Roman German than modern German… But it all sounds German to me.

"What other nations do you recognise?"

"Bretonnia is most similar to a country called France, which is south of my own home country. Estalia is almost indistinguishable from Spain. Tilea is Italy, though at its peak Italy conquered our version of Estalia, Bretonnia and the Empire. That's why I went there to find a manager for the road project; they were really good at roads. Once their empire fell apart it was over a thousand years before we started building roads as well as they did, and they're still respected for their cultural achievements. Kislev is Russia, the Hobgoblin Khanate is Mongolia… Only Mongolia is a human nation. Cathay is China, Ind India, Lustria is the continent of South America, a mixture of the Inca and Mayan civilisations. No Ulthuan, and with no Ulthuan we don't have a Naggaroth."

"And your home country?"

I wince.

"Ah… Well… The closest is… Albion."

"Albion?"

"They're about on a level with what we were two thousand years ago, before being conquered and civilised by our Tileans."

She looks decidedly uncertain.

"I suppose that they are better civilised that the people of Albion-."

"Look. You know the standing stone network that I'm incorporating into the road network?" She nods. "The people of Albion have a similar system in the Ogham Stones. It drains Dhar from the world while wrecking their own island. They literally can't build a better civilisation than they have now, and they did that to themselves for the benefit of the rest of the world. I realise that their society isn't very sophisticated, but they limited themselves for altruistic reasons and every generation born there has chosen to leave the Stones in place rather than tear them up to get some decent weather."

She nods, the disdain leaving her face. "Then you are right; we owe them for their sacrifice."

"No, what we should do is get elf or Nehekharan specialists in and replace the Ogham Stones with ones that don't wreck the entire country. But there aren't all that many people on Albion compared with the number of people in the Empire, so I can't afford to prioritise it. Or we could just get the polar gates closed and it would fix itself." I shake my head. "There isn't really anything of my culture there; they're more like how we used to be. It's like comparing pre-Sigmar humanity with the Empire. But-."

Winds howl around us, the sound deafening and the dust blinding! Shield up! A moment later it falls silent again-. Aranei is standing in the field, staring imperiously down at Lady Richilde.

"And who are you?"