Side Story 5.7: Siblings, Stooges and the Nightmare of Master Ben
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What Do You Think?
Adam was, by any reasonable measure, a man handling an unreasonable situation with commendable composure. He had two wives who had just given birth within hours of each other, two newborns who had not yet decided on a sleep schedule that accommodated anyone else's needs, and his two younger siblings who were now regarding him with the specific authority that children reserve for adults who have recently done something questionable.
"So, little brother and sister," he said, with the particular tone of a man attempting to project dignity while holding two infants, one in each arm, "what do you think of your nephews?"
Griz considered this with the gravity appropriate to a very important question. "Babies," he said finally. "They are cute. Can we play with them?"
"I will protect them!" announced Hela, pounding her chest with the confidence of someone who had decided that personal declarations of responsibility were the correct response to most situations. She was four years old and had already developed opinions about everything. "Very adorable babies. I will protect them!"
Adam laughed with the full-throated pride of a man who had done at least one thing correctly in a complicated life. He laughed loudly. He forgot he was holding two sleeping newborns.
The babies woke up.
The sound that two newborns produce simultaneously when disturbed from sleep is difficult to describe to anyone who has not experienced it firsthand. It is immediate, it is complete, and it fills every available space in a room with the specific outrage of small people who have been wronged. Adarna and Hiraya appeared from the adjacent room with the speed of mothers who had developed an instantaneous response to that sound, took their respective children from Adam's arms with the efficiency of people reclaiming property, and looked at him.
The look said many things without saying anything at all.
Griz and Hela gave him the same look. They were four years old and they had already mastered it, which suggested they had absorbed it from the women of the household through some process of cultural transmission that nobody had formally taught them.
Adam looked at the ceiling as if to ask for some form of camaraderie. The inanimate ceiling offered no assistance.
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Jeany and the Education Department
While the Finn household navigated its new domestic configuration, the rest of the thirteen stooges were making themselves useful in the ways that their particular capabilities allowed, which was turning out to be more ways than anyone had predicted when August had brought a wagon full of young children to Gremory and told them of stories of a frontier village that needed skilled people, which was what inspired them to come here.
Jeany Hermes had been formally accepted by the Elder Council as the head of the village's new education department, on the recommendation of August, who had observed her long enough to know that her combination of intelligence, patience, and genuine enthusiasm for teaching was exactly what a village with an education system that had developed organically and somewhat chaotically actually needed for the foreseeable future. The current situation was what it was: adults and children in the same classes, irregular scheduling, a curriculum that had accumulated rather than been designed. Functional, but only just.
Jeany's first recommendation to the council was simple and comprehensive: it was to organize it. Her second recommendation was about what that organization should look like, and it was considerably more detailed.
The basic curriculum would keep what already worked. Reading. Arithmetic. First aid. Basic self-defense, which was a requirement for every student regardless of age because the Great Forest that was outside the village walls was unforgiving to anyone and that was simply the reality of life here. What she added around these foundations was the substance that turned a basic education into something that actually prepared people to live and contribute in Maya Village specifically.
History of the village, because people who understood where they came from made better decisions about where they were going. The unique culture that had developed here, the coexistence of humans, beastfolk, and allied beasts that was unlike anything in the outside world. Knowledge about the surrounding Great Forest and what the village's relationship with it meant, because too many new arrivals still treated the forest as an abstraction rather than understanding that they are now living inside it and that the Grimfangs who patrolled their streets and outside of it were doing them a genuine service. The local bestiary was also the most important as it is the foundation of what to do when you meet one and the expected outcome outside the safety of the village. Magical theory and application, which was one of the areas where the current curriculum was weakest, because it was disorganized and Master Ben doesn't teach just anyone. Basic and advanced trading, because the village's economic future depended on people who understood commerce. Physical education, mandatory, because the morning training runs had proven their value across the entire population and the education system should formalize what the village already practiced.
And for the students who went on to the security division's specialized track, a full military curriculum: basic and advanced warfare tactics, formation training, defensive and offensive combat doctrine, magical application in warfare, a comprehensive bestiary anatomy course that went significantly deeper than the basic version, advanced forest knowledge including territorial boundaries and the village's relationship with the beast populations, and security protocol — how to identify, assess, and handle threats within the village environment efficiently and without creating the kind of incidents that generated diplomatic headaches.
The council approved it. Jeany set about turning approval into implementation with the focused energy of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of problem.
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Juan Tamad, Who Was Definitely Not There
If you walked through Zone Two on any given morning and paid careful attention, you would not notice Juan Tamad.
This was not because he was absent. He was present. He was present in the specific way that a shadow in your peripheral vision is present, which is to say you registered something and your brain filed it under not important and moved on, and then later you were not entirely sure if there had been anything there at all. He was not dressed in anything distinctive. He was not doing anything that drew the eye. He was simply there, moving through the village at the pace of someone with nowhere particular to be, listening to conversations with the specific quality of attention that looked, from the outside, like no attention at all.
The intelligence network he was currently building was working out well because he was the one working in it, and because the gift he had been developing since his days in Gremory had only gotten more refined with practice. His shadow element was part of it, but not all of it. Most of it was older than magic, the simple human fact that people talk freely around people they don't register as present, and Juan had made himself systematically unregisterable in any room, street, or gathering he chose to occupy.
August had assigned him to flag unusual arrivals, unusual questions, and anyone whose behavior pattern didn't match their stated purpose. Juan had expanded this scope somewhat on his own initiative, which August had not formally authorized but had not formally objected to either, because the results were useful.
He would not be noticed unless you specifically looked for him. Even then, you might not find him on the first pass.
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The Other Stooges
Mary Sween had the kind of relationship with food that most people reserved for art. She had spent her years at the Fernando household learning from professional cooks, absorbing technique the way Ashford absorbed mechanical principles — not passively but with the focused intent of someone who understood that the gap between competent and exceptional was made up of exactly these accumulated hours. Her dream had always been a restaurant of her own, a place built around the specific idea that food could be more than sustenance, that it could be a reason to travel, a reason to stay, a reason to come back. The Elder Council had approved her spot. The location was chosen. The concept was simple and audacious at once: she would use what the Great Forest produced, not as an exotic novelty but as the entire foundation of the menu, and she would make it extraordinary because she knew what these ingredients could do in the right hands and she was the right hands of someone who was both passionate and knowledgeable of what they do. The village did not yet have a dedicated culinary destination. But it would soon and it would become an attraction for the gourmets of society.
Loyd Yu had been a mercenary since he turned thirteen, the minimum age the world permitted, and had spent those years developing the hotheaded but absolutely reliable combat presence that came from taking real contracts for real coin against people who were genuinely trying to hurt him. His weapons were a short sword and round shield with throwing knives for range, a loadout built for the close, ugly, personal kind of fighting that bodyguard and enforcement work produced. His element was null, which meant he could not throw fire or move water but could push his body beyond its natural limits in ways that most elemental users envied. Enhancement mana was quieter than the flashier elements and twice as useful in a sustained fight. Loyd's anger came quick and it came honest, forged in the same trauma that had shaped all of them, and his loyalty was the kind that did not negotiate. He was currently among the first enrollees of what the village's leadership was already calling the military academy, though it did not yet have an official name or an official building, just an official level of rigor that made the training sessions very clarifying in its experiences for anyone who had previously believed they understood what hard work meant.
Edgar Filtt had spent his years in Gremory as Madam Susan Fernando's personal bodyguard, which was a job that required a specific kind of attention that most combat training did not develop — the constant low-level awareness of everything in a room, every person's position and weight distribution, every exit and entry point. He carried a longsword and had been developing his element, metal manipulation, with the steady patience of someone who understood that rare abilities required proportionally rare dedication to master. He could sense metal objects at a distance and with concentration could exert minor influence on their movement and temperature, which in a combat context was more useful than it sounded if you understood how much of what people carried was metal. He was training alongside Loyd and Henrich, accumulating the kind of field experience that no formal program could manufacture, because they had already been inside Kirka Village during the reconnaissance operation and had come out the other side with judgment that was worth considerably more than anything theoretical.
Henrich Maus loved archery with the specific devotion of someone who had identified their thing and was not distracted from it. His understanding of range estimation, trajectory, and the thousand small adjustments that turned a competent archer into an exceptional one had been developed through years of hunting experience in the forests around Gremory, and it had accelerated dramatically since arriving in a village where the things you might need to shoot at were considerably larger and less forgiving than anything he had encountered outside. He carried a longbow and a dagger, the longbow for range and the dagger for the moments when range ceased to be available. He was in the same first cohort of the military academy training as Loyd and Edgar, and the three of them together had already proven during the Kirka operation that they could function as a coordinated unit under pressure, which was the test that mattered.
May Bel-lin had found the Great Forest the way most people find the thing they were made for: by arriving somewhere and understanding immediately that this was where she was supposed to be. Her love of botany, which had been constrained at the Fernando estate to a small garden plot and whatever the Gremory City library could tell her about plant science, had expanded in the forest into something that did not have adequate boundaries anymore. She wandered the designated paths in the mornings with the absent focus of someone so deep in observation that the rest of the world was reduced to background noise. She identified species, catalogued medicinal properties, studied the interactions between plants and the unique mana-saturated soil of the Great Forest that produced growth rates and properties nothing outside could replicate. She had become a genuine contributor to the village's agricultural and botanical community, her knowledge already surpassing several of the established farming families in specific areas. The patrols had quietly incorporated her habits into their circuit planning without making an announcement about it, because she wandered toward the edges sometimes and the edges of the village paths that were still part of the Greater Forest and it was not gentle about distracted visitors who were paying attention to plants instead of their surroundings. The Grimfangs had also taken it upon themselves to accompany her in the denser sections, which she accepted with the serene obliviousness of someone who had decided that dangerous things clearly meant her no harm and had filed this under confirmed facts rather than ongoing concerns.
Sia Su had arrived at the village with a mind already trained in numbers and business from her years working at the Fernando household and Mitch-Maya's Embroidery in Gremory. She understood commerce from both the production side and the transactional side, which was a combination that most people had only one half of. She had found an unlikely partner in Bonny Tanner, who had spent her years in Gremory developing the specific eye for materials and aesthetics that had made her exceptional at the embroidery work, transforming ordinary cloth into things that nobles paid serious coin for. Alone they were each good at one thing. Together they had begun to work out what a business looked like that combined Sia Su's commercial instincts with Bonny's material sensibility and the forest's abundant supply of fibers, dyes, resins, and organic materials that the outside world simply could not access. The concept was still forming. The energy behind it was not. They had ideas that were going to become something, and the village's trade infrastructure already existed to carry whatever they produced to markets that would pay for it.
Judge Burner was at the forge every day under Elder Anvel Ironhide, learning in the sequence that Anvel enforced without flexibility: technique first, nothing else until technique was correct, application only after technique was correct. His hands were blistered in the specific pattern of someone learning hammer work from scratch, which Anvel accepted as appropriate evidence of progress. Judge had been drawn to the craft since his days at the Fernando estate's small forge, where he had started with maintenance work on the guards' weapons and equipment and had discovered through that process that he had an instinct for metal that was not purely mechanical. He wanted to make things, real things, weapons and tools of quality, and he understood that the distance between where he was and where he wanted to be was measured in hours at the forge and he was putting in those hours without complaint. His designation as the Finn household's personal blacksmith was a responsibility he carried with complete seriousness and the intention of being genuinely worthy of it rather than merely assigned to it.
Don Garo could not be adequately described by listing what he did because he did everything. Roof repair, construction labor, crop planting, harvesting, equipment maintenance, workshop assistance, structural problem-solving, general intervention in whatever situation needed an extra capable person who would show up without being asked twice. The village had developed an informal scheduling system for him because the demand for his presence in a given day exceeded what one person could physically cover without some coordination of priorities. People left his name with the district coordinator the evening before and he divided his working hours between them with the cheerful efficiency of someone who found each new task genuinely interesting rather than merely another obligation. His fellow stooges had stopped trying to understand how he sustained this across every category of work without his enthusiasm degrading, because his enthusiasm and passion did not degrade at all. Everything he did, he did as if it was the thing he had been looking forward to doing. He trained in whatever time remained. The others had collectively decided he was a hidden genius of unprecedented capability and had moved on from trying to explain it further.
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Master Ben's Premonition of an Approaching Danger!
The summer that was seemingly extending well into the seventh month had given Master Ben a particular unease that he could not quite locate the source of. He was standing at the top of his tower with the expression of someone whose instincts were reporting something that his senses could not yet confirm, which was an experience he had learned over centuries not to dismiss.
He asked Amanda, who had been his research assistant for long enough now to understand that when Ben said something was off, the correct response was to take it seriously and work through the possibilities methodically.
"Have you disengaged from the experiments properly?" she asked.
"I am not so old as to forget that."
"Any missed meetings with Master Daemon or the Council?"
"Not this week."
"Active volcanoes nearby?"
"Several, but none close enough to matter."
She paused, considered, and offered the last item on her mental checklist with the careful neutrality of someone who understood the territory. "What about a former lover? Or someone with a grievance who might be thinking about you very intently from a significant distance?"
The color left Master Ben's face with the completeness of a candle being snuffed.
"That woman," he said, to no one in particular. Then, with considerably more urgency: "Amanda, help me move the experiments into the fort. Immediately. All of them. Especially the ones she would find interesting. Especially those."
Amanda was already moving she knew what those ones mean.
Mirabeth Flamespyre arrived at the Zone Two gate approximately forty minutes later.
She was dressed in the manner of someone who had traveled a great distance and had nevertheless arrived looking like she had not, which was either the result of considerable personal care or a minor but practical application of magical ability, or both. Her presence at the gate generated the specific quality of attention that happens when someone very distinctive appears in a place that is not accustomed to being unimpressed by distinctive people — the guard captain, who had withstood far more alarming arrivals than a well-dressed woman with a commanding bearing, maintained his professional composure and asked the appropriate questions.
"Mirabeth Flamespyre," she said, when he asked her name. "You may simply call me Mirabeth. I am here looking for a colleague. His name is Ben Flameswrath."
"I see. Should we inform Master Ben of your arrival, madam?"
"That will not be necessary. Just point me in the right direction, please."
The guard captain, whose job was to do his job regardless of who was asking him not to, explained the entry procedure. A one local gold coin entrance fee, eighty percent returned upon exit, of course only if you didn't do any law breaking inside the village justification. It entails the visitor's identification plaque, orange-striped, to be worn visibly at all times when outside. Directions to the inns, though as Master Ben's acquaintance she would likely have accommodation arranged. The explanation was delivered with the professional courtesy that the village had established as its standard for all arrivals regardless of apparent status, because the whole point of having a standard was applying it without exception.
Mirabeth noted this. She had arrived via the access road from the south, passing through the queue of caravans and travelers at the checkpoint, and she had seen enough on that approach to revise whatever expectations she had brought with her. The Grimfang Cavalry riders on their circuits. The Mighty Peregrine Eagles overhead, their wingspans casting shadows that moved across the road like slow-passing clouds. The joint patrol of imperial troops and village security forces, their different banners and different armors making clear who was who without creating any visible tension between them. The walls, which were not decorative, but was there serving its function an intimidating silence to anyone who is new here.
The village she had heard described in letters and rumors was accurate. If anything, the description had been conservative.
She collected her plaque, noted the directions, and walked into Zone Two.
The news of her arrival traveled through the village ahead of her at the speed that interesting information always traveled in a community where everyone knew everyone else's business: faster than walking pace, slower than a shout, arriving at destinations through a chain of passersby who had each contributed their own small amplification to the message.
By the time she was halfway through Zone Two, the information that a very striking, very well-dressed woman had arrived asking for Master Ben had made it to three separate households in Zone One, been discussed by two groups of people at the market stalls, and reached the ears of at least one person who knew exactly what it meant and was already composing a way to tell August about it that preserved all the best details.
Master Ben was in his fort (tower) with his experiments and the expression of a man who had made his preparations and was now simply waiting for what was coming.
It was definitely a hot summer. But wit this it was about to get considerably hotter.