Blood Shaper

The former slaves stared at Kay after he welcomed them. A few of them clustered together into small groups, but most of them just stared at him. Eventually, one of the men in the group shook his head. "What's happening? Did a Blood Mage just free us from slavery?"

"I'm not a Blood Mage," Kay corrected him.

He gave Kay an incredulous look in return. "Do you think we're stupid? I know what blood looks and smells like, and you just ripped those collars off of us with floating blood."

"I did," Kay nodded in agreement, "But I'm not a Blood Mage; that wasn't a spell. I used Blood Manipulation."

That gave some of the group pause, and he noticed one of them mutter "Blood Melder" to the person standing closest to them, so he knew at least one of them had Inspect at a decent level.

Kay watched the former slaves stare at him and whisper and realized that this wasn't a task he needed to handle himself; he had people now. He glanced over to the messenger he'd used as a witness. "Go get Amanda."

The man nodded and ran off.

Next, Kay looked over to where the guards and Meten's adventurers were working to restrain the slavers and drag them off to a secure location, whether that was the cells that might be done by now or not. He waited until his Head Guard saw him trying to get her attention and waved her over.

She handed over the manacles she was putting on one of the criminals to someone else and walked over, "Did you need me, sir?"

"Yeah, I want you to interrogate the prisoners and interview these folk," He gestured at the former slaves, "I want to know all the crimes that those fuckers committed in our territory, so we can try them for that. They probably did a whole lot of stuff we consider crimes outside of the area we control, but we can't really punish them for that."

Sarah Huento nodded and then stopped and opened her mouth to ask something. She paused again, then looked at Kay with a curious expression. "What area does Avalon control, exactly?"

"Hmm." Kay stared into space for a bit. "You know what? Just tabulate all the crimes they've committed in this area and when they happened. We'll narrow them down into crimes we'll actually punish them for after that."

"Um, what does 'tabulate' mean, sir?"

He realized that he'd said that in English. He thought about it for a second and realized that there wasn't a good translation for the concept. "Record. Record all their crimes in the area."

"Yes, sir." She gave him a salute, which he realized must be from the Tumbling Rapids guard force. He made a mental note of yet another thing to decide on.

He noticed Amanda walking up out of the corner of his eye, and he turned back to the group of former slaves who were still watching him warily. He waved to indicate Amanda as he started talking to them. "This is Amanda, my assistant. Or maybe adjunct is the best title?" He glanced at her, then shrugged. "Either way, she's in charge of a lot of stuff. She'll be handling getting you somewhere to stay while we deal with them." He pointed at the restrained criminals. "If you want to go home or somewhere else and it's possible for us to help you with that, we'll do our best. If for any reason you guys want to stay here, that can be discussed. At some point, Amanda will arrange for you to talk with our guards at some point." He shared a nod with Amanda, then bowed to the group of people and walked off.

He grabbed Meten's shoulder and dragged him along as he left, and Eleniah fell in next to them.

"You aren't staying?" Meten asked.

"No, there's not much I can do to be useful, so I'm going back to my office, and we're finishing that meeting we were having."

"What were we doing?"

"We were discussing what to do about the Adventurer's Guild when they show up, then we were going to talk about starting a military, and then about formalizing your adventurers or whatever we're going to call them."

"Oh, right."

Hours later, Kay stared at the growing list of decisions to make and issues to solve in dismay. He scrubbed at his face with both hands. "Right, what's the next thing after deciding if we're allowing all genders into our new military?" He glared a little bit at Eleniah.

She raised her hands up. "Look, my opinion on the answer is obvious, but I think we should put it out there officially so no one can try and fuck things up by insisting one way or the other."

"Fine." Kay sighed and looked at Amanda. "What's next?"

Amanda looked down at the list she'd brought with her after she'd finished getting all of the freed slaves settled for the rest of the day at minimum. "Well, the next thing is-"

"Wait." Kay interrupted her, "Why am I writing all of this down if you have it all on a list already?" He pointed at the sheet in her hands, "You can just give me that one, and things will go much faster."

"Sir!" She threw her head back in comical dismay, "This is my list! I can't just give you my list!"

Meten and Eleniah laughed at her dramatics.

Kay rolled his eyes. "Alright, sure. But for real, why?"

"This is just the list of things I thought of," She told him seriously, "It's not the actual list of everything that needs to be thought of."

"Oh, okay." He grabbed his pen again, then paused. "Why am I writing up the main list?"

"Because my hands are full." She gestured with her free hand at the hand holding the paper.

Kay glared at her with narrowed eyes, and Amanda stared back with an innocent expression.

"…Fine. What's next?"

"You need to determine the focus of the initial training for the military."

"What?"

Meten jumped in, "Are we going to have cavalry or infantry to start? What weapons should our people use? That kind of thing."

Kay stared at him with his mouth open. "How am I supposed to know that?"

"You are in charge."

"Yeah, but I don't know what the best choice for weapons to start our tiny military on are!" Kay sighed again and gently set his head on the desk. "Amanda."

"Yes?"

"Add to the list that we need to find someone for me to delegate military things to since Meten already refused."

Amanda glared at her dad and sniffed at him in a derogatory way as she made a note on a different piece of paper. He rolled his eyes back at her.

Kay actually chuckled at the exchange, as annoyed as he was at life. "Right. Table that idea and move on to the next one." He mentally ran through the topics he'd thought of to discuss. "I think we move on to Meten's people, right?"

"This is the fifth topic you've pushed off for later, sir." Amanda informed him, "But yes, next would be that."

He shrugged it off, "I can't answer every question in every meeting. What am I supposed to say? Give them all longswords? That could be a terrible idea! It probably is a terrible idea." He mused, "Anyway, I don't know what would be best, and we can't afford to fuck that one up. So we leave it for when we can learn more or have someone who knows more here to advise me."

Eleniah nodded in agreement as she grabbed a drink from the tray sitting on a side table, "He's right. Since we're not in a massive rush for the military, we can afford to wait to make good decisions."

Kay gave her a thankful look. "Good, we're in agreement. For the next topic, can you guys give me an overview of what other countries do?"

Meten took the drink Eleniah held out to him and paused in the motion of taking a drink, "What do you mean?"

"So there are three types of…" Kay paused and looked up at the ceiling while he formatted what he wanted to say, "I guess, tools for fighting for countries, right? Adventurers, their own military, and then groups like Meten's people. But we can't keep calling them 'Meten's People' all the time, so what do other countries call them? How are they organized? Stuff like that."

"Why make completely original ideas when you can just copy someone else?" Eleniah smirked at him.

Kay shrugged, "You don't have to innovate everything."

"Well, I don't know what a lot of countries call them, but they're all essentially the same thing."

Kay cocked a brow at her and waited.

"Household troops of the Nobles in charge."

"… Okay… I think I have enough background to get the gist of that, but tell me in detail."

"Once a Noble reaches the Lord level with their title, they gain the ability to create a House, which is a bit like a settlement in that members of the House get bonuses from being members that stem from the leader of the house, but other powerful House Members with titles can also confer bonuses on other House Members." Eleniah saw Kay's questioning expression and shook her head. "We can talk more about that later; what's important for now is that once you create a House, people can swear to the House and join it via an oath of service."

"Okay…?"

She smiled at him. "The short version is that adventurers sworn to a Noble House serve that House. Nobles will use their House Members as personal adventurers to go achieve goals they want to beat others to, are secret, or any of the other numerous reasons they couldn't trust regular adventurers. The household troops of the leader of the entire nation often complete missions on behalf of the entire nation since the leader is invested in the nation, but they can also be used to complete personal tasks. Same with every other noble."

Amanda frowned and stepped forward. "That might be how some nations do things, including the Seramist Isles, but many nations have a separate group of people that work directly for the nation. The Isermani Concord calls them Servants of the Concord, multiple nations call them National Adventurers, and so forth. It's basically the same thing, but they serve the nation directly instead of serving the leader and helping the nation because they choose to." She saw Eleniah's surprised look and continued: "I'm sure they still have household troops; they just also have some kind of National Adventurers as well."

Eleniah frowned and looked off. "That's… Huh. I can see why that's a good idea." She scratched her chin with a finger and nodded. "I can see why my cousin wouldn't do that, though; it would mean she'd have to loosen her control." She gave Kay a serious look, "I suggest we go with that idea."

"Just from listening to the concept, I agree with you." He looked up from making some notes and got Amanda's attention. "The Isermani Concord, that's one of the two massive countries west of here, right? The one that Cindy and the others came out of?"

"Correct. The Isermani Concord is northern of the two larger countries in the area, and the Bannerthrust Empire is to the south, on the other end of the Upper Heart Strait."

"Right!" Kay made sure his mental map was correct, then noticed Meten's considering expression. Kay was pretty sure he could predict what that look was about, but he decided not to broach the topic yet. "Let's come back to the household troops topic when it's relevant and agree that we're going to make our own version of National Adventurers for Avalon?"

Everyone agreed verbally or through a nod in Meten's case.

"Great, let's brainstorm then. We need to have a rough idea of what responsibilities and duties we want included for when we eventually make a real constitution for ourselves."