Side Story 5.10: Village Life
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A Student's Daily Life
Keirara was already awake before the morning horn could be blown in the village.
This was not a rule that everyone follows — the school did not require its students to arrive early — but Keirara had developed the habit and almost a ritual at this point because the walk through the streets of Zone Two in the early morning hours was one of her favorite parts of the day, and she had decided some weeks ago that she was not going to let sleeping through it to become her normal routine. The village in the early morning had a specific quality to it that the busier hours erased: the sound of the aqueduct channels running, the smell from the longhouse kitchen beginning its first preparations, the particular way the light came through the forest canopy and hit the zone's rooftops at an angle that made everything look like it was made of something more significant in its design of more than just timber and stone and hard labor that was put into it.
She was a beastfolk child, one from the Lokoroko clan, and her family had been among the earlier arrivals that had gone to the Southern Beastmen Tribes to relocate their homes, but instead they were redirected here to the village. Her parents had made a specific choice, one not every beastfolk family had made, which was to integrate fully rather than maintain the cultural separation that a good portion of the beastfolk community still preferred. Both options were respected inside the village and there was even a community made for those who wish to be culturaly separated while still coexisting with each other. Her parents had simply made their choice, and Keirara had grown up in that new environment as a result: a household that navigated two worlds without treating either of them as a problem that needs to be solved.
She had friends from both worlds. Human friends who found the world of the Lokoroko clan interesting in the way that children found things that were different from what they already knew. Beastfolk friends who had grown up in similar households and had similarly mixed friend groups. The school had accelerated all of this, because the school put everyone in the same room and did not distinguish between them on any basis except how quickly they were paying attention.
She arrived at the meeting point near the edge of the market district to find Mark, Karoto, and Minerva already there. Mark had been in the village for two years, arriving with the second major wave of refugee families. Karoto was human, born in the village itself — one of a growing number of children who had that particular distinction, having no memory of anywhere else as home. Minerva was also from the beastfolk, the same Lokoroko clan as Keirara, who arrived roughly the same time as Mark's family.
"Are you ready for today's combat lessons with special instructor Erik?"
She got the question out before any of them managed a morning greeting, which was characteristic of her. For her morning pleasantries could only follow after she got that itch out of her system, a secret news that she seems to have overheard from the adults around her.
"I heard one of the special instructors today is one of the first people who came to the village after it fell," said one of her friends, with the reverence that the village's founding generation reliably produced in the children who had grown up in the stories about them. "They say Master August is friends with him. There are supposedly three of them and were one of the very first who came — Sir Erik, Sir Bren, and Mistress Betty. I wonder which one today."
"I hope it is Mistress Betty," said Minerva. "Her fire element is something else. And she does not coddle you."
"I hope it is Sir Bren," said Karoto, in the tone of someone who had a specific and possibly embarrassing reason. "He commands one of the Peregrine Eagles. The big ones."
Keirara was left speechless she had already told them who the instructor was.
"But it's sir Erik… ohh never mind"
She said in a whisper to herself.
Her friends countined the argument about which of the three would be the better instructor. They didn't notice that it had carried them through most of the walk to the school, which sat in the northwestern part of Zone Two, positioned with deliberate intention relative to the walls — far enough from them that in any emergency situation, the evacuation route to Zone One's mountain fortress was clear and short. Most of the village's major non-military facilities followed this same logic. The farms clustered near the walls. The military and security infrastructure sat along the perimeter. Everything that they deemed as important and is not vital to any fighting where positioned closer to zone one where its non-combat residents could be moved quickly.
The school was near one of the thirteen stooges' recently opened restaurants, which meant the morning air around it smelled considerably better than the school's own interior did before the day warmed up. This was considered an acceptable tradeoff by the student population.
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What the Schools was About
The school had not been running long enough to have its own traditions, it had been running long enough (one to two months) to already have its own reputation.
The education it offered as discussed previously by the head of the Education Department was not the basic literacy-and-numbers curriculum that most villages could afford when they could afford it within their villages. It was the kind of education that only cities could offered to children whose families could pay for it — the kind that produced adults who could not be easily tricked in a contract, who understood what a map was telling them, who could apply a tourniquet without being shown how first, and who had some framework for understanding the history of the world they were living in beyond the immediate thirty kilometers of their own experience.
The day that they spent for learning was limited only to six hours. This was a deliberate choice. The village leadership decided that children of this village needed act like children and behave as such, and the village's as a whole had decided that six hours of serious learning was the most that could be extracted from such young minds before the returns starts to diminished below the cost of the attempt. This was only recently introduced to the broader populace for a discussion and majority of the parents had already agreed that this would be a great thing for their childs personal growth and it would also not take much of their time away from them, some have fears that the children would be estranged from their parents if they are out at school all day instead of being taught at their homes. Thus this was a great compromise by the community and their education department.
The rest of the day of course was left for the children to use and enjoy as they chose, which was also an education in some informal aspect. They could have their own fun games with friends or even choose to learn their parents skills early on.
The curriculum that was created ran from foundational literacy and mathematics through history, culture, physical education, wilderness survival, basic first aid and field medicine, and self-defense. The self-defense component had attracted the most external attention from visiting parents of the human variety, who had not expected to send their children to a school that also taught them how to break someone's grip, and after bearing the decision why this was implemented they decided that this was fine. The location of the village inside the forest and the history of this that has threatened it so far made its context more obviously relevant than it might have been elsewhere.
The higher grades also added vocational components — actual work experience in the village's various industries, paired with classroom understanding of what made those industries function. The final stage before graduation was a placement period in the student's chosen field, working alongside people who actually did the jobs they were learning at school rather than the people who were teaching them about the job. This was not a new idea. It was an old idea that the village had implemented because nobody who built anything here could afford to hire a person who only knew theory.
Erik Rubbard was the special combat instructor today. The argument among the children resolved itself when he appeared at the training ground behind the school building — a cleared area with proper spacing and marked zones for different types of training — and the children filed in to meet him.
He was not as flashy as they had hoped. He was also, as they quickly discovered, considerably more effective, considerate and soft spoken.
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Anguy Archers Shopping Experience
On the other side of the village, in the craftsman district of Zone Two, a member of one of the major hunting families was making his morning rounds.
The Archers had been in Maya Village since the early period, of what we now know as the first revival — not quite as early as the absolute founding members, but early enough that the family name was woven into the village's informal history as one of the hunting clans that had made the settlement's food security possible through its most precarious years. The family had produced some of Maya Village's most capable hunters across multiple generations, and the skills moved through the family the way practical skills did in such families that treated them seriously: passed from experienced hands to younger ones, refined by each generation through accumulated field time, and taken seriously enough that the people carrying them remained among the best at what they did.
Anguy Archer was the family member that is most often seen in the market district because Anguy was the the one tasked to manage the household's equipment procurement. He did not resent this position of course. Because he was naturally thorough about what equipment was handed to their family in a way that not everyone in the family was capable of, and because of this thorough equipment management of his it produced better results in the field, and he had made the connection between those two things early enough in his hunting career that it had become a governing principle for him as a person and the bearer of that responsibility .
His wife Bella was not with him this morning — she was managing something at home, which in a household the size of the Archer family always meant that there was always going to be something to manage around the house. He moved through the craftsman district alone, which suited him. Browsing through the wares was not a social activity for him. It was an analytical one.
The four specialist trades that had emerged around the village's hunting economy were laid out in adjacent shops along the craftsman district's main stretch. The Fletchers naturally handled the wooden shafts, the fletchings, the nocks — the geometry of the arrow that governed flight behavior, the part that most hunters took for granted until they had a bad batch and found out what taking it for granted actually meant. The Arrowsmiths on the otherhand worked with the heads or the arrowtips, which in the village case they had largely moved to bone arrows rather than the standard metal heads — not because the smiths lacked the capability to buildl one, but because the beast bone was much more available in quantity from the village's hunting operations had certain properties that well-crafted metal heads did not. Penetration at comparable weights. Less tendency to deflect on contact with hide. And an abundance that kept costs manageable for hunters who went through arrows in the volumes that the village's hunting output required. Meanwhile the Bowyers built the bows themselves, a craft that took years to do well and produced equipment that a hunter could used for a decade if they looked after it and maintained it properly. Then we have the Stringfellows who made the bowstrings, which sounded like a lesser specialty until you had snapped a string at the wrong moment and understood exactly how important the person who made the string actually was.
What Anguy was looking at this morning was a new broadhead design that had been circulating in the hunter community for several weeks. The bone-carved variant, rumored to have been developed from a design that August had passed to the master craftsman as an off-hand observation about aerodynamics and penetration geometry. Whether August had actually done this or whether the attribution was the kind that useful innovations tended to acquire — a famous name and a good story behind it — was something Anguy did not know and did not particularly need to know. What he knew was that the hunters who had already used the new head were reporting better results against Boarats, which had thick hides that standard heads tended to spread against rather than penetrate.
He examined the display stock with the attention of someone who was going to put these on arrows that he was going to put through things that could kill him if he missed. He asked the Arrowsmith two specific questions about the bone sourcing and the finishing process. He received answers that satisfied him. Personally he had to test it for himself before he would buy in bulk for the family, so he divided his two quivers' worth of arrows between his usual reliable stock and an experimental allocation of the new design — not all-in, because that was not how you tested things that your life depended on, but enough to generate actual data from actual use.
He paid. He tucked the purchase under his arm and stepped back out into the morning.
Tomorrow there was a hunt, and the hunt had acquired additional significance this month because Earl Millhaven's delegation was in the village and the Earl had expressed interest in seeing how Maya Village's hunting operations worked in practice. Which meant the hunt would have an audience of nobility that would join them, which meant it would also serve as a demonstration that would have its own uses for the village beyond the practical business of bringing meat and materials back through the gate.
The household patriarch had told Anguy to be present in tomorrows event. And he intended to be there.
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The Fishing Settlement
Somewhere in the small settlement of Tagkarit outside the village walls near the river sector. It had developed its own economy without anyone planning one for it, just yet.
What had started as a local habit with the settlement's fishermen catching and cooking fish at the riverside, the way they had always done it — had acquired its first outside participant when a traveling food enthusiast with more money than patience had arrived at the settlement famished, and had found that a local was willing to share a freshly cooked riverside catch for him to eat.
Of course there was an argument for the hospitality that the fisherman had shown to the said food enthusiast and richman. He insisted that he should pay a fair price for the effort that the local did to prepare his catch and feed him. The local of course was taken aback by the suddenness of it and began to think of an amount that he had invented on the spot, because he had no idea what a fair price would be for this was. Feeling the pressure of the richman's stares the fisherman blurted out a random number that came to mind, one local gold coin, which is an absurd amount for one piece of fish, it was his way of dissuading the person in front of him. But the richman was beyond satisfied with what he had eaten and had declared that the experience was worth its weight in gold and was one of the finest he had encountered in his considerable traveling career.
That statement had begun to travel, from one ear to another. As words moved faster than most people gave it credit for among the merchant and traveling classes, who maintained their own informal networks for exactly this kind of information. Within a few weeks the settlement had begun to receive unexpected visitors. Within the next month it had begun hosting regular visitors. And within the next following month it had become a trend among the specific type of travelers who preferred experiential satisfaction of the said moment over the conventional accommodation and was even willing to camp outdoors to get it. Since there is no formal housing that had been built for visitors as of yet, and even if there was it was only limited to the locals only.
The village had been informed of this unusual spike of activities of course. The village leadership had thought about what to do with it and it came to a decision, that the correct response was not to stop it but to regulate it instead. They planned to maximize the value that it was generating and direct those taxes through the construction of permanent structures that could provide accommodation to those who wanted to enter Tagkarit; the regulation of entry to the settlement would also bolster its current security and accountability.
The expanded toll fee system that had emerged from this was now three-tiered. The first option was the original, One local gold coin for any standard entry and business within the village proper, with eighty percent of it to be refunded on exit in good standing. Two local gold coins for entry plus access to the fishing zone, also with eighty percent of the fee to be refunded. One local gold coin for the fishing zone alone, now it can only be accessed after passing through the village's entry point first — because that was where they would pay the fee for entrance to Tagkarit, it is also where the the markers were issued, where the record was made of who went where and when. The plaque or markers to be given were specialized and non-removable during the visit, visible to any security patrol, color-coded by access level. A person wearing the fishing zone plaque-marker (red orange) in the wrong part of the territory was a security conversation to be had with the bearer of said plaque, before anything worse could happen.
The refund mechanism was the element that most visitors found either clever or irritating depending on whether they had created any trouble during their stay. It was neither punitive nor generous. It was simply as it was. If you came, conducted yourself appropriately, and left, eighty percent of your entry fee would be returned to you. If you did not then it was not refunded. The mechanism enforced its own lesson without requiring any additional persuasion.
Dignitaries and official delegates — which included Earl Millhaven's entire retinue, currently — were exempt from the toll entirely, but they were required to bring with them a Blue Plaque. The village did not charge its formal guests to enter its own territory. That would have been rude, though it would have to be a formal one, that has gone through the appropriate channels and was pre-approved before they even arrived.
The assassins who had been resettled into the fishing community following their reformation process were still under surveillance. They were learning from the master fishermen, which was not a role anyone would have designed for former professional killers, but which had produced observable results. They had come a long way from what they had been. But they were not finished in their reformation efforts yet, and the surveillance was not going to go away until that process was clearly concluded one way or the other. But the fishing community had absorbed them with the practical tolerance of people who had already absorbed a remarkable range of individuals. The community here had decided that what a person was doing now mattered more than what they had done before, provided that what they were doing now was genuinely different from their past criminal actions.
# Color-Coded Identification Plaque System
To ensure proper identification, security, and access control within the community, all residents, workers, visitors, and officials are issued color-coded identification plaques according to their status and authorized areas of access.
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Plaque Classifications
| Plaque Color | Designation | Description and Access Privileges |
|---|---|---|
| 🟢 Green | Permanent Resident | Issued to individuals who hold full and permanent residency within Maya Village. Grants unrestricted access to all resident-designated areas of the village. |
| 🟡 Yellow | Temporary Resident | Issued to individuals residing within the village while their application for permanent residency is under review. Access is limited to approved residential and public areas. |
| 🟤 Brown | Contracted Worker | Issued to laborers, craftsmen, merchants, and other personnel employed under a fixed-term contract. Access is restricted to work-related locations and authorized facilities. |
| 🟠 Orange | Visitor / Traveler | Issued to guests, traders, merchants travelers, and other non-residents visiting Maya Village. Valid only within the village proper and designated public areas. |
| 🔶 Red-Orange | Tagkarit Settlement Visitor | Issued to individuals authorized to visit the Tagkarit Fishing and Logging Settlement. Does not grant any access within Maya Village. |
| 🔴 Red | Dual-Access Pass Holder | Issued to individuals granted permission to travel between both Maya Village and the Tagkarit Fishing and Logging Settlement. Provides authorized access to public and designated operational areas in both communities. |
| 🔵 Blue | Diplomatic and Official Delegate | Issued to visiting dignitaries, government representatives, envoys, and official delegates from foreign nations or neighboring settlements. Grants access according to diplomatic protocols and the scope of their official mission.
Note: All identification plaques must be visibly worn or carried while within the jurisdiction of Maya Village and its associated settlements. Unauthorized use, transfer, forgery, or possession of a plaque may result in confiscation, fines, expulsion, or other penalties as determined by village authorities.
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Master Ben's Underground Secret Lab
Beneath the surface of Master Ben's tower in Zone One, is the secret laboratory that Master Ben had asked to be constructed at a depth that discouraged casual visitation, something important was happening.
The lab was thoroughly sealed by magic and its physical structure. The sealing was done in the standards of master Ben's own unique elemental properties and he had done it with care, because what was occurring inside it was not something Master Ben intended to share with the broader world before he had even decided that the broader world was ready for it. That calculation had not yet been made and it might not be made for quite a long time.
He had been working on this project in parallel with his other responsibilities for months — the volcanic inspections that Benethar periodically reminded him to complete, the teaching obligations, the ongoing upgrades to Benethar's internal systems that had brought his first creation to a level of sophistication that was approaching true Master-ranked classification. The new project shared its conceptual DNA with Benethar but was not a direct copy of him. The materials were different. The beast cores incorporated into the framework were different, and they much better — drawn from Boss-ranked specimens and one Forest Guardian Beast component that had been acquired during the Beast Dominion War engagements. The current emancipation of this new being was learned through everything he had understood from his previous creation of Benethar, and it had taught him about what worked and what did not, there must be a certain balance that is to be achieved for it to even remotely work.
What Benethar represented was a proof of concept that was manifested into reality. But what was in the lab now was the proof that is more refined.
Master Ben had his concerns about what this refinement meant in the context of a world that did not yet know that this was even entirely possible. He had only told Benethar about them, not because Benethar could resolve the concerns but because Benethar had grown into the kind of being that understood why a person needed to say something aloud even when no resolution was available. The construct who had once been a naive and empty vessel had become, in the five years since his creation, something with genuine interiority — his own opinions, his own assessments of situations, his own discomfort with certain outcomes. He had told Master Ben that he understood the fear of what this creation is going to become. He had also told Master Ben that he would keep the secret as long as keeping it was the right thing to do, and that he trusted Master Ben to tell him when it was no longer possible to hold it.
That conversation had somewhat settled something within for the old man. Not everything. But something was released from his worries.
Benethar also knew about the new project. He had been told because not telling him would have been a different kind of wrong — keeping a secret from the person most directly affected by what the secret contained. He had processed it in the way he processed most significant information: quietly, over time, arriving eventually at an understanding that was his own rather than a reflection of whatever Master Ben had communicated.
He called it his sister. This was the concept he had chosen from the human relational vocabulary he had accumulated, and it was not wrong.
August had been brought in briefly. Not because August's technical expertise was relevant to what Master Ben was doing — it was not — but because some things deserved a witness who could understand their significance, and August was one of the people whose judgment Master Ben trusted to hold what he was about to see without doing anything reckless with it.
The activation was not that dramatic to look at from the outside. First there was a bright light that began to emit, from somewhere within the constructed framework. Then there was a movement that was at first gradual and then it slowly became purposeful. And then the eyes began to open and the being began taking in the view of the ceiling of the laboratory with the specific quality of attention that new sight produced in a mind encountering the world for the very first time.
She sat up.
She looked around.
And she heard her creator's voice for the first time.
"Your name shall be Sylvier Solvorn. Speak, if you agree to it."
The being that Master Ben had made in a female configuration — similar to Benethar in fundamental structure, different in the specific materials and therefore in the specific nature of what she was — looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at Benethar. Then she looked at August, who was standing back, not intruding at the moment, he was simply present for the occasion. Then she returned her attention to her creator.
"Father. I acknowledge my name."
The voice was not similar to Benethar's. It had a different quality — not weaker, not stronger, simply different in the way that two instruments of the same family were different. Related but individual to its owner.
August watched her for the few minutes that remained of his presence in the room. She asked two questions of Master Ben before he was required to leave. They were not the questions of a creature testing its new awareness. They were the questions of something that had been given enough pre-inscribed knowledge to understand the shape of the world it had entered and was now asking about the specific gaps in that shape. She had received knowledge through the runic inscription Master Ben had embedded in her cognitive framework — a pre-installed foundation that prevented the disorientation of total ignorance at the moment of first awareness. She was not starting from nothing. She was starting from an informed position but she still had questions she could ask in it, for that is how beings grow in understanding, by asking, by being curious.
Benethar's expression, when Sylvier looked at him, was not something August could fully translate. But it was something akin to a being that had found its kin.
He said nothing and left the lab and went back up to the surface and proceeded to work on the waiting tasks of the day. He had seen what he needed to see. He had understood what it meant, both the immediate reality of it and the longer shape of what a world that contained these beings was going to eventually have to reckon with.
For now, that was Master Ben's problem to manage. August trusted him to manage it for as long as it could be managed.
He emerged from the access point into the afternoon light of Zone One and oriented himself toward the guest house and the diplomatic obligations that an Earl's visit generated, and he let the underground access point close behind him.
The village continued its day around him, entirely unaware of what had just been born beneath it. It was something as significant as Benethar's birth to this world.