A lush green hill rolls gently under a vast sky, its slopes completely smothered in a dense carpet of wild lavender and yellow daisies. A cool, crisp morning breeze sweeps over the crest, causing the sea of petals to ripple like waves of colored water. Below the hill, a gentle, silken river snakes through the valley floor, its dark surface reflecting the bright morning sun as dozens of wooden cargo barges and small fishing boats bustle along the banks, their oars dipping rhythmically into the water.
Aldo sits flat on the damp grass, his spine perfectly erect. The morning air feels exceptionally clean as he draws it into his lungs. It is the second day of the grand Gala, and he has successfully sneaked out of the stuffy Thromium mansion to carry out his meticulously planned topographical initiative, lingering on the hillside to wait for the professional Cartographer he had hired through an agency.
Right beside him, Comtois is snoring soundly, his long legs crossed carelessly at the ankles while his head rests heavily on his thick, folded arm. His solid, muscular frame looks massive against the greenery, his smooth, boyish face completely relaxed in sleep. A few feet away, Hano is completely nestled in a thick pile of wild grass, his agile body curled up so tightly that only a shock of his dark hair is visible above the blades, his rapid, energetic breathing slowing into a steady rhythm. Onaga sits on a flat rock nearby, his small, femboyish frame looking delicate under the open sky. His skin is exceptionally smooth, completely devoid of any scars or blemishes, and his rosy cheeks are comically puffed out as he greedily munches on a thick white bread roll stuffed with greasy fried meat.
A local peasant girl, carrying a massive, overflowing wicker basket of laundry on her hip, walks briskly along the dirt path that cuts across the hill. She stops dead in her tracks, her sharp gaze sweeping over the four young men. Her lip curls into a look of deep disdain as she takes in the sight of the sleeping boys and the greasy bread.
"Look at you all," she scoffs loudly, her voice sharp and dripping with judgmental irritation. "A bunch of lazy, gluttonous young men lounging in the dirt while the sun is already high. Not a single one of you looks man enough to pull a plow or hold a spear."
Aldo doesn't look up from his lap. His dull, dead-fish eyes remain entirely vacant, reflecting absolutely nothing of the girl's presence. His face is a mask of absolute neutrality; he doesn't think anything of her words, treating her voice as nothing more than a temporary acoustic anomaly in the environment.
Onaga, however, freezes mid-chew. His forehead wrinkles into a deep, prominent frown as he stares down at his half-eaten roll, his puffed cheeks shifting as he swallows the large bolus of fried meat with a visible gulp. He looks around at their expensive but currently dirt-streaked garments, his delicate fingers tightening around the bread.
"Hey, Aldo," Onaga whispers, his voice dropping into a self-conscious, worried cadence. "Do we really look that incredibly shabby and pathetic in the eyes of the ordinary people of this medieval fantasy world?"
Aldo picks a blade of grass from his trousers, his rosy lips moving with slow, mechanical precision.
"Never mind her," Aldo replies flatly, his voice carrying the deadpan weight of an instruction manual. "Medieval people place an absolute structural value on visible, continuous manual labor. If you are not actively sweating, you are categorized as a parasite."
Onaga turns his head, his gaze drifting from Comtois's wide, snoring mouth to the messy pile of grass where Hano is completely buried. He lets out a small, miserable sigh, his shoulders slumping.
She definitely said that because she saw those two looking like absolute bums, Onaga thinks, his internal monologue twisting with embarrassment. They ruin our collective image wherever we go.
Aldo notices the shift in Onaga's posture. A tiny, nearly imperceptible flicker of exasperation crosses his fair face, his head turning just enough to bring Onaga into his peripheral vision.
"Just ignore it entirely," Aldo says, his tone clipping short. "Why should you spend finite mental processing power caring about what other random demographics choose to say about your baseline appearance?"
Onaga tears another piece of the white bread roll off with his teeth, chewing aggressively as his eyes narrow at the commander.
"You are exceptionally strange, aren't you?" Onaga grumbles, his voice muffled by the meat. "You literally do not care about other people's opinions at all. Aren't you even a little bit afraid of losing face in front of the local populace?"
Aldo slides his hand into his leather satchel, his dead-fish eyes staring straight ahead into the valley.
"No," Aldo answers instantly, his voice cool and level. "Unless a specific behavior directly leads to actionable legal issues or a breach of contract, I don't care. I operationalize my actions based on a single parameter: I do whatever the law does not explicitly prohibit."
Onaga stops chewing entirely, his delicate face twisting into a look of profound intellectual confusion. He blinks twice, his small shoulders tilting forward.
"So... you're saying you only care about what the law allows you to do?" Onaga asks, trying to follow the logic.
Aldo pauses his hand inside the bag, his head turning fully toward Onaga.
"No, Onaga," Aldo states firmly, his voice rising by half an octave to emphasize the distinction. "Doing what the law does not prohibit is a completely different jurisprudential paradigm from merely doing what the law explicitly allows."
Onaga stares blankly at him, a stray crumb falling from his lip onto his smooth knee. He tilts his head to the side, his hands hovering over his knees.
"I... I don't quite understand the practical difference," Onaga admits, his voice trailing off into a confused squeak.
Aldo pulls his hand out of the bag, holding a small brass instrument. He looks back down at his work, his rosy lips closing into a tight, unyielding line.
Onaga's face flushes with sudden irritation. He drops the remainder of his meat roll onto the rock and jumps up to his feet, his small frame trembling slightly as he stomps his foot against the turf.
"Hey!" Onaga yells, pointing a smooth finger at the commander. "Are you seriously not going to explain it to me? Don't just leave me hanging like that!"
Aldo doesn't look up, his fingers carefully checking the alignment of a brass dial.
"The law in this specific territory is nothing more than a medieval arbiter based on feudal whim," Aldo says, his voice flat and dismissive. "Knowing the theoretical philosophy behind the law wouldn't do anything to change your current physical output. Digestion is a better use of your time."
Onaga's mouth drops open. He lets out a sharp huff, his lips turning downward into a deep, exaggerated pout as he plops back down onto his rock, crossing his arms tightly over his chest and glaring at the back of Aldo's head.
Aldo ignores the boy's dramatic display completely. With steady, deliberate movements, he begins unbuckling the heavy leather straps of his primary gear trunks, carefully retrieving his specialized mechanical inventory one by one, laying them out on a clean linen cloth spread over the wild clover.
First, he lifts a heavy, polished brass Theodolite. The metal gleams intensely under the morning sun, featuring perfectly oiled leveling screws that turn without a single sound, silvered vernier scales engraved with microscopic precision, and a gleaming glass lens designed for capturing flawless angular measurements across the river valley.
Next, he unloads a towering Zenith Telescope. The instrument is equipped with an incredibly delicate glass spirit level filled with clear alcohol and fine-focus knobs, specifically engineered to track the exact positions of the stars through the atmosphere.
Beside it, he places a highly complex, multi-mirrored Sextant, its heavy brass arc meticulously engraved with microscopic degrees that catch the light like a cluster of diamonds.
He reaches into a smaller padded compartment and pulls out a pocket-sized, mechanical Pedometer. The device features an internal pendulum that chimes softly with a tiny ting-ting sound with every simulated stride to track distance across rough terrain.
From the larger crate, he hoists an Advanced Hodometer—a bizarre, wheel-mounted contraption fitted with custom-cut, precision gear teeth engineered to count wheel revolutions with absolute mechanical fidelity, ensuring the user never slips a single digit while measuring roads.
He carefully lifts a massive Marine Chronometer. The heavy time-keeping device is securely housed in a polished mahogany wooden case and suspended in thick brass gimbals to completely defy the local effects of gravity, ticking with an absolute, deafening regularity: tick... tick... tick.
Finally, he stacks several thick, leather-bound volumes of Logarithm Tables & Trigonometry Charts that smell heavily of fresh black ink and old, dried parchment, acting as the intellectual backbone for his complex geometric calculations. Beside the books, he drops several massive, heavy stacks of blank Grid Paper, their blue lines perfectly square and ready to be used for mapping out unknown terrain, strategic choke points, vital water sources, and precise slope grades.
The rustle of grass breaks the silence. The girl who had just criticized them a moment ago suddenly turns back around, marching right back up the crest of the hill. Her large laundry basket is balanced precariously on her shoulder, her eyes locked onto Aldo's red suit with a look of sharp suspicion.
"Hey," she calls out, her voice loud and demanding. "Do any of you lazy boys actually know who Aldo Patriot is?"
Onaga looks up from his pout, his sharp mind immediately catching the name. He glances at Aldo, then back to the girl, his curiosity piqued.
"Who is asking?" Onaga asks, leaning forward. "And what exactly did this Aldo Patriot do to interest you?"
The girl stops in front of them, lowering her heavy basket onto the grass with a solid thud. She straightens her posture, pulling a tightly rolled leather parchment from her bodice and slapping it against her palm with a proud expression.
"My name is Isabetta de' Rossi," she announces, her chin tilting upward. "And this Aldo Patriot is a high-paying client who officially hired my workshop to perform a regional survey. He produced this exact contract."
Aldo's dead-fish eyes blink once. Without a word, he reaches into his own jacket, secretly sliding his fingers into an inner pocket to pull out his copy of the official agency agreement. He unfolds it beneath the shadow of his knee, his eyes darting back and forth between the two documents. The ink matches perfectly. The official seal of the Carravin Guild is identical.
But a sudden, sharp calculation freezes Aldo's fingers. His brow furrows by a fraction of a millimeter.
[The parameters are completely mismatched] Aldo thinks, his mind spinning through data fields. [The name explicitly registered on the binding contract is male, but the physical entity that has arrived on site is demonstrably female. Could this be a standard local scam, or was the guild administration simply too lazy to update their personnel registries? This total lack of transparency is entirely unacceptable for a strategic deployment.]
Aldo looks up, his dead-fish eyes locking onto Isabetta's face with a cold, piercing intensity that makes her step back by half a pace.
"Why is the official name registered on this binding contract Tommaso de' Rossi," Aldo asks, his voice cutting through the wind like a steel blade, "but the specific person who came to execute the survey is a woman?"
The girl's expression hardens, her grip tightening on the leather roll. Aldo doesn't give her a chance to speak, his voice remaining level but turning deeply accusatory.
"Are you an unregistered fraud attempting to intercept a military payment?" Aldo presses, his rosy lips forming the words with mathematical coldness. "Or is your home workshop simply too lazy about updating its official legal documentation? Tell me exactly what is wrong here."
Isabetta's face flushes a deep, angry crimson. She points a finger directly at her own chest, her jaw clenching tightly.
"Just trust me!" she snaps, her voice rising in a fierce, defensive pitch. "I have the full technical ability, and I possess a rare eye for cartography that few men in this province can match!"
Aldo's fingers tap against the brass casing of the chronometer, his voice remaining entirely unswayed by her emotion.
"I have not proven your operational ability yet," Aldo says cautiously, his voice low. "And you still have not answered my core administrative question."
Isabetta steps forward, her boots stomping into the wild lavender as she glares down at him, her chest heaving with indignation.
"You doubt my qualifications simply because I am a woman?!" she yells, her eyes flashing with pure rage. "I am Tomasso de' Rossi's daughter! I have been rigorously trained since I was old enough to hold a quill, and I have years of practical field experience! Although I am still young, my professional name, Betta, is already highly famous throughout the entire territory of Ofliran!"
Suddenly, the grass near Onaga's knees rustles violently. Comtois's massive, muscular frame begins to stir. He lets out a long, groggy yawn, his goofy face twisting as he blinks against the bright sunlight. Instead of sitting up properly, he begins to crawl forward across the grass like a large, clumsy snake, slithering his torso along the dirt until he lazily snuggles his head right into Onaga's lap, resting his cheek against the smaller boy's thigh. He looks up at Aldo with a sleepy, mischievous grin.
"Hey, Aldo..." Comtois mumbles, his voice a low, gravelly rasp as he blinks up at the sky. "Where the hell is this Ofliran place she's shouting about? Is it near the border of Thromium?"
Aldo doesn't look at Comtois, his eyes remaining fixed on the angry girl.
"Ofliran is an semi-independent maritime republic located in the southern sector of Mikhland," Aldo explains mechanically. "It is a highly developed coastal region specializing in advanced naval cartography."
Isabetta's angry expression instantly vanishes, replaced by a bright, cheerful smile as she claps her hands together, her chest puffing out with pride.
"Exactly!" she cheers, her voice turning sweet and confident. "Then you must have heard of my famous work!"
Aldo turns his dead-fish eyes fully toward her, his face completely expressionless.
"No," Aldo says flatly, his voice dropping into a dull drone. "I... I only study actual, objective geography. I do not track local trade celebrity gossip."
Isabetta's cheerful expression instantly evaporates, her mouth hanging slightly open as her face falls into a mask of pure, stunned disbelief.
Aldo doesn't pause, his fingers gesturing toward the stacked grid paper.
"Then tell me exactly what structural event happened at your familial Workshop to cause this contractual discrepancy," Aldo commands.
Isabetta looks down at the grass, her fiery energy suddenly draining away as her shoulders slump. She grips her leather contract tightly, her fingers tracing the edges as her voice drops into a quiet, somber tone.
"My father's Workshop was once the most famous establishment for this specific profession in the south," she says softly, her eyes staring at the river below. "He fully intended to pass the entire lineage and the guild titles down to his two sons... but they both died of a sudden wasting illness three winters ago. After a few years of grief, his own eyesight began to rapidly deteriorate until he could no longer see the lines on the charts. So... he passed the instruments down to me."
The girl falls into a heavy, absolute silence, her eyes darting between the boys as she anxiously observes their reactions to her story.
Aldo remains completely silent, his dead-fish eyes staring at her face like a statue. Comtois remains silent, his cheek still resting lazily on Onaga's lap as he tracks a bug crawling through the grass. Onaga is also completely silent, his delicate hands hovering over his bread roll. The only sound on the entire green hill is the rhythmic, loud snoring of Hano, who remains blissfully wrapped in his blanket inside the pile of fresh grass.
Onaga looks up, his soft heart touched by the story. He breaks the silence, his voice gentle.
"So... what exactly happened afterwards?" Onaga asks softly.