Chương 91: 90: Ground Work

Mawrth 3rd My talk with Emily a couple nights ago had been tense, but I said everything I needed to say, and I thought Emily was on board with my reasoning. She was Emily, so she didn't cry, but I could tell she had been harboring some strong emotions that she was trying to keep in check. Colin was going to have breakfast with us upstairs tomorrow. Speaking of Colin, he showed up with the soldiers as I spoke to my farmhands.

I had them gathered around to show them how I'd be hooking up the plow and what implements we'd need for this spring. Rupert, Seamus, and all the ladies on the homestead also made their way over to watch. No doubt drawn to the spectacle. The tractor and the farm equipment were a cool novelty. The soil was finally dry enough to do the groundwork on the plots on the homestead, so I decided today would be the day we got started.

Ideally, we would've plowed a month before planting, but a couple of weeks would be just fine. Last year we only had a couple days; so it was clearly doable. This would just give time for the grasses to break down, and for the microbes to settle down. I had the entire cornfield, and part of last year's potato field revitalized in the last seventeen days since I could cast my spell twice a day. I was now a level 3 Wizard!

It was time to switch back to my Tier 1 Homesteader class so I could get my farming bonuses back, so my leveling for Wizard would have to wait. When I saw Colin walking up, I couldn't help the grin that crept over my face.

"Look who we have here!" He looked down and let his still long hair cover his face. I hadn't seen that expression much lately. At least he didn't scuff his boots on the ground. Everyone looked at him, but their attention was quickly drawn back to me as I began speaking.

"My tractor is full of fuel, and ready to go, thanks to our wonderful emperor, oh and the bishop." I threw that last part on as if it were an afterthought, and everyone chuckled along with me. The bishop might actually be on our side, but he didn't endear himself to anyone. I continued on after a moment.

"This tractor runs on diesel, and it makes these huge pieces of farm equipment move using hydraulic oil. The same fluid that lifts and runs the equipment also moves the transmission. That's the gears that make the tractor move if you're not sure what a transmission is." I looked over at Colin and said, "I'll let the expert here, hook up the hoses. There's a proper order, which I have marked with colored tape. So red will go to red, and brown to brown and so on."

Colin stepped up and used the double-push technique I'd shown him last year. He expertly made sure each hose was properly seated.

"Thanks Colin," I said.

"Alright, let me climb into the tractor." I got into the seat and ran my diagnostic program. I could "see" that my magical seals were holding, and that all the hoses on the plow were still in the green. They were definitely not 100% anymore, but they weren't in any danger of blowing up anytime soon. I looked down at my farmhands who were crowding around the bottom of stairs and yelled down to them over the sound of the engine.

"Now that the hoses are connected, my new class lets me run a diagnostic on anything that's connected to the tractor! I can see that all the hoses are still good!" I told everyone to get back, and I raised the plow up on its tires to make sure they all had air in them. So far, so good. I wanted to let each of the four farmhands ride with me to get a feel for things, but I had to ask Colin if he wanted to ride with me first. He surprised me when he shook his head.

"No, this isn't my path. Laeth, Zach, Stephen, and Sean need to ride with you. It won't give me any experience." I was proud of him, but also a bit confused.

"What do you mean experience? I'll be running the tractor." Cara, who was the grizzled veteran of farming life among us, spoke up.

"Yeah, the boys should get experience even with you running the tractor. My husband and son would both get experience if one of them guided the horse, and the other one rode the plow. Can't be sure that'll happen here with the tractor, but it sure could."

"Well that changes things," I said. I was going to let each man ride in the cab with me while the others watched, but we better get all four men up here all at once.

"We might not be OSHA approved, but we can get everyone on the tractor safely enough with ratchet straps." Rupert looked at me and asked, "Who is OSHA?" I laughed and said, "No one we have to answer to here." I used the very scientific method of having the four men tell me their ages, and letting the oldest ride with me first. Stephen was a whopping twenty-three years old, so he got first dibs. Zack and Sean were both twenty-two. Sean was three months older. Laeth was the youngest at twenty.

I rigged up the ratchet straps so the three not in the cab were as safe as I could make them. Then I made my way over to the southern plots and got ready to plow around a hundred acres today. We would plow the other two hundred over two or three more days. We weren't moving at high speeds over this virgin ground covered in grass. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The entire crowd made its way towards the area where I'd start, and watched with plenty of ooh's and ah's as I set the plow down and used the hydraulics to spread out all three sections of the plow. When I throttled up and got moving, there was actual cheering and clapping. I showed Stephen all the controls. I could tell it was overwhelming to him, but that was fine. He wasn't going to be running this machine anytime soon. Within an hour, we began losing people to more interesting tasks.

The tractor was super cool, and everyone was suitably impressed, but it was still boring work if one was just watching from the sidelines. My own Farmhands got bored pretty quickly as well. At least they weren't eating dust sitting outside the cab thanks to the grass and moisture in the ground. It was loud, though. After two hours, I stopped so everyone could grab some water and a snack. Then we rotated Stephen out for Sean.

Two hours after that, we stopped for a lunch of ham sandwiches and stew, served to us in the field. By the time we got to Laeth, everyone but me was super bored. I was back in my happy place since the seagulls returned about an hour into plowing. I loved hearing them squawk and watched as they landed and walked around the field, looking for worms and bugs to eat. I also spent the time getting to know each of my farmhands a little better.

I'd talked with each of them before, but I'd never spent two hours with them one on one with no one doing anything that took some of their brainpower away from the conversation. I had to look back and made sure that I stayed in a straight line since I didn't have GPS, but it didn't take too much brainpower. I found out that Zack wanted to be a Craftsman. He wasn't sure if he'd rather be a Carpenter, Joiner, or Cabinet Maker, but he definitely wanted to do one of the three.

He was more than happy to be the homestead's handyman until he could find a way to be apprenticed to a Craftsman and become an apprentice. He was already a level 15 Laborer. He was happy to be on the homestead, but I could tell his heart wasn't truly in running a homestead of his own. I didn't tell him I planned to help him out quite yet. It seemed too early to dangle that carrot over his head. Sean wanted to be a Rancher subclass. He'd shown he was great with animals.

He didn't want to talk about his family life, though. When I asked him why he wasn't working for his parents, he politely declined to answer. I let it go. I didn't need to know the backstory for each of my employees. He did tell me that he was still courting a girl in town. Jessa was her name. He told me she wasn't in the know, and neither was her family. Priest Lewys, and the bishop had told Sean that he couldn't make any offers of marriage until he had a definite acceptance offer from her parents.

He was disappointed, especially since her parents had told him they wanted him to have a homestead of his own before they'd say yes. Now that he was out here with me, there was no running off and eloping, or even bringing her out to see the homestead ahead of time. I apologized to the kid, but told him that if he worked hard, I'd do what I could for him. It seemed like the thing to do, even though I hadn't said the same thing to Zack.

People could do stupid things for love, so I wanted Sean to know playing things smart was the right choice. Stephen was the Farmhand I had the most trouble reading. He was also a Laborer who had been a dockhand. He seemed to like helping with the homestead, but he wasn't overly ambitious. He enjoyed the mystery of being in the Order, but from some of his answers to my questions, his wife, Tess, was the ambitious one. There was definitely more, "well Tess wants us to do this or that," in reply to my questions.

He was still a hard worker, and I didn't have any issues with an ambitious woman, so as long as the two of them showed they were an effective team, I'd be willing to help them out if he didn't get a lottery spot next year. Then there was Laeth. He was quiet and almost seemed timid. He was willing to talk extensively about his childhood with me when I asked. I didn't know if that was because he was happy to, or he just didn't want to say no to me.

His dad, who was a career soldier, had been a System Knight in action, as well as in name. He was a Royal Dragoon. It was a mounted Musketman class. It was about as high as a non-nobleman could hope to climb. His dad was approaching a hundred years old now, and had been eighty when he had contracted a marriage between him and Laeth's mother. Laeth's mother had died when he was seven. Laeth had actually been born in Riverton.

It had taken a hundred years to properly pacify things, but Riverton was completely built thirty years into the reconquest. I learned a nice little factoid when listening to Laeth's story. Children born in the colony even before the official expansion phase didn't count against the numbers for the emperor, just like kids who aged out for settlers. A fair number of dockhands and general laborers in the territory were the offspring of soldiers and their wives.

Laeth said there were people as old as seventy who had lived in the Western Territory their whole lives. There were as many as ten thousand such souls, and they didn't even count in the official total number of people here. So there were actually at least sixty, not fifty thousand people on the continent. Laeth had come to Weston as soon as he turned sixteen so he could be sure to avoid seeing his dad, who sounded like he had some untreated PTSD after eighty years of almost non-stop fighting.

His dad was level 40, and was frustrated he couldn't figure out how to evolve past that. He took those frustrations out on Laeth far too often. A man with level 40 strength with anger issues was a truly dangerous person. Laeth was a fount of knowledge, and I was more than happy to keep him talking all three days of plowing. I couldn't help but like the young man. He was earnest and polite. I hoped to help him grow as a person, and if he proved to be a hard worker, I'd love to have him as a neighbor.

The System has an oft studied, but still not entirely understood, mechanism by which children born during phase one of a Grand Quest are granted certain privileges within the framework of a Grand Quest. There have been five Grand Quests over the sixteen hundred years that the Albion Empire has existed in one form or another. In the second, third, and now fifth Grand Quest, children have not counted against the number of people who can be brought over before affecting the victory conditions of the quest.

The most widely accepted theory is that in the three Grand Quests that have most obviously supported expansion and colonization, birthing children shows that there is stability and progress towards completing the quest. It would also be punitive if a child counted against the allowed number of people because they could not contribute in any meaningful way towards the required tasks. Never before has the birth rate played such a large role in achieving victory as it has in the fifth GQ.

That is no surprise since it took a hundred years to make it out of Phase 1, and the territory is so much farther from the home isles. Excerpt from The History of the Grand Quest: The Western Territory Homestead Project of the Royal Research Academy, multiple authors.