“Orcs are tribal people,” Eve muttered into her drink. “We’re supposed to stick together and ever since our parents died, Franky’s been with me all the way. Even when Sol—” She stopped herself with a growl. “That’s not fair. Sol… Aunty tried, and I don’t think I even realized how much.”

  The table solemnly listened, Vladdy wrapping his arm around his wife and pulling her close. Luka hunched over his jrum; his elbows sticky on the alcohol-stained table. Annie nodded to her friend’s every word, learning more about the orc in these few minutes than in two months of living at the park.

  “He’ll come around,” Luka said. “Once the newness of the relationship wanes, he’ll come rushing to you asking for advice.”

  Eve quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t think Franky has ever asked for advice.”

  Annie scoffed. “He will. Once he realizes he has no clue what he’s doing, he’s coming to you, me, or Tram for help.”

  Vlad nodded. “Take it from me. When I first realized Annie and I weren’t a two-week fling, I made discussion board posts asking for advice a hundred times. The internet is very knowledgeable in that regard.”

  “What?” Eve asked.

  “Wrong world,” Luka mumbled.

  Elf Boy hesitated. “Let me rephrase. I made… quest postings at a local adventuring hub?” He obviously wasn’t sure of what he was saying. “Asking for specialists in dating—err, I mean monster hunting.” He sat up. “Yeah, that sounds right. I asked anonymous monster hunters how to best slay a monster. And since they—”

  Vlad stopped cold when he saw Annie’s face.

  “Am I the monster in this analogy? And did you slay me, Vladdy?” She batted her eyelashes, but her tone was anything but sweet.

  He visibly swallowed, which got a chuckle out of Luka.

  Eve, meanwhile, understood. “And since there aren’t any adventuring hubs around here, he’ll have to come to me—I mean us. Because slaying the princess is a dangerous task!”

  That last little bit was a hair too loud and drew eyes from all over the tavern.

  Luka cleared his throat awkwardly. “And if he doesn’t, he’ll invite you to dinner with her and have you properly meet her, then you two will become friends and gossip about Franky, go shopping, etcetera, etcetera. You know, girl stuff.”

  Vlad nodded sagely.

  Annie and Eve, however, stared incredulously. “Girl stuff?” the former asked.

  Luka froze. “Woman stuff?”

  “Woman stuff?” Eve asked, attempting, and failing, to hide a smirk. She leaned onto the table, facing her boothmate. “What is woman stuff?”

  “And why mention gossip when referring to us ‘girls?’” Annie asked, her feigned frown much more restrained. “Are you saying girls gossip a lot?”

  “Of course he is, honey!” Vladdy said, his wine perhaps a little too strong.

  Luka, very calmly, said, “Vlad? Shut up.”

  Eve and Annie laughed.

  ***

  As lunch wound down, Luka brought out the blueprints. “So—I want help. I need to stop building stuff willy-nilly and actually sit down and plan stuff.”

  “’Willy-nilly?’” Eve muttered rhetorically.

  “What did you have in mind?” Annie asked.

  “The Bestial Grove.”

  The idea was simple. With Ressen now a fixture of the park, her very presence would call and sooth beasts, monsters, and animals from all over. The forest was teeming with life, and why not capitalize on that?

  “I think the first thing we should do is map out where we can realistically expand to,” Luka said, drawing a rough sketch of a bird-eye-view map of the park and surrounding area. “From there, we’ll be able to see what we’re working with and what we can build.”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  He drew a blobby shape stretching around Ressen and toward the lake. It curved a little, like a rounded “L.” He then marked off various smaller circles inside the larger—potential plots for rides, attractions, shops, restaurants.

  “What do we need in the park that we don’t already have utility wise?” he asked.

  “First aid center?” suggested Vlad. “I cut my finger the other day and had no clue where to get a band-aid.”

  “What’s a band-aid?” Eve asked.

  “Good idea!” Luka said, filling in one of the circles. “I was thinking about a security office. The Crew needs more bodies, and we need a place to house them during breaks and stuff.”

  “And,” Annie added, “whenever they need to put someone in time out or hold them while Sneerhome’s guard shows up.”

  “’Time out?’” Eve asked, her voice inflecting. “What are these terms?”

  “I think adding an information center would be smart,” Vlad said. He, like the others, ignored her question. “But that’d have to be at the front of the park.”

  “Oh!” Luka interjected. “That reminds me. I think tickets should stop being per-ride and be a single up-front price. It was smart to charge per-ride when we only had a few attractions, but people are starting to spend the whole day here.”

  “Doesn’t the season pass already give unlimited rides per ticket? What’d be the point?”

  “It does, but not everyone wants a season ticket. Not everyone is local enough to warrant the price.”

  Annie pursed her lips at that. “We need someway to travel to the park easier. There aren’t cars in this world or planes for that matter. Travel’s going to be an issue eventually.”

  “Cars?” Eve asked, knowing she wasn’t going to get an answer.

  Luka snapped his fingers and added a circle on the other side of Ressen. It was labeled “Teleportation hub.” The others leaned over the table to read it, each recoiling back.

  “I don’t think you understand how rare teleportation magic is,” Eve said. “Not to mention, how expensive. Mage specialists are usually under tenure for nobles and the like. It’ll be hard to purge and hire them here.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about teleportation spells,” Luka said, subtly showing his artifact ring. “I was thinking portals. Mage-tech portals.”

  Annie and Vlad, two people who have seen and read Earthen science fiction movies and books, nodded as if his words made total sense. Eve, whose greatest source of entertainment before Luka arrived was trying glyphs in the dirt, was not.

  “I see you’re not convinced,” Luka said. “Tell you what, if you can tell me how difficult it would be to get a few items, we’ll see just how feasible my hub idea is.”

  Eve gave a limp shrug.

  With that, Luka queried his ring.

  Requirements for a mage-tech portal hub (high grade):

  1 dimensional gate frame

  2 reality anchors

  21 energy field conduits

  Programming glyph-matrix

  1 chrono-nexus core

  3 Arcane scanner protocol emitters

  1 quantum disruptor

  2 teleportation relay nodes

  2 etheric auto recharging stations (high grade or above)

  1 multi-realm chamber (up to divine grade or lower)

  1 fluxsinder…

  Luka stopped reading—another hundred or so items were required. Maybe… maybe this wasn’t the best idea. But then again, maybe it was. He queried “reality anchor.”

  Requirements for a reality anchor (high grade):

  1 enchantable item

  Reality Lock enchantment

  That sounded doable. He’d have to learn enchanting, but it was very possible he was going to anyway. He queried for the next item and the next. Both were similar stories. The components list was short, incredibly short.

  “Earth to Luka,” Annie drawled.

  “Earth to… Huh?” Eve asked with a sigh.

  He looked up, then went over his thoughts—Eve echoed his own sentiment. It was possible, but another long-term goal.

  “Then you need someone to do the mage-tech engineering,” she said. “Unless you want to learn an incredibly difficult discipline.”

  “Would someone do commission work for that?” Luka asked. “Maybe the Guilds?”

  Eve snorted. “No—the Guilds hate mage-tech. You’d have to commission a gnomish inventor.”

  Everyone’s faces crumbled. Gnomes, well, a gnomish gang specifically, came to mind. “Yeah, maybe we should hold off on that for now,” Annie said flatly. “Let’s get back to the Beasty Forest or whatever.”

  “Bestial Grove…” Luka mumbled.

  It took another two hours, but eventually the map plotting was finished, and the park had direction. Annie and Vlad departed, each off to do their respective jobs in the park. The latter returned to his brews, while the former took over a shift at the WHEEL’s operational booth.

  Eve stopped Luka before they left Todd’s.

  “Listen, about the deal you made with the Guilds,” she began. “We were supposed to have a shipment of alchemy reagents arrive today. It never came.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe I overreacted when I kicked the Guilds to the curb. I should’ve thought more about what that meant for you and the villagers.”

  He was, of course, referring to potions of reincarnation and how now it was going to take longer to create them. Without a source of crafting reagents, no progress would be made on that front.

  “Well, what are we going to do?”

  “I can think of a few things,” he said, smiling like everything was going to be okay.

  The gesture infected Eve, and soon she was smiling too.