Building Connections

  I woke up well rested the next morning. The reason I woke up hale and healthy was that I was stuck upside down in a barrel. I only started feeling discomfort when I came fully to and realized my cheek was being pressed into moist wood. I began vaguely to remember a bottle of gasoline-tasting mescal, and explaining loudly to a group of new, friendly faces who were singing and dancing along with me that I needed to get into a closed space. When they got the message they cheered, threw me onto their shoulders, and carried me to this barrel, where I passed out almost instantaneously. I groaned, though I felt neither hangover nor even soreness from what was possibly the unhealthiest sleeping position available to a human body.

  I didn't bother trying to push myself up and simply fell sideways, which sent me rolling for a few disorienting minutes before I hit a wall. I crawled out of the barrel and found myself between a couple of buildings where a group of men were cooking corn flatbreads on a cast iron skillet, spooning sauce over them and passing them around. A few had the look of a hangover, but almost everybody in the Tower had recovery abilities by now.

  "Alex! Good morning! You still want to teach us that game? About the wizards?" said a man I vaguely remembered from the night before, grinning as I emerged from the barrel.

  "Xavier, right? I'm pretty busy," I said, shaking my head. I hadn't got properly wasted with the recovery ability before. A bit inebriated, sure, but the feeling of fuzzy, disjointed memories without the accompanying nausea and pain was a new and odd experience.

  "No worries, I know how it is. We all said you didn't have to," he said, and passed me some breakfast. As far as I could tell it wasn't any common South American dish and seemed like an improvisation from whatever the Tower had to offer, but then again I had grown up on a farm in the Midwest.

  We ate and pieced together the previous evening between us. I'd apparently sold the Guild and the new branch well enough that most of the half dozen men around the fire were thinking about joining up. I'd had a thought of my own about it, not about quests or joining, but about giving one.

  I could get to Nothing. I could also set my Sentinel teleport to the Guild branch in the Village, so personally I could reach my tower and back again with little danger. But there were problems with that. For one, I could only make the trip once a day. This would be fine most of the time, but if an emergency came right after I'd used my daily teleportation, I'd be delayed by a full day, which could be long enough for disaster. Second, I couldn't bring anyone with me. Third, Nothing was a space of real potential and I didn't want to be the only one able to use it. If nothing else, it offered safety from the sometimes scripted dangers of real-space Tower.

  I wasn't sure how I'd manage it, but I wanted to start simply. Nothing was a non-space, but things brought into it from outside still functioned normally, and distance could at least be replicated. So I set up a quest through Mrs. Xiang's ability.

  Quest: The Nothing Venture

  Laborers and guards are required for a potentially dangerous construction project in Nothing.

  Bridge between The Silver Park and the Tower of Wizard Vorhal built 0/1

  Reward: 100 gold per person

  The gold value was set automatically by the quest, with 50% generated by the Tower itself. I'd have to provide the rest, but I had enough put aside to manage it without difficulty. Now that I thought about it, the Guild branches might do a great deal to standardize gold as currency across the second challenge. It was rewarded by most quests and was almost literally a labor token, not unlike what Earth money was supposed to be. Trust and value were still open questions, but I could see it stabilizing within a year. Gromshnag had already shown that people from outside the Tower treated the currency as real.

  My work here was done, and I wanted to get started on my research. The quest was a medium-to-long term solution, and I doubted I could get even a rickety rope bridge built this morning. I called Chum to me, held up my tower's heart, and activated its teleportation ability.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Impossible silence swallowed me when I arrived. For a moment I thought something had gone wrong, that someone had done something to my tower, but when I had a second to think I remembered I was in Nothing, and this time Nothing wasn't full of allies and refugees. There was simply nothing around to make any noise, not even beyond the tower's walls. I had materialized in the entrance level, one large round room with a flat circle rug, several small wardrobes and storage spaces, and my emergency recovery nook set into the walls.

  "Might as well explore the place properly," I said, dusting off my robes. The dirt and road dust that had felt appropriate last night now felt out of place. I was home. I had a strong suspicion that it felt a little too much like home, but I didn't think there was anything sinister in that. Some part of the binding that had created the tower had made me supernaturally familiar with it.

  "It's your bound tower, boss. Shouldn't you already know it?" Chum said, settling on a wardrobe.

  "I have a feel for it, but I haven't seen it. I think the third floor is a bedroom and there are two hidden libraries, but knowing isn't the same as seeing," I said.

  "Fair enough. Mind if I buzz off for a bit? I need a break, and you can ping the bond if you need me," Chum said.

  "What do you want to do?" I said.

  "Can't say. Union rules about time off," Chum said.

  "Just asking as a friend," I said.

  "Sure, sure. It's not a secret, but I dare not go against the bylaws." He dropped from the wardrobe and stretched his wings. "Don't worry, boss. I'm not planning to do any torturing of sapient creatures or anything."

  "You know when you get that specific it gets concerning," I said.

  "Yeah, yeah. Alright, I'm off the clock starting now," Chum said, produced a puff of green smoke, and was gone by the time it cleared. I could still feel him through the bond not ten feet away, but I didn't mind. If the guy wanted a break, he'd earned one several times over.

  I started my tour in the basement. I went straight for the bath and got myself clean. Then I worked my way around the circular hallway and soon realized it was too long. No, not too long. It was spiraling inward. There were several more rooms: storage, some of it magically chilled, with one room sitting just under room temperature, one below freezing, and one somewhere between. A walk-in freezer and a refrigerator, in a magic tower in a non-space between dimensions. The kitchen was also down here, looking like a careful historical restoration of wood-burning stoves and stone basins, but the stove came to heat instantly at a push of mana and the basin could be filled with hot or cold water the same way the bath could.

  At the very center of the basement there was, rather ominously, a roughly eight by eight foot room behind iron bars that opened only to my touch. Cot, sink, toilet. So I had a prison too.

  The second floor was another large open room, this one dominated by a matte black table with an overhead light and blackboards along the walls, stocked with chalk and sponges. I still didn't know why Xem had apparently committed to the blackboard when whiteboards existed, but you rarely saw whiteboards anywhere in the Tower.

  The third floor had three bedrooms, as I'd sensed. Two were small, a single bed and a chest each, barely enough room to turn around. The third was mine, with a massive curtained king-sized bed, wardrobes, mirrors and candelabras in deep blues, greens and gold. It seemed a waste at first, since I was most comfortable sleeping in an enclosed space. Then I looked at the canopy and realized it covered everything including the space above the mattress, effectively creating a room within a room. I could actually sleep in the fancy bed.

  There was also a switch hidden at the headboard, which triggered a grinding mechanism that rotated the bed. If I lay on it and let it turn, I arrived in a room with a window open to Nothing and floating orbs for light, a desk and bookshelves covering every wall. Perhaps the size of my old dorm room plus the bed I'd arrived on, but strangely peaceful, and the shelves were lined with books I would eventually want to read.

  Going up through the levels I found more: an old English-style lecture room, a floor given over entirely to planters of black soil in warm and humid air, a training floor with dummies and practice staves, and one floor that was nothing but labyrinthine hallways and strange doors that eventually required me to fall back on my connection to the tower to find my way out. In short, everything I could ever have wanted from a home, even back on Earth. Most of it was empty, no food in the cold rooms, no clothes in the wardrobes, no decoration beyond the functional. But the libraries were fully stocked and I couldn't find two of the same volume at a cursory glance. I had running water on most floors, writing utensils of every kind from quill and parchment to ballpoint pens and ring binders.

  Finally I reached the top of the tower and my study. I'd been here before, but as promised, it had been tidied and restored to its original state. A large desk with a dozen drawers and enough surface area to run a serious wargame on.

  I walked around the desk, past the large comfortable leather chair, through the warm ambient light and the smell of books and ink, and something washed over me all at once.

  I was safe. Nothing could touch me here. I was home and there was no emergency. I was free to make plans for the future.

  My legs went shaky first. I just managed to grip the desk before I made it to the chair and collapsed into it. Then the shaking started, three weeks of tension releasing all at once, leaving me laughing and sobbing in equal measure, a wreck in the best possible way.