No amount of alcohol could stop me from fixating on Dino, so I dismissed my childish feelings and switched to a better distraction—the settlement’s new power point.

  After turning to my game alerts, I remembered we’d recently increased our town’s population—enough for another level and a power. My interface offered six tier 2 mandates.

  Unlike other powers, mandates became mutually exclusive by tier. We chose Aggression as our tier 1 power, and it looked like tier 2 offered different ways to be aggressive. It made me wonder—if we chose Amphibious for our next mandate, would the tier 3 menu offer six ways to leave the water?

  We weren’t a coastal settlement, so I already doubted the practicality of choosing Amphibious. Since the menu listed powers alphabetically, I looked at its description first.

  This mandate could be practical on the high seas. Pirates could leap onto an enemy boat, a cutlass between their teeth, making for a picturesque exhibit of Aggression.

  Applying waterborne bonuses to Otter Lake or the Orga River seemed unlikely. While a river and a lake bound our village, an orrery would be useless. Orreries looked like wind chimes or mobiles whose arms extended to nearby moons or planets. Complicated mechanisms governed their components, which showed celestial rotation and orbital positions. In Miros, the only application of an orrery revolved around supplying maritime merchants with tidal charts to avoid dangerous conditions. Hawkhurst sought to subvert oceanic travel, not facilitate it.

  The only benefit of an orrery involved its ability to read the heavens. Magic in Miros came from the sun and four moons, so owning an orrery might somehow augment my control of magic. As far as I knew, celestial objects only held sway over oceanic travel and horoscopes. I have yet to witness lunar influence on magic in any way. Perhaps a trip to Arlington might change my opinion.

  The trident’s properties offered no surprises. It endowed its wielder with underwater breathing, speaking, swimming, buoyancy, and combat bonuses whenever the weapon got wet. Like Charitybelle’s siege hammer, the trident delivered structural damage, making it ideal for sinking ships. Hawkhurst needed to make boats, not destroy them. Irrelevant as it was, Amphibious lived up to its tier 1 prerequisite, Aggression.

  I didn’t need to know anything about Miros to guess how this mandate worked. It wasn’t subtle. Even if we wanted to develop siege engines, our nearest enemies, goblins and kobolds, lived underground. And siege engines couldn’t survive a wilderness journey into the mountainous orc homeland.

  These mandates seemed very situational. Conditional bonuses became typically bad choices in games unless they suited your circumstances—in which case they often became overpowered.

  The description of the Lens of Minute Crafting applied to making traps. Traps applied to the contest, but I had developed no skills or powers to use them. My proficiency with reading stones somewhat opposed the discipline of trap-making—I could spot them but not necessarily make them.

  Devious felt like another pass.

  This power felt passive, considering it fell under the Aggression mandate. Giving +5 stats to everyone made the town more resilient, but it did nothing special for officers. In a pinch, we could demote ourselves to ordinary citizenship to gain five levels’ worth of stat increases. We would need a trustworthy backup governor to reinstate us. We had Ally, so perhaps we could exploit that loophole.

  The amphitheater’s +5 culture could help our efficiency, but construction efficiency shouldn’t be an issue by the time we had a manor.

  The Orb of Split Self offered an amusing game mechanic. It created a decoy that persisted until someone touched it. Activating it granted 5 seconds of invisibility, and it created an illusion. Technically, it counted as a dark magic object, but its utility seemed benign. It looked like a crafty mechanic to either lure or distract enemies. The stat boosts alone made Famous an intriguing upgrade.

  I looked at the next mandate.

  Pernicious certainly lived up to its name. Like siege engines and pirating, this required little imagination. Unless a contestant had crowned themselves, I had no desire to meddle in the affairs of kings, so this wasn’t the right choice for us.

  Someone could use a power like this against us since Fabulosa, Charitybelle, and I counted as officers. Thankfully, the bonuses applied to settlement chiefs, so it wouldn’t apply to the Book of Dungeons contest.

  Transdimensional rooms already proved their utility, and a secret poison shop would be perfect if I used poisons. I didn’t, nor did I know how. Perhaps that might be a question for Yula.

  The details of the Root Adder Blade weren’t surprising. The double-bladed dagger received the application of two venoms. Assassin game mechanics worked the same way in every role-playing game.

  Dabbling in poisons seemed as underhanded as dark magic. None of this seemed like my style of gaming.

  The economic version of Aggression wasn’t particularly applicable either. We didn’t export goods, and influence on foreign governments wasn’t something we cared about at this stage of our game. Even if we wanted to tangle in politics, becoming Medicis seemed like the most boring way to play The Book of Dungeons.

  The item for Rapacious involved a pair of Eavesdropping Gems. By putting one against my forehead, I could see and hear happenings near the other gem. It worked like my new spear, Creeper, of which I’ve yet to find an application. The Eavesdropping Gems might be great for negotiations or listening to an enemy’s battle plans. We needed a spy to place them—otherwise, they didn’t serve any purpose.

  The last mandate didn’t seem any better than the others.

  Oddly enough, Seditious offered attractive features. While political intrigue wasn’t essential to us, inciting doubt might halt a stampede of goblins or kobolds in their tracks. It could have helped me in Tully’s bar with those flea-bitten gnolls.

  The extra religious slot appealed to me, although we needed someone to make another idol. I doubted an orc idol would be popular with Fort Krek travelers, so I saw little need to ask Yula about her clan’s deity. I also doubted one person could follow two deities, which left us with only a little upside. And would two patron deities instill unrest? If so, a mandate called Seditious might cause more problems than it fixed. Still, a free religion slot offered flexible options more than anything else I’d seen in tier 2.

  The free item, the Eastwind Weathervane, involved a magic hex. Placing it atop a roof in a foreign settlement lowered the enemy’s morale by the owner’s governing rank. Surprisingly, my governing remained only at rank 3, but its effect might be powerful if Charitybelle or Ally placed it. Yula once mentioned morale had implications on militia formations, which officers created for war. Again, it didn’t apply to our current state, but it might help us down the road.

  Since we weren’t close to building a manor and no tier 2 powers applied to our current game, I saw no reason to spend this settlement point. If Arlington had problems with us establishing a land route or Grayton guilds tried to muscle in on our operation, then we could spend a mandate to leverage our position.

  The impractical nature of these tier 2 mandates rested on my shoulders. Hadn’t I been the one who’d lobbied for Aggression? I’d campaigned hard for the battle college so Charitybelle could catch up on her combat skills. Now that it became clear the resident weapons trainer marginalized my status, picking Aggression felt like a mistake. I closed my interface in disgust.

  Cycling through the tier 2 options circled me back to my sour obsession with Dino. I became the star pupil at Belden’s military academy. Even the instructors loved me because I helped the other cadets. The battle college belonged to players, not NPCs, and Dino acted like an alpha gamer.

  He undoubtedly made for a better fighter, and I needed his training. But being the butt of jokes as the class punching bag would make taking lessons unbearable.

  I refocused my thoughts after I spilled my ale.

  If we traveled to kobold territory tomorrow, perhaps I could bolster my self-esteem with a victory or discovery. Maybe I could return to camp as a hero, like when Fabulosa told everyone how I’d contributed to the fight against the arc weaver. Then maybe Dino wouldn’t try to make me look foolish—or better yet, the town might turn against him if he tried.

  I needed to avoid him this evening and hope Fabulosa wouldn’t invite him to our adventure. Even if he excelled at combat, I didn’t want along, leeching experience.

  I emptied my cup. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and the ale wasn’t helping. It would probably be better if I didn’t make more decisions tonight.

  I could hear gales of soprano laughter filling the air from the arena. Dino still held court. The entire settlement hung onto his every word. After more townspeople filtered in from the stadium, I didn’t feel so cornered. For whatever reason, Dino wasn’t coming to the town hall. I breathed easier and mixed with the crowd.

  Eventually, I mustered the courage to approach Fabulosa. “So, what do you think about leaving tomorrow to explore the gnoll coordinates?”

  “So soon? We just settled in.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to adventure?”

  She looked toward the arena.

  “And let’s not bring NPCs this time. We worked hard to uncover these coordinates and don’t want them leeching experience.”

  Her brow furrowed when she realized I talked about Dino. She exhaled loudly. “Fine, whatever.” She said nothing else before stalking into the crowd outside the town hall.

  I didn’t need to trace Fabulosa’s movement on the town radar to know she went straight to Charitybelle.

  I didn’t care and returned to the line for another ale—a decision that seemed like a good idea.