D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

--- Kamiko ---

Once lunch was done they set off again, much better rested. Kamiko did consider suggesting that everyone relax for another day… but didn't know if anyone would agree to it. Bower wanted to go home and start his journey to bother his grandkids, Hunter was much to serious and had already been insisting she was fine.

Meg might have gone along with it… but if Meg thought it was a good idea perhaps it actually wasn't. So Kamiko held her tongue and the group set off.

It was slow going. Hunter offered to scout ahead with her stealth trick but Meg shot it down for reasons Kamiko didn't understand. The conversation had been at high speed, something she wasn't used to hearing or properly comprehending and ended with Hunter sticking around so Meg must've had either a persuasive argument or blackmail. Kamiko wasn't sure which, or which was scarier.

So they started heading towards the dome in the distance… and quickly realised that space here? It was completely messed up. That twisty nonsense they'd been worried about encountering? It was all right there ahead of them. Probably meant it was a good idea Hunter stuck around.

See not even one hundred metres from camp the dome in the distance vanished, as did the camp and really anything they'd seen before. Oh there was now a warehouse that had fallen apart about one hundred and fifty metres away so there were landmarks… but not recognisable ones.

The robots attacked when we all froze up for a second in confusion but that minor delay didn't really help the metal offenders do any damage.

"What the fuck?" mumbled Meg.

"Um… what… what do we do?" asked Kamiko quietly.

"I suspect that the compass has a feature for using it in twisted space so I would recommend switching over to it, assuming it exists," offered Hunter.

"I… think it does? Let me just check if I have the right model for that…" answered Meg as she started to poke a few places on the compass, then brought out a large table, twisted the compass and suddenly the whole thing had unfolded into a large computer looking device with a keyboard and a bunch of glowing screens Kamiko found she couldn't make much sense of.

Suddenly, I have a better understanding of why Meg said it would be hard to re-track stuff you'd filtered out. This all looks like a mess. Sure I can get translations for text… but it's mostly just unlabelled dials and graphs!

"Why have multiple versions of the tracker?" asked Bower.

"It's a materials issue mainly. One great enchanter can make quite a few of these but it's a problem of degrees. First, you need something quite finely tuned for the environment so you can't just make a tracker out of the best materials because if it's too good that causes issues.

If it's too sensitive you can just blow out the enchantments completely yet it's not sensitive enough then you lose things.

"So you have to make these things PERFECT. With not the best, but the perfect materials. They don't all need to be strong, it needs to be just right. Now I've got no idea on the specifics but you can't just make an endless amount of these things. You need it to work perfectly in the specific environment and you don't get a lot of leeway.

Mostly it's about how much mana or qi is in the air, or if it's both and if so what ratio… it's just a mess you see.

"But the fancier you make them? The more materials you require and they need to be perfect for not just the environment but for the rest of the compass as well. This one here? It's probably worth about as much as your entire planet. Maybe more," explained Meg with a huff as she navigated the screens with precision.

Bower blinked a few times as he tried and failed to process that bit of information. Kamiko winced as she looked the compass over. She… knew things could get expensive sometimes but she hadn't realised that it had such an extreme cost.

"How can you even use something like that?" asked Bower. "Sometimes I feel like saving up my good arrows because of the cost but… I can't even wrap my head around something costing that much. I don't know what that even means! How… how expensive is a planet?"

"Well I was mostly implying it would cost more precious metal then your entire planet has on it rather then the cost to actually by the planet… once you get to like space age stuff the price of everything gets super whacky.

Like… a lot of metals go down to think but other metals go way up because asteroids have just huge amounts of stuff like gold but almost no mithril in stuff for obvious reasons," answered Meg without issue. Despite the confusing interface she was still navigating it well in the face of questions.

"I um… I don' think it was super obvious…" added Kamiko.

"It's the magic. There's less magic in space," answered Hunter.

"Yup Hunter's right. It's not that there's no magic in space but living being tend to generate more mana then they use up and once you have enough magic somewhere? Well that magic starts to become alive and then it all just compounds. So your planet is alive, but some random asteroid probably isn't…

"But a lot of asteroids are pieces of planets that got broken into pieces and if that planet was super magical before it exploded well the magic might stick around. Honestly it's a complicated issue and the price of this compass is basically infinite and yet almost nothing at the same time.

"It's an incredibly narrow use case and I imagine the creator gets favours in return for making it instead of money. For stuff this specific and hard to make it has to be that way… especially if the crafter is responsible for finding all of the materials. But maybe they're not? I never looked into it too closely once I finished learning how to work the damned things.

It was interesting enough to search up some info but not really interesting enough to go digging,"

"But really… an entire planet?" asked Bower.

Meg sighed as she tapped a few more things and then a few of the screens refreshed. "Look it's a really hard comparison to make Bower. At higher levels of power barter becomes the name of the game a lot of the time. Even with a reliable currency when you get people with massive amounts of power and skill they tend to have nearly everything they want.

The only exception is other things that take incredible power and skill to make so they trade for those things.

"I have no idea how much this is really worth. On the one hand, from a super basic perspective? The materials could probably be used to make a ca- carriage. They could be used to make a nice high end carriage. But a carriage can be made with a much wider set of materials and the tolerances are all different.

"So it's hard. Look, I'm really not equipped to explain this. I may have greed demon heritage and have some interested in getting my moneys worth on contracts but some of this shit is really hard to price. Like… like… hmm… you got any old war relics from your younger days? Or things from your wife?" asked Meg.

"Of course," answered Bower.

"Right, and those things are worth a lot more to you then they are to anyone else. Say it was a portrait of your wife. Others might care for the artist or the brushwork but for you it's a picture OF YOUR WIFE and that makes it so much more valuable. These compasses are a lot like that.

They need really specific stuff for each version of the compass and finding the correct parts are a massive pain because most people don't know what you need so you can't really order it…n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

"And you can make different compasses. So like… if you need say ten parts per compass and you had one hundred parts, you might be able to make five different compasses but you likely couldn't make five copies of the same compass. So… are they worth a lot more for being unique? Or are they worth less because you made five? It's that sort of nonsense," Find exclusive stories on empire

Suddenly the compass made whirring noise like a propeller spinning up and Meg tapped it once more on the side then the whole thing snapped shut into a ball while the needle spun around rapidly. "So I've recalibrated it for the messed up space. If we follow the needle it should get us where we need to go… eventually," Meg paused as she glared at the needle.

"Clearly it needs a bit more time to figure out the path then I thought it would. Want to check out the building for a bit then?"