RCJoshua
patreon
Chapter 129: A Line of Credit
🕑 Added 2023-11-01 23:06:22 +0000 UTCInside the building, everything was marble. Not in the Earth way where the building had marble flooring and just a lot of marble inlaid with other materials. As far as Matt could see, every single surface in the place was really, truly, and actually made of the stone. The only reason he felt confident walking around the room without banging his shin on something was with his PER score and the fact that, at some point, some architect had tempered the calcium carbonate madness by differentiating objects with some variety in color. The benches and tables were black, the floor and walls were white, and the panel the higher-ups were sitting behind was a dark gray. All marble.
As soon as they entered, an usher took note and shuffled them toward the front, apparently trying to expedite the proceedings as quickly as possible. Derek was called forward to speak first, and stepped up to a marble podium apparently meant for that task.
“Greetings, Reincarnator Derek.”
“Hi, Bishop M’aal.”
The bishop shuffled some papers in front of him, apparently looking for a particular section of his notes. Once he had found it, he re-focused on Derek, glancing at his notes here and there as he did.
“Reincarnator Commander Brennan and Commander Artemis have told us quite the story, not that we disbelieve it. We ask that you now add your accounting of the details of the period between your departure from the capital for Epsilon Colony and your eventual return, including any of what we might, as an understatement, call detours.”
Derek began talking, keeping his words uncharacteristically dry and concise. Matt had guessed he had been through this before, and was bored of it. For Matt, however, it was a fresh experience. He did learn some things he didn’t know before, primarily how very close the group of three had come to being overwhelmed by enemy forces before they got more-or-less clear behind enemy lines. But even without those new nuggets of information, it was interesting to see when the questioners behind the counter would stop Derek to clarify certain sections, and guess at why they did so.
Only when Derek got to the part of the story in which Matt entered as a character did his story-telling get a little more animated. He downplayed the fight between them, calling it a misunderstanding and not going into much detail about how things had come close to getting bloodier than anyone wanted. He also didn’t mention Matt’s planet-of-origin relation to Derek at all, excluding both Earth and Gaia from his description of their peacemaking.
He had more words to describe both the sapping of the tower walls and the battle at the cliff, attributing the vast majority of the kills to Matt. He even included a guess of the total enemy defeats that he thought should go to Matt, it sounded something like twice the enemies that were on the battlefield in the first place.
After a brief talk about their return at the gate and saying he had been “showing Matt the better parts of town since then,” Derek sat down, without waiting to be dismissed in any way. This seemed to be normal, too, as the men behind the panel didn’t react to it.
“Well, then.” Bishop M’aal, who appeared to be leading the meeting in general, turned to the other officials with a half grin on his face. “That’s three accounts, almost entirely consistent with each other on all important parts. I trust that satisfies the more doubtful members of the panel?”
Nobody objected to that. Apparently, it had in the past.
“Reincarnator Matt, would you be so kind as to take the stand? I know it’s been a long few days, and I can promise you that you won’t be asked to recount the events at all, unless you think there’s something meaningful to add.”
Matt stood and walked to the podium. “I don’t think there are any, bishop. Besides, maybe, the fact that all three of the others risked their lives constantly on that trip. Brennan took on a demon I think the other three of us united would have failed to fight. In comparison to that, I think I just got lucky.”
The bishop considered that, thoughtfully. “Brennan will be rewarded for his contributions, so have no worries on that account. Our problem stems from something slightly different. It is rare that one man destroys the bulk of an invading demon army by himself, let alone saving three or four colonies in the same swoop of his…”
He looked closely at Matt’s weapon for the first time, as if confirming something for himself.
“His shovel. Which means we have a slight problem in terms of payment. Not because you aren’t entitled to it,” he said, with a pointed look at one of the other people behind the panel, “But because it’s simply an amount of money we would be hard-pressed to give to you in a liquid form. Have the others given you… estimates? I suppose? Some idea of the amount of reward we are talking about here?”
“They gave me some idea. I want to make this easy for you if I can. I am a visitor from off world. You know that, right?”
“Correct. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s not an occurrence with which we are unfamiliar with. Don’t have any worries on that front, by the way. We’ve found that all such visitors are helpful to us, even if not quite all of them have been particularly effective.”
Matt nodded. “Well, the idea is that I’m going to get back to the world I traveled here from sooner or later. Sooner, if possible. In the meantime, I don’t need much. Probably just some armor and a few novelty weapons at the most.” Something occurred to Matt at that moment, and he snapped his fingers, which appeared to slightly startle Bishop M’aal. “Actually, a reliable way to travel back, an inter-world portal or something, would be the thing I need the most. Do you have anything like that? I’d be glad to call it even right there if you do.”
M’aal shook his head, sadly. “No, we don’t. As far as our records of other-world reincarnators state, they seem to have gotten back on their own power in some way or another, usually at the termination of their quest. You’ll have to pursue that with your own system, I’m afraid. We’ll help where we can, of course, we just have limited technological and magic prowess in that particular area.”
“No worries.” Matt had figured that might be the case. The Gaians had been tapping into fairly odd fundamentals of the universe at the end there, if he was reading the descriptions of their technology correctly. It wasn’t all that surprising that other planets hadn’t gotten that far, or if they had but were nuked by the system in some way or another because of it.
“As to your assertion that we needn’t pay you, it’s very kind. Unfortunately, much of the magical infrastructure that makes our government run is system-supplied, and as such comes with downsides that somewhat offset their substantial upsides. One aspect of them is both downside and upside, depending on how you look at it, and it’s this: we can’t fail to pay a debt. Our financial system runs on a series of magically enforced contracts, and the penalties for breaking them would be much more significant than the substantial payment required.”
He sighed.
“All of which means, we will be paying you as quickly as possible, if for no other reason than to avoid trouble on our end. But it will be… havoc, to an extent. We will console ourselves with the very true fact that it’s havoc that we are alive to have, where there was a possibility we wouldn’t.”
Matt looked at the man thoughtfully for a moment. He at least didn’t appear to be trying to guilt Matt into anything, and Matt truly didn’t care about the money that much. The last thing he wanted was to create problems for other people, especially if he wasn’t getting anything out of it himself. He could imagine some contingent of guards taking a pay-cut over this kind of thing, and he didn’t want that to happen. Suddenly, something occurred to him.
“What about a line of credit? Do you have anything like that?”
“I’m sorry? I’m not familiar with the term.”
“On my original world, before I was reincarnated, it would have been something like a card or token. Someone would put up something as collateral, like a house. Then they could spend money equal to the value of the collateral. It was complex, but I’d be willing to ‘loan you’ the money back, with a term in the contract with the phrase that the money would be forfeit if I were to leave the world, or something like that.”
The man appeared ready to object, then stopped. “Interesting,” he said, drumming his fingers on the desk. He motioned an assistant over, and whispered something in their ear. “If you could give me a few minutes, Matt, I’ll check on the possibilities of that. It just might be that there are options there.”
Matt took a seat, back by Derek.
“I think what you are doing is crazy, Man. Do you know how many carriages you could buy with that? A lot. Nice ones, too. They have carriages with shocks here.”
“What do you need a carriage for? You can run like thirty miles an hour.”
“It’s not about getting there, Matt. It’s about how you get there. I want to get there looking cool.”
A few minutes passed before a man walked in who was, in all ways, unmistakably an accountant. He wasn’t wearing anything that directly corresponded to an Earth button-down and slacks, or something that Matt could put his finger on to point at what gave him that impression. But he was somehow still sure. This was a man who, on Earth, would be really good at spreadsheets and probably not all that great at basketball.
Behind the panel, he conferred with the various authorities in attendance. Matt couldn’t hear, but he could see him responding to various questions, thinking, and pointing at various reference materials he had brought with him. The whole process took the better part of ten minutes, and at the end Matt was called back up to the lectern.
“Reincarnator, it looks like your idea had some merit. The main difficulty with the idea, it turns out, isn’t so much that it’s unfeasible as that what you proposed was too one-sided in our favor. We can’t write a contract taking your money where the only benefit to you is that you then get to spend it if you choose to. The advantage is too much on our side for our system to allow it.”
Matt nodded. It made sense. It sounded like some sort of system-driven predatory lending prohibition, or something. Whatever upsides there were, they also got significant downsides when they bought their government’s financial system in a big box from the system. It was like cheap Swedish furniture. Convenient, but not a lot of variation for individual needs.
“It seems the easiest solution to this, the one that gets closest to the spirit of your offer, is to simply increase the buying power of what your money can do. As you’d imagine, there are usually restrictions on what money can buy here. Some materials are controlled, some treasures aren’t for sale, and things of that nature. Your token, once we’ve created it, will buy literally anything our government owns. And to sweeten that deal, we are even willing to open some of our armory supply depots to let you access materials you might otherwise have trouble finding.”
Derek ran up behind Matt and whispered in his ear. “That’s a good deal. They must have figured out I’m going to take you to see the old blacksmith. He can do almost anything, but he doesn’t always have the parts he needs. The church gets a cut of almost everything anyone brings in. They have plenty of materials.”
“It looks like Derek has explained the implications of the deal to you. With a… non-contractual request on my part that you don’t get too carried away, I think this is a practical solution to our problems. What do you say?”
“It sounds fine to me.” It really did. Frankly, Matt didn’t need any of this. If this is what it took to get his big ol’ reward downgraded to a reasonable amount of spending money without busting the local economy, it was fine.
“Good. I’ll send word to the appropriate people to get the token created. It shouldn’t take long, perhaps as short as just a few hours. Once it’s done, we’ll see to it that it catches up to you by messenger.”
Matt nodded, then turned to go.
“And Matt?” The bishop said, as he was leaving. Matt turned back around. “We lost one settlement a few days ago. It’s a devastating thing. But it could have been much, much worse. Thank you.”
Comments
Nictis
Oh no. He's going to be able to buy the plinths. I'm cackling at this, I thought the horror would be that he would be introducing *credit* but instead they decided that he would be allowed to purchase towns.
Jake Holland
Seems too good to be true.
Lyncher98
They seem decent so far
